Paradox Point

          Ask Dr. Psience (2)               Dear Dr. Psience:           What is the “Missing Mass”? Where has it gone off to?                    Signed, Lost in Space             Dear Lost in Space:           Cosmologists say that the universe will continue to expand forever unless it contains a critical density of matter. Observations show that the cosmic mass density is only 5% of that amount. Cosmologists, who like their theories neat, their questions answered and their cosmos closed, ask; where is the missing mass?           Parallel to this is one called the “Fermi Paradox”, named after Enrico Fe...

      On the Crime Shortage             I think that police brutality is caused by a crime shortage. Crime rates have been falling in America since the early 90s, despite wars, recessions, natural disasters and the W administration. I credit the banning of leaded gasoline 20 years earlier, in 1973. That stopped poisoning young brains, and twenty years later crime dropped, just as it did in every other country that banned leaded gas. In the 60s, conservatives blamed high crime on the ‘criminal element’, meaning blacks, the poor and dissidents; liberals blamed high crime on ‘root causes’, meaning insufficient nanny-state; and it turns out that both were right and both were wrong. The ‘root cause’ was indeed a ‘criminal element’, namely element 82, lead! Well, we tracked down that criminal element, and we’ve addressed the root cause, and we’re reaping the benefits; but the bloated police-and-prison state created in ...

The Welfare Matrix; a modest proposal             What becomes of society’s losers? Jared Diamond asked a similar question; what becomes of the losers of tribal warfare? He found three solutions. For sparcely-populated hunter-gatherer societies (politically-incorrectly called ‘savage’), the losers are driven off the land, to starvation or more marginal land or dispossessing someone else. For middling-density pre-state agricultural societies (‘barbarians’), the losers are exterminated, down to the last woman and child.   And for high-density state-dominated farming societies (‘empires’), the losers are enslaved.           These three solutions translate to the modern criminal code. The savage ‘Jacksonian’ solution is exile; the barbaric ‘Hitlerian’ solution is capital punishment; and the imperial ‘Pharaonic’ solution is imprisonment. But are these the only alternatives?  ...

           To The Next Mass Shooter      A Modest Proposal             Dear Sir:           I get where you’re coming from. They don’t, but I do. Life sucks, doesn’t it? You’ve got no friends, and you get no respect . Girls won’t date you, the asshole boss pays an insultingly low slave-wage, so your revenge arsenal cost you all of your money. You’re trapped, you’re dying inside, you hate everything and everybody, especially yourself, so you want to go out with a bang. I get it.           I write to offer a suggestion. You see, all of your predecessors did their massacres all wrong, and we’ve grown bored with them. We’re jaded. Somebody shoots up a movie theater? Ho-hum. A school? Yawn. A church? Whatever!   Then we do nothing, and a day later we forget all about it. So what’s the p...

          How Tyranny Won in Spirit             I say that Hitler won World War Two, in spirit; for how else are we to describe nuclear deterrence? After Hitler, the threat of genocide was accepted as a political norm, indeed as the foundation of world order, even though it was a crime against humanity. We who survived that system called it, fittingly, MAD, meaning Mutual Assured Destruction. In what way was the Cold War not Hitlerian?           In this way only; the superpowers preferred to threaten all with the genocide that Hitler did to some . Jews, Roma, homosexuals, Communists and dissidents were the test subjects; the experiment was a success, and the program was updated and adopted by the nominal winners of the war. Those nominal winners added two reforms; to use atomic fission rather than poison gas for genocide; and to advertise...