The Wayward Axolotl

Comrades, I want to speak to you about the greatest injustice of the modern world: the unequal distribution of sex. Sex is not distributed equally among us — far from it. Some, through no virtue or effort of their own, have an almost unlimited supply of sex, while others go their whole lives without even getting laid, let alone being loved. Some of us inherit good looks from our parents. Others are born into ugliness. Is this fair? Is it humane to allow millions of people to suffer without sex or love? I think not. Sex and love are basic human rights. They must not be denied on the basis of ugliness, shortness, fatness, age or poverty. We all deserve love and sex. The history of sex is a story of class struggle. Women are the owners of sexual capital, while men are the sexual proletariat. Women are born with baby-making factories inside them. Men must purchase access to the means of reproduction with their labor. In the past, this system, although inequitabl...

February is black history month in the United States. Unfortunately, the month is not dedicated to actual history. It is not about understanding the past. It is about constructing and reinforcing the myth that black people were (and still are) oppressed by white people. The myth of black oppression is part of a larger myth: that white people and European civilization have oppressed the entire world for the past 500 years. The truth is very different from the myth. The preceding graph shows the population history of Africa from 1500 to 2000. The population grew very little over most of that time, and then it exploded in the last 100 years. This graph shows the entire African population: North Africans as well as Sub-Saharan Africans (blacks). A graph of just the black population would show an even more dramatic upward curve at the end. It is important to understand both sides of this graph: why the population remained flat for so long, and why it grew at the end. Let’s...

On New Year’s Eve, there were sex attacks in Cologne and other European cities, perpetrated mostly by Muslim immigrants. These attacks demonstrate some of the problems associated with mass immigration. The response of leftists has been denial: the attacks didn’t really happen, and if they did, they had nothing to do with immigration or Islam. Liberals, on the other hand, are somewhat more honest. They admit the existence of the problem, but view it as entirely cultural, as something that can be solved by “education”. They believe that the migrants have “retrograde ideas”, and that they will adopt our obviously superior Western liberal humanist values. The Muslims may even thank us for teaching them our superior ways! To me, this view is dangerously naive. There are problems with this migration that go beyond cultural differences. One is the sex ratio of the migrants. Most of them are young single men. Almost none of them are young single women. This migration creates a sexual i...

When I was 9 years old, I lived in an apartment complex at the edge of a small town. Behind the complex, there were hills covered with bunchgrass, sagebrush and a few old ponderosa pines. In those days, kids ran wild from dawn to dusk. We rode around on our bikes, played games, went exploring in the hills, etc. In the process, we learned about life. In the summer, there were lots of grasshoppers. They would often lay their eggs in cracks in the road. I would sometimes kneel on the road and watch them pumping their eggs into those cracks, oblivious to my presence. Once a female grasshopper is committed to laying her eggs, she stays there until the job is done. I have always been close to nature. I spent much of my time as a kid outdoors, exploring the landscape and observing plants and animals. I found those grasshoppers interesting for their own sake. But the other kids in the apartment complex enjoyed killing them. They made a game out of running over the grasshoppers with the...

Written in June, 2004. I am sitting on a log on the beach. It is a beautiful, sunny day in June. The sand is warm on my feet. I often come here in the afternoon, to gaze at the view and think. To the north, across the bay, you can see over the flat expanse of Delta to the skyscrapers of Vancouver. Beyond them, the mountains rise out of the haze. They are blue at this distance, with a few patches of snow still clinging to their peaks. It is low tide. The beach is sandy, then pebbly, and then the mudflats begin. At low tide, they stretch into the bay for a mile or so. A heron is standing in a tidal pool not far away, looking at me with one eye. Let’s go out on the mudflats. The pebbles are painful to bare feet. But then the cool mud is soothing. This is an estuary into which several creeks deposit their loads of silt. To the north, the Fraser River sends a big curling plume of muddy water into the ocean. Some of that plume curls back and settles down here. In a thousa...

Two days ago, Donald Trump called for a temporary shutdown of Muslims entering the US. Predictably, this caused a storm of protest from leftists, liberals and mainstream conservatives. Will it hurt Trump’s popularity with his base? Probably not. Will he win the Republican nomination? Probably. Will be become president? Maybe. I don’t agree with any of Trump’s off-the-cufflink proposals. I don’t think building a wall between the US and Mexico is necessary or practical as a way to stop illegal immigration. I don’t think that stopping all Muslims from entering the US is a practical way to deal with the problem of Islam. I don’t think that “parts of the internet should be closed off” (whatever that means). However, my views are not that different on the first two issues. In my opinion, the US should prevent illegal immigration and deport all illegal immigrants. The US should also drastically reduce legal immigration, and be more selective about it. So, although I don’t agree with T...

At the end of each DNA strand in your chromosomes, there is a sequence of base pairs that repeats over and over: TTAGGG. That sequence doesn’t code for a protein, but it has an important function. It causes the strand to fold on itself, which prevents it from unraveling. That sequence is the telomere. The concept of God has a similar function. It is not useful as a description of reality. It might appear to be simply memetic garbage, but it has an important function. It holds together a system of memes and prevents it from unraveling. Religion is a way of propagating knowledge down the generations. It is a package that holds accumulated knowledge, especially values. The symbols and rituals of religion are merely packaging for values and traditions that have important functions. Religion is an anchor for the values of an individual and the organizing principles of a society. It provides a foundation for thought and communication: an endpoint of reasoning and debate. It holds ...