This is a photograph of a valley in Baffin Island. Please observe the U-shape of the valley. That space was formerly occupied by ice. This is the typical shape of a valley created by ice, in contrast to the V-shape of a valley created by water erosion.

Millions of tons of ice have melted to expose that fiord. So yes, this is the time scale on which to consider the reality of global warming. Thousands of years. Do you see the glacier hanging there in the background, high in the mountains? That is where the glacier has retreated. I say hurrah!

GOOD BYE AND GOOD LUCK

As we leave Illinois for good, I wanted to say goodbye to my friends and wish all of you well. I am a lifelong son of the heartland and proud of it. After 60 years, I leave Illinois with a heavy heart. BUT enough is enough! The leaders of Illinois refuse to see we can’t continue going in the direction we are and expect people who have options to stay here. I remember when Illinois had 25 congressmen. In 2012 we will have 18. Compared to the rest of the country we have lost 1/4th of our population. Don’t blame the weather, because I love 4 seasons.

Illinois just sold still more bonds and our credit rating is so bad we pay higher interest rates than junk bonds! Junk Bonds! Illinois is ranked 50th for fiscal policy; 47th in job creation; 1st in unfunded pension liabilities; 2nd largest budget deficit; 1st in failing schools; 1st in bonded indebtedness; highest sales tax in the nation; most judges indicted (Operations Grilled and Gambat); and 5 of our last 9 elected governors have been indicted. That is more than the other 49 states added together! Then add 32 Chicago Aldermen and (according to the Chicago Tribune) over 1000 state and municipal employees indicted. The corruption tax is a real cost of doing business. We are the butt of jokes for stand up comics.

We live in the most corrupt big city, in the most corrupt big county in the most corrupt state in America .. I am sick and tired of subsidizing crooks. A day rarely passes without an article about the corruption and incompetence. Chicago even got caught rigging the tests to hire police and fire! Our Crook County CORPORATE property tax system is intentionally corrupt. The Democrat State Chairman who is also the Speaker of the Illinois House (Spkr. Mike Madigan) and the most senior alderman in Chicago each make well over a million dollars a year putting the fix in for their clients tax assessments.

We are moving to Texas where there is no income tax while Illinois just went up 67%. Texas sales tax is ½ of ours, which is the highest in the nation. Southern states are supportive of job producers, tax payers and folks who offer opportunities to their residents. Illinois shakes them down for every penny that can be extorted from them.

In the Hill Country of Texas (near Austin and San Antonio ) we bought a gracious home on almost 2 acres with a swimming pool. It is new, will cost us around 40% of what our home in Wilmette just sold for and the property taxes are 1/3rd of what they are here. Cook County ‘ s property tax system is a disaster: Wilmette homes near ours sell for 50% more and their property taxes are ½ of ours. Our assessed home value was 50% higher than the sales price. The system is unfair and incompetent.

Our home value is down 40%, our property taxes are up 20% and our local schools have still another referendum on the ballot to increase taxes over 20% in one year. I could go on, but enough is enough. I feel as if we are standing on the deck of the Titanic and I can see the icebergs right in front of us. I will miss our friends a great deal. I have called Illinois home for essentially my entire life. But it is time to go where there is honest, competent and cost effective government.

We have chosen to vote with our feet and our wallets. My best to all of you and good luck!

Extensive research into these sites reveals that there are a lot of women out there doing naughty things in front of their husbands or boyfriends, with his cock, with his friend’s cocks, with casual acquaintances, with girflriends, on beaches, in bedrooms, in cars, in parking lots, at swimming pools, nearly everywhere. And as for the men doing things with other men, don’t get me started. Their shamelessness is not less than the women’s and possibly greater.

There are sites for or about amateurs, gays, professional porn stars, trannies, big tit afficionados, teens, older women, bondage and discipline, male domination, female domination, cuckolds (fucking groups of black men while being photographed by the hubby seems to be a large niche), anal, public, nude beach, lesbian, facials, you name it.

All the photos appear to be in the public domain. I am waiting for the first female politician to run successfully for office despite a picture of her with her mouth stuffed with her former boyfriend’s dick. I expect this within the decade. So the Minister of Transportation (say) sucks dick? Meh. If an associate deputy minister of the department of redundancy disports herself on a nude beach, will anyne care?

I think of the hours of work each day that are required to maintain and update these sites. Perhaps I am wrong and the classification system allows for the more rapid recognition of photos consistent with the site’s themes. Surely however, a great deal of labour is poured into these sites for months and years on end. Whoever has maintained a blog knows how often that particular dog has to be walked.

More serious research should be conducted on the sex-habits of North Americans with porn sites as a proxy for actual behaviour. The big issue would be the discount to be applied to assess how representative the sites and the acts depicted are of actual behaviour. I read once that the average North American male has had seven sex partners in life, while the female has had five. Don’t ask me how they derived such figures. If we grant that this behaviour is distributed on a bell curve, then the top five percent of sex practitioners must have way more sexual activity than the norm. Or, as I think more likely, it is a power curve, then a very few people are the Amazons, googles, and hotmails of this world, and a long tail goes out to zero.

Is the inequality of sexual partners and activities increasing with increases of inequality of wealth?

In any case, there are issues of human behaviour worth investigating here. I suspect that, armed with some empirical data, and some skepticism about current ideas of who is doing what to whom, we might come to a better understanding of human nature in prosperous times. How many more bathtubs do we actually need than we have now? Zero to one, maybe. How many more sex partners, orgies, threesomes or kinky sex would you like to have than you have now? You get my point. Social scientists, stop your blathering about empowerment, racialized, otherness, queering, and do some empirical research. Tumblrworld awaits your intrepid explorations. But before you theorize, consult a mathematician for your models.

In the commendable decision to rule that a law against polygamy (strictly speaking polygyny) did not constitute an offence to Charter rights, the large obvious fact was missed, at least  in any coverage I have seen. My point is that, given the anti-male bias of contemporary society, the harm to men is not perceived, and if perceived, not thought worthy of mention.

Mr. Justice Bauman discussed the damage in terms of reduced male parental investment in children, and hence lower survival rates for children, higher rates of violent crime (from surplus men), exploitation of women and violence in the household, and the “lost-boy” effect, when male children reckon that they will never have a woman to love, so they leave the community.

If all of the society is polygynous, then there is no community which surplus males can leave except by emigration to another country which forbids polygyny. Fat chance of that for the Muslim world, and the 100 million surplus males of China and India.

And what do you do with 50 million surplus males, such as China or India have? The answer is obvious. You go to war. You have an inbuilt incentive to spend your surplus males on warfare, brigandage, and wife-gathering. And how do you gather a wife? You kill her husband, and take her home. Iran got rid of a huge surplus of its male population in the Iran-Iraq war(1980-1988), spending them as wastefully as they could. Half a million battle deaths resulted from the use of World War 1 tactics in that ill-fought conflict.

Among Mr. Justice Bauman’s many findings, these three struck me as closest to the theme of this article:

[785]     The sex ratio imbalance inherent in polygyny means that young men are forced out of polygamous communities to sustain the ability of senior men to accumulate more wives. These young men and boys often receive limited education as a result, and must navigate their way outside their communities with few life skills and little social support.

[786]     Another significant harm to children is their exposure to, and potential internalization of, harmful gender stereotypes.

[787]     Polygyny has negative impacts on society flowing from the high fertility rates, large family size and poverty associated with the practice. It generates a class of largely poor, unmarried men who are statistically predisposed to violence and other anti-social behaviour. Polygyny also institutionalizes gender inequality. Patriarchal hierarchy and authoritarian control are common features of polygynous communities.

The damage is done by “the internalization of harmful gender stereotypes” is minuscule compared to the evident unfairness of polygyny to most males. Multiple wives mean sons without effective fathering, and produces  a surplus- unwanted collection of surplus males available for war, and crime, and disinclined for useful work. Osama bin Laden was the result of such an upbringing.

Such is the political correctness of our times, and its anti-male bias, that the principal harm of polygyny is mentioned briefly in the decision, and rates nothing in the media treatment of the question.

There was once a comedy skit of two guys talking about women and sex, with shopping carts loaded with diapers in the aisles of Costco, with floor to ceiling boxes of diapers surrounding them. It slowly dawns on us that sexual activity leads to something quite different from the ecstatic communion of sexual bliss. It leads to little copies of yourself who strangely differ from you and your mate, wondering about the world, demanding lunch and entertainment. It also frequently leads to marriage, and eventually, depending on your choice of mate, divorce and custody arrangements.

As to the amazing and by no means obvious relationship of sex to reproduction I am not alone in wondering.

Sex at Dawn joins the growing ranks of books on human nature, as seen through an evolutionary perspective. It is subtitled “How we mate, why we stray, and what it means for modern relationships”. It covers some of the same ground as Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn and Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind, albeit from different perspectives.
Anthropologists and biologists are asking how it is that man has come to dominate the planet, and what critical differences distinguish man from the other four great apes: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and gibbons.

We have gone in the space of a several hundred thousand years from chipping rocks on the African plains to colonizing every available part of the planet. How this has occurred is, in effect, the Question. What mechanisms, what processes, could have caused to domesticate and transform ourselves in such a brief timespan as 150,000 years?

Apparently it has to do with sex. Our sex lives are essential to our rapid evolution. Many people are repelled by that answer, but according to Darwin, there are only two ways of doing it: natural selection and sexual selection.

As Geoffrey Miller puts, only sexual selection is directed, rapid and intelligent enough to have produced us, because natural selection, in the Darwinian sense, is too slow and random to have moved us up the food chain from dimwitted rock shapers of 400,000 years ago to people able to play Bach and appreciate it. That means women have selected men to be as they are: capable of violence but good around the kids, able to bring home the bacon, and faithful enough to be tolerated. And women have been selected by men to be as they are: good with kids, able to forage for themselves and the family, handy, beautiful (no facial hair please), and smart enough to appreciate our jokes.
This is a depressing conclusion for those who imagine the perfectibility of man is only held up by the existence of bad social structures (economic and religious arrangements). It is of no consequence to those who believe that man – in whatever condition he then was – received revelation as to how he should behave.

Sex includes better brains, which offer more entertainment value, bigger dicks and more beautiful chicks, and cleverer, more emotionally engaged men and women loving one another. I could have written that differently, but that is the main conclusion of Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind. We have conquered the planet by being smarter, which has entailed and caused us to be more sexy, to be more rapidly reproductive, and to share the burdens of reproduction better as between men and women.

We are each the result of sexual selection. Men have been selected by women, and women by men, and what you experienced in your mate selection days is what everyone has gone through. And, by and large, despite the fact that less than one percent of our sexual activity is aimed at reproduction, we have populated the planet with ourselves quite effectively.

This brings us to the controversy dealt with in Sex at Dawn. How much were we ever intended to be sexually faithful?

This issue bedevils our understanding of ourselves. The time before agriculture spreads backwards from 10,000 years ago into the mists of time. It is in this time that anatomically modern humans emerged, probably about 50,000 to 30,000 years ago. This long period is a sort of blank slate onto which writers project their theories of how we got be so smart and well adapted.

Did the family unit mean that much then? Did we pair-bond for longer than a few years, in order to raise children? Was the family the engine of human survival? Was evolution accelerated by sexual exclusivity, however short term, which is implied in the idea of family?

Or, to the contrary, did people just boink and move on? Did the hunter-gatherer pack or tribe enforce any kind of sexual exclusivity in the days before we had more property than we could carry on our backs? Did men choose sexual exclusivity for some relevant period of time as they supported their mates in breeding? In the absence of accumulation of property, did we have something to defend that made patrilineal relationships a sensible social institution? Did we grow up as a species knowing who our fathers were, and did they and their brothers teach us how to hunt? Or was dad just one of the guys who fucked mother on occasion, and also taught us how to catch fish and shape a spearpoint?
This is the context in which books like Sex at Dawn are written.

Sex at Dawn is engaging in an argument about the family and the pair-bond which lies at the core of it. Essentially it is stating that the human being was not meant for sexual fidelity and it is time we recognized that fact.

The argument goes like this.
1) The behavior of the human species since the invention of agriculture is of no relevance. Since we began to accumulate property (beyond what we could carry on our backs and pack-animals) only with the advent of settled existence, and that only with agriculture, the history of the last 10,000 years reveals nothing of our true nature. It is a distortion caused by property. Property enforces the need to assure ourselves of the fatherhood of our children, and therefore the sexual exclusivity of our pair-bonds.

2) If you want to know about how we behaved sexually before agriculture, compare the human body to those of the other 4 great apes: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and gibbons. The evidence, in the form of penis size and shape, external testicles, female ovulation – whether hidden or evident, shows that we are designed to be sexually promiscuous. The existence in humans of “sperm competition” means that we were and are promiscuous, and that males have fucked women in group situations forever. Sexual exclusivity is a fantasy, a lie we keep telling ourselves.

3) As we pass out of the agricultural epoch, sexual arrangements are starting to leave behind the mould imposed by the property-obsessed homo economicus of the previous era.
As the authors state, “despite centuries of religious and scientific propaganda, the basic illusions underpinning the supposed “naturalness” of the conventional nuclear family are clearly exhausted…we need to seek peace with the truths of human sexuality. Maybe this means improvising new familial configurations” (p.310)

That, in essence is the book. I have rendered it as logically as I could, and spared you the ranting tone and the irrelevant asides on the religious suppression of human sexuality.

To which I respond:

1) The whole thing is an argument against the concept of marital fidelity over the course of a lifetime, fair enough. But who is arguing for marital fidelity over the course of a lifetime? The anthropologists argue merely that the human pair-bond was an engine of our reproductive success, in the raising of children and the transmission of culture to them. So it is pointless to argue about the pair-bond with people who are not saying it was ever wholly exclusive or meant for life.

2) That leaves institutional religion. The Christian Church and Islam have both praised the institution of faithful marriage and repressed sexuality in the interests of family stability. If you had responsibility for the human species in your hands, over the course of centuries, would you argue for anything less? Would your religion make explicit allowance for group sex and seasonal orgies? Point me the way to one such and I might join. But I doubt it would last for centuries, as the sexually repressive ones have.

3) As to improvising new familial configurations, what do you think has been going on for the last fifty years? As soon as we could escape the bonds of one man or woman for life, we have done so. Though the results are not entirely in yet, there is little ground for total confidence that sexual liberation is possible where children are involved. I am not ready to join David Warren in wholly condemning the modern era, but the importance of the family to the welfare of children is a non-negotiable truth, and free-form boinking will always take second place to the requirements of child-rearing. Child-rearing is the twenty to twenty five year mortgage. And if marriage fails, it is always a tragedy, even if leads to better outcomes eventually for the couple engaged in it. How it affects the children is the crucial test, and we do not yet have confidence to say it carries no cost to them. It is a price they pay for their parents’ inability to love one another for a lifetime.

4) Societies are in competition. The improvising of familial configurations in which we have been engaged for fifty years is a novelty. There is no reason to believe the society which engages in it will always prevail against those which suppress sexuality in favour of everyone doing their duty, and out-breeding the pleasure-seeking improvisers of family configurations.

So the advocates of the pair-bond may, with Baronness Thatcher, say that the facts of life are conservative, even if humans were, are and remain a randy bunch of adulterers, group-sex devotees, and polymorphously perverse libertines.

We are not responsible for our children.

The purpose of today’s essay is to outline the reasons for confidence that these menaces are beginning to be better understood and remedied.

Islam

The danger that Islam poses to rational discourse, liberal values, and the status of all non-Muslims, is clear to those who read about the core doctrines of the religion, or read the history of Islamic civilizations and their relationships to the outer world. I do not propose to adduce evidence on this point: no amount of argument can ever settle a matter of fact, and there are plenty of histories available.

Islam has four insuperable difficulties in dealing with the world. First, there is no basis for science, or any fundamental understanding of how the world works. Since there is no basis for science, there is no basis for the Koran to be criticized or understood. Incidentally the lack of belief in cause and effect means there can be no specifically Islamic contribution to scientific understanding or progress. Second, Islam exists in a state of continuous and unending war with all other beliefs and cultures, which may only be suspended, never renounced, and which is enjoined as the religious duty of Muslims. Third, within Islamic cultures, Islamic commandments engender poisonous relations between men and women, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, and males with each other. Fourth, Islam has never figured out what to do with the state, and political succession, so that legitimacy is forever denied to all forms of state organization. Mohammed never ruled on the issue of political organization and the legitimate succession of political rulership, with the result that political stability is made impossible, whether the state be democratic, oligarchic, mercantile, dictatorial, monarchical, customary or modern.

The four elements compose a toxic brew which has stultified Islamic societies in (almost?) every dimension of human achievement.

The recent importation of large numbers of Islamic peoples into Western societies is engendering a much greater consciousness of these issues, but the official cult of “multiculturalism” and its numerous backers prevents or discourages intelligent commentary upon them.

Each of the four issues mentioned above could generate a book, and has. It may be helpful to engage in the briefest possible foray into the first one, because it is the stubborn irrationalism of Islam which lies at the core of all its subsequent failures.

In essence, Islam turned its back on rational inquiry into the nature of things around the 10th century AD. The work may have started with Mohammed, but it was culminated in the doctrines put forth by the philosopher Al Ghazali. The doctrine which he succeeded in propagating is called “occasionalism”. It works like this. When I fire up the barbecue, the spark ignites the propane, and the flame bursts forth. So we think. But for Al Ghazali, the lighting of the flame is but the occasion for God to ignite the propane. God causes everything. When I say everything, I mean everything, and he does so directly, without at any stage the intermediation of physical laws.

The average person might well wonder whether such an abstruse conception could be at the root of Islamic difficulties with the modern world, or indeed with any conceivable world. But as Ayaan Hirsi Ali recounts of her childhood, the eventual social result of holding that God causes everything is to discourage all inquiry into anything. Every inquiry into the operation of the world is either superfluous, or heretical, and therefore haram. She recounts how every question she asked of her mother, no matter how unrelated to religion, was met with a slap across the face: every question. She recounts how, when she first lived in Holland, she watched a Dutch kids’ show every afternoon. On this show, kids would write in and ask questions, and the staff of the TV show would do their best to answer them. She sat for hours, fascinated, with the concept that an entire culture was oriented to answering the questions of children, about anything they chose to ask. It was utterly foreign to how she had been brought up.

When a Muslim says “inshallah”, (“as God wills”) he is not uttering a pious hope in the subjunctive mood; he is actually stating a fact about the nature of causation, as he believes it occurs. God is a tyrant unconstrained in his relationship to the world by natural law. Worse, perhaps, he is not constrained by love for his human creatures because, in Islamic doctrine, God’s majesty requires that humans have nothing in common with him. We are not made in His image, as Christians and Jews believe.

Imagine a universe without either law or love, and you have imagined the Islamic world-view.

To the extent this description of Islam is true, it argues that liberal societies are at a cross-roads: they can continue with the multicultural assumption that all cultures are equal, and fall quickly or slowly to Islamic pressures, or they can recover their sense of self and assert the pride they have in their own culture.

How much evidence do we see that western liberal societies are getting clearer on the concept?

I would point to several events this past year which may amount to a trend.

• both Angela Merkel and David Cameron have spoken conspicuously about the failure of multiculturalism as policies;

• the political persecution of Geert Wilders has failed;

• Prime Minister Harper has stated in calm and clear terms, almost as an aside, that “islamicism” is the principal ongoing threat to Canada.

• The deligitimation of speech controls exercised by Canadian Thought Control Tribunals, courtesy of Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn, has opened up the public space in a most healthy fashion, and the popularity of Sun-TV continues to broaden the boundaries of what can be said in public.

It is also clear that, when people feel safe to speak their minds, no one is deceived by the Islamic “thing” – everyone is aware that, whatever it is, whoever they are, a major emanation of trouble is coming from Muslims: whether some or all of them is not yet clear. Whether the militant intolerance is part of the religion or a perversion of it, is not yet clear (to the uninformed). People are prepared to be generous and tolerant, but they are not fools.

On balance, I would say that we are on the way to defining the nature of the Islamic problem for liberal societies, and as we are increasingly able to talk about it publicly, we are able to deal with it effectively. Readers of Vlad Tepes or Gates of Vienna may have cause to disagree, and I have my own moments of despair. But gradually the western liberal discourse is becoming far clearer as to what the nature of the menace is. Our policemen and spooks, by contrast, are fully aware. All over the world, our guys are breaking down doors and putting bullets into heads, as required.

Next: The decline of eco-wankery

It is difficult to decide what is most offensive about this screed – the author’s bullying attempt to make me disbelieve the evidence of my own eyes or his assumption that he has the moral right to do so. Only a devoted liberal could write such dangerous nonsense, but unfortunately the Globe is not the only outlet foolish enough to print it. I am grateful for the Internet revolution that has allowed voices of rebellion and dissent such as Ezra Levant’s and Mark Steyn’s to arrive unfiltered through your otherworldly sensibilities.

(By the way, Globe editors, let me repeat what I wrote at the time, you decided not to print the Mohammed cartoons not because of your superior appreciation of the situation, you did not print them out of fear of direct physical retribution. Your real cowardice lies in not admitting that.)