We live in a miraculous age. Things that used to kill off large numbers of humans like disease or accidents, are no longer much trouble, thanks to modern science. People still die from falls and cancer, but not from the sniffles or a broken leg. Every year, science makes various cancers less lethal. New methods from genetics promise to mitigate things like Alzheimer’s Disease.

It is hard not to think that man is inches away from conquering creation by knowing its details. Then, you see something like this and you’re reminded of how much we don’t know.

The most important job inside any cell is making proteins, and they are all made using instructions from DNA. This process is practically gospel in the field of molecular biology, but new research identifies some exceptions. Some proteins, it turns out, can make other proteins.

Proteins are assembled from amino acids inside cellular structures called ribosomes. Normally, the blueprints for every protein—from disease fighting antibodies to structural components that allow muscles to contract—are encoded in DNA and delivered to the ribosomes by molecules called messenger RNA. There, those genetic instructions are used by a related molecule called transfer RNA to build the protein.

The image above, published today in the journal Science shows a totally different way of building a protein. The yellow blob is a protein called Rqc2 that’s doing the job normally done by messenger RNA. It is connected to the transfer RNA (the blue and light green blobs), telling the ribosomes (the mass of white curls) to insert a random sequence of amino acids into the protein string.

This isn’t a case of a protein going rogue. It seems to be part of the recycling process that occurs when there’s a mistake in a protein being built. When an error is introduced, the ribosomes stall and call in a group of quality control proteins, including Rqc2. In observing this process, the researchers saw how Rqc2 links up with the transfer RNA and tells it to insert a random sequence of two amino acids into the chain (out of 20 total amino acids).

The researchers believe that Rqc2’s seemingly aberrant behavior might be an integral part of keeping your body free of faulty proteins. It’s possible that it is flagging the protein for destruction, or that the string of amino acids could be a test to see if the ribosome is working properly. People with disorders like Alzheimers and Huntingtons diseases have defective quality control processes for their proteins. Understanding the exact conditions where Rqc2 is triggered, and where it fails to trigger, are the next step in this research, and could be important for developing new treatments for neurodegenerative diseases.

Even with technological acceleration, it will probably take a generation to figure out how that works. In the process, all sorts of new things will be discovered that present even more mysteries to be solved by future generations. It’s a good reminder that the set of things we do know about the natural world is a drop in the ocean of what can be known.

Way back in last year (who can remember so far back?), Larry Elder wrote a piece about cops shooting people. The thrust of his post was that the frequency of cops killing citizens has dropped steadily, particularly amongst blacks.

By 2011, law enforcement shootings caused 2.74 deaths for every million blacks, and 1.28 deaths for every million whites. While the death-by-cop rate for whites has held pretty steady over these last 45 years, hovering just above or below the one-in-a-million level, the rate for blacks has fallen. In 1981, black deaths by cop stood at four in a million, but since 2000 has remained just above or below two in a million.

The bit he does not address is the ratio. Blacks make up 13% of the population, but make up 65% of the death by cop population. On the other hand, whites make up 73% of the population and just 35% of the death by cop community. It’s important to realize that those numbers he quotes are unreliable because the CDC does not collect the data. This is self-reported data, with the cops have discretion over what is reported.

Still, the broad outlines are good enough to wonder why blacks are so much more likely to have a violent encounter with the cops. Just using population numbers, blacks are getting off’d at a rate five times higher than whites. The most obvious explanation is that blacks commit much more crime. Blacks are 13% of the population, but are responsible for 50% of the murders. When you adjust for crime rates, the violent confrontation rates make a lot more sense.

The fact is the drug game is run through the black inner city. Everyone knows this, including the cops. Baltimore, for example, is a main cross dock for the heroine trade. The drugs are smuggled in through the port, broken up and sent north and south. It’s why the cops look for young blacks driving rental cars on I-95. They are most likely moving drugs.

The cops get paid to police crime and that means they go where the crime is and that means the black inner city. The drug business is a violent business so you get a lot of violent young men attracted to it. Put the two together and you have a lot of cops chasing violent black in the drug business. The inevitable will happen, which is what drives a lot of the death by cop numbers.

There’s another thing though. Blacks hate the cops. This is true everywhere, not just the ghetto. There’s respect to be had if you give the cops a hard time. White people, even thugs, avoid hassling the cops. There’s no gain in it. Cops checking out bikers at a bar will find the bikers to be friendly and cooperative. Cops encountering a group of black males in the ghetto can count on at least one getting in his face, trying to start trouble.

It’s not just the cops. In the ghetto, one of the things you get used to seeing is young black males walking in the streets. They are just daring you to blow the horn. They will also stroll across a street against the light real slow so traffic has to stop. I’ve seen black females wait until the light is about to turn green and then walk into the crosswalk, laughing as the cars have to wait for the buffaloes to pass. It is a chaotic sense of entitlement that manifests as a random bucking of basic rules. In confrontations with the cops, this leads to violent conclusions.

I’m not sure how you fix this or if it can be fixed. Putting cameras on cops is just a way to avoid facing the facts. It lets race hustlers like Obama sort of blame the cops while pretending to look out for them. It also allows the more slippery members of the Randian cult to pretend they care about the black man. The libertarian angle here is drugs. It’s always drugs with them. But, it also lets them avoid confrontation with the Left, which is what they fear more than death.

Many conservatives believe race or racism was never a factor at all in the Brown and Garner cases, or in most of these types of cases. Many insist that the protesters were just making all this stuff up.

Who disagrees with this? Black people.

In poll after poll after poll after poll after poll—strong majorities of black Americans have consistently said that race plays a role in how law enforcement is applied and how the justice system is conducted in

We know that black teenagers are 21 times more likely to be shot by the police than whites. We know that 1 in 3 black men can expect to go to jail in their lifetime. We know that 1 in every 15 black males in the U.S. is currently incarcerated. We know black offenders receive longer sentences than white offenders. We know that despite the same rate of use of marijuana, blacks are 4 times more likely to be arrested.

You’ll note that libertarians love asking the question, but never bother to provide an answer. In this case, the question is “why do blacks believe they are at war with the police?” The obvious answer is that the Left has been preaching this to them for three generations, but the Randians can never take up that fight. Instead, they turn on the Right and blame them.

But are blacks just misperceiving these circumstances as racism, as many conservatives seem to think? Or have black men and women have observed things in their communities for a very long time that many outside their communities aren’t aware of?

Is this even a possibility? Many conservatives: Nope.

Years ago, I used to say inflammatory things as a conservative radio shock jock, “The Southern Avenger,” knowing it would generate a certain animosity, even racial.

I thought it was a badge of honor, that this was my role. I believed part of being a conservative was simply to ignore minority criticism, or perhaps to point to other minorities who agreed with me. Over the years, I’ve changed my mind significantly.

But do many and perhaps most conservatives subscribe to this mindset? I must ask—particularly given recent events and the reactions to them—is part of being conservative just not caring what black people think? It should be noted that there were diverse conservative opinions about the Eric Garner decision.

You’ll note the Randian never bothers to prove that there is something racial behind the statistics. He just throws out some numbers without finishing the thought. It’s a common trick. You, the reader, are supposed to pick up the line of thought and conclude there must be something malevolent behind those numbers. Of course, the solution will inevitably be the legalization of drugs, the only reason the Randian Cult exists.

I’m open minded about drug legalization, but I’m also skeptical about the results. There’s no free lunch. The trade-offs in legalization are more drug use, more social pathology from drug abuse and more petty crime. The welfare state will also balloon as the need to care for the addicted increases. The courthouses and jails will be less busy, but the medical system and welfare system will be much more busy.

More important, anyone who thinks legalizing drugs will solve the black ghetto problem has never set foot in the ghetto. Those corner boys slinging drugs are not going to start programming disruptive mobile apps once the drug money is gone. They will still be violent criminals looking to score. They’ll just move into something else, maybe Rand Paul’s neighborhood.

I saw this in a Taki column by Ann Sterzinger. I’m not a fan of Sterzinger’s brand of groaty snark. It may be a generational thing. Maybe it is my sexism. Who knows, but the New Yorker piece on the Internet parasite was worth wading through Sterzinger’s many references to bodily functions. Jim Goad has this habit too. Anyone he does not like is compared to a bowel movement or vomit or some other base human function. I don’t get the point of painting such pictures for the reader, but I’m not an edgy writer for Taki.

Anyway, the linked piece above is interesting and free of scatological references. The title is what gets me. A virus is always bad. Calling someone a “virologist” should be an insult, unless the person works for the CDC. Even after reading the article, I’m not sure if it is an insult or compliment here. What’s clear is the subject of the story makes his money by deceiving people and stealing the property of others. His sites are built around appropriating the ideas of others to draw an audience. Then he sells ad space to the sites.

Deception is the primary line of business.

Much of the company’s success online can be attributed to a proprietary algorithm that it has developed for “headline testing”—a practice that has become standard in the virality industry. When a Dose post is created, it initially appears under as many as two dozen different headlines, distributed at random. Whereas one person’s Facebook news feed shows a link to “You Won’t Believe What This Guy Did with an Abandoned Factory,” another person, two feet away, might see “At First It Looks Like an Old Empty Factory. But Go Inside and . . . WHOA.” Spartz’s algorithm measures which headline is attracting clicks most quickly, and after a few hours, when a statistically significant threshold is reached, the “winning” headline automatically supplants all others. “I’m really, really good at writing headlines,” he told me. “But any human’s intuition can only be so good. If you can build a machine that can solve the problem better than you can, then you really understand the problem.”

At the bottom of a Dose post, there is usually a small “hat tip” (abbreviated as “H/T”). Many people don’t notice this citation, if they even reach the bottom of the post. On Dose’s first day of existence, its most successful list was called “23 Photos of People from All Over the World Next to How Much Food They Eat Per Day.” It was a clever illustration of global diversity and inequity: an American truck driver holding a tray of cheeseburgers and Starbucks Frappuccinos; a Maasai woman posing with eight hundred calories’ worth of milk and porridge. Beneath the final photograph, a line of tiny gray text read “H/T Elite Daily.” It linked to a post that Elite Daily, a Web site based in New York, had published a month earlier (“See the Incredible Differences in the Daily Food Intake of People Around the World”). That post, in turn, had linked to UrbanTimes (“80 People, 30 Countries and How Much They Eat on a Daily Basis”), which had credited Amusing Planet (“What People Eat Around the World”), which had cited a 2010 radio interview with Faith D’Aluisio and Peter Menzel, the writer and the photographer behind the project.

This is a recurring theme here at The Z Blog. What passes for building a better mousetrap in the new economy is usually just using technology to game the system. In this case, the guy started out by attaching himself to the Harry Potter franchise. Calling it a “fan site” let him skirt the rules governing theft of intellectual property. If he tried selling Harry Potter shirts he would have been sued out of existence. Selling ads on a “fan site” is essentially the same thing, but it skirts the rules just enough to avoid a lawsuit.

The click bait sites are just fraud, for the most part. He’s gaming search engines and he’s misrepresenting his site to get hits. He then uses the traffic to defraud advertizes. Increasingly, mainstream sites employ the same tricks. They split stories into many pages to drive up page hits. Bleacher Report has figured out how to game Google so that their crappy pages show up at the top of any sports related search. I’ve had to modify by browser to block that site.

Stealing from one another is not economic activity. There are only three types of economic activity that can increase the nation’s wealth. You either invent things, make things or fix things. Emerson Spartz is not doing any of that. He is siphoning money from people who make things, invent things and fix things. These parasites are the only part of the economy that are growing. The parasite economy has a natural limit. When the host dies, the parasite economy dies with it.

I saw this on Drudge today and I got a chuckle from it.

The first Jews to settle in what is now South Dakota established themselves in Deadwood during the Gold Rush over 150 years ago, finding a niche selling hardware, groceries, dry goods and more.

By 1920, the state was home to some 1,300 Jews. That community has dwindled to an estimated 390 people. No state has fewer.

It’s a small, but tightknit flock that makes do without a permanent rabbi and worries too few children are coming along to sustain it.

Steve Benn is a doctor who serves as lay leader at Rapid City’s Synagogue of the Hills. He says “nobody wants to be the last one to turn the lights out.”

Benn orchestrates bar mitzvah ceremonies, performs ritual circumcisions and conducts funeral services.

South Dakota is also one of the whitest states in the country. It is 6th, in fact. If you’re a member of Stormfront then South Dakota looks like a great place to live. Out of curiosity I looked for a breakdown of Jews by state. It looks like there are a number of contenders for the ideal Stormfront state. I’m not very familiar with their stance on these things, but my guess is they hate blacks slightly more than they hate Jews.

I searched “best state for black people” and I got back a lot of hits on black centered sites with state rankings by flava. I changed black to white and the results are mostly liberal sites ranting about racism. Change white to Jews and we’re back to serious analysis of where Jews have it best. Funny how that works.

Steve Sailer once proposed something called a Cromartie Index. It’s one of those funny things that pops up on those bad think sites. I wonder if anyone has ever created a measure to rank places to live, by the amount of diversity. In ecology, there’s a thing called the Simpson’s Index, which measures the diversity of species within a system.

A HBD Index would take into account race, age, religion and political outlook. I’m throwing religion in there because a place like Utah might look good to some, until they learn about the magic underwear business. The other problem is the fact that a 100% Hispanic town would have the same HBD score as a town in Maine, but mean different things to different people. Maybe including IQ would solve that problem.

Maybe if I have time I’ll try and come up with an HBD Index.

A year ago I wrote a post critical of BitCoin. At the time, it was trading at $1000 and all the smart people were saying it was the future. A year later and it is trading at $300 and no one talks about BitCoin anymore.

There are a lot of practical problems with digital currency, but the biggest defect is no government will ever let control of their currency slip into the hands of a bunch of anonymous nerds. It’s why we no longer have hard money. Money is the language of economics. Control the language and you control the debate. Control the money and you control the economy. One of the reasons the US runs the world is the dollar is the world’s reserve currency. That and a massive military and a nuclear arsenal.

Putting that aside, the other big problem with BitCoin is it is not really money. You don’t go into the market and buy your groceries with stock certificates or bonds. Those things have value, but they are not money. They lack certain key attributes of money, namely the predictability we expect with money. I know what a dollar or pound or yen will be worth a year from now, with a 99% accuracy. That stock can have a range of values, perhaps a very broad range of values. That’s what we see with BitCoin.

Of course, BitCoin is valued in dollars. That’s because the dollar is money, a universally accepted money. BitCoin is a gaming device. People bought them as an investment, a bet that dumber people would come along and buy them at a higher price. It turns out that peak stupid in the BitCoin realm was a year ago.

I’m not sure how I stumbled onto this blog. I was looking for something on Africa and it was in the search results. Google is a great search engine, but it is not without its weirdness. The post that was linked was this one. I thought it was a joke of some sort so I kept reading. Turns out the blog is by a self-absorbed and possibly unbalanced Brit. At least that’s my take. Maybe it is just very clever satire that I’m too “obtuse” to comprehend. You never know.

But the about me section says it is most likely not an elaborate gag.

I am a computer programmer who has lived mostly in or near New York City. The part of the world that has most shaped my view of it is Uptown Manhattan. Although I tend to think of myself more individually, I am in fact part of the wave of middle-class West Indians who left the city in the 1990s to bring up their children. I have two sons, ages 12 and 14 (as of 2010). After 15 years of marriage I left my wife, Rebecca, on March 1st 2009. I took our two sons. She was growing increasingly violent.

At university I studied computers and ancient Greek. Computers showed me how to make a living, the Greeks showed me how to live. People told me studying ancient Greek was a waste of time, but I learned far more about life and the world from the Greeks than from anything in computers.

In my twenties I was a Marxist, a materialist: If God exists, he does not matter to us. The universe is just matter in motion. In my circles in New York, Christianity was something for old women who did not know much about the world.

Then I got married, had children, settled down. Before I got married I had promised Rebecca that I would read the whole Bible. I did, cover to cover. As a materialist Marxist, no less. I found out it was not the pious fable I had always assumed it was. And so in time I became a Catholic.

West Indian, of course, means black from the Caribbean. They are not typically obsessed with their race, but the better educated are just as solipsistic as American blacks. Looking at the guy’s posts shows me he has a near pathological obsession with his skin. John Derbyshire has written a lot about this phenomenon. He thinks it is an American thing, but it is a worldwide phenomenon. The post-colonial African leaders were educated in the West and brought back with them an obsession with their race.

In a recent radio transmission, Derb said:

For many American blacks, especially elite blacks like the Obamas, nothing exists outside their own blackness. Their blackness is endlessly interesting, endlessly fascinating to them. They can never get enough of thinking about it, talking about it, reading and writing about it.

If they write a book, it’s about their blackness: Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, for example. If they write a college paper, it’s about their blackness: Mrs Obama’s Princeton thesis, for example, the seven words of whose title contain the word “black” twice. If they read a book, it’s about blackness. I’ve spent many, many hours riding the New York subway. Sitting next to a black person who’s reading a book, I take a peek: two times out of three it’s some black author writing about blackness.

Black black blackety-blackety-black. It fills their consciousness and absorbs their attention. What on earth must it be like to so trapped like that, such a prisoner of your own skin? I can’t imagine. I guess, just as the T-shirt slogan says: It’s a black thing; I wouldn’t understand.

It really is a strange thing. John is mostly right to isolate it as a feature of elite blacks, but you see some of it at the lower levels as well. My own sense is it is a part of the racial solidarity that is so strong with blacks. If you are living a middle-class life as a black person, the only way to keep it black is to talk non-stop about being black. It is an overcompensation to remain loyal to the blood, without walking around with your pants down, playing with yourself like they do in the hood.

It is not just a superficial affectation. The latest post on that blog referenced above is a good example of the studied obsessiveness with being black. If you scan through a course list of an Africa-American studies program, you see the same thing. There’s some history and culture course, but the meat of it critical race theory and its variants. CRT is the theory that a super-secret cabal of pale penis people rig everything to keep the black man down. That sounds insane, but I’m being kind. Here’s the official definition:

“CRT recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalization of people of color.”

I’ve written a lot about the need for blacks to drop the racial solidarity as a way to move into the mainstream of American life. That’s why the people in the race rackets are so obsessed with keeping everyone on the reservation. It’s a self-ghettoization that is self-perpetuating, therefore I see no way out of it. Perhaps it becomes so poisonous it just collapses on its own. Maybe when all the old race hustlers from the civil rights era drop dead, the funk will lift. When you have a distinct minority that defines itself by its obsession with being a distinct minority, there’s no reason to think they ever pull out of that spiral.

A Howard University football player celebrated Christmas by getting killed in a  botched home invasion. For those unfamiliar with Howard, it is a black college in Washington DC. TN Coates flunked out of Howard. It’s probably the most politically connected black college on earth. That’s why it has an endowment of half a billion. It’s also why it is counted as one of the Black Ivies.

A former coach and family friend of the Howard Bison running back who was one of two suspects fatally shot during an attempted robbery in Texas says Terrence Neal Tusan was a “good kid” and student.

Tusan, 22, was killed on Sunday at a Denton, Texas, apartment complex. Denton police say five people were involved in some sort of altercation during the home-invasion robbery.

“He was a good kid,” Clarence Nevels, a former coach and mentor to Tusan, told the Denton Record-Chronicle. “He had good grades and was just down at AT&T Stadium for Thanksgiving Day Madness Youth Football speaking to students about believing in themselves.”

Tusan, who was at home on holiday break from the Washington D.C., school, was killed along with 18-year-old Jakobi Dmon Gipson.

Police say three men forced their way into an apartment and gunfire broke out, leaving two suspects dead and two residents wounded. The third suspect fled and reportedly remains at large.

Nevels, who said he knew Tusan for 15 years, told the Denton newspaper that Tusan didn’t have a criminal history and wasn’t known to be associated with drugs.

“You have to wonder, what would be the purpose to throw his life away?” Nevels said, according to the Record-Chronicle’s report.

Tusan, a junior for Howard, had 331 rushing yards with two touchdowns this season as a backup running back, including a 70-yard TD in a 38-25 loss to Rutgers.

Police recovered two guns, one belonging to a victim and another belonging to a suspect. Police haven’t specified who opened fire.

“Terrence was the only child [his mother, Donna Tusan] had left, and now he is gone, too,” said Nevels, who the newspaper reported was speaking on behalf of the Tusan family. “We just want to ask anyone looking into this incident to investigate further.”

It’s not much of a mystery, of course. Terrence and Jakobi decided to rob someone, probably over drugs or a lack of respect. A gun fright erupted and the result was inevitable. Young black males commit an enormous amount of crime and this is fairly typical of what happens in the ghetto. The technique of bursting into a home and shooting up the place is popular for reasons no one bothers to explore. It does seem to be a more popular murder technique with blacks than other races.

What is a mystery as well is why black males commit so much crime. This story is a familiar one. A young man seems to have some promise so adults like coaches and teachers take a special interest in him, hoping he can be an exception. Everything goes well until he suddenly decides to rob a liquor store or murder a drug dealer. It’s not like the kid started to hang with a bad crowd or start taking drugs. It just all goes wrong all of a sudden.

The explanation for this that jumps out to me is the extreme racial solidarity in black America. In white America, keeping the good kids away from the bad kids is the focus of everyone. Even back in the paleolithic when I was coming along adults had no trouble culling the defects from the herd. Somewhere around puberty, the stupid and uncontrollable ended up in “special” classes, away from the rest of us. That is not permitted in black culture.

The result is Terrance gets to hang with Jakobi as an equal, but they are not equals. Jakobi, I’m guessing, is high status in the hood. His ghetto name is what I’m going on here. In the white world, Dakota is not allowed anywhere near Dwayne and that was the case from about the fifth grade. By the time Dakota is at college, Dwayne is long gone. In black America. Terrence is never allowed out of the hood. He has to “keeps it real.” Otherwise, he runs the risk of being a “Tom” or acting white.

Until blacks drop the racial solidarity, this story will be a common one.

When I was a young man my grandfather would tease us about how soft we were compared to his generation. His line was, “In my day it was wooden ships and iron men. Now it is iron ships and wooden men.” Of course, he did not live in the age of sail so it was not to be taken literally. He was always joking about it so it was just the good natured ribbing old men give to young men as a part of their admission into manhood. On job sites as a teenager, the men would give the young guys crap about being soft and stupid. As I got older I realized they were right, particularly about the stupid part.

In my grandfather’s day, Americans still died from the flu and bad food. Infant mortality was a major part of life. Most men worked in jobs that required brute strength and a fair degree of risk. Men getting killed on the job was not unusual in many fields like construction. Working in a factory in the first half of the 20^th century was not clean rooms and robots. It was dirty, hot and dangerous. Both men and women had to be tough to make a go of life. Today most people call in sick with the sniffles. My grandfather never missed a day of work in his life, even when his kids were born.

My first blush with the other side of this experience was a few years back. I had an intern for the summer and he was as soft as a sneaker. I was amazed at his cluelessness and this was a kid studying to be an attorney. He was not stupid, but he was shockingly naïve about the world. He also lacked any sense of curiosity. Having had my eyes opened to it, I started noticing it with other young people. This is a generalization, but the generation coming along seems to wait for life to come to them. When it does, they are easily vexed by it.

My inclination was to assume it would fade with time. The period from the early 90’s through the late 2000’s was a wild run on the credit card. America charged a five star lifestyle and that meant the kids lived uncommonly soft lives in those years. The crash and the stagnant economy were probably going to beat those nutty ideas out of them. Thirty percent unemployment for college grads seems like a good way to pound some sense into them. That was my view for while, but I’m starting to reconsider it. Maybe my grandfather was right and we are getting softer.

Back in the summer, I was with some friends and a couple of them brought their teenage sons. We were having beers and shooting the breeze when one of us said something off-color. I want to say it was a crack about the gays, but it is not important. One of the boys gasped. He did not faint or throw his dress over his head, but he was clearly shocked to hear it. The look on his face was of someone hearing something for the first time.

This happened a few times as we got drunk and it occurred to me that these kids were probably quite typical. They spend half their awake time in Massachusetts public schools. Throw in organized activities and they have little time not marinating in the PC culture. Popular culture has banned just about anything anyone can possibly find upsetting. When kids are not in school, they are plugged into pop culture so the colleges fretting over micro-aggressions may not be fringe. They may be mainstream in youth culture.

I bumped into another example tonight. Tonight is a lift and run night. Once it gets cold I put away the bike, hit the weights and switch to running for my cardio. I’ve gotten into the habit of listening to the British History podcast while I workout or run. It’s a great podcast if you like history told in an offbeat sort of way. The guy who does it mixes in a lot of pop culture stuff to spice it up. I’m guessing he is in his 20’s, maybe early 30’s. He sounds young and talks like a young person.

Anyway, I downloaded some episodes on the Vikings – the series – he did for members. When the issue of rape came up in one episode, I thought he was going to faint. He was terribly upset that the writers put a rape scene in the show. It was a very strange reaction, given the amount of sex and violence on TV these days. The weird thing is it felt a little contrived, like a public act of piety, rather than true feelings.

Later in the episode, he and his co-host for the segment spent a lot of time complaining about the “gender roles” in the show. They were upset that the writers had the female characters acting like females. I thought it was a joke at first, but they were really upset that the writers had the women acting womanly and the men acting manly, at least as far as the Viking age.

I’m an old man and I’ll be dead soon so no one gives a crap about my opinions. The people who will shape the culture, are shaping the culture, are the 20 and 30 year olds. The men of this generation are not soft in the conventional sense. It appears they detest and reject the traditional concept of masculinity and femininity. The reaction by the host of the podcast is the same sort of visceral response Americans have when offered dog as an entree. They are revolted.

The future, at least it seems, will belong to a class of eloi nothing like those who came before them. We’ve reached some sort of inflexion point where the gradual change takes a sudden turn in another direction. Each generation of Americans got softer and more comfortable through the last century. Then all of a sudden, one generation has taken a big leap into the head winds of biology and declared 50,000 years of human evolution over. They are going in a new direction.