For those of us fond of population genetics and the inevitable quarrels resulting from the subject, this promises to be good times. Wade’s new book is causing a lot of difficulty for the Cult. Gregory Clark’s book, The Son Also Rises, seeded the field, so to speak. Now the genetic realists are trying to breach the lines. It promises to be a good summer of reading blog posts like this was from Steve Sailer.

A massive problem in contemporary intellectual discourse is that people don’t remember the past well and don’t have a critical attitude toward whatever is the latest conventional wisdom about the backwardness of the past. In the Obama Era, we see race and sex disparities all around us, and the only socially acceptable explanation for them is that the past was so incredibly racist/sexist until … well, nobody can quite remember when, but it must have been practically the day before yesterday.

So, it’s hard for contemporary intellectuals to put themselves back into the shoes of their predecessors.

Tyler posted this yesterday without comment as a part of his daily list of links. I can only guess at his motivation for posting it. I get the impression he is a voracious skimmer and does not always know what’s in the links he posts. Anyway, I found it to be a wonderful example of authentic new age gibberish. Maybe I don’t travel in the right circles, but I don’t get to hear this sort of emotive, synthetic language much these days. When I did real work, the man would send me to diversity camp or sensitivity camp, where this sort of gobbledygook was common.

Astra Taylor is the author of “The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age,” a new book on how information technology and market changes are reshaping art and culture.

Having never heard of Astra, I went to Dr. Google and inquired about her bona fides.

Astra Taylor is a Canadian-American documentary filmmaker, writer, and musician, best known for her 2005 film, Zizek!, about the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, and for her 2008 film, Examined Life.

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Taylor grew up in Athens, Georgia,^[1] and was unschooled until age 13.^[2] She attended Brown University for a year and holds an MA in Liberal Studies from the New School. She has taught sociology at the University of Georgia and SUNY New Paltz. Her writings have appeared in numerous magazines, and in 2006 Filmmaker Magazine listed her as one of “25 new faces to watch.” She is the sister of painter and disability activist Sunny Taylor,^[3] and is married to Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel.^[4] Taylor performed with Neutral Milk Hotel during the band’s reunion tour of 2013/2014. She is the author of the book The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, published by Metropolitan Books.

I like the unschooled bit. I guess if you are going to make up a bull shit biography, calling yourself “unschooled” is a good start. The links in her Wiki page go nowhere so a little search reveals this video. Mostly third-wave feminist nonsense, bit we learn that “unschooled” means home schooled. In her circles, “home schooled” is equated with Walmart and gay bashing so I can see why she made the change.

Right out of the shoot, the interview takes on the vibe of a couple of hens yapping at one another while waiting for their kids at the Montessori school.

HF – At many points in the book you suggest that new technologies, far from leveling the playing field, are creating their own forms of inequality. How can open technologies lead to very unequal outcomes?

AT – It’s true that our new communicative technologies can create space for many voices, but the Internet also reflects and often amplifies real-world inequities. It is open but also unequal.

Contrary to all the hype about the “long tail,” the cultural playing field hasn’t been leveled so much as rearranged. What we are seeing is the emergence of the “missing middle” (a phrase I’ve taken from the political scientist Matthew Hindman). Online the bandwagon effect intensifies: the big can get bigger than ever before, and there are lots of tiny interesting things on the margin, but the in-between is hollowing out. The Internet is a global distribution medium.

Now, the Interwebs has been with us for two decades. The first browser was dropped in the early 1990’s. I recall downloading it from a FTP site at the University of Illinois (I think). It has been a long time. Not many people were on-line back then compared to now, but it was not a tiny community. When Astra was discovering middle-school, adults were discovering the Internet. Now she “educating” the rest of us about how the Internet is changing the world. Hilarious.

I try to highlight a contradiction in the contemporary media ecology. On the one hand, a handful of businesses are rising to become new info-monopolies. Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook are now among the biggest companies in the world, siphoning revenue away from other local economies to Silicon Valley or Seattle or wherever, concentrating wealth in the process.

On the other, even as this remarkable concentration is playing out, our relationship with media is becoming more personalized. No one can tell you what to click on, Web sites reflect your preferences, and everyone has a glowing screen of their own. Yet these catered services generally rely on centralized vendors and services, like Amazon or Apple, that control the hardware we are using and the content we consume. This creates a kind of vertical integration behind the scenes. Certain barriers to cultural participation have been removed, and we can all post on social media or comment on articles, but massive asymmetries of power persist. Individually we glean benefits that are orders of magnitude smaller than the benefits for the platform owners who can collect and harness the “big data” generated by our communications.

There are certain buzzwords that are popular with these new age hustlers. One of them is “ecology.” The reason, I think, is it conjures images in the mind of plants and fuzzy cute animals. Then there’s the old standby, the false dilemma. The specter of the global mega-corporation versus granny viewing pics of her grandkids on Facebook.

Of course, we see the liberal use of neutralizing words. A “kind of” vertical integration is, logically, no vertical integration, but the point is to have it both ways. It is a way of taking both sides while allowing the listener to assume whatever ever they find pleasing. Obama does this all the time. His Nobel speech has some hilarious examples.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this. As I crest the hill of life I notice this sort of stuff more often. When I was young, wacky old hippie-hens were invisible to me. The only exposure I had to them was whenever I had dealings with Human Resources. Because we all pay for our sins in this life, I’m cursed to notice these crazy old broads now. Or, perhaps, I have more crazy old hens in my peer group now. I don’t know.

Semi-famous homosexual, Michael Sam, was given an award today for working so hard to make a public nuisance of himself, in addition to publicly professing his love of penis.

Michael Sam has been selected the winner of the Arthur Ashe Courage Award.

The Missouri defensive end, who likely will be drafted by an NFL team this weekend, will receive the award given to individuals who transcend sports at The 2014 ESPYs on July 16.

Sam, the SEC Defensive Player of the Year, has announced that he is gay, making him set to become the first openly gay player in the NFL. ESPN is honoring Sam for “his courage and honesty that resonates beyond sports.”

Courage? If he came out as a conservative then you’re talking about courage. Every other day some homo is waving us down and demanding we hear how much he loves penis.

“I’m very honored to be presented with the Arthur Ashe award,” he said. “It is about courage.

“You know I don’t think there is anything courageous I did. I look forward to when we can live life in a world when gays don’t have to come out in public.”

Sam said he has received support from athletes in all sports, “from football to basketball to softball to soccer, everyone.”

“I am thrilled to be living in a time when you can be accepted for how you live.”

So true. I remember last year when homosexuals were forced to work on lavender farms in the South just because they were homosexuals. Now, they are cluttering up our TV’s. Maybe one day Obama will come out of the closet a homosexual will be President.

Sam joins a prestigious list of winners ranging from Jim Valvano, the first recipient in 1995, to Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, Cathy Freeman, Nelson Mandela and Pat Summitt.

The award, of course, is named for Ashe, the inspirational tennis star who died in 1993 after contracting AIDS from a blood transfusion. After learning he had the disease, Ashe campaigned to raise awareness about AIDS.

“Arthur always believed in and practiced leading by example,” said Ashe’s widow, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe. “When Michael Sam announced that he is gay, he courageously stepped forward to engage an issue that still remains a pervasive problem in many professional sports. Michael has displayed true leadership both on and off the field.”

Sam is one of eight children from Hitchcock, Texas. Two of his siblings have died and one disappeared and has not been found.

This is something that turns up frequently. Homosexual men are often the last of big litters. There’s some correlation between the number of males born to a mother and the probability of the last one being homosexual. No one knows why some tiny number of people are homosexual, beyond the obvious definition. They seem to be that way by nature, but it is certainly not genetic. No gene has been found to cause it and that follows from the logic of evolution. Traits that reduce reproductive advantage disappear quickly.

As to the award, I’m sure Sam is a great guy trying to do the right thing. ESPN, however, is a loathsome outfit trying to exploit this poor bastard. I will not be shocked at all if it ends badly for Michael Sam.

[subscribe2]When I was a young man, it was possible to have a conversation with a man of the liberal cloth, even if you were a normal. By that I mean a conversation about politics. It was not that everyone got along. It was that everyone seemed to agree on the facts and the point of public policy. Only far out wackos thought you were evil for voting for Reagan or favoring tax cuts. Many a night I got drunk with fiends on the Left debating one thing or another. Liberals did not like Reagan, but they did not hate him and they did not treat his supporters like lepers.

In the 1990’s that began to change. The vulgarity of the Clinton crowd made civility difficult. I really think the culture gap became a chasm in the 1990’s. If you voted Republican it was not just because you happened to like their positions or their candidate. Party affiliation became tribal identification and the debates, therefore, were not about facts and reason. They were about which side you were on in the culture war.

On television, the public access shows turned into shouting matches. The liberal democrat would talk over everyone, ignore the questions and just chant the slogans the liberal democrats were embracing at the moment. They called it spin, but it infected everything. I lost a few friends because they simply would not stop repeating the party line to me whenever they saw the chance. I simply decided there was nothing I could do to help them. They had turned into moonbats.

These days I mostly avoid having anything to do with Lefty. The few liberal friends I still have are “weather and sports” only friends. Anything that bumps up against the tenets of the Cult, even tangentially, is avoided. Everywhere you turn a lunatic is preaching at you about gay marriage, the war on women, racism, white privilege and on and on. I often feel like Robert Neville in the book I am Legend. Instead of raging vampires, I’m surrounded by lunatic liberals shaking their piety bracelets at me.

This post over at The Spectator does a good job analyzing the ratcheting lunacy we see around us.

It has long been clear that expressing certain views has been a form of social signaling, although social media has made this far more explicit. Holding what might be loosely called politically correct opinions on a range of issues suggests that the holder is more likely to be well-educated, wealthy, young, probably attractive, and possessing social nous (ie in touch with social trends).

But Kristian’s theory also explains one aspect of political correctness: the speed at which the accepted and acceptable view moves, heading in an ever-more extreme direction.

I’d extend this further. Ever notice the speed that buzzwords and catchphrases get popular amongst Lefty? Obama used the word “shellacked” after the 2010 election and every Lefty in America was littering their language with it. Another example was “gravitas” after that idiot Biden was picked to be Obama’s running mate. I can rattle off a dozen more examples. It’s why I call it The Cult.

He uses the analogy of the music fan who, once the band he’s into has been discovered by everyone else, must find some other obscure outfit as a positional good. Once a wacky idea becomes accepted, the high-status politically correct brigadier must stand out with some new area of concern; this he or she does with one of those articles or blogs in which it is argued that, while progress has been made in one particular battle against prejudice or bigotry, the real war is now against racism in food labeling or the lack of transgender dolls for my children. It doesn’t matter if the issue at hand is inconsequential or, more likely, impossible to overcome; in fact the more so, the better.

Unlike with music, however, the trend is always in one direction and there is no re-centering; it would be as if the mainstream of elite taste in music went from Led Zeppelin to Black Sabbath to Metallica to Slayer and onto Napalm Death. Politically that’s what much of the commentary in places like Slate sounds like to me – just some guy atonally screaming in my ear about some micro-injustice.

Not a bad example. Thatcher called it the ratchet effect.

Another aspect of this mindset is the desire to punish people who have insufficiently correct views on doctrine, even if the beliefs they hold were orthodoxy ten or five years ago. I’d really like to conduct a Stanford Prison-style experiment in which people were rewarded (perhaps with a dopamine hit) for punishing those with heretical views, and to see where it led. To make it more interesting, only people with unorthodox views on only one side of the political spectrum would be punished, to see how extreme a group would become towards the other direction in a short space of time. Soon they’d be sacking people for disagreeing with an idea that didn’t exist anywhere in the world before 2001 – oh whoops, sorry, that was real life.

There are examples of the public simply going mad. Athens leading up to the Sicilian Expedition is an example that comes to mind. The Athenians appear to have lost their bolts and threw away their advantage on a crazy idea cooked up by a conman. The Abolitionist Movement is something closer to home. Large numbers of whites in the north wanted to murder the whites in the South and would not be deterred. Prohibition is another example from the American past. Maybe there is something wrong with our grain.

In this post about the economics of Brooklyn, I see this bit of data:

Kind of. In 2011, the Census estimated the median household in Brooklyn earned $42,752 a year.  In 1999 the Census estimated the median household income in Brooklyn was…$42,852 (in 2011 dollars; the listed figure in 1999 dollars is $32,135).  That’s compared to a national median household income of $50,502 (in 2011) and $55,999 (in 1999), again using 2011 dollars.  In constant dollars, Brooklyn stagnated while incomes dropped elsewhere.

In that period, we have probably absorbed 20 million legal immigrants. Some claim we have also added another 10-15 million illegal immigrants. The debate over the exact figures is pointless. Everyone agrees we have added a whole bunch new people. This at a time when Americans are getting poorer, outside the over-class and managerial class. They are doing great, naturally.

I fully admit to being a bit of squish on immigration. The sentimentality of it is tough to resist. The mathematics of it, however, are beyond dispute. The elites are deliberately impoverishing the country by importing millions of foreigners. With all the talk about addressing income inequality, I have a suggestion on that front.

Paul Craig Roberts has an interesting take on the current mess in Ukraine.

Washington has no intention of allowing the crisis in Ukraine to be resolved. Having failed to seize the country and evict Russia from its Black Sea naval base, Washington sees new opportunities in the crisis.

One is to restart the Cold War by forcing the Russian government to occupy the Russian-speaking areas of present day Ukraine where protesters are objecting to the stooge anti-Russian government installed in Kiev by the American coup. These areas of Ukraine are former constituent parts of Russia herself. They were attached to Ukraine by Soviet leaders in the 20th century when both Ukraine and Russia were part of the same country, the USSR.

This is a popular refrain from paleo-cons, but I’m not so sure I buy it. One of things that is apparent about Machiavellian schemes is that none of our princes are all that clever. They can reason through the here and now and even plot a few steps ahead, but anything beyond a couple of moves and they get into trouble. That’s been my take all along here. The State Department was mucking around in Ukraine thinking they had things under control. Then they didn’t and Putin found himself with a golden ticket.

Essentially, the protesters have established independent governments in the cities. The
police and military units sent to suppress the protesters, called “terrorists” in the American fashion, for the most part have until now defected to the protesters.

With Obama’s incompetent White House and State Department having botched Washington’s takeover of Ukraine, Washington has been at work shifting the blame to Russia. According to Washington and its presstitute media, the protests are orchestrated by the Russian government and have no sincere basis. If Russia sends in military units to protect the Russian citizens in the former Russian territories, the act will be used by Washington to confirm Washington’s propaganda of a Russian invasion (as in the case of Georgia), and Russia will be further demonized.

Well, there we are. I don’t see how you can square the claim about wanting a new Cold War with the follow on that the administrations is a bunch of bunglers. The case for the latter is too strong to dismiss and the case for the former is absent.

The Russian government is in a predicament. Moscow does not want financial responsibility for these territories but cannot stand aside and permit Russians to be put down by force. The Russian government has attempted to keep Ukraine intact, relying on the forthcoming elections in Ukraine to bring to office more realistic leaders than the stooges installed by Washington.

However, Washington does not want an election that might replace its stooges and return to cooperating with Russia to resolve the situation. There is a good chance that Washington will tell its stooges in Kiev to declare that the crisis brought to Ukraine by Russia prevents an election. Washington’s NATO puppet states would back up this claim.

It is almost certain that despite the Russian government’s hopes, the Russian government is faced with the continuation of both the crisis and Washington puppet government in Ukraine.

This I think is the interesting bit. I don’t think anyone wants to leave things in the hands of the voters. That’s an important lesson of history. Elites are all for democracy as long as they can predict and control the results. The French, Germans, Americans and Russians will be spreading around money and hit-men between now and the election, trying to get a favorable result.

On May 1 Washington’s former ambassador to Russia, now NATO’s “second-in-command” but the person who, being American, calls the shots, has declared Russia to no longer be a partner but an enemy. The American, Alexander Vershbow, told journalists that NATO has given up on “drawing Moscow closer” and soon will deploy a large number of combat forces in Eastern Europe. Vershbow called this aggressive policy deployment of “defensive assets to the region.”

In other words, here we have again the lie that the Russian government is going to forget all about its difficulties in Ukraine and launch attacks on Poland, the Baltic States, Romania., Moldova, and on the central Asian states of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The dissembler Vershbow wants to modernize the militaries of these American puppet states and “seize the opportunity to create the reality on the ground by accepting membership of aspirant countries into NATO.”

Talk to people in the military and they will tell you that we are transitioning to a peace time military. The War on Terror is winding down and a whole lot of folks will be looking for new dragons to slay. It is an old problem. A nation ramps up for war and then finds itself with a whole bunch of restless warriors looking for something to do. American motorcycle gangs are a direct result of World War II vets coming home and looking for action.

Today, the decommissioned warriors are guys with advanced degrees and wearing suits. Instead of buying a Harley they take a job at some quasi-government outfit full of ex-Seals and former intel guys. Maybe they end up at a defense contractor. Companies like this rely on their contacts to get contracts for dirty jobs like sending vehicles to Georgia as they prepare for war with Russia.

The time is approaching when Russia will either have to act to terminate the crisis or accept an ongoing crisis and distraction in its backyard. Kiev has launched military airstrikes on protesters in Slavyansk. On May 2 Russian government spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Kiev’s resort to violence had destroyed the hope for the Geneva agreement on de-escalating the crisis. Yet, the Russian government spokesman again expressed the hope of the Russian government that European governments and Washington will put a stop to the military strikes and pressure the Kiev government to accommodate the protesters in a way that keeps Ukraine together and restores friendly relations with Russia.

This is where the Western mind goes wrong. In Eurasia, time is measured differently. Waiting is the preferred strategy. In fact, it was the basis of Russian military tactics for close to a century. Let the enemy wear himself out attacking you then counter-attack in force. Putin most likely sees no advantage to doing anything but waiting for the West to make another mistake. If he is wrong, not much changes on the ground. If he is right, he can advance his cause a little more.

This is a false hope. It assumes that the Wolfowitz doctrine is just words, but it is not. The Wolfowitz doctrine is the basis of US policy toward Russia (and China). The doctrine regards any power sufficiently strong to remain independent of Washington’s influence to be “hostile.” The doctrine states:

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”

The Wolfowitz doctrine justifies Washington’s dominance of all regions. It is consistent with the neoconservative ideology of the US as the “indispensable” and “exceptional” country entitled to world hegemony.

Maybe, but it also looks like elements of the American ruling class are flinching at the price tag. Empire is expensive and the public appears unwilling to pay forever. The marginal return on investment of Poland is infinity higher than Ukraine. What we may actually be seeing is the water’s edge. Kiev is just outside Hadrian’s Wall, so to speak. The benefits from expanding empire further east are far outweighed by the cost. Russia is just not worth all that much.

The old saying is “Russia is never as strong as she looks and never as weak as she looks.” I’ve always read that as an indictment on Western thinking. Russian is not European. They don’t think like Europeans and they don’t respond like Europeans. We get this with China or Africa. We never figured it out with Eurasia. Hence we always get the Bear wrong.

Way back in the olden thymes I had one of those conversations familiar to anyone in the tech world back then. The web was just getting going and everyone was throwing up websites hoping to get rich. Someone I knew was involved in one such venture. He was giving me the elevator speech about how it was positioned to take advantage of synergies and vectors and so on. After he was done I asked him how they planned to make money. I was not being cheeky, I just assumed he left that part out for some reason. Instead of telling me, he went into another spiel about unique visitors per month and page visits. My reply was something about the bank not taking page visits as payment on his mortgage. Not long after, the venture collapsed.

The great challenge of the tech boom was figuring out how to make money from things people did not need, but they could possibly want, if the price was right. Some services like porn figured it out for a while. Others like eBay and PayPal came up with real businesses to replace existing businesses. Others figured out how to transfers big chunks of their costs onto some unsuspecting sucker like the ISP. Others figured out how to tax you through your phone bill, using some sort of tying/skimming arrangement that is baked into the service contract. The latter is where patent trolls come into play. They shake down companies for rents, abusing the patent laws. That’s the racket of dirtbags like James Logan.

James Logan freely admits that he’s never made a podcast.

But he also insists he helped create the medium of podcasting. Logan says that it happened in 1996 — and that he has the patents to prove it.

In a controversial legal battle, PersonalAudio, the company founded by Logan, is suing comedian Adam Carolla’s ACE Broadcasting, two other podcasters and networks Fox, CBS and NBC, saying they are infringing on his copyright and owe him money.

The trial begins in September. Carolla has taken to the Web to raise money for legal fees against what he called “patent trolls.”

Carolla says he needs $1.5 million to face PersonalAudio in an East Texas courtroom that historically has been favored by patent litigants. So far, Carolla has pulled in just over $370,000 on the Fundanything.com crowdfunding website, including a $20,000 donation from e-commerce giant Amazon.

“The first thing they (PersonalAudio) said was ‘Give us $3 million,’” says Carolla, whose show is listed in the Guiness Book of World Records as the most downloaded podcast ever. When faced with the suit, Carolla said he chose to fight.

“Obviously, $3 million is out of the question,” he says. “But even if they said tomorrow, ‘Give us $100,000, and this will all go away’ — $100,000 for what?”

Should he lose, Carolla says he might shut down his show, a sentiment seconded online by others.

Podcasting has been around since at least 2004, initially as a vehicle to supply non-music programming for the Apple iPod, which launched in 2001. Apple began offering podcasts, through subscriptions and downloads, via its iTunes app in 2005.

As the popularity of smartphones and tablets has eliminated the need for subscriptions and downloads, sites such as TuneIn Radio, SoundCloud, Stitcher and Swell offer instant listening, both on the Web and via increasingly popular smartphone apps.

Nerdist‘sChris Hardwick built a huge online following with his podcast, which he parlayed into a high-profile hosting gig with cable network AMC. Comedian Aisha Tyler, a co-host of TV’s The Talk, parlayed her popular podcast Girl on Guy into a best-selling book, Self-Inflicting Wounds. National Public Radio has found huge audiences for shows such as This American Life, Snap Judgement and Fresh Air, which regularly top the iTunes podcast charts.

The trials — six separate suits between PersonalAudio and Carolla, Discovery Networks, podcaster Togi Entertainment and the broadcast networks — will take place in a small Texan town with 24,000 residents. Marshall, three hours east of Dallas and near the Arkansas border, has become known as the “patent trial capital”, a popular place to get a trial in a city whose docket isn’t filled with other cases waiting to get a hearing.

Many patent cases take place there, and historically, litigants win 60% of the time, according to a recent study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Carolla’s team fought the locale, seeking a bigger city and fearing the history.

PersonalAudio, based in Beaumont, Texas, has a handful of employees working on creating new technologies, says Logan, who himself is based in New Hampshire.

PersonalAudio has no products but instead owns patents and investments in several companies, including consumer tech company Bringerr.

Logan’s 1996 idea predates podcasting as we know it. His concept was downloadable entertainment via the Internet to a new kind of MP3 player he was trying to market. The product fizzled, so he switched gears to subscription of cassette tapes. He filed for and was granted several patents, which included the notion of having downloaded playlists.

In 2009, PersonalAudio amended the patent to include podcasting.

It is patently obvious that James Logan is adding nothing to any of these companies. They are not using his technology. He has not created anything unique or original that they are relying upon to do their work. He is good at fooling stupid government clerks in the patent office into giving him rights to things he never created. His entire business is built around the idea of finding someone he can sue in a courtroom full of rubes.

That’s the main problem with these patent suits. Their claims have no relationship with the real value of their product. Carolla would never pay $3 million to this idiot in order to record a podcast. He probably would not pay anything. Instead he would find some other way to do his show without using whatever it is this guy claims he owns. James Logan is simply a highwayman, but one that robs you after you pass, instead of as you pass.

I’m not much of a David Brooks fan. I read his book Bobos in Paradise a long time ago and I thought it was an excellent bit of cultural observation. Brooks is a member of the managerial class, a layer of servants and aids to the ruling class.  He knows his peers well and often does an excellent job describing their habits and world view. It is also why he sounds like a space alien when he addresses issues facing common Americans. Still, he scores with a column or two a year and this is one such example.

Many people join the political left driven by a concern for the poor. But, over the past several years, the Democratic Party has talked much more about the middle class than the poor. Meanwhile, progressive political movements like Occupy Wall Street directed their fervor at the top 1 percent. Progressive movies and books have focused their attention on conspiracy and oligarchy at the top, not “Grapes of Wrath” or “How the Other Half Lives” stories at the bottom.

This is natural. The modern left is led by smart professionals — academics, activists, people in the news media, the arts and so on — who tend to live in and around coastal cities.

If you are a young professional in a major city, you experience inequality firsthand. But the inequality you experience most acutely is not inequality down, toward the poor; it’s inequality up, toward the rich.

You go to fund-raisers or school functions and there are always hedge fund managers and private equity people around. You get more attention than them at parties, but your whole apartment could fit in their dining room. You struggle with tuition, but their kids go off on ski weekends. You wait in line at the post office, but they have staff to do it for them.

You see firsthand the explosion of wealth at the tippy-top. It really doesn’t help that you have to spend your days kissing up to the oligarchs and their foundations to finance your research, exhibition or favorite cause.

And right there he touches on precisely why a hitherto unknown economist named Thomas Piketty is taking the beautiful people by storm. The people writing at the NYTimes, teaching at big state universities and carrying bags for elected officials have grown resentful of their masters. They look around at lottery winners like Mark Zuckerberg and wonder why he gets to live like an 18th century French royal, while they toil in his fields, so to speak. After all, they went to an Ivy League college too.

Back in December, Obama declared inequality is “the defining issue of our time.” Obama is a babbling idiot, but he is still a decent weather vane, telling us where the Cult is heading for it next crusade. His writers and teleprompter operators are members of the managerial class. What’s important to them will eventually come flapping from Obama’s gums in a  speech. With an election coming and the Cult on its heels, it is a safe bet they will be pounding this drum for the rest of the year in an effort to change the subject.

I think there may be something else going on here that is driving the interest from the Left. If you look back at the last fifteen years, the period of this last Great Awakening of Progressive fanaticism, they don’t have a whole lot to show for themselves. In the 2000’s, it was mostly an extended tantrum about the unlettered rubes of the Bush administration. The Obama years have been a big disappointment to the Left. The great dreams of 2008 have been boiled down to one major initiative, health care, which has been a grotesque flop.

If you are a member of the Cult of Modern Liberalism, it’s feeling like 1972 in San Francisco. The Summer of Love is a distant memory and all the promise of that time amounted to nothing. More broadly speaking, this last fevered push by the Left never had much going for it. Health care is a math problem, not a moral problem. The rest of their agenda amounts to nothing more than silly fads cooked up by college professors with too much time on their hands. Otherwise, it has been a bunch of true believers looking for a cause.

The other side of the coin is the Right has nothing to offer at the moment. Conservatism in America has mostly functioned as a brake on the progressives. Every once in a while they come up with a good policy and aggressively promote it, but for the most part they are the party poopers telling the Left they can’t have what they want. Right now, the Left is exhausted and the Right has nothing to champion, other than singing old dongs from the Reagan era. Both sides are looking for a reason to get public attention so a fight over the super-rich is as good as any.

Ideologically, we are at a dead end. With no way forward, going back and re-arguing inequality suits both sides well.

I’m fond of calling Mark Zuckerberg a lottery winner. The reason is he is a billionaire for no earthly reason. His company has value, but nothing close to what it is valued right now. The weirdness of the financial world at present is what has made it and him super-rich. That weirdness is easy to see in something like this.

Just when it seemed like investors might have lost some of their appetite for initial public offerings of companies that lose money . . . yeah, right.

Papa Murphy’s Holdings Inc. priced its IPO today at $11 a share. The stock closed up a nickel. I’ve grown accustomed to seeing IPOs by profitless technology companies. But this is a pizza chain that had net losses of $606,000 in 2011, $2.1 million in 2012 and $2.6 million in 2013.

Now it has a stock-market value of about $187 million, or about 2.3 times its revenue last year. Founded in 1981, Papa Murphy’s, based in Vancouver, Washington, sells uncooked pizzas that customers take home to bake. It had been majority-owned since 2010 by private-equity firm Lee Equity Partners LLC.

The argument is the suckers buying stock in a company that is losing money are just suckers. Those suckers, however, are caught up in a game created by sharps to fleece squares. A great book on the subject is called The Money Game, written by a game named Adam Smith. No kidding.

People have often asked my how I look so youthful. I’m pushing 50, but most people think I am in my thirties. I always tell them that I drink the blood of the innocent. Normally, they laugh, uncomfortably, and assume I’m weirdly telling them to fuck off. On occasion someone will press me and I just say it is genes. No one wants to believe drinking the blood of unbaptized infants is a real thing, but now the wider world is finding out about my secret.

It may seem the stuff of gothic horror novels, but transfusions of young blood could reverse the ageing process and even cure Alzheimer’s Disease, scientists believe.

Throughout history, cultures across the globe have extolled the properties of youthful blood, with children sacrificed and the blood of young warriors drunk by the victors.

It was even rumoured that the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il injected himself with blood from healthy young virgins to slow the ageing process.

Now scientists have found that young blood actually ‘recharges’ the brain, forms new blood vessels and improves memory and learning.

In parallel research, scientists at Harvard University also discovered that a ‘youth protein’ which circulates in the blood is responsible for keeping the brain and muscles young and strong.

The protein, known as ‘GDF11’, is present in the bloodstream in large quantities when we are young but peters out as we age.

Although both the discoveries were made in mice, researchers are hoping to begin human trials in the next two to three years, in studies which could bring rapid improvements for human longevity and health.

“This should give us all hope for a healthier future,” said Prof Doug Melton, of Harvard’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology.

“We all wonder why we were stronger and mentally more agile when young, and these two unusually exciting papers actually point to a possible answer.

“There seems to be little question that, GDF11 has an amazing capacity to restore aging muscle and brain function.”

Last year the team discovered that the protein could repair damaged hearts. But the new study showed that that raising the levels of the GDF11 protein in older mice improved the function of every organ in the body.

Harvard stem cell biologist Prof Lee Rubin added: “We do think that, at least in principal, there will be a way to reverse some of the decline of aging with a single protein.

“It isn’t out of question that GDF11, or a drug developed from it, might be worthwhile in Alzheimer’s Disease.”

It is likely that the protein is at least partly responsible for the parallel finding by Stanford University that young blood can reverse the signs of ageing.

In the study, the blood of three-month-old mice was repeatedly injected into 18-month-old mice near the end of their natural life span.

The “vampire therapy” improved the performance of the elderly mice in memory and learning tasks.

Structural, molecular and functional changes were also seen in their brains, the study published in the journal Science found.

If the same were seem in humans, it could lead to new therapies for recharging our aging brains and novel drugs for treating dementias such as Alzheimer’s disease.

“We’ve shown that at least some age-related impairments in brain function are reversible. They’re not final,” said Dr Saul Villeda, of Stanford’s School of Medicine.

Ageing mice given eight infusions of young blood over three weeks improved their performance in mental tests of fear condition and locating a hidden platform in a water maze.

Evidence was seen of new connections forming in the hippocampus, a brain region vital to memory and sensitive to ageing.

Dendritic spines – finger-like extensions from the branches of neurons that are thought to play a role in memory formation – also became more dense.

Infusions of blood from other elderly mice had no effect, the study, published in the journal Nature, found.

“This could have been done 20 years ago,” said lead researcher Dr Tony Wyss-Coray of Stanford.

“You don’t need to know anything about how the brain works. You just give an old mouse young blood and see if the animal is smarter than before. It’s just that nobody did it.”

“Our data indicate that exposure of aged mice to young blood late in life is capable of rejuvenating synaptic plasticity and improving cognitive function.

“Future studies are warranted in aged humans and potentially those suffering from age-related neurodegenerative disorders.”

Dr Eric Karran, from the dementia charity Alzheimer’s Research UK, said: “This technically complex study looks at the effects of exposing old mice to blood-borne factors from young mice on age-related cognitive decline.

“Although the treatments tested here rejuvenate certain aspects of learning and memory in mice, these studies are of unknown significance to humans.

“This research, while very interesting, does not investigate the type of cognitive impairment that is seen in Alzheimer’s disease, which is not an inevitable consequence of ageing.”