The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

Posted on June 24, 2020 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this book by Richard Dawkins:

* Breeders are almost like modellers with endlessly malleable clay, or like sculptors wielding chisels, carving dogs or horses, or cows or cabbages, to their whim.

* Something funny happens to the gene pools of domestic dogs. Breeders of pedigree Pekineses or Dalmatians go to elaborate lengths to stop genes crossing from one gene pool to another. Stud books are kept, going back many generations, and miscegenation is the worst thing that can happen in the book of a pedigree breeder. It is as though each breed of dog were incarcerated on its own little Ascension Island, kept apart from every other breed. But the barrier to interbreeding is not blue water but human rules.
Geographically the breeds all overlap, but they might as well be on separate islands because of the way their owners police their mating opportunities. Of course, from time to time the rules are broken. Like a rat stowing away on a ship to Ascension Island, a whippet bitch, say, escapes the leash and mates with a spaniel. But the mongrel puppies that result, however loved they may be as individuals, are cast off the island labelled Pedigree Whippet. The island itself remains a pure whippet island. Other pure-bred
whippets ensure that the gene pool of the virtual island labelled Whippet continues uncontaminated. There are hundreds of man-made ‘islands’, one for each breed of pedigree dog. Each one is a virtual island, in the sense that it is not geographically localized. Pedigree whippets or Pomeranians are to be found in many different places around the world, and cars, ships and planes are used to ferry the genes from one geographical place to another. The virtual genetic island that is the Pekinese gene pool overlaps geographically, but not genetically (except when a bitch breaks cover), with the virtual genetic island that is the boxer gene pool and the virtual island that is the St Bernard gene pool.

* You want high milk yield in cows, orders of magnitude more gallons than could ever be needed by a mother to rear her babies? Selective breeding can give it to you. Cows can be modified to grow vast and ungainly udders, and these continue to yield copious quantities of milk indefinitely, long after the normal weaning period of a calf. As it happens, dairy horses have not been bred in this way, but will anyone contest my bet that we could do it if we tried? And of course, the same would be true of dairy humans, if anyone wanted to try. All too many women, bamboozled by the myth that breasts like melons are attractive, pay surgeons large sums of money to implant silicone, with (for my money) unappealing results. Does anyone doubt that, given enough generations, the same deformity could be achieved by selective breeding, after the manner of Friesian cows?

* If you see an animal feeding, you can measure its flight distance by seeing how close it will let you approach before fleeing. For any given species in any given situation, there will be an optimal flight distance, somewhere between too risky or foolhardy at the short end, and too flighty or risk-averse at the long end. Individuals that take off too late when danger threatens are more likely to be killed by that very danger. Less obviously, there is such a thing as taking off too soon. Individuals that
are too flighty never get a square meal, because they run away at the first hint of danger on the horizon. It is easy for us to overlook the dangers of being too risk-averse.

Natural selection will work on the flight distance, moving it one way or the other along the continuum if conditions change over evolutionary time. If a plenteous new food source in the form of village rubbish dumps enters the world of wolves, that is going to shift the optimum point towards the shorter end of the flight distance continuum, in the direction of reluctance to flee when enjoying this new bounty.

Something like this evolutionary shortening of the flight distance was, in Coppinger’s view, the first step in the domestication of the dog, and it was achieved by natural selection, not artificial selection. Decreasing flight distance is a behavioural measure of what might be called increasing tameness.

* Selection – in the form of artificial selection by human breeders – can turn a pye-dog into a Pekinese, or a wild cabbage into a cauliflower, in a few centuries. The difference between any two breeds of dog gives us a rough idea of the quantity of
evolutionary change that can be achieved in less than a millennium.

* evolutionary scientists are in the position of detectives who come late to the scene of a crime. To pinpoint when things happened, we depend upon traces left by time-dependent processes…

* A tree-ring clock can be used to date a piece of wood, say a beam in a Tudor house, with astonishing accuracy, literally to the nearest year. Here’s how it works. First, as most people know, you can age a newly felled tree by counting rings in its trunk…

* Varves are layers of sediment laid down in glacial lakes. Like tree rings, they vary seasonally and from year to year, so theoretically the same principle can be used, with the same degree of accuracy. Coral reefs, too, have annual growth rings, just like trees. Fascinatingly, these have been used to detect the dates of ancient earthquakes. Tree rings too, by the way, tell us the dates of earthquakes.

* What would be evidence against evolution, and very strong evidence at that, would be the discovery of even a single fossil in the wrong geological stratum. I have already made this point in Chapter 4. J. B. S. Haldane famously retorted, when asked to name an observation that would disprove the theory of evolution, ‘Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian!’ No such rabbits, no authentically anachronistic fossils of any kind, have ever been found… Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order.

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Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit (2020)

Posted on June 24, 2020 by Luke Ford

Ashley Mears writes:

* Door personnel quickly assess a person’s status by sizing up physique, beauty, race, accent, clothes, watch, dress, even handbag. Red-soled Louboutin heels signal high status, but if the girl wearing them stands below five feet seven, matching the height of the “door girl” stationedat one club, she is not allowed inside. Especially if she’s a person of color.

The VIP space is a racially exclusive environment. Even if hip-hop is frequently played inside VIP clubs, on most nights out I could count on both hands the number of black and brown people present, not counting the service workers. Promoters know not to fill their table with too many women of color—a couple of black, brown, and Asian girls are fine, but the majority of tables host white bodies, and deliberately so. Some of the clients that I interviewed, too, were subject to race-based discrimination. On one egregious occasion, a handsome French Middle Eastern man with a lot of inherited wealth and connections was out with his white male friend, to whom the “door girl” leaned in and whispered, “Your friend can’t come in unless you go inside and bring out a brown person he can replace. There’s too many brown people inside already.” Such outright discriminatory remarks were rare, however, because for the most part nonwhite bodies are implicitly denied on the basis of the quality of their looks. With alarming frequency, such “velvet rope racism” prohibits nonwhites from entering. But unlike its Jim Crow predecessor, this is a softer form of race-based discrimination that articulates race in terms of beauty, status, and “quality.” Clubs are careful to admit the right number of exceptions to conceal racial bias, making it much harder to legally prosecute. 40 In this way, the clubs cater mostly to white clientele and appeal to them with the bodies of mostly white girls.

Yet as much as nonwhiteness lowers the status of a potential entrant in the eyes of the door person, for girls, beauty can override it: a black fashion model, a real model, will always be welcome. A white girl of short stature or large size, on the other hand, will be told that tonight is a “private party” and she cannot come in. Or, perhaps, she will be insulted to her face. Short women are regularly called “midgets,” and heavier women are dismissed as liabilities for the club’s prestige and the promoters’ reputations. To describe a club that was perceived as lower quality, one promoter flatly stated, “The girls were fat.” Another promoter said in our interview, “I will use the term muppets or hobbits to describe the, like, less-than fortunate looking girls.” Another referred to the women at a nearby table as “ugly dogs.” Midget. Troll. Elf. Hideous. Disaster. Monster. These are words club personnel use to describe women who do not meet their physical criteria. Their bodies are seen as worthless and contaminating. Their presence is perceived as draining value from the club, its management, the promoters, and their reputations. They lower the quality of the crowd, the fun of the night, and its economic potential. They are fiercely excluded. Ask a doorman to make an exception just this one time, to let in a girl of perceived lower quality, and you will likely hear this retort: “If we let her in, you won’t want to come here anymore.”

* Any club, whether in a New York City basement or on a Saint-Tropez beach, is always shaped by a clear hierarchy. Fashion models signal the “A-list,” but girls are only half of the business model. There are a few different categories of men that every club owner wants inside, and there is a much larger category of men that they aim to keep out.The most valuable in this hierarchy of men is the whale, a term you might know from casinos and speculative finance. Whales can drop huge sums of money from their vast riches, sometimes over a hundred thousand dollars in a single night. Their reputation is legendary in nightlife.

* After whales, club owners hope to attract celebrities, another class of highly valued clients. Sometimes celebrities buy expensive bottles, part of the show of excess that will likely make it into the press, but usually they are comped, since their mere presence adds value to the club. Some celebrities even get paid to make appearances in clubs, notably Paris Hilton, a pioneer in paid club appearances who created her own celebrity through the VIP scene, which she then aggressively monetized. 45

While exciting, whales and celebrities don’t account for the bulk of clubs’ profits; they are too rare. Furthermore, very rich men who could spend huge sums are regularly invited to party free of charge, even if they aren’t celebrities. An elaborate informal system of prices marks who is important enough to be among the VIPs, and who is actually “very” important. Prices are negotiable, contingent upon the spender’s social status; some men pay reduced prices for tables, and some are comped automatically because of their status. In fact, the men with the most riches, either in terms of their social connections, symbolic value, or financial worth, are often comped drinks on the house. One self-described Brazillionaire explained why he rarely paid for drinks in any Meatpacking District club that knew who he was: “They think I’ll give something back,” such as investing in the owner’s next bar or club venture, or holding his next big (and lucrative) birthday party at that establishment.

Free things are a clear marker of status in the VIP world. Free entry, drinks, and dinners signal recognition of a person’s social worth. 46 “I always said, in nightlife it’s not what you spend, it’s what you get for free. That’s real power,” said Malcolm, the promoter I followed in New York and Miami. “You got a lot of money and you spend a lot, of course you get respect. But if you don’t spend a dime, that’s power.”

Most clubs make the bulk of their profits from smaller and more reliable table bills, the $1,500 to $3,000 sums spent by groups of affluent tourists and businessmen—your run-of-the-mill banker, tech developer, or other upper-class professional with a disposable income. While on the lower end of importance compared to whales and celebrities, they are central to the VIP scene; in fact, they bankroll it. They regularly run up high-volume tabs because they, too, want to be close to power and beauty. Unlike celebrities and higher-status VIPs, these men always pay.

Duke, a former club owner and now a real estate magnate in downtown New York, calls these people mooks: “You know, a mook. Someone who doesn’t know what’s going on … It’s the dentists that come in and buy the tables, thinking they’re in the company of the cool people, and the beautiful people.” Dentists with their own practice in New York, I should note, make considerably higher incomes than the national average. But such high-earning professionals are not nearly as exciting as the people at promoters’ tables.

At the bottom of the hierarchy is a category of men without connections or money who cannot afford even modest table rents, but they might still have something of value to offer the club. Called “fillers,” these men keep the place from looking empty. They look cool enough, and have enough “cultural capital” to be allowed in, but they have to stand at the bar and jostle for their drinks like everyone did in the old clubbing formula.

And then you have the “bridge and tunnel” crowd, people who might have some money, maybe even enough to buy a table, but don’t have the right look. To the bouncer of a VIP club, they look like outsiders, people from Staten Island or Queens, who lack the right cultural sense to live on the island of Manhattan. If you give off class-coded cues that make you look like you traveled by bridge or tunnel to the Meatpacking District, you are unwelcome upon arrival.

Also at the bottom of the hierarchy is what Dre called the “ghetto crowd, scary crowd,” invoking stereotypes that link the lower classes, criminality, and nonwhite people. Plenty of clubs in New York cater to this crowd, and while they make money in the short term, Dre would never step foot in these clubs. “You can make a ton of money with them,” on inflated prices on bottles, “but they are carrying a piece [a gun]. They start shooting and will fight. It’s dangerous, scary people.” Himself a black man, Dre took pains to distance himself from other black people, whom he understood were stereotyped as lower class, and who therefore posed liabilities for his reputation.

Bridge and tunnel, goons, and ghetto. These are men whose money can’t compensate for their perceived status inadequacies. The marks of their marginal class positions are written on their bodies, flagging an automatic reject at the door.

How deeply stamped in our bodies is the status structure of a society. You can actually see this hierarchy just by scanning a room like the Downtown, which depicts a topography of embodied statuses everywhere you look. Bouncers, or security personnel, are large black men nearly always dressed in black; they are emblems of physical power but not social status. The busboys who carry trays of empty bottles and glasses are short and brown skinned Latinos, between five feet three and five feet five tall. Wearing plain black uniforms, they weave through the crowd carrying trays, mops, and glasses almost sight unseen. In the space they are “non-persons,” as Goffman would call them. 48 Sometimes they hold flashlights above their heads so you know they are coming through, but you can hardly see the body beneath the light, a contrast to the sparkling bottle of champagne illuminating the tall, stiletto clad girls. Cocktail waitresses, called “bottle girls,” are tall, voluptuous, and relatively racially diverse, their dresses as tight and revealing as their heels are high; they stand for sex and, according to guys like Dre, they are as much for sale as the bottles they carry. 49 Unlike the seemingly available bottle girl, the fashion model represents not sex but beauty—a prize of far greater status. While everyone else—bouncer, busboy, filler, and even the bottle girl, except when needed—tends to fade into the background, the model is meant to stand out. Tables for models are reserved in highly visible areas of clubs and restaurants, and everyone in nightlife wants to be seen with them.

To be clear, to refer to a “high-quality crowd” is first and foremost to refer to the quality of its girls: that is, to a crowd full of models or women who look like models. Girls determine hierarchies of clubs, the quality of people inside, and how much money is spent.

* The cool people don’t stay in one place for long, and club owners can both spend and earn a lot of money in pursuit of them. A nightclub usually stays in business for a few years, rarely more than that. During that period, each club follows a similar life cycle. First it attracts highstatus guests and excludes everyone else. Over time, as the VIPs gravitate to other, newer clubs in the city, the club opens its doors to the lower-status masses and the crowd gets less exclusive.

* Elite communities are no longer anchored to neighborhoods or cities, as they flock to prime destinations at specific times of the year in what have been called “rich enclaves”: summer colonies like the Hamptons and the French Riviera; St. Barts, Aspen, and Gstaad in the winter. 60 The island of St. Barts transforms from a quiet upper-class resort into a celebrated landing pad for millionaires’ yachts during the peak season, in January. 61 The elite business class follows a transatlantic calendar of VIP scenes—St. Barts in January, Miami in March, Saint-Tropez and Ibiza in July—and a predictable schedule of parties crops up along the Fashion Week calendars each September and February, with stops in Milan, London, and Paris. 62 On the one hand, elites are more diverse and geographically dispersed around the world than other classes; on the other, they are so segregated from them that geographers describe their movements as “super-gentrification,” characterized by geographic isolation, social self segregation, and a sense of remoteness. Today’s hypermobile elites live in a bubble separate from most people.

* Like Dre, most promoters unexpectedly fell into their line of work. They tell a remarkably consistent story: of the thirty-nine male promoters I interviewed, only one sought out the job on his own initiative. 2 Rather, the job had a way of finding them. It’s easy to see why: they are charming men, flirtatious, stylish, and persistent.

* Men may have more fun and find more pleasure in being around beautiful girls than not, but it would be hard for a client like Wade to account for this pleasure as deriving purely from deliberate status-driven pursuits. High-status places are surely pleasurable in themselves, in part because being high status feels good. 6 A beautiful woman communicates this, irrespective of her own status or class background: “I’d still rather be around beautiful people even if their lives are on derailment and they’re college dropouts,” insisted Wade.

Even if clients did not necessarily go out seeking economically enriching connections, the VIP scene gave them a place where they could build valuable social ties with other men like them. There was a law firm partner who met prospective clients at clubs. A cosmetic dentist met his celebrity patients. There was an Italian entrepreneur who worked in fashion and now in politics who was such a regular at one New York club that he had his own table reserved nightly for entertaining guests. He told me, “I never met a billionaire in a Starbucks. I’ve never met someone who could change my life in Starbucks.” But look around, the club was full of such people.

Even if rich men didn’t particularly care for the party scene in Saint-Tropez or in the Hamptons, they felt it was important to be there, if nothing else, to collect the stories and the credit to show colleagues and would-be partners that they too belong in an international circuit of VIPs.

* For clients and promoters alike, then, the real finds were not “party girls,” no matter how physically attractive, but “good girls.” What the good girl has the party girl lacks: sexual respectability and self-restraint, and a promising future in which she herself might fit in among the upper class. Good girls were candidates for relationships but unlikely to be found in the company of promoters; party girls were suitable for hookups, and clubs were overflowing with them.

This very tension plagued the introduction of Melania Trump to the national stage during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Melania Knavs, the Slovenian fashion model, met future husband and real estate mogul Donald Trump at the Kit Kat Club, in 1998, at a party organized by former model agency owner Paolo Zampolli, a man known for bringing together models and economically powerful men at exclusive parties. 19 But, Zampolli assured the press, Melania was not a party girl.

* The term “bottle girl” even has associations with sex work and criminality in popular and legal discourse. In an FBI investigation of theft in Miami in 2014, agents called a ring of con women “bottle girls” (and “b-girls” for short) for targeting men at bars and aggressively upselling them alcohol, in exchange for a share of 20 percent of the bar’s profits.

* The stigma of prostitution threatened to pollute all party girls in the scene. While the VIP club space extracted value from women’s beauty, women suspected of using their looks for their own economic gain were shunned. Club owners, promoters, and wealthy clients all shared suspicions around women who seemed to have economic motivations. They called such women “users,” “hookers,” and “whores.” The specter of the paid girl loomed over all girls who, by virtue of being in the VIP space, had entered into a disreputable exchange, prostitute-like in that they capitalized on their looks for free champagne and vacations.

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LAT: Porn star Ron Jeremy charged with four counts of sexual assault

Posted on June 23, 2020 by Luke Ford

From the Los Angeles Times:

Ron Jeremy, one of the most iconic figures in the adult entertainment industry, has been charged with sexually assaulting four women in West Hollywood since 2014, prosecutors said Tuesday.

Jeremy, whose legal name is Ronald Jeremy Hyatt, was charged with three counts of forcible rape and one count of forcible oral copulation and sexual battery, according to a news release issued by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

Prosecutors allege Jeremy attacked one woman at a West Hollywood home in 2014. The other three attacks allegedly happened at a West Hollywood bar in 2017 and 2019.

Hyatt is scheduled to make his first appearance in the case in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom Tuesday afternoon. If convicted, he could face up to 90 years in prison.

From my archives August 17, 2001:

A few weeks ago, I left my Uncle Ron a message asking him to call. Wednesday at 11:13PM, he finally called me back.

Ron: “I didn’t wake you up, did I? I’m sorry for calling you so late. Things have been so hectic, I finally wanted to take care of some phone calls I hadn’t returned yet. I didn’t want to be a stuck-up little bastard. How’s it going? How’s the website doing?”

Luke: “I sold it. I’m out.”

Ron: “What? Get out of here. To who?”

“Are they going to report about the business? Are they going to be on sets and stuff?”

Luke: “Yes.”

Ron: “I’m very unsavvy about computers. I don’t even have one. I’m living in the dark ages. No computer, no cell phone. Didn’t you have a lot of hits?”

Luke: “Yes.”

Ron: “Isn’t your site largely based on your personality?”

Luke: “Yes.”

Ron: “So what are you going to do now? Ignore the industry?”

Luke: “Yeah.”

Ron: “Were people giving you a hard time?”

Luke: “Yeah, my synagogue.”

Ron: “You’re a converted Jewish boy.”

Luke: “Yeah.”

Ron: “Why, there are Jews in the business.”

Luke: “They tossed me from my synagogue.”

Ron: “Did they say you could come back in if you sold the site?”

Luke: “Yeah, but it looks like it will be a long time before they do let me back in.”

Ron: “Are you Conservative or Orthodox or Chasidic?”

Luke: “Orthodox.”

Ron: “I don’t understand. I can belong to a synagogue and I’m in a lot worse shape than you’re in. Why can’t you just go to a different synagogue?”

Luke: “I will. But I’ve been banned from two of my favorite synagogues now.”

Ron: “Why wouldn’t they look at it as ‘Our son needs help. He got involved in a very strange business. Now he wants to come over. He dropped his entire living…’ Why wouldn’t they look at it as a good sign? Jews are known to be more liberal. If it was a Catholic church, you’d have a much bigger problem. They’ve got God and the Devil and Heaven and Hell and all that stuff.

“You were controversial. You even gave me a couple of good slams. But I liked that. You can’t always have the positive press.”

I last ran into Ron Jeremy in August, 2000, while winding down a date at Jerry’s Deli on Beverly Blvd. While walking out, I heard a familiar voice, ‘Hey Luke.’ It was my Uncle Ron surrounded by some slutty looking girls. I left my date behind and walked over to chat with Ron. My date later wondered why I didn’t introduce her to my friend.

Luke: “A few weeks ago, this Israeli pop culture magazine Blazer wanted me to interview you. And when you didn’t return my call right away, I just wrote up something from previous talks with you.”

Ron: “That’s fine. How am I going to look? Pretty good or am I getting slammed?”

Luke: “It’s pretty down the middle.”

Ron: “You’re always honest. There’s a great documentary coming out on me, you can see the trailer at RonJeremy-themovie.com. Eddie Murphy’s in it.

“I’ve been opening for many acts, huge of course. Run DMC, B52s, Kid Rock, Metallica, Corn, Motley Crew. And I’ve been on stage with a lot of big names too such as Gene Simmons of Kiss.

“You still enjoy looking at things, right?”

Luke: “I don’t have as much enjoyment looking at things anymore.”

Ron: “I was never a big connoisseur of it. I’ve often been told that when someone converts, they’re often more religious than those around them. My brother’s wife converted too. Were you Catholic?”

Luke: “No, I was raised a Seventh Day Adventist.”

Ron: “Oh, is that Lutheran? No, is that Mormon?”

Luke: “It’s like Mormon in some ways.”

Ron: “The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Some scholars say that if Jesus did come down to earth, the first place he’d want to go was a synagogue. Because they’re doing the religion the way he planned it. A rabbi, a cantor, a guy who sings, a guy who speaks. The first place he’d hate would be a Catholic church because it is all statutes, exactly the stuff he was against. Am I correct?”

Luke: “Probably.”

Ron: “Isn’t that an interesting thought? All these Catholics going ‘Jesus, Jesus.’ He’d look at them and say, ‘Idiots, the Jews are doing it the way I planned.’ He wasn’t into praying to different saints. It’s funny how Jews are doing Jesus more than the Catholics are.

“Remember what Sam Kinison used to say – the last thing Jesus would want to look at is the cross. He’d say, ‘Who the f— made that the corporate envelope?’ If you love John Kennedy, are you going to wear a .36 bullet around your neck. ‘Hey look John, we love you.’ The cross was a means of extermination. That’s like, if you love the French, put a guillotine around your neck.”

From my memoir, XXX-Communicated: A Rebel Without A Shul, referring to an event in February 1996:

I look over the hundreds of fans pouring into the mammoth Mayan Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. They violate my middle-class values with their tattoos, piercings, and obscene t-shirts.
I pick through the crowd, looking for porn stars. When I introduce myself, I try to present the image of a journalist with only a professional interest in his subject. Most of the porners won’t talk to me because they instinctively distrust outsiders. I wish I could temporarily become one of them, so I wouldn’t have to travel such a great psychic distance to get my story.
Struggling to talk over the music, I manage a five-minute tape-recorded conversation with a pornette from Las Vegas, who then tells me I can’t use anything she’s said because she hasn’t signed a release. I allow her to intimidate me.
A black couple asks to get paid before giving an interview. I refuse.
I hand out my business card, which features my modeling photo and reads, “Luke Ford – Actor, Model, Writer.”
I spot Ron Jeremy, who’s appeared in about 1,600 porn films. I give him my card. He’s polite but clearly has no intention of calling me.
I feel rejected. Nobody wants to talk to me. I doubt I can get the scoop. And even if I did, I doubt I can craft it into a coherent story. Except for the complete absence of book-length journalism on porn, meaning that I see this as the easiest professional opportunity for me to establish myself as an author, I wouldn’t be here.

* June 16, 1996:

On Father’s Day, June 16, I dine at the Rainbow Club in Hollywood with 43-year old stud Ron Jeremy, porn’s most recognized face, and gangbang queen Jasmin St. Claire, who claims an Ivy-league education.
“I have this guilty conscience about the gangbang,” sighs Jasmin.
“And you’re not even Jewish,” says Ron.
“Hanging around you, I’ve become Jewish.”
Ron looks at me. “You’re Jewish?”
“Ron,” says an exasperated Jasmin, “he has a yarmulke on. It’s the first thing I saw.”
“No wonder you’re a nice guy.”
“Ron, why don’t you wear a yarmulke?”
“It’s not appropriate.”
“I’m a nice Jewish boy,” I claim. “I don’t do the talent. I’d like to, but I don’t want to come on to the women I interview.”
“I know that,” says Ron. “If you did, we’d know about it.”
Jeremy walks us over to the Comedy Store and gets us in for free.
A stream of comics use his presence for jokes. Mark Turner sings, “If I were a rich man, I’d be Ron Jeremy. All day long I’d be in and out and in. In and out and in. And I’d come. Oy!”
Ron laughs, “It’s a Jewish night.”
Jasmine chirps, “I like it.”
I get up and walk to the bathroom. The comic notices my yarmulke. “What’s a Jew doing here, hanging out with Ron Jeremy? You can’t be a Jewish porn star. I haven’t seen any with yarmulkes on.”

* August 2000:

Driving back from a party Saturday night in my old van, I stop by Jerry’s Deli with Peppy. At the end of the meal, she opens up. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but after I met you at synagogue, I told two other women that I’d recruited another guy to come on the trip. They were happy until I said your name. They didn’t want you to go. They thought you were a loose cannon.”
“Yeah, it’s true,” I sigh. “I’m in therapy. I’m working on it.”
“After the trip, they were glad you came along. They like you. But this is something that concerns me. I’d like to bring you to my uncle’s barbeque this afternoon, but I’m concerned about your sense of propriety. You have a tendency at times to say really inappropriate things.”
I nod and pay the bill. As we walk out, I hear a familiar voice calling my name.
I turn around and see Ron Jeremy at a booth with four sluts. I pause and then step forward to Ron, leaving Peppy behind. She waits for me to introduce her.
When I don’t, she skips off to the bathroom.
Jeremy regales me with his latest accomplishments, including a public introduction at a Chris Rock concert.
After a few minutes, I say goodbye to Ron and find my girl outside.
“Who was your friend?” she asks.
“A B actor.”
“Why didn’t you introduce me?”
“He’s kinda sleazy.”
I try to keep my life neatly separated. There’s a compartment for work, for love, for lust, for religion. When I hit a bump in the road and the contents spill together, I feel uneasy.

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How To Stop Illegal Fireworks?

Posted on June 23, 2020 by Luke Ford

From the comments at Steve Sailer:

* Matt Drudge must be under sedation. This kind of story would top his page in his heydey. Now he’s hardly updated anything from yesterday.

* Maybe they should have Jason Pierre-Paul talk to these firework kids.

* Cops show up in force with nightsticks and riot gear to a randomly chosen fireworks call. Scofflaws w fireworks are beaten severely and left bruised and bloodied in the street. Ambulances are told not to respond.

Ok, it’s “mean.” It will also stop your problem in one night. But we can’t have nice things anymore.

* That’s more or less how the LAPD stopped Mexicans from shooting their pistolas in the air to celebrate, which used to get a couple of innocent bystanders killed. The LAPD ran a lot of public service announcements against celebratory shooting, then killed a few drunk shooters.

* The demographics in New York City no longer exist to support a critical mass of criminals and thugs. The city has by and large been gentrified. Blacks have been replaced. It is same thing that is going on throughout the country. This is the last gasp of Blacks to remain relevant in face of the tsunami of immigration.

* Tucker Carlson’s been doing everything he can to call out Trump on his incompetence and lack of leadership while maintaining not-so-plausible plausible deniability-not dropping the name-ever since the pandemic started, back when the rest of the ditto-heads on FOX were dismissing the virus as a novo-flu.

They are only going to succeed in making his show more popular, the advertisers. Why? Because regardless of whether you agree with Carlson or not, he at least shows a modicum of intellectual *independence*, and a refusal to be cowed into giving that up. He’s not willing to slay every GOP sacred cow, but he’s slayed an impressive amount while remaining honest about his right-wing beliefs. That’s more than you can say about most media people.

* “The Irishman” has a brief bit about the Italian American Civil Rights League, which was basically Mafia Lives Matter until its mobster founder got rubbed out.

* I live in a small urban area (“urban” literally and as euphemism).

Yes, apparently Memorial Day is now the urban “Black Friday” for 24/7 fireworks leading up to July 4th.

Also, yes, “Juneteenth” has been opportunistically pulled out of nowhere to become an instant Old Tradition amongst all urbanites everywhere in the year 2020. Been living here 25 years, and nobody cared about no Juneteenth before, no how. Before this year I had not heard of it actually being recognized or celebrated outside of Texas (I believe) where it began.

“Fireworks” – The problem is M-80s and firecracker strings set off everywhere and all night long. M-=80s are not fireworks; they are small bombs with no visual effect just heart-stopping noise. Their purpose is not to entertain with sparkling display, but is strictly aggression by concussion. That and an utter indifference to others.and stupidity to enjoy this. This whole story and comment thread is distorted by the failure to distinguish amongst which “fireworks” are the problem.

M-80s serve the same anti-social, small-minded purpose as “boom cars” and loud motorcycles (rice rockets and Harleys, both. They are not for the enjoyment of anyone including their users, other than the enjoyment of giving a big FU continually.

Posted in Crime | Comments Off on How To Stop Illegal Fireworks?

Scott Alexander Closes Down

Posted on June 23, 2020 by Luke Ford

I don’t think you can be doxxed when you already use your real first and middle names on your blog and you are easily identifiable. The New York Times did not doxx this shrink, he doxxed himself long ago.

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* In the comments section of his recent Steve Hsu post, Scott Alexander essentially said that he had stopped writing about HBD a while ago to protect himself.

I work in the corporate world, and my career could be destroyed if it came out that I’ve commented here. I take some precautions now, but years ago in more innocent times, I put my actual email in the email box and didn’t mask my IP address. Is that information still stored somewhere? How vulnerable is it? Is there any reason that it couldn’t be deleted?

* On the doxxing front, this Scott Alexander situation brings to mind Alex Kuczynski’s unmasking in the NYT of my friend Ed Conlon way back in the 90s, when he was writing pseudonymously for The New Yorker about his work as an NYPD officer. She just did it for fun: like her father the similarly repellent Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, disgraced ex-President of Peru, she evidently has few moral scruples.

* Rod Dreher at The American Conservative is doing outstanding work on this subject of emerging soft totalitarianism. He is not self-censoring out of fear in writing under his real name. Rod is very clearly made of the stuff that liberty and civilization are made of. Perhaps only a small percentage of such people are needed to secure these blessings for broad society, but some discreet percentage are surely required.

* Rod Dreher is correct and people of a certain disposition must anticipate a possibility of being unable to work in a growing number of professions. If you have certain religious or political or scientific views, and are honest about them, it may be hard to work in your chosen profession. Unless you are very quiet about your beliefs. East Germany had a Stasi. As Steve Sailer probably has pointed out, now we have volunteers who work for free to monitor the rest of us.

It won’t quite be like the Soviet Union or the old East Bloc in Soviet times–but there are similarites.

1. Many individuals will believe one set of things but be afraid to state those things out loud. It will be hard to tell what people actually think because informers may be anywhere.

2. Many creative individuals will have mundane day jobs and do their “real work” at night. Vaclav Havel comes to mind, offhand.

3. Various professional and occupational fields will be increasingly taken over by hacks. How to define a hack? I think of someone who is (a) predictable, (b) mediocre, and (3) produces what is politically called for and unthreatening. Consistently.

4. You would expect to see people in exile. There was no shortage of creative minds from the Soviet Bloc who got out or were advised to get out–Western observers could conclude these individuals were just the tip of the iceberg. Off the top of my head…

Czeslaw Milosz

Solzhenitsyn was in a class by himself, of course

Andrei Amalrik

Joseph Brodsky

5. As in the Soviet Union, there will be a set of disciplines (The Party Sciences) in which it is understood that the body of research does not actually describe reality, but rather describes a desired reality that doesn’t exist but is wished to exist.

In the Soviet Union, these things included history and economics. Literature was strongly hobbled as well.

in the USA, it seems that psychological topics around gender, psychometrics, and criminology are some of our emerging Party Sciences.

In both systems, journalism is compromised. We don’t have Pravda and Isvestia. But it can be hard to get an accurate portrait of reality by reading the newspaper.

In the Soviet Union, plane crashes were often not reported, according to Hedrick Smith’s old work _The Russians_.

In the US papers, certain events are de-emphasized. To learn of them you should consult the Daily Mail in the UK, rather than the NY Times or the Washington Post.

* The mob cannot fire him. Neither can the odious characters who work for The Times. The question at hand is why his employer would fire him in those circumstances. Here’s a hypothesis: the modal character type in the professional-managerial class today is a craven and other-directed simp who has zero sense of honor.

* The inexorable pressures of government and mammoth insurance companies have lead to the result that the great majority of doctors today are employed, usually by large hospital or academic systems. The loss of the “shopkeeper” private practice doctor is one reason the profession is moving strongly to the left (half the articles in the New England Journal now are SJW crap). Also in most localities psychiatrists are in short supply. If he was cancelled and fired it is certainly possible there wouldn’t be another psych readily available and on the right insurance plans to take on his patients. And psych patients do kill themselves at times.

* If the guy is a psychiatrist that has given out his first and middle name, along with the not-that-huge city that he lives in, how hard would it be for any lame-brain to find him? You don’t need Jim Rockford at $200 per day plus expenses. Shit, if he were of the left, and it was time for me to do this, I wouldn’t have to know anybody and could do this in a day or two (at $200/day + expenses, of course).

I haven’t read the guy’s blog, but I’ll take you all’s word for it that it was good reading. On the naivety of the guy, “indeed”, indeed. It’s not just naivety – it’s a lack of imagination here – think about what someone would have to do to find out who you are.

Posted in Journalism, Psychology | Comments Off on Scott Alexander Closes Down