lpm100's reviews
711 reviews

Book Review
The Power Broker
4/5 stars
"The Ashkenazi brainpower, front and center, of a First Class Dirtball."
*******
QUOTE (Eric Hoffer): "Men like Gandhi and Trotsky start out as apparently ineffectual Men of Words and later display exceptional talents as administrators or generals."
 
Of the book:

-1162 pages/50 chapters+intro. (23pps/per).

-Bibliography contains>100 interviews.

-Sources used in bibliography are incomplete (Caro said that the bibliography would be a separate book in its own right Sources are also set up in such a way that it is time prohibitive to go through and count them all.)

-The (relatively short) chapters have well spaced breaks in case they are longer than you could read in one sitting.

-Book is probably twice as long as need be--but an investigative marvel just the same.

-The author manages to construct a great narrative arc; the last section of the book was unputdownable.
*******
A snapshot in history and the amount of information is overwhelming.

Primary information: 

1.  Governance structures. An "Authority" is neither fish nor fowl:

a. It is contractual/enters into contracts, and cannot be altered by a simple act of State legislature, any more than another contract could be -- because they have the protection of the Constitution.

b. An Authority "possesses the powers of a large private corporation, but also some powers of a sovereign state." (p.623)

2. The story is that: someone enters public service with the most idealistic motivations, and enough experience sees his idealism mocked to death and he becomes just a cynical as the people that he thought he was going to "fix." I'm sure that this story has been told 1,000,000 times before, but this 1,000,001st time was beautifully done.

3. Building effective government is something that takes many generations, and this book is a snapshot of some of that time (p.745, etc).

4. A lot of people have suggested that the government is not the best choice for social engineering. If you have not been convinced, this book will help you come to that conclusion. Too many very corrupt people with very bizarre / distorted incentives (psychic and otherwise) are attracted to that profession for it to be reliably successful.

5. (p.150) Robber Baron wealth: Westbury House: 32 rooms, Woolworth Mansion, 62. Solid gold bathroom fixtures and a dining room ceiling gilded with 1500 square feet of 14 karat gold. Private police forces and armed guards. Bomb shelter large enough for 1800 people. Diamond tiaras for lady guests. Cigarettes wrapped and smoked in $100 bills. 48 miles of shoreline, all of it was closed to the public except for 1,250 ft.

6. RM was descended from German Jews, who, even back then were very keen on assimilation. (Moses actually became an Episcopalian.)  And Bella "did not want her sons to be circumcised, to be bar mitzvahed - or to have any training whatsoever in the Jewish faith."

7. Reform was going strong at that time, and the German Jews took on the Jewish White Man's burden of civilizing the Eastern European Jews.

8. The opulence in which Moses lived as a government official is untold. (At least for any government officials outside of Africa / Haiti.) $179, 215 (1960 dollars) spent just on entertainment. A fleet of boats. A fleet of the newest custom-made limousines. The finest liquors. A $300,000 (1960 dollars) restaurant built just for his use. A $4.2 million private theater to entertain guests. 3000 service employees at his beck and call. A private police force. A private beach.

9. With respect to urban planning: supply generates its own demand (recurring theme with RM's projects). If one bridge is overcrowded and if you build a second then it will be just as crowded as the first. And then if you build a third, it will be just as crowded as the first two. Etc.

Second order thoughts:

1. RM may have not had a brit milah, nor a bar mitzvah, and he may have "converted" to "Episcopalianism" (which I doubt), but his mental architecture was 150% Jewish:

a. He read the pre-existing law very carefully and later defined the terms in his omnibus bill with Talmudic-level-hair-splitting precision.

b. The stereotypically dislikeable-but-indispensable Jew: Moses got to be what he was not through conspiracy, but just by being VERY VERY good. (And wow, was he a nasty piece of work.)

c. RM was very situationally aware, and he knew exactly how to find the right people and market to them. (Hence his designation as a "power broker.")

d. Lots of elements of the Neurotic Jew. (So much for that stereotype.) It's very odd that he remade New York City in his image, but never learned to operate a car.

e. The Golden Jew as viceroy goes all the way back to Joseph in Egypt and RM is just one more data point through until present times.

2. The corruption in New York was breathtaking. It seems like they had nothing on present-day Haiti (pps 980-1).

3. I don't know if it was that Moses didn't like black people, or did he just know that they bring trouble wherever they go. (And, decades after the completion of this book they are 99% of New York's pickpockets, violent criminals/armed robbers/flash mobs, etc).

-(p.318): "For Negroes, whom he considered inherently dirty, they were further measures. Buses needed permits to interstate parks; buses chartered by negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits."

-(p.510): "Areas of the maps on which dots where sprinkled most thinly of all corresponded to those areas of the city inhabited by its 400,000 Negroes. Robert Moses built 255 playgrounds in New York City. He built one playground in Harlem."

-(p.514): "Q: 'Don't you have a problem with the Negroes overrunning you?' A:'They don't like cold water and we have found that helps.' Moses told him that while heating plants at the other swimming pools kept the water at a comfortable 70°, at the Thomas Jefferson pool, the water was left unheated so that it is temperature, while not cold enough to bother white swimmers, would deter any colored people who happen to enter it once from returning."

-(p.560): "The wrought-iron trellises of the Harlem playhouse comfort station are decorated with monkeys"

-(.p.736): "... Ideological agreement with Moses including feelings about Negroes and Puerto Ricans and the necessity of keeping them in their place."

4. In spite of all the vast power that this guy had during his lifetime, there are very few people that can remember all that he did. (In that sense, he is the living embodiment of Shelley's "Ozymandias.") Indeed, after his forced retirement he became a tragic figure as he watched himself fade into irrelevance and the fruit of his works rot.

5. Many of these larger-than-life rulers/public officials seem to know a lot of one thing, but have SEVERE blind spots toward other things. (Witness, for example, the severe overbuilding / resulting real estate crisis in China.) In the case of Moses, he was great at building parks, bridges, and roads. But he would not set up a mass transportation system to save his life - - though it would have been much better for more people. (It seems like for him, working class and lower class people did not exist.)

6. The role of Men of Words here is duly noted: journalists and other professional talkers ignored the plight of these many tens of thousands of people that were forcibly relocated (good luck finding a single newspaper to give coverage). But a few dozen literarily oriented people in one spot (p.985, 988) whose park would be paved over were enough to break the story wide open.

7. A free press can be a double-edged sword. It can create a fictitious person (nobody knew about the level of Moses' "honest graft" for about 3 decades), but it can just as well expose things that others would prefer hidden. (Interesting that RM's corruption was *only* exposed when he fell out of favor.)

8. Making enemies with the press is not the way to go. (As RM learned almost 3/4 of a century ago, and as DJT has yet to learn.) An anthill full of reporter-ants writing stories one at a time can add up to a lot of damage.

9. It's interesting that: RM could build everything that he wanted for several decades when he had an unlimited amount of other people's money to spend. But, when it came time for him to balance the budget on The Fair Project (ch.47), he crashed and burned with the greatest of ease. 40 years of experience did not prepare him for running something in a business-like way.

10. Strange that RM came from money and managed billions of dollars over his career, but at the end of it was impecunious. 

11. Rockefeller is the Warren Buffett/Bill Gates of yesteryear. These guys have enough money to buy any conceivable thing, but then they find they want the only thing that's not as simple to buy as any consumer good: power and influence.

12. -(p.1141): "What was necessary to remove Moses from power was a unique,
 singular concatenation of circumstances: that the Governor of New York be the one man uniquely beyond the reach of normal political influences, and that that a trustee for Triborough's bonds be a bank run by the Governor's brother."

13. RM is a cautionary tale of what happens when a person defines himself in terms of his work: once the work disappeared, his life had no meaning. A man who had a job as a timeserver (but used the job to raise 5 or 10 children) would have been much better off in his twilight years then the subject of the book. 

All of his good genes turned into ONLY two children, and then 4 grandchildren--and one of the grandchildren was mentally retarded, and the other was killed in an auto accident at 21. (That's not even enough for replacement levels when you calculate children per woman: one woman turns into two babies who turn into a total of two grandchildren that reach reproductive age.)

14. Hindsight is always 20/20. A reading this book with that benefit makes it seems like a lot of RMs errors were unforced. 

Verdict: Recommended.

Nonetheless, the book loses a point on account of two things:

1. The excessive length: It worth the first read, but because of its length it is not worth a reread. It might have been at the length of probably about 400 pages. The information is so much that after several hundred pages, the book takes on an impressionistic quality.

2. Some people have questioned whether or not the book was a bit biased (and his picture of RM is not so sympathetic), because it seems that the author never met a road construction whose benefit he could find. Mass transit seems to be his panacea and roads his bete noir.

Future events also gave lie to a lot of the observations that the author made: the extensions to the New York subway did eventually get built, but probably about three decades after the time of this book. Yes, they would have been cheaper if they have been built during the era of Moses.

Vocabulary:

Tammany Hall
sachem
parure
demesne
fluke
mikado
Juno
marcelled (hairdo)
prognathous
palisade
batten
political boodle
vulturine
dories
alluvial
Roman candle
potter's fields
martinet
vista (a view or prospect, especially one seen through a long, narrow avenue or passage, as between rows of trees or houses)
jetties and groins
frieze 
serried
astrakhan
busby 
atelier
claque
verbum sapienti sat est
sandhogs
raffish
hod carrier 
Lochinvar (=brave knight)
throttlebottom
swabbie
liveried
Fordham gneiss 
schmear
Bodoni (font)
clicking/ hitting on all sixes
transom
panoply 

Side note: the title for Sandra Day O'Connor's book "The Majesty of the Law" seems to have been taken from this book.

Quotes: 

(p.401): "Moving quickly to forestall any further appeals, Moses had crews of workmen tearing down the casino within 24 hours after he received a copy of the Appellate Court decision. Within 2 months, the building was gone and its site was covered with a playground."

-(p.678, Francis Bacon): "A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green."

-(p.688): "He's the most unethical man I have ever met."/  "He's a brilliant guy with a highly defective character." / "He is the original smear artist, like Hitler."

-(p.713): "The governor noticed a student pouring intently over his [law] books. 'There is a young man studying how to take a bribe and call it a fee.'"

-(p.797): "He selected the roots for a dozen expressways, had thousands of families evicted from them and demolished their residences."

-(p.838): "Imperial Rome was 1/8 the size of New York; Athens.... was never larger than Yonkers."

-(p.1022): "It was us against the world, us against them - - the city, corruption, unmovable forces. We were young enough to breathe that kind of air then."

-(p.1068): "New money buys things; old money calls notes."

Book Review
Algorithms To Live By
3/5 stars
"Gimmicky. Moderately interesting. Of Limited Practical Utility."

Of the book:

-256 pages of prose over 11 chapters plus an intro. (23.7/per)
-≈475 sources. (1.9/page). 

This book is difficult to describe. It has things that are either/ both interesting-in-the-conceptual-sense/ picayune-in-the-practical-sense.

And I do know that authors need a delivery vehicle to transport their message and I do understand that computer programmers need to explicitly consider every aspect of logical operations--hence the choice of Computer Science.

But: human beings are not computers, and so when these authors take a bunch of random concepts from Computer Science and staple them together to talk about ways that human beings can behave more successfully.......

What could go wrong?

For example:

1. If you have to arrange your bookshelf, how often are you really going to sit down and think about what method you're going to use to sort it? It takes more time to go through those methods than it does to just do it. And there might not even be that much benefit to doing it at all, since you have a rough idea where things are.

2. Caching. Moving any number of things to the place where you are most likely to use them. So, his example person puts vacuum bags behind the sofa because that's where they are likely to be when needed.

So, am I going to do that with every item in the house? *Can* I do that, with a whole bunch of kids running around moving things every minute of the day?

3. A lot of these problems are intractable, and the author admits as much. (p.117): "... The status of about 7% of problems is still unknown.... Of the 93% of the problems that we do understand... Only about 9% can be solved efficiently and the other 84% have proven intractable." (But then, what is the point of the exposition, then?)

4. A lot of these things are trivial: of course I'm not going to organize my bookshelf because the time investment to organize something so fluctuant is more than the benefit.  

*******
It seems like other of the topics alternate between:

1. Things that we already know from other contexts (people who have read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's books are likely to be familiar with things such as the Lindy effect /misapplication of the Gaussian distribution)

2. Things that are likely to be helpful in very limited circumstances (when you want to choose your life partner, it's probably better if you reject about 37% of what you're able to get and then choose the best right after that).

Interesting sundry tidbits:

1. Three types of distributions. Power law. Normal. Erlang. Prediction rules for each: multiplicative, average, additive.

2. Copernican principle: your best guess for how long something will last into the future is exactly as long as it has lasted already. (This is sometimes called the Lindy effect.)

Verdict: Weak Recommendation. I understand the gimmick of packaging these ideas around Computer Science, but there may have been a better way.
*******

Vocabulary:

-thrashing (where a system grinds to a halt because it is preoccupied with metawork)
-timeboxing
-pomodoros
-Dutch auction (vs. English)
Good quotes:

(p.123): "This is thrashing: a system running full tilt and accomplishing nothing at all.....computer scientists now use the term "thrashing" to refer to much pretty much any situation where the system grinds to a halt because it's entirely preoccupied with metawork. A thrashing computer's performance doesn't bog down gradually. It falls off a cliff. Real work has dropped to effectively zero, which also means it's going to be nearly impossible to get out.

"Thrashing is a very recognizable human state..... When merely remembering everything we need to be doing occupies our full attention--or prioritizing every task consumes all the time we had to do them--or our train of thought is continually interrupted before those thoughts can translate into action, it feels like panic, like paralysis by way of hyperactivity.... It's thrashing, and computers know it well.
24

Book Review
"The Undertaking"
Thomas Lynch
5/5 stars
"Brilliant prose craftsmen and wordsmiths are hidden in plain sight--a funeral director, in this case."
*******
This is a book written by a funeral director right here in Michigan that was so good, he had a PBS special made about his line of work.

I also believe that this book is an antidote to the very popular Jessica Mitford book "The American Way in Death." (I don't think it's exactly novel that funeral homes or businesses like any other and they need to turn the profit to stay alive.)

******
What I see here are multiple threads, all of which are connected by some inner necessity of the author to write.

1. A philosophical / spiritual journal.
2. A memory journal of someone one with decades of experience and multiple generations in the funeral industry. (Who wouldn't think there'd be a story there?)
3. A book of poetry.
4. A travelogue. (The author is first generation American and still has family and property back in Ireland.)

No one of them is enough.
Any two could potentially be enough. 
But three or more  come together to create a splendid structure.
*******
Who knew that a funeral director could talk like this?

I will let the writing in the book speak for yourself.

QUOTES:

1. Heartbreak is an invisible affliction. No limp comes with it, no evidence scar. No sticker is issued that guarantees good parking or easy access. The heart is broken all the same. (p.64)

2. But if women in their twenties will trade favor for poems and warm to the easy duty of muses, by 30 they grow wary and by 40 regard it as an invasion of privacy and politically incorrect. They won't be muses. They have their own version of the story. (p.62)

3. When we bury the old, we bury the known past, the past we sometimes imagine better than it was, but the past all the same, a portion of which we inhabited. Memory is the overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort.... But burying infants, we bury the future, unwieldy and unknown, full of promise and possibilities, outcomes punctuated by our rosy hopes. The grief has no borders, no limits, no known ends, and the little infant graves in the corners and fencerows of every cemetery are never quite big enough to contain that grief. Some sadnesses are permanent. Dead babies do not give us memories. They give us dreams. (p.51)

4. In the room where Mrs Regan's body was, despite the candles and the flowers in the February chill-- a good thing in the townlands where no embalming is done - - there was the terrible odor of gastrointestinal distress. Beneath the fine linens, Mrs Regan's belly seemed bulbous, almost pregnant, almost growing. Later I heard comment in the hushed din of gossip, that Mrs Regan..... had made her dinner the day before unboiled cabbage and onions and ham and later followed with several half pints of lager. (p.39)

5. I sometimes think the only firms to put their names on what they do anymore are firms that make toilets and direct funerals. (p.34)

6. But seeing him, outstretched on the embalming table with the cardiac blue in his ears and fingertips along his distal regions, I thought, this is what my father would look like when he's dead. And then, like a door slammed shut behind you, the tense of it all shifted into the inescapable present of: this is my father, dead. (p.23)

7. Embalming my father I was reminded of how we bury our dead and then become them. In the end I had to say that maybe this is what I'm going to look like dead. (ibid)

8. He was sharing a condo with a woman who always overestimated the remedial powers of sexual aerobics. Or maybe she only underestimated the progress of his heart disease. We all knew it was coming. In the two years of consortium that followed, he'd had a major heart attack every 6 months like clockwork. He survived all but one. (p.19)

9. There is a belief that I, being the undertaker here, have some irregular fascination with, special interest in, inside information about, even attachment to, the dead..... And I am no more attracted to the dead than the dentist is to your bad teeth, the doctor to your rotten entrance, or the accountant to your sloppy expense records. (p.8)

10. Once you are dead, put your feet up, call it a day, and let the husband or the Mrs or the kids or a sibling decide whether you are to be buried or burned or blown out of a cannon or left to dry out in a ditch somewhere. It's not your day to watch it, because the dead don't care. (ibid)

11. The doctor pressed the stethoscope in the usual places, and after considerable silence pronounced his diagnosis: "Eddie, I can't find a thing wrong with you." Whereupon Eddie, ever contentious, slumped to the floor, turned purple, and died in an instant, proving for all in attendance, once and for all, the fallibility of modern medicine, and the changeability of life in general. (p.140).

12. If the past is a province the aged revisit and the future is one that the child dreams, birth and death are the oceans that bound them. And midlife is the moment between them, that frontier when it seems as if we could go either way, when our view is as good on either side.

13. It happened for me one night some years ago. Is it needless to say we had just made love? I was propped on my elbows looking out of the window.... We had buried my mother that morning..... And there, for a moment, I could see it all that night. Between the dead body of the woman who had given me life and the live body of the woman who made me feel alive, I had a glimpse of my history back to my birth at a glimpse of the future that would end in my death. (p.148)

14. Revision and prediction seem like waste of time. As much as I'd like to have a handle on the past and future, the moment I live in is the one I have. (ibid)

15. In the name of diversity, any idea is regarded as worthy as any other; nonsense is entitled to a forum, a full hearing, and equal time. Reality is customized just to fit the person or the situation. There is your reality and my reality, the truth as they see it, but what is real and true for us all eludes us. (p.159).

16. Assisted suicide and abortion are as near to mirror images of the same existential concerns as life in this century will provide. And if a review of the last quarter century living with safe and legal abortion did not tell us exactly how to settle the current debate, it surely tells us how we shouldn't..... Left to chance, if we cower from the difficult issues, we get Kevorkian or a variation on his pathological if oddly cartoonish theme. (p.170)

17. "The slippery slope argument!" someone always says--as if to say it is to nullify it. As if things don't go from bad to worse. As if gravity did not exist. 

18. When someone dies, we try to get a handle on it. This is because dead folks don't move. I'm not making this part up. Next time someone in your house quits breathing, ask them to get up and answer the phone or maybe get you some ice water or let the cat out. He won't budge. It's because he's dead.(p.181)

19. On the subject of money: you get what you pay for. Deal with someone who's instincts you trust. If anyone tells you you haven't spent enough, tell them to go piss up a rope. (p.196)

Verdict: recommended. Probably about 3 to 4 hours of reading time.
*******

Vocabulary

epithalamium
carillon
gerundive
sepia colored 
intellection
vale (vs. veil)
domain
somatic death
metabolic death
shirred
coffin vs casket
Pietà

Book Review
When Rabbis Abuse
1/5 stars
"Defining everything and excluding nothing as sexual abuse cannot help anyone. Feminazi author squandered an opportunity here."
*******
Of the book:

-375 pages of prose over 14 chapters. 27pps/chapter
-235 citations over 375 pages. 0.62/page. (Not impressive.)
-Almost all of the sources are to blogs and newspaper articles.

The training of the author is from two fields that really are not suitable for this type of book. 

1. Anthropology is concerned with endless anecdotes, and that's because they don't have actual data to work with (unlike population geneticists, for example).

2.  Education. And that is because they tend to not attract the most academically gifted / insightful people. (Those who can't do, teach.)

This book has a lot of problems, and I can see why Sztokman could not get it published with a reputable label: even for all of the great bulk of this book, it just doesn't have that much to say.

∆∆∆FIRST major problem is that the definition of sexual abuse is way too expansive. 

So, by the lights of this author

1.  If some Rabbi describes a woman as a "beautiful blonde cantor" (p.49) or

2. If a woman is "lured" into a long-term sexual relationship (p.50) where she goes with a man of her own volition,

Then Sztokman treats this the same as if some grade school aged boy (likely from a lower status family) involuntarily gets sodomized by some Haredi Rabbi (let's call him "Yoseph Ungar," p.113) with no one to speak on his behalf and no recourse, nor justice.

Just, no. 

Author also seems to come from this school of thought (that has been debunked and is in the process of going down the memory hole even as we speak) that sexual abuse / sexual assault is about "power" and not about the pleasures of the sexual experience. (Who ever heard of a rapist going after somebody with gray hair? Why do you think that these guys are after the tender bits of young ones and not menopausal ones?).

And I guess that supports Sztokman's theory of rabbis doing this ONLY because they are in power and not because they're actually interested in crotch.

I hate to impinge on what-is-not-really-even-a-very-interesting-theory with reality, but: as any moderately successful musician can tell you, being in a position of exposure to a lot of women can lead to.... Indiscretions. (A lot of bands admit that the purpose of forming a band was to meet women. Everybody knows that being a singer in a band adds about 4 inches. Everybody, that is, except for one particular "Jewish feminist anthropologist, educator, and activist.")

She even adds the term psycho-sexual abuse (p.172) just in case the definition of sexual abuse is still just a bit too narrow to include Every. Possible. Thing.
*******
And the bad news is that: REAL sexual abuse is a problem in Jewish contexts, and this author wasted an opportunity bring that across.

These MANY, regular, frequent cases in which Haredim choose some victim because they know about the status differential between the two parties happens on a regular basis and for often two or three decades per case. (And just a few well selected cases could have been enough to illustrate this, rather than 1,001 anecdotes.)
*******
∆∆∆SECOND major problem is that the book is just too wordy. Everything that she said in 375 pages could have been said equally well in 225 by cutting out the waffle.
******
∆∆∆THIRD problem is it the book just doesn't have a sense of reality with respect to:

1. Donors; I don't think anybody who has an IQ above room temperature can fail to notice that institutions send out young, attractive girls to solicit donations from these Big Shots. And these Big Shots are used to easy access to the loins of almost any woman that they fancy.

If you are a nice looking woman going to ask someone for a large donation to an organization, is it surprising when the encounters go sideways / turn sexual?

And let's not forget that in this land where there is separation between church and state, somebody has to do the dirty work of getting donations to keep synagogues open.

And sometimes that entails dealing with unsavory people.

2. The sexual dynamics of boys and girls. Men don't have anything to go on with respect to a woman's sexual availability except for asking and being rebuffed. And if every man immediately gave up after one single rebuff, probably 90% of us would not have been born. 

Where to draw the line between persistence and harassment is something that people are bound to miscalculate--and it may be completely innocuous.

There is a whole chapter on grooming tactics, which *could* actually be a chapter on how men pursue women (It is called "putting in coupons"): flattery / ingratiation / prizes and candy/repetition.

3. Hoeflation is making it such that a lot of women over-interpret even tangential interest as "traumatizing sexual abuse." Even for the girls that resemble elephants and don't bathe regularly, there is NOTHING that could not be construed as abuse.

4. The author uses the word "rape" to mean too many different things: if some lady has drunk sex with a guy or later regrets having sex with him, she does not get to retroactively define that as "rape."

∆∆∆FOURTH problem is that the book is just sloppy and needs some editorial work.

For instance: Malka Leifer is indexed on pages 33, 113, 148, 169, 283.

I find nothing about her on page 113 or 283. There is a bit about her on page 114, but nothing either before or after page 283.

Because some of these people were so famous, an editor might have suggested to this author to put everything about them in one place as a story.

Each of those stories could have been used to illustrate what happens more often than not in the Haredi case:

1. Higher status people are believed over lower status ones;

2. Rather than fire the predator or press charges, they would just reassign him / her;

3. If aggrieved party goes to the secular authorities, they will be the one that is dismissed from school or run out of town. (Aharon Sorscher/ Yosef Kolko case.) This is to do with the prohibition against "mesira."
*******

Page 133 is this exact point that the author has gone off the deep end: A man who is openly gay is supposedly sexually abusing a woman. (Talk about everything looking like a nail to a hammer. Sheesh.)

Verdict: This is a very silly book. Don't waste your time.
*******

Prototypical sexual abusers:

Yosef Kolko
Baruch Lanner
Yona Metzger
Yehuda Meshi Zahav
Yosef Ungar
Leib Trooper
Malka Leifer
Barry Freundel
Chaim Walder
Eliezer Berland
Macy Gordon
George Finkelstein 

Not sexual abusers:

-Yonasan Abrahamson (voluntary relationship)
-Any other person who is in a voluntary sexual relationship (>70% of the non-Haredi Jewish people profiled in this book)

Book Review
"Motley Crue: The Dirt"
3/5 stars
Read one rockstar biography, and you've read them all.
*******

Of the book:

428 pages in 11 parts.

In tiny print, it does mention that Neil Strauss is the one who wrote the book. (This is the author of the bestselling "The Game.")

The chapters were very small and bite-sized and they were written from the perspective of different people around the same events, so that we could see the same thing from different perspectives. (Nikki. Mick. Tommy. Vince. But also the minor characters such as managers. 1 chapter from a womn's perspective: Sylvia Rhone.)

Even if I allow for whatever literary license that Strauss may have taken, the conclusion is that:

This book is disgusting.

1. The people are disgusting. ("The place was crawling with vermin. If we ever wanted to use the oven, we had to leave it on high for a good 10 minutes to kill the regiments of roaches crawling around inside."/"we couldn't afford --or were too lazy to afford-- toilet paper, so there would be shit stained socks, band flyers, and pages from magazines scattered across the floor.")

2. The overall energy is disgusting: 

This is a story that I've seen I don't know how many times: you have some nice looking/obnoxious young white boy (Nikki Sixx/Vince Neil/ Tommy Lee were all quite nice looking before the tattoos and alcohol and drugs ruined them) that's a fuckup and is so bent on self-destruction that he could drown in a spoonful of water. 

Yet, somehow he manages to avoid the penitentiary and ends up wasting a fortune of several tens of millions of dollars.

One of these idiots actually killed somebody and severely maimed two other people in a drunk driving accident and only did 30 days in jail. (He had to pay $2.6 million.)

Another of the idiots raped a girl in a closet, and actually put it in print in this book. And he didn't do a single day in jail.

And then the way that they abused/disrespected their fans and foreign countries such as Japan: they should have been imprisoned and executed.

Foolish Tommy Lee ended up in jail only on the second physical confrontation with his second wife.

*******
Second order thoughts:

1. Balance is a good thing in life. (p.134) "What do you do after the orgy?"

I think I've read 5 other of these celebrity bios, and it's the same thing over and over again.

They are constantly looking for some way to top the latest thrill, and it invariably leads to drugs. 

If everyday is a sunny day, then what is a sunny day? If you could have sex with any person that you want to, what does a sexual encounter become? If you have unlimited access to a given hard drug, what does the hard drug mean?

2a. I know that the purpose of setting up a band is to meet women, but a lot of celebrities end up making more efficient use of the end goal. (How to say?)

These four guys that are the subject of this book fathered a total of 12 children in between all of them. 

That is 3 per man. 

(Meanwhile: Eddie Murphy, 10. Debarge, 11. Ray Charles, 12. BB King, 15. Isaac Hayes, 12. DMX, 15. Stevie Wonder, 10. Nick Cannon, 12)

The author of this book claimed that some of them would have sex with 5 women at a time before the show, and then 5 more after the show.

2b. These men also couldn't seem to make a relationship / marriage last longer than a week, in spite of having so much to choose from.

(Meanwhile: Ozzy Osbourne, 52 years. Dolly Parton, 56 years. Bono, 41 years. Keith Richards, 40 years. Elton Johna, 30 years.)

3. I don't understand why people knock themselves out to prove that they are celebrities, and then whine about it when they get there (p.239). 

4. Bewildered  Musician Redux: seems like only 1% of musicians realize that the music industry is a BUSINESS. All of these advances have to get paid back SOMEHOW. All of this investment and risk has to be compensated for SOMEHOW. So, they're going to have to sing the same songs night after night and some beancounter somewhere is going to have to make it work.

5. These guys sold a lot of albums, but they certainly are no Mariah Carey or Beatles. Not even close. With respect to other metal bands, I find the source that says that they are number 14 out of 20. 

6. If you ever see a woman getting smacked around by a guy, don't get involved. She likes it, and she is getting what she deserves.

These filthy, unshowered men in this book (p.344: "I put on my dirtiest fucking leather pants, slipped into an old t-shirt the stank of bo, and didn't bother to shave or shower. I did, however, brush my teeth")  had track marks all over their bodies, but there were women sending them anonymous ladybits in the mail. 

And you had all of these women pass over perfectly normal/tame guys to find people with drug problems or outside children.

7. I guess musical intelligence and practical intelligence operate on two separate tracks.

Dumbass Tommy Lee ended up in jail, and it seems like that is the first time that he ever thought to sit down and invest some time in reading a book. 

This is the 5th of these books that I have read, and they are listed in descending order of quality.

1. Gretchen Wilson, Redneck Woman
2. Joe Jackson, A Cure for Gravity
3.  Elton John, Me
4. David Bowie, Living on the Brink (George Tremlett)
5. Motley Crue, The Dirt (w/Neil Strauss)
6. Dave Grohl, The Storyteller

Verdict: Weak recommendation. There is a minimal amount of introspection in this book, but the characters are so dislikable that it is easy to miss the message for despising the character.

Quotes:

We wanted to blow up the scene, rule the strip, and fight or fuck anything that moved.

We scrounge up enough money to buy an egg burrito from Noggles. Then we'd bite off the end and stick our dicks into the warm meat to cover up the smell of pussy so that our girlfriends didn't know we were fucking anything stupid or drunk enough to get into Tommy's van.

But then she realized that she was one of the five girls that he did in those 15 minutes.

Vince would do 10 girls before the set and 10 after.

Perhaps that's why celebrity relationships are so difficult: everybody puts you both on such a high pedestal that it almost seems like a disappointment when, at the end of the day, you discover that you're just two human beings with the same emotional defects and mother father issues as everybody else.

Book Review
The Color Complex
1/5 stars
"Old hat; Painful detailing of a black psychological hang-up"
*******

Of the book:

-301 sources/166 pages=1.8/page; respectably sourced 
-Light reading; about 4 hours of reading time

*******
This book is about something that is well known within the black community, but virtually unknown outside of it: intraracial color prejudice. (In the black vernacular: being "colorstruck.")

It starts off on the wrong foot with me--and never manages to get off it. 

Big problem #1: There are three people involved in its writing-- and NONE of them are historians. (One social worker and two social psychologists.)

Big Problem #2: They go right in with the hackneyed myth of "the reason black people prefer light skin is because lighter skin slaves were used in the house and darker ones were used in the field." (pps. 18, 126) This shibboleth has been repeated so many times that you might almost be forgiven for not noticing that:

1. Not all blacks were slaves;
2. Most miscegenation was voluntary and a lot of it happened after slavery;
3. A lot of the mixed race offspring were manumitted AND made a living providing services to free people of color.

Big problem #3: They make the same mistake in this book as Joel Williamson did in his book ("New People") which is to ascribe mulatto ancestry to ANY black person with ANY degree of European ancestry, in which case 90% of black Americans would be "mulattos." They even (mis)ascribe mulatto status to some of the same people as Williamson.  (p.31): Sojourner Truth. Benjamin Banneker. A. Philip Randolph. Malcolm X. (There are pictures available of all of these people, and NO ONE would think that they were the same thing as Alicia Keys/Jennifer Beals / Benjamin Jealous.)

Big Problem #4: More banalities. Every time someone has a preference for a certain phenotype, then they are doing it based on some historical conflict. (p.113: "That the black man's desire is rooted in rage stemming from his unconscious desire to seek revenge for his slave past.")

It's like nobody can just like what they like.

a. What happens if it's a black guy that likes Asian women? No historical conflict there, just that Asian girls look good.

b. What happens if it's a white guy that has a stomach for black women? (I have one white coworker who has six kids with six different black women.) Is he trying to fulfill some secret desire to have a bedwench?

c. What happens if it's a guy that is interested in a brunette Italian/Jewish woman with a really thick bush (e.g.: liubimaja, noshavebabe, etc)? Is this guy REALLY making a defiant statement against having had razor bumps?

>>>See how silly this gets?

 (p.121: "Why should we deprive ourselves of each other because of the history that neither one of us had anything to do with?")
*******
Second order thoughts:

1. In a lot of ways, this book has passed its (limited) relevance. You could wake up on a particular Monday and decide to change your gender and it's just a simple trip to the courthouse. So, when they talk about people such as Susie Phipps that are 1/64th black and have to be declared that way..... That is so 1991. 

2. A lot of this book is academic babbling. When you live in the real world among real people, you will see that:

a. Some of them just choose their associations in a matter of fact way and without much discussion. We all know black people that are not interested in being black / having black relatives; we all know white people that choose to marry and live around blacks. 

b. All men all over the world choose women lighter than themselves, and it doesn't depend on the American context. As these authors have observed. But, a book that explores those issues would be an issue for anthropologists or maybe even molecular geneticists. It is not this book.

If you consider the other 98% of the world, there's no surprise that, GIVEN A CHOICE, most black men would not choose black women.

3. This story is not new. And for the record this story is the case where you have some people that are more wealthy / advanced/civilized connect with people that are not, (whatever the reason), and the people on the higher end become something to be imitated and the people on the lower end become stigmatized. (Because so many poor black people live in ghettos, then being black *becomes* synonymous with being ghetto / trashy / low class.)

a. We could talk about the Russian royalty speaking French. We could talk about City Arabs reveling in speaking good French/English/ Modern Standard Arabic instead of local languages. We could talk about Scotsmen blindly imitating English behavior a couple of centuries back. We could be talking about people who grew up speaking Cockney or Scouse affecting an Oxbridge accent.)

b. QUOTE: (p.72) "Every time I hear African-Americans speak horrid, broken English or I see a flash of gold teeth, public displays of Jheri curl caps, genital holding, or big, gold door knocker earrings, I cringe. The hairs literally stand up on the back of my neck."

c. This is *some* of the story with the Indian caste system.

*******
What is the most useful information from this book?

1. All black people know about the concept of being "colorstruck." Maybe they don't know about blue vein societies or paper bag tests, and this is a way to help remember.

2. Virtually no white/non black people know how deep these psychological Hang-Ups are. If said people want to know a little bit more than what they did before, this is a way.

3. There is a lot of interesting history about the roles that were open to Black performers a century ago. Night and day different to today..

Appalling quotes/definitions

1. Paper bag test

2. Blue vein societies

3. Eartha kitt's stepfather would not accept her and her mother eventually sent her out to relatives and placed her in a foster home and chose over her own child for some sorry a$$ nicka. (p.99)

4. Zena Oglelsby, of a black adoption agency, says that light skin babies go first and 40% of black couples wanting to adopt specifically request light-skinned children.

5.. As of 1987, 35 States prohibited adoption of black children by white families. (The Howard Metzenbaum Multi-Ethnic Placement Act seems to have reversed this in 1994.)

6. Walter White, president of the NAACP was 1/64th black. And his wife was white, producing children that were 1/128th black.

7. dinge queen

Verdict: Not recommended. 

Book Review
"The Arab Mind"
5/5 stars
"The detailing of a VERY different conceptual space"

*******
Of the book

-322 pps/20 chapters= 20pps/chapter
-587 point citations for 322 pages of text.1.8/per (=well sourced)
-10 hours of reading time

This book is just a little bit too busy.

Preface to the 1976 edition, one to the 1983 edition, and then another full preface on a personal note; At the end, we have a 1983 postscript that consists of 8 parts and 46 pages. And then TWO appendices after that, one about the judgment of historians Spengler and Toynbee and the other--a comparison of the Arab world and Spanish America.

It must be clear that this author was actually someone who:

1. Lived in Arab countries for many years--not merely an armchair academic. (He puts me in mind if somebody like Eric Harper or Ernest vanDenhaag.)

2. Spoke and taught Arabic in what later became the State of Israel. (The author is deceased, and he was born in such a way that he was teaching Arabic in the 1930s; also, a lot of his observations are from before the '70s, and so they are out of date with respect to demographic numbers. But, a lot of what he says still makes sense in the present day).

3. Completed two PhDs

4. Portrayed the Arabs actually very sympathetically, but a lot of what he observes people will find unflattering--Which does not make it any less true.

*******
This book was originally published in 1973, revised in 1983, and republished in 2002. (Author died in 1996.)

In spite of its age, I think it is still worth reading because:

1. It was written just before it became fashionable to assume that all human beings are the same and all cultures are equal in every way and it is "racism" to say anything otherwise; lot of failed initiatives and blood and treasure have been wasted going to places and assuming that the Arabs are tabula rasa.

2. It is a snapshot of what a perceptive observer saw at that time. (And perceptive observers are a rare thing.)

3. Some of what is written here is testable; some of it may be explanation that has stood the test of time.

*******
Second order thoughts, first:

 1 It seems like when you study great civilizations, they have a lot of resonances to each other.

a. It seems like, by this book, the Arab civilization has a Bedouin/tribal substrate. And in Arab eyes, they are the things to be emulated. (India is a society with an Aboriginal substrate and a superstructure created by invasions from 20 centuries ago. )

b. China is a society with a glorious past that they keep replaying over and over because in their mind, the perfect days were in the past at some indeterminate point. And that seems to be the exact same thing that is repeating itself in the Arab world. It feels like they have a very schizophrenic relationship with modernity.

c. Closed civilizations have a VERY HARD time with the fact that they are not the center of the world once they wake up. (Japan only found out the emperor was not Divine in 1945; China/The Middle Kingdom only became aware that it was not in the center of the world around 1979.)

2. Surprisingly, Arabs in the United States have some of the highest rates of interracial marriage--but WHITE/ASIAN ONLY. (Andrzej Kulcycyzski: over 80% of them have non-Arab spouses, and by the third generation only 1% of them are married to each other.) Their interfaith marriage is 39%.

3. The section on "unity and conflict" was very eye-opening. I couldn't even pull all of the good quotes out of it because they were so many, and I think the upshot is: factionalism and protracted and bloody antagonisms are idiosyncratically Arab and pre-Islamic. 

They do not depend on any colonial power or, indeed, anything except the Arabs themselves. If it was not *these* two factions fighting against each other, it would just be *those* two.

4. Intra-Arab fighting used to be mostly/symbolic ceremonial, and with a minimum of bloodshed; but the addition of Western weapons has made them much more deadly than they would otherwise have been. 

5. The book was written at a time when the number of children per Arab woman was 9; today, it is just barely over 3. Dramatic improvements in primary and tertiary education have been observed.

*******
For brevity, I will present direct quotes from two sources:

1. Arabic proverbs/Quotes from other authors;

2. The most striking observations of the author, as direct quotes.

*******
>>>Proverbs:

(p.28) Character impressed by the mother's milk cannot be altered by anything but death.

(p.44) I against my brothers; I and my brothers against my cousins; I and my cousins against the world.

(p.85) Blood demands blood.

(p.155) Labor for This World of yours is if you were to live forever; and labor for the Other World of yours as if you were to die tomorrow.

(p.117) The shared kettle does not boil.

(p.117) Better a mat  of my own than a house shared.

(p.134) Whenever a man and a woman meet, the devil is the third.

(p.263)  [Edward Atiyah] Until 1798, when Napoleon set foot on Egyptian soil, the Arabs were still living in the Middle Ages.

(p.265) They live in a splendid past as an escape from the miserable present.

(p.297) Piety and virtue lie in obedience and conformity, while nothing is more repugnant than change and innovation.

(p.302) [Hans Tütsch] Proud peoples with a weak ego structure tend to interpret difficulties on their life path as personal humiliations and get in tangled and endless lawsuits or through themselves into the arms of extremist political movement.

>>>Author:

(p.29) A man who has only girl children is derided as an abu banat ("father of daughters").

(p.31) A boy is breastfed for 2 to 3 years; a girl, for one to two.

(p.34) This comforting and soothing of the baby boy often takes the form of handling his genitals.

(p.14) The world, in the traditional Arab view is divided into two parts: "House of Islam," and an outer one, "House of War."

(p.36) In the meantime clashes occur, and with them comes the bitter taste of the father's heavy hand, the rod, the strap, and at least among the most tradition-bound Bedouin tribes, the saber and the dagger whose cut or stab is supposed, beyond punishing the disobedient son, to harden him for his future life.

(p.67) The intention of doing something, or the plan of doing something, or the initiation of the first step toward doing something - - any one of these can serve as a substitute for achievement and accomplishment.

(p.75) This means, of course, that to the mind of Muhammad, The Exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt (13th century BCE) and the foundation of Xtianity were practically simultaneous events. [Talks about the use of aspect in Arabic, as opposed to tense.]

 (p.79) Among the Arabs, with their typical ahistoricity, the heroic age is actually timeless.

(p.91) By practicing hospitality lavishly, one "whitens" one's "face," that is, one's reputation; contrarywise, a show of inhospitality can "blacken" one's face.

(p.98) The most preferred marriage is that between children of two brothers.

(p.94) A number of games are voluntarily engaged in by adolescent boys in which their courageous tested. Lashings are administered to them or their arms are burned with pieces of duracaine or cigarettes or cut with a knife..... The most painful form of the circumcision is performed among some Arab tribes in the Hijaz and Asir, where the skin of the entire male organ is removed, as well as the skin of its environs on the belly and inner thigh.

(p.89) Bedouin values: hospitality, generosity, courage, honor, self-respect.

(p.155) There is belief in innumerable demons and spirits jinnis, ghouls, ifrit, the evil eye, as well as belief in and ritual worship of numerous saints who, especially at their tomb sanctuaries, wield great supernatural power.

(p.195) The second type of bilingualism is found in all parts of the Arab world.... of literary Arabic and local colloquial dialects.

(p.193) By 1971, more than 2 million Algerian students were learning French, a figure never even remotely approached during the period when Algeria was an integral part of France. (8.8 million as of 2024.)

(p.191) In fact.... There is an almost direct correlation between the degree of cultural and linguistic assimilation to the west and the intensity of anti-western feelings.

(p.182) Arab music is not tempered, and is based on quarter tones, 24 of which constitute an octave..... What western music considers as harmony is regarded in Arab musical tradition as dissonance ... Arab music is in its entirety modal and possesses dozens of modes. (Wow! So THAT'S why their music sounds like that!)

(p.181) Just as the decorative frieze has no beginning and no end, but simply starts and ends according to the space to which it is applied, so the Arab musical frieze fills the available stretch of time and is characterized throughout by the same level of emotion sustained unchanged from beginning to end. 

(p.179) Having foresworn the use of animal in human figure even as a decorative motif, Arab art was left with only three elements...... The plant motif, the geometric motif, and the Arabic script.

(p.216) This idea of the national unity of all Arabs is a very new concept.

(p.144) Only in the outlying areas..... has homosexuality come out into the open with the sheikhs and the well to do men lending their sons to each other.

(p.229) According to tradition, one of the two original ancestors was Qathan, progenitor of all the South Arabian tribes, and the other was Adnan, ancestor of all the North Arabian tribes..... The Southern tribes are considered the true Aboriginal Arab stock, while the Northern tribes are considered merely Arabized peoples.

(p.251) Such willingness to go through the procedures of mediation again and again can only be understood as a conditioned reflex based on the reliance on mediation for countless generations.... The persistent Arab refusal to meet in direct talks with Israel can be considered as a case in point. It appears that in this instance, too, Arab behavior reflects the old tradition of considering the mediator conditio sine qua non for resolving the conflict without loss of face, while the direct peace negotiations, insisted upon by Israel, remain for them a psychological impossibility to accept.

(p.291) In historical perspective, the Arabs see the West as a young disciple who has overtaken and left behind his first world master, medieval Arab civilization. Now it is the turn of the Arabs to sit at the feet of their former pupil, a role which is beset by emotional difficulties.

(p.321) It is a psychological law that people nurture a greater hatred toward those who have been their inferiors in the past and then succeed in outdistancing them, than toward those who proved their superiority from the very first moment of their encounter.

(p.328) Turning our attention to the traditional components of the air personality, we find that they fall into two main categories: a pre-Islamic Bedouin substratum.... and the Islamic component, superimposed on the first one and often merging with it imperceptibly.

Verdict: Strongly recommended. I feel bad that I waited 7 years to read it.

*******

Vocabulary:

thawb
abā
abu banaāt
kūfiyya
iqāl
khamsa
muruwwa
razzia
bedizen
fellahin (Egyptian peasant)
mubazzira (female female circumcision/infibulation expert)
moiety
summum bonnum

Quotes

 (Ibn Khaldūn, p.20): "Arabs can gain control only over flat territory.... On account of their Savage nature the Arabs are people who plunder and cause damage. Eventually the civilization they conquer is wiped out."

Book Review:"Girlvert"
4/5 stars
"If this was not literary license, how is anyone alive after all this?"
*******
This is my sixth book about someone who worked in the adult industry.

The other 5 were:

Lisa Ann (In The Life)
Asa Akira (Insatiable)
Liara Roux (Whore of New York)
Kayley Sciortino (Slutever)
Tracy Quan (Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl)

and now : Ashley Blue (Girlvert)

I have yet to read a book by a male star, and the likelihood of getting a well written memoir is lower because there are many fewer males than females in the industry.

This book  is emphatically not for those faint of heart. (Another review of this book aptly said: "After every chapter I was in desperate need of a bleach bath, a lung X-Ray and a lengthy stint in rehab. How anyone had sex with this girl or how she is still alive are both miracles.")

What makes ME want to read this book?

1.  I make an intensive study of the parenting details of children who have been raised wrong so I can have some idea of what NOT to do.

2. I want to get a psychological profile of people who do such an unusual job. 

Do they all have damage? (It seems to be that way in every case.)

Were they abused as children? (It certainly was in this case, but it was of neglect and not sexual.)

Is it something about an addictive personality? (My own family is littered with alcoholics and drug addicts as far as the eye can see, but none of them have ever done adult work.) 

Do they all do this out of some sense of acedia? (It seems so. None of these people in these many other books were from poor families. Ashley Blue was Quintessential White Trash, but she never complained about being hungry.)

A Yiddishism says that "If a man is meant to drown, he will drown in a spoonful of water"--which makes me think that some people are just genetically unsalvageable. There is a very low life expectancy for people who do this job as a result of suicides and drug overdoses, and a lot of people in this book ended up either dead or in rehab. (And I think that being bent on self-destruction and being drug addicted are related, but not as strongly so as smoke and fire.)

It seems like at least 3 out of 6 subjects of the books liked pain and abuse as a sexual fetish. (Ashley: "I was used to being the one who got slapped and sodomized.")

Subjects in 2 out of the 6 books did sex work to the point where their orifices were damaged, but their partners spent all of the money.  (Liara Roux was tricked out by her wife pimp and had not one single penny to show for it by the time they divorced. Oriana: "I'd been making several thousand dollars a week, but I hadn't saved any of it.")

3. It got lots of reviews, so people must have seen something in it. (I am not familiar with Ashley Blue's work.)

Oriana Small/Ashley Blue does actually have a few insights:

1. "Older people look so stupid when they are fucked up and trying to hold on to something is intangible as youth. Youth can never be brought back, swallowed back, held back, or sold."

2. When she was on the Judge Mathis Show, she told us that the producers actually paid the settlement of the case.

3. "All the porno girls felt like Cinderella. On that one special evening we pretended to be bonafide film stars rather than glorified hookers."

4. When it comes to pornography, it's fair to expect that the viewers should know what to expect. If you don't want it, don't watch it. I don't know why anyone would find it necessary to protect the average pervert from a dirty movie.

*******
On one hand: it seems like the poor girl didn't have a chance; her mother was given up for adoption (heavy predictor of later mental problems), and then became a severe alcoholic / drug addict, with a revolving door of men. (She was actually a mother at 15 and divorced by 18.)

But then on the other: she had a sister who came out normal and got married and had three children and held down a stable job.

We all understand the meaning of the expression "There but for the grace of God go I,"  but sometimes we all need a story give it enough to help us remember.

This is that story.

Verdict:  Recommended at the price of $5.

°°°Oriana/Ashley, in her own words:

And my idea of fun consistent of experimenting with drugs and having sex with older men.

It always feel good to do this when I was barfing up my food alone over the toilet, so I just Incorporated the gratifying feeling of self purging into our sex.

Some nights there were more random guys that I really didn't know, but Colby said they were cool. I trusted him, his opinion.

At 18, I blew through a $20,000 trust that was supposed to be for college. I took out a loan for the education and spent the cash on a car, clothes, and drugs. Then I dropped out of school.

I've been fired, asked to quit, and just plain and not showing up for my last four jobs, all and only 5 months time.

You remind me of when I would have one night stands with strange, older men when I was a teenager. I was no stranger to sex with strangers.

Now, I really love seeing poop. It fascinates me. When it comes out of other girls during their sex scenes, is interesting.

I never thought about the risks of overdosing. My mother and father were drug addicts.

I shouldn't expect any better treatment from these pornographers, really. Why seekers respect? In a few minutes he's going to see me with my tongue in some guy's asshole.

Desiree would call the night before to tell us a present was coming. The next day, a FedEx envelope would arrive at our doorstep. I'd even signed for it. Delivered to our door with love, a bag of crystal meth and a couple of bars of Xanax.

We spent $1,000 a week on cocaine.

I always brought more coke with me when I was doing heavy anal scenes.

She holds the world record for putting the most chopsticks into her ass - 100 chopsticks.

Max throat-fucked me hard. That squeaking noise, from where the back of the esophagus is being crushed, resonated throughout the bathroom. Tyler stood up and started to piss on me. Both of them pissed at the same time.

I was calmer than expected after having my boyfriend asked me to pull out cash for a whore.

Desiree [boyfriend's 17 year old sister] wanted to stay the night with the sommelier, even though she was still on her period.

Cheryl [her mother] openly admitted that she smoked weed while pregnant with me.

At 14... The living conditions in our home have become unsuitable. There were needles lying around the entire house, with two other junkies living there.

My phone bills were $800 a month. Most of it went to things that I have nothing to show for now.

Staph goes around like wildfire in the porn business, and it leaves scars if you have to get it cut out.

We were making crack cocaine as if it were some children's science experiment..... How can we make a crack pipe?.... Out of an antenna. Or a light bulb. I've smoked crystal out of light bulbs lots of times.

Days later, Tyler was told that he wasn't his father's son. His mother had lied to him for his entire 18 years.

"Ori, he's my dad! I just want to spend some time with him. If he wants to smoke crack, we'll smoke crack. Don't be so fucking selfish."

As with his other dude-crushes, he thought the ultimate way to bond with Kris was to share me in bed. Tyler gave the gift of girlfriend ass. I was used to it. [She is 22 at this point.]

Tyler bought Trixie her airline ticket. He borrowed $500 from me to pay for their hotel room. I was going to stay home and shoot anal scenes to pay the bills and the rent.
The dilapidated house we shot at belongs to voltron, my old acquaintance from the "Pissmops" and "Meatholes" days.... Getting pounded in the ass is very empirical. I was in that moment and nowhere else.

Fulton had to resort to blowing the cocaine up Shasta's asshole to get her high. Her asshole was the only unblocked passageway into her body.

Thinking of him made me go so insane with rage that I had no problem going ballistic on the other girls. I shouted at them, pulled their hair, shoved giant toys in their butts, and stepped on their heads.

Sometimes, though, Jim wanted me to do things I didn't want to do. He wanted me to put a candy bar in my asshole and shit it out on a girl's face.

The morning of the flight, I drunk-drove to his house.

The abuse I received was in the form of neglect. I saw the attention very negatively. I must have slept with at least 30 guys by the age of 18.

Book Review
Asian Godfathers
Joe Studwell 
5/5 stars
"Economic history and conditions of Southeast Asia."
*******

Of the book:

-199 pages of prose/ 7 chapters; 28pps/per
-470 (notes+point citations); 2.36/page=well sourced
-6-7 hours of reading time.
-Brief biography of all the Godfathers, arranged by country. About 90 profiles.
-Brief biography of the codependent politicians, arranged by country. About 45 profiles.
-Selected bibliography arranged by topic. (Proponents of race-based interpretations of development. Skeptics of race based interpretations of development. Etc.)
-Deals with: Malaysia, Thailand, indonesia, Singapore, Philippines, Hong Kong, Macau.

Part I (42pps): Historical background

Part III (82pps): Four steps to be a post-war godfather

a. Build a character that is an amalgamation of Chinese and local;
b.  Have a government granted Monopoly that creates core cash flow.
c. Create your inner circle of people, some foreign, some local, some chinese.
d. Use government policy lenders to financial projects and keep the gains and socialize the losses. Multiple bailouts. Financial repression details.

Part III (74pps): Fallout and financial crisis in the 1990s and aftermath. There were some modest changes on the edges, but no sea change. 
******

This book follows the formula employed in Joe Studwell's "China Dream": It gives necessary historical background in order to to explain and analyze some current (journalistic) phenomenon. 

And it's just chock full of information.

In the "China Dream," it was putting into context the centuries old foreign craze to sell into the always-huge-but-never-commercially-fruitful Chinese market.

Here, the goal seems to be to explain the extreme concentration of wealth in Southeast Asia in a few (mostly Chinese, but not exclusively Chinese food okay) hands and to get some discussion on the causes and consequences of the Asian financial crisis. (This book was written before 2008.)

1. First is recapitulation of the fact that even though all of the migrants who came to the countries under discussion were Chinese, that has meant different things at different times.

Even if cultural reasons are a lot of why Chinese came to dominate Southeast Asia, they're not the only reason: political conditions in China at the time were very bad during the collapsing Qing dynasty and that created a motivation for motivated people to go elsewhere and make money.

2. Second is detailing the historical accidents that made it such that: Colonial Powers needed neutral people that they could work with on the ground, and Chinese fit this bill--and they did as revenue tax collectors and monopoly holders.

Because they were in the right position, they also were benefits of colonial government contracts in various places. Also, for some reason, the local people (Thai, Indonesian, etc) were just not interested in doing business (because maybe they thought it would make their hands dirty), and so that was a boon to the Chinese.

It also appears that after independence, the new indigenous leadership (which was often just as corrupt as the governments they replaced, nod to Orwell's "Animal Farm") needed the same type of neutral people.  The same PEOPLE, in fact.

Later on, The Godfathers relied on state monopolies for certain things (gambling, etc) in order to make a fortune from DOMESTIC inefficiencies. (Sorry about that, Milton Friedman, but neither Singapore nor Hong Kong are what you think.)

It's never exactly the same story twice, but that's just about it in a nutshell.

Secondary information:

1. Chinese triads (which have a 20-century history) were useful and needful to manage local Chinese coolies / others make several cameos in this book. They're also types responsible for kidnapping of family members of these tycoons in exchange for ransoms.

2. Vis-a-vis Asian Indians, most Chinese people did not return to China, with most of them marrying local people and speaking and living local languages. (It's not that East Asia could not have been Indian dominated, it's just that they didn't stay around long enough in large enough numbers to leave a footprint.)

3. As we have seen before, not everybody from one ethnic group is the same just because they happen to be from that ethnic group. Studwell introduces us to two very separate things: those who are shopkeepers and small business owners, and those that are truly overlords.

4. Wealth and degree of "Chinese-ness" are inversely proportional. There also seem to be a LOT of Evangelical Christians in here (p.50). 

5. Singapore has a higher execution rate per capita than either China or Saudi Arabia.
*******

*******
Second order thoughts:

1. All these Chinese men had multiple identities that could be taken on or put off at different times, subject to expendiency.

There is no shame in modifying your identity for the sake of convenience.

2. It is interesting that higher IQ races of people (such as Chinese and Jews) treat identity as malleable-subject-to-context and lower IQ ones (think of black people in North America) treat it as something to be idealized and preserved. (Afrocentrism is a very quirky manifestation of this.)

3. There's nothing wrong with eugenics, and these billionaire's profile in this book have no problem with admitting that some cultures / races are more efficient at producing better results. (This is as opposed to the current Western model of assuming that they are all equal and then explaining away differences and results as "racism.") For example: "Matahir's thinking that one solution for Malay's perceived genetic handicap was intermarriage with other races." Lee Kuan Yew was also a vocal proponent of Chinese genetic exceptionalism.

4. As much as populists talk about "redistributing the wealth," it seems like it works everywhere that people start off as well as wealthy.... There is some dramatic shake up... And the same people stay just as wealthy, or become even wealthier.

5. The best part was the conclusion where the author did a bit of comparative analysis of the South Korean and Taiwanese academies vis-a-vis Hong Kong and Singapore. The former two have recognizable brands because their economies were built on trying to manufacture products, as opposed to the latter two and much of Southeast Asia which has an economy built on rent seeking extractions.

*******

Quotes: 

1. All these expressions point to the same thing - - that the use by political power of a wealthy but dependent class of tycoons was too attractive to be ditched merely because of the end of colonialism.

2. We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves. LaRochefoucald.

3. (p.201) Of the [Russian] commercial Godfathers who have dominated the domestic economy since the end of the Cold war, almost every one is Jewish. They operate entirely at the discretion of a non-jewish political élite, whose whimsy has sent several to prison or exile...... The only big Russian godfather who is not Jewish is Vladimir Potanin.

4. Weather Hong Kong has been ruled by British colonialism, Japanese imperialism or Chinese communism, it has always been managed through the same group of people.

5. Oei Tiong Ham "Had a great interest in women and sex. He had 18 acknowledged concubines and a total of 42 children by them. Eka Tjipta Widaya is associated with at least 30 children. Stanley Ho has only 17 acknowledged children." (p. 59).

6. Southeast Asia is not comparable with the kleptocracies that have ruined many African countries. In most cases Southeast Asian politicians sell public resources and economic rights to private businessmen and do not interfere with the running of the businesses.

7. Racial prejudice went out the window once it was clear the local Godfathers were the key to the banks development.


Verdict: Recommended at the price of $3. The historical events in here are time independent, but the journalistic events are yesterday's news. The book was written in 2007, 16 years ago. (Li Ka-Shing is 95 years old and worth US$36.2 billion as of today.) A lot of the subjects have already died. (Lee Kuan Yew. Stanley Ho. Suharto.)This book could potentially be fun in order to test how well Studwell's predictions have aged.

Vocabulary: 

arkatia (Indian recruiters)
perankan (Indonesian Malay speaking Chinese middle men)
cabang atas - Chinese tax Farmers used by the Dutch
priyayi
baba (Malaysian Chinese)
Alibaba (business fronted by Malay but run by Chinese)
One syllable Chinese (those who had not assimilated and adopted local surnames, Lucio Tan, et al)
unctuous 
gweilo



Further Reading

Huston, Peter "Tongs, Gangs, and Triads"
Booth, Martin "The Dragon Syndicates"

G. William Skinner, various.

Book Review
2/5 stars
"A combination of Thomas Edison and Henry Kissinger."

Even though this book is 136 pages, it's not exactly a light read. It is written in familiar English, but it has that clunky style that people used a few of centuries back.

If you are looking to hear about his invention of bifocals or the water harmonica, you will not find that from this book.

Part I: Life up until ≈1739 (54pps). Interrupted by revolutionary war.
Part II: Life's philosophy (18pps)
Part III: 1733-1757. (60pps) resumed in August 1788, a couple of years before his death.
Part IV: A few random events around 1757

To be honest, even though this is Benjamin Franklin in his own words, I think that I enjoyed the Walter Isaacson autobiography a bit better. And that is because it was a professional research project that drew in many sources to make a more complete picture.

This book does not have the talents of a person who writes professionally, and that could have helped with the narrative arc--it was otherwise intensely boring.

Even though the book was only 136 pages it read like it was 350--quite a boring slog.

Some of the more interesting points about Franklin's life:

1. He was the son of his father's second marriage, and between two marriages his father raised 17 children.

2. Franklin was only one generation away from living in England, and his family had records going back several centuries. It seems that they were literate for quite some time. (He started the book as an Englishman and finished as an American.)

3. He was indentured at 12 years old to a printer - - his brother - - and was to continue up until 9 years to become a journeyman.

Good thinking is time independent, and what I get from this are a number of quotes as well as mental habits of a productive person.

4. There was not even a standardized currency during the time of his earlier life. He talks about paper money in Boston and silver coin in Philadelphia. (p. 23)

5. Boston to Philadelphia back in those days was a two-week journey.

6. In these days before any unified US currency, Franklin was actually a currency printer.

7. His pen name was Richard Saunders, hence "Poor Richard's Almanac," and from this he made a considerable amount of money.

8. (p.79) He lost a 4-year-old son because he was too lazy to vax him (for whatever reason). This was way back in 1736.

9. He took turns of duty as a common soldier.

10. He was a founding member/trustee of the University of Pennsylvania.

11. (p.112) he was the first and witness to the uncouth behavior of the English troops, as well as a witness to the fact that their military prowess was most overrated. No this is 57 right here and the other one I already read like you know some of it and so it's like I might be able to finish tomorrow because it's you know

Habits:

1. Voracious reader.

2. Learned from the School of Hard Knocks.

3. I see him as a combination of the Hofferian Man of Words (in the sense that his output was words) and Hofferian Man of Action (in the sense that he had to keep a business open and profitable in order to speak those words; his writing has a parsimony that belies the fact that he was counting every word written because in his business every word cost money).

4. "That hard-to-be-governed passion of youth hurried me frequently into intrigues with low women that fell in my way, which were attended with some expense and great inconvenience, besides a continual risk to my health by a distemper which of all things are dreaded, though by great luck I escaped it."

5. Like all men of words, he sought influence."I considered my newspaper, also, as another means of communicating instruction..." (p.75)

6. He was a member of a voluntary / secret organization called the Junto society.

7. A flaneur. By the later part of his life, his business activity had made him enough of a fortune so that he could have eff-you money and spend his time as a flaneur / dabbler/inventor.

Quotes:

1. My father convinced me that nothing was useful which was not honest.

2. Since such a repetition is not to be expected, the next thing most like living one's life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection is durable as possible by putting it down in writing.

3. A man is sometimes more generous when he has but a little money than when he has plenty, perhaps through fear of being thought to have but little.

4. There was great difference in persons; and discretion did not always accompany years, nor was youth always without it.

5. He wished to please everybody; and, having little to give, he gave expectations.

6.. I grew convinced that truth, sincerity and integrity in dealings between man and man were of the utmost importance to the felicity of life.... Revelation had indeed no weight with me as such.

7. But he knew a little out of his way, and was not a pleasing companion; as, like most great mathematicians I have met with, he expected universal precision in everything said, or was forever denying or distinguishing upon trifles, to the disturbance of all conversation.

8. The spoken word perishes, the written word remains. (Latin proverb. "Litera scripta manet.")

9. If it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means. It is already annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited the seacoast. (Yikes! Seems like Indians have had problems with alcohol for many centuries.)

10. Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are there for seldom adopted from previous wisdom, but forced by the occasion.

Verdict: NOT RECOMMENDED.

Archaic words:

fair
compleat
chid
dram/dramming
chuse
confuting
pistoles
(nuncupative will)
crimp's bill
Junto 
Dunker
caluminate
hautboy (oboe)
pacquet boat