Agreed

I have somehow tricked Emory into accepting me to their MPH program on top of the Johns Hopkins MHS. Global epidemiology and epidemiology respectively. Now only waiting for EuroPubHealth (will be notified by March 3) and Georgetown (no notification timeline).

Apartment lease ends at the end of March. I'll be moving in with my parents for a few months before shipping off to wherever I go come late summer/early fall. Parents still don't know I've applied. Waiting to hear back from EuroPubHealth before I tell them I applied so I can have some idea of whether or not I'm staying in these great United States.

Covid cases slowing down sharply which is great. It's allowing me to do a lot of data cleanup which was badly needed.

So let me get this straight:

We have a financial system of investments that "worked", by which I mean for the sake of this simplification that it produced decent return on investment with relatively little investment risk. Over time, it has stopped working because the foundation has slowly eroded underneath it: the returns on things that are relatively low-risk are lower than ever, hardly beating inflation. This has pushed people controlling large sacks of money into more and more risky, more predatory investments just to keep the returns on their investments good enough, attempting to secure future wealth. The financial Overton window has shifted dramatically towards risk, the solid foundation of alpha gains falling out.

We have a financial system that used to be limited by the speed of a broker's mind. That used to be limited by the ingenuity of an Ivy League econ major to come up with new risks to create out of thin air on top of existing market and goods movements. Over time, the yelling at phones in a big room in NYC was replaced by computers, the creation of financial markets by computers, they're all interconnected in strange ways. The dark side of the pools are now squarely out of view of anyone with regulatory power, the frequency of high-frequency trading bots from companies gobbling up CalTech and MIT grads so high it's measured in nanoseconds.

We have a financial sector that got not much more than a mild burn from the Financial Crisis. No real strucutral repercussions, of course. With the bailouts left and right, and the money printer going brrr evermore, we have a financial sector that is not restricted but spurred on into madness, totally fine with taking obscene risks because their Clubhouse buddies are doing it too and you gotta keep up with the Jonases over at Goldman, right? So they short what they want. Who cares about a bit of leverage here and there if you're right.

We have a generation (or two) of the 99% who had the 'boomer dream of college-jobbyjob-house-pension shattered in front of our eyes in 2008, who are no stranger to nihilism in their 9-years-out-of-college 180sqft bedroom their degree got them. A generation who have not forgotten the tents of Occupy that did not colonize an inch of the bank accounts of Big Money. Enabled by the slot machine of Robinhood, unhindered by any lack of expertise, some gather on Reddit and speculate on the straight white bro horoscope that is the NYSE. They move a market here and there, but only if they align their lulz with their cash for a bit. They tell themselves this is how they reclaim their grip on the(ir) future, but deep down they know it's mostly a game of which they're a bunch of duck-sized horses fighting against an army of horse-sized ducks.

UNTIL someone came up with a plan that is equal parts nihilism, meme, and a call-out of the madness of the market. A plan that squarely points the middle finger at the amorphous class of the Rich who destroyed their future, by destroying their future with their own hubris. A plan that's easy enough to communicate in one of the few thousand Twitter threads that popped up as soon as $GME started getting traction. Easy enough to follow through on, throw a bunch of cash that wasn't growing anyway into it just to believe in the long arm of justice. Throw in some Musk and crying billionares to keep the train steamin'.

Cue billionaires crying because the wrong people are getting rich. A friend of a friend is actually hit badly by this! Can you imagine them picking something in my portfolio? Let's gear up the scare tactics and make Very Important Calls with Very Important People to put an end to these plebs. Let me call up that guy we lost to those Robinhood losers. He can buy us some time, for sure.

We have a stock market that has still ignored the largest health crisis since WW2. We have economists screaming recession for the last eighteen months. We have a market that has done nothing but radicalize, on the flimsiest of economic foundation, for the past decades. We have books left and right telling us how close we got to a meltdown a decade ago.

And now have Bed, Bath & Beyond going places. I'm not saying generations to come will learn Gamestop and Lehman in the same breath? But it's not unlikely.

pointing a kaleidoscope at a turd

Had to try it.

Real hero: Wife.

Been busy as all hell the past two months. We're really understaffed at my preschool, and I'm running myself pretty ragged. They just cut our hours down to 30 hours a week, which I am actually pretty grateful for at the moment. I don't have to go in until 11:30 every day now, which finally gives me some time to work on things before I am completely exhausted at the end of the day. I've made it my goal to make some new music every day, and so far I've managed to keep up with that goal for the last two weeks or so. If you want to listen, you can check it out here. Pretty much all just ambient stuff, I've been going back to recording live on tape and slowing things down. I'm considering taking about an hour's worth of the best tracks here at the end of the month and printing a limited run of like 25 tapes.

I also did some music for a friend's short movie recently, which just came out this weekend:

And last, here's something I'm really proud of that I made for the preschoolers when we were talking about robots:

It's a light/touch sensitive synthesizer thingamajig! LDRs for the eyes, and custom-made PCB touchplates on the sides. The kids had a blast exploring this.

Hope all the Hubskiers are having a good start to 2020 2.0!

LOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLERSKATES at your freeze peaches

Y'all young'uns know the Tale of Traci Lords? Sure, Crybaby, sure, neckbiter in Blade. Hey let's cue up that video real quick we could use a soundtrack. Traci would approve after all she cut an album with Juno Reactor as her backing band

So here's Traci back when she was Nora Kuzma, a 14-year-old getting raped in Ohio while visiting her estranged dad

Her alcoholic mom was dating a dude who molested her but he had a heart of gold; he hooked young Nora up with a friend of equally loose morals who hooked Nora up with a fake ID and took her to a bunch of auditions

At age 15, Kuzma became pregnant by her high school boyfriend. Afraid of her mother's reaction, she went to Hayes for help. He arranged for her to have an abortion without her mother's knowledge. Looking for a job to get some money, she was introduced to his friend and started working for her as a babysitter. The woman offered to improve Kuzma's job opportunities by helping her get a fake driver's license. She provided Kuzma with a new birth certificate on condition that if she were ever caught she would say that she had stolen the phony identification. Kuzma now had the alias Kristie Elizabeth Nussman and a new driver's license that stated she was 20 rather than 15 years old. In February 1984, she answered a newspaper advertisement for Jim South's World Modeling Talent Agency. Posing as her stepfather, Hayes drove her to the agency. After signing a contract, she began working as a nude model and appeared in magazines such as Velvet, Juggs, and Club. During August, when she was selected to model for Penthouse magazine's September 1984 15th-anniversary issue, Kuzma was asked to choose a stage name. According to a 1988 interview, she chose Traci—one of the popular names she had longed for growing up—and Lords, after the actor Jack Lord, since she was a fan of the television series Hawaii Five-O, in which he portrayed the character of Steve McGarrett.

Traci? Traci was big. I was in fourth fucking grade and I knew who Traci Lords was. Pinups, videos, she did all the dirty stuff. We were just starting to negotiate puberty and we wanted Traci lords.

THE GIRL WITH THE HAMMER IS SIXTEEN

After appearing at age 16 with John Leslie (an actor 23 years her senior) in the porno parody Talk Dirty to Me Part III (which won the AVN Award for the best movie), Lords was hailed as the "Princess of Porn". She became one of the highest-paid porn actresses of that time, earning more than $1,000 a day.

"I won't get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day" - Linda Evangelista, four years later

Lords continued making more movies until late 1985 when she tried to quit the industry at age 17, but returned a few months later. Afterwards, she met Stuart Dell, who became her boyfriend, manager, and business partner. They formed the Traci Lords Company. Dell and Lords made a distribution deal with Sy Adler, an industry veteran who ran Vantage International, that they would produce three movies for the company.

"Tried to quit the industry" is such a laden phrase.

Two adults who knew Lords, but who requested anonymity, said they saw her picture in the adult magazine Velvet during July 1984 and telephoned the district attorney's office to inform authorities that she was underage, but that an investigator told them, "There isn't anything we can do about it."

Let's review. We've got a seventeen-year-old kid who has "tried to quit the industry" who is only there because her molester hooked her up with an ex-girlfriend who got her a fake ID so she could get an abortion without telling her mom. She's got high school classmates who tried to whistle-blow but nothing happened. What happened next is... some of the most fraught language I've ever seen on Wikipedia:

During late May 1986 (around three weeks after Lords' 18th birthday), authorities were informed that she had been underage when she appeared in the porn movies. She had lied (according to Lords, it was a "white lie") to law enforcement, photographers, producers, directors, co-workers, and the general public for two years.

Yep, blame the 16-year-old kid for breaking the rules for money and approval.

Government prosecutors declared that Lords was a victim of a manipulative industry, maintaining that she was drugged and made to do non-consensual acts. Industry insiders, including Ron Jeremy, Tom Byron, Peter North, and Ginger Lynn said they never saw her use drugs and that she was always fully aware of her actions.

Oh well if RON JEREMY says she wasn't coerced

Make no mistake: Traci Lords ANNIHILATED the porn industry. She was Penthouse Pet in the September 1984, the issue in which Bob Guccionne ran nude photos of then-Miss America Vanessa Williams against her consent

In July 1984 (two months before the end of her reign), Williams learned that nude photos of her, taken before her involvement with the pageant, would be published without her consent in a future issue of Penthouse. Williams believed that the private photographs had been destroyed; she stated that she never signed a release permitting publication or use of the photos in a public format. In contrast, Hugh Hefner, the publisher of Playboy, was also given the opportunity to publish these photos but turned it down stating: "The single victim in all of this was the young woman herself, whose right to make this decision was taken away from her. If she wanted to make this kind of statement, that would be her business, but the statement wasn't made by her."

The black-and-white photos dated back to the summer of 1982 (after her freshman year at Syracuse University) when she worked as an assistant and makeup artist for Mount Kisco, New York photographer Tom Chiapel. At the time, Williams stated that Chiapel said that "he had a concept of having two models pose nude for silhouettes, basically to make different shapes and forms. The light would be behind the models. I was reluctant, but since he assured me that I would be the only one to see them and I would not be identifiable in the photographs, I agreed.

Owning this magazine is a felony.

It cost the porn industry tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to clean it up. In my mind? Young Nora realized at some point that the clean start no one would give her was hers for the taking if she was willing to burn her abusers to the ground. So she did. And helped out fellow sex industry victim Vanessa Williams while she was at it. And her actions shook some shit up. Every disclaimer you used to see in porn? Traci Lords put it there. We may not call Section 2257 the "Traci Lords Act" but it's the fuckin' Traci Lords Act. Traci Lords legit flew a figurative airliner into the figurative World Trade Center of the porn industry, surveyed the rubble, said it was good and enrolled at Lee Strasbourg. The only reason she's not a goddamn DC Comics superhero is all the scummy old men who run Hollywood are still pissed.

One afternoon in 2012, I went to lunch in the Valley at a Hamburger Hamlet with adult veteran Bill Margold, who’d codirected Traci, and adult agent Jim South, who’d represented Traci. Traci, and what happened 25 years ago, was the topic of conversation between these two. Not for part of the lunch, for the whole lunch. The way they told the story was as a noir, with Traci as the ne plus ultra of femmes fatales: She’d scammed the adult industry with a fake ID; had made one movie after the age of 18, a movie she owned the rights to; and then she’d blown the whistle on herself to make more money and become more famous. And the anger of both these men was still, all these years later, hot to the touch.

But that was then, this is now. Then, there were forms, there were lawyers, there were scummy old men. Now? Now there's freedom and sweetness and light and "chilling effects...on the sex work industry" and "literally the "think of the children" argument finely weaponized against the open internet yet again."

Up until that New York Times article, you could find thousands of hits for Traci Lords on Pornhub.

This is like the FBI not screening for Osama bin Laden. This is a lackadaisical freedom from harm so deep that the most obvious, most immediate, most thunderously bad consequences aren't even screened at surface level. This is a company so completely unconcerned with liability that they aren't motivated in the slightest to do the barest due diligence. Could they? Sure - you couldn't find Paris Hilton on there. Why? Her lawyers are meaner. Pornhub was filtering Paris Hilton, whose videos carry civil consequences, and carrying Traci Lords, whose videos carry criminal consequences. And if you don't think that was a conscious, deliberate decision you're fucking high.

And if you're more worried about hypothetical threats to sex workers than actual threats against underaged girls, FUCK YOU.

I almost forgot! I'm officially a scientist now! 🥳

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cstp.2020.09.007

I'm curious as to why we need to augment your self-loathing on this one, Ben. The article is a nuanced, long-form investigation of "velvet eugenics" and the impact of prenatal testing on parents, children and society. By your own admission you've undergone professional and voluntary education and training on medical ethics, so this is likely something you've grappled with your entire adult life. You're an intelligent man, capable of distinction and compartmentalization but lately you've eschewed all that to get people to yell at you. It seems to be a form of "the religious shouldn't breed" and no amount of discussion around "this isn't a religious discussion" or "this isn't a people shouldn't breed discussion" dissuades you from your monolithic pursuit of castigation.

It's a shame because clearly you could add to this discussion but you're instead choosing to obfuscate it with inflammatory language so the discussion can be all about you. What are you worried about us discussing? What are you trying to distract us from? As someone whose life has been shaped by congenital defects I would value your input if you chose to share it. Speaking for myself, we went out of our way to get our kid genetically tested. We absolutely would have aborted if we'd popped Trisomy 21 because yeah - that's an 80% mortality rate with profound lifestyle impacts. Some of the other stuff? We didn't plan. Fortunately it didn't matter. So I have a perspective on this, and appreciate the perspectives of others. And I'm curious what you're so afraid of.

I'm guessing there's an outward "I wish I was never born" performative dance that supports you socially, combined with an inner "but I love my fiancee and am actively planning a future" hopefulness that can't be reconciled, so you go through this "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" Kabuki because if you have to admit that you actually hope you wake up every morning you'll be forced to address that you have something to lose now and you're just too spiritually weak to accept that the world would regret your passing. After all, if you value the world and the world values you, you might just have to press pause on your wholesale outward rejection of your entire inherited value system. You might have to examine your core beliefs and attempt to mature as a man. And it's so much easier being the angry product of arrested development.

You're getting lazy with it though. It's transparent. It also demonstrates how uncomfortable you are with yourself and your self image, which is usually a sign of readiness for growth.

I, for one, am here to help. Happy Holidays!

You know... I originally posted a picture of a friend of mine with Downs and jokingly said “my other friend Ben said you can eat a bag of dicks”.

But I had to delete it. This Ben would never say that. Frankly, he’d never say anything mean like that. Ben reminds me of all that is good in the world. He is a man filled with love. He lights up a room. He is happy.

So I deleted the picture of Ben because he would be sad if he knew that I weaponized him because I was frustrated with your disregard for his life. He would hug you and tell you he “loves you too much”.

So you don’t get a picture of Ben with a snippy response from me. Instead you get this response. Which is me being sad for you. Sad that you’re so angry at the world that you would rob the humanity from people who are often times the best of us. I’m embarrassed that I sunk to your level.

The bad Emily

Get a load of these guys, thinking they had it rough!