The sister of infamous Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff and her husband have been found dead in an apparent murder-suicide:
Deputies who responded to a 911 call found 87-year-old Sondra Wiener and her 90-year-old husband Marvin dead from gunshot wounds in their Boynton Beach, Florida home on Thursday, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office said in the release Sunday.
Now I’m wondering if they were linked to Epstein somehow.
Back before he became a movie mogul, when he was a young concert promoter, Harvey Weinstein was friends with Daniel Kriegman, who went on to an unusual career himself:
We subsequently drifted apart, and while Harvey went on to find astronomic success in Hollywood, I worked as the chief psychologist at the Massachusetts Treatment Center for Sexually Dangerous Persons from 1977–86. I’ve continued to evaluate sex offenders there ever since. The Treatment Center is a maximum-security prison where the most dangerous sex offenders are committed for observation once they have completed their criminal sentences to determine whether or not they can be safely released back into society.
The Harvey he knew was an entrepreneur with chutzpah:
One weekend evening after I had moved off-campus, Harvey dropped by the apartment I shared with my girlfriend. Our only toilet was clogged and we couldn’t get it unstuck. It was late at night, so we couldn’t buy a plunger, and we were in the middle of the city during a Buffalo winter, so we couldn’t just go outside and defecate in the woods. What were we going to do? Harvey looked at us with disdain before rolling up his sleeve, sticking his arm into the toilet, and dislodging the blockage with his hand. That may sound disgusting, but the point is not that Harvey was a dirty or unhygienic person. On the contrary, he was always freshly showered and cleanly dressed, if frequently disheveled. But when he saw that something needed doing, he just did it.
Arguably he had too much chutzpah:
When he and David were 11 years old, they had searched the Yellow Pages for bakeries that sold cookies wholesale. They then dressed themselves in Boy Scout uniforms they borrowed from David’s older brother, and went door-to-door selling them for a dollar a box (around $7 in today’s money). This was a lot of money for such young boys and they started taking cabs all over the city, going out to restaurants, and seeing shows. When a skeptical customer asked if they were really raising money for the Boy Scouts, they agreed that phonies were a terrible problem for the Scouts. The man bought two boxes.
Harvey’s parents, Miriam and Max (after whom the brothers would later name Miramax Films) had a peculiar relationship:
Miriam, a pretty, petite woman, filled her obese husband’s large plate to overflowing with spaghetti and meatballs. When Max had finished, he pushed the empty plate away and Miriam began insisting that he eat some more. He refused. Several times. He seemed to be aware that he needed to lose weight. But Miriam persisted. Finally, he gave in and ate another vast plateful. Based on this exchange, I assumed that this was a frequent occurrence. I also assumed that Max would die relatively young, which he did a few years later at the age of 51 without ever achieving the success he yearned for.
The French model agent who was charged with securing girls and young women for billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was found dead Saturday in a Paris prison cell:
Jean-Luc Brunel, 74, was found hanged by his bedsheets in his cell around 1:30 a.m. local time at La Sante prison, the Paris prosecutor’s office told CNN.
Brunel, who ran Karin Models in Paris, and later formed MC2 Model Management with Epstein, was awaiting trial on charges of sexual assault and rape. He was also being investigated for trafficking minors, including girls as young as 12 years old, according to French news reports.
[...]
Brunel — who was credited with launching the careers of models Christy Turlington, Monica Belluci and Angie Everhart — went into hiding after Epstein’s own suicide in a Manhattan lockup in August 2019.
[...]
“It was very convenient and yes suspicious,” a veteran Paris police detective told The Post, who nonetheless said he was not yet convinced Brunel was “suicided.”
An estimated 73% of the US is now immune to omicron:
About half of eligible Americans have received booster shots, there have been nearly 80 million confirmed infections overall and many more infections have never been reported. One influential model uses those factors and others to estimate that 73% of Americans are, for now, immune to omicron, the dominant variant, and that could rise to 80% by mid-March.
Board of Education President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga, and controversial former vice president Alison Collins were sent packing by margins of more than 44 percentage points each, Matt Welch of Reason reports:
The recall had its roots in a series of decisions that the SFUSD did and did not make in January and February 2021. The Board of Education had, the previous fall, set January 25, 2021 as the day to finally reopen a school system that had been fully closed since March 2020. But it then failed to hammer out a reopening agreement with the local teachers union (which, like teachers unions in many Democrat-dominated cities and states, persistently used its considerable local political leverage to delay school reopening long after most Republican-governed polities had gotten back to normal).
It was against this backdrop, with anguished public school parents pulling their hair out over the personal disruption, learning loss, and social dysfunction that comes with extended remote learning, that the SFUSD board made the fateful decision to rename 44 of its schools that still weren’t open, on the ground that those names—including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, John Muir, Paul Revere, and Dianne Feinstein—were too culturally insensitive and/or unrepresentative.
“It was like you have this house on fire, and they’re basically painting the front door,” Looijen told me Monday.
Dale Farran has been studying early childhood education for half a century, but her most recent study has her questioning everything she thought she knew:
“It really has required a lot of soul-searching, a lot of reading of the literature to try to think of what were plausible reasons that might account for this.”
And by “this,” she means the outcome of a study that lasted more than a decade. It included 2,990 low-income children in Tennessee who applied to free, public prekindergarten programs. Some were admitted by lottery, and the others were rejected, creating the closest thing you can get in the real world to a randomized, controlled trial — the gold standard in showing causality in science.
Farran and her co-authors at Vanderbilt University followed both groups of children all the way through sixth grade. At the end of their first year, the kids who went to pre-K scored higher on school readiness — as expected.
But after third grade, they were doing worse than the control group. And at the end of sixth grade, they were doing even worse. They had lower test scores, were more likely to be in special education, and were more likely to get into trouble in school, including serious trouble like suspensions.
[…]
That’s right. A statewide public pre-K program, taught by licensed teachers, housed in public schools, had a measurable and statistically significant negative effect on the children in this study.
[…]
To put it crudely, policymakers and experts have touted for decades now that if you give a 4-year-old who is growing up in poverty a good dose of story time and block play, they’ll be more likely to grow up to become a high-earning, productive citizen.
[…]
Farran points out that families of means tend to choose play-based preschool programs with art, movement, music and nature. Children are asked open-ended questions, and they are listened to.
This is not what Farran is seeing in classrooms full of kids in poverty, where “teachers talk a lot, but they seldom listen to children.”
Swedish speedskater Nils van der Poel dominated the 10,000-meter race Saturday and then released a training guide for anyone who wants to get on his level:
A friend of mine thinks that my success is mostly based on me being a talent. That the training plan that devoured me wouldn’t give anyone else the same results. Perhaps he’s right, perhaps he’s not. I actually think that he is a little right and a little wrong. I like to think that I earned my success. I also wish for the sport to keep developing and for my records to be broken. I will not be the one to break 6.00,00 nor 12.30,00, but maybe someone else will. For those who might want to, I wrote this document. It’s basically a summary of how I trained from May 2019 to February 2022.
[…]
During my last two seasons I regularly skated 240 laps of 30,0 weekly, alone and with lane change. I believe that I am the only skater ever to be able to do that continuously. I was not born this way, I worked for it. From May 2019 up until August 2020 I abstained from competitions on ice and instead aim my powers at developing a strong aerobic base that enabled me to, later on, perform more high intensity work than ever before. The physical ability that enabled my success was a very strong aerobic base.
[…]
Some pro athletes say that, since they are professionals and can train as much as they like, they might as well add some weight training, and some stretching, and some core, and some technical sessions, and some training competitions, and some coordination sessions… All training sessions are performed at the expense of other, more efficient, training sessions, or at the expense of recovery after these sessions. My point isn’t that stretching is useless. If you need to stretch then go ahead and bend over. But do not fool yourself; do not drop hours from the essential sessions in order to perform something that sounds cool or is easy. Yeah, the gym is warm and nice, mirrors everywhere so that you can see your pretty face and attractive muscles. But you’re more likely 50 watts of the required bike threshold to make it below 12.00,00, than you are 50kg in squats from it. I completely cut what I thought were the sub-optimal sessions in order to increase the optimal ones. But, as I’m looking back upon it all, 5 minutes of core and stretching weekly would have been a smart way of staying clear of injury. Those “prehab” sessions I believe should be approached with an attitude of “how little of this is enough?” in order not to get injured nor steal time and effort from the essential sessions. During winter I skated a lot more competition speed laps than any other long distance speed skater, but I did a lot less of any other high intensity training than all the others.
I was vaguely aware that the Interstate Highway System was seen as important for civil defense in the Atomic Age, because dispersed industry would be harder to take out with a limited number of atomic bombs, but the Federal Highway Administration‘s own history points to a slightly different concern:
For the President, the Formosa crisis illustrated the need for the Interstate System. He worried about evacuating Washington and other cities in the event of a nuclear attack. He knew the present roads were inadequate for that purpose. Still, in a meeting with legislative leaders on January 11, 1955, the Formosa crisis prompted a discussion of what would happen in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States. The President said he was worried about an atomic bomb attack, which prompted him to suggest the need for a plan to relocate Congress in an emergency.
[…]
[Civil Defense Administrator Val Peterson told a Senate Armed Services Subcommittee that] evacuation was the only practical solution. “It’s much better to get people out, even if in the process you may kill some of them or damage property. It’s better to do that than to have millions of Americans just stay there and be killed.”
On this same day, Governors Averell Harriman (New York), Robert B. Meyner (New Jersey), and Abraham A. Ribicoff (Connecticut) met with Mayor Robert Wagner of New York City to discuss plans for evacuating the city in the case of a hydrogen bomb attack. A report by the Mayor’s Special Committee on Civil Defense estimated that 1 million people could be moved from the worst danger zones in an hour by rail, subway, and ferryboat. Another 4 million would have to be evacuated by bus, taxi, truck, and automobile along 200 outgoing traffic lanes.
[…]
The report also estimated that 400,000 people an hour could be moved out of Manhattan in 75,000 to 100,000 available vehicles, aside from mass transportation facilities. In addition, if evacuation was not possible, 2,411,855 people could be accommodated on subway platforms serving as emergency shelters.
As illustrated by these activities on the day of General Clay’s testimony, the idea of evacuating cities was by no means unusual. Still, doubt existed about whether evacuation would prove to be practical if needed. In questioning General Clay, Senator Pat McNamara (D-MI), who was from Detroit, observed that when one crash occurs on a freeway, 10 cars pile up. “This is just normal driving, and they are not running scared for their lives.” He couldn’t “visualize it lasting for 10 minutes as a means of escape” and said he would “use the alleys rather than use the superhighway” in the face of a pending atomic attack.
The Interstate Highway System does not strike me as a system for evacuating cities. That does present an interesting thought experiment though: what would be a good system for evacuating a city and getting its population out of immediate danger from the blast and then the fallout? Subways out into the countryside?
This Treehugger piece presents the more familiar argument that one of the best defences against nuclear bombs is sprawl:
In 1945, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists began advocating for “dispersal,” or “defense through decentralization” as the only realistic defense against nuclear weapons, and the federal government realized this was an important strategic move. Most city planners agreed, and America adopted a completely new way of life, one that was different from anything that had come before, by directing all new construction “away from congested central areas to their outer fringes and suburbs in low-density continuous development,” and “the prevention of the metropolitan core’s further spread by directing new construction into small, widely spaced satellite towns.”
But the strategy had to change after the development of the more powerful hydrogen bomb, and with it the realization that having people living in the suburbs but working downtown was a problem. “President Dwight D. Eisenhower instead promoted a program of rapid evacuation to rural regions. As a civil defense official who served from 1953 to 1957 explained, the focus changed “from ‘Duck and Cover’ to ‘Run Like Hell.’”
To service that sprawl and to move people quickly in time of war, you need highways; that is why the bill that created the American interstate highway system was actually called The National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956- they are exactly that, defense highways, designed to get people outta town in a hurry.
It’s clear that the suburban way of life didn’t develop because suddenly people could afford cars; it happened because the government wanted it.
[…]
After getting the people out, the next step was to actually move the industries and offices out of the dense urban cores, where so many corporations could be taken out with a single bomb, and establish them in suburban corporate campuses where just about every one of them would be a separate target. There was actually a National Industrial Dispersion Policy, designed to decentralize industry and commerce.
Wealth is not power, although, given time enough, it may be possible to turn it into power. Economic power can determine the relationships between states only by operating within a framework of military power itself. That is, potential power has to become actual power in order to determine the factual relationship between power units such as states. Thus the relationship is not determined by manpower, but by trained men; it is not established by steel output, but by weapons; it is not settled by energy production, but by explosives; not by scientists, but by technicians.
When economics was called “political economy” up to about 1840, it was recognized that the rules of economic life had to operate within a framework of a power structure. This was indicated at the time by the emphasis on the need for “domestic tranquility” and for international security as essentials of economic life. But when these political conditions became established and came to be taken for granted, political economy changed its name to “economics,” and everyone, in areas where these things were established, became confused about the true relationships. Only now, when disorder in our cities and threats from external foes are once again making life precarious, as it was before the 1830s, do we once again recognize national security and domestic tranquility as essential factors in economic life.
In the past century we have tended to assume that the richest states would be the most powerful ones, but it would be nearer the truth to say that the most secure and most powerful states will become the rich ones. We assumed, as late as 1941, that a rich state would win a war. This has never been true. Wealth as potential power becomes effective in power relationships, such as war, only to the degree that it becomes actual power, that is, military force. Merely as economic power it helps to win a war only potentially and actually hampers progress toward victory. We could almost say that wealth makes on less able to fight and more likely to be attacked. Throughout history poor nations have beaten rich ones again and again. Poor Assyria beat rich Babylonia; poor Rome beat rich Carthage; poor Macedonia beat rich Greece, after poor Sparta had beaten rich Athens; poor Prussia beat richer Austria and then beat richer France several times. Rich states throughout history have been able to defend their positions only if they saw the relationship between wealth and power and kept prepared or, if they were able when attacked to drag out the war so that they had time to turn their wealth into actual military power. That is wheat happened in the two World Wars. In each case the victims of German aggression were able to win in the long run only because there was a long run. If the Germans had been able to overcome the English Channel, their victims would not have had time to build up their military power.
Thus we see that wealth in itself is not of great importance in international affairs. It must be turned into military power to be effective, but then it ceases to be wealth. Wealth turned into guns no longer is wealth. But guns can protect wealth.
Where did pop culture’s most dramatic sound — dun, dun duuun! — come from?
On screen, a dramatic “dun, dun duuun” has appeared in everything from Disney’s Fantasia to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to The IT Crowd. In 2007, a YouTuber scored a video of a melodramatic prairie dog with the three beats, earning over 43m views and a solid place in internet history. Yet though many of us are familiar with the sound, no one seems to know exactly where it came from. Try to Google it and … dun, dun, duuun! Its origins are a mystery.
Taken together, these three duns are what’s known as a sting — a brief bit of music that media producers can use to break up the action or punctuate a theatrical moment.
[...]
Suspense, an American horror show broadcast on CBS Radio between 1942 and 1962, was filled to the brim with sound effects and dramatic stings. Just over three minutes into its first episode (after bells, the sound of a train, and plenty of piano), a three-beat sting lingers on its last note when a man discovers his wife is potentially an undead poisoner. But it’s difficult to pinpoint the very first on-air dun dun duuun, and it’s likely the musical phrase predates the radio.
[...]
In 1940’s Fantasia, Disney’s recording of Stravinsky’s 1913 Rite of Spring emphasised two duns and a lingering duuun at the end of a dinosaur battle (though the composer’s original features a similar three beats, they’re not as pronounced or as recognisable as the sound we know today). From Tom and Jerry to Ren and Stimpy, dun dun duuuns also cropped up in cartoons, ensuring the sound became a television mainstay. Young Frankenstein’s version debuted in the 1970s, and it was this recording that was used for the dramatic prairie dog viral vid.
[...]
In 1983, recordings library KPM Music asked Walter to produce four vinyl albums of musical phrases known as The Editor’s Companion. With an orchestral lineup of around 35 to 40 people, Walter recorded hundreds of tracks over the course of 18 months, including chase music, sleighbells, and a four-second, three-beat sting called Shock Horror (A) that comprises the notes D#, C and F#.
“It’s musical shorthand which says a lot very quickly,” Walter says of the first of five melodramatic exclamations that run all the way down to Shock Horror (E).
[...]
The devil’s interval is a dissonant combination of tones that unsettles the listener because it is unresolved. You’ve likely heard the devil’s interval as the opening two notes to The Simpson’s theme tune, as well as the beginning of Maria from West Side Story (Walter helpfully sings both). Yet in both cases, the tension is immediately resolved with the next note, producing a pleasant effect. “But if you don’t resolve it, you’re left feeling unsatisfied,” Walter explains, “That’s what it boils down to.”
When Walter was charged with creating horror stings for The Editor’s Companion, “the obvious thing to do” for Shock Horror (A) was use the interval — his is “just an extremely abbreviated version, about as short as you can get”.
[...]
The recording has since been used in SpongeBob SquarePants, Roseanne, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Beavis and Butt-Head, as well as adverts for cereal, snacks and a home improvement store.
I was introduced to the term “Gnomes of Zürich“ by Steve Jackson’s humorous conspiracy-themed game, Illuminati, where the secretive Swiss bankers were one of the factions vying for global domination. I never hunted down the origin of the term though:
Although Swiss bankers had been criticised in Britain since the 1950s, the term “gnome of Zürich” originated in a crisis meeting of the Labour politicians in November 1964. The politicians blamed Swiss bankers for raising speculation against the pound. During the meeting, politician George Brown criticised the Swiss bankers and said, “The gnomes of Zürich are at work again.” The term “Gnomes of Zürich” was then used by many other politicians of the time. Then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson vowed to resist the gnomes’ sinister power.
Conflict arises when there is no longer a consensus regarding the real power situation, and the two parties, by acting on different subjective pictures of the objective situation, come into collision.
The purpose of such a conflict, arising from different pictures of the facts, is to demonstrate to both parties what the real power relationship is in order to reestablish a consensus on it.
[...]
Unfortunately this kind of fighting between young boys now occurs much more rarely than it did before (say a century ago) with the result that boys of today grow up to manhood and go off to fight, or to run the State Department, without any conception of the real nature of power and its relationships. This lack is, at the same time, one of the causes of juvenile delinquency and of adults’ mistaken belief that the role of war is the total destruction, or the unconditional surrender, of one’s opponent, instead of being what war really is, a method of measuring relative power so that they can live together in peace.
The role of any conflict, including war, is to measure a power relationship so that a consensus, that is a legal relationship, may be established. War cannot be abolished either by renouncing it or by disarming, unless some other method of measuring power relationships in a fashion convincing to all concerned is set up. And this surely cannot be done by putting more than a hundred factually unequal states into a world assembly where they are legally equal. This kind of nonsense could be accepted only by people who have been personally so remote from real power situations all their pampered, well-protected lives that they do not even recognize the existence of the power structures in which they have lived and which, by protecting them, have prevented them from being exposed to conflict sufficiently to come to know the nature of real power.
Ever since, I have seen the SAT as the friend of the little guy, just as James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard, said it would be when he urged the SAT upon the nation in the 1940s.
Conant’s cause was as unambiguously liberal in the 1940s as income redistribution is today. Then, America’s elite colleges drew most of their students from a small set of elite secondary schools, concentrated in the northeastern United States, to which America’s wealthy sent their children. The mission of the SAT was to identify intellectual talent regardless of race, color, creed, money, or geography, and give that talent a chance to blossom.
[…]
It makes no difference, however, that the charges about coaching are wrong, just as it makes no difference that the whole idea that rich parents can buy their children high SAT scores is wrong. One part of the indictment is true, and that one part overrides everything else: the children of the affluent and well educated really do get most of the top scores. For example, who gets the coveted scores of 700 and higher, putting them in the top half-dozen percentiles of SAT test-takers? Extrapolating from the 2006 data on means and standard deviations reported by the College Board, about half of the 700+ scores went to students from families making more than $100,000 per year. But the truly consequential statistics are these: Approximately 90 percent of the students with 700+ scores had at least one parent with a college degree. Over half had a parent with a graduate degree.
In that glaring relationship of high test scores to advanced parental education, which in turn means high parental IQ, lies the reason that the College Board, politically correct even unto self-destruction, cannot bring itself to declare the truth: the test isn’t the problem. The children of the well educated and affluent get most of the top scores because they constitute most of the smartest kids. They are smart because their parents are smart. The parents have passed their smartness along through parenting practices that are largely independent of education and affluence, and through genes that are completely independent of them.
The cognitive stratification of American society — for that’s what we’re talking about — was not a problem 100 years ago. Many affluent people were smart in 1907, but there were not enough jobs in which high intellectual ability brought high incomes or status to affect more than a fraction of really smart people, and most of the really smart people were prevented from getting those jobs anyway by economic and social circumstances (consider that in 1907 roughly half the adults with high intelligence were housewives).
From 1907 to 2007, the correlation between intellectual ability and socioeconomic status (SES) increased dramatically. The socioeconomic elite and the cognitive elite are increasingly one. If you want the details about how this process worked and how it is transforming America’s class structure, I refer you to The Bell Curve (1994), the book I wrote with the late Richard Herrnstein. For now, here’s the point: Imagine that, miraculously, every child in the country were to receive education of equal quality. Imagine that a completely fair and accurate measure of intellectual ability were to be developed. In that utopia, a fair admissions process based on intellectual ability would fill the incoming classes of the elite colleges predominantly with children of upper-middle-class parents.
In other words, such a perfect system would produce an outcome very much like the one we see now. Harvard offers an easy way to summarize the revolution that accelerated after World War II. As late as 1952, the mean SAT Verbal score of the incoming freshman class was just 583. By 1960, the mean had jumped to 678. In eight years, Harvard transformed itself from a college with a moderately talented student body to a place where the average freshman was intellectually in the top fraction of 1 percent of the national population. But this change did not mean that Harvard became more socioeconomically diverse. On the contrary, it became more homogeneous. In the old days, Harvard had admitted a substantial number of Boston students from modest backgrounds who commuted to classes, and also a substantial number of rich students with average intelligence. In the new era, when Harvard’s students were much more rigorously screened for intellectual ability, the numbers of students from the very top and bottom of the socioeconomic ladder were reduced, and the proportion coming from upper-middle-class backgrounds increased.
It means that the actor himself is convinced of the correctness and inevitability of his actions to the degree that his conviction serves both to help him to act more successfully and to persuade the opposition that his (the actor’s) actions are in accordance with the way thins should be. Strangely enough, this factor of morale, which we might like to reserve for men because of its spiritual or subjective quality, also operates among animals. A small bird will often be observed in summer successfully driving a crow or even a hawk away from its nest, and a dog who would not ordinarily fight at all will attack, often successfully, a much larger beast who intrudes onto his front steps or yard. This element of subjective conviction which we call morale is the most significant aspect of the ideological element in power relationships and shows the intimate relationship between the various elements of power from the way in which it strengthens both force and persuasion.
It also shows something else which contemporary thinkers are very reluctant to accept. That is the operation of natural law. For the fact that animals recognize the prescriptive rights to property, as shown in the fact that a much stronger beast will yield to a much weaker one on the latter’s home area, or that a hawk will allow a flycatcher to chase it from the area of the flycatcher’s nest, shows a recognition of property rights which implies a system of law among beasts. In fact, the singing of a bird (which is not for the edification of man or to attract a mate, but is a proclamation of a residence area to other birds of the same habits) is another example of the recognition of rights and thus of law among non-human life.
Sure enough, the Phantoms were an update to the book:
The story, for the most part, follows the book. The movie’s major divergence is the absence of Ben Meecham’s Jewish best friend Sammy. The spelling of the family’s surname was also changed from Meecham to Meechum. Also changed is Meecham’s aircraft; in the book, he flies and commands a squadron of F-8 Crusaders, while in the film the fighters shown are F-4 Phantom IIs.
The F-8 was the last American fighter with guns as its primary weapon, earning it the title “The Last of the Gunfighters”.
The Great Santini exemplifies what we now call toxic masculinity, and his wisecracking older daughter compares him to Godzilla — which got me to look up the illustrious monster, who made his American debut in 1956:
Gojira is a portmanteau of the Japanese words: gorira (“gorilla”) and kujira (“whale”), owing to the fact that in one planning stage, Godzilla was described as “a cross between a gorilla and a whale”, due to its size, power and aquatic origin.
I was surprised when the oldest son’s high school basketball coach made a reference to — pardon my French — poontang, because I thought that was a term only popularized after Vietnam, but the term goes back decades:
1920s: alteration of French putain ‘prostitute’.