Entertaining Forgiveness

The past few years have been notable for their official egregiousness.  They have also been marked for me by two major sources of alienation, both of which have origins in the dismaying state of global affairs.  Israel's enormous response (in the pedantic sense of outside the scope of what could be considered normal) to the Hamas attack of October 7  2023 forced sides to be taken in what had been an uneasy truce between those with Zionist sympathies and those of us (myself included) increasingly questioning our tolerance of Israel's privileged exemptions from claims of special pleading and double standards for its treatment of the Palestinians whose homeland it has occupied.  I'm thinking in particular of artists I had an uncomplicated admiration for, whose recalcitrant Zionist stance post Oct 7 has complicated my admiration.  To be sure, plenty of assholes I had no feelings for have come out of the woodwork to bear down hard on their Israel chauvinism and they get the brunt of my unhesitant irritation.   But its always disappointing to learn (or have suspicions confirmed) that someone I'm a fan of is on the wrong side of an issue with such devastating consequences.

A bit closer to home-- ever since Bernie Sanders conceded the 2016 Democratic Primary to Hillary Clinton, a dismayingly large number of former Sanders allies have cordoned themselves off from those on the left who so prefer to take their chances with Democratic politicians / presidents as opposed to Republican ones that they will actually continue to vote for them.  These post left leftists will readily admit that the system is structured so that only one of two parties will win; that one of those parties -- corrupt and entrenched and elitist and venal though it is-- wreaks less havoc on the rights and needs and futures of the laboring majority of people.  They disavow electoral politics while at the same time participating in ways that hinder the least harmful outcomes and they think absolve them from the worst. Many of them are otherwise very intelligent people who on the issue of electoral politics are basically idiots.  To me, harm reduction isn't a political strategy, it's a survival mechanism.

The time has not come for forgiveness.  That will not be possible in the first case until an Israel/Palestine with a fully restored Gaza becomes a democratic non-apartheid state in which residents of all religions and ethnicities live in equality and peace.  In the second case, some corner must be turned in which all who value freedom, peace, equality and a society in which needs are treated not as privileges but as rights begin to work together to turn the tide against fascism, capitalism and oligarchy.  It shouldn't be the case, but as of this moment, it's easier for me to imagine forgiveness of the first category of transgressors than of the second.

In the meantime, I guess I still have a capacity to be horrified at acceptance of the fascist outcome.  This is a winner take all system we’re living under (against our desires).  In 2024, either Joe Biden’s DEI VP was going to take all -- she who was very likely taking a sloppy tack of promising continuance of Biden’s legacy in her campaign in order to try to overcome the perceived multiple handicaps of her ethnicity and gender  as well as her lack of cultural currency as a political brand (thanks to being sheltered away in the vice president’s residence for four years by the senile fart who very openly let voters know he was only using her ironically enough for the youth, ethnicity and gender he lacked in order to overcome his own decrepit racist and sexist brand).   Or the Fascists were going to take all.   The Biden tack failed with low-information Biden haters—it was a bad strategy based on the typical bad dem notions about the electorate as bars on a bar graph.  But even high information voters, including single issue voters did not seem to me to take the care that they needed to with the history changing differences in the two outcomes this time.   Because of that the Fascists won all.  Is this not what we are dealing with?  By the slimmest of majorities among the fraction of the electorate who actually voted, Donald Trump got it all.  I don’t think because of political wisdom or honor.  I think because people with the same information as me projected an image on Kamala Harris that was tainted by her association with Joe Biden.  People didn’t want to give Joe Biden the satisfaction, even though he wasn’t running.  You projected continuation of Biden’s administration onto her.  I projected a break from Trump and Biden.  Neither of us knew which way things would go with a Harris administration, but frankly KH was not Joe Biden.  She had resentments.  She had secret disagreements.  She was movable.  She was a different person who would I felt very probably want her own legacy.  I saw signs of the difference in the beginning before the Biden team and Jill and Joe Biden got to her.  She and Walz clammed up at one point, and I think it’s because she was advised very badly and given the limited amount of time she had available she trusted the pros. And note—I am not saying she would have been a great president.  She undoubtedly would have sucked.  But I don’t think she would have kept up a Joe Biden continuation façade, and I know we would not have the big beautiful bill and cracker racists kidnapping our neighbors and Stephen Miller and Pam Bondi and Hegseth and Kennedy and the Trump-Kennedy Center and the Trump court and Congress rolling over and playing dead.

I agree we need a new political system—Trump is the proof of that.  But what are we supposed to do in the meantime?  Watch families get ripped apart?  Watch Gaza get razed to the ground while Trump gets the Peace prize for it (Because Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris as his DEI mascot and therefore she had to be punished because he was no longer around to be)?  Pretend the planet is not dying because Trump doesn’t believe in climate change?  Watch reproductive rights and civil rights and voting rights and other social gains drift away?  All of those are hostage to the political system we’ve got.

The leadership of the dems has said it: For every vote they lose among the working class or the radical left, they pick up two more in the republican suburbs.  And I believe that strategy actually worked for them once so they expect it work everytime regardless of whatever else is going on. (And these are the evil soul-less neolibs I’m talking about.)  That’s why they don’t view lost voters as teachers and lesson givers but rather as ballast necessary in order for the statistics to come together for them—the spaces they leave in the democratic constituency just make extra room for the multiples of suburban professionals coming on board in response.  The ones who need the lesson don’t get the lesson.  They haven’t learned anything new since 1992.  That’s the problem.  And then the fascists win and their response is not – gee maybe if we were only more palatable to the working classes and the radical left.  It’s more like, “Maybe if we offer fascism lite we’ll attract even more Republicans.”  They are worthless.  This is actually what makes them preferable to Republicans every time.  Because the Dems are at their very worst (which sucks I agree) feckless.  But the Republicans will deliver on the fascism that they promise because they mean it.  This is a glorious, glorious time for them. And the Dems did not even learn their lesson.

I resent having to be the one to help the unsexy loser Dems keep the fascists at bay.  I resent the shirking that people whose politics (and distaste for corporate dems) I share, who winkingly give each other permission to shirk. who winkingly excuse themselves from blame for the fascists winning because the Dems, being feckless fools, can be agreed upon by them to be at fault.

At least Zionists own the havoc they wreak.

The Relations of Order

I finished Cedric Robinson’s The Terms of Order a short while ago.  T.b.h., it was a bit of a struggle but I think I finally came to terms (no pun intended) with the notion that it may have been a slog on purpose.  I came down on feeling that the book was essentially a critique of political theory using the language and canon of political theory. Robinson had a hard time getting awarded his Ph.D. from Stanford. He grew up in Oakland and was a major autodidact as a youth reading his way through the stacks at the Oakland public library system.  His depth of scholarship shows, but some members of his committee at Stanford quit saying they could not understand his thesis.  After three years of unsuccessful persuasion, he ultimately had to threaten litigious action to get the Ph.D. in 1974  and then he published the thesis as The Terms of Order.  I was feeling a bit sympathetic with the committee quitters for long stretches of the book, but every now and then his project crystallized for me, especially toward the end.  

In using the canon and language of political theory to critique it, he was essentially saying political theory is often a mythology of how society is organized politically which too often overlooks the role of violence and force.  He criticizes political theorists large and small for hammering their conclusions into a tacitly pre-agreed upon framework.  There are bits and pieces here and there that he doesn’t reject outright, but even those he caveats. In particular, he spends a lot of sympathetic time on anarchy and mutual aid.  But he contrasts all of western political theory and organization with the Stateless societies of primitive people which he says grow organically out of a mutuality in the project of survival that is missing from the hierarchical structures of the so called developed world.  

As an undergraduate, Robinson got suspended from the University of California at Berkeley for his participation in student protests there.  On getting his Ph.D. at Stanford he went on to teach African American studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara  and to head the department of Black Studies there as well as the Department of Political Science.  He ultimately founded and directed the Center for Black Studies Research from which he retired in 2010, though he continued to teach Emeritus until shortly before his death in 2016.  After publishing the Terms of Order he went on to write his chef d'oeuvre Black Marxism in which he was the first to describe what he called Racial Capitalism, emphasizing the mutually bound origins of Capitalism and Racism (which he recognized manifested in Europe as exploitation toward European minority populations in parallel with the customary American exploitation of indigenous, African and Asian workers as well as the waves of non-WASP immigrant huddled masses yearning to breathe free).  

The best part of the reading experience for me was in the last chapter, as Robinson is wrapping up his discussion of western political theory by talking about the unintentional value he found in reading about quantum theory – he indicated that although the theorists likely didn’t intend it, he found value in describing ideal order as being organic from the interdependence of all matter on all other matter—the notion that relativity implies the relatedness of everything to everything else.  This resembles the political theories of Carlo Rovelli, the Italian quantum theorist who wrote Helgoland which I read last summer.  It was kind of a beautiful resonance.  (I seriously doubt Carlo Rovelli has read The Terms of Order, but Cedric Robinson definitely read the same quantum theorists that Carlo Rovelli did.) 

Having discovered The Terms of Order only recently (it was mentioned in Palo Alto), I think it’s a good thing to be aware of this rather amazing book. 

Supraliminal Seduction

Is it just me or are you too getting YouTube ads for say Carpet Cleaners that are-- how shall we say? --hard core pornographic in nature?  They aren’t video ads, they show up at the top of the recommendations whilst a video is playing and just sit there kind of like print ads, but are linked to (we presume) the carpet cleaning business.  The graphic of the ad is generally a poorly veiled image of a lady ingesting a thick cylindrical member—tinted unnaturally or otherwise obscured only enough for some vague plausible deniability but not enough that you’d be ok with it showing up in say a sharing of your screen in a zoom meeting or a visit from a child.

 When I was in junior high school in the seventies, a bestseller among my classmates was a paperback ostensibly written for adults called Subliminal Seduction.  The author was Wilson Bryan Key, a writer and associate of Marshall McLuhan specializing in mass media and communications who in this title stumbled upon a thesis that captured the pubescent imagination and gave its author his career.  The premise was that just below the threshold of consciousness, advertisements were rife with barely detectable erotic suggestions that were doing the heavy lifting on persuading the consumer to have to have the product.  Many copies of the book were worn out by being passed between the hands of middle schoolers taking turns leafing through the generous supply of illustrations to stare at the configuration of ice cubes in a whiskey glass or the haze of smoke from a cigarette or the reflection of studio lights on the paint job of a new car to try to spot the images of naked bodies supposedly floating barely below the level of detection.  

The jury is still out on whether something extra nefarious was actually going on with those images (above and beyond the nefariousness of the normal activity of the advertising business) or whether the eagerness to see them was merely an epiphenomenon of the hyperactive pareidolia of pubescent middle schoolers.  The "science" on which Key based much of his thesis has been found by other researchers to be flawed.  Nevertheless, the sleazy nature of advertising invited the hopeful scrutiny of the prurient, and the advertising business has never minded the heightened attention of the public.

Sex has always sold, but in the sixties of my youth, advertising was largely known for its bland caution.  Over the years, however, the temptation for an advertiser to hide a powerful suggestion below the radar of the viewer has been obviated by relaxed standards that appear to have kindled an arms race of open lewdness and scatology, from Big Ass Fans to country western songs about diarrhea to bears who "enjoy the go."  Entrepreneurs frankly discuss the loci of every odor and secretion of the body and invite viewers to elide the aptness of a blue pun with the body part or intimate act it's meant to conjure.  Outright pornography is a frontier I hadn't expected advertisers to cross in my lifetime, but these are unprecedented times.

After seeing 3 variations of these ads, I did report it to the YouTube authorities.  I mean how far do I extend my tolerance for such things?  If I were to post a video with that image as my thumbnail I’d probably be banned.  It’s ok if some random “business” does it?   I don’t know if I succeeded in nipping a bad YouTube trend in the bud but since reporting it I can’t seem to conjure up an example to show you but if I come across one, I’ll share it if I think of it.  Unless you too have already seen enough.

Olive Tree

A new piece from the Lebanese-French artist Bachar Mar-Khalifé, set to a backdrop of slices of West Bank life without the ugliness of Western colonialists marring up the scenery, courtesy of historic footage from UNRWA.  

 

Child Sacrifice

JD Vance answering a question from a self-identified Pro-Life member of the audience at a Turning Points USA event at the University of Mississippi in October:

Somebody asked me earlier about my Christian values, and one of the points I made is that when the settlers came to the New World they found very widespread child sacrifice.  I imagine there are some people who don't agree with my view on the pro life issue let me just make an observation.  If you go to historical archeological sites where there were brothels and the two oldest businesses in the world are gambling and prostitution so there were brothels even in very ancient civilizations.  If you go back to ancient brothels and you dig up the bones of the women who were working in these places you will very often find a lot of children who were buried with them. And the answer is that whenever a society decides to discard innocent babies, they also don't treat their women very well.  And whenever a society mistreats its women it is very often its the babies who come right after that.  There is a reason why Christian civilization ended the practice of child sacrifice all over the world and it's one of the great accomplishments of Christian civilization.

If your first thought about what this has to do with White  House policy is, "Wait, whuuut..??!"  you're not wrong.  Strangely this was the second time in the evening that Vance raised the topic of child sacrifice in the New World leading me to believe he picked up something viral on the topic from the internet.  It's hard to know where to begin with it.  Certainly some instances of human sacrifice in the Americas, particularly Central and South America (as in many other parts of the planet including Europe and the Holy Land) have been documented by historians and archaeologists.  What put an end to them was not so much the insistence of the Christian European invaders who had come not to spread the good news of Christ (the Human Sacrifice to end all human sacrifices) but primarily to take the land of the indigenous people here, but rather the violent termination of those indigenous civilizations by the Europeans.  It had next to nothing to do with the European conquest of what came to be the United States.  In essence, child sacrifice is a post hoc rationalization for genocide.  What's more, give one moment of thought to it, and it's not at all hard to come up with a myriad ways that Christian civilization continues to sacrifice children.  Let's start with sending 18 year olds to die in foreign wars of choice.  How about the conservatively thousands of children killed by US bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, to say nothing of the potentially millions starved by US policies such as sanctions and Trump's own cessation of USAID's promised and earmarked shipments of grains to the third world.  Charlie Kirk, late Christian extraordinaire and the honoree of Vance's appearance famously said the victims of gun violence were perhaps a decent exchange for the freedom of their murderers to purchase weaponry.

This is not even to mention the tens of thousands of Palestinian children killed or injured since October 7 2023 by US funded Israeli bombs, artillery and gunfire (and now starvation).  That was the unspoken subject of remarks-- instructive in their otherwise meticulous articulation-- given by former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz speaking in a plenary to the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of America in Washington recently:

Today, we have social media which is a global medium.  Its algorithms are shaped by billions of people worldwide who don't really love Jews and so while in the 1990's you know a young person probably wasn't going to find Al-Jazeera or someone like Nick Fuentes, today those media outlets find them.  They find them on their phones.  It's also this increasingly post-literate media-- less and less text; more and more videos.  So you have TikTok just smashing our young people's brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza and this is why so many of us can't have a sane conversation with younger Jews because anything we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments and they are just seeing in their minds carnage and I sound obscene. 

But it isn't just foreign non-Zionist video journalism that's the problem, but ironically  the "smart bet" that Jewish cultural leaders made on "Holocaust education to serve as anti-Semitism education" which "may be confusing some of our young people about anti-Semitism":

,.. because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews and they think, "Oh, anti-Semitism is like anti-black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless black people."  So when on TikTok all day long they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it's not surprising that they think, ''Oh, I know!  The lesson of the Holocaust is that you fight Israel.  You fight the big, powerful people hurting the weak people."  

The problem: 

That's not how the Holocaust happened.  We all know that.  We all know that it happened because the Germans insisted that the Jews-- 1% of the population-- were responsible for all their problems just like people insist that Israel-- the size of New Jersey-- is responsible for all the world's problems today.  But that's not really what you take away from Holocaust education.  You take away the images of Power - Powerless. And you also don't really learn about Islamist anti-Semitism and Soviet Anti-Zionism which is so much of what i'm seeing especially on campus with young people today.  

The origin of the problem according to Hurwitz  (besides apparently inadequate training in discerning who are the right kind of Nazis) is the vestiges of a 250 year old strategy of assimilation by relegating Jewishness to a "protestant style religion" to enable Jews to adopt the identity of the countries they found themselves in with the rise of Nationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  The once smart strategy has outlived its usefulness.

The problem is, we're not just a religion, right?  ... We are a nation, a civilization, a tribe, peoplehood, but most of all we're a family and so if you are a young person raised in America that thinks Judaism is a protestant style religion, then the 7 million Jews in Israel are merely your co-religionists so like if my co-religionists, I look at them and if they're not practicing my religion of social justice and certain prophetic values then what do I have to do with them? 

That's a category error.  The 7 million people in Israel they are not my co-religionists.  They are my siblings. But I think if you think of them as merely your co-religionists it's very easy to slide into Anti-Zionism. You don't necessarily have that connection to them.  And you know I have to say, I think, to conclude it's becoming increasingly clear that the kind of contentless bagel and lox, Jewish mother joke identity that many American Jews have, it just doesn't cut it anymore.You know when your Jewish identity is a big empty void with a few ethnic jokes rattling around in it, it will be filled by what is around you.  And if what is around you is anti-Semitism you will be helpless to fight back.  

You will not be able to take advantage of the billions in financial and military aid bestowed on Israel by the government you pay taxes to.

Hurwitz concludes:

If someone tells you that the Jewish G-d is violent and vengeful and Judaism is a legalistic unloving religion and you know nothing about Jewish tradition then what will you say? Tikkun olam?  You know it's not a great answer.  If they say Israel is a genocidal racist state and you know nothing about Jewish history or Israel but are like 'I like Seinfeld?'  it doesn't work.  You know we need to know our Jewish story in a way that when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s I didn't really;  I could get away with that identity.  Young people who have that empty Jewish identity today, it is being filled by anti-Semitism and we need to give them the content to protect them.

I am not a Jew, but I am a 66 year old American (22 years older than Sarah Hurwitz) and I would call my position on Israel until 2 years ago Soft Zionism.   My views were formed not from a place of informed consideration, but by osmosis of the prevailing pro-Israel atmosphere of post-Holocaust America.*  Essentially I believed that Israel represented a legitimate reparation for the evils of the Hitler's Germany.  Never again forever.  Being essentially a softie and a natural sympathizer with the underdog, I was not a fan of what Israel had become under 16 years of on and off Benjamin Netanyahu leadership, but all of my presuppositions about Israel's right to existence and to a kind of legitimate special pleading regardless of its apartheid abuse of the Palestianians whose homeland Europe bestowed to Zionist Jews were called into question by Israel's egregious asymmetrical response to the October 7 attack by Hamas fighters who had breached Israel's Iron Dome.  I felt then and feel now that I was late to a proper understanding of Israel as the last imposition of Western European colonialism on the non-European world.  Anti-Zionism is not Anti-Semitism.  I stand with my Jewish brothers and sisters who reject the claim of European Israeli supremacist Zionists on their Jewishness, especially as a means of implicating them in Israel's elective extermination of the Palestinian population-- not least of them, its women and children--  it is aiming to replace.

Thank you, Sarah Hurwitz for your eloquent, and JD Vance for your clumsy self-exposures. 

~~~~~

* Which Hurwitz's ideological sibling and recently appointed head of CBS News Bari Weiss has announced she is determined for CBS News to revive.

Uncanny Valley*

I have read fewer books this year but more pages.  Even so a higher proportion of my read this year has been consumed with AI and its place of origin Silicon Valley.

The first of these, Karen Hao's Empire of AI, is an astonishingly well reported chronicle of contemporary AI's rise in recent years, its origins as the non-profit enterprises of self-appointed guardians of humanity, Sam Altman and Elon Musk prominently among them who worried about what AI left to other less prescient and prudent hands could spell for humanity's future.   Could technology that potentially fashioned a superior competition to the human species be trusted in the hands of just anyone?  But as the original vision of AI as literal intelligence programmed by humans receded into the same space occupied by jet packs and space colonies, while the stakes for arriving first to the market increased, the space race for "compute", brute computation of massive amounts of data in the processing of simulation of thought  heated up, and schisms erupted in Silicon Valley and miraculously every altruistic non-profit morphed into for profit companies in search of dominance of the field.   Hao's meticulous reporting also includes the impact that AI's sudden explosion in "compute" has had on the environment, particularly in already ravaged territories of the most vulnerable populations around the world, and especially in the global south.  The manner in which a handful of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have imposed themselves on the resources of indigenous peoples inspired Hao to liken AI's rise to Empire, reminding us that the greatest threat to humanity is not vaporware but certain elements of humanity itself.   

Adam Becker's More Everything Forever deals with the predilections and sci-fi fantasies of Tech billionaires that Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres have summarized with the acronym TESCREAL (Transhumanism (the merging of the death of humanity with the rise of AI), Extropianism (a fancier name for Techno-Optimism or the belief that technology will solve all problems), Singularitarianism (belief in the inevitability of the Singularity), Cosmism (the ambition to spread human intelligence across the universe), Rationalism (Bayes Theorem supremacists),  Effective Altruism (belief that maximizing one's capacity to give charitably by maximizing one's own wealth is better for collective happiness than acting charitably or being subject to taxation for social programs) and Long-Termism (belief that one should behave now in ways that improve the conditions of the cosmically spread progeny that is yet to come even if it is at the expense of those now living).  Becker's book explains each proclivity indentifying the adherents and proponents and deftly debunking them along the way.

I knew Malcolm Harris was from Palo Alto and that his book of that name was a leftist critique of his hometown, but I wasn’t aware that it was basically making a case that Palo Alto was a (if not the) major hotbed for the worst ideas, tools and exponents of capitalism—largely through the auspices of Leland Stanford’s university and expecially as directed by one of its original class’s alumni, Herbert Hoover who lived long, long after his response to the Great Depression got him booted out of office after one term yet who remained as influential on the cadre of Stanford-affiliated capitalists as he ever was as President.  It was born out of the genocide of the Alta people who were unlucky enough to be at the terminus of the intercontinental railroad when the barons arrived.  It was the place where the most land  raping technology of the gold rush was devised and served as the prototype of exploitation of immigrants for the various projects of capital, especially in ways that assured the thievery of those immigrant’s rights as citizens and neighbors.  And when outcries against immigrant hordes were raised at various times by the temporary white majority, it invented outsourcing as a means of exploiting foreign non-whites on their own lands reducing the cost (and the bargaining power) of labor in the process.  It invented tools of war but more especially proponents of war (including those who urged the use of atomic weaponry and of anti-communist adventurism in Indochina under the pretext of the domino theory.  It was also the willful bastardizer of Binet’s theories of intelligence in devising and conquering the world with the Stanford Binet intelligences tests (literally devised to separate the cannon fodder from the officers in World War I and then adapted to promote pre-believed racist eugenicist policies and to mold the American public education system into a factory for the production of workers.  And it used all these historic means of exploitation and dominance to invent the silicon chip and the personal computer and the high tech bubble, and disruption and financialization and uberfication and surveillance capitalism and now AI.  

Harris’s book weaves the tale very adeptly, revisiting the threads that have been interwoven in the town's history decade after decade.   And in his conclusion he talks about the Muwekma Ohlone tribe that have been in Palo Alto from the beginning, and that survived the genocide, only to become unrecognized by the Federal Government due to anthropology out of Stanford.  According to the US, the tribe is extinct but there has been a continuous presence of activists, working to get recognition and reparation in the sense of return of their lands to their original state.  So Malcolm Harris in his final chapter raises the possibility of ceding Stanford’s land back to the Ohlone people.  And on first reading about it, my brain automatically goes, “Oh yeah, sure!   That could happen!”  But Harris makes a passionate case for the symbolism as well the justice of the act, the start of a healing of the planet by putting an end to the locus of so much of the origin of capitalism’s interminable soulless destruction in the sole pursuit of profit and you can’t help but be struck by the simplicity of giving Stanford back to a people who will tend it back to nature.  It’s the kind of idea that is unlikely to happen on the face of it, but just the notion of it increases the presence of beauty and justice in the world.

~~~~~

* I'm reminded that this year I have also read Anna Wiener's excellent Silicon Valley memoir, Uncanny Valley.

Did it happen?

 

Does it feel real yet?  I was watching his victory speech way after the fact last night and feeling both the kind of horror you sometimes feel in nightmares when you know something dreamy and unusual and good is an illusion that’s going to be snatched away from you by a demon (granted I was pretty close to stage 1 sleep while I was listening), but I was also involuntarily beaming at everything he said.  It got me to thinking.  I think Zohran Mamdani’s victory could well be the very best thing that’s ever happened on the political stage in my lifetime.  They owned the airwaves.  We owned the streets and the streets won.  I shouldn’t hedge or hesitate at all.  I can’t think of anything comparable.  Aside from some Bernie primaries, it's the only victory for any office in any election anywhere in my lifetime for which my gratitude at the outcome is not qualified.  He’s incredibly talented, but he also had phenomenal help from his volunteers.  Thank you for your service.  

I am also thinking that as personable and genuine and likeable as he is, he is something very special.  Not to idolize—it’s admiration that I feel for the qualities that brought him to victory but also I feel like I am witnessing a rare piece of seminal history in the making.  This is what I wish history was more like and what I hope for history for the future.

Judging from the clobbered over the head look that dem leadership and some of our most prominent dem leaning media personalities exhibited in the post mortem to the victory, it doesn't seem that everybody in our soulless clueless age is ready for a new one, but I hope the fascists are quaking.  I hope their days are numbered.

Waltz About Death

 Angela Autumn and Lockeland Strings prove that we are still making beauty.

I don't care what you think about Graham Platner

But these two would like to thank you.

I already liked Graham Platner, oyster farmer, harbormaster, democratic candidate for Senate from Maine who is aiming to defeat the evergreen Susan Collins-- seeking her record breaking sixth term next year as the reasonable republican who only votes against her party's oppressive public policy impositions when they are assured to win-- when details suddenly surfaced of a raucous internet past peppered with what Elie Mystal has characterized as "bigoted" language, and of a skull and bones tattoo that he and his drunk buddies on leave in Croatia thought looked cool that turns out to have a Nazi origin (he has replaced it).  With a voice that immediately reminds you against your will of John Fetterman's sonorousness and a deep, long Military past that involved stints in every American operation from Iraq to Afghanistan, followed by time as a diplomat's bodyguard as an employee of a company formerly known by its deservedly infamous name of Blackwater, there were hurdles that he had to get past to win my enthusiastic support, but he cleared them with his fresh, unapologetic expounding of policy positions revealing a favoring of government that serves the people that resonates with my own aspirations for government, and that earned him an endorsement from Bernie Sanders* (who stands by him) and a joint appearance with the Vermont Senator at an anti-oligarchy and endorsement rally in Portland attended by a crowd filling the Civic Center on a summer afternoon, massive for political events any time of the year even by Maine standards.

Much of the online left however has lost its mind.  The generally helpful Humanist Report has demonstrated a need for a vacation in professing a done-ness with Platner on account of the scandals. Elie Mystal usually excellent on the law at the Nation has a very bad take on the controversy.  The point of that Platner-defending Pod save America tweet that Mystal critiques is not that Woke is bad.   The point is that very few people, and certainly people ambitious enough to seek public office have lived perfectly woke lives.  Mystal links to a digest of the controversial Platner posts which is how I first set eyes on them.  I am not at all offended by Platners’s obviously over the top use of "gay" in his ancient reddit posts that he now as a mature therapized adult disavows (but I’m not gay, which is why I don’t argue with gay people about how much offense they take from people’s past overuse of the ubiquitous 90’s kid slang addiction to the word "gay" which shocked me when I first heard younger colleagues bandying it about like a beachball in the audience of a festival stage.  Platner's usage strikes me as being in this spirit.)   I truly don’t care about anything Platner wrote in the throes of PTSD as he was sorting out how he felt about how he had spent his adult life to that point.  What he says now about gay people and how he came around to regretting his language is what matters to me.

 

My take is people can decide for themselves (and they will—and the only ones who matter are the voters of Maine) how they feel about the past of a candidate who is strongly in favor of everything I’m in favor of as a candidate to replace the Republican who votes against every Republican bill as long as it’s guaranteed to win.  I happen to think they are wrong not to listen to Graham Platner now.  They are wrong to base their support on no longer in-context internet posts from the wildest west of sites.  (For that matter, though I may be blind, I don’t see anything really objectionable or Nazi or right wing about what he has said at heart. We’re tone policing here.  We’re up in arms about the over the top language of a passionate PTSD sufferer in the rough and tumble of internet shit-posting.    If you read the Wikipedia article for a good summary of what is "troublesome" in his reddit posts, you may be able to see through the fog that his posts pretty consistently show a staunch radical who is not opposed to radicals being as well armed as the other side.  I don’t see anything to apologize for that.

Oppo research is not presented as a service to everyone.   The targets of oppo research are not those who already agree with the funders of it.  They are precisely the terminally online leftists who might dutifully, reflexively, obligingly take up the oppo case for them in order to sow dissent among the ranks and weaken the opponent's base.  This is exactly what has happened in Graham Platner's case.  The left parodies itself when it demands that those who get to work to make life better for people must pass a purity test.  It's a parody of the left, and the dream of the right.  The operatives drooled over what is transpiring: the usual pile on of leftists falling over each other to be the first to cancel an easy target.  What Graham Platner should be is a challenge to the left to grow up, grow some shells and get some game for once for fuck's sake.

The whole mess has once again highlighted for me that the election of ambitious people with flaws that may color the dysfunction of their service, by voters with their own flaws that likewise are apt to contribute to the dysfunction of their choice is no way to pick those who represent us in government.  The answer for the 10,000th time is sortition: the scientifically random selection of our leaders from among ourselves -- all citizens, residents, subjects of the places we live-- for short, non-consecutive terms.  It is the only way to remove the types of partisan politics that in this day and age has come to mean battling opposition research, horrifying reveals of our candidate's mistakes and their humanity, and millions of dubiously come by dollars spent on hours of negative ads of performatively fake outrage rehashing those hard-won nibblets of scandal.   I will take sortition anyday.  But as long as we are stuck with our duopolistic system, can you imagine if one day sortition actually won and in an effort to undermine it and get back to oligarchy, billionaires (perhaps using AI) studiously dug up oppo research on every one selected randomly by sortition?   How would you do, comrade, under the censorious scrutiny of the oligarchic oppo machine?

If you want me to take your own false outrage seriously, try to come up with a better candidate than Graham Platner first-- good luck with that-- and if you succeed, let's see how long that candidate evades the oppo trap and your own acquiescence to it.

~~~~~

* There's a contingent of the left who in spite of everything Bernie has done in the Senate to try to end the funding of Israel's assault on Gaza (to say nothing of what he's done for left causes throughout his still very vital career) think he took too long to call what Israel is doing in Gaza genocide.  Good for you you fucking purists.  What has your purity actually accomplished for Gaza?

What it is

No comment

 

Losing Time

I recently got into my head a notion I couldn't shake to read 107 Days, Kamala Harris's new book about the 2024 election.  Nearing completion of a book with nothing else in particular lined up I found myself scanning the list of current titles in the Apple Book store, and Harris's book appealed to me as a quick settlement of the what's next question.  I made the purchase and was dismayed to discover I had accidentally selected the audiobook instead of the ebook.  Being frustrated in my efforts to figure out how to make an exchange (it seems to be impossible), I resigned myself to the audiobook delivery method.  It paid off: at double speed, I was able to finish the unabridged book, read by Harris herself in about 4 and half hours.   That was really about all the investment I had hoped to give it anyway.*

I can't say I didn't have an agenda in even considering Harris's book.  I have been maintaining for months that the impulse felt by so many single-issue leftists to punish Kamala Harris as a proxy for Joe Biden, particularly over Biden's Gaza policy by voting third party (or abstaining altogether) without regard to what a Trump victory would mean instead was a tragically misguided mistake.   The "cease fire" just negotiated comes when Gaza has been flattened after months of  intensified bombing by Israel after unilaterally breaking a January cease-fire in March.  Israel continues to starve those who remain.  Trump did not get the Nobel Peace prize this year-- another few years of degradation and it should be his-- but it's all he wants out of it -- he couldn't give a shit was happens to Palestinians.  And if he doesn't wind up profiting from Israel's development of Gaza's beachfront real estate (as he has certainly indicated are his designs) it will only be because we have been transported to another dimension.  Would a Kamala Harris administration have been any different?

I don't make a habit of reading political memoirs, but it strikes me as a given that politicians who want to continue their careers do not serve themselves by speaking unvarnished truth in their public utterances.  If I were a politician, I would certainly have to hide my atheism and reflexive eye rolling at displays of patriotism and expressions of American exceptionalism.  Not only do I think we should expect politicians to be somewhat hypocritical and duplicitous in their public lives, but I almost think we should want them to be at least in certain relatively benign respects.  If Kamala Harris had said in her book that Joe Biden was the albatross around her neck that prevented her from soaring to the presidency it would have been truthful but might have had a ring of unseemliness coming from her.  For this reason, I was not expecting Kamala Harris to come out and say, "As President, I would have forced Israel to stop bombing Gaza and done what I could to see Netanyahu and Israel punished for war crimes." and she does not, but I did expect to see some coded signals of differences between herself and both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and I was not disappointed.  She speaks about generational differences between herself and the reflexively pro-Israel Biden, as well as the importance of International consensus and her preference that Israel and the US not be opposed to the rest of the world in wanting to proceed with the destruction of Hamas regardless of the cost to Gaza and its innocent 2 million inhabitants.

In undertaking Harris's book, I was partially interested in seeing if I could get to the bottom of the question “Would Kamala Harris have been a continuation of Joe Biden?  Did Kamala Harris deserve to be punished for Joe Biden’s administration?”  While she doesn’t come out and say, “Are you fuckin’ kiddin’ me?  Of course I would have wiped the floor with Joe Biden’s first term, ” she does codedly indicate that Joe Biden’s Israel steadfastness prevented him from seeing Palestinians as people whom Israel was unjustly immiserating.  We learned last spring that Biden's sense of timing with the demands for loyalty that he placed on his hand-picked replacement was impeccable as on the eve of her debate with Trump three months after Biden's own pratfall of a performance hastened his exit from the campaign when he urged her to allow "No daylight, Kid" between herself and him in public assessments of his administration and promises of how hers might depart from it.  It's also clear that in 4 years of being the racist and sexist Biden's ethnic and feminist beard as his DEI Vice President, she did not get a lot of support and loyalty from the Bidens before or after she took over the ticket, and attributes the deficit in public recognition she was handicapped with at the start of her curtailed campaign to her purposeful invisibility as Biden's second in command.  Notably, she regrets not having had the courage to talk the poorly aging Biden out of seeking a second term (she thought it would be perceived as being self-serving at the time but in retrospect she thinks it would have been the right thing to do for the country.)  Nevertheless, with the microphone hers, she openly mocks some of Joe’s senile foolishness around the election such as his ideological discomfort in pushing the wedge issue of reproductive choice in contrast with Trump's role in gutting it, as well as incidents of tomfoolery on the campaign trail such as actually putting on a MAGA hat that someone handed to him at an event they both appeared at following his dropping out of the race providing helpful fodder for mockery from alt-right media.

My big takeaway is that she called the book 107 Days --not to echo 10/7 as some dummies have suggested-- but rather to emphasize that the curtailed campaign was the obstacle she could not overcome, that it forced her to make decisions and edits and snubs that she would not have taken if she’d had the whole 2 years and left her at the mercy of "the conversation" that was already underway, such as her failure to negotiate an opportunity to speak to Joe Rogan's audience of disaffected young men-- Rogan had congealed as a Trump endorser before she was able to persuade him to have her as a guest.  (Of course she probably would not have been the candidate if there had been an actually open Democratic primary as there should have been.)  

One of the highlights of the book is when campaign adviser David Plouffe tells her too late in the game for her to re-adjust her strategy the thing she needed to hear from a strategist on her side much sooner: “People don't like Joe Biden”.  But the campaign was already lost by then and it was too late to pivot from its focus on peeling wishy washy Republicans from Trump’s side to add to what she assumed was Biden’s solid support.  More malpractice.   Low point of the book: she talks about her appearance on the View, which she says was marred by an answer to a Whoopi question to the effect of She would have done nothing differently from Joe Biden if she had been president.  She was not prepared for the question she said and she gave a perfunctory answer.  But that’s not the low point.  The low point is that she was prepared to say that she would have had a Republican in her cabinet.  (In keeping with what she thought her strategy was supposed to be.)   Because she blew Whoopi’s question, she actually made a point of slipping her prepared Republican in the cabinet remark into a reply to someone else’s question.  She apparently did not ever see that if “People hate Joe Biden” it’s not because he didn’t coddle enough Republican genitals.  

I’ve probably left important stuff out but the thumbnail is, as an adult who has seen a lot of elections and politicians and as an American in October 2025 who can tell the difference between a fascist creep and a smart enough if rather typical post-Obama democrat, I feel satisfied that I was not deluded that regardless of what Joe Biden was forcing her to say at the time, she would have been a break from the stench of the America of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden.  Not a savior of anything but America from more of the same old old man stink.  

~~~~~

* The downside is that when I appear to be quoting the book I am actually paraphrasing it and paraphrasing it from memory at that, and from memory pieced together from whatever snippets of attention my ADHD brain was devoting to it at the time.

What Times Are These?

US 2025: A faceless force the people did not call fires on the people

Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.  -  G. Michael Hopf, from his 2011 novel, The End

I am grieving for my stupid-ass country.  It has fallen into the hands of thick, soulless clods.  Greedy, tasteless twits.  Nasty-spirited fucks.  It happened by accident, because its asinine political system-- designed by a self-appointed committee of slave-owning aristocrats a quarter of a millenium ago-- permitted it.  The people perhaps mean well, if you can mean well by putting your trust in a cadre of over privileged ungrateful louts who believe their thievery of the commons is their birthright-- or worse yet their reward for an imagined exceptionalism-- who promised to restore a nation diseased by the most craven capitalism and in genuine pain to a supposed former greatness by removing a completely conjured cancer called Immigrant.

The epigraph of this post has a pleasing ring of truth to it.  Could it explain how we got here?  But try to follow it back.  Are we in hard times?  Did weak people make them?  Who are those weak people-- is it Biden and Kamala Harris or Trump or all of them?  If Trump is not weak, is he strong?  Is he making good times?  When were the good times that made the people weak?  Who were the strong people who made those times good?  Good for whom?

Truthfully, the course of history in my lifetime brings the lie to that pleasing theory of history.  On the contrary, even the greatest times of my life-- the far distant past-- were tainted by their stinginess to the least of us.  What made them great was not their greater ignorance as MAGA would have you believe and is urging us all to get back to, but rather the greater economic equality in this country between those at the top and those at the bottom.  Social engineering was in the process of enshrining the social equality that science-- the product of flawed humans that was nevertheless still recognized as a process useful for getting at truth (and sometimes used that way)-- was reluctantly coming around to seeing as every human's birthright.  Strong people were indeed required to overcome the inertia of history.  But equally strong people, mostly men whose strength derived from their place at the top of the economic ladder soon came to defeat the heroes of Civil Rights and Liberation Movements in order to impose wonderful times for themselves and increasing misery for the rest of us.  My life has been a trajectory from hope to disappointment to despair as I have witnessed the arc of history wrested from the justice bringers by the thieves of the commons for 50 of my 60 plus years.  Those thieves have won.

"The Conversation" that we overhear on our TV screens and read about in what's left of our news outlets tends to normalize the horrific loss that happens every day.  Political loss, economic loss, loss of freedom, loss of culture, loss of autonomy, loss of the biosphere.  The Conversation would have you believe that on the whole things are getting better; that our vision is clouded by the myopia of our present circumstances.  Just hold on, the Conversation says, until 2028.

"The Conversation" is stupid.  Don't engage in it.  It is designed to distract.  Start your own conversation.  Start the ones "The Conversation" is avoiding.

US 2025: Who ordered this?  What was the order?

Hard Knocks

Real and TV Amanda Knox - Amanda Knox (l) and Grace Van Patten (r)

I am very happy that Jimmy Kimmel's suspension has been suspended by ABC because it means that there is no longer any need to boycott Hulu at the moment.  Hulu, apparently owned by Disney is one of my streaming indulgences, and apparently enough people made good on their impulse to cancel all Disney related subscriptions, including Hulu, in protest that they succeeded in reversing Disney owned ABC network's caving to the FCC's extortion campaign to use the excuse of a Charlie Kirk adjacent joke that Kimmel told (which was actually at Trump's expense) to force the show off the air.   ("Charlie Who?" I can hear future readers ask.   Trust me, you don't want to know.)  I barely had time to betray the cause before the boycott was over.  I can go months without even thinking of watching Hulu, but lately I'm invested in the mini-series The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox which has two more episodes to go.  

Anyone who has been around since 2007 should be able to remember the real Amanda Knox-- Foxy Knoxy as she was known by the European press at the time-- a 20-year old American college student taking a year abroad in Perugia Italy who was accused, tried and convicted of killing her British roommate Meredith Kercher in some weird sex game with her brand new Italian boyfriend of just over a week, Raffaele Sollecito, on the evening of All Souls Day of that year.  Under police interrogation before her arrest, Knox had voluntarily wrongfully implicated a third party, her boss Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese immigrant who owned the bar at which Knox served drinks for extra money.  Lumumba was ultimately acquitted for lack of evidence-- he was after all at his bar when the murder happened.   Knox and Sollecito after a lengthy highly publicized trial were convicted on December 20, 2009 after spending 2 years in prison and sentenced to 26 and 25 years respectively.  In the meantime, police work had uncovered the participation of yet another party to the murder,  Rudy Guede, a troubled Côte D'Ivorian by birth brought to Perugia at the age of 5 by his polygamous ne'er-do-well father who ultimately left him there, and ever since in and out of trouble, raised by a succession of unofficial foster parents.  The wealthy couple that finally adopted him at age 17 were so immediately overwhelmed by his behavior that they had the adoption nullified.  According to the story presented by the prosecution, Knox and Sollecito had procured Meredith for sex with Guede-- a sometime guest of the group of male jocks who lived in the apartment below Amanda and Meredith's-- and then  killed her with Knox delivering the fatal blow which the three attempted to cover up by staging false evidence of a robbery.

As the dramatization demonstrates, Amanda Knox had been tried in the court of public opinion before her verdict was reached, painted in the press in Italy and in Kercher's Britain as an ice cold American beauty, a serial sexual adventurer who betrayed callous feelings toward her roommate's death, preoccupied as she was with brazenly engaging in nookie with her new boyfriend and partner in crime while the investigation was underway.  The narrative of the murder was provided to the public from the interrogation of Knox herself without a lawyer present (Italian law requires a lawyer only for the already accused.  Knox's accusal came out of her testimony.  Once accused, Knox was advised by her interrogators that requesting a lawyer would only be seen as admission of her guilt.). In fact, the police conducting the interrogation had already formed a theory about Knox cultivated by the prosecutor of the case Giuliano Mignini from suspicions of the lead investigators Monica Napoleoni and Marco Chiacchiera in spite of a stubborn lack of corroborating evidence.  

From the beginning, Knox had maintained that the night of Kercher's murder, she and Sollecito spent the evening at his place smoking pot and watching Amelie since her boss Lumumba had given her the night off.  However during lengthy interrogation, Knox was worn down by insistence that she give her testimony in the Italian that she was barely fluent in.  The police had decided that the text Knox had written to her boss on learning of her suddenly free night-- "See you later"-- was not some benign American pleasantry, but rather proof that Knox, Sollecito and Lumumba had planned to meet up after the bar closed, no doubt to terrorize and murder Kercher.  In a harrowing recreation of the interrogation it's evident that the police used a number of tactics familiar from miscarriages of justice on the American side of the Atlantic-- withholding permission to speak to her mother as she repeatedly requested, domination to the point of disallowing bathroom breaks, teaming up against her with several interrogators screaming at her in Italian all at once, coaching desired answers out of her, wearing her down with accusation after accusation without the opportunity to respond to each in turn, lying about the testimony that Sollecito was giving separately in a way that suggested her new boyfriend was implicating her, threatening her with serious consequences for lack of cooperation and even committing physical violence against her with slaps to her head.  Having learned from witnesses of an African man who may have been involved, the police had suggested that Lumumba was the man and planted the false accusation in her head which came out of her mouth only after hours of relentless interrogation.  In the end, both Knox and Sollecito had under duress signed confessions composed by their interrogators.

Even during the trial, irregularities and improprieties in the investigation were brought to light.  The interrogation was determined to be inadmissible, but as the details were already well discussed in the press, the damage had been done.  After two years, Knox and Sollecito were convicted.  By this time it was widely known that the African seen by witnesses was the actual murderer, Rudy Guede who had fled Perugia but was returned to stand trial separately and given 30 years for the murder and sexual assault of Kercher in 2008.  Knox and Sollecito's convictions were automatically appealed.   By the time of the second trial, momentum against the false confessions of Knox and Sollecito coerced by the police and for the story that both originally told, placing them at Sollecito's apartment when the murder was committed gained enough traction that the convictions of both were thrown out.  Knox's conviction for false accusation of Patrick Lumumba held, but she was sentenced to time already served.  After 4 years, Amanda Knox left Perugia Prison on October 3, 2011.*  On returning to America, she has made a career out of advocating for those falsely convicted, and has published books, cooperated in the production of documentaries and news programs about her case and now co-produced with fellow redeemed unjustly fallen woman Monica Lewinsky this powerful and (be forewarned!) truly harrowing fictionalized account of her story.

As is often the case, Kercher's family has apparently had a hard time letting go of the original conviction and have been critical of Amanda Knox's involvement in media that they feel capitalize on their daughter's murder.   This is commonly seen in American cases as well and happens because families searching for answers for their loved ones' deaths often work closely with the Prosecutors of those accused of responsibility for their murders. For my part it seems obvious that Italian prosecutors and police (like their American counterparts all too often) in an effort to bring swift "justice" to the victim and the victim's family -- indeed to the public which had become so invested in the verdict-- composed a pleasing narrative out of the scraps that were strewn about them.  But you only need to apply Occam's razor to conclude that the pleasing narrative was false.  The notion that a 20 year old American foreign exchange student just spreading her wings in an excitingly new language and country was actually a calculating murderess of her roommate on a lark who, when cornered by police, falsely implicated her boss-- to protect the identity of her actual accomplice?-- was the stuff of utter fantasy.  It seems inconceivable to me that, knowing the true story of her own murder, Meredith Kercher would describe her friend Amanda Knox's ordeal as justice.

The problem I am certain lies in the western system of justice that Italian and American law have in common-- particularly the notion of prosecution and defense.  In both systems, organs of the state are tasked with identifying parties to accuse of guilt, and while the burden of proof is on the state, in practical terms, the accused must raise their own defense with the assistance of lawyers procured by themselves or by the state.  In short, what is supposed to pass for justice is really a contest between the considerable forces of the state and whatever defense the accused can muster.  Only one side will win.  It is not clear to anybody that the state's victory actually amounts to justice.  Imprisonment or even capital punishment of the convicted rarely restores justice to the bereaved, and it frequently spreads injustice to the family of the convicted.  Never more spectacularly than in cases like Amanda Knox's in which trumped up charges of innocents are fabricated out of whole cloth in sacrifice to the bloodthirsty God of Punishment.  As practiced in most of the developed world verdicts are ground out compulsively as if in service to a tic of society that demands that vengeance on a designated perpetrator be the sufficient reflexive response to every incidence of a wrong.

In order for real justice to occur, the pursuit of it must be, not a competition, not a gotcha for the accused, but a shared effort between all parties.  The focus of justice should be restoration, not revenge or retribution or pwning of the accused.  The process should be more akin to science or history and not at all akin to biblical vengeance or to game shows.  Restorative justice is how injuries heal.  This is how the false pleasing narratives of police keep from ruining innocent people's lives as a settled for substitute for true justice.

~~~~~

* Three more legal steps had to be cleared in Italy in her absence following her release from prison before she was finally legally absolved for the murder: The Italian Supreme Court of Cassation (the highest court in Italy) reversed her acquittal and sent the case back to the lower court for a re-trial demanding further DNA tests to correct the errors of the original investigation.  The lower court again found Knox and Sollecito guilty, a verdict which was immediately sent for appeal back to the Supreme Court of Cassation.  In the second Supreme Court trial, Knox and Sollecito were acquitted for the murder for lack of evidence of their physical presence at the crime scene.  Nevertheless, based on the inadmissible coerced confessions of the two defendants from their first trial, the court determined (perfunctorily and incorrectly in this blog's estimation) that Knox and Sollecito had been present at the Villa when the murder occurred as witnesses.  Nevertheless, they were permanently free from the possibility of facing trial again for the murder.

Shell Game

A client of the firm I work for slipped a requirement into the guidelines it demanded for our working relationship.  Specifically, we needed to prove that we could pass the GHG (Greenhouse Gas) Protocol and ISO 14064 in order to certify our sustainable and environmentally neutral contribution to the project.  Unlike you or I in our piddly interactions with the companies and services we employ and are at the complete mercy of down here at ground level, at the highest echelons of power it's the clients who are in the driver's seat and they can and do impose any restrictions and limitations they please on the professionals who bow and scrape to serve them.  Discounts, rate freezes, prohibitions on being charged for certain costs that the firm must incur in its work are only part of what clients feel empowered to impose on the professionals they employ.  In the past few decades, facing their own battles with a lack of diversity in their executive suites among other complaints, corporations got wise to the idea of leeching off the virtue of others, forcing firms that worked for them to adhere to strict Diversity standards, inspiring even self-policing firms like mine to adopt DEI.   Now that the firm has gone as far as adding a Chief Officer of Diversity to their C-Suite, with the coming of the current administration, the wind has blown the other way, causing whispers of the wisdom of finding ways to obfuscate our DEI compliance should the business environment tilt away from it.  The same is surely possible with Greenhouse Gas Protocols but as the client asking them of us is European and the requirement was demanded only after January 20-- and the firm has its own history of environmental window dressing anyway-- the protocols will be followed.

The ISO 14064 Standards are the product of the International Organization of Standardization (always abbreviated and pronounced Iso in keeping with its global reach), a NGO  that comprises the selected representative standardization organs of 173 member nations, the successor of an international professional association of engineers commissioned in 1947 by the UN to broaden its mission to complement the UN's own under a rebranded ISO umbrella, now headquartered in Geneva.  ISO concerns itself with the development of internationally recognized standards in a variety of fields "from manufactured products and technology to food safety, transport, IT, agriculture, and healthcare" per the Wikipedia article on it.  Per the ISO website, the 14064 Standard contributes to a group of related standards called the "Sustainable Development Goals."  The current iteration of the Standard was published in 2018 and replaces the original which was introduced in 2006. The protocol is reviewed at least every 5 years to ensure its currency, and though it has passed its most recent review, a successor is already in the works.  ISO 14064 was devised as a way to give corporations and others metrics for demonstrating compliance with established greenhouse gas guidelines such as the already existing GHG Protocol.

The GHG Protocol is the product of the World Resources Institute, a Washington based research non-profit established in 1982, with now a dozen international offices and a presence in over 50 countries worldwide.  Per Wikipedia, as an institution WRI "seeks to promote a sustainable human society with a basis of human health and well-being, environmental sustainability, and economic opportunity" and partners with local and national governments, corporations and other non-profits in this mission.  Originally funded with MacArthur Foundation money, of late it has received sizeable gifts from Real Estate and Sports mogul Stephen Ross and the Bezos Earth Fund.  The current CEO, Ani Dasgupta has just published a book ,The New Global Possible: Rebuilding Optimism in the Age of Climate Crisis, that has been blurbed by former Obama Secretary of State John Kerry and Jesper Brodin of Ikea, and which Jane Goodall describes as a "compelling and hopeful reminder that change is not only within our grasp-- it is happening." (Yes, but what kind of change?)

ISO 14064 and GHG Protocol are complementary tools for corporate Greenhouse Gas accounting, and their history is intertwined.  As a 2007 notice described:

ISO, WRI, and [the World Business Council for Sustainable Development  a/k/a] WBCSD  have already collaborated on the multiple globally accepted standards for GHG accounting and reporting. The ISO 14064 standard, established in 2006, is consistent and compatible with the GHG Protocol, published by WRI and WBCSD in 2004. The organizations are encouraging corporations, governments, and others to use them as complementary tools. ISO 14064 details internationally agreed requirements on what needs to be done in GHG accounting and verification efforts, while the GHG Protocol outlines, not only what needs to be done, but also how to undertake GHG accounting and reporting. 

Is there any plausibility to thinking the GHG Protocol and ISO 14064 series of standards are just window dressing and self-congratulatory mcguffins for corporate malfeasance and not really environmentally effective standards?  If you scratch the surface of the GHG Protocol you don't have go too deep to find trouble for actual action on climate change. From the WRI website (emphasis mine):

GHG Protocol arose when WRI and WBCSD recognized the need for an international standard for corporate GHG accounting and reporting in the late 1990s. Together with large corporate partners such as BP and General Motors, in 1998 WRI published a report called, “Safe Climate, Sound Business.” It identified an action agenda to address climate change that included the need for standardized measurement of GHG emissions 

Similar initiatives were being discussed at WBCSD. In late 1997, WRI senior managers met with WBCSD officials and an agreement was reached to launch an NGO-business partnership to address standardized methods for GHG accounting. WRI and WBCSD convened a core steering group comprised of members from environmental groups (such as WWF, Pew Center on Global Climate Change, The Energy Research Institute) and industry (such as Norsk Hydro, Tokyo Electric, Shell) to guide the multi-stakeholder standard development process.

Having BP, GM, Shell, utilities and the banks that finance all of the above construct standards for GHG compliance is rather like inviting the fox to contribute to the design of the henhouse.  Of course the emphasis will be on strategies for exchanging your corporations "credits" for allowable GHG emission for another company's needs to rape the planet.   Of course the emphasis will be on anodyne entreaties to individuals to bear the burden of environmental mitigation by choosing to consume approved products.  While the change actually required by our predicament is too dear from the perspective of corporations' bottom lines, no expense can be spared in securing the stamp of approval of the Green Energy Committees whose board members come from the same corporations or from "Citizens' Climate Lobbies" founded by the ubiquitous former Reagan Secretary of State George Schulz, Republican congressmen and Ivy League climatologists.   

The interwebs abound in optimistic appraisals of where we are with respect to climate change as a result of voluntary compliance of our worst offenders to their own Protocols.  Finding the real news about how we're doing is much harder to come by.  When we leave the policing of polluters on their progress with climate change to themselves, the noise of the optimism of their self-congratulatory public relations can drown out the conversation of what really must be done to mitigate the harms we continue to inflict on the planet.

The dilution of what should be the mission of the protocol is in the title of that 1998 report. Isn't "Sound Business" what got us into this mess?*

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* Whatever benefit  to the planet there is to be gained from the harm my firm might accidentally be avoiding by adhering to the anodyne standards of  a client is almost certainly easily undone by its equally trendy fascination of late with shoehorning AI into every area of work in lockstep with every other workplace in America.

1968 All Over Again

 

Roger Ailes walked so Charlie Kirk could run.  And run he did.  Until he couldn't any more.  Felled by the meme-coated bullet of a (perhaps jealous?) assassin at 31, the big-headed corpse of Charles James Kirk of the aptly named burg of Prospect Heights, Illinois and late of Phoenix (named aspirationally for the beast re-emergent from the ashes) has been stilled.  But his memory lingers, like the smell of a bathroom where someone forgot to crack a window and left the door closed overnight, and it will surely be his legacy that another Charlie Kirk somewhere out there will take it upon himself to take up the mantle of the struggle for white Western Christian male supremacy as Charlie did from so many who went before him-- James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, William F Buckley, but also David Duke,  and Adolph Hitler.  Charlie Kirk did not just talk the talk; he walked the walk, sending perhaps 6-- or was it 8?-- buses to the January 6 rally at which Kimberly Guilfoyle whom Kirk's Turning Points Action had treated the pre-Congressional riot rally to to the tune of $60,000 summarized the quixotic goal of the day, saying "We will not allow the liberals and the Democrats to steal our dream or steal our elections."  As Ezra Klein has said Kirk did politics the "right" way (perhaps a pun?)   Glenn Beck insists that Kirk deserves to be called nothing less than a "civil rights leader" for his service to the cause of freedom for White Christian prosperous males.  I challenge anyone to look at Charlie Kirk's long list of accomplishments, and find a single burst of relief from his unrelenting commitment to an extreme and some might say consistently and , appropriately enough, unoriginal obtuse and archaic conservatism.  He was such a fierce advocate for the free speech of himself and for the freedom to not be called an asshole for it that he was paid very handsomely for his speech on a very large and widely available public platform.  How appropriate to his memory that the many ardent fans of his advocacy for free speech for himself and against cancel culture are busily engaged in destroying the lives and careers of (aka "canceling") the random Joes and Janes who have dared to expose their Charlie Kirk contempt in spontaneous tweets, TikToks and instas (aka "speech") acknowledging the ironies of Kirk's death.

Before I go any further, let me be the first to condemn this heinous cowardly act of sneaking a weapon into a Turning Points USA rally in the whitest state of the union in order to unload on Charlie Kirk a bit of the medicine he was known to dole out in statements such as “It’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment.”  In spite of that unfortunate quote which I do not doubt he would come back to say again, he did nothing to deserve murder let alone martyrdom. True, he called homosexuality an abomination worthy of death (per his interpretation of the bible) and suggested that women who have had an abortion, even in the case of rape, might be guilty of capital murder. But we came to expect nothing less than such irritating left-baiting blather from him.  What did we care what Charlie Kirk said?  Indeed, by all accounts so far, it appears that the murderer-- the sort of anti-sincere denizen of 4chan who is revulsed at waftings of earnestness on the internet-- had quibbles with Kirk's flavor of Christian Nationalism.  True or not, it seems clear that his killer grew up around right wing gun culture, was conversant in 4chan memes and acted alone.  In light of this, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, calling for a congressional investigation on "The money, influence, and power behind the radical left’s assault on America and the rule of law.”  has said:

In the wake of numerous attacks on our way of life, the destruction of the rule of law, and the murder of innocent Americans, prominent and unknown alike, we must take every step to follow the money and uncover the force behind the NGOs, donors, media, public officials, and all entities driving this coordinated attack.

Our representatives, hard at work for us as always!  I expect this kind of take to be the legacy of the assassin's attack.  Whatever was intended, whatever incontrovertible truth comes out about this, I think we can be fairly certain that in our current atmosphere, the left and others who had nothing whatsoever to do with it will get the brunt of the backlash, and we can surely expect some of it to be in kind.  Nay, Charlie's life's work (and perhaps his assassin's) was not in vain.

With the suspect in custody, the wheels of justice, such as they are in this country, have begun their grind.  May they crush this verdict.  The only question that remains: Who hurt Charlie Kirk to make him the way he was?  He would have had you believe it was the non-male, non-white student who was selected over him for admission to West Point when he applied unsuccessfully at the start of his anti-collegiate career,  until evidence to the contrary forced him to retreat from that story.  But surely it was someone.  For me, it has the hallmark of 6th grade rejection all over it.  O vile Eros-- would that thou wouldst ne'er miss thy mark!

Epic Fails and Instant Regrets

I'm having a hard time with focus.  Too much time on the computer, too much time on YouTube, too much time being tempted by the algorithm into watching hours and hours of a category of video called Epic Fails or Instant Regrets -- clip after clip of dinners being ruined, drapes going up in flames, roofs being fallen off of, merchandise sliding off shelves, structures collapsing with the builders still on them.   I find myself hypnotized by what I can't disagree are failures of epic proportions captured on video and assembled (many of them apparently by AI) into socially irredeemable entertainment.  The alternative is torturing myself with videos that bystanders have helplessly taken to document scenes of violent absconding of neighbors, co-workers, strangers by jackbooted masked thugs in out-of-state pickup trucks with makeshift generic insignia on their army/navy surplus in a cosplay of officiality.  The videographers often interject themselves into the video in an attempt to get the thugs to answer to them; failing that to shame them for destroying the fabric of the community, for abandoning their humanity, for emulating Nazis.  I wish these heartfelt interjections were more satisfying to behold.  I find myself wishing for more from the citizens standing in for me and especially from the faceless mooks facelessly destroying peoples lives and homes with an infuriating entitlement.  More shame hitting its mark, more anger making a dent in the armor, more immediate retribution and restoration of justice from the injustice unfolding before our eyes.  More pain returned to the source.

I am aware that it's happening in parts of the heart of the metropolitan area I live in.  I have yet to see evidence of it with my own eyes and I haven't even watched the local news about it, but I have overheard local anchors referring to it (passing through the room with the tv on) and I have of course seen clips of it here and there.  It’s surreal to me at this point.  Just another drip drip drip in the feeling that the world has gone to shit and more reason to worry about how / whether/ if there will ever be recovery from it.

The whole Trump/ Project 2025 agenda seems like something out of the twilight zone.  The chaos of the episode is explained in the reveal that we are no longer on earth but have been somehow transported to a Dumbass Planet where dumb is smart, smart is dumb, bad is good, good is bad, beautiful is ugly, ugly is beautiful, lies are truth and truth is a lie.  People may have voted to give booting immigrants a try not dreaming that that might mean they themselves if they are themselves immigrants.   Or that it could mean that the future of labor in America is the necessary underpaid hard work that has been opened up by the expulsion of the immigrants who have been doing it.  As though people had voted to stop the cannibalizing of immigrants only to find out that they were now on the menu.  Hey! It’s what you voted for!

I want to think of the Trump and the Trumpers and the minions who eagerly serve as Trump's death camp drones as the D Students.  And I realize that some students do poorly in school because we don’t know how to educate them or care to but these are proudly D Students who do poorly because they are spoiled rotten assholes.  Because brains are how you get empathy for other people but these D Students are consumed with feeling only for themselves.  Because of their class or their race or simply their status as white males they’ve never been punished for being poor at thinking.  Au contraire, they are daily rewarded for it because their interactions with the world are a lot like a rock’s with a small precious creature.

I like to think that if I encountered a group of ICE bros tormenting a neighbor I would find the reserves of strength to not let it happen.  It amazes me how civilly these invaders are treated in so many of the snippets of documentation that you come across on the web.  But I am getting the idea that in the moment there is not much one decent person can do in the face of a mob of violent armed authoritarian doofuses.  In the meantime, as I scour the recs put before me by the algorithm, I am holding out hope for some Epic Wins and Instant Gratification.