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 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 Serbia 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 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 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

 

Lost 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, "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?*

~~~~~~

* 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.

The Quiet Part

 Truthout tells us what we already knew: Former Top Biden Spox Admits Israel Sabotaged Ceasefire Deals as US Blamed Hamas.  This comes two months after a related non-revelatory revelation from the same "spox"--  Matthew Miller--that "without a doubt" Israel committed war crimes throughout the period that at the State Department podium, Miller repeatedly asserted that it had not.  Lying is part of the job according to Miller: “When you’re at the podium, you’re not expressing your personal opinion. You’re expressing the conclusions of the United States government.”   And yet, as the articles and interviews make clear, the Biden Administration was behind the scenes fully aware of the truth.  So how were these lies the conclusions of the United States government?  The reality is that Matthew Miller, John Kirby, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and other officials and representatives of the government were tasked to lie in keeping with the US's longstanding role as enabler and abettor of Israel's genocide against the Palestinians.  And Miller, Kirby, Blinken et al rose to the task.

From the article:

Miller’s latest statements make it clear that the statements blaming Hamas were a lie. In April of 2024, for instance, Netanyahu announced that Israel would cross Biden’s supposed “red line” and invade Rafah, even as Biden was publicly calling for a ceasefire at the time.

“But in the middle of that proposal being submitted to Hamas, the prime minister publicly said that Israel was going to invade Rafah, whether there was a ceasefire or not,” Miller said. “You can imagine how much harder that made it to get a deal over the line.”

Then, he said that U.S. officials would even try to outmaneuver Israel when announcing Biden’s ceasefire outline in May — only for Netanyahu’s office to “leak” to the press that the plan was not what Israel had agreed to.

“We told the government of Israel only an hour or two before the speech because, frankly, we spent the last few months seeing the government of Israel, at times, try and sabotage an approach to get to a ceasefire, and we were determined not to let that happen here,” he said. “It is consistent with the pattern we saw for many months.”

Later in the program, Miller recalled statements from Netanyahu at a war cabinet meeting toward the beginning of the genocide, saying that he wanted to continue fighting in Gaza for decades.

Blinken told Netanyahu that Israel was “‘making it impossible to realize the dream that the state of Israel has had since its founding. You’re going to be bogged down here fighting this war for years and decades to come,’” Miller recounted. “And the prime minister said, ‘You’re right. We are going to be fighting this war for decades to come. That’s the way it’s been. That’s the way it’s going to be.’”

If it were serious about the ceasefire, the Biden Administration could have exposed Netanyahu's duplicity in order to shine a light on the intransigence of America's partner in the Middle East and shame Israel into doing the right thing.  Instead it chose to signal its commitment to not hindering Israel's goals.  Learning to what extent this is due to ideological commitments to the Zionist project and to what extent due to more venal motivations of the ruling class may perhaps need to wait for a future casual truth bomb that Miller, ex-spox, feels free to drop.

 

Victory At Sea

Because I am really struggling to find anything more to say about the horror show we find ourselves in but am not yet ready to throw in the towel on this blog writing thing, I am presenting yet another rant on the topic of the piss poor electorate that proves yet again that people can not be trusted with democracy.* The below is from yet another correspondence with a leftist who felt it important not to reward Kamala Harris with his vote on election day.  Out of the blue, he shared with me a series of Bluesky skeets on the topic of the deserved unpopularity of Biden's senile Gaza policy, which was fine and truthful.  But the Bluesky poster (skeeter?) who wrote the thread could not resist tacking on the name of Kamala Harris to every other post in a clear attempt to tar her and those still regretting her loss with the same brush.

~ ~ ~

In the long series of generally insightful posts by [poster who I will refer to mercifully as "Skeeter" rather than by his Bluesky name] on Biden and Gaza, it’s ruined for me by the very stilted insertion of Kamala Harris in every other post.  This is the kind of thing that drives me crazy.  Take her out of it.  It’s only done to make yourself (Skeeter) feel better about your complicity in Trump’s victory.  Nobody’s fooled.  Nobody fuckin knows what KH would have done as president.  You (Skeeter) are not absolved.  

Casually slipping her in to the conversation really trivializes Biden’s psychopathy in my view.  We all know why you’re doing it.  I don’t forgive you!   (Skeeter)  ^_^  You ruined your excellent points about Biden. C’mon man!

I know it makes you feel better to assert that Kamala would have continued Biden's Gaza policy unabated.  But what’s the point?  She didn’t win.  We lost—meaning we who preferred our chances with Kamala because we were determined to stop Trump.  We lost already.  Everyone else won, including the people who did not want Kamala to win simply because they were for reasons of principle not particularly focused on the difference between Kamala and Trump.  

Kamala did a very bad job with people who have an unsophisticated notion of politics.  That was her bad, that was on her.  She fucked that up irreparably.  It’s the bulk of why she lost.   She did bad with every one else too, but part of a sophisticated understanding of politics is that in an election one of two futures will win.  The choice will be stupid because everybody, even those whose understanding of politics is so sophisticated that they understand both futures are deficient, use one day to administer to their politics and it is the wrong day because it’s already too late to administer to your politics on election day.  "None of the Above" never wins.  Your vote has consequences.  You did not want Kamala Harris to win.  You got your way.  Behold the consequences.  I am unceasingly annoyed by the endless justification for not taking election day seriously, for squandering it on a performance.  

I will stop reflexively complaining about this when people stop trying to rationalize to me why they squandered their opportunity to prevent harm.  I don’t really want to see proof that Kamala promised that if elected she was going to equal Biden in Gaza.  She was told to say that.  She didn’t have to, and that’s on her.  But no one could possibly equal the demented, brain deficient psycho Joe Biden on Gaza.  She lied like a politician and also like a weak vice president (who was reportedly shut out of policy discussions for the entire administration.)  Anyway.  Not to re-litigate but those who did not vote for Kamala should frankly shut up about the election.  It’s unseemly to gloat about a victory—especially when your part in the victory was sweeping the obstacle of yourself out of the way of the guy who won.

~~~~~

* For the sake of the people, Democracy has to be left to chance.

Taking the Plunge

A political podcast I watch frequently recently had an interview with Osita Nwanevu, author of the forthcoming The Right of the People (subtitle: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding) his book on electoral reform.  The book will be well-discussed in political circles as it is one of those rare attempts to take seriously the problems we all know exist with our political system-- among them, the exclusive influence of money, polarization, politicians who do not represent the desires of those who elect them-- and do nothing about.  From what I gather the author proposes radical reform of our political as well as our economic system, and the cosmic void knows we are overdue for both.  I am always looking for the next thing to read so I have wish listed the book, but to be honest, I am skeptical that it is going to go far enough toward particularly the political changes that I am convinced are needed in order to shake up our democracy for real.  In particular, I've read the introduction and Nwanevu appears to offhandedly dismiss the classical Athenian system of sortition-- the selection by lot among all eligible citizens of a body of decision makers (a mini-public to use the terminology) for short, non-consecutive terms, much in the way we select juries for criminal cases-- as something that is clearly no longer how we think of democracy. 

Nwanevu quotes Pericles' Funeral Oration from Thucydides as the description of the vaunted strengths of the Athenian system:

Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. Our government does not copy our neighbors', but is an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while there exists equal justice to all and alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty an obstacle, but a man may benefit his country whatever the obscurity of his condition. 

Nwanevu dismisses this as "nonsense" on the basis that of course in actually existing sortition, the pool of citizens was limited to landed males.  Women, slaves, immigrants and eventually even those with less than two Athenian born parents were excluded from the process.  That there could be a fix for these shortcomings is beyond the scope of what Nwanevu appears to have in mind for his book so is never discussed.

To the contrary, I am convinced and reconvinced daily by what our electoral system has wrought that it is sortition with the proper obvious tweaks to the qualification standards to make them as inclusive and representative as scientifically possible*-- even as unfamiliar as the concept has become-- that is the only truly democratic alternative to electoral politics worth replacing our current system with if we're  going to take the trouble of replacing it.  Furthermore I would propose sortition as the most powerful means of setting a chart for the major course correction required if humanity hopes to make amends for the planetary ravages of capitalism and its most nightmarish successors.  The alternative to transitioning quickly to sortition is yielding to the uninformed, brain-dead bad science fiction fantasies of the unself-aware class of billionaires who have insinuated themselves into ownership of our political system and who are  too overconfident in and full of self-regard for their talents at representing the needs of humanity for skepticism about their goals, with the result that in their hands the planet is too choked from the way that they would have with it for the survival of life as we know it.  

In brief, the system I would propose is one developed by Terry Bouricius at Democracy Creative in which the logistics are entrusted to a number of panels each of which is peopled by random selection from a pool of volunteers each of whom would serve non-consecutive terms of varying (albeit short) lengths depending upon the office.  For instance, one panel might determine the methods for random selection and other rules and regulations of the process; another would solicit and compile proposals for legislation; another would solicit expertise and identify and evaluate the best information on the proposed legislation.  For the actual passage of legislation,  "juries" would be selected by lot from among the entire population for mandatory service.  The juries would convene to be informed of the issues to be decided upon and to debate and deliberate on whether more study is needed or to vote on the legislation.   Counterpart systems could be set up for the executive and judicial branches as well replacing and vastly improving the current corroded structure for those institutions as well.

It's a system even the left couldn't fuck up.

Some points I would highlight in making a case for sortition over electoral politics:

Sortition is exclusively about governing the people as we would govern ourselves.  The process is streamlined to 1) Identification of the problems to address;  2) Empowering a randomly selected scientifically representative mini-public of significant size to inform themselves about the same with the same expert information; 3) Informed discussion about the options and goals;   4) devising proposed solutions and taking a vote on their adoption on our behalf (or, if deemed appropriate by the selected body, in a public referendum). 

Electoral politics busies us with a convoluted, purchased process of choosing among self-selected careerists as a way of distracting us from its inability to give us the consent of the governed.  The goal of sortition is governing well; the goal of electoral politics is winning.  Winning is the wrong goal of government.

While it doesn't have to be this way, the way our society is structured now ensures that in every election there will be winners and there will be losers.  The stakes are high and the money spent on the contest is both a result of it and the primary reason that campaign financing perpetually escalates.  Our politics is no longer (if it ever was) concerned with improving outcomes for the electorate but merely with kicking the opposing team's ass.   No less than half the country is thus kept in misery for the duration of the winning teams' term.  This is no way to run a country, but it is an excellent way to run a country into the ground as we see happening around us every day.

Sortition is not about defeating half the country; not about parties or personalities or war chests.  It is strictly about government charting the course we ourselves would chart given our current predicament, the best information about what to do about it and ample opportunity to deliberate and the power to decide our future for ourselves without having decisions imposed upon us.

Understanding the resistance to revolutionary democratic change, I look forward to filling in the blanks in my understanding of what Nwanevu proposes.  May the best re-making win.

~~~~~~

* Randomness guarantees diversity at the top, in sharp contrast to the depressing sameness of our whiny self-selected elite.  No wonder those motherfuckers bitch about diversity.  The actual diversity that would result if our leaders were randomly chosen gives the lie to their artificially uniform, curated monopoly.

Death by Smugness

Since I'm basically still on vacation, guest host Francesca Fiorentini compiles a buffet of the comically self-confident suicidal spite of the Republican electorate that threatens to take us all down by virtue of being in power and garnishes it with a lean paté of eloquent whoop-ass.

What I Wouldn't Give

I am finding "I don't give a fuck" to be a little too much a part of my vocabulary these days.  (As in, I don't give a fuck that ICE is a Federal law enforcement agency.  They're fucking Nazis. ^_^)  I don't want to be stuck in a rut, so I occasionally mix things up with  "I don't give a shit."  But this is hardly an improvement.  In Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt introduced me to an Irish variation, "I don't give a fiddler's fart."  Are you noticing a pattern?  What I need is both a lot more variety and for the sake of the children, some restraint in the subject matter.  As I also happen to need to pad out my postings for the month, I'm sure you wouldn't mind if I tried out a few alternatives here, would you?  (Go ahead and ask me if I care enough to hold on for your response.)

Without further ado, how about ...

I don't give two toots.  For extra effect, I don't give two toots in a tin can.  As in I don't give two toots in a tin can, Mister.  You are not signing up for interfaith beach volleyball.

I don't give a flying Finnegan what you do in the afternoon when I'm not here as long as you clean it up before I get home.

I don't give a Pringle or an Utz what you do on Election Day as long as it isn't vote.

I don't give the hide off a road-kill sneetch what you think of my sideburns.

I don't give a crawling thingamajig who's going to win American Idol.

I don't give a Vivian Vance who popped my dongle as long as they pop it back.

I couldn't give 2 shakes of a dollar store maraca how much I could be making if I purchased tax liens.

I don't give a wit or a whistle what the square root of 59,814,756 is.

I couldn't give an interplanetary plotz that there's another dumpling left.  

I don't give a puckered penguin what you have behind your back.

I couldn't give a belch in a windstorm who's on Fallon.  I'm going to bed. 

I wouldn't give the eye off a french fry to cure my social anxiety.

I don't give a pan fried cricket what you say,  It's cold in here!

I wouldn't give a twice read copy of last week's TV Guide to find out what happened on Happy's Place last night.

I don't give a Gen Z Conservative Fashion Victim who you think I think I am.

I don't give a gibbering id! *

I don't give a thimbleful of quinoa!

I don't give a continuous nibble! 

I don't give a good beef jerky!

I don't give a steaming bowl of bibimbap!

I don't give a frizzy whisker what Elon Musk's IQ is!

I don't give the shadow of a she-goat how you get here.  Hurry!

I don't give a hamster with a herniated hamstring what Florin said behind my back!

No Buffalo Bob, I don't give a flipped flapjack what time it is.

I don't give a yak wool thong what you do with your half of the money!

(The next four are from actual phrases encountered on the internet involving the "It's giving..." meme.)

   I couldn't give major Persona vibes.

   I couldn't give Lindsey Lohan Y2k.

   I couldn't give Zimbabweans.

   I couldn't give Ohio.

Sorry Robert Reich, I don't give a vintage pledge week tote bag what happens to the husk of what’s barely left of PBS.

~~~~~

* This and the next four entries were inspired by random purple passages from Benjamin Lorr's  The Secret Life of Groceries.

Getting Tenth Up In Here

Can it be 10 years?  Apparently it can.  I had an empty blog for more than 5 years before something got into me and made me use it to share a video of a Hungarian group I had discovered in the course of wading into that language.  I practically had to cover my eyes to hit the Publish button so terrified was I of you, dear Reader.  Look at me now.  Where have the years gone?  Part of the answer lies below, not a best of but sort of a compilation of some of the moods we've shared for the past decade.   To another ten. 

2015 -  BIN JIP's Dinner With A Demon - The first and still the best.

2016 - I want to blame Trump - Prove me wrong.

2017 - Bobbing for Decimals - Synchronized Swimming Hungarian Style.

2018 - Happy?  - Pretty much sums it up.

2019 - It's a Jungle Out There - A little contemporary urban angst.

2020 - Ludic Freedom - What makes a mosquito tick? 

2021 - The Forest for the Trees - An American family

2022 - Confessions of a Philistine - And a proposal for a different word for it.

2023 - An elegant solution - Considering abolition.

2024 - A good life - Can't we have one?

Quantum Relations

When I got my first iPhone -- the iPhone 4 circa 2010-- one of the ways I devised to increase my time with it was reading iBooks.   My Motorola Razr had died just as I was being courted by a new firm at the lowest ebb of my time at the old one, and somehow I managed to snag the new job without the use of any mobile device just through the clever use of my personal voice mail which I was able to access from my work phone.   The new job was a welcome change after 20 years of slow decay into depressing nothingness at my old firm.  I had gone from sharing an interior closet with 3 others in a flavorless block downtown to my own office with a door and a window in what was formerly a TV station situated in a pleasant neighborhood on a hill overlooking the city across the street from my favorite deli.  I had gone from looking forward to nothing but retirement if I didn't die first to a brand new beginning full of hope and opportunities to engage my intelligence and creativity for gainful employment.  The iPhone was a treat to myself in keeping with the new era of possibility.

I was in the habit of carrying around books for my daily commute at the time, so being able to carry them in my pocket was a revelation and a revolution in my habits.  iBook "pages" turned much more like the pages of a book at the time adding to the delight.  It was somehow appropriate that the first books I tried on the phone were the works of Bertrand Russell whom I'd never read before, but whose very name evoked my first encounters with the giants of the Twentieth Century on the spines of books in my oldest brothers' burgeoning collection of college texts when I was undergoing puberty around the time of Richard Nixon's curtailed second term.  I picked Russell because his titles were in free editions, but it didn't hurt that he was an engaging writer with a surprising sense of humor and a style and outlook as fresh as a spring morning 100 years later.  Reading Russell was like a communion with my younger self, with the state of the world before Reagan and Thatcher got their vampiric fangs on the life of it just as I was entering adulthood, an adulthood that has been oxygen deprived ever since (along with the rest of us-- even those of us too young or too braindead from the encounter with neoliberalism to know what we were missing).

Recently, I've been re-experiencing that sense of revival with another eBook.  This one is by the Italian theoretical physicist and science writer Carlo Rovelli and it's his short 2020 book for non-physicists on the question of how to conceive of quantum dynamics, Helgoland, so named for the Danish/German archipelago in the North Sea where Werner Heisenberg on a working visit had the brainstorm that led to the development of Quantum Mechanics.   Rovelli is a notable scientist himself as the co-developer with Lee Smolin and Abhay Ashketar of the theory of loop quantum gravity.  He's also a gifted writer; and Helgoland is full of lively gossip about Heisenberg and the contemporaries and influencers who charted the way for scientists, philosophers, political figures, artists like Niels Bohr,  Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born, Paul Dirac, Alexander Bogdanov,  Carl Jung,  Pablo Picasso-- and others into the strange, often paradoxical mysteries of a reality based on quantum science apart from the safety of materialism and classical physics.

Chronicling his own experience building a foundation of understanding of quantum mechanics which he has characterized as Relational, Rovelli discusses such unexpected byways along the way as the writings of 2nd century Buddhist Abbott, Nagarjuna, author of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way), and the political dispute between Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov over whether quantum mechanics was revolutionary enough.  Bogdanov argued that Comrade Lenin's impulse to purge science of uncertainty that did not fit with a materialist understanding of history was itself counterrevolutionary if it denied how the cosmos worked.   On the contrary, the new understanding of physics, dependent as it was on acknowledging the equality of all perspectives in understanding Nature was itself supportive of the upheaval of classical structures that Lenin's revolution represented.  

In the end, Lenin's adherence to classical materialism won (and maybe contributed to the finitude of the era of actually existing socialism).  But Bogdanov is featured prominently in Rovelli’s Acknowledgements, with a photograph, right next to Heisenberg whose anecdote is the basis for the title of the book. In the course of explaining his belief that subjective reality is actually not “a problem” for a scientific understanding of consciousness, but rather an indicative example of what quantum mechanics teaches us about the fundamental importance of the relations of objects to each other in the scheme of how the cosmos works—as in crucial and wholly in keeping with quantum mechanics’ discovery of how matter comes about and behaves  (think Schrodinger’s cat and Uncertainty and Entanglement and the importance of the observation to the measurement and for that matter General Relativity—the connecting tissue being that nothing is “real” except in relation to every other thing), Rovelli tosses out a brutally to the point quote from Bogdanov:  

The individual is a bourgeois fetish.

Rovelli himself puts it this way:  

Everything we have been able to accomplish over the centuries has been achieved in a network of exchanges, collaborating.  This is why the politics of collaboration is so much more sensible and effective than the politics of competition . . . [ellipses Rovelli’s]

Reading Helgoland was for me a deep and beautiful experience.