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!