Blackcap Blog

Published at 09:49 on 5 November 2026

I Was Wrong — Thankfully

My prediction of a disappointingly narrow victory followed by a stolen election did not come to pass. The victory was surprisingly broad, broad enough to stun the fascists and compel them to meekly acknowledge the reality of just what happened.

Oh, sure, they tried to spin it in various ways, and were sour-grapes-y about it. Because of course they did. Losing sucks. Nobody is happy to be a loser. What matters is that the basic truth that the Trump fascists did lose has been acknowledged across the political spectrum.

A steal at this stage seems unlikely. Even Trump himself has now talked, in one of his typically wandering and aimless speeches, about working with the Democrats and about his veto power. Both are things that point to plans for dealing with the coming Democratic majority in Congress, which by implication accepts the legitimacy of the election results.

The Three Rules Still Apply

The three rules I outlined last year still hold. This election does little or nothing to refute them. Many liberals thought a sea change, a repudiation of the right-wing politics that has produced so many poor results in the USA through my lifetime, had happened when Obama won in 2008, yet Obama was followed by Trump. The election represented, overall, nothing more than a temporary level of frustration.

Rule No. 1 meant the Republican Party was not going to change its generally successful pattern of experimenting with elements of fascist politics. Rule No. 2 meant the Democrats were unwilling or unable to hold the Republicans to account for their crimes of the Bush years. Rule No. 3 meant that the electorate remained, as a whole, fully capable of falling for right wing garbage politics in the future. And boy did they ever.

Per Rule No. 2, it is important to note that many in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party are full willing participants in the ongoing democratic decline, and to the extent that they have criticism of the party’s centrists, it is that the centrists are too obsessed with things like norms and standards. From an analysis published in Jacobin magazine in the wake of the elections:

This time, the Left will be making these arguments in a world in which socialists have already transformed the way even centrist Democrats talk about politics. The party’s years-long obsession with “norms” and rescuing democracy having largely faded into the background in favor of the affordability-focused and anti-billionaire rhetoric popularized by, respectively, New York’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and the socialist duo of Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour.

When it comes to the party’s establishment, you have this post-election quote from incoming House speaker (and he is incoming House speaker, per Rule No. 2, alternative scenarios are simply not plausible, sorry) Hakeem Jeffries:

The American people don’t want us to get even; they want us to get things done on their behalf.

Sure, it’s possible to draw a distinction between justice and retribution, and argue that Jeffries is not ruling out the former. And I’m sure that some Congressional committees will start some useful investigations into Trump’s corruption. But odds strongly disfavour any corrective measures sufficient to form a crucial part of any societal rejection of the thoroughgoing rot pervading the American republic. To argue otherwise, again, violates Rule No. 2 (and Rule No. 3 to boot).

Look Outside Your Country More, Americans

One of the greatest blind spots in US political discourse is the widespread, across the spectrum, ignorance of how the rest of the world sees the USA. Just like it is often easier for others to see the faults of one’s own personality, it can be easier for foreigners to see the faults of a particular country, because the latter lack the emotional attachments that can interfere with objective observation and analysis.

A good place to start right now is the Canadian centrist pundit Andrew Coyne, and his recent analysis of the results. He is not expecting any widespread healing or turning away from the rupture Mark Carney spoke of at Davos.

Looking Forward the Next Five Years

Despite wanting to address kitchen table issues, the Democrats are going to have only very limited ability (at best) to effect any changes here. Trump remains president, and thanks to recent court decisions, he is effectively a führer; his word and his will being superior to any written laws of the land. He has, and will continue to, spend money on pet projects like a new ballroom and new monuments without Congressional appropriation or approval. His veto power means pet Democratic priorities won’t get past his desk. Despite their gains, the Democrats don’t have enough votes to override vetoes, and Rule No. 1 says they will not get any significant measure of help here from any Republicans.

Ironically, focussing on democratic decline would be far easier and more productive for them. The letter of many laws have been violated, and Congress has the power to investigate these violations on its own, no cooperation needed from any other branch of government. (Cooperation is needed for prosecution and punishment, but that could wait a couple years. Getting the dirt indictment-ready would give them a head start for 2028.) This discrepancy of diffuculty can, in fact, be counted upon to produce a certain measure of investigatory work (incoming committee chairs are already getting to work on it). It’s just that any such work will end up falling far short of what arresting democratic decline would require.

What this all means is that not much is going to be accomplished in the next two years. The same sorts of problems that prompted the gains in the midterms will continue to fester. It will be much like the final two years of the George W. Bush administration in this regard. Just like then, this will keep the irritants that prompted the midterm gains relevant political issues. Expect the Democrats to take the White House in 2028.

Looking Forward Further

The new administration will, as Obama did, and as Biden did, fail to pursue accountability to the necessary degree. Things will get better, but only temporarily. The essential nature of the Republicans will remain unchanged.

The Trump Administration has been extremely lucrative for Trump, his family, and those in the rest of the bourgeoisie who are connected to it. The general lack of accountability will ensure that things remain this way. Rule No. 3 further implies that the electorate will remain suckers for the sort of rebranded fascism they were suckers for twice already. It won’t take much. Perhaps a scandal or two (all parties get fat, lazy, and arrogant after too many years in power). Perhaps an economic downturn of the sort that the business cycle makes inevitable. Perhaps (this one is quite likely due to ongoing climate change) a new surge in immigration. Perhaps, again due to ongoing climate change, economic disruptions or growing climate disasters that outpace the ability to respond to them. There are so many possibilities.

Put it all together and it makes the next Trump a political inevitability. It is only a matter of time.

The Long Decline Will Continue

It will seem at times in the next six to ten years that the malaise has passed, when in fact it is but a temporary remission in the political cancer. Absent certain changes which I have not yet seen so far, the decline will continue. It is merely that the nature of the decline differs from what many imagine: it will have ups and downs, it will proceed in fits and starts, it will have pauses. It will happen, but it will not be a smooth, linear process.

That is, unless serious and meaningful steps are taken to arrest it. But there is presently not much plausible evidence to indicate this will happen in the near future.

The rules are, to reiterate, rules of political inertia, not ironclad rules for all time. Eventually something will give, because the contradictions inherent in the system will inevitably produce enough political force to overcome the inertia. It is simply that such a force presently does not exist, and it does not appear likely to manifest in the near future.

Those of us who find the above depressing and unacceptable need to work on making it more likely for such forces to manifest.

Published at 12:50 on 29 October 2026

The call that there will be buyer’s remorse (which I have made multiple times on other platforms but which I am making the first time here) after the first winter of dark mornings is a super-easy one. Because we’ve been here before. Twice, in fact. First during World War II, next about forty years later during the energy crisis of the 1970’s. Both times, the measure didn’t last, precisely because of the dark winter mornings problem.

Now, about fifty years later, comes take three. There’s probably something significant about there being approximately two generations between each attempt: it seems like a good idea, until people actually experience the consequences. Then everyone knows how much of a dud the idea is, and the idea rightly becomes toxic until enough old people die off and enough young, naïve people reach voting age.

It hasn’t even officially begun yet (clocks would have been turned back this weekend), yet already the doubts are being expressed. Just about the easiest call ever.

Here in BC we have a brand-new Conservative government. The permanent DST measure has the outgoing New Democratic Party’s fingerprints all over it. This lowers any political resistance to a repeal (already low, because, face it, this is no politician’s pet issue) even further.

I predict a repeal come spring, if not sooner.

Published at 16:56 on 28 October 2026

Finally got a response from a human today. And it actually came via text message as I requested, not email. And it “only” took an hour or two this time. Fourth time’s the charm, I guess.

But it doesn’t matter for purposes of changing my decision not to change over to their service. Three strikes, you’re out. Particularly since some of those strikes indicated just how badly broken their systems are. The cancellation process is now underway.

All that shit from them about having to respond within an hour, or within 10 minutes, while they take hours (and sometimes many hours) each time, and the inability to usually notify me via the proper channels, is just too much. To reiterate: easily the worst customer service of any business I have ever dealt with in my 63 years on this planet. It is not even close.

Published at 08:48 on 27 October 2026

Tried to contact them yesterday around 11:00 AM local time. Got the same chatbot. Same story “we are busy now, will contact you later.” Asked to be contacted by SMS.

Never was contacted by SMS. Around 7:00 PM, entering a theatre to see a movie with a friend, I notice a newly-arrived email from Oxio. Yes, another email, even though I requested SMS. It gives me an hour to respond. As I am walking into the auditorium for a movie that starts in a few minutes. Eff that.

Apparently Oxio thinks it is fair to require me to put my life on hold so I can cater to their needs, instead of them serving me for the money I pay them. Apparently they think it is fair to require me to respond within an hour after it taking them nine hours to respond to me.

Worst. Company. Ever. At least, the worst I have ever dealt with. And I’m an old guy, so I’ve dealt with a lot of businesses over the years.

Published at 17:35 on 26 October 2026

I have Telus internet service, which is rock-solid reliable but expensive and you have to call back every few years, threaten to leave, talk to retention, and get some crazy nonstandard temporary deal (that expires in a year or two) to get service that does not cost even more than the already expensive discounted special deal. Stupid and tiring. The idea of paying around $50/month for a straight deal was real tempting, so I decide to give it a whirl.

They ship me my equipment and I track its arrival. Eventually it arrives and I get the notice that my outlets should be live. So I plug the modem in and turn it on. Nothing. No signal at all. It goes through a power-up light show and eventually settles into a flashing green “no signal” state.

So I try the other cable outlet in the house. Same story. I have several 75-ohm coax patch cables, so I try a different cable. Same story. Different cable, other outlet, still dead. At that point I try to talk to support.

Except Oxio doesn’t have customer support people, so far as I have been able to tell. Just an AI chatbot. One of the worst chatbots I have seen, in fact. Slow, buggy, unreliable, keeps asking for the same information over and over.

Eventually it asks me if I’ve tried pushing the recessed reset button on my modem. I haven’t, so I try that. Fifteen minutes later I come back to realize that my chat session has expired due to being inactive for more than ten minutes. Have I mentioned yet that it takes 10 minutes minimum to reset a modem, because the instructions Oxio gives says to wait 10 minutes after pushing the reset button?

So I start a new chat session, this time via SMS. Easily the worst SMS chatbot I have ever used. About half of my SMS messages fail to get delivered. When they get delivered, it is super ultra slow to respond. Eventually I get a canned message saying they are real busy and will SMS me back. They never do.

Then the next day I notice a response from Oxio in my spam email inbox. They had responded by email, not SMS as promised. I respond to that message, and get the same g-d- chatbot that starts asking me the same basic information all over again (province, email address, full name, account number, etc.).

That’s it, I’ve seen enough. That was last Friday evening and I put returning my equipment and cancelling my service on today’s agenda: I have seen enough. I don’t want to deal with Oxio anymore. It is worth putting up with Telus to get service that actually materializes and humans I can actually talk to.

Except of course it’s the same g-d- chatbot. Which, of course, is “busy” and “will get back to me later.” Because of course. I am never allowed more than a 10 minute delay, but they feel entitled to hours of delay.

I can see where this ends up: a billing dispute. Because I am not going to pay Oxio one red cent more. Let them send me to collections and start calling me back. Oh, I’m going to try avoid getting to that stage, but I’m pretty sure it will get there anyhow, because talking to a real person and getting any issue resolved seems impossible. I’m also taking screenshots and a journal in case I have to take them to court.

Ugh. Worst mistake I have made in many years.

Published at 18:08 on 22 October 2026

This site was down for a few days. Yes, it was related to the recently-announced PHP2Shell vulnerabilities. No, no security incidents happened on this site that I am aware of. I preemptively took the site down until I could update PHP and remove the vulnerabilities.

What’s amusing is all the temper tantrums about PHP that this prompted. People were huffily announcing that PHP should be phased out post-haste. I get it: PHP is a pretty awfully-designed programming language. But, as I wrote a little over five years ago, it doesn’t matter: market-leading packages like WordPress are written in PHP, and if you want to run them, you have to run PHP.

And, in this case, I had to do a little coding in PHP, because stock WordPress didn’t quite do all I wanted out of the box. Because WordPress is so well designed, it was simple to extend. Because it is so well documented, it was easy to figure out how to do it. I am better off writing several dozen lines of code in PHP (code that I can just write, thanks to good documentation), than I am writing many hundreds of lines of code in some other, theoretically superior, programming language (code that takes lots of painful trial and error, thanks to lousy documentation).

But back to the temper tantrums. People were talking about uninstalling PHP and using packages written in some other programming language. Just ridiculously impractical for code that already mostly works as intended anyhow. Sure, there was a security hole in PHP. There have been security holes in all sorts of software systems, including the Linux kernel, yet you don’t hear the same people saying not to use Linux. PHP is one of the key technologies powering the Web today; as such, of course there was going to be a security patch promptly released to address the issue. As indeed there was. Problem solved, no painful, expensive rewrite needed.

I do work on programming projects as a hobby from time to time. This blog is not one of them; it is something I mostly want to just work. Thanks to WordPress, PHP lets me do that easier than any other alternative, so it is PHP that powers this site.

As such things often are. The decision of which programming language to use is almost never based solely on the capabilities and attributes of the core programming language. Instead, it typically comes down to the libraries and subsystems that programming language gives you access to.

Published at 22:57 on 13 October 2026

Not in any significant numbers, anyhow. Anyone asserting so is spreading misinformation.

This first came to my attention via Joohn Choe, who has always struck me as a reliable source who values factual correctness. Tellingly, Snopes backs this up, saying flatly that “The claim that Ukrainian strikes on Russian bot farms caused right-wing or MAGA social media activity to decrease is unproven.”

Update: The CBC agrees, reporting that “Zelenskyy’s claims that Ukraine drone attack halted Russian bot traffic don’t hold up.”

Published at 10:07 on 2 October 2026

The pilot is now talking, and has said that he deliberately and intentionally unlocked the door.

This is significant, because it makes a false flag significantly less likely. If it were a false flag designed to produce the sort of feel-good outcome this incident overall did, by far the most likely scenario would have been a copilot who was an Israeli asset attacking and trying to kill or disable the pilot, before intentionally losing the struggle himself (including unlocking the door to make storming the cockpit possible). So the pilot story most compatible with this scenario would be the pilot saying he did not remember unlocking the door, and that it must have either happened inadvertently during the struggle, or have been done externally via a crew member unlocking it from the outside.

The point is that the reason for the unlocked door would probably be a mystery to the pilot. Instead, the pilot knows he unlocked the door.

This does not, of course, prove that the copilot was not an Israeli asset who was intending to “accidentally” release the door lock at some point, but whose intent was mooted by the pilot in the struggle. It is more of an lack of evidence thing, rather than an evidence of lack of conspiracy: the loose end of how the cockpit was stormed despite post 9/11 security measures has been accounted for.

And spare me scenarios in which both pilot and copilot were assets and deliberately scripted the whole charade. That is just too complicated a plot to be plausible. It is more the desperate rationalization of a conspiracy theorist unwilling to give up on the conspiracy theory.

Published at 22:02 on 1 October 2026

There is already no shortage of crap starting to circulate, using the flimsiest of evidence and the shakiest of logic, to proclaim the FlyDubai incident was definitively was a false flag.

We don’t know that. We also don’t know that it wasn’t a false flag. We merely know there are some things about this incident that seem oddly fortunate.

On the Establishment media side, there really isn’t much raising of how curiously convenient and fortunate things were, and how the Netanyahu regime is just the sort of one to have both the motive and inclination to stage a false flag of this sort. The narrative that it must have been a foiled plot instead of an intended outcome is just being accepted. Plus many are assuming it must have been terrorism.

This is equally wrong, because again, we don’t know what the motive was. To the best of my knowledge, the stabbed pilot has yet to be questioned (he might not even be in a condition to be questioned at the moment).

Published at 18:33 on 30 September 2026

The story is that passengers and crew foiled an attempt by a rogue copilot to crash the aircraft, by breaking into the cockpit, subduing the copilot, and resuming control of the plane (one of the passengers being a pilot). Netanyahu has already proclaimed it a foiled terrorist attack amid celebrations at Ben-Gurion Airport.

Some things about this story just seem strange to me right off the bat. Specifically, two big things.

Breaking into the Cockpit

Simply put, this should not have been possible. After the 9/11 attacks, new standards for hardened cockpit doors were developed. There has now been a quarter century in which to fully implement those standards. Said standards should have, perversely, acted to make an incident like this, a security breach from inside the cockpit itself, harder to foil. Yet somehow, they did not. Why? Was the door not properly locked (if so, why)? Was the door defective (if so, why was the plane allowed to fly)? Did the pilot unlock it as part of the struggle for control (the stories I have seen do not mention this)? Did some passengers have tools with which to force the doors (if so, why were they allowed to board with such tools)? And so on.

Resuming Control of the Plane

It was incredibly convenient that there was a pilot qualified to fly a passenger jet flying as a passenger on that flight. Maybe there is nothing amiss here. Pilots book seats on passenger jets all the time. In fact, they are more likely to do so than normal people, because as airline employees they are typically entitled to fly for free or at a significant discount. But again, it strikes me as, shall we say, curiously convenient.

Remember Who Is Celebrating

Namely, the Netanyahu regime, which is best described as a rogue regime. Because it is: it flouts international law, is committing genocide and ethnic cleansing, and is destabilizing its region of the world by launching wars of choice against other countries.

It would be totally in character for such a regime to stage a false-flag attack (complete with a “miracle” outcome to celebrate) for political purposes. I am not saying that is what happened, mind you, only that it might be, and this needs to be understood and investigated as a possible motive. If it is, and it is ruled out, fine. End speculation.

But so far this final aspect is missing from most coverage of the incident. It is if recent Israeli history is being swept into a memory hole.

Going Forward

Any investigation has to answer the above questions, and must not tiptoe around the false-flag possibility. The more it does that, the more believable it will be, and vice versa.

Update

This is probably the best coverage I have seen so far. It interviews a pilot who mentions that in addition to there being a way for the cockpit to be unlocked from the inside, there is a way to do it from the outside, via a code that the crew know. (And before you say it: Yes, he is Israeli, but he keeps politics out of it and sticks to the facts. He even mentions that it might not be terrorism; pilots have committed suicide/mass murder by deliberately crashing passenger planes at least twice already.)

In fact, it makes the current story all the more suspect. We’re being told that a plumber grabbed the controls and brought the plane under control before handing control to one of the off-duty pilots riding as a passenger. The pilot mentions that the sort of supersonic dive the plane was in would be very difficult to escape with the plane intact.