Blackcap Blog

Published at 19:55 on 24 June 2026

Note: I am basically blowing what I believe to be the secret of the DSA Democrats’ recent successes here. I feel comfortable doing so for three main reasons:

1. I am just a guy with a blog. The Democratic Party elite don’t even know I exist. Therefore this post will not reveal anything to them.
2. I don’t think the Democratic Party establishment is capable of changing. They are simply too old and stubborn to assimilate new data and change their ways, and too addicted to their own power to be able to stand aside and let more competent people occupy their seats. So even if they do become aware of this, they won’t be able to act on it.
3. If I am wrong above, I still win. I don’t like the Nazi tattoo guy in Maine very much. He strikes me as an opportunist and a fraud. I would have been happy if a centrist Democrat with principles had eaten him for lunch in the primary. Competitive pressure that forces the left to do a better job is a good thing.

Zohran Mamdani is a relative newcomer to politics who has not been mayor for even a year now, yet he is already as described in the title above.

Going into yesterday’s primaries, even some pundits on the right were saying that it would show Mamdani has a lot of power if his preferred candidates were able to sweep to victory on primary night.

Well, sweep they did. And not only that: his preferred committee member candidates dominated in the Brooklyn Democratic Party — up to now an uncooperative thorn in the mayor’s side — dominated, meaning the mayor’s allies will now control that party.

And the Democratic Party establishment is not amused. To which I say: up your game. Do better. Don’t dish out the same feckless mediocrity and tell voters to shut up and eat their vegetables because it’s good for them. That shit works as badly in the primaries as it does in the generals.

You have to find some sort of principles to stand on, instead of continuing your long, sad, sorry tradition of making a firm stand for precisely nothing at all. Let us look at the case of Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat, who just lost to Mamdani-backed Darializa Avila Chevalier, simply because that one has the chattering classes chattering the loudest about it. Do you know that Espillat refused to stand up for Mahmoud Khalil (a resident of his district) when Trump’s ICE goons kidnapped him? Other Democrats did better; he could have, too. Could it be that this is the sort of sorry cravenness the voters have had their fill of, to the point that they are willing to overlook some of the baggage Chevalier arguably has? Just a thought.

We’re talking about things like civil rights that make extrajudicial punishment unlawful (and the punishment was for exercising political free speech, so doubly unlawful). Hardly far left stuff. If you can’t make a firm stand there, you’re fucking useless. And it looks like the voters are already starting to figure this out.

Your move, Establishment. And remember: if you keep making it so that only left candidates are the ones firmly standing for anything, if you keep being co-participants in democratic decline instead of opponents of it, may I suggest that you are headed straight for the dustbin of history. Which will be where you belong.

Published at 18:09 on 24 June 2026

Link to Mediaite article:

‘I’m Done, I’m Not in That F*cking Political Party’: James Carville Freaks Out After Progressives Win Big in Democratic Primaries

Published at 09:32 on 23 June 2026

There will be a lot of twists and turns on the road leading there, but as of this morning I do not doubt the above statement in the least.

Israel has, as predicted earlier, almost completely destroyed its reputation. This now is even underwater (and continuing to sink further) in the USA, Israel’s chief patron state.

Meanwhile, sympathy for the Palestinians continues to grow. When it gets to the point where a formerly apolitical global travel social media personality is posting stuff like this, I think it is safe to make the sort of game call I just did in the title above.

Published at 11:55 on 19 June 2026

Most liberals are positively giddy about Trump’s current low numbers in the opinion polls and what that means for the coming midterms. In doing so, they overlook the reality of the current situation. They overlook the three rules.

The reality is that the immediate results of the coming midterms are likely to consolidate fascist GOP rule more so than to undermine it. Note I didn’t say that the GOP would win the midterms. To focus on the midterms as if they are yet another election, operating under the standard rules of a functioning electoral democracy, and the parties competing in them are normal political parties, is to miss entirely the reality of the situation.

The fascists in power at the Federal level (and many state and local levels) believe elections to be illegitimate unless they win them. This is established fact. To hypothesize that they will for some reason act differently this time is to contravene Rule No. 1. (What just happened to Massie and Cornyn, dear liberals?) There is no better GOP.

When they lose the vote in November (as, in all likelihood, they will), they will not concede defeat. They will claim the results are illegitimate, and will cheat to stay in power. Vote counts in fascist-controlled swing areas will suspiciously change in favour of the fascists in ways that will seem very familiar to anyone with knowledge of how other banana republics operate. Court challenges that threaten the fascists will be slow-walked. Ones that favour the fascists will be given special express treatment. New precedents will be constructed out of whole cloth as needed. The mass media will be subject to politically-motivated persecution if they harp on these issues. In many cases, the persecution will be theoretical and there will be no shortage of compliance in advance.

In response, the Democrats will in general be meek and conciliatory. Because of course they will. Rule No. 2. Sure, there will be some noteworthy exceptions. But the overall pattern, the one that dominates, the one that produces the overall net result, will be as described.

At that point, Rule No. 3 will come into play. Here, the outlook becomes decidedly less bleak. It doesn’t take any belief in a different, better electorate to get Minneapolis-style resistance to fascism. The electorate we actually have has proven itself capable of such resistance. It has also, of course, proven itself capable of acquiescence. So resistance is not a given, but it is definitely plausible.

If Minneapolis-style resistance to fascism erupts nationwide, there is real hope. It could even end up reforming the Democratic Party. Not because of any firm moral principles amongst its leadership, simply because of the principle of political opportunism, the ability to sense which way the political wind is starting to below, the desire to hitch their wagon to a rising star. And that would be fine. It would not be the first time in history a political party claimed for itself and for electoral politics a victory whose roots were in direct action. Demanding that a necessary process happen only for the purest of motives (and via the purest of tactics) is an unrealistic expectation.

Anyhow, that, and not false hopes of both major parties acting contrary to their amply-demonstrated norms of behaviour, is where my hope lies.

Published at 09:07 on 18 June 2026

The chattering classes are busily chattering about what a defeat for the USA it all is.

Well of course it is a defeat. That was baked into this thing at the onset: Trump decided to start an asymmetric war in which the asymmetry strongly favoured Iran. Criticisms of the deal, as if a significantly better deal were somehow possible, completely miss the point. A significantly better deal is not possible, sorry. The U.S.A. is now restricted by circumstances to choose between various forms of bad deals.

Why do you think every other post-Carter president had a chance to start a war with Iran but decided to take a pass instead? Yes, this one was that obvious. Any semi-sane, semi-intelligent observer, wherever he or she landed on the political spectrum, could see it. This outcome was as predictable as the sun rising in the morning and the tides ebbing and flooding.

The next thing — which is already starting to dawn on some people — is the start of the end, or at least the restructuring, of the US/Israel special relationship. Again, because of course. The zio-fascists who run Israel want war with Lebanon. Iran does not want Israel making war on Lebanon, and is willing to deny Trump the end of the war he so desperately wants to end in order to accomplish this.

So Israel is now standing in the way of Trump getting what he wants, which means Israel now gets to experience first hand Trump’s famously one-way concept of loyalty: it is your obligation to be endlessly loyal to Trump, who has zero obligation to reciprocate that loyalty. As Trump likes to say: Israel doesn’t have the cards. They are dependant on U.S. aid and if the U.S. cuts off that aid, Israel faces an existential crisis (an actual one, not the pretend one the Israeli government always trots out any time it wants to treat its neighbours like untermensch).

Thanks to Israel’s self-inflicted reputational damage, Congress is unlikely to get in the way of this political hardball. Per Rule No. 1 the GOP is just a bunch of sheep following their führer. Oh, the odd GOPig here and there will stand by Israel… and then proceed to be on the receiving end of that famous one-way loyalty of which I just wrote. The remainder will forget their loyalty to Israel approximately as quickly as they forgot their loyalty to free trade. Meanwhile, support for Israel is deeply underwater amongst Democratic voters. Sure, a few of the most diehard “Israel can do no wrong” crowd in the Democratic party will stand by Israel, but the majority probably won’t. Simple politics.

As I wrote two years ago: Reputation is just touchy-feely stuff that doesn’t much matter… until, suddenly, it does. Looks like that suddenly part is about to start happening.

Published at 09:45 on 12 June 2026

About two months ago, I started experimenting with scraping online job listings. The main motive was just to save myself frustration; I have long been disappointed with the quality of the search results from such boards. Why should I waste time wading through a bunch of crap I am, given my search specifications, self-evidently uninterested in?

The scraper gathers the texts of recent job listings from a variety of different online job boards into a data file. A separate postprocessing step then reads through that data file, doing some rudimentary natural language processing on the texts of the job listings therein. Basically, it does keyword searches, giving points for matches, and bonus points for combinations of matches I view as signs a job is likely to be particularly interesting. Then it sorts the listings by the resulting scores and presents them to me.

And indeed (pun unintended), it is not unusual for some jobs to end up with a score of zero. A complete goose egg. The only way this is possible is if none of the keywords I am searching for match.

Another thing my scraper does is filter out things it has seen before. I keep track of the primary keys the site uses to store the listings in their database, and when I last saw them. (These primary keys are easy enough to deduce, because they inevitably show up in the HTML link to each job details page.) Today Indeed proudly returned a job I had last seen in the middle of last month as its first result, despite my request to sort the results in descending chronological order.

Why do this? Why show listings that have nothing whatsoever to do with my search terms? Why show some old listings I saw a month ago to me again? Because money. Indeed is obviously charging its clients extra for these services, so their ads get better reach. It may be bad for job seekers like me, but it is good for their own bottom line. This is textbook enshittification, wherein market forces reward businesses for offering worse services.

Have I mentioned yet that a dozen or so years ago, you didn’t have to do anything backhanded to scrape jobs from Indeed? They had a public API whose purpose was to make it easy for a program to download and filter job listings. They got rid of that, of course, because it is contrary to a business model that now includes shoving old crap or irrelevant crap at users in return for money.

And it’s not just Indeed. It’s most of them. The only job board that seems completely immune from this trend, in fact, is Job Bank, which is a public service run by the Government of Canada. They offer a public API, too. Let capitalism fans and their mythology of private enterprise always offering superior products put that in their pipe and smoke it.

Published at 16:59 on 3 June 2026

I had been seriously considering moving this summer. Nothing super-dramatic, just to another address in the Greater Vancouver region, probably one still within the City of Vancouver itself.

That would be part of a consistent pattern in my adult life. I seldom stay put in any one home for longer than five years. But I digress.

Real estate prices (both for sale and rental) have been on the soft side the last year or two. Prices have actually gone down somewhat. A little cursory scanning the rental ads let me to believe it might be possible for me to score a larger place for little or no extra in rent.

If I could do that, and it would enable me to close my storage unit, I would end up paying slightly less per month in combined rent, all for more personal space. Plus, if I had the right criteria, I could end up in a place where I could hide a few outdoor antennas, which would make my ham radio hobby less of an exercise in frustration.

The above would constitute a clear win, and be well worth the hassles of moving to achieve.

But reality seems not to be so simple. Yes, such larger, less expensive properties can be found. Inevitably, however, they are in far-flung neighbourhoods nowhere near as convenient to friends and activities. This would make it less than a decidedly clear win (it would be a mixed outcome, with give and take, leaving me at best approximately as well off as I currently am). Which, in turn, makes it not worth the hassle of moving.

There is one possible exception, and that is Renfrew-Collingwood. It’s further out, but it is well-served by rapid transit, being crossed by two SkyTrain lines, which counteracts the distance factor. Plus it is home to one of my favourite city parks, an under-appreciated gem of a refuge that makes one feel miles away from the big city when one is down inside it.

But still, the odds are not so good as I once imagined them to be. And that is fine with me. I only want to move if it is clearly worth it. Stability has its virtues.

Published at 11:43 on 28 May 2026

I really think they don’t. At least 90% of the anti-Trump crowd in the USA is positively giddy about how low Trump is in the polls.

What they don’t get is that they are no longer in the Republic they have spent most of their lives in. Such poll numbers used to mean something. Now, alas, they mean far less. The Republicans are going to try and steal the election, and they are going to have far more success at doing so than many think possible.

Oh, the GOP will probably still lose their majority in the House of Representatives, but not by much. That narrow majority, coupled with most Democrats not believing in anything, save for the principle of never standing firmly for anything, and the myth of American exceptionalism enabling widespread denial, means not much will change. And I would not be surprised if the GOP holds the Senate.

At that point, my hope is that for many in Middle America, the stench of the rotting corpse will be undeniable, and things might start to get interesting (think resistance like what happened in Minneapolis, but on a national scale).

Published at 08:30 on 27 May 2026

After using Avalonia for one project, I can say that it is basically what I thought it was, with one exception.

My previous deadline for the wxPython web site coming back up to something approaching full health blew by, so Avalonia it was. As I knew going in, it’s a little more clumsy and boilerplate-y than I like. The resulting apps don’t look as slick and polished as native ones (because they don’t use native widgets). But it works well enough, and it’s popular enough I don’t have big worries about it turning into abandonware.

The exception was multithreading. Avalonia supports async/await, or as Microsoft calls it task-based asynchronous programming. Because of course it does. Async/await got its start with .NET languages. So it’s been part of C# for a long time, and that feature has been fully absorbed into frameworks developed for that programming environment.

This ends up making Avalonia a clear winner over Qt and its quirky signals and slots and its poorly-implemented memory management. It even makes it a clear winner over the callback-based multithreading that wxPython offers. Async/await effectively compiles under the hood to callbacks, but it lets the programmer write code much more as if it were traditional blocking code, which makes coding far easier.

Signals and slots were a significant step backwards over Swing’s callbacks. Async/await is a significant step forward. What seemed to be a narrow win now looks like a clear win.

The things that make Avalonia suck still suck. All GUI frameworks suck. Avalonia simply sucks less than the alternatives for my purposes, significantly less.

And yeah, I know: the wxPython web site now seems to be back up. Well, so what? It took most of a fortnight to come back to full health. That speaks loudly as to how little momentum there currently is behind that platform.

Published at 15:26 on 20 May 2026

So, anyhow, I settled on wxPython as my Python GUI framework of choice.

One would think that, given its generally superior programmer interface (it is not even close), wxWidgets and wxPython came after Qt and PySide. Surprisingly, the exact opposite is the case.

My explanation for the mystery is a mixture of groupthink and functionality. Having to continually think about memory management just comes with the territory in C++. So the Qt team, being C++ programmers, didn’t think much of it when designing their Python bindings. It’s all just a natural part of programming, right? Add to that how important smart phones have become, and how Qt supports those (but wxWidgets does not), and you have your answer right there.

Unfortunately, while wxPython is free from the worst braindamage that pervades PySide and PyQt, the package, despite being around for a while and despite having a fairly recent release, doesn’t seem to be very popular and may be on its way to becoming abandonware. What makes me suspect this is that late last Thursday, the wxPython web site started acting up, and as of my typing this is basically completely down. On top of that, I’ve run into a clear bug in the underlying wxWidgets code that has been sitting around unfixed since last February.

Maybe they’re just having a spot of rough luck, but my feeling is that a popular project with lots of active development would probably have a backup site going by now. If they manage to restore service by Friday afternoon, I will probably keep the faith (and even offer to contribute my own efforts), but things are on hold until then.

If it doesn’t come back up, it will probably be time to chalk up another win for .NET. Avalonia certainly has its issues, but they don’t seem to rise to a Qt level of obnoxiousness, and I don’t want to produce something that’s basically obsolete the instant I finish coding it.