Pay Attention to the Experts

Published at 07:03 on 4 March 2026

If you want to have some idea how this war is likely to go, I recommend paying attention to what experts, experts with a lot of inside information, were saying about a dozen days ago. And the answer is “not likely to go well for the Western imperialists.”

Further Thoughts

Published at 17:11 on 28 February 2026

The more I think of it, the more it becomes clear to me that Carney’s sucking up to Trump on the Iran attacks shows incredibly bad judgement. The Trump regime has threatened Canada before, and will threaten Canada again. Sending a message to the rest of the world that this fascist regime’s aggression can at times be acceptable is not only morally repulsive, it undermines Canada’s national security.

The was against Iran has nothing — absolutely nothing — to do with upholding international norms. To think that the actions of lawless president who has flaunted norm after norm, both domestic and international, can be being taken for such ends is beyond naïve.

It also has absolutely nothing to do with promoting democracy. Just look at what happened in Venezuela. The same regime remains in power, now with US backing, just with a different, more subservient, leadership. It would not surprise me in the least to see an analogous outcome in Iran.

Just about the Worst Take Ever from Carney

Published at 07:15 on 28 February 2026

This is just about the worst take on anything ever from this PM. To assume that two fascist governments flexing their muscles in an attempt to make a third sovereign nation submit to their will could have anything in the least to do with democracy, human rights, or international norms is simply beyond belief. And to assume that two nuclear powers, one of them a nuclear proliferator who helped arm the apartheid regime in South Africa, have anything in principle against nuclear weapons, simply boggles the mind.

No thinking person is a fan of the vile regime that currently rules Iran, but come on. This is exactly the sort of naïveté that led democracies to underestimate the growing global threat posed by Hitler, who got people to tolerate his initial exercises in military adventurism by mostly directing them eastward, towards the widely-disliked Soviet regime.

It looks a whole lot like Carney just put the sign back in Canada’s window.

Trump, MAHA, and the Nature of Fascism

Published at 08:12 on 27 February 2026

Many of Trump’s critics are rightly denouncing the efforts of the RFK-led Department of “Health,” but I think they are missing the true scale of the malice behind it.

My theory is much darker. It is merely part of American fascism’s project of creating a fact-free world, so that disease is no longer based on its actual causes, enabling a fascist government to scapegoat the groups it hates. Nazis decried the Jews (and homosexuals) as “unhygienic;” expect the Trump regime to do so in earnest for the nonwhite immigrant groups it despises (not to mention the LGBTQIA community) once a critical mass of its base is sufficiently distant from fact-and-science-based theories of health.

It’s not about increasing the market for quack cures, it’s about increasing the market for fascist measures. They are building concentration camps and they intend to use them.

More of This, Please

Published at 09:48 on 26 February 2026

Canada is sending aid to Cuba in response to increasing efforts by the USA to strangle the regime there.

I am 100% in support of this, not because I am a big fan of the regime there (I am not, it is a dictatorship), but because freedom has absolutely nothing to do with anything any fascist regime does (and the Trump regime most definitely is a fascist one).

When dealing with a long list of things one does not like, often one must prioritize. As Churchill, long a proud conservative and ardent anti-communist, once said when asked about Stalin after the Nazis invaded the USSR: “I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler, and my life is much simplified thereby. It Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”

So yes, supporting countries under US pressure right now is a good thing. The more fascism fails, and fails early, the better off the long-term prospects for the world as a whole.

And yes, I have been awfully quiet here recently. This is because I have been working on an involved software project, and have decided to mainly focus on that.

What I Hate about Java

Published at 12:32 on 12 February 2026

Consider a common programming task: open a text file for reading with buffering. Let’s go through some of the programming languages I have used, in rough order of my learning them. (Disclaimer: my memory is a little rusty on some of these; they may not all be 100% correct. But they are not that far off the mark.)

First, the non-Java languages.

BASIC-PLUS:
OPEN "FILE.TXT" FOR INPUT AS FILE #1%

FORTRAN:
OPEN(UNIT=1,FILE='FILE.TXT',STATUS='OLD')

Pascal:
assign(file1, 'file.txt');

C:
FILE *file1 = fopen("file.txt", "r");

Perl:
open(FILE1, '<file.txt');

Python:
file1 = open("file.txt", "r")

C#:
var file1 = new StreamReader("file.txt");

And then we have Java:
var file1 = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("file.txt"));

LOL, what? Why should those internals be exposed? Why should I have to explicitly wrap an unbuffered reader in a buffering one? Why the extra step to do something so common and routine? Why did I just have to spend a half hour studying the documentation, chasing from class to class to class, to figure out how to do something that was almost self-evident in every other language I was learning?

Why can’t Java do out-of-the-box today in one simple step what FORTRAN could do in 1966?

And don’t say “object orientation.” Python and C# are object-oriented, and don’t have this programmer-hostile silliness.

Sure, this seems to be a little thing, and it is just one thing. But it’s not really just one thing: this sort of crap is all over the map in the Java world. Everything is clunkier and more awkward than it should be, everywhere. It’s relentless. It’s wearing.