Blackcap Blog

Published at 15:26 on 31 March 2021

The world is full of analyses like this one that confidently perform crimping to be better than soldering. The real world is not nearly so simple.

Yes, a properly executed crimp connection with a quality crimp connector is by all measures superior. The devil is in those weasel words.

Given that it is possible for a crimped connection to be superior to a soldered one, and given that crimping is faster than soldering, why would anyone solder? Soldering when connections can be crimped seems obsolete.

That is how many retail hardware stores promote crimping, often in a big blister pack with cheap crimp connectors and a cheap crimping tool like this one. Well, good luck with that. It takes a skilled craftsman to execute a quality crimp with a cheapo tool and cheapo connectors. It is, in fact, easier to learn to solder.

An anecdote to close: When I worked in IT support, the department purchased a cheap crimping tool, that could crimp both 6 and 8-position modular connectors, and some bulk cable. No longer would custom lengths of cable need to be special ordered.

Those crimps were responsible for trouble ticket after trouble ticket. When I broke the crimpers in the attempt to exert enough force for a quality crimp, I put my foot down and insisted they spend over $100 on a name-brand, quality crimping tool and set of crimping dies. It was money well spent, because the number of trouble tickets dropped to zero on connectors crimped with it.

It’s not that bad with standard wire crimp connectors; $25 or so can get you a good, compound-action, ratchet-based crimping tool. Even then, it’s good to budget in some practicing, and learning how to recognize a bad crimp. But again, that’s not how crimping is sold. Most of those crimp kits don’t even cost $25 total, and no mention is made of skill development.

Personally, I solder. Already have a soldering iron and know how to use it as a result of messing with electronics for many years, and I don’t splice wires often enough to justify the expense of a crimping tools, the clutter managment headaches of maintaining a stock of crimp connectors, and so on.

Published at 11:57 on 22 March 2021

Make no mistake, the refugee crisis along the southern border represents a real danger for Biden and a real opportunity for the fascists.

The Democrats are already swimming against the tide: their majority in Congress is razor-thin, and midterm elections tend to go badly for the party that occupies the White House. A refugee crisis would be just the thing the fascists need to whip up their base and get people to forget what a disaster Trump was.

Remember how the Trump regime was rightly excoriated for the deliberate cruelty of its policy of separating children from their families? Well, now unaccompanied minors are showing up en masse at the border, asking for refugee status. They have, in other words, been pre-separated from their families, largely by the actions of those families themselves.

What does that say, that large numbers of families are now willing to impose the same cruelty on their children that hateful fascists once wished on them? The most logical explanation, I think, is that families are doing so because the conditions the children are experiencing when with their families, both in the refugee camps, and before the families fled their home countries, is so bad that, as bad as child separation is, it is being judged as better for the affected children.

Conditions, in other words, must be really bad for those refugee families.

Any solution to the crisis must therefore be focused on resolving that problem, and not just making things more difficult at the border itself. Such latter measures are unlikely to work very well. Most likely a massive military deployment (with shoot-to-kill orders), and the impressment of the survivors into Nazi-esque forced labor and death camps would do the trick, but obviously that’s beyond the pale for any civilized country to so much as contemplate.

Measures that fall much short of that are unlikely to be sufficiently discouraging. Remember, families are already volunteering to send their children into concentration camps that fall short of death camps. The border wall is both incomplete and porous (it is easy to defeat with standard tools, and smaller individuals, such as children, can squeeze through the slats).

The conditions that are pushing refugees across the border must be addressed. The quickest short-term fix would probably be to fund improvements at the holding camps in Mexico. Once COVID-19 is under better control, we can (and should) resume admitting refugees, and on a widespread scale.

The fascists will howl that the latter is being done to destroy their vision of America, and they would be right. This is very much a reason why we need more immigration to the USA.

Letting more immigrants in is good for many reasons, and one of those reasons is that it dilutes the power of the fascists, because recent immigrants tend not to become fascists. Immigrants, as a rule, simply make for better citizens of an open and free society than does Trump’s base of Christian fascists. It is probably politically toxic to admit this, however, so don’t expect any establishment figures to do so. (Such frankness is something I can get away with, because I am just a semi-anonymous nobody with a blog.)

That said, however, it is far better to not be compelled to flee one’s country of birth in the first place than to be admitted as a refugee in a foreign country. That is going to be a harder nut for establishment politics to crack, because it means questioning U.S. neo-imperialism, which is directly responsible for regimes like the one in Honduras (installed with the approval of the Obama administration) that are prompting so many to become refugees in the first place.

The bottom line is that Biden must move swiftly and decisively on addressing the issues that are forcing Central Americans to move north. Failure to do so would not only be a moral weakness, but a weakness from the standpoint of realpolitik as well.

Published at 10:27 on 20 March 2021

In one of my more obvious (to me) insights, I correctly predicted that the Democrats would end up sorely regretting their decision to go nuclear in 2013.

Well, here we go again.

Or do we? The most likely measures fall short of an outright kill of the filibuster and are more a scaling-back of it. Of course, as the article linked above argues, that is likely to beget further scalings-back.

One thing that bears pointing out is that weakening the filibuster is less Constitutionally harmful than the continued evolution of an imperial presidency, and the latter becomes more likely if Congress is paralyzed by an unweakend filibuster. The filibuster is mentioned nowhere in the U.S. Constitution; it is merely one of the many “Rules of its Proceedings” the Senate chose to establish for itself per Article I Section 5, and it can just as easily weaken or abolish that provision as it first created and then strengthened it.

Yes, strengthened it. It is far easier to filibuster something today than it has historically been. A filibuster is nowadays mostly a simple matter of paperwork. It used to be the case that Senators opposing the measure had to actually be physically present and take turns speaking in order to talk a bill to death. In fact, returning to this past state of affairs is probably the most likely measure to be enacted.

In a real sense, this time, there is less room to maneuver. Fail to pass a new civil rights bill, and we head into a new Jim Crow era of near-permanent minority rule. So the Democrats’ hand is being forced in a way that it was not in 2013.

But this does not in any way change what Ruth Marcus wrote in the article linked above; a backlash is still likely to come. It is one reason for my general pessimism about the political future of the United States.

Published at 17:25 on 19 March 2021

Really, this should come as about zero surprise; in fact, I predicted it back in 2019. (That was pre-pandemic, and I got many of the specifics wrong, but the general gist of relations swirling down the toilet with China not just being all Trump’s fault has aged well.)

Many Marxists foolishly supported (or refused to oppose) tyranny in the USSR, falsely believing that the principles of socialism would inevitably produce freedom despite the immediate result of the revolution in Russia producing a new and more oppressive tyranny. Many on the Right criticize such naïveté, and rightly so.

Well, it was equally stupid to think that a totalitarian dictatorship could inevitably be steered towards becoming an open society by the magic of capitalism and markets. Capitalism has proven itself compatible with states of profound unfreedom more than once, so it should come as no surprise to see it exhibit compatibility with so-called “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

A falling-out was going to happen regardless of Trump, so it should be no surprise that the end of the Trump era has not changed the general downward spiral of US/China relations.

Published at 10:16 on 14 March 2021

On Thursday I said there was a chance of snow tonight into tomorrow morning (note the emphasis). At that time, it really looked as if the models might be converging on that forecast. But, it was still a ways out and they had not settled on lowland snow for very long, so I had my doubts.

Well, it’s not happening. My skepticism was borne out: the storm tracked further north, keeping the coldest air further north. The front also made landfall a bit earlier.

But we actually came fairly close to getting some lowland snow. Here is a capture from a highway cam near Port McNeill, BC (near sea level at the northern end of Vancouver Island) this morning. Pretty snowy.

Published at 08:54 on 25 February 2021

This is called a meteogram:

It is a graphical representation of a model run for a single point on the Earth’s surface, in this case the weather station at Bellingham airport. Note that I should have said “suite of model runs” instead of “model run:” each so-called forecasting model is in fact multiple runs, each initialized with a slightly different set of parameters, all based on current observations. This is done to provide a measure of how reliable the model is: if each run in the suite is all over the map (like they are for the weekend after next), it means the model’s predictions cannot be trusted very much.

By contrast, every run in the suite above is in agreement that we are about to have a lowland snow event, totaling an inch or two. Very high confidence, but wait. This is for the GFS model, the one developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This model has a tendency in our climate to underestimate the moderating effects of the Pacific Ocean and the Cascade Mountains, plus it is generally not as reliable as the ECMWF model developed by the EU nations. What does that model have to say?

Both significantly less snowy and significantly less confident in any sort of snow outcome. Let me let you in on another secret: any time those models forecast a snowfall range in the lighter gray colors, one almost never sees any accumulation unless the temperature is solidly below freezing at the onset of the event. The temperature is not forecast to be solidly below freezing. In other words, this model is saying there is an off chance of seeing some wet flakes in the air tonight, with no accumulation.

Now, if the ECMWF model had shown basically the same story as the GFS one, we would be in a situation much like we were going into the solstice, and I would be making a confident snow prediction regardless of what the official forecasts said. If both models consistently tell the same story, they are almost always correct.

But both models are not consistently telling the same story, so what to do about it? First, what we can do is limited: it’s going to be a lower-confidence forecast, no matter what. The signs are mixed as to what is going to happen. However, the more accurate of the two models is saying little if any snow tonight. Moreover, the less accurate model is known to have defects which can explain precisely this discrepancy.

Therefore, it is wise to go with the ECMWF guidance: an off chance of some wet flakes in the air.

But note what would have happened if a) I liked snow, b) I didn’t know about the defects in the GFS model, and c) I let my emotions cloud my judgement. I would have helped start a false rumor about there being a viable chance for an inch or two of snow overnight.

This is why the models are often called model guidance: they are not there to forecast the weather, they are merely there to help people forecast the weather.

Published at 19:38 on 19 February 2021

That is both my forecast and the official forecast. On the subject of the official forecasts, they are usually pretty good, and usually the same forecast I would give, were I a professional weather forecaster. The times I make a big stink are the times the official forecasts don’t make much sense to me.

Anyhow, if you’re planning outdoor activities, Saturday definitely sounds like the better day. The source of the moisture that will make Sunday (and the beginning of the work week) so wet is coming out of the tropical Pacific, so it will drag some relatively warmer air up our way with it. Expect some high temperatures in the fifties, maybe well into the fifties (Bellingham is often one of the warmest spots in Western Washington when a strong south wind is blowing, more on why that is the case sometime later).

That means snow levels will be rising, though at this time it seems likely they will stay (just) below the elevation of the Heather Meadows area. Still, if I were skiing, I would opt for Saturday. Some light snow which is drier because temperatures are still reliably below freezing sounds a lot nicer than copious amounts of heavy, wet “Cascade concrete” snow.

This will likely prove to be just a temporary mild interlude to a generally cool pattern that we are for the next several weeks. The long-range models have all been consistent with things staying on the cool side at least through the first half or March.

This also means that we’re not out of the woods quite yet when it comes to lowland snow; yes we can get lowland snow in March, sometimes significant amounts of it. I must emphasize, however, that at this time there is no specific indication of any such thing. The dice are merely loaded so that outcome has a higher chance than normal, that is all.

Published at 19:23 on 19 February 2021

A bit of introduction for the unaware is in order here: one of my many interests in the sciences is meteorology. As such, I follow a number of weather forums. Those with more money to their name than I subscribe to professional services that give access to raw forecasting model data.

Maps and other graphics were getting reposted to the forums from those professional services which showed something interesting was probably going to happen, curiously enough, right on the first day of winter: a powerful cold front would suddenly cause the snow level to drop to sea level. Since precipitation rates were forecast to be quite intense at the time, a few inches of wet snow were likely to accumulate.

More interesting is that both of the two historically most accurate forecasting models, the ECMWF and the GFS, converged on that scenario a few days out, and then kept on saying the same thing. It has long been my experience that when this happens, the forecast event almost always verifies. Yet the official forecasts, be they from the National Weather Service or Weather.com, had no mention of lowland snow that day.

That made no sense at all to me. Again, when both those models consistently agree on something, it really tends to happen. So I made a post about the likelihood of a snowfall to the /r/Bellingham Reddit forum. Skepticism ensued, followed quickly enough by flabbergasted amazement as “this guy on Reddit” forecast a snowfall that was not mentioned in any official forecasts.

Last weekend it happened again. The model guidance had converged quite nicely on a significant lowland snow event, with the vast majority of runs clustered right around the 6 to 8 inch range. The official forecasters only reluctantly started forecasting snow, and then only a few inches of it. This time the skepticism was tempered, because I had been right before.

I knew going into last weekend that if I was right a second time with a radically different forecast, a lot of people would have difficulty seeing me as something other than possessing supernatural powers, even though my logic for my forecasts was rather simple.

Eight to ten inches fell. My forecast was off, but only by a bit (10 inches of snow is not significantly more disruptive than 8). It is, however, way more disruptive than 3 inches, which was the high end of the range the official forecast was going for. So my status was assured. For now, at least.

Given that the community is now funding my access to the official forecast models, I owe them some at least semi-regular weather analyses, which I plan to post here.

Published at 13:06 on 19 February 2021

One of its co-founders has been exposed as a sexual predator, and a significant number of its top luminaries have departed the organization in the wake of that revelation.

The whole organization now has the stench of death hovering over it. It’s probably only a matter of time before it collapses and is no more. Or maybe it will linger on as a sad shell of itself. The distinction is somewhat academic; what matters is that henceforth, the Lincoln Project will no longer be the powerful influencer it once was.

It was probably a long time coming. I would suspect that there had been significant stresses and strains in the organization for some time, but it was held together largely by the desire to stay united and work to defeat Trump. It is not a coincidence that the collapse happened after Trump lost and Biden took office. A similar thing happened to the Western-Soviet alliance after Hitler was defeated.

There is still very much a need for anti-Trump politics on the center right, and I hope that some new organization (or organizations) rise to take the place of the Lincoln Project.

Published at 11:58 on 27 January 2021

This is in clarification to my most recent post, where I advocated that Trump and his family be targeted for prosecution so as to ruin their future political prospects (and by implication, the future prospects of American Christian fascism).

Make no mistake: that is precisely what I advocated. This is war. Either the fascists win, or the non-fascists win. Fascism must be crushed, by any means necessary. It is that simple.

There is of course no way on Earth that the present administration could strip the veneer off and say it plainly like I just have. Thankfully, they do not have to.

Pretexts are unnecessary in order to prosecute Trump. All that is needed is to reverse the disgusting precedent that nobody in a position of great power ever gets held accountable in the USA. That is it.

Biden recently tweeted that presidents should not be above the law. Make it so, and the powerful get held to account, in a politically necessary way. Refuse to make it so, and the Republic dies.

It is your choice, Messrs. Biden and Garland.