Blackcap Blog

Published at 07:59 on 18 May 2017

The excerpts below are from this article by the New York Times.

Enemies from within have launched a “deep-state” smear campaign, news organizations are acting with ulterior motives, and the worst attacks are yet to come.

The term “deep state” is not a neologism; it’s been around for a long time and applied to many political situations. And there does appear to be such a thing at work in the USA presently. That’s a good thing, in this context, since it’s acting for the preservation of an Establishment that while deeply flawed, is greatly preferable to the sort of fascist state Trump desires to create.

The worst attacks are indeed probably yet to come, but it must be pointed out that the most effective attack strategy so far has been to simply tell the truth about how awful Trump is. If Trump stopped violating the norms of a free, open society, he’d be brutally effective in disarming his adversaries (who in turn would dwindle in number and diminish in militance as motives to oppose Trump vanished).

The bit about the media I will cover after the following excerpt:

Pushing back against the biggest threat so far to Donald Trump’s young presidency, his most fervent supporters are building alternative narratives to run alongside the “establishment” media account — from relatively benign diversions to more bizarre conspiracies.

Sources such as the New York Times are definitely the Establishment media. There is no inaccuracy on the part of anyone (including the far right) describing them as such. And they are out to get Trump. For good reason; Trump violates numerous basic norms of a free and open society.

With varying degrees of credibility and credulity, conservatives have fed stories that Mr. Trump is the victim of sabotage by an adversarial intelligence community full of Trojan horse holdovers from the Obama administration.

“There is someone burrowed into the intelligence community who wants to hurt Trump,” the conservative author and radio host Laura Ingraham warned.

There are individuals in the Intelligence Community who want to damage Trump. For good reason: Trump violates basic norms. These acts on the part of the Intelligence Community are not a violation of duty. These agencies do serve under the command of the president, but the oath they pledge to upheld is not one of loyalty to president; it is one of loyalty to the US Constitution. Intelligence agents have not merely the right but the duty to disobey orders, regulations, and even laws if doing so is, in their sober judgement, the best practical way to uphold the Constitution they pledged loyalty to.

This goes for more than just the Intelligence Community, by the way. All civil servants (as well as all members of the armed forces) take similar oaths. The wording of the oaths was deliberately chosen long ago, for the express reason of helping to incite precisely the sort of resistance from within which we are now seeing, should an enemy of a democratic republic ever take possession of the White House.

The “deep state” is very real, but far from being an unforeseen aberration on the body politic, it is a deliberately created check against the sort of situation we find ourselves in.

The part about the Obama administration is mostly baseless smoke-blowing. While it is true that there are many in the civil service who were hired during those years, the civil service has long been operated at arm’s length from the presidency. Moreover, the civil service is full of individuals who have been in it for many decades; there’s plenty of civil servants who were hired under Republican administrations.

For many Trump loyalists, the issue is not whether his presidency is messy and chaotic and dysfunctional. Many of them seemed resigned long ago to the fact that it would be. The more relevant question is whether they see anyone else who is equipped to change Washington in the way Mr. Trump promised he would.

None of the above should be construed to deny that many of the motives for voters to choose Trump are in fact valid. The Establishment has ignored the desires of many working-class people, for many decades. This is true for both political parties.

That anger will not vanish when Trump vanishes from the White House. Nor should it. It needs to be given a more fact-based and less hateful outlet by creating a left-wing populist movement. This may prove easier than many assume (witness how the Occupy movement emerged seemingly out of nowhere).

Trump supporters will feel plenty bitter and let down when their führer falls, but the vast majority of people have shockingly short political memories. After the anger dies down, many will become potentially receptive to alternate messages.

Any alliance the Left makes with the Establishment should therefore be a temporary one aimed at addressing the current crises the Trump presidency represents. If not, the anger will remain, searching for an outlet, and there will always be demagogues on the Right willing to exploit it.

Ultimately, the Establishment is untenable and cannot stand in its present state for long. If one desires to preserve basic freedoms, it is going to be necessary to move society leftwards.

Published at 21:31 on 17 May 2017

But it is encouraging to see how much the Trump regime has unraveled in the past week or so. Trump is a supreme threat, both to this country and the planet as a whole, and the sooner he goes, the better.

At this stage, it bears observing that everything publicly observable about Trump is consistent with the thesis that he is a Putin puppet. This includes the bombing of that Syrian air base (remember, he warned Russia first so they could move their planes out). When it’s topped off by first firing the FBI director for refusing to stop a Russia-related investigation, then the leaking of classified information to the Russians, things really smell fishy.

No this doesn’t prove anything, of course, but the Putin puppet thesis is the simplest explanation going, and even if ultimately proven false, the willing obstruction of justice is itself an impeachable offense.

Now we wait. Investigations take time, and while that happens it’s likely the “downward spiral” will continue. I do not necessarily think it will continue to happen at the rate it has this week, based on Trump’s campaign (he had his epically bad weeks, but then he’d have better ones, and even occasional times when he appeared mostly normal).

But, who knows, it just might. Trump is extremely thin-skinned and emotionally immature (on the latter point, he himself has admitted he’s basically the same person he was in the first grade), and leaks from the White House indicate he is taking recent events very poorly. Things may well have passed a tipping point wherein bad news has created an emotional breakdown which ensures further erratic behavior (and thus further bad news).

It also bears pointing out that the Trump regime may end sooner than most people think, if Trump chooses to resign in frustration. If the latter happens, expect no small amount of purile outbursts about how the evil system and ungrateful public have deprived a now unworthy country of its greatest president ever. According to Trump, everyone is potentially responsible for Trump’s problems save for Trump himself.

Who knows, it may even end in Trump’s suicide, particularly if damning enough news comes out during the investigations. The motivating factor would be an existential crisis caused by being forced to acknowledge that far from being the greatest ever, he’s a miserable failure the likes of which the presidency has never seen before.

Published at 21:27 on 19 April 2017

Probably not. He’s never tried to stage a coup d’etat in the name of the people (Chávez), and unlike Trump he does actually have some prior political experience.

But, really, “better than Chávez” or “better than Trump” are very low standards to set, and the guy just has a tawdry air around him. He’s certainly not shying away from using ethnic bigotry (against Germans) for his own personal gain. His promise to tax all income above above €400K is unrealistic (no such massive income redistribution can be successfully imposed by government fiat; it would take sustained social pressure from civil society over many years). His apparent admiration of both Castro and Chávez is both foolish and sickening (though not terribly surprising for an ex-Trotskyite).

On the latter fact, it’s important to consider that self-professed communist candidates that are freely elected have never turned out to be totalitarians, despite their delusions about those who share their political label in less free societies. Cyprus had an elected communist as head of government for a few years. On the local and regional level, parts of Italy and India have long had communist governments.

To sum up: no, he’s probably not another Hugo Chávez. He’s definitely not equivalently awful to Marie LePen. But he’s hardly the dawn of a great new era, either. Mostly, he sounds like a garden-variety faux-populist gasbag out to capitalize on popular discontent.

Published at 21:12 on 11 April 2017

I think this:

• Trump wants to be chummy with Russia. He (or others on his campaign) may well even have colluded with Russia.
• Fascists admire Putin and want to be chummy with Putin, too.
• Trump wants to pander to fascists.
• But Trump’s ideology is mostly about promoting Trump. He has no firm commitment to fascism. He just pandered to fascism because he needed their votes in the election.
• Fascists (and even fascist sympathizers) with significant policy experience are rare, meaning Trump has been compelled by circumstances to hire many conservatives.
• Conservatives are not fascists. Trump was never very popular with conservatives. They just learned to eventually accept Trump because at least he’d probably appoint judges they’d like.
• Moreover, Trump may be losing patience with the fascists. Bannon’s advice hasn’t exactly served him well. This doubtless explains Bannon’s recent demotion.

End result? An administration packed with conservatives who went into orbit when Assad launched that gas attack and automatically started denouncing it. Yes, I believe at least some of them started denouncing Assad before even consulting their boss on the matter. Reason: they wanted to strongarm their boss into seeing things (or at least professing to see them) their way.

But Trump still wanted to be chummy with Russia, so he told Russia first and launched a deliberately ineffectual attack. But it’s looking increasingly like that didn’t work. Putin paid for his lapdog, and he’s apparently quite upset that he hasn’t gotten what he paid for.

This is where things might start really getting interesting. For openers, if Putin does really have kompromat on Trump, he will almost certainly use it, given how upset he seems to be. Don’t expect that shoe to drop until after Tillerson leaves Moscow. If it doesn’t, the kompromat probably doesn’t exist.

On the subject of Putin and his wished-for lapdogs, expect Putin to be particularly livid at Assad for launching the attack and setting off the whole mess in the first place. The Russians are doubtless already searching for someone better to back in Syria, and as soon as they find him, Assad will be dumped.

The lesson here is that ruling elites are not the master manipulators that conspiracy theorists believe them to be. They hold great power, but they also work with limitations and imperfect circumstances in an unpredictable world.

Published at 22:30 on 9 April 2017

First, yes, Trump indeed told Russia about it first. I mention that not because there’s been any shortage of such mentions, but that they have, so far as I have been able to tell, mostly been one liberal blog citing another. My link is to a Time magazine article that quotes a Russian official by name confirming the notice.

Second, the runways were left alone. Add that to the point above, and it’s no surprise that that planes (which Russia and Russia’s ally Syria were able to move to a safe place thanks to the deliberate warning) used the (still intact) runways to launch sorties from.

Before closing I’ll point out that there is a bit of truth that came out from the White House, namely, that attacking the runways with missiles wouldn’t have accomplished much. No, it wouldn’t have. But that’s sort of beside the point I’m making, which was that a deliberately symbolic attack, with only limited military significance, was made. In other words, it was for show.

Published at 19:18 on 5 April 2017

I’ve been looking at the Go programming language recently, because (a) it’s started showing up a lot more in job descriptions, and (b) it combines the interesting attributes of both being compiled to machine language and being garbage-collected.

Unfortunately, it also falls victim to what I regard as an unfortunate fad amongst programming language designers in recent years: the decision that full, preemptive threading is something that programs don’t need and that some sort of ersatz (cooperative) concurrency is good enough.

Well, sorry, in my experience it’s just not. Maybe I’m atypically biased, because of my recent experience writing web crawlers, which have to parse pages as part of the job of finding new links to crawl. That’s a computationally complex task that in certain pathological cases can take indefinitely long. The solution is to run the parsing in a thread, and to kill that thread and proclaim the page unusable if it fails to parse in a reasonable amount of time.

This only works with true preemptive threading. The parsing is taking place in some third-party library that’s stuck in a loop someplace. I don’t want to recode the parsing library and clutter it up with dozens of yield statements. I shouldn’t have to recode it. But absent genuine threads, there is no alternative.

Maybe I’m being unfair here; maybe my experience with concurrency is highly unrepresentative. I don’t know, exactly. I can’t imagine I’m the only person who’s tried to make calls into a computationally complex library routine from a multithreaded program. So color me skeptical about the whole “ersatz threads are good enough” mindset.

I’ll note that C# has both full preemptive threading and the ability to be compiled down to machine code (by default, it’s just byte code, but there is what the C# world calls “ahead of time” compilation, which is just what I described). And C# is not a Microsoft-only thing; there’s Mono.

Published at 14:36 on 9 March 2017

Introduction

I’m working on my on-again, off-again digital clock project, and one thing I learned before I broke off before is that the number and density of connections made soldering very impractical. So wire-wrapping it was. Some basic points:

1. Wire-wrapping is spendy. Just getting a batch of sockets, a spool of wire, and an entry-level tool cost me around $100.
2. Because of that, I can’t consider it worthwhile for less-ambitious (read: less complex) projects.
3. You’re on your own, basically. There’s no instructions with the tool I ordered. I presume that’s typical for most tools.
4. There’s an incredible variety of tools and wires out there.

So, with all that, here’s what I’ve learned so far.

Get a Less-Expensive Tool

Unless you’re really going to get into wire-wrapping, don’t get one of those gun tools. The base price is spendy enough, and they’re even more spendy than that! The gun tools (both electric and hand-powered) require both a bit and a collar, and both of those items are costly as well. Expect to spend $200 to $300 or more just to get a tool capable of making connections. Ouch!

Instead, opt for a “screwdriver” type tool. I’d recommend getting one made by a well-known name brand, because you are going to be making hundreds of connections on the typical project, given the size and complexity needed to make wire-wrapping make sense.

Use 30 Gauge Wire

Specifically, 30-gauge, Kynar-insulated, silver-plated wire. It’s basically the standard. (Just to make it interesting, they sometimes call Kynar by other names: PVDF, polyvinylidene fluoride, or polyvinylidene difluoride.)

Get the Right Tool

The tool you need is governed by both the wire gauge and the style of wrapping you’ll do. You already know the gauge; the wrapping style I’d recommend is the “modified” style that involves wrapping about a turn of insulated wire around the terminal posts before the bare wire starts. This provides a degree of strain relief, which minimizes the chance of things breaking while you wire your project.

Taken together, the right tool is the Jonard WSU-30M. It’s not much larger than a small screwdriver and costs over $30. Cheaper than the guns by far, but still, ouch! It’s a name-brand tool, and it’s well-known enough that there’s (incomplete, but still better than no) instructions for using it on the web.

An added plus is that the WSU-30M can remove connections as well as make them, so you don’t have to order a separate removing tool. The latter is a must, as Murphy’s Law says you will sooner or later make a wrong connection.

How to Use the Tool

There’s some instructions here. Alas, they’re missing one of the most important things: how much wire to use to account for wrapping and slack between two terminals. After some frustration, I arrived at the distance plus 7 cm (sorry, I’m not going to convert that to inches; I prefer working in metric because the math is easier).

Published at 19:59 on 8 March 2017

As I am wont to do at times, I’m delving into a subject deeply for no apparent reason other than a friend mentioned it and it sparked my interest to read further on it. The subject in this case is the Chilean Revolution of 1970-1973 that was brutally cut short by a US-supported coup d’etat against the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende.

I’m not quite old enough to qualify as “old” yet, but this still resonates with me:

“[T]here is no generation gap–there are young old people and old young people, and I place myself in the latter category.” — Salvador Allende

This comes from a little-known (in the US) speech that Allende gave at a university in Mexico:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

 

Published at 08:14 on 4 March 2017

And really, could anyone doubt that it wouldn’t?

That speech that some foolishly gushed over looked good only in comparison to the general standard of awfulness that Trump has set. If any other president had uttered it, proposals like the Naziesque one to track and publicize immigrant crimes would have inspired the horror and revulsion they deserve.

Trump has done that before: His “I am your voice” acceptance speech was actually far better than his norm, too. He’s given up tweeting before, too. Neither has lasted. The leopard has proven time and time again that he cannot change his spots.

Published at 12:28 on 26 February 2017

They managed to successfully ram through a Clintonite to be the next head of their party. This shows that enough Democrats are either terminally clueless and cannot understand the mechanics of the Trump victory, or terminally craven and think risking a further slide into fascism is a price worth paying for continuing to appease the oligarchs.

Either way, I have no stomach for working closer with those bastards. Yes, I realize that there’s an argument to be made for perseverance, one that is basically not refutable (since it depends so much on unknowable future events). It’s just that the chance seems so remote to me, and the need seems so profound for more revolutionary politics, that I cannot in good conscience squander my precious life energy on working within the Democratic Party.

It bears revisiting the point that the Establishment left does not exist to liberate people from capitalism; it seeks to placate people with reforms so that they don’t get uppity and threaten the rule of the elites. As such, the reason that Ellison wasn’t voted in is that he serves no useful purpose to the Establishment. There simply isn’t enough viable threat of social revolution to sufficiently motivate serious attempts at reformism at the present.

So the conflict between following my heart and choosing the most practical route turns out to be illusory; focusing on radical politics is the most practical route.