Blackcap Blog

Published at 18:36 on 9 November 2016

That’s truly frightening. No disagreement there.

But it’s not the prime reason why all Trump voters supported him. He attracted the votes of a many less-educated Whites that voted for Obama. Voted for, bought the message of hope, only to find out that hope was mostly hype. And, when faced with an even more openly pro-Establishment Democrat candidate, decided to cast a big “fuck you” vote for Trump.

Some “racists;” they ignored race and voted for the first non-white presidential candidate in history… many of them twice!

To write all Trump voters as nothing more than “deplorable” is to make a grave error. Even Hillary didn’t do that. Her quote was:

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?”

Who knows how accurate her 50% estimate was, but she was spot-on in her remark that only some but not all Trump voters qualify for the “deplorable” label.

Published at 18:25 on 9 November 2016

When he wrote this. Not that it would happen; as I’ve mentioned earlier, he didn’t actually say it would happen. Only that it might. And it did. Pretty much exactly as Moore said it would.

And today when he wrote this. The Republicans had a free-for-all primary. The candidate the talking heads said was unwinnable proved quite winnable, all the way to the White House. The Democrats had a more controlled process, and it wasn’t just controlled: Democratic voters tried to be “responsible,” paid more attention to the bullshit Establishment ideas of electability, and elected… a pro-Establishment dud of a candidate.

Had Bernie prevailed, there’s a very good chance we’d be talking about president-elect Sanders right now.

Postscript. Establishment pundits were wrong about Obama, too. In 2008 they were yammering on about how the “Bradley effect” (named after a successful Los Angeles mayor and failed California gubernatorial candidate) made Obama unelectable and that Hillary was the only responsible choice for Democrats.

Published at 07:33 on 9 November 2016

First off, not the same as German or Italian fascism. Those movements happened against the background of a growing tide of left-wing sentiment that worried the capitalist class and the traditional conservatives to the point they believed it was worth supporting fascism (in part under the mistaken belief they could control it). There is no strong socialist or anarchist movement in the USA; therefore, American fascism is happening under a different set of historical and political circumstances.

That said, these are still very dangerous and very uncertain times. Some things to keep an eye on:

Armed Private Militias

Both Hitler (SA) and Mussolini (Blackshirts) had organized paramilitaries acting under their command. Those militias played a key role in those leaders rapidly acquiring dictatorial powers. The right-wing militia movements in the USA are not centralized and under Trump’s official control. For many of their members, Trump wasn’t even their first choice of a Republican candidate. Therefore any sort of automatic widespread allegiance is far from a given.

Pay attention if Trump starts appealing to such groups directly in his speeches. Even an informal chain of command would be very worrisome.

Radical Islamic Terrorism

It’s here, it’s part of the world, and it’s not going away. There’s really nothing that can be done to absolutely prevent terror attacks from happening, so expect occasional attacks to continue. Such attacks could well serve as pretexts for “temporary” emergency measures to be enacted. In this way, terrorism could help serve as a replacement for the missing left-wing militancy.

Furthermore, the leopard will not be able to change his spots. Trump will continue to open his mouth and stay stupid and inflammatory things. And it may well go beyond mere words. If Muslims start getting singled out for officially mandated discriminatory treatment, the motives for terrorism will be radically increased.

The Business Class

There is no powerful socialist, anarchist, or labor movement for the business class to want to crush. This removes an aspect of utility for Trump to them. Moreover, Trump’s anti-globalization and anti-immigrant stance threatens their profit maximization. Finally, the markets like certainty, and Trump represents anything but certainty. So there’s definite room for a wedge to be driven between Trump and the business class.

On the other hand, there is still some utility in Trump to the business class, because he also and paradoxically promises deregulation. Hitler made a bunch of left-wing proposals to seduce the working-class vote, then turned around and stabbed the working class in the back once he got power. Trump’s the biggest liar in the campaign, so he could easily have just been lying about being anti-NAFTA and anti-TPP. Time will soon tell on the latter.

Urban Unrest

Like Islamic terrorism, it’s here, it’s part of the world, and it’s not going away. Plus, the biggest spark for urban riots is and has always been the brutality of local police officers. The Federal government has very little to do with local government agencies, so even if Trump wanted to fire all bad cops (and had a magic way of smoking them out), he would not be able to. “Keeping America safe from riots” is is another potential motive for “temporary” emergency measures. (And recall what I said earlier about the leopard not being able to change his spots.)

Published at 20:02 on 8 November 2016

She’s probably going to win Michigan. She’s trailing, but not by much and the votes in Wayne County (i.e. Detroit) are being counted slowly, there’s a lot of them, and Detroit is of course heavily Democratic.

In Wisconsin, she’s losing by a bigger margin, and Milwaukee County counted its votes faster than the norm for the state. I don’t see a way for her to make up her deficit there, and if she loses Wisconsin, she loses the election.

She could pull a rabbit out of her hat and make up for Wisconsin by winning Arizona, but odds strongly disfavor that on an evening where it’s become clear that the polls underestimated Trump’s strength.

I wrote long ago that the lesson in the Bush Regime getting away with lying its way into an Iraq war (and torture, and extrajudicial executions) was that the rule of law was now irrelevant in the United States, and the lesson in that was that leaders can ignore democratic norms and get away with it.

I wrote less long ago that Hillary’s tone deaf pandering to the Establishment wing of her party could end up proving very costly to her.

Looks like both predictions have just been proven all too correct. Though I will admit that going into this evening I expected Hillary to win despite them.

Personally, this really sucks for me, since the capitalist class doesn’t like Trump, either. That means they will probably have self-fulfilling expectations that will cause a recession. And I’m currently between jobs.

Published at 19:09 on 8 November 2016

She’s almost certainly lost Florida, though none of the major media outlets have to my knowledge been willing to call it yet. And she’s probably going to lose Ohio, too.

She’s narrowly winning in Virginia, and will probably widen that lead a bit given that most uncounted Virginia votes are in the Washington, DC suburbs. But it wasn’t forecast to be close there at all, and it is. Given that, she’s almost certainly going to lose states that only occasionally swing Democratic, like North Carolina.

That means she has to carry Michigan and Wisconsin, or she’s fucked. Who would have thought Michigan would be a key swing state?

Published at 15:36 on 31 October 2016

I spend altogether too much time on You Tube and when I ran across a channel called The Texas Snake Hunter, naturally I thought the worst. Imagine my pleasant surprise when I discovered it’s exactly the opposite sort of channel I feared it was.

The truth about rattlesnakes is exactly as the linked video shows: they are by nature shy and unaggressive to humans. They are deadly hunters of rodents, but what is the point of a rattlesnake biting a human? That venom is metabolically very expensive to purchase, and a human (even if it dies from the bite, and odds are it won’t, most snake bites are not fatal) is way too large for even the largest rattler to swallow.

Biting and envenomating only makes sense for a snake (a) if the creature being bitten is small enough to be swallowed after it dies, or (b) as a last resort defense measure. As to (b) the snake is much better off if it can slither away and escape without biting; it keeps its precious venom and can use it to invest in a nutritious meal to further its growth.

That’s why rattlesnakes evolved rattles in the first place: to warn away large animals that might trample them before a situation degrades to the point where a bite in self-defense becomes necessary for survival.

I’ve been in rattlesnake country many times, and doubtless passed within feet of them dozens of times without my even noticing them. I’ve only actually seen a wild rattlesnake twice. Both times the snake was completely unaggressive and just wanted to be left alone.

Naturally I obliged, and thus was in no danger. The two most common causes of snake bite are:

1. Person being bitten doesn’t even notice the snake and steps on it.
2. Person being bitten wants the snake to act stereotypically (coiling up, preparing to strike), starts teasing it to that end, and ends up getting more than he bargained for.

Published at 10:19 on 25 October 2016

Von Mises is one of the political economists the “libertarian” right is particularly fond of. They often point to his anti-fascist sayings in an attempt to refute any criticism that his ideas pose a right-wing threat to freedom.

Well, it turns out those sayings are mostly a case of selective editing and after-the-fact buyer’s remorse. Back when fascism was a shiny new thing, von Mises was a happy buyer. That doesn’t mean he was himself a fascist, just that like many on the non-fascist right he believed fascism would prove to be a temporarily useful iron fist with which to smash labor unions, socialists, communists, and anarchists.

He believed that fascism would prove self-limiting and thus ultimately refrain from pursuing the many of the other destructive and dangerous things it advocated. The end result would be a (in his eyes) beneficial purging of social elements he found to be distasteful and which threatened the power and ascendancy of his beloved capitalist ruling elite.

In that, his views were proven to be even more dangerously naïve than the standard view of most conservative enablers of fascism, which was that the non-fascist right would somehow be able to control and limit the the fascists once the latter gained power.

Published at 10:05 on 21 October 2016

ACARS is a digital protocol used by aircraft to transmit messages. It’s been around since the late 1970’s and is decodable using nothing but a sound card and the right software. But, after helping a friend (a technologically-sophisticated one; like me, he has a ham license) who has previously had no luck decoding the messages, it’s clear there’s some tricks involved.

• Don’t use squelch. Squelch will chop off the first tiny fraction of information in a packet, causing decoding errors (typically, messages simply won’t decode). There’s no need to use squelch, anyhow. Squelch exists to prevent humans from being annoyed by listening to the background noise when a frequency is not in use. Computers don’t care about being forced to analyze static, and can easily distinguish between static and an ACARS packet.
• Use a wide bandwidth. A big part of my friend’s problem was that he was using the default AM bandwidth on his communications receiver, which was apparently too narrow. I have myself tried using both the wide and narrow filters on my receiver; only the wide one works. ACARS is apparently a wide-bandwidth mode, and a narrow filter throws away critical information needed to decode a message.
• If using ACARSD, configuration is critical. ACARSD is the most popular freeware package for decoding ACARS. Alas, it’s not exactly user-friendly. To install it you must first configure the installer and manually tell it to create the directories it needs. To configure it you must use a separate program that (re)writes the necessary .INI file. Moreover, that program doesn’t always default to reasonable values as advertised. It claims ACARSD will use the default sound card if none is specified. I found it necessary to explicitly specify the sound card for the default one to be used on my friend’s computer.

Published at 15:07 on 19 October 2016

Just by chance I met him as he disembarked from the ferry, and he shared the news with me. The short story he gave (it had to be short, as the ferry loaded soon thereafter) is that hs was demoted, saw that as completely unacceptable, and walked out the door for good.

My educated guess is that he was demoted for failing to achieve the impossible: bringing some of the least-maintainable code I have ever seen up to snuff. The only way to fix its problems is a complete rewrite, which is something that may in fact not be possible given the resources available to the firm in question. At any rate, it’s something that firm is unwilling to seriously entertain. The latter two facts were some of the things that was playing through my mind when deciding it was time to part ways myself.

The upshot of this news is that things would have gotten significantly worse had I decided to stick it out (he’s definitely one of the best people I’ve reported to, odds are the next guy wouldn’t be so good, plus morale and continuity would have suffered). I’d probably either be quitting myself of soon be asked to leave under that alternate scenario. In turn that would have put me in pretty much the same scenario I am now, but without the benefits of being able to make that late-season trip to Wyoming.

It all goes to show that honesty (with oneself as well as others) is almost always the best policy. Buying into a lie that there was a future in the work I was doing there would have simply made me worse off.

Published at 10:26 on 19 October 2016

Taleo is a software-as-a-service (SAAS) package that some business’s personal departments use. As the title of this post implies, it sucks. I’m hardly alone in having this opinion, either. Just type “Taleo sucks” into your search engine and see.

I used to put up with its suckiness (clunky menus, duplicated data, bad browser compatibility, excessive use of crap Javascript, inability to view job description and application form at the same time, etc.) in the name of doing a more diligent job search. No more; if a link (or redirection) to Taleo happens during an application process, it’s game over.

I’m hardly alone in having this policy, either; if you read some of the hits you got in your search engine exercise above, you’ll find that others act as I do.

What tipped the balance for me was the realization, at the start of this current job search, that I have never received as much as a preliminary phone screen from any of the dozens of firms I put up with Taleo to apply for jobs at. That’s right, never. Not once. It’s as if my data vanish into a black hole.

My theory is that Taleo sucks not only for the applicant, but also for the person on the other end. Why shouldn’t it? Bad design is generally not confined to just one or two places in a software system; if it exists, it tends to be pervasive. As such, personnel departments also generally avoid using it. Thus, the way to land a job at a Taleo-using company is via some other channel.

But why should I? By the virtue of choosing Taleo, they’ve demonstrated their organizational incompetence by choosing to waste money on a demonstrably bad product. And I have no interest in working for incompetent organizations.