Blackcap Blog

Published at 16:04 on 30 June 2019

It mostly misses the point. Yes, he’s not getting much in return for legitimizing one of the world’s worst (if not the world’s worst) dictators. Consider the alternative with Trump: it would be war. And considering that North Korea has nukes, the consequences of that would be truly horrific.

So, while the whole escapade is pretty much everything its detractors say, it’s still the best possible outcome one logically could expect, given who occupies the office of the presidency.

Published at 08:16 on 28 June 2019

First, it was hard to keep all the candidates straight (insert joke about one of them not being straight in the first place). There were twenty of them, fercrissakes. Twenty.

Second, Biden did better than I expected. A huge part of that was this:

That’s right: Biden actually talked about Trump less than Sanders did. He seems to be realizing that it’s not enough to be the Not Trump candidate; you have to offer positive reasons to vote for you.

Third, Elizabeth Warren continued to come off as unelectable. Yes, she has a plan for just about everything. It’s not her plans so much as her style; like it or not, logic plays second fiddle to emotion when it comes to winning elections. I wish it weren’t that way, too, but sadly that’s the way it is.

Fourth, Buttigieg came across as having the most smooth and carefully-chosen answers. If he weren’t so young and inexperienced, he’d be a shoo-in. Alas, he is so young and inexperienced.

It all leaves me feeling somewhat pessimistic, until I realize that, like it or not, Biden is in the lead and doesn’t seem to be doing the awful job I feared he might.

Published at 08:54 on 20 June 2019

US Might be in the Wrong

Consider what happened in 2016. The Navy apparently has a policy of running right up to the very edge of Iran’s marine borders, and sometimes messes up and strays across them. If the latter happens, Iran is completely within its right under international law to deal with the intruders, like it or not.

Beware of Bolton

He’s a first-class, grade A, number one warmonger. Trump probably doesn’t want war with Iran but Bolton probably does.

This is Only to be Expected

1. Trump is dishonest, incompetent, and incoherent; he’s the last sort of leader anyone would want to manage a war. Iran knows this.
2. Trump has done virtually everything within his power to alienate Europe from the USA, which further weakens the US’s hand in any conflict (fewer allies). Iran knows this, too.
3. Tearing up the Iran nuclear deal taught Iran that deals with the West are pointless exercises.
4. Not attacking North Korea (which had nukes even then) after 9/11, while attacking Iraq (which didn’t), taught Iran that possessing a nuclear deterrent is a good idea.

Published at 10:17 on 19 June 2019

First, yes, they are by any reasonable definition “concentration camps.” A concentration camp is any prison camp, usually a makeshift of flimsy one, in which people are detained en masse, often in substandard conditions, for an indefinite period time, and without any sort of formal process of criminal conviction. A concentration camp is not necessarily an extermination camp. Germany built its first concentration camp, Dachau, shortly after Hitler took power. It wasn’t until approximately eight years later that the wholesale slaughter began.

Second, the whole brouhaha over AOC’s (factual) claim shows what a shrewd politician and effective propagandist AOC is. In making her claim, she has successfully managed to shift the public dialogue to talking about the camps. Every time a Trumpist snowflake takes umbrage over AOC’s politically incorrect language violating his safe space, its point is being served: the camps are being talked about.

Published at 12:00 on 18 June 2019

It’s been obvious for some time that the US empire is on the decline, and the recent announcement by Facebook of the Libre cryptocurrency underscores how the belief in such decline is no longer restricted to those on the political margins.

There’s the proximate reasons being offered, such as Facebook’s desire to diversify its revenue stream, but the bigger one is that Facebook believes there will soon be a demand for a cryptocurrency. (Else, they would have chosen some other lightly-exploited field to venture into.)

The most logical explanation for why such a demand would materialize is a loss of faith in the US dollar. In turn, that’s not likely unless there is a widespread loss of faith in the empire which created and backs up that currency.

Published at 07:38 on 12 June 2019

The Democrats have so far refused to launch impeachment proceedings against Trump or Barr, despite multiple incidents of impeachable conduct by both. What lesson does any bully take when his victims refuse to stand up for themselves? The obvious one: bullying works.

Past history has demonstrated that in all likelihood the Democrats will cave to Barr, so why shouldn’t Barr act like this? Just because it’s nice? It is to laugh.

Published at 07:40 on 21 May 2019

Her refusal to appear on Fox News has demonstrated that her lapse of judgement in letting Trump troll her on the Pocahantas issue is not a one-off.

Facts do not care about your feelings, Ms. Warren. Like it or not (and, like most on the left, I most assuredly do not), Fox News is the No. 1 most-watched news channel in the USA.

Only a fool too incompetent to campaign properly would turn down a chance to market her platform to an audience that size. Especially when you consider the not-insignificant number of voters who voted for Obama twice (and/or for Sanders once in the primary), and decided to either sit the 2016 general election out or vote for Trump. There are, in short, persuadable viewers on Fox News; Ms. Warren decided to write them off.

This is not a center versus left thing, either. Both Sanders and Buttigieg got it, and decided to accept Fox News’ invitations despite their personal dislikes of that network’s overall politics.

It is also not purely campaign realpolitik. If Warren’s gut reactions get the best of her when it comes to Trump’s trolling or Fox News’ editorial record, odds are gut reactions will get the best of her as president when she has to quickly respond to crises. That’s the last thing we need.

Buh-bye, Schoolmarm.

Published at 11:37 on 17 May 2019

So, I recently modified two existing software tools a bit and connected them together with a shell script to make a tool to extract individual TrueType fonts (.TTF files) from a TrueType font collection (.TTC file).

And the Property Rights Über Alles crowd immediately took offense, because this is a tool for “piracy.” Purportedly, simply because I am extracting files from what amounts to an archive I am creating an unauthorized derivative work, in violation of the copyright on the fonts.

I say bullshit. The fonts were in TrueType format before my extractor operates on them, and they are in TrueType format after it does. All that changes is what was a single file becomes multiple individual files. That’s it.

Really, now: If this “violates” the “terms of the license,” then you can’t even install software (including fonts) legally in the first place. Because how do installers work? By extracting files from archives, that’s how!

On top of that, just how are glyphs rendered? By reading the information in font files, copying it into memory, and doubtless in many cases normalizing it into a standard form in the case of software that supports multiple font file formats. That, too, is the dreaded and forbidden act of extraction. Worse yet, it is followed by the modification of the extracted data, producing an unauthorized derivative work (according to the property rights über alles crowd)!

It gets worse: the internal coordinate system in font files has nothing to do with the coordinate system on a screen or a printed page. Multiple scaling (multiplication) and offset (addition) steps must be performed in order to render text at the desired size and place. And if you print the text, or render it into a PDF, yet more transformations are performed on that raw data. And I haven’t even gotten into all the transformations that must happen if you send your text to a printer.

The biggest difference really is, the files from my extractor linger indefinitely on the filesystem, instead of being fleeting data in main memory somewhere. Even that’s not completely unique to my case, however: PDF documents contain stored fonts in a persistent and transformed form.

PDF documents must contain font data, in order to serve their intended purpose of being “softcopy hardcopy” that remains true to their intended format everywhere they go. If they didn’t have embedded fonts, they would fail in this purpose on any computer that didn’t have the needed fonts present. The fonts in PDF documents are transformed both to save on space, and to limit the utility of the embedded fonts for piracy.

As in the case of PDF documents, my extracted font files shouldn’t matter, and I doubt it does. Unless I distribute the extracted fonts (and I don’t plan to), they are private, internal data used by a few applications on my computer, nothing more.

That so many people are apparently incapable of seeing this just points to how divorced from reality the status quo has gotten when it comes to property rights.

Published at 10:56 on 12 May 2019

About a year ago, I made a post which claimed that many of the voters labeled “moderates” do not in fact have any strong ideological commitment to moderation or any other political principle. They are what I labeled nonideological pragmatists, willing to entertain ideas from across the political spectrum, provided they are presented in a convincing way.

Today, I ran across a Twitter thread by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez which anecdotally illustrates this point.

Published at 15:45 on 6 May 2019

In the least surprising news development since the Sun rose at the forecast time this morning, it turns out that Alexa and Siri are, in fact, home eavesdropping devices.

George Orwell was an optimist. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, everyone had a telescreen in their home because the government forced them to. In today’s USA, people agree to it because advertisers have convinced them it’s personally convenient.