Blackcap Blog

Published at 12:37 on 10 June 2013

Seeing the movie Two Lives brought that home. We now know a lot about what evil things various Soviet Bloc secret police agencies did, for the simple reason that the regimes they served vanished, and the replacement regimes have not been interested in preserving the secrets of their predecessors.

So far as the misdeeds of various Western secret police agencies (and, be honest now, that’s what they are: secret police don’t stop being secret police just because they serve ideologically convenient regimes), we don’t know vastly more than we did at the height of the Cold War. Sure, there’s been a leak or two here and there, but no vast revelations on the scale of the Stasi archives falling into the hands of its opponents.

Any attempts to document said misdeeds will therefore be biased towards making the Soviet side look bad (not that that’s particularly hard to do). Circumstances dictate it: there’s just not much factual material to work with when it comes to the Western side. It cannot really be otherwise until, say, the MI6 archives suffer a fate corresponding to the one the Stasi archives suffered.

All we can do is guess, based on the observed overt behavior of both sides’ governments. In brief that guess is “the Western intelligence agencies were less evil than their Soviet Bloc counterparts, but they were still plenty evil.” The USA, after all, backed some thoroughly vile Third World regimes, even though its record in Europe is indeed much better than the Soviet Union’s. In other words, better overall, but still plenty evil.

Published at 13:17 on 24 May 2013

A major bridge collapsed not far to the north, and already some sources are trumpeting how the trucking company responsible for the damage was given a permit by the State.

Said permit is mostly irrelevant. The load being carried was oversize, and it is the responsibility of the carrier of an oversize load to ensure it can clear all obstacles along the route.

The clearance on the damaged bridge was not posted, because it doesn’t have to be posted. The minimum clearance was 14’6″ on the right side of the right lane. By law, clearances only need to be posted if they’re under 14′. The load was thus oversize at least in part because it was over 14 feet in height and signage alone could not be relied upon to ensure the load cleared. Interestingly, the span is high enough in the center that the load could have cleared, had the truck taken the left lane and used it while crossing the bridge.

Pilot vehicles come equipped with poles which are extended to the maximum height of the overheight load they are escorting. At least one witness says he saw the pilot vehicle’s poles hit the right side of the bridge girder before the load made impact. Alas, the load was apparently following the pilot too closely to be able to stop or change lanes in response to the pole hitting the bridge.

In short, it seems pretty damn obvious who’s at fault for this, and it’s not the state DOT for issuing a permit.

Published at 09:48 on 10 May 2013

Really, now, if I’d want to make a gun myself why would I spend over $1000 on a 3D printer and spend a week fighting with software configuration to print a flimsy plastic gun that self-destructs after a single shot, when for far less money I could build a good old-fashioned zip gun which is both safer and more effective?

Maybe that subject should really read “Liberals Wetting Pants over a Non-Threat after Libertarians Hype a Non-Development”, since it’s as silly to hyperventilate about this gun being a threat as it is to hyperventilate about it being a radical expansion of the right to keep and bear arms.

The Register nails it on this one.

Published at 18:50 on 22 April 2013

I took a quick ride down to one of my favorite spots in the Seattle park system this evening, to the Arboretum where Foster Island ends and Union Bay begins.

Alas, it won’t stay as nice as it currently is for much longer. Seattle has acquiesced to the tripling of the width of the freeway they made the mistake of allowing to be built through that park in the first place. Naturally, the neighborhood of upscale homes immediately adjacent will have an expensive tunnel built to conduct the freeway under it. (Why preserve public amenities when there is private wealth to pander to?)

That is the sort of thing I am very glad to be bidding farewell to.

Published at 07:59 on 20 April 2013

The Obama Administration is denying the Boston bombing suspect his civil rights.

As Glenn Greenwald points out, this is not a surprise. Obama’s poor record on human rights is the main reason I voted for a third party candidate in the past presidential election.

And spare me the rhetoric about how evil those two brothers were as an excuse. Sure they were evil. So were Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and any number of other violent criminals that come to mind. All of whom were successfully prosecuted without having to ignore the Constitution.

Published at 11:54 on 8 April 2013

I received the following in the mail a few weeks ago:

(Click to enlarge; the red box was added by yours truly for emphasis, of course.)

Published at 08:30 on 9 March 2013

I guess I’ve become jaded by political hypocrisy, because I find it more amusing than depressing or infuriating that there’s so many double standards in the Establishment media’s summing up of his legacy.

The Guardian had a great editorial the day after he passed away, which unfortunately seems to have been pulled from their web site. The gist of it was that most of the bad stuff being repeated about Chávez is indeed both true and bad stuff, but that his overall legacy must be balanced against the significant gains the least fortunate have made during his regime, and that the economic difficulties Venezuela has been experiencing over the past few years are being greatly exaggerated by one-sided reporting.

Like most resource-rich Third World nations, Venezuela has (still has, despite the progress of the past 15 years or so) an absolutely staggering amount of inequality. This is sadly not unique to Venezuela. Natural resource wealth in the developing world tends to end up concentrated in a few hands, with the vast majority sharing in little or none of it.

None of this justifies Chávez’ authoritarianism, of course, but neither does the authoritarianism invalidate the progress which has been made. And Chávez’ authoritarianism was a far more mild variety than that which existed in Chile under Pinochet or in Argentina during their military dictatorship, to pick just two examples of many one can find in Latin America.

If the coup against him in 2002 — backed by the US — had succeeded, all available past historical evidence indicates that human rights would have been vastly worse under the resulting right-wing dictatorship.

Published at 20:31 on 25 February 2013

Jeez, after the last one later proved itself to be fake, you think the chattering classes might learn. Apparently not.

Paging Dr. Aesop on Line Three.

 

Published at 08:19 on 20 February 2013

NPR had yet another example this morning: they reported how British PM David Cameron became the first PM to visit the site of the Amritsar Massacre, then added parenthetically that his visit fell short of issuing an apology.

I doubt the same spin would be put on a Japanese PM visiting a Pearl Harbor memorial. Instead, it would doubtless be “Japanese leadership still refuses to issue formal apology.” As it should be, in fact: the fact that nationalism leads its adherents to overlook or minimize their own side’s atrocities is something that should be exposed whenever it happens.

Given that’s how nationalism operates, then, it’s particularly important to focus on what one might be overlooking about one’s own country’s past. Keep that in mind you hear the next preachy story condescendingly talking about the Japanese refusal to fully face what their side did during World War II. While the story is valid, the condescension is not: just consider the Wounded Knee massacre.

Published at 20:04 on 18 February 2013

Today I had a chance to drive on Highway 9 north of Arlington. The first time I drove that stretch of road, about 25 years ago, I was shocked at how quickly it changes character. Between Arlington and the Seattle suburbs, it was a wide, straight 2-lane highway with paved shoulders.

Past Arlington, it was like a different road altogether. The road abruptly became not much more than 20 feet wide as it started climbing into the foothills. The speed limit dropped from 55 to 35. Many curves were far slower than that. Bridges were typically wooden and single-laned. The traffic volume also dropped to practically nothing at about the point the road changed character.

Well, it’s still not as straight and fast there as it is south of Arlington, but it’s been widened to some degree; it’s probably more like 22 or 24 feet now. There’s been a depressing amount of suburban development in those hills (well, two subdivisions, but that alone is depressing considering how rural it used to be).

But there’s still a 10 mile stretch that’s as narrow and windy as it ever was, and I was floored when I discovered that the last of the one-lane bridges was still there. This time, I had to wait for traffic coming the other way (I don’t think I ever had to way back when; there was almost no traffic on that stretch then).

It’s not going to last, however. Not that I’m surprised.

What really frosts me is that the need for widening and straightening on that stretch of highway is driven by the suburbanization. The logging-road-with-a-layer-of-blacktop that was the old highway had plenty of extra capacity to handle the odd logging truck or weekend vacationer from the city. If the land had stayed rural, that old road would still have no trouble handling the little traffic using it.

Being a state highway, it is my taxes which are helping to pay for those upgrades. If the full cost was charged back to those moving to the remote subdivisions above Clear Lake, I doubt those subdivisions would have happened: the fees would have rendered them economically uncompetitive.

It puts the lie to the capitalist individualist rhetoric against growth management laws: even if you just focus on economics and ignore the environmental costs of sprawl, it’s not just a matter of a freely-chosen set of economic transactions between landowners, builders, and home-buyers. If those homes had been built up against existing developed land in Burlington or Arlington, it would have taken much less (dozens of miles less, in fact) road building to serve them, and the road-building would have been done mostly at the municipal level, paid for by local property taxes.