Blackcap Blog

Published at 09:02 on 13 October 2013

Shut down the government, but proclaim perks like your gym and your catered meals to be “essential” and don’t shut them down. Because obviously, the services you as a Congress critter use daily must by definition be more important than those used by the mere peasants.

Really, every support employee used by Congress should be furloughed. That means the secretaries and the janitors as well as the chefs and personal trainers at the gym. Everyone but the Capitol police — and I’m being overly generous there. But I figured I’d make my proposal truly modest, just to underscore how deep the hypocrisy of the ruling elite runs.

Let their phones go unanswered. Let their bathrooms get dirty until the Congresscritters themselves have to open up the janitor’s closet and start having to unclog and clean their own toilets.

You want to shut down “non-essential” public services? Fine. Complementary gym memberships, free catered meals, personal secretaries, and maid service are not “essential”. Most of the USA gets by just fine without any of those services, in fact.

Published at 14:59 on 11 October 2013

So, there’s this new option available where I work called a “Health Savings Account”. The one offered by my employer is actually a very generous plan. And it sucks less abjectly than the ironically named “flexible” accounts, which you have to use within a calendar year or lose, forever.

But, there’s still a whopper of a catch. In this case, it’s called “You must save your receipts. Every last one. For seven long years.”

Good heavens, I can’t even keep one week’s worth of notes on a project straight. I could not fathom what would be required to care for hundreds or thousands of slips of paper for seven long years.

And note that these aren’t pieces of letter-sized paper one gets delivered by mail; they are randomly-sized small slips that get handed to you at the pharmacy or the clinic, ones that you must not, ever, leave in your pockets when doing the laundry. You must not let one fall out of your wallet unnoticed, ever. You must not forget and leave one on the sales counter. You must not toss one in a sidewalk waste-basket by mistake. You must not leave it in the bag then toss the bag in the recycle bin. Ever. Or woe unto you if you are audited.

Obviously, there’s people in the world who are intrinsically organized. My parents, for one. When they work on a big project, every item on the desk is at a neat 90-degree angle with respect to the other items and in order, always. It’s just the way they’re wired.

It’s also just not the way I am wired. Even if I make conscious effort to organize my things during a project, within a minute or two after said effort is ended, a significant degree of chaos and disorder will have emerged. It doesn’t bug me; in fact, I never even try to achieve strict desktop order anymore. It’s just not the way I work.

Sure, there needs to be greater cost control in the medical establishment, but I’d much rather get it like, say, the Canadians do, by having a Medicare card that I can just use, with other people (you know, the intrinsically organized types) being paid to professionally do all the receipt-tallying minutia that I am personally so ill-suited to do.

And I don’t think I am the only one. Really, now, saving every last medical receipt? For seven years? This is someone’s idea of “reform?” Seriously?

Published at 08:05 on 6 October 2013

It turns out that the NSA are indeed doing the sort of efforts to compromise entry and exit nodes and do time-based analysis (amongst other attacks) that I hypothesized about. However, it seems they are having less success than I believed they would have.

Published at 18:41 on 22 September 2013

It happened again last week. One of my co-workers — this time, one of the smartest people in the company, in fact, though most everyone where I work is above average in intelligence — was in the basement garage retrieving his bicycle at the same time I was retrieving mine.

He started walking with it in the direction of the elevator. To which I remarked:

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Oh, you have a door opener? I don’t.”

“Yes, I do, but that’s irrelevant. You can get out without one. There’s a button.”

“Really?”

It was one of the first things I checked on my first day riding a bike to work, because: a) I had no garage door opener at the time, b) it’s easier to exit from the garage door, and c) I was at least 99% certain there was some way to exit without an opener. The latter point was because of two reasons a) fire codes typically mandate that all doors be usable as exits, and b) the building management’s own self-interest is to allow drivers whose door openers fail after hours (batteries do die, after all) a way to get out that does not require them to go to the expense of dispatching someone to free the entrapped vehicle.

And sure enough, there it was: a standard, commercial-grade up/stop/down garage door control. A quick push on the “up” button, the door opened, and I was on my way significantly faster than if I had taken my bike up to the first floor on the elevator. I thought little further about the matter.

What floors me is that people who are smart enough to get advanced degrees (far more advanced than mine, and probably with a far better GPA than I managed as well) never even seem to go down that same train of thought. It’s not as if it’s a very complex or difficult one; it’s all pretty basic facts and logic.

It’s related, I think, to how badly I cope with advanced capitalist society’s demand that one hyperspecialize in one small area such as writing computer software. It’s one reason most of my spare-time pursuits are decidedly non-software; I crave the variety. I start going nuts if I have to do almost the same thing all the time.

It’s one reason my career path has generally been so rocky: simply because it’s a career path, and any such path falls afoul of my need for variety.

So maybe it’s not a surprise that someone who’s done better than I in the career world (and the academic world, for that matter, which also demands hyperspecialization) wouldn’t realize he could almost certainly use the garage door to exit. It’s something he can easily ignore as off-subject.

I wouldn’t trade the way I am, however. It’s probably the biggest reason why I’m an anarchist: because I have, over my life, felt compelled to dive into various diverse areas of knowledge. I know enough about enough things that standard propaganda tends to not work that well on me: I can come up with counterexamples and see the logical fallacies hiding beneath the rhetoric.

Published at 08:05 on 25 June 2013

I think its very important to them to adhere to the rule of law and respect the relationship.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, on Russia and Snowden. Source.

Really now, John? Respect for the rule of law is suddenly important, now? How about this law?

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

File this one under Yet Another Reason Why I Have Absolutely No Respect For Establishment Politics.

Published at 09:20 on 24 June 2013

Could this have been deliberate? Per The Guardian, the plane is “…full of journalists – and presumably representatives of various governments…” The latter in particular makes it precisely the sort of place that one might expect Snowden to want to avoid being cooped up in for over 7 hours.

What better way to avoid that fate than to mislead all that unwanted company into cooping themselves up with each other for 7+ hours while you slip onto another plane unnoticed? It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to learn that he got onto another plane, possibly when the news hits as he’s getting off that other plane someplace (or, who knows, maybe not even until arriving at his final destination).

Published at 09:18 on 23 June 2013

That has to be the biggest pile of horseshit the Establishment has shoveled out about its invasions of everybody’s privacy in recent years.

And yes, I mean everybody. Everybody is a non-citizen of most of the world’s nations. So let’s suppose the NSA follows the law to the letter and never ever spies on US citizens without warrant. (A very generous assumption, in light of the well-documented principle that a lack of transparency always breeds corruption in organizations.) B.F.D.; just have CSIS, MI6, or ASIS* do that by secret agreement.

With the exception of a few dual citizens (easily handled by other agreements or by simply ignoring the law a bit), Americans don’t have British (or Canadian, or Australian) citizenship, meaning those foreign agencies can legally spy on Americans to their heart’s content, with access to US training and technology, and pass on only the “goodies” to the US after some pretext is used as “probable cause” for a US warrant.

So, so long as the Establishment has the ability to spy on everyone, they will (and already do) spy on everyone. Message content, not just contact records. Without any laws about warrants to get in the way. Your citizenship does not matter one iota. Sorry.

* And it’s almost certainly those three that are doing most of the spying-by-proxy on Americans, because those nations are both English-speaking and close allies.

Published at 09:01 on 20 June 2013

In a summary of his most recent book, George Packer goes on and on about how the evil US ruling class has given pretty much everybody else the short shrift since about the mid- to late- 1970s.

Well, yes, indeed they have. All the details Packer presents are fairly obvious and well-documented.

What Packer misses is any real sense of the root causes of the whole change. The ruling elite has always wanted more for itself, damn the costs to anyone else. It’s pretty much what any ruling elite anyplace has wanted.

There was plenty of whining from the Right about the New Deal and the Fair Deal (Truman’s followup to FDR’s New Deal) when they were being enacted, and much of it was every bit as venomous and hysterical as the words of any contemporary talk-show host.

The difference wasn’t in the ruling elite, it was in the ruled. Capitalism had been largely delegitimized in the public mind thanks to the Great Depression and things like huge numbers of people going hungry and skipping meals while farmers were going under because there was no market for the food they grew (all because those going hungry had lost their jobs and thus the dollars which to express their desire for food). Or houses lying vacant and unrented while Hoovervilles grew. And so on.

Why do you think Joseph McCarthy and HUAC later had it so easy dragging up instances where this or that public official or celebrity had gone to a Communist Party meeting or two, or had joined a populist front group run by the Communist Party?

That degree of class consciousness ensured that while some of the elite whined, the whining was largely ignored by a good chunk of the elite, who worried that if they didn’t swallow the bitter pill of kicking down concessions, they might someday have to be faced with losing all their power, not just a few concessions.

Packer’s lack of deeper insight leads him to propose an implausible theory about external enemies motivating the consensus, a theory that fails completely to explain the Reagan era, where an increase in perceived threat to US global power thanks to the Iranian Revolution and the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan caused a marked increase in international tensions (just look at what happened to military spending then). All the while Reagan was aggressively accelerating the very “unraveling” that Packer posits was prevented by those same tensions.

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.