Blackcap Blog

Published at 11:03 on 8 November 2011

OK, you’ve just seen (in my last post) how much better than shortwave Internet audio quality can be. One might be tempted to conclude that demonstrates shortwave broadcasting is now obsolete. Not so fast.

First, this is an example where shortwave fares unusually poorly, even by its own standards. The signal paths between India and the USA are so difficult that India has never even tried to target the USA for their shortwave broadcasts. Even though I’ve been lucking out with a strong signal and low local interference the past two mornings, the signal still ends up seriously degraded by being forced to take a multi-hop path over the polar regions. That’s why it has such a fluttery character to it.

If India were to rent time on a transmitter in Eastern Canada or the Caribbean, for example, my audio recording would have had significantly better quality. It still wouldn’t have been as good as the Internet download, of course, but the newscast would have been completely intelligible instead of only partly so.

Second, the US Government does not particularly care if I listen to news broadcasts from India or not. So the government is not blocking my ability to download podcasts of their news bulletins, or requiring ISPs to report the names of their customers that attempt to do so. The Chinese are not so fortunate. If they want to hear news that has not been subject to their government’s censors, the Internet is of little or no use to them. On shortwave, they often end up in cat-and-mouse games with jamming transmitters, but in such games sometimes the mouse wins.

Basically, any communications medium that requires either payment for access and/or third-party (beyond the producer and consumer, that is) infrastructure is extremely vulnerable to censorship. Governments can track or block payments, or pressure the third parties into not carrying the offensive material. Pretty much any satellite or Internet-based means of delivering information ends up falling onto this category.

Direct-broadcast satellites could theoretically provide a real alternative, once there are free (to the consumer) options and they get to the point where there are a large number of such options under a wide diversity of ownership. Those latter points are critical, and current satellite broadcast options do not satisfy either one.

Therefore, shortwave is still really the only option for getting information into an area against the will of the government which controls it. Crappy audio quality beats no audio any day.

Published at 10:50 on 28 October 2011

Simply put, it will end up being litigated in court. It blatantly violates the Washington State Constitution’s single subject clause, so a legal basis for challenging it exists. Nowhere in the title or text of the measure on the ballot is scrapping light rail to Bellevue mentioned, yet (if allowed to stand unchallenged) it would most likely achieve that end. Based on the ballot measure that implemented the project, extending light rail to Bellevue has the support of both the majority in the Sound Transit district and the majority in Bellevue itself.

Therefore there exists both a means to challenge the measure in court and a motive (an electorate annoyed at falling for a bait-and-switch) to do same. And the absence of any mention of light rail in the measure will furnish ample evidence that the voters did not intend this outcome when they voted for it, which will probably cause any court-interpreted revision of the measure to gut the provisions of it which interfere with the proposed light rail line.

It may even get overturned by a subsequent bill in the legislature before it gets through court. Normally, the legislature is reluctant to touch the text of voter-approved laws, but again, the bait-and-switch nature of this one might bias the legislature in the opposite direction to the normal trend.

Moreover, the system listens to what Big Money has to say, and with the exception of Kemper Freeman, Jr., Big Money does not want I-1125 to pass. Transportation in the Puget Sound region is a horrible mess, this mess is making it hard for the Big Money crowd to do business, and the initiative will complicate the process of doing things to help relieve the transportation mess.

Naturally, when the inevitable happens, Eyman is going to go into conserva-victim mode and whine about how the evil courts and legislature are subverting popular will. Which will be something of a rich comment when one considers that the measure was obviously deliberately crafted to be a bait-and-switch. It’s not as of the single-subject clause is any big secret or anything: it’s right there in the state constitution, and Eyman’s initiatives have ended up being reinterpreted by the courts in the past because they’ve run afoul of it.

Of course, Eyman’s main motive in the thing is money. He earns it by hawking his services to the highest bidders in the right-wing crowd; he will laugh all the way to the bank no matter how much the legislature and the courts end up gutting the measure. Whether or not the thing eventually flies is completely beside the point.

Published at 18:14 on 25 October 2011

I have learned very recently that at long last Voice of Korea has an official web site. Unfortunately for those who wish to stream audio, the links that let one do that are currently not working. However, that will probably get fixed in the not-too-distant future, meaning that there will at long last be an alternative to shortwave for those who want to listen to official North Korean propaganda.

Until then, I plan on recording their broadcasts off shortwave, as time and propagation conditions allow.

Published at 14:48 on 20 October 2011

Figured I’d post this here because there’s a high change the right wing echo chamber (or possibly even the establishment liberal echo chamber) is going to start endlessly repeating otherwise.

Here’s an excerpt from a report from Greece itself (by an English-language newspaper that is not tied to either side that clashed):

One man has died in hospital after [note the wording here: after, not because of] violent clashes between communists and anarchists marred the second day of a massive 48-hour strike, ahead of this evening’s parliamentary vote on a raft of new austerity measures.

Dimitris Kotsaridis, a 53-year-old construction worker and trade unionist, died of heart failure at Evangelismos hospital on Thursday afternoon.

According to sources, Kotsaridis was a member of the Communist Party-backed union, the All-Workers Militant Front (Pame). He came from the Athens suburb of Vyronas and was one of around 50 injured people who were taken to Evangelismos hospital this afternoon. He was unemployed, married with two children.

A hospital statement said that Kotsaridis was transported by ambulance from the Zappeio mansion to hospital at 4.45pm. One man has died in hospital after violent clashes between communists and anarchists marred the second day of a massive 48-hour strike, ahead of this evening’s parliamentary vote on a raft of new austerity measures.

Dimitris Kotsaridis, a 53-year-old construction worker and trade unionist, died of heart failure at Evangelismos hospital on Thursday afternoon.

According to sources, Kotsaridis was a member of the Communist Party-backed union, the All-Workers Militant Front (Pame). He came from the Athens suburb of Vyronas and was one of around 50 injured people who were taken to Evangelismos hospital this afternoon. He was unemployed, married with two children.

A hospital statement said that Kotsaridis was transported by ambulance from the Zappeio mansion to hospital at 4.45pm. He had no injuries and no pulse. Medical staff unsuccessfully tried to resuscitate him for 50 minutes before pronouncing him dead.

⋮

[All boldface emphasis added by yours truly.]

So there you have it. The official statement, from the hospital that treated him, says that guy who died after the riots today died as the result of heart failure, not as the result of any injuries received (of which he had none).

Published at 09:18 on 20 October 2011

I was actually for a moment inclined to vote for the thing, because it bans red-light cameras, which are one of the many tentacles of the emerging total surveillance society. Alas, it is cluttered up with two other unrelated provisions related to tolls and gas taxes. So forget it.

And this is not just my personal pet peeve here. Article II Section 19 of the Washington State Constitution says that all bills (and an initiative to the people counts as a bill) must address only a single subject. So the initiative is yet another piece of legal garbage from Tim Eyman which will end up in court if it passes.

Published at 10:32 on 15 October 2011

I got down to Westlake Park last evening to see what was going on at Occupy Seattle. Not terribly much, initially (there were several dozens of people around, many with signs, but not much was happening), so I went to find something for dinner.

When I got back from my meal, the evening “General Assembly” was in full swing. In general, it was pretty impressive. From what I could tell, anyone was free to join in and participate in its decisions, and there seemed to be a pretty strong effort to prevent a leadership and power hierarchy from arising. A fair amount of the meeting seemed to be focused on dealing with the problem of people autonomously going off and trying to speak for the Occupy Seattle movement in general, even though no Assembly had ever agreed to give them such power.

Some of the discussion related to the thing the Establishment media keeps talking about, the demands of occupiers. It’s clear from visiting the Occupy Seattle web site (link: http://occupyseattle.org/demands) that no such firm list of demands has yet been decided and agreed upon.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. The most powerful thing that is happening right now is that a bunch of people, many of whom don’t really have any background in activism, are acquiring one. And they’re using techniques which are decidedly non-authoritarian to organize themselves.

Those techniques are somewhat different from what many of the current crop of self-identified anarchists use. This has caused a measure of dismissiveness amongst some of my comrades about it. Which is not to say they never have a point — there is a measure of bourgeois naïveté to be found, as well as (particularly amongst some older folk there) plain old pro-Establishment bias.

However, that’s no reason to write the whole movement off. Expecting people to become committed anarchists within moments of their first exposure to anarchist propaganda is itself a naïve attitude, as well as an authoritarian one that devalues the other’s own judgement and experiences. It typically takes time to make a significant shift in one’s weltanschauung; wanting people to quickly agree with you is tantamount to a desire for them to outwardly cave to your reasoning (probably because you have brow-beaten them) while still doubting it inside. I’m optimistic that the Occupy movement is going to end up being a enlightening (and therefore, radicalizing) process for many if not most of its participants.

For one, whether its participants realize it or not, it is already a fundamentally radical movement, since it is denying the Establishment’s legitimacy to pronounce rules about camping and traffic. In the eyes of the law, the cops are actually in the right when they have used force against Occupy movements, since such events at the least are camping in parks the law says are for day use only, and often embark on unpermitted marches in the streets in violation of the traffic code.

(Digression: Yes, that means the Egyptian government was in fact legally entitled to try and forcibly break up the occupation of Tarhir Square. The landscaped area around the Square was a park, not a campground, so erecting tents and staying there overnight was in fact illegal, as was blocking traffic in what is a major Cairo intersection. That latter act was making Cairo’s already legendarily bad traffic even worse. Which in turn shows how much the domestic right-wing “law and order” crowd shares with unsavory thugs like Mubarak.)

In that, it’s rather a brilliant strategy, since it is leading the Establishment to act like jack-booted thugs when faced with a bunch of nonviolent people assembling and trying to hash out what to do as a result of the growing economic and social inequality in society. If they don’t do that, then the Establishment ends up caving to those who are directly challenging its authority, and Establishments absolutely hate to do that.

And when the Establishment acts like jack-booted thugs when faced with a nonviolent group of concerned young people, many of those concerned young people will end up being lessoned by the School of Hard Knocks that the stuff us radicals keep saying about the Establishment actually has validity.

Published at 12:59 on 14 October 2011

You don’t have to be a conspiracy kook to think so; there are plenty of good reasons to suspect it.

And in regard to it possibly being the work of an extremist cell within the Quds force, I must observe that it is equally likely to be a false flag operation from an extremist cell within the US intelligence community.

Published at 09:30 on 6 October 2011

Not always. If they see something they believe suspicious while zapping you with X-rays, the TSA will grope you anyhow. It happened to my sister a few days ago.

I opted for the groping on my recent trip, because I don’t believe them when they say the waves emitted from the machines are harmless. Powerful organizations like governments and corporations have persistently claimed such about various kinds of radiation, only to be definitively proven wrong later.

It happened to those downwind of the Nevada Test Site, and it’s starting to happen with cell phones.

Published at 09:48 on 5 October 2011

Apropos this entry, there is a reason that the ruling elite has lost the ideological flexibility needed to prevent their rule from being jeopardized by a crisis of their own creating: it’s all a matter of timing.

Those old enough to remember the Great Depression are now also old enough and few enough to be mostly irrelevant in the halls of power. Contrarily, those old enough to remember the fall of the USSR and its satellites (which the elite spun as a vindication of capitalist orthodoxy and a repudiation of anything critical of it) are numerous and at about their apex of power in those same halls.

So it’s a tremendous opportunity for those of us who are opposed to the current order. The only question is: can and will we take advantage of it?

Published at 11:29 on 27 September 2011

Basically, unlike in Venezuela, the revolution in Bolivia is a bottom-up affair, backed by a diversity of groups, as opposed to being something orchestrated from above by a single charismatic figure. That becomes clear when you read stories like this one about a highway project being opposed by the indigenous people whose land it would compromise.

Of course Morales has become a new oppressor. How could he not, given the nature of the job he sought? By becoming the chief executive of a hierarchical system of authority, he chose to participate in a rotten system.

That’s not to say its a useless achievement and that Morales administration is no better than those it replaced, only that it’s a very limited achievement. Past administrations would not have stepped back, embarrassed, and called a moratorium. However, unless the pressure from below continues and intensifies, the outcome will be the typical “compromise” of industrial civilization: less wild nature and more development.

True change must always come from below.