Blackcap Blog

Published at 13:42 on 9 October 2021

The committee knew.

They knew their deadline would come on the eve of a holiday weekend. They knew their subpoenas’ recipients would probably ignore the documents. They never planned to enforce the “subpoenas” in the first place (it’s time for quote marks here, since a “subpoena” that is never intended to be enforced is a “subpoena” in name only).

I mean, really now: it is not unusual for me to slip up and forget about this or that schedule conflict, but I am just one individual, and someone for whom time management is not his strong suit as that. Am I to expect that every committee member is as pathetically disorganized as I am? Am I to expect that even if they are, no committee member (it would take just one) would notice the deadline falls right before a long weekend? And that’s just the committee members, then there’s all the staffers! Am I to expect that none of them would notice this, and flag it for attention?

No, it is pretty obvious: they knew. They knew, and they planned it this way. It is no coincidence they had no plans in place to enforce those “subpoenas,” because they were never intended to be enforced in the first place.

It was all a show. The Committee is nothing but a ruse (and a piss poor one at that) to pretend that the system cares about accountability.

Well, it doesn’t. If there’s one thing that’s clear about my fifty-eight years spent in the USA, is that this country has two sets of rules: one for the powerful, and one for everyone else, and that it is damn rare for any sufficiently powerful person to be held accountable for anything.

Trump is a noxious individual with loathsome goals, but the one thing he understands in spades is the total rottenness to the core of the whole system, and how utterly and thoroughly ripe it is for authoritarian takeover.

I am now more certain than just about anything that we will see just how ripe it indeed was in the coming years. The Republic is dead, and the corpse will soon enough start stinking to the point that even the dullest amongst us can no longer ignore this fact.

Oh, and one more thing: the Committee knew that, by the time the long weekend was over, the lapsed “subpoena” “deadlines” would mostly be forgotten by their constituents and by the media. Just wait and watch. You will see.

Published at 17:30 on 8 October 2021

In the synchronicity department, the day it became obvious beyond any reasonable doubt that the Republic is dead (and that it is merely a matter of time before the stench of the corpse becomes more than can be ignored), is also the day that my provincial nomination went through.

Canadian provinces have more power than US States do. For openers, they can definitely secede if they want to. None have so far, but Quebec has floated the issue a couple times, and there is widespread consensus that if the Quebecers ever do cast a majority vote to leave, Quebec gets to leave.

Another, less dramatic, aspect is immigration policy. In the USA, it is strictly a Federal issue. In Canada, it is divided between the Federal and the provincial governments. A provincial nomination is an official statement from a province that said province really wants a person to immigrate there, and would the Federal government please give that person’s request special priority and consideration. (There is even a special allotment of immigration slots reserved for provincial nominees.) In other words, I’m basically in.

Not formally in, not quite yet, however. The ultimate permission is still given by the Canadian federal government. I will be applying for that once I get one final bit of paperwork from my new employer.

The job is in Vancouver, by the way. So it’s a little bit of an odd situation: I’m only moving about fifty miles. It really underscores the arbitrariness of borders: I could move thousands of miles east or south, and I would not have to contend with the slightest bit of immigration red tape.

Published at 13:37 on 8 October 2021

There was a well-known and important deadline yesterday. It was a deadline that anyone with an IQ above room temperature expected to be ignored. As such, and given its importance to the Republic, plans for it to be ignored had to be made.

Instead, the deadline passed with the normal, nearly-silent “whoosh” that any garden-variety lapsed deadline makes. Nothing else happened.

The Committee’s members have left town to enjoy some vacation time. So not only has nothing happened, it is pretty damn clear that nothing substantive will happen.

At this point, there are basically two plausible conjectures:

1. The members of the Committee were so intellectually damaged by decades of exposure to inside-the-Beltway Establishment politics that they lacked the common sense of a bucket of warm piss and actually believed their deadline would be taken seriously. Alternatively, they expected their subpoenas to be ignored but, being morons, didn’t think they were all that important.
2. The members of the Committee are so chickenshit that they are afraid to enforce their subpoena’s deadline.

It is a committee of either idiots or cowards. Neither is the sort of committee capable of defending the Republic.

Trump was right. The Republic is so rotten to the core that it is incapable of defending itself against an authoritarian takeover. As such, Donald J. Trump will now go down as the most consequential president in the history of the American Republic.

Published at 13:51 on 7 October 2021

It is now put up or shut up time. Your subpoenas are going to be ignored.

It was always obvious that they would be ignored, because you have a long, sad history of caving. You have a long, sad history of standing firm for precisely nothing except craven capitulation. So of course your subpoenas will be resisted. Any subpoenaed Trumper would have to be a rank idiot to do otherwise, because the only rational expectation is that you will be too chickenshit to enforce those subpoenas. But I digress.

Democrats, it is now your job to prove them — and me — wrong. Enforce the subpoenas, and enforce them mercilessly. Ignoring them should result in arrests and jail time, just like ignoring any other more mundane subpoena does.

Anything less means capitulation to fascism. Enforce the subpoenas or else go down as co-responsible for the natural consequences of failing to enforce them.

Published at 14:57 on 6 October 2021

I have no disagreement with the contention that today’s social media monopilies represent a menace to society. Indeed they do.

Rather, I wish to make a word of caution about the response to this menace. If Congress is not careful, it might well do something that makes it easier for the Federal government to micromanage pretty much any firm (or individual) with an Internet presence. Pair that with the likelihood of a second Trump term, and you have a disaster in the making: a fascist government being handed a new tool for repression of political speech.

Whatever is done about the likes of Facebook and Twitter needs to be done in a way that keeps the government out of the job of deciding what sort of speech gets allowed online.

Published at 20:41 on 2 October 2021

I interrupt all this obsession with a relatively unimportant infrastructure bill with an observation that time is rapidly running out for you to do the critical work of stopping the Fascists from stealing the next election. And yes, compared to saving democracy, your infrastructure bill is unimportant.

It is as if there is widespread belief that merely electing Biden ended the crisis in our democracy. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Update: Here is a common-sense roadmap that the Democrats could follow.