Blackcap Blog

Published at 09:17 on 16 February 2013

And no, it’s not just because there are no suburbs here with the names “Clackamas” or “Gresham”.

One of the standard amenities of a major city is a rapid transit system which runs on a right-of-way independent from the streets and highways and which has more than token coverage of the metro area. That latter aspect means multiple lines, so when the lines converge in the inner city, headways end up being very frequent.

I chose the wording above deliberately. It’s a standard amenity of a major city. As such, cities that lack the amenity can be characterized as being deficient in what services a city should offer to its residents.

If all goes as planned and there are no bumps in the road, Seattle may be at such a point in thirty years or so. By which time I will be age 80, and probably have only a limited ability to enjoy such an amenity (and I will have no ability to enjoy it before then, because it won’t exist).

And the other two options for getting around in Seattle basically suck, too. Driving sucks, because the roads are congested and parking is difficult in many areas. Bicycling sucks, because street maintenance has been badly neglected, the city is spread out, and there’s steep hills almost always involved.

Every option for getting around Seattle sucks; there simply is no escape. It’s one aspect of why I’m not planning to stay in this city for the long term.

Published at 22:35 on 15 February 2013

I actually know — or, used to know; I cut off all contact with him when he started cavorting with fascists — the guy they are talking about. He’s a longtime activist that had done many positive things in Portland.

He was always deficient in the critical thinking department, which might provide some explanation for what he’s been up to in recent years. I remember him once trying to convince me that David Icke’s conspiracy theory about shape-shifting space aliens infiltrating human society was plausible and reasonable.

Perhaps even a more plausible explanation is that what he’s seeking is to mainly be the member of an exclusive “club” which is “in” on some knowledge that the rest of the world is not. Any sort of non-mainstream scene can furnish that; its values and whether or not its shared beliefs conform to logic and observable reality are irrelevant for such purposes.

Regardless, it’s tragic. It’s particularly tragic that Citybikes hasn’t taken the commonsense step of voting the guy out of any sort of position involving power or prestige in their organization. (It’s a worker’s co-op, so they easily could.) Yes, he did play a key role in forming the collective. Too bad — past good works should not serve to excuse one from present accountability.

And yes, Calvert does cavort with known fascists. Here’s him shamelessly and fawningly introducing one at a so-called “9-11 Truth” society meeting in 2009.

As such, it’s especially tragic that I have to say I find Rose City Antifa’s call to boycott the establishment sounds like a reasonable response. Though I do take issue with their demands that Calvert be fired; I think a demotion would be sufficient. He has a right to express his views, reprehensible though they may be. What he has no right to is any sort of respect for those views.

It’s a great store, and I generally believe that worker’s collectives deserve all the support they can get, so it really pains me to come to any sort conclusion in favor of boycotting one.

Published at 19:27 on 10 February 2013

Unlike most liberals, Peter DeFazio gets it.

For a particularly egregious example of just how wrong the outcomes of carbon trading can be, consider how it is enabling indigenous people in Chiapas who live very modestly being moved off their land so that Californians can continue their fossil-fuel-intensive lives unchanged.

If you want a modest first step that can easily fit within Establishment politics, it would be a carbon tax (levied at the point of purchase of any fossil fuel), not casino capitalist games with “trading” carbon emissions. Worries about such as scheme being regressive taxation or leading to growth of government can be addressed by making it an “untax“: a revenue-neutral tax that simply goes into a trust fund which is refunded to all equally on a per-capita basis. Wastrels will end up losing, and the carbon-thrifty will be rewarded; the poor will tend to come out winners simply because they can’t afford to consume much, even though they might spend a higher percentage of their income on fossil fuels than the non-poor.

Published at 10:05 on 7 February 2013

The conventional wisdom is that Rudy Guiliani as mayor was responsible for turning around New York’s crime problem. Not so fast:

Giuliani took office in 1993, when the declining-crime trend was well underway. Crime rates were dropping rapidly when the much-maligned liberal David Dinkins was mayor, and had first started dropping when centrist Ed Koch (whose terms are off the left edge of the chart) was mayor.

New York’s turnaround from its low point in the 1970s has been a long process which has spanned the terms in office of three mayors. Giving all the credit for it to Giuliani is like giving all the credit for building a house to the drywall hangers and painters.

Moreover, a big part of the decline in NYC and elsewhere has been simple demographics and not public policy at all: Statistically, young men are the most likely to commit crimes, and the US population has been aging, causing that demographic to represent a shrinking fraction of the nation’s population.

Published at 07:47 on 5 February 2013

So, it’s OK to kill Americans extrajudicially overseas, not because of any specific evidence they are planning to launch attacks, but simply because they are part of an organization which is “continually” planning attacks. (Which is not to imply that extrajudicial executions of anyone are ever morally justifiable, just pointing out the ever-slipping standards.)

Well all righty now.

By the way, just when is the President planning his next overseas trip, anyhow?

Update: full document here.

Published at 08:39 on 2 February 2013

… somewhere west of the Cascades,

… either on the US side of the border, in a borderless world, or in a Canada that did not have the immigration hurdles the current Canada does.

… with San Francisco’s urban form. No, scratch that, not possible: SF is the way it is in part because of when it started growing rapidly, and that is about a half-century earlier than any of the Northwest cities started doing so. So make it with an dense urban form dominated by neighborhoods like Portland’s Northwest District or Seattle’s Capitol Hill.

… not ringed by a huge moat of urban sprawl; the country begins relatively close to the urban center.

… with a good, comprehensive mass transit system that could take you to that edge of the city where the country begins.

… without the Willamette Valley’s hellish late spring grass pollen counts.

I would live there and be very happy, even if it were a bit more expensive than I’d like, even if it were in the Willamette Valley and hotter in the summer than I like. Because there’s lots I like about cities.

But no such big city exists. All the ones which do exist are fundamentally broken.

Seattle’s the least-bad match, but the way in which it is broken speaks volumes as to how I don’t belong there, because a city gets to be broken in the way Seattle does only if the vast preponderance of its residents lack the sort of values that would lead them to demand things go in a different direction.

Sure, one cannot demand absolute perfection, but I’m not demanding absolute perfection above. Nothing I’ve described above is fundamentally impossible in the current, statist, capitalist world.

With the exception of the bit alluding to immigration hassles, in fact, it comes very close to describing the real-world city of Vancouver, BC. So what I’m describing is hardly unrealistic in any sense of the imagination.

It just doesn’t happen to exist. Hence, my focus on living out of the city.

And having said that, I now promise to write a good anarchistic political rant here sometime soon. Things have been awfully skewed towards the personal as of late, and it’s time to re-establish some form of balance here.

Published at 09:20 on 30 January 2013

I floated a carefully crafted proposal to mostly telecommute that was devoid of any mention of in-person meeting intervals but which contained wording about only wishing to do so if it did not damage my career with my employer. That prompted acceptance of the concept, with the general idea of fortnightly appearances in person.

That interval is precisely twice as frequent as the desired interval for making periodic trips from Bellingham. Moreover, if the current week is any indication, it seems as if there’s a high chance the interval will end up being more frequent than once every other week, which means that ease of travel to the city really needs to be of paramount importance.

One thing I’m entertaining doing in response to the elitist class privilege aspect of Bainbridge Island is to rent a two-bedroom apartment then take a roommate, charging a rate based on income as evidenced by paystubs or some other such sliding-scale basis. Or maybe just charge no more than what the going rate in Seattle would be. The general idea would be to start out by at least doing something small to undermine such privilege.

Though at this stage it’s still very much up in the air, and although the odds probably do favor Bainbridge at this point, it’s not entirely unforeseeable that I’ll chose some other option, perhaps even to give up on leaving the city for another year or two in hopes of building further employer confidence over the concept of working remotely so that I can move further afield and leave the Seattle metro area entirely.

Published at 09:17 on 30 January 2013

I found this while doing some searches on intentional communities in the Pacific Northwest:

Seattle….it’s an interesting and progressive city, but I don’t think I’d want to live there.  Of course, we’re not really looking to live in a big city, but if we were to change our minds, I don’t see us in Seattle.  One of the biggest disappointments of Seattle was the public transit.  From what I saw, they just don’t have it quite together yet.  They are very late in adopting some kind of light rail or subway system and are planning a very expensive project to retrofit it into the downtown area.  There is a very short monorail through downtown that really doesn’t take you very far, and it was built for the World’s Fair in the 1960’s, so it is a bit outdated.  And pricey – it is $4 for a ride of 1 mile. More of a tourist attraction than a functional mode of transit.

Though for me it’s not quite the same: I actually did want to live here, to do what I’ve done since June of 2011: find a good job, do a good job at it, then switch to telecommuting. Which I plan to follow up by leaving Seattle.

Seattle has been a great place for me to engage in a desired life transition. But as a place to settle long-term, no thanks. As such, there’s a very good chance that it’s now served its purpose for me, thus it is time to seriously consider exiting.

Published at 21:18 on 19 January 2013

I spent the afternoon investigating another island alternative to Seattle, should my desire to telecommute from Bellingham for one reason or another not come to pass: Bainbridge Island.

It’s not as culturally compatible with what I desire as Vashon Island is, but all in all it is a far more practical location and could be a workable solution. Vashon’s sole town is in the center of the island, miles (and an arduous hill) from the nearest ferry landing, and that ferry goes not to Downtown Seattle but to one of Seattle’s outer neighborhoods, a significant bus ride from Downtown. There are a few foot ferries that run from Vashon Island to Downtown, but the key word is few: miss them, and you’ve gone from a little bit late to incredibly late.

Bainbridge Island, by contrast, has its sole town on the same harbor the ferry docks at, and every run of that ferry goes directly to the dock in Downtown Seattle. So I would be able to walk from my apartment or condo on the island to the ferry, and then walk from the ferry to my office Downtown. No worrying about missing the one or two useful ferry runs of the day, or about timing transfers from bus to boat.

Bainbridge, like Vashon, is a once-rural island that has turned mostly into exurban hobby farms. Thus, it still has the minus of not having any large and truly wild areas on-island. In Bainbridge’s case, however, that doesn’t matter so much, because the far side of the island is connected by a bridge to the Kitsap Peninsula, which in turn is connected by a bridge to the Olympic Peninsula. It ends up being possible to drive to some very nice hinterlands without having to compete for limited vehicle space on the ferries with all the other summer weekenders.

In fact, that limited vehicle space acts as a sort of limiting valve for how busy the Kitsap and Olympic peninsulas can get on summer weekends, meaning less crowds (and a very low chance of traffic congestion) for me.

So, a condo on Bainbridge could work for me. There’s no food co-op there, but the one grocery store on the island is one of those rare supermarkets which really does live up to its claim of having a full and comprehensive selection of organic and natural foods. (I’ve seen such things before on islands.) And there’s the basic selection of businesses any town of 10 or 20 thousand people would be expected to have (in addition to lots of upscale boutiques). I wouldn’t have to live a life revolving around a car for my daily routine.

But, Bainbridge is still very much part of the Seattle metro area. It’s easier access to nature (compared to the big city across the water) is a privilege rationed out on the basis of the ability to pay a significant premium; it’s one of the most expensive places to live in the Pacific Northwest.

I have a good job and no kids to support, so I could afford to live in an apartment or condo there. That’s not the issue. The issue is that a greater urban area which reserves basics like access to nature and a home in a quiet, unpolluted neighborhood so much according to socioeconomic class is not an urban area in keeping with my core values.

In Bellingham, by contrast, everyone lives a bicycle ride (not a drive in a car) away from large wild areas. The children of the poor and the working class can ride their bikes on the trail to Larrabee State Park as easily as the wealthy California retirees. There’s even a mobile home court which abuts a green space in Bellingham; housing close to nature is not strictly limited to the affluent, either.

So, Bainbridge would work as an alternative, but it’s very much a “Plan B” alternative. My primary desire involves shaking the dust of Seattle’s elitist class privilege from my feet.

Published at 20:41 on 15 January 2013

They’re definitely trying to use land more efficiently than normal suburbia. There’s lots of townhomes and apartments there. There’s not always huge amounts of separation between differing land usage; it is possible to easily walk from some of the housing to some of the shops. A big chunk of the land was set aside as a wildland park (which was the main reason I was there, to go for a midwinter hike).

Particularly at its current stage, it’s still very much auto-oriented suburbia. It has its own freeway exit, and is served by a feeder road far wider than one would have in an older, traditional city for an equivalent-sized neighborhood. While there’s plans to build enough shops to make it self-sufficient, it’s not there yet: for example, there’s still no grocery store at all there; you must drive several miles to the nearest one. There’s big gaps in the still-incomplete development that beg to be driven across. Most of the housing is not at this time a convenient walk to shopping. Transit service, at this stage, is minimal.

It shows the limitations of capitalism. If you’re not affluent, all you can afford there is a condo or a townhome. If you’re well off, there’s detached homes (with views) available. There’s very large homes on large lots if you’re really rolling in the dough-re-mi. In other words, it’s not really repudiating the wasteful American lifestyle: it’s merely pricing the non-rich out of some aspects of it, turning it into more of an elite privilege than it presently is. (Which it definitely is, when you look at things on a world-wide scale.)