Blackcap Blog

Published at 20:03 on 5 December 2012

Some months ago, I wrote a rant about what I believed to be the capitalist censorship of radical political opinion. It seemed a reasonable thing to presume at the time: the building in question had been a disused eyesore for over a decade, mainly serving as a venue for advertising posters of various sorts.

And then a radical political group appropriates it for their own message, followed quickly by the building being surrounded by fencing. Mere coincidence? Highly unlikely.

Unlikely or no, I feel safe now saying that it does indeed appear to have been coincidence. There’s been an ever-increasing amount of activity at the site since it was fenced, and it’s now quite obvious that the building is in the process of being gutted and renovated.

Moral of the story is that even fair dice sometimes come up snake eyes.

Published at 07:37 on 5 December 2012

The most important thing to remember about the “Fiscal Cliff” the Establishment types are obsessing over is that it is merely a law, not a Constitutional mandate. All it takes to change or repeal a law is a new law. That’s hardly anything extraordinary.

In other words, “going over a cliff” is a very poor analogy. It’s a curious kind of cliff, one that can be wished away at basically any time, even after one has “gone over” it. All Congress needs to do is pass a law retroactively repealing the “Fiscal Cliff”.

The nervous mobs that rule the fiscal markets may get a few jitters about the process until it is all settled, but there is approximately zero chance that the “cliff” will fully and lastingly go into effect with all its drastic measures intact.

Published at 19:40 on 3 December 2012

Introduction. This is going to be a somewhat long and rambling collection of thoughts prompted by a visit to Vashon Island last weekend. Conventional blogging wisdom says I’m not being a very good blogger big gaps in activity punctuated by periods when I post lots of content.

To hell with the conventional wisdom. Regarding the first electrical communications medium, Thoreau once wrote:

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

Well, often times I have nothing meaningful to communicate. In those cases, the most appropriate course of action is to post nothing.

On last Saturday. I spend most of the day (and the following night) on the island, visiting some friends, touring artist’s studios, communing with nature, and generally evaluating Vashon Island as a possible place to move to and live one day.

On primal beauty. One of my favorite places on the island is Maury Island Marine Park (despite its name, Maury Island is connected by an isthmus to Vashon Island, making it a peninsula rather than an island of its own). Much of it is a pretty ravaged landscape, having once been a large sand and gravel quarry.

No matter. Nature is continually reasserting itself, showing that in the big picture, on the scale of eons, civilization’s depredations, catastrophic though they may be, will be but a fleeting departure from the normal wild state of things. Already madrone are spreading from the surrounding forest, colonizing the once-bare land, the sunny, denuded slopes being to the liking of this drought-adapted species near the northern limits of its range. Many of these relatively young trees are already the brilliantly intense red berries that are their fruit, ensuring that the pace of afforestation will only accelerate in the coming years.

So there it was, little bits of red so intense and vibrant littering the ground, contrasting so strikingly with the overall grayish-blue dusky scene. I didn’t even bother attempting to photograph any; some things must simply be experienced. Art always falls short of wild nature, serving at best as a reminder to get out and appreciate it.

On feelings, reason, and rationalization. Ultimately, it is the feelings inspired by direct, unmediated exposure to primal beauty and not logic or science which will save both the natural world and the possibility for freedom to exist. That’s not because science and logic have no value, but because they are merely amoral tools. It is as easy to construct arguments — logical arguments based on scientifically-determined evidence — against freedom and wildness as it is to construct arguments in their favor. We are ultimately not rational animals but rationalizing ones.

The forces of capitalism ensure that almost all the money is on the side of the destroyers. How do you privatize and monetize beauty and freedom? You can’t. But you can easily to both to natural resources, even when extracting these resources destroys beauty and freedom.

On Anarchism, Evolution, and Freedom. That freedom is possible is probably the greatest and best thing about the world and universe we find ourselves in. That’s probably why most authoritarian power structure value organized religion and why the advocates of both tend to get so upset when the lack of evidence for their boss in heaven is pointed out. The existence of our 3 billion year old biosphere proves that leaderless systems can work and create a lasting order — and order that has lasted at least six full orders of magnitude longer than any hierarchical civilization has lasted.

With all its warts and drawbacks, I can think of no better way to exist as a sentient being than as the way I do, in fact, exist — as an animal, as a product of a freely-organized and freely-evolved natural order in a world where the pursuit of greater freedom for all beings is possible. Morbidity and mortality are small prices to pay for this possibility of freedom.

On commuting. I tend to forget the above when I get wrapped up in my workaday city life. It’s particularly a hazard in a place like Seattle, which has not done a good job of preserving any large swath of nature close to the inner city. There is no Forest Park, Point Defiance Park, or East Bay regional park system here. One must cross a wide moat of sprawl in order to get to anything reasonably wild.

Of course, were I to live outside of the city that would not be the case. But it would be no win for either myself or the environment — I’d merely be replacing commuting to nature once a week with commuting to the office five times per week. Under my present circumstances, commuting cannot be eliminated, only minimized.

I hope to make the transition to mostly telecommuting within a year. That would make living out of the city more of a net win, if I could get my in-person appearances down to a weekly or fortnightly level.

On island living. This takes me full circle back to where I was on Saturday. Overall, I feel save saying now that Vashon is about what my previous observations led me to believe. It’s not a particularly good match for me. Although it’s not an awful match, and I could probably make it work, there’s a few things about it that give me pause.

For one, grocery shopping — a routine task for which it is thus critical to be able to accomplish on-island — the options are significantly more limited than on the mainland. There’s a small natural-foods store, but the key word is small. There’s a nice Thriftway supermarket there, but that is still slim pickings compared to the food co-ops found in Seattle (or in Bellingham, Mount Vernon, or Olympia).

There’s also a moat — one of water, this time — between the island and any truly large wild areas. Most of the island itself is exurban in character; there are many hobby farms on lots of 5 to 50 acres there. Swaths of wild land tend to be limited in number and size. If I’d want access to any wilderness, it would mean a ferry ride. Sure, there’s always bicycling the back roads on the island, but I’d still be on a machine on a paved road — not as good as being barefoot in the wilderness.

So, probably not. With the proviso that any future living arrangement I transition to is going to depend strongly on some particulars. If I find a home on Vashon which is in all other ways ideal, then I could see perhaps deciding to accept the other limitations of the place.

Realistically, though, the odds are against my finding that otherwise perfect match there.

Published at 19:17 on 29 November 2012

After covering the recent internet blackout in Syria, NPR All Things Considered had one of those basically useless wastes of breathable oxygen known as professional pundits come on to discuss the story. He was full of BS about how the USA so much better than that, and respects free speech so that anything of the sort would be “impossible” here.

Ignoring completely, of course, the inconvenient fact that the US ruling elite would like very much to have that capability, has sought it in the past, and almost certainly will seek it again. Oops!

Published at 21:20 on 14 November 2012

An astounding bit of progress, and the marijuana legalization is, for the first time in my memory, the United States (well, two states) actually starting to take the lead on something progressive for a change. (Same-sex marriage was the law of the land on other countries before the first state in the Union legalized it. Ditto for universal health care, which Obamacare really isn’t, given the cracks and gaps in that program, as much as it will dramatically expand coverage. But even The Netherlands never actually flat-out legalized cannabis use; they merely decided to stop enforcing the laws against possession of small amounts of it.)

But, there’s still plenty to do, particularly on global warming and ecological sustainability.

Published at 22:02 on 1 November 2012

Executive summary: Maybe. It’s impossible to say with any certainty. But that’s not the real issue to be concerned about.

Climate science is pretty unanimous that the Earth is warming and that human activity is responsible for that. But, the amount of warming so far has been a degree or two Fahrenheit. That’s far less than the natural variability that weather systems provide (deviations of ten degrees above or below norms are common).

It’s one of the things that makes life easier for deniers: “Look! There was a terrible, cold winter on the East Coast! That proves that the Earth cannot be getting warmer.” No, it doesn’t: add a degree of warming to a cold snap that sends temperatures twenty degrees below normal, and you have a cold snap that sends temperatures nineteen degrees below normal. Still a severe cold snap.

Might global warming have tipped things “over the edge” in this case, and caused a superstorm where none would have existed otherwise? It’s possible. Possible. Not certain. We can’t say. Weather is an extremely complex system and it’s not possible to predict specific outcomes well in advance.

Hurricanes have always happened. They happened well before humans started burning fossil fuels and dramatically increasing the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

But that’s irrelevant. There’s plenty of evidence that global warming will make storms like Sandy more common. Whatever Sandy’s root causes, Sandy offers a preview of what will become increasingly common in a warming world — and the more warming, the more common such storms will be.

That, and not any claim that Sandy must have been caused by global warming, is the real lesson to take from this week’s news.

Published at 22:47 on 30 October 2012

It’s going to be weeks before the subway fully reopens again. Weeks. If not months.

This was obvious the moment I heard about the flooding being worse than expected, and the media and the authorities are now starting to drop hints about it.

The biggest problem is the electrical and electronic components of the signal and control system. Salt water is absolutely the worst thing to expose such equipment to. Anything that’s been flooded by salt water will either have to be removed from service, washed several times with distilled water, baked for at least half a day in a drying oven, allowed to cool, and be thoroughly tested before reinstallation; or it will have to be discarded and replaced with new equipment.

Anything less will sacrifice reliability, and doing so is absolutely unacceptable on a passenger railroad. You don’t want malfunctioning signal and control equipment to send two trains in opposite directions on the same track, giving both a full-speed-ahead signal.

The reconditioning option will take much time and labor, and the replacement option will be (a) very costly, and (b) in the near term, impossible, because such equipment is fairly specialized and there’s not enough currently on hand to replace everything.

So the MTA is doubtless going to decide to give up on some lines of the subway system for the time being. Once you get away from lower Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn, there wasn’t much flooding. That means the unflooded parts of the lines being sacrificed can be salvaged for spare parts to restore service on the priority lines. Then, in the coming weeks and months, the damaged equipment can be either reconditioned or replaced and used to put the sacrificed lines back in service.

The problem is, there really is no substitute for the subway in Manhattan. It’s so densely developed that the only practical way to deliver the number of commuters who are employed there is an extensive rail system which is completely separate from the surface streets.

Sure, they will try to make do as much as possible with buses, probably bringing in rented ones from other cities and banning or severely restricting the use of private vehicles in Manhattan, so as to make room for the expanded bus service. But that will only go so far.

To some degree, it’s a moot issue anyhow, since the subway tunnels and building sub-basements are interconnected, meaning that there’s a huge chunk of office buildings which are now unfit for occupancy until the HVAC and mechanical systems in their flooded basements and sub-basements are reconditioned or replaced.

It is, in other words, a real mess. More later, including something about the relationship between Sandy and human-caused global warming.

Published at 22:35 on 1 October 2012

A prime example of that can be seen by considering the abandoned building at 11th Avenue E. and Pine St. in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. For over a decade it’s been disused for any purpose save for those of bill-posters. It’s typically covered in ads for upcoming music performances and whatnot.

Well, about a month ago, a group called Grrrl Army decided to appropriate that space for their own. It was a wonderful action which provided a glimpse of what a world where advertising is used to challenge people to become better individuals, instead of simply to turn a profit, could be like:

This was arguably vandalism, but then again, so was the postering of every available vertical street-facing surface on this structure, which to reiterate has been tolerated for a decade or more. But, it’s postering with a political meaning (as opposed to postering to encourage people to spend money). We can’t have that!

The building’s owners saw to promptly erect a fence to prevent any such further defilement of their precious dilapidated eyesore from happening again:

What’s particularly amusing about this is that the structure, post-Grrrl Army action, was far more attractive than it had been in years. The unified effect of everything being the same basic color scheme made it look significantly better than the disorganized collection of advertising which it had previously borne. It’s not just me who thinks so, either: a number of my friends volunteered the same opinion.

Published at 21:11 on 6 September 2012

I came closer than I like to think to missing it, but I managed to catch Kumare on the last night it showed in Seattle tonight.

It’s a documentary about what is essentially a case study on the human will to believe. The producer decided to exploit the advantages of his ethnic heritage and pass himself off as a guru from India. He basically concocted a spiritual belief system of his own (complete with plenty of new agey woo), and had no trouble attracting a small group of followers. (Which could have probably been a large group had he been so motivated to acquire one.) Eventually, he let them know the truth, after hinting at it in his teachings all along.

It’s an interesting study that raises a number of questions, not the least of which is his assertion that gurus are not needed. That’s an assertion that I am very fond of myself, but I have to admit that the movie can be taken as proving the opposite in some sense. Most of those who followed him really did seem to benefit from it, and it’s an open question whether they could have so benefited on their own.

Of course, we’re dealing with a self-fulfilling prophecy here. If you firmly and sincerely believe that gurus are necessary, and that you need one, then that belief in and of itself will get in the way of your being able to improve your life without finding and following one.

Published at 16:39 on 3 September 2012

As received while camping near Garland Mineral Springs, WA earlier this weekend.

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