Blackcap Blog

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 15:19 on 12 June 2013

I spend most of Saturday on the other side of the Sound and had two such moments.

The first was when I saw what I thought were two new duplexes (or maybe triplexes or quads, depending on the size of the units therein) had been built, and there was a “for sale” sign in front. Given that circumstances might still make it impossible for me to live on Bainbridge long-term,* it’s in my interest to keep an eye on the housing market.

Huh? What? One unit per building? Four bedrooms? 3000+ square feet? Oh, yeah — it’s Seattle. Restrictive zoning makes it impossible to build multifamily housing in most of the city. So even though the neighborhood in question has one of the smallest average household sizes in a city with the second-smallest average household size in the country, two 4-bedroom single-family monstrosities more suited to a large Mormon family from Salt Lake City were built. If you want an apartment or condo, you’re not worthy of the peace and quiet of a residential neighborhood. Go live on an arterial or next to the freeway were Seattle says you belong.

The second was near the end of the day when I wanted to catch a bus downtown.

Huh? What? No bus for 25 minutes? In a dense urban neighborhood like this? Oh, yeah — it’s Seattle. The city that’s never found it worthwhile to rationalize its bus service by doing a modest amount of route consolidation. If you want prompt service, either drive and shell out for parking or shell out for cab fare. If you can’t or don’t want to pay that much, get used to waiting because Seattle says your kind doesn’t deserve any better.

That’s just the way it is, take it or leave it (it’s been like that for decades, after all)? Fine, glad I chose to leave it.

* Losing my job downtown and not being able to find another one there, basically. Bainbridge works if you’re commuting to downtown Seattle, but commutes get unacceptably long for pretty much any other destination.

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.

Published at 09:48 on 10 May 2013

Really, now, if I’d want to make a gun myself why would I spend over $1000 on a 3D printer and spend a week fighting with software configuration to print a flimsy plastic gun that self-destructs after a single shot, when for far less money I could build a good old-fashioned zip gun which is both safer and more effective?

Maybe that subject should really read “Liberals Wetting Pants over a Non-Threat after Libertarians Hype a Non-Development”, since it’s as silly to hyperventilate about this gun being a threat as it is to hyperventilate about it being a radical expansion of the right to keep and bear arms.

The Register nails it on this one.

Published at 09:54 on 8 May 2013

I think I had my “I think I’m staying” moment on Friday of last week. It was another day of working indoors at the home office as usual, and I neither wanted to waste a sunny evening indoors nor make a big production of things, so I got on my bike to the Hawley Cove trailhead and took this route along the beach to Wing Point.

It was low tide and I saw colonies of sand dollars (living ones, covered in dark fuzz, not bleached skeletons) exposed near the water line. There were also a few tide pools teeming with baby hermit crabs.

I could have had such a walk along the beach in Seattle had I gone to Golden Gardens Park, but that’s a good 30 to 40 minute drive along congested arterials from where I lived. Forget mass transit; the buses get stuck in even worse traffic because of the routing they take, and there is no established, comprehensive rapid transit system in Seattle. Forget riding a bike, that would take even longer; not worth it for a quick hike. And I haven’t added in the time I’d have to spend circulating looking for parking (because everyone else would have had the same idea on a warm, sunny Friday evening) yet. I would have known all that ahead of time, of course. So I wouldn’t have bothered going; the time and frustration cost wouldn’t have been worth it.

Instead, I was at the Hawley Cove trailhead inside of ten minutes on my bicycle. No fighting traffic, no competing for scarce parking, just decide to go on the spur of the moment and get there with no fuss.

I think I’m staying.

Published at 08:35 on 30 April 2013

Most people who just met me assume I must have a smart phone, probably (a) because most people do, (b) I have plenty of technical know-how, and (c) I can easily afford one. They are mistaken in their assumption.

I really cannot see how having a smart phone would represent a net improvement in my life.

First, smart phones almost universally use touch screens, and I hate touch screens. They have abysmal tactile feedback (essentially none at all, in fact), and they force you to mess up the screen with fingerprints. Blecch and double blecch.

Second, I’ve never really “gotten” text messaging. If I want to send somebody a textual message, I’ll send them an e-mail. It will have no length restrictions, and I won’t be asked to pay a patently ridiculous per-character rate to transmit it. Moreover, my cheap flip-phone can receive (and, in a pinch, send) text messages on those rare occasions where I desire such functionality (generally related to interacting with someone who’s big on texting).

Third, I have little interest in a phone that also sends and receives e-mail. E-mail is for less-critical messages that can (and in my case, probably will) end up waiting for a response. If it’s really urgent or demanding of real-time interaction, make a phone call instead. I don’t want to be continually disturbed by incoming e-mail alerts wherever and whenever I am. I’ll get to it when time allows me to check my inbox, thank you very much.

Fourth, I have no interest in a clock or GPS which also sends and receives e-mail and phone calls. Most often, I don’t want to be pestered by either when I’m out in nature or even out and about in town, even though I often want a clock with me (and I’m about to start doing volunteer botanical survey work for which a GPS will be useful).

Those last two objections can be answered of course by configuring the smart phone to disable e-mail notification and to not ring for incoming calls. The problem is, those configurations are hidden away in a menu, and I tend to forget such things. So I’ll either forget to disable them and have unwanted disruptions from my watch or GPS, or forget to re-enable them and miss an important contact I was expecting.

It’s far simpler to just keep such devices separate, and to have one device serve one function. If I want to be in phone contact, I take my cell phone with me. If I want to know the exact time of day, I take a watch. If I want to know my geographic coordinates, I’ll buy and take a GPS. The technological functionality is mirrored by what I choose to carry. Simplicity itself.

Published at 07:23 on 24 April 2013

I often wonder if the attractiveness of Seattle, particularly to young adults, is not based in part on those attracted being unaware of what large urban areas typically offer.

I guess that’s because in my case, it’s true. I first moved here from the Southwest. I hadn’t lived there all my life, but I had never lived in an inner city. So I could be wowed by the city things that Seattle does have, and not notice things like the sub-par mass transit or parks systems.

Such awareness came only later, and only got truly driven home when my first and only romantic relationship turned out to be a long-distance one which sparked many trips to another metropolitan area.

Naïveté doesn’t explain it all, of course. Seattle is in an unusually spectacular natural area for a big city. That’s a big part of the reason why I came back. But the region is more than the city, and if the city is dysfunctional and a poor match for my priorities, why not live elsewhere in that region if my job situation allows?

To that can be added, how, as I have gotten older, I appreciate more and more how much more important being in nature is to me than big-city cultural things.