Blackcap Blog

Published at 08:16 on 10 March 2023

By which I mean, either the government of Ukraine, or the some of the governments of its Western allies, were involved in some fashion in blowing up the pipeline. The involvement might be as direct as agents on the staff payolls of one or more governments doing the job themselves, or as indirect as knowing about a plot by some non-government group and deciding to sit on that knowledge and let it happen. Or just about anything in between.

Firstly, this makes a lot more sense that Russia blowing up its own pipeline, a piece of infrastructure important to its largest economic sector, and part of the ties between Russia and Western Europe that complicate the ability of the latter to confront the former.

Secondly, the invasion of Ukraine provides a motive.

Thirdly, we have Seymour Hersh’s claims. Now, Hersh is not a reliable source, many of his past claims have gone nowhere, and his particular story has some major holes in it. But that merely means that if Hersh claims something, it is not necessarily true. It says nothing about it being definitively false. And in fact, some of Hersh’s previous claims have turned out to be true. When Hersh’s claims came out, my reaction was not to believe them, but not to completely disbelieve them either, and to be alert for future evidence that might corroborate or refute them.

Fourthly, such evidence is now starting to emerge. Now, the story in the Post is still just someone speaking off the record, but the fact the Post thought it newsworthy indicates it comes from a reliable source in a position to know. This is especially the case given how the existence of this story conflicts with the Post’s (and my own) bias in favour of the Ukranian side in this conflict.

The takeaway is still rather vague, however. Revisit the leading paragraph: it simply means that Ukraine or some of its Western allies were involved in some way. It says nothing about the details of the involvement. As reliable as the Post judged their source, there is no way to know how much of the details that source accurately knows. Secrets within government organizations are shared on a strictly need to know basis, and if this source did not need to know many details, he could be in the dark (or even have been fed misinformation) about them.

More details, however, are likely to continue leaking out. This is how actual government conspiracies work: they don’t stay secret for long. The world that conspiracy kooks live in, where all-powerful governments prevent all leaks of consequence, the kook and his friends somehow know it all, and those all-powerful governments at the same time sit on their hands and do nothing to stop the kooks from running their mouths off, simply does not exist.

And the reaction of Ukraine and its supporters to this newfound knowledge also fits the pattern perfectly. Note that the truth is leaking out. Note also how it is rapidly getting buried by other stories. It is not considered important enough to be given feature coverage. (If equivalent evidence in favour of Russia being behind it all had come out, you had better believe we would all be hearing about it nonstop.) This is the way bias works in our media.

None of this means that Russia is in the right and Ukraine deserved to get invaded. The world is not composed solely of angels and devils; a refutation of Ukraine’s angel status does not prove it a devil. The world is a messy place where all actors are a mix of good and evil in various degrees. (If you think Russia does not support terrorism, think again.)

It is still far better for the world if Russia loses this war. As such, I still support helping Ukraine so as to maximize the chance of Russia losing. I would have rather have Russia lose to a Ukraine that does not back ecologically-destructive acts of terrorism than to have it lose to one that does, but I would also rather have Russia lose than win.

Published at 21:39 on 4 March 2023

It’s a compelling story, but it has a hard time horrifying me because it is so fake. This is the consequence of a) the film being engineered to horrify and b) my knowledge of basic mycology.

First off, Cordyceps is no threat. This might make some of those reading stay up at night, but Cordyceps species are found over much of the Earth, including, yes, much of North America. Odds are it is where you live.

And yet, despite mammals living in close proximity to Cordyceps for literally millions of years, no fungus in this genus has crossed over into infecting mammals. It just hasn’t happened. And this includes periods when the climate was much warmer than today (so there goes the movie’s premise that climate change could push Cordyceps to cross not just a species barrier, but a class barrier). Trust me, it’s not happening.

But set that aside for a moment and suppose it would? Then what? It would probably be barely capable of infecting a human. It would cause a minor, localized infection, something like a case of athlete’s foot or jock itch, which the patient would eventually fight off and recover from. It would fail to complete its life cycle and fruit.

But again, suppose it would, then what? The infected would go insane and then die. After they were dead, the fungus would sprout from their bodies and fruit. End of life cycle. No decades-long zombie stage, sorry.

And by “insane” above, I just mean randomly berserk and increasingly deranged. Remember, it took eons for Cordyceps to evolve to instill in an insect a very rudimentary desire to climb into a bush and bite a leaf vein. It would take eons more just to properly instill in a mammal the desire to do climb high up in its last hours of life. Forget about the complex desire to pursue prey that happens in The Last of Us. Just not happening. And don’t get me started on how preposterous the whole hive mind thing in the infected is.

And the long-term infected are just so unrealistic. Cordyceps is an ascomycete fungus, yet the infected sprout characteristic basidiomycete fruiting bodies.* That’s a difference at the division level of biology — a step above the class level! And to put the icing on the cake, they are a mix of fungal fruiting bodies from many different genera of basidiomycetes.

* In fairness, I will note that Cordyceps fruiting bodies do appear growing out of the skin of some relatively recently-infected individuals. But that doesn’t diminish the nonsensical premise of all the other unrelated ones erupting later.

It’s like some Hollywood type with little or no knowledge of mycology was tasked with making people look like ghoulishly infected corpses full of fungus. Because, no doubt, one was.

Published at 20:08 on 1 March 2023

Well, now, isn’t this interesting. An official investigation has concluded… basically what was obvious five years ago.

As for the supposed discrepancy between that study and earlier ones that “concluded” otherwise… they didn’t! All they said is that the syndrome could have been caused by hostile action. They didn’t say they were caused by hostile action. Exactly zero evidence was presented for the contention that hostile action was the cause.
Finding such evidence was the purpose of the new study, and when they looked, (surprise, surprise) there was none to be found.

It all goes to show just how deranged US politics is when it comes to Cuba, which is all in all a relatively garden variety third world dictatorship (the USA has propped up worse ones). It’s just one that humiliated the US empire a few times, and the Establishment still hasn’t gotten over it.

Published at 10:49 on 20 February 2023

It seems to have been an amateur science project.

Why is this not a surprise?

Published at 10:46 on 20 February 2023

… and it is not a viable political strategy. For those unfamiliar with this three-letter acronym, I am talking about oppositional defiant disorder.

Of course, any instance of behaviour classified as “a disorder” is subject to abuse by power structures, particularly one characterized as “arguing and defiance toward parents and other authority figures.”

The way to distinguish healthy skepticism of authority from pathological behaviour towards same is, I think, best epitomized by the old anarchist slogan: “Question authority.”

One is being advised to question authority. Not to reject outright, but merely to question. The answer to a question can be in the affirmative as well as the negative. It is entirely possible to question authority and come away with the conclusion that authority figures are being at least partially correct about something.

Consider the COVID-19 pandemic. Heading into it, there was already a large body of evidence and work by researchers in infectious diseases all pointing to the conclusion that a pandemic of some new disease was all but inevitable. Governments had long been planning for such a pandemic, and those plans had long advocated restrictions that would amount to a huge overnight change in daily life.

It was, in fact, obvious that COVID-19 was a pandemic before the authorities admitted it was so. In the earliest stages of the pandemic, questioning authority led me to conclude… that the pandemic was real and authority figures were refusing to acknowledge it was going on! It was also obvious that there would be various restrictions and disruptions to everyday life coming soon, once the crisis became too big to ignore.

Did it stop being a pandemic when the authorities bent to the inevitable? Having ODD leads one to one answer. Having an intelligent and healthy skepticism of authority leads one to quite another.

Published at 12:13 on 13 February 2023

Obviously, something’s changed. We virtually never heard of spy balloons, then we hear about one, it gets shot down after being tracked across North America, and now suspected spy balloons are getting discovered and being shot down all over the map.

What has changed is unlikely to be the mere presence of spy balloons. We know this because it has already come out that what are now known to be, or strongly suspected to be, spy balloons flew over the USA under the Trump Administration.

The mere existence of spying is no great surprise. Nations have been spying on each other since literally forever, and aerial surveillance by superpowers against each other has been a thing at least since the USA got caught with its hand in the cookie jar by the USSR.

I suspect paranoia or at least some measure of it. There are a lot of reasons to launch unmanned balloons. Collecting upper atmosphere weather observations is one of them. It is not hard to come up with other ideas for research involving unmanned balloons. More than likely, some of those balloons which have now been downed (or will be downed in the near future) will be discovered to be innocent. More ominously is the possibility that some manned aircraft might get accidentally shot down.

Some probably are spy balloons after all. All I am saying above is that it is very likely that not all of the suspicious flying objects are there for espionage or other nefarious purposes.

Beau’s theory is probably a good one. Beau of the Fifth Column recently released a YouTube video where he speculated about the origins of the suspicious flying objects, and concluded that:

1. There could well be multiple causes at play here, and
2. It is likely that air defense systems have now been fine-tuned to detect and respond to such objects.

China has no grounds to complain about their balloons being shot down. Suppose for sake of argument it was just an innocent scientific research project. Well, why didn’t China then tell the USA and Canada that it had gone off course and was about to enter their airspaces? What did they think was likely to happen were such an unannounced balloon to be discovered? That an unannounced balloon would get shot down is just about the least surprising bit of news since the sun rising this morning.

Published at 08:25 on 9 February 2023

Elon claims to be restricting Ukraine’s usage of Starlink for drone purposes, and my question is the one I just posed in the title above.

Consider first of all that the internet protocol used for such purposes is almost certainly encrypted. Then consider that most internet traffic these days is encrypted. (Look at your browser’s address window. If it starts with “https:”, congratulations! You are using encryption.) So all that those drones are doing is passing streams of unintelligable (to others) gibberish over an Internet full of such streams of gibberish. Good luck filtering that out.

Now, encrypted Internet protocols don’t encrypt everything. It would be possible to use IP addresses and port numbers to filter out the offending packets. It is, however, a relatively simple matter to reassign both. Make a few software tweaks (this is all software, after all) and one could easily disguise everything as traffic between a browser and a web site. Again, good luck filtering that out, at least if you don’t want to cripple Starlink for its vast majority of (non-military) uses.

I think the only plausible theory is that the Muskrat is just blowing smoke. It all goes to show just how little this self-professed technological genius actually knows about the technologies the companies he owns uses. His role is that of a capitalist with money, not a technologist with ideas.

Published at 09:04 on 26 January 2023

Well, because Ukraine is at war and needs them to help defend itself, duh. But it’s not that simple.

You see, the M1 Abrams tank is just about the biggest, most high-tech tank around. Each tank comes with a very complex set of technological and logistical challenges. It will take a significant amount of time to train the Ukranian military to answer these challenges. Until that is done, one might as well send Ukraine a shipment of large boulders; they will be as useful in war as those tanks will be.

Yet Ukraine needs help now, not at some ill-defined point in the future when training in the use and maintenance of the M1 becomes complete. As such, smaller and simpler tanks like the German Leopard 2 would be much more useful. So why waste time and money sending Abrams tanks at all? Just send more Leopards.

The answer is politics. Germany has a deep-seated domestic aversion to using military force or helping others use military force. This aversion was in fact deliberately planted by the victorious Allies after Germany was carved up after losing World War II, and it persists in today’s unified Germany.

There is, as a result, very little support in Germany for taking a leading role when it comes to arming Ukraine, and shipping a big batch of Leopards to Ukraine would amount to taking such a role. So the Germans said to the USA: “after you.” They were willing to send tanks only if others did so as well. The United Kingdom is also sending some of its Challenger tanks, making this whole tanks-to-Ukraine business a multinational effort. (France may send tanks as well.)

That some of these tanks are unlikely to be as useful as others matters not; domestic German politics, and not military strategy, necessitated sending them.

Published at 17:47 on 23 January 2023

So, given the advanced state of democratic decline in the USA, where next? What is the way out?

It is obvious that a political class which does essentially nothing about a coup attempt that is more serious than the one that happened at Munich in 1923 stands atop a political edifice so thoroughly rotten that it will probably soon collapse of its own weight. The inevitability of such a democratic collapse can be understood even more when one considers that the Beer Hall Putsch, despite its far less serious nature, was treated far more seriously by the Weimar Republic (see previous link) than the USA has treated the 2021 putsch at the Capitol, yet the Weimar response to the 1923 putsch is now almost universally seen in retrospect as having been insufficiently robust. Future historians will doubtless struggle to explain today’s American political elite, and how they could be so feckless in response to such clear signs of danger.

Since change cannot come from within, it must come from without. Reform being impossible, the only choice will be revolution. Such it has always been: societies that have revolutions tend to have them as a result of having become failed societies.

The coming revolution will of necessity have a bourgeois character. The radical left is simply too small, and too politically ineffective, and the vast majority too ignorant, for it to be any other way. In today’s USA, the principle that one should have a society of laws and not of men is in and of itself a radical notion that the status quo is incapable of accommodating, and therefore it will be this general precept that motivates the coming revolution.

What should the response of those of us on the radical left be?

First, the response should not be to dismiss the revolution as useless or irrelevant. It will offer a very real hope of substantial improvement, even though the degree of immediate improvement will fall short of what we would like to see. In fact, it’s the only thing that can offer such hope, there being no possible alternate revolution. A bourgeois democracy is a far better environment in which to struggle for a better world than a fascist dictatorship. The perfect must not be allowed to become the enemy of the distinctly better.

Second, it was capitalism that got us into this mess. This should become the watchword of the radical left. We should say this phrase over and over until people become sick of hearing it. It was capitalism that created a society in awe of capitalists like Trump, and preached that the authoritarianism of the capitalist was a virtue. It was capitalism that built the media empires that degraded dialog to soundbites and kept the public stupid and indoctrinated. It was capitalism that created a political process so grotesquely beholden to wealth. It was capitalism that led the attack on the unions that created such inequality and resentment amongst blue collar workers. And so on.

Capitalism was, after all, the cause. The masses may simply want democracy, but unless, to paraphrase W.D. Haywood, we push back, pull out, or break off the fangs of capitalism, we cannot have lasting democracy. Capitalism was the midwife of fascism in Germany, Italy, Spain and Chile. It almost was the midwife of fascism in the USA once already, and will soon be again. Capitalism is an enemy of democracy. Make that sufficiently clear and there will be a chance for real change to start happening.

Published at 10:58 on 22 January 2023

Since some here may be unfamiliar with the term, here is a definition (shamelessly copied from Wikipedia):

The Führerprinzip (German for ‘leader principle’) prescribed the fundamental basis of political authority in the Government of Nazi Germany. This principle can be most succinctly understood to mean that “the Führer’s word is above all written law” and that governmental policies, decisions, and offices ought to work toward the realization of this end. In actual political usage, it refers mainly to the practice of dictatorship within the ranks of a political party itself, and as such, it has become an earmark of political fascism. Nazi Germany aimed to implement the leader principle at all levels of society, with as many organizations and institutions as possible being run by an individual appointed leader rather than by an elected committee. This included schools, sports associations, factories, and more. Nazi propaganda often focused on the theme of a single heroic leader overcoming the adversity of committees, bureaucrats and parliaments. German history, from Nordic sagas to Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck, was interpreted to emphasize the value of unquestioning obedience to a visionary leader.

From this, we come to an inescapable conclusion: The USA ascribes to the Führerprinzip. Because, really, it does:

• Johnson’s word was above all written law. Johnson was exempted from punishment for lying his way into Vietnam and starting a war without a formal declaration of one from Congress.
• Nixon’s word was above all written law. Nixon was exempted from punishment for Watergate and the invasion of Cambodia.
• Reagan’s word was above all written law. Reagan was exempted from punishment for Iran-Contra.
• George W. Bush’s word was above all written law. Bush was exempted from punishment for lying his way into Iraq.
• Trump’s word was above all written law. It is pretty clear now that Trump is not going to be punished for anything. Even my nice liberal friends who used to consider me cynical when I said that odds disfavoured the system holding him accountable now mostly agree with me on this.

Nixon was right: if the if the president does it, it is not illegal. Oh, sure, the system might put on a good show about hypothetically being interested in accountability, but when the rubber meets the road it never actually ever happens. In today’s USA, the leader’s will is above all written law.

Don’t get me wrong. The USA is not a fascist state. The next time I check up on my place in Bellingham, I do not expect to be questioned about posting opinions critical of the ruling ideology when I enter the USA. The USA is somewhere in between being a functioning democracy and a fascist state: it is a flawed democracy that ascribes to a fundamentally fascist principle.

Like all states where fascist principles are in play, the American public is not allowed to choose whether or not fascist principles are to be policy of the day. Both the Republicans and the Democrats agree that Führerprincip ought to be the policy of the land. Typically this support is worded as “having respect for the institution of the presidency” or some other such bullshit.

Yes, the Republicans may be the big innovators in using Führerprincip, but the Democrats really never ever truly challenge their right to use it, and the system is rigged to make it virtually impossible for any political party other than these two to achieve power.

The question is what it all means for the future. Probably the main takeaway is that one cannot rely on the professional political class to do much about it: both parties, and the punditocracy that supports them, agree on Führerprinzip.

A second conclusion is that it is inevitable that the USA will become a full-fledged fascist dictatorship if nothing is done to turn away from Führerprinzip. Trump was attracted to the unlimited power of the presidency, and the only reason he failed was that he really wasn’t all that good at political leadership. Eventually someone equally power-hungry will get into that office who is not so politically incompetent. Then it will be game over for democracy.

Eventually may take a while, but eventually it will happen.

If, that is, nothing is done to turn away from this principle. And since such turning away cannot depend on the professional political class, it must depend on those of us who are on the outside of power. What are the chances of that?

First, anti-fascists are not a majority in the USA. A little under half the country is already objectively pro-fascist or at least very fascism-friendly in their outlook, based on the support Trump was able to obtain. When you get to Democrats, many of them support the status quo, too. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that a lot of rank-and-file Democrats are already disgusted with their party and its morally bankrupt principles. They only support the Democrats because the rigged system gives them no other real choice. Such support is grudging enough that the Democratic Party establishment often has difficulty overcoming the resulting voter apathy.

I have no idea how big the number of actual antifascists in the USA is, but I would have to guess that it probably is somewhere between 10 and 20 percent, maybe more. If half of rank and file Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents were disgusted by American Führerprinzip, that would make 25%.

Note that this fraction is not simply the party’s progressives: many of the Democratic Party’s “centrist” voters are also disgusted by the elitism and lack of accountability in society. In fact, such disgust often drives their distrust of liberal policies; they wonder and worry about how such a corrupted system can properly oversee expanded social programs, which they might theoretically support if only the system were not so self-evidently rotten.

Then we get to the Republicans that Trump pushed over the edge and have abandoned their party. The numbers may not be great, but they exist, and (given how even the divide is) their numbers are significant. If they had stayed loyal to their party, Trump would have been reelected. So 10 to 20 percent is a very conservative estimate, and the actual number is probably higher. But let’s err on the side of caution and go with the more conservative numbers.

10 to 20 percent is significant. It is way more than the 3% or 5% that is commonly cited as the critical mass needed to launch a social revolution. The size of the Womxn’s Marches (the largest demonstrations in US history) that happened shortly after the Trump inauguration prove that the base numbers are there.

The question is how much pain and suffering there will be before that revolution happens. The numbers are there and ideally it would happen before a full-fledged fascist dictatorship is in place. But complacency and denial are things, as is general disorganization and ineffectiveness on the grassroots Left, so we cannot count on this.

And if it doesn’t happen early enough to avert a fascist dictatorship, then the likelihood of violence (understated in the article I just cited, but that is a topic for a future post) and the associated pain and suffering goes way up.