Blackcap Blog

Published at 18:08 on 19 November 2021

So, if you are white and right-wing, in today’s USA it is literally legal for you to smuggle a weapon across state lines and shoot people with it in cold blood, as long as they are Black or left-wing. Make no mistake, that is the clear message of today’s verdict.

Also make no mistake: the fascists heard that message. They heard it loud and clear. And they will soon start acting on it.

Published at 08:07 on 15 November 2021

Mind you, this is very good news. Whatever I go on to say later, it had to happen, and although it happened late, better late then never.

However, the clock is running out and time is not on the side of the pro-democracy forces. The results in Virginia and New Jersey proved that yes, there are enough stupid and apathetic people that, added to the rough third of the USA that harbors decidedly fascist sentiments, there are plenty enough votes out there to let the fascists back into power.

And once that happens, there will be decisive fascist majorities in Congress and the select committee, as weak and ineffectual as it has been, will be no more. Donald Trump will be Speaker of the House (there is no requirement that the Speaker be an actual member of the House; this is mere tradition), and soon enough, president once more.

This is, of course, not a 100% certainty. It is still theoretically possible for the Democrats to start taking this existential threat to an open society seriously, but odds strongly disfavor it. As I have written before, it is at this stage likely that the whole damn system, both the government and the political culture it exists within, must first burn to the ground before there can be any significant hope of something better emerging.

Published at 16:25 on 13 November 2021

Just signed a lease on a place in Kensington this afternoon, so the biggest hurdle to getting settled is now over. Location is neither great nor terrible, neither my first choice nor my last one. Landlord seems like a nice enough guy; he plays in the Vancouver Symphony and keeps his rental in good condition. That’s more than can be said for the landlord for the place I looked at in Strathcona (which would have been a dream neighbourhood to move to).

Best thing about it is that it’s what is called a laneway house, which means no common walls with anyone, windows in all four directions, and a location in a quiet residential neighbourhood. There is frequent bus service a few blocks away, and a good natural foods market about ½ mile (or since this is Canada I should say just under a kilometre) away. It’s also a fairly easy bike ride to the Commecial Drive area, where some of my friends are.

Laneway houses are one of the advantages of Vancouver. Unlike Seattle, one doesn’t have to choose between a (very expensive) detached single-family dwelling on a quiet street, an apartment on a busy street, or scrambling like mad for one of the very few apartments on a quiet street. (Mind you, a lot about the housing situation here is definitely an effed-up mess, it’s just that the tyranny of extensive single-family zoning is mostly a thing of the past here, and that has really beneficial effects.)

Published at 18:04 on 4 November 2021

So I bicycled all over Vancouver today running various errands related to getting settled in here. And it came to me how much I really do like living in a big, older urban core. It’s so nice to have a more human (as opposed to automobile-centric) scale to things, and it’s also a big plus to have a wide variety of stores and services within easy reach. (Such as, for example, an electronic parts supply house, where I could procure a few parts to fabricate a replacement for the fused power cord that I forgot to bring up with me.)

I left Seattle not because I lacked appreciation for the benefits of a large city, but because Seattle forced me to give up access to wild nature in order to get those benefits. In fact, the vast majority of large North American cities have this problem. That Portland did not have it is one of the reasons I clung so tightly to that place, despite it massively not working well for me in either the employment or allergy departments.

Vancouver has that access to nature in spades. Not only is there Stanley Park, which is absolutely huge and contains large wild tracts, there is the North Shore, a quick ferry ride away, where suburbia (a lot of which is old-school, walkable, ferry-and-streetcar suburbia) gives way quite quickly to all-out wilderness. My temporary rental is in fact on the North Shore, and my host talked about bears prowling the neighborhood.

I just assumed that it would be too hard after fifty to convince Canada to let me in. Persuaded by a good friend, who thought otherwise, I decided to conduct a little experiment, and well, here I am.

Now we get to see how long it lasts. If there is one constant in my life, it is that work and living arrangements never last long, so it is not reasonable to expect this one to last long, either. It is reasonable to expect it might last two or three years, which would be long enough to secure permanent residency in Canada. If that happens, I will consider the little experiment a big success.

Published at 06:44 on 3 November 2021

So the Democrats not only lose Virginia, it looks like they might have lost New Jersey as well. It all goes to show just what a disaster their non-strategy of refusing to take the threat of Trumpist fascism really is. As I wrote earlier, inaction speaks louder than words.

It is probably now too late for them to change course. If, that is, they were even capable as a party of realizing a need to change course. We are talking about an organization which won’t recognize that their opponents are fascists even when they try launching a coup to make their guy führer-for-life, after all.

Let’s just say the prognoses for 2022 and 2024 are not optimistic.

Published at 20:08 on 28 October 2021

It seems there are a lot of vaccine refuseniks in the Air Force who are about to miss the deadline to get their shots.

What should happen at this stage is that it becomes time to bring down the hammer on those participating in this lack of discipline. When those service members joined, they took an oath to obey all lawful orders. They are now disobeying lawful orders. Deal with them. That means prosecution in a court-martial or a dishonorable discharge.

Not doing so basically telegraphs another sign of the weakness of the existing order: the refuseniks are doubtless for the most part Trumpy little fascists who would enthusiastically back a coup if given the chance. This is, in fact, part of the reason why they must be dealt with. Whatever the short-term cost of drumming them out, the longer-term cost of not doing so will be far greater.

Unfortunately, everything I know about the sorry state of the Republic leads me to believe that the breakdown in discipline will be for the most part ignored, thus cementing the precedent that it is OK for right-wingers in the military to ignore orders if they want.

At that point, the military has become a power unto itself, one that no longer answers fully to the civilian government. Be afraid, be very afraid.

Published at 16:01 on 27 October 2021

Executive summary: Avoid Airbnb like the plague. Pretty much everything about them sucks.

So, about a week and a half ago, I thought I wanted to reserve a room for a few nights in Vancouver, BC to do some apartment hunting. I decided to check out what was available on Airbnb.

The first thing that happened was the site was almost totally unusable. It is one of those piece of junk web sites that is crammed full of as much badly-written client-side Javascript as possible. I’m sure the site works fine on the high-end gigabit connection at the office where the testing is done. Problem is, not everyone has a high-speed, high-end connection, and the site is so heavy with hidden (and sometimes excruciatingly slow) requests to their servers, without any user feedback that this is happening, that the site is virtually useless on a slow connection.

So I wait half an hour and the site becomes barely usable. I manage to find what looks like a very attractive deal; apparently someone cancelled at the last minute and something desirable is available at a competitive price. I try to reserve it, and at one stage it drops back into two-factor authentication and asks for a cell number to text. I enter my number and receive no text. I try a few more times, then a message comes up that Airbnb is now blocking texts to that number for 24 hours.

So I wait 30 hours, and by some miracle the good deal is still there. I try again, only to discover my number is still blocked. So I borrow a friend’s phone and attempt to use it for two-factor authentication. The first text takes forever to get delivered, so long that I have given up and tried again. That second try causes Airbnb to proudly proclaim it is now blocking texts to my friend’s number as well.

At that point, I write off Airbnb entirely, and give up in disgust.

But Airbnb was not done imposing its suckiness on me. At one stage in that process, it did ask for a credit card number. It turns out that Airbnb, despite pestering me with two-factor authentication and refusing to complete my transaction, did nonetheless try to bill my credit card at that point… from the United Kingdom. Why a San Francisco-based company would instigate a charge from the UK for a sublet in Vancouver, BC is beyond me, but that is exactly what Airbnb did. Seeing a charge from the UK come within mere hours of a charge from Canada, my credit union then decided to cancel that credit card.

When I called my credit union to ask why charges were suddenly failing, they did some investigating, and their reaction was “Oh, Airbnb. They tried to charge you from the UK. We run into this sort of thing often with them. We advise our clients always call us before using Airbnb to stop their credit cards from being cancelled.”

So now I must wait for a new credit card to arrive before I make my next trip north. Fuck you very much, Airbnb.

Published at 08:02 on 25 October 2021

From this article:

That’s in large measure because Democrats are fighting apathy among their base. The party’s agenda in Washington, D.C., is stalled, Biden’s poll numbers are sagging, and Democrats are sounding the alarm.

What might have changed this, of course, would have been for the Democrats to take the threat to democracy that the Trumpified GOP poses more seriously. That’s right: the Democrats’ institutionalized Stockholm syndrome is not only bad for the country, it is bad for them politically. Truly, of all the major political parties in the world’s nations, the US Democratic Party must rank amongst the most incompetent.

If the Democrats had taken the threat of Trump seriously, it would have dovetailed with some very effective fear-based, get-out-the-vote propaganda. The GOP has long used such strategies effectively; this, coupled with the Democrats’ refusal to use such effective tactics, is part of the reason why the GOP tends to punch above its weight in the political arena.

If it is not already too late to shift to this strategy, it soon will be. Why should voters take seriously any fear-mongering when inactions are speaking louder that words?

A worry of mine in posting many of my recent articles has been that if such a narrative gets traction, it could prove counterproductive; pointing out how useless the Democratic Party has been is not the way to get people motivated to vote for its candidates. Eventually, the logic that well over 99.9% of voters don’t even know who I am, let alone read this blog, persuaded me to just speak my mind. Lack of influence is both frustrating and liberating.

Published at 20:22 on 23 October 2021

The political culture of today’s Democratic Party seems an awful lot like a teenager or young adult who grew up in privileged, sheltered conditions. They just think they are special (their parents continually tell them so, after all), and that the normal rules which apply to other people, do not apply to them. Or, in this case, the normal political rules of motion which apply to other nations, do not apply to the USA.

Therefore, many of them really do think that there is not much need for accountability for the crimes of January 6th. Coups d’etat happen to other, less fortunate nations. The USA is special, and it cannot happen here. No unpleasant work needed. That sort of thing is for other, lesser nations that are not special.

Come to think of it, this probably affects many Republicans as well. They just can’t believe that backing Trump could be as risky as some people say, because fascism is something that can only happen to other, lesser nations.

Just like the 19-year-old awakening in the drunk tank with a DUI charge to his name, the Democrats in particular are about to suffer a rude awakening.

Published at 20:12 on 23 October 2021

The subject says it all. Yesterday, I finally cut the cord to Leaseweb. I had moved off their servers some months ago, but were still using their DNS resolution services. As of yesterday, no more.

Leaseweb is neither no better nor no worse than most shared hosting services. It shares the same obnoxious feature of all of them, namely, a laughably (as in at least five and typically closer to ten years behind the state of the art) obsolete software platform. Unless you want to run the most vanilla PHP-based frameworks (and even those typically plead with you to upgrade, which you can’t, because you don’t control that aspect of your service), forget it.

In my experience, if you want the freedom to be the least bit creative, you really need at least your own virtual host, i.e. bare metal or emulated bare metal where you have absolute control over all software from the operating system on up. Anything else leaves you hostage to someone else’s ambition, or should I say the lack of it. Why should they upgrade anything merely for your sake?

So long as their creaky old shared hosts can run a semi-recent version of WordPress, they don’t care. And apparently, neither do most of their customers. Most of them are probably only faintly aware that Python or Java frameworks, or newer PHP frameworks, even exist.

It is made all the worse by how painful (and thus costly to the service provider) it can be to upgrade Linux by a major revision. The last time I tried, doing that, the upgrader made such a mess of things that I ended up wiping it all and starting again from a blank slate.

For all these reasons, shared hosting just seems to inevitably trend downmarket.