Blackcap Blog

Published at 20:52 on 24 February 2022

It really depends on what the reaction of the West and the Ukrainians is.

First, sanctions are mostly a spent force. The West is about to sanction the Putin regime up the wazoo. It almost certainly won’t work, assuming “work” is defined as “prompt a quick recalculation on Putin’s part.” Putin has no doubt priced such sanctions into the expected cost of invading and occupying Ukraine, and has decided they are worth it.

What he hasn’t necessarily done correctly is price the military cost of an indefinite occupation. In doing so, he might be repeating the error made by Leonid Brezhnev when he ordered the invasion of Afghanistan. When that happened, the West immediately and accurately realized the possibility of giving the USSR its own Vietnam experience.

At that point, it was only a matter of time: how long would it take the USSR to get worn down by an unwinnable situation and slink back across the border in defeat?

Invasions have a fundamental asymmetry. In order for the invader to win, the invaded nation must be thoroughly subdued and subjugated. It is not enough to merely install a puppet regime in the invaded nation’s capital; that puppet regime must be able to stand on its own and control the people subject to it.

In order for the invaded to win, all that must be done is to deny the former to the invader. The invader can still invade. The invader can still install and recognize a puppet regime. But that regime won’t be able to defend itself against a hostile population. Such a population will resist conscription; if conscripted, they will fight poorly and divert materiel to the resistance. That resistance will keep popping up, destabilizing the regime. The population will be sympathetic to the resistance, which will further frustrate efforts to stamp it out. So the puppet regime will require a continual military presence of the invader’s forces to prop it up. Eventually, the invader gives up. Victory for the resistance.

It all makes occupying and subjugating a nation a tall order, one that has often seen powerful armies bested by ragtag groups of resistance fighters.

So it ultimately comes down to the West and the Ukranians. How much are the latter willing to fight, and how much are the former willing and able to furnish military aid to them? It may take years, and it will take a terrible price, but it is possible to drive Russia out of Ukraine.

And no, I don’t mean direct military assistance. That’s off the table, anyhow. Nobody wants to instigate a direct conflict between two nuclear-armed powers. I’m talking about providing weapons, intelligence, training, and diplomatic support to the resistance within Ukraine, post-invasion.

Putin will of course label this as “supporting terrorism,” and in a way he will be correct. Terrorism is merely a pejorative label for set of tactics; one man’s terrorist is quite often another man’s freedom fighter. Such it has always been. If Putin didn’t want to have so much trouble with so-called “terrorism,” he shouldn’t have picked the fight he just did. Hypothetically speaking, of course.

But, to reiterate, there is a way to punish Putin for what he has done. It won’t be quick, it won’t be pretty, but there is a way. The question is: is there the will?

Published at 21:19 on 22 February 2022

That is what happened today, and that is basically what I predicted would happen a month ago. The bit about it being peacekeeping to stabilize some new republics is merely the propaganda messaging for selling the whole exercise, nothing more. Those “new republics” are part of Ukraine, and their separatist movements have been bankrolled by Russia.

The question now is, will Russia try to do more? The prediction above says: probably not. The fact that the US has completely moved its embassy out of Ukraine says: probably so (the embassy is nowhere near the whittled-off chunks).

Time will tell. One big determiner will be how strongly NATO is willing to sanction the Putin regime. As I also wrote earlier, it won’t be more than sanctions; no NATO country considers this worth the lives of their soldiers, plus a direct conflict between NATO and Russia would invite nuclear war.

Published at 11:30 on 18 February 2022

The crackdown is in process, and perhaps “crackdown” is something of an exaggeration, since so far I haven’t heard any stories of heads being cracked. Arrests, yes, but they were only to be expected.

It was, after all, a protest that chose to use illegal tactics. Camping on a public street is not allowed in most all cities. And pretty much every place has parking regulations that do not let you store a vehicle on a downtown street indefinitely. Not to mention that parking your vehicle in the middle of a traffic lane and blocking traffic is unlawful even on the most minor of side streets.

Now, protesters commonly choose to use illegal tactics. The reason is rather simple: such tactics are an effective way of attracting attention, and attracting attention is the chief motive for any protest. I have myself been part of such protests, and helped in the planning of them, including the choice of illegal tactics.

The rub is that illegal tactics are still illegal and as such those who choose to use such tactics should expect legal repercussions. It is up to you as a protest participant, and particularly as an organizer, to decide whether or not the likely consequences of the repercussions are a price worth paying for the increased attention. Perhaps more importantly, it is also your responsibility to reflect on how your chosen tactics adversely impact others, and whether it is reasonable for you to exact such an impact on others. And, guess what, the protest planning I have participated in did quite openly ponder all these issues.

When the crackdown comes, it makes for good propaganda as an organizer to then adopt a “those jack-booted thugs are oppressing us” line when the inevitable repercussions materialize, but that’s just propaganda. It is not actual fascism if a deliberately illegal protest gets dismantled by the authorities. As much as you might passionately agree with the cause of the protesters, it is important to keep this in mind.

All that said, never was I part of a protest where the plans were to occupy a downtown core and to expect to be allowed to do so for weeks on end. All of the illegal protests I helped plan got broken up within six hours of their onset. There has definitely been a different standard applied for these protests.

What sticks out, therefore, is not the use of force on the part of the authorities to end the protest, but how reluctant the authorities were to use such force in the first place.

This is, in fact, part of the reason behind the national state of emergency. It would not have been necessary if action had been taken earlier, before the occupations had gotten so large and so entrenched. (None of the protests I helped organize resulted in even a local emergency declaration.) This, and not the mere use of the police to disband an unlawful protest, is the real scandal behind the invocation of the Emergencies Act.

But I have digressed from my original point. So far, so good. I have heard no reports of violence. I hope it stays that way as the rest of the protest is ended. Whether or not it will is an open question, as so far the police have merely nibbled at the edges of the occupation. Things may well change if they encounter a core of more passionate and committed occupiers.

Published at 22:00 on 17 February 2022

All the warnings, that is. Not to mention the open announcement to the media that an operation is “imminent” and that things will be different by this weekend. The authorities don’t seem too keen on creating and exploiting the advantage of surprise. Maybe that will work, but I fear it will just cause more digging in and resistance, which will just make violence more likely.

Published at 08:56 on 14 February 2022

Is This Just for Show?

If so, if the state of emergency is just more “go away or else, I really, really mean it this time,” is is but a prelude to tragedy, because it just digs an already deep hole deeper, further constraining the immediate future to capitulation to the occupation or using violence to end it.

Will Trudeau Abuse His Powers?

If so, the result will be a tragedy for the principles of an open and democratic society, and not just in the immediate term, for it will create a source of lasting division by giving the political right a legitimate narrative of having been oppressed.

Published at 20:25 on 12 February 2022

Before I continue, a word of explanation is in order. I almost did not choose this title, because: a) 90% of Canadian truckers are fully vaccinated, and only a tiny fraction of them are illegally occupying downtowns and border crossings, and b) most currently participating in the occupations do not appear to be truckers.

Yet the protests did start as a truckers’ convoy, before they morphed into something else. That begs the question asked by the title above.

You see, if I were to pick a group of working class people adversely affected by the pandemic, it would have to be workers employed in the hospitality, travel, and live entertainment industries. Those industries suffered almost total shutdowns.

One working class group that it would definitely not be would be truckers. Trucking is a vital service; as truckers are fond of pointing out, whatever you buy in a store, at some point it travelled by truck. While restaurants, hotels, airlines, and live music venues were shut down, the trucks kept rolling.

In fact, if you type the phrase “shortage of truck drivers” into your favourite search engine, you will quickly discover any number of articles in reputable sources reporting just that. Basically, if you want to drive a truck, and you have the necessary training, and you are not banned for some reason related to safety, you have work. And your wages are going up, because that is how the law of supply and demand plays out during a labour shortage.

Truck drivers are, in short, about the last people one would rationally expect to be upset about hardship-inducing pandemic restrictions. Yet it was a truckers’ convoy, and not protests of upset restaurant, hotel, or airline workers, that inspired the occupations.

And, of course, the vaccinated and responsible majority of truck drivers are having no problem finding work and earning a living. It is the small and vocal minority, insisting (paraphrasing Isaac Asimov) that their ignorance be regarded as good as others’ knowledge, who are making all the noise.

But, again, why?

I have a theory and it relates to loners. Driving a truck is a great job for a loner because you will be alone behind the wheel most of the time. Now, not all loners are antisocial, but the vast majority of antisocial people are loners (they basically have to be, it gets them away from those other people they have such a disregard for).

So by simple virtue of the profession being a magnet for loners, being a truck driver is also a magnet for the antisocial, and the proportion of antisocial people amongst truck drivers can reasonably be expected to be higher than in society as a whole. This being the case, it is not a big surprise that within this industry a critical mass of selfish people formed. And they had tools at their disposal (their trucks) with which to use to express their contempt for the concept of being asked to consider the well-being of others.

Now we get into the mythology of the Trumpist right. (Despite being Canadians, it is completely fair to call them Trumpists. There has been no shortage of MAGA hats and Trump campaign flags at the occupations. But I digress.) They vocally proclaim themselves to be the majority, to be “true” Americans (or, in this case, Canadians), as if those with values different from theirs do not even deserve to be considered full citizens in their own country. No amount of data to the contrary will shake them of this belief.

Related to this, they believe themselves to be salt-of-the-earth, humble, regular, working-class type people, or at least that their movement is comprised of mainly such people. (This is also incorrect. The much-reported factoid of Trump voters tending to be less affluent is mostly an artifact of Trump voters being more rural, and rural incomes and property values trailing urban ones. Within rural communities, the affluent support Trump at higher rates than the non-affluent. Again I digress.)

But if facts were relevant to the beliefs of Trumpers, they wouldn’t believe most of what they do. Their myth requires them to be humble, genuine, “real” types, so that is what they are to themselves. A movement that got its start from a subset of truckers is therefore proclaimed to be a truckers’ movement, because believing it to be so is politically convenient.

It’s not because those poor truckers are having their livelihoods ruined by all those uncaring elites and city-dwellers. That is a right-wing myth, nothing more.

Published at 23:28 on 11 February 2022

If I were Trudeau, I would right now probably not be doing all that much differently, when it comes to publicly visible actions: simply making increasingly stern warnings that the occupations must end ASAP. Given that the worst occupations are in Ontario, I would probably try to get Doug Ford to issue a similar message. (Interestingly, Ford did exactly that today. I would not be surprised to later learn there was coordination behind the scenes.)

The one thing different I would do is I would not openly rule out the use of military force. Mind you, I would still try very hard to avoid it, but publicly I would be much more in “all options are open” mode. Something like “We would like very much to avoid using the military to end the occupations, but the occupations must end and we are willing to use whatever means are necessary to this end.”

The goal here is to instill a sense of uncertainty and fear amongst the occupiers, in order to encourage them to disperse. And definitely let them disperse, don’t make arrests as they walk away. Punishing people for doing what you want is not the way to get more of them to do it. Arrests can always be made and charges pressed later, after the occupation has dispersed.

Aside from that, though, openly I wouldn’t be doing much. Behind the scenes it would be a different story entirely. Plans would be being made and put into place to break the occupations up. The planning would be kept secret, with as little signs as possible of how concrete plans actually were, or what the time frame was. It is key to have the element of surprise.

So far as the time of day, sometime between midnight and dawn would be ideal. That is when most participants would be asleep and thus at their most vulnerable. Then come in aggressively but at the same time using non-lethal means only.

So far as the trucks go, they are not so easy to remove as those who drove them, but once the latter individuals have been removed, the trucks can be dealt with. Any motor vehicle can be hotwired, particularly if those doing the hotwiring are themselves the authorities and therefore do not have any reason to fear getting apprehended while doing so. Hotwiring is in fact not even necessary; give a manufacturer a VIN and you can often get a set of keys made. At that point, there are plenty of trucks in the military, and therefore plenty of military members trained in driving trucks. Drive them away.

So far as the time of week, early Monday morning would seem ideal. It would keep the story out of the weekend news for the longest. And I mean this Monday: the occupations have already gone on unacceptably long, and the occupiers are getting both physically and psychologically more entrenched with every passing day. Waiting another week would invite tragedy.

This would have to be a coordinated effort. Both the Ottawa and the Ambassador Bridge occupations would have to be broken up simultaneously. If they are not, the one not broken up first will have to be broken up later without so much benefit of surprise.

In other words, don’t be surprised if Monday morning dawns a big news day.

Published at 07:50 on 10 February 2022

So far, your chief strategy in confronting the spreading, increasingly disruptive, and increasingly illegal protests has been to show weakness. It’s not working. Well, it’s not working to limit the scope and impact of the demonstrations.

Nobody wants this to go to the point of violence, but the window is rapidly closing to resolve this via nonviolent means. The time for various levels of government to get serious about cooperating is now. We need to see things like business licenses getting pulled for those who disrupt trade and traffic, and cumulative fines starting to really add up (with special measures for expedited and aggressive collection). If we don’t, things will get to the point where such actions basically cease to matter anymore. Then the only options will be violence or total capitulation.

Make no mistake, they have a right to demonstrate, no matter how wrong I believe them to be. That’s a basic freedom in any open society. What they don’t have the right to do is to unilaterally call the shots for everyone else.

Let’s do a little math here. The most recent Canadian federal election was under a year ago. The general politics of the protests are right up the alley of People’s Party, so let’s assume that all their voters are behind them. That’s about 5% of the electorate. The Conservatives polled 34%, but not all of them back the protests. Just listen to Ontario Premier Doug Ford, a pretty conservative Conservative, to prove that point. But let’s be generous and assume ⅔ of them do. That’s ⅔ of 34% or 23%. Add the earlier 5% to that and you have 28%.

Where is the “freedom” in letting 28% call the shots and telling the other 72% (who support COVID-19 policies distinctly more organized and interventionist than the 28%) to go lump it? That is what the policy of continuing to show nothing but weakness will get us.

Published at 22:05 on 9 February 2022

Or maybe I should say, “The Joys (Not!) of SonarQube As Implemented by My Employer.”

SonarQube is a code-analysis system. It analyzes computer code and enforces coding standards. If it doesn’t pass the sanity checks, builds don’t properly complete.

I have nothing in general against coding standards, and I fully admit that the code I write is not 100% perfect. I also have nothing in general against tools to help uncover questionable coding practices.

The problem is the automatic mandatory implementation, with it being like pulling wisdom teeth from an elephant to get any exemptions from.

Consider my recent use of a random number generator. It was in a bit of performance-sensitive code, and the random numbers were not being used for any cryptological or other security-sensitive purpose. The default (crap quality radomizer) Java ThreadLocalRandom class was good enough, plus it had lots of convenience methods for doing things like generating a floating point number within an arbitrary range. So of course I used it.

Nuh-uh, no can do! SonarQube says that’s a security violation. I start inquiring about what can be done to get an exemption, and learn that it’s such a pain I’m better off recoding. So I do that, blowing a half day in the process (I have to implement a bunch of convenience routines missing from the SecureRandom class).

It’s made worse by SonarQube itself being of generally shoddy quality. Its metric for there being enough test coverage so unreliable that a commit can pass muster on a branch, yet get failed when merged to master, even when the result of the latter merge is exactly the same as what was on the branch. That’s right: you have no idea if a merge to master will succeed or fail. Every merge might well prompt last-minute frenetic test-writing.

So I decide to write a boatload more tests, just to err on the side of high test coverage and avoid triggering the wrath of SonarQube. Everything works just fine on the branch, so I merge.

The build then promptly fails, because get this, the new code has insufficient test coverage.

That’s right, SonarQube is refusing to accept my test classes… because they themselves don’t have tests! Can you say “Catch-22” boys and girls?

Again, this wouldn’t be so bad (it would be more humorous than anything), if SonarQube were implemented in an advisory capacity instead of a mandatory one.

Actually, it’s still humorous. If they want to piss away their money on stupid policies that waste productivity, fine. I just make note of all the unnecessary busywork their policies cause and report as necessary when queried about why something takes so long. Their loss.

Published at 21:32 on 1 February 2022

What is it about those who write labels on bottles of household chemicals, anyhow? The recipes are always for ridiculous quantities. Honestly, how many people need 5 liters (or litres, if you prefer the Canadian/UK spelling) of cleaning solution?

So you just end up using the ratio, and that’s the point of this post. Quick, how many milliliters in a liter? So 60 ml per 1 l is a 6:100 or 1:16 ratio. And the other ratio is in the 1:20 to 1:40 range. Wow, that was simple, wasn’t it?

Isn’t that much better than cups per quart (quick, how many cups per quart?) or whatever it would be in the USA? Aren’t all those 10’s, 100’s, and 1000’s easier to deal with than a hodgepodge of 2’s, 3’s, 4’s, and 16’s?

I sure think so.