Blackcap Blog

Published at 08:18 on 11 September 2018

Seventeen years ago this morning, the BBC hadn’t completely abandoned shortwave for Internet audio streaming. I had a newly-purchased Lowe HF-150 (still in my possession) struggling against the interference to receive the BBC World Service on 12095 kHz, as I usually did in mornings, to listen to their hourly world news broadcast.

But something was different that day. For some reason, the BBC was airing a drama rehashing the terrorist attacks, using truck bombs in the parking garage, against the World Trade Center in 1993. Or so I first thought, until I heard them start talking about airplanes. It was then that I realized that a new and far worse attack was underway. Shortly thereafter I heard the voice announcing through the radio noise that one of the towers has just collapsed.

It felt like I had been teleported into the plot of some sort of tacky Hollywood disaster movie, just too surreal. I headed in to work. When I got there, the conference room TV had been hooked up to a rabbit ears antenna and tuned to one of the local broadcast stations, which was replaying scenes of the attack and building collapses (plural by then).

Most in the First World, particularly most Americans, can tell similar stories of where they were and what they were doing when they first heard the news.

But what about most Iraqis? Do they remember when their nation was first attacked? Or do they remember date of the first attacks on their cities and villages more? Or maybe the dates when their friends and relatives perished in the resulting orgy of violence sticks more in their minds?

Iraq was attacked by the USA in “retaliation” for the 9/11 attacks despite that nation clearly having absolutely nothing to do with those attacks.

The Wikipedia article on the toll of that war has a variety of estimates, ranging as low as 110,600 to as high as 1.2 million. Let’s throw out the highest numbers as outliers and use 200,000 as a very conservative weighted estimate. That’s still two orders of magnitude worse than the toll of roughly 3,000 for 9/11 in the USA, and that difference has not been adjusted relative to the populations of the two countries.

Do that arithmetic, and if what Al Qaeda did to the USA was as bad as what the USA did to Iraq, over 2.3 million Americans would have perished on 9/11/2001. Maybe we should ponder that a bit more, instead of simply dwelling in our “they hit us once, oh boo hoo hoo, we’re so picked on” rhetoric.

First-world superpowers ultimately can’t do much to choose, manage, and control the means used by the desperate (and badly misled and infected by retrograde beliefs) individuals that oppose them. They can much better influence the means they inflict on other peoples (and the retrograde beliefs within their own borders that enable such means).

Published at 17:49 on 10 September 2018

So many words from John Bolton today. Why didn’t he just say “Israeli apartheid today, apartheid tomorrow, apartheid forever” and leave it at that? Would have been a lot more concise.

Published at 14:15 on 9 September 2018

Apropos this post, Orange Julius Caesar appears to be (thankfully) squandering his opportunity to launch a diversionary military action against North Korea, because his authoritarian love for dictators is getting in the way.

It’s things like this that are why I can’t take Michael Moore’s hyperventilating over how Trump is an evil genius seriously. Trump is evil, all right, but he has barely a fifth grader’s smarts. He’s so astoundingly incompetent that he’s his own worst enemy. For that, we can all be thankful.

Hitler was an actual evil genius. Within six months of taking office, he had managed to:

• Legally acquire dictatorial powers,
• Ban all opposition parties, and
• Imprison his opponents.

We’re nearly two years into the Trump regime and none of the above has actually happened. I have no fear of being arrested and tortured because I oppose the president.

That’s not to say that Trump isn’t awful, or that he isn’t a fascist. But please, keep it in perspective: there is such a thing as a comically incompetent fascist. Trump is not a master at playing political chess. He can’t even play political checkers well.

Published at 21:10 on 7 September 2018

I got a fancy new top-of-the-line MacBook at my new job. It disappoints me:

1. It is deficient in ports and connectors; there is no longer a dedicated power connector; one must use one of the USB connectors to connect a power cord, and
2. That latter fact means that the power cord has a USB-C connector on it, not a MagSafe connector.

It is beyond me how anyone could be so big of an idiot to not realize that (2) is just about the worst idea since New Coke. MagSafe connectors were one of the best things about Apple laptops, full stop. I can’t count how many times they saved a laptop of mine from crashing to the floor. And now this advantage is gone from most of Apple’s highest end machines.

Apparently Apple started this idiocy in late 2015. Until this week, I had been blissfully unaware of it, thanks to being a cheapskate who purchases lower-end laptops (and then only when the previous one dies and spare parts are unavailable).

Were Jobs still alive, the idiot who proposed such an idea would doubtless have been the victim of one of Jobs’ famous temper tantrums. And the idiot would have deserved it.

Thankfully, there’s a company out there dedicated to giving Mac users back what Apple took away. I plan to request one of their adapters; it should be a cheap insurance policy against my laptop meeting the floor at high speed.

Published at 17:53 on 6 September 2018

If you use an address book, Apple Mail can be very aggressive about auto-completion, to the point that your ability to send messages to an arbitrary address ends up being seriously compromised. There’s a simple workaround to this problem: enclose the address in angle brackets, e.g. <user@host.com>.

There’s an old discussion thread on apple.com (without any resolution) about this, but not much else, so I figured I’d put it up here just in case it gets indexed and ends up being useful to someone.

Yes, I’m using Apple Mail again… for now… and only on my new work computer. That’s because others there report it interoperates better with their mail server than Thunderbird. I have the sneaky feeling that I’ll bail on Apple Mail within a month or two, but might as well be a good sport and give it an honest chance.

Keywords: Apple, Mail, address book, autocomplete, disable.

Published at 08:12 on 6 September 2018

While some degree of schadenfreude is inevitable, it is not in fact the best of news that Trump’s handlers are working to actively frustrate his worst impulses. As the subject of this post alludes, it is in fact a literal example of what may quite accurately be termed a “deep state coup d’etat.” There is simply no legal justification for Trump’s unelected, appointed handlers to usurp executive authority like they apparently have been.

There is a 100% legal and above-board means of addressing the undeniable fact that Trump is unfit to hold the office of president. Two means, in fact: permanent removal from office via the impeachment process, and temporary removal from it per the 25^th Amendment.

None of this is to deny that:

1. The Republicans are complete, sheep-like authoritarian followers so are unwilling to cooperate in such processes, and
2. The world is doubtless a safer and better place as a result of Trump’s worst impulses being deliberately frustrated.

The problem is, as the old saw goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. There’s two perils being created by the present, informal measures: an immediate one, and a more long-term one.

The immediate one is that the measures themselves rest on very shaky ground. Trump, as chief executive, is totally empowered and on firm legal standing in attempting to smoke out and dismiss his insubordinate employees. We are only a few simple executive actions from a far worse immediate crisis.

The long-term one is that unaccountable, extralegal means of governance are being legitimized. Too many people are expressing relief rather than unease at this recent news. The temptation to descend the slippery slope and engage in more such actions against increasingly less unfit presidents will inevitably present itself.

In short, the recent news is yet one more example of how the Trump regime and its enablers are normalizing abhorrent practices and ideas.

Published at 08:29 on 5 September 2018

In this article, Cliff Mass claims the recent spate of wildfires (and wildfire smoke) in this region doesn’t have much to do with climate change, and that we’re merely returning to normal, smoky summers. Cited as evidence are statistics for area burned in Oregon and historical anecdotes about fires and smoke in Washington.

Missing is virtually any mention of fires in British Columbia. That’s highly significant, for two reasons:

1. Most of the wildfire smoke the Seattle region has experienced in the last two summers has been from fires in BC, and
2. In BC, unlike Oregon, the area burned is setting all-time records. This happened both last year and this year, in fact: 2017 set an all-time record for the province, and then 2018 bested 2017’s record.

It gets worse: there is plenty of evidence that the unprecedented size and severity of BC’s fires is related to global warming. The worst fires in BC are in the interior, in areas of lodgepole pine forest. Those forests are burning because they are full of diseased and dying trees. So many trees are diseased and dying because the population of pine beetles has exploded. The population of beetles has exploded because winters no longer have the extremes of cold that they used to.

Winters with fewer extremes of cold are precisely the sort of thing one would expect in a warming climate. Winter cold waves originate in the arctic and move south, and it is the regions closer to the poles whose temperature changes the most as global average temperatures change.

Yet despite all the above, British Columbia is almost completely absent from Mass’s blog post. I find this highly curious, to the point that I find it difficult to understand how it could be a chance accidental oversight.

Mass prides himself on being a political centrist, and I believe he has just illustrated how centrism is an ideology like any other, and centrists are subject to their political biases blinding them to obvious realities, just like those to the left and the right of the center.

The biggest problem with centrism is that if one side claims 2 + 2 = 4, and the other claims 2 + 2 = 5, you do not arrive at a correct answer by averaging the two and concluding that 2 + 2 = 4.5.

Published at 21:52 on 3 September 2018

Cape Flattery was spectacular and well worth seeing, but the camping options near it leave something to be desired. In particular, Hobuck Beach got crowded sooner than I thought (by Thursday evening; I was expecting it to get bad Friday and as such had planned to leave Friday morning). Worse, it attracts clueless idiots who think it’s a reasonable thing to fire up generators for their RV’s at quarter to five in the morning.

Prompted by that camping experience, I craved balance, so I decided not to go to Lake Ozette on Friday. Instead, I went into the Olympic Mountains and did some dispersed camping on national forest land, because I craved silence and solitude. I figured I could look for high-elevation huckleberries, part of an ongoing search. They’re easy enough to find in the Cascades, but not so easy to find in the Olympics.

And I found them. Not just a few bushes, good for a snack and that’s it (all I’ve found before in the Olympics). They weren’t near where I camped, so on Sunday I packed up and started driving to a spot on the map that looked promising (higher in elevation). The road became impassible before I reached that area, but at the same spot I was compelled to turn around, there they were. I found the silence and solitude, too. It was delightful to fall asleep to the sounds of no other human activity.

Today, for the first time in many years, I made mountain huckleberry jam again.

Tomorrow, I start my new job, which I certainly hope turns out to be a better match than my previous one.