Blackcap Blog

Published at 11:43 on 9 July 2021

Perhaps you have noticed it: the sky has a dingy aspect to it today, and sunlight is a little less intense and a little more yellowish than normal. The reason is smoke. There is wildfire smoke above us. It has not made it down to the surface due to the surface flow being onshore, so there have not been any real air quality concerns about it. (East of the Cascades, it is a different story; the smoke has made it down to the surface several times already there.)

This has happened once or twice before in the past week or two. Eventually, our luck will run out and the smoke will make it down to the surface. Although it is not known exactly when that will happen, it is early enough in the summer, with most of the dry season left to go, therefore it is almost certain to happen at some point. Hence my earlier warnings about preparing for smoke.

For this weekend, however, we should be safe. The smoke aloft is in fact modeled to depart by Sunday afternoon, so the sky should get clearer and bluer. Temperatures will be somewhat above long-term norms, but it will not be a heat wave by any measure. Highs should be in the mid-to-upper 70’s near the coast and into the low 80’s inland.

What we really need at this point is a summertime rain storm to reset the fire conditions, but nothing of the sort is modeled in the near future.

Published at 10:31 on 9 July 2021

Now that the House has committed itself to forming a select committee to investigate the events of last January 6th, there is room for a little more optimism about the future.

A little more. We are still in a world where the Democrats have damned themselves via their own reluctance to form such a committee in the first place. This indicates an overall, collective lack of appreciation for the seriousness of the current situation.

Also, these are Democrats we are talking about, the party that continually squanders opportunities and has a long, sad history of losing easily winnable elections. A competent Democratic Party would leverage the work of such a select committee to help inspire voters to oppose the GOP in the coming election (the GOP sure wasn’t shy about leveraging the work of the Benghazi select committee). But that is not the sort of Democratic Party we have; instead, we have one that by and large labors under the delusion that the voting public is, in general, comprised of rational actors who are concerned about political issues and who will naturally tend to reward the Democrats when they do things that are in the interest of the vast majority.

Thankfully, the antifascist coalition consists of more than just Democrats. In particular, it consists in part of dissident conservatives who have left the Trump-era Republican Party in disgust, and some of these individuals are the very political operatives who have long helped the GOP eat the Democrats’ lunch in campaigns. Thus, we can expect the Lincoln Project (which, contrary to my expectations, seems to have weathered the storm of its earlier scandal) to not be shy about doing what is necessary to politically capitalize on the fallout from January 6th.

The question is whether or not it will be enough. The Lincoln Project is something of a political oddball, and is not well tied-in to conventional sources of funding, thus limiting its power to do the politically savvy things that its leaders know need to be done. Then again, they recently did manage to spank Toyota good and hard for bankrolling seditious politicians, so do not underestimate that organization’s ability to make up in talent for it lacks in funding.

So: a little more optimism is called for at this stage, but not any more.

Published at 08:31 on 8 July 2021

I wrote a few months ago how leaving Afghanistan in defeat is basically a foregone conclusion, and thanks to the malfeasance of the ruling class that ordered the invasion, has been a foregone conclusion for nearly two decades and counting.

As such, there really are only two fundamental choices: leave in defeat now, or continue squandering lives and resources and leave in defeat later.

At best, there is some sort of weak argument for leaving not quite now, so the departure can be done in a somewhat more orderly fashion, with a somewhat more hopeful future prognosis. The risk in this is that when “not quite now” comes around, there will be a strong temptation to come up with a new “not quite now,” just a little bit further in the future, and so on, until significant delay has transpired, with the associated waste in lives and resources. In fact, much of the duration of the Western presence in Afghanistan can be accurately characterized as precisely this process.

Eventually, the bitter reality of defeat must be accepted by the ruling class. Of this, there is no alternative.

All that said, however, there are still better and worse ways to leave in defeat. One huge question is the one of what happens to the Afghans who chose to throw their lot in with the Western invaders. If they are not given asylum in the West, it is crystal clear what will happen to them, and as of this stage it is unclear if they will be given asylum.

Mind you, this is a ruling class we are talking about, so such rank callousness over the lives of others just comes with the territory. It would be entirely in character for those Afghans to be abandoned. History is replete with such examples. So they may well be abandoned. That much is as clear as the inevitability of the US defeat in Afghanistan has long been.

However, it would be, in addition to inhumane, highly unstrategic. It would say to future potential allies that being an ally of the West is a stupid exercise that will likely lead to one being abandoned later. This has the obvious consequence of making it more difficult to secure allies in the future.

The question is whether the ruling class is capable of realizing this. They really do believe they are superior human beings whose lives matter more than others; one cannot easily rule over others without believing such claptrap. And, of course, the lives that matter least of all are the lives of those least like the ruling elite, those whom: do not have much money to their name, do not have white skin, do not have a Western culture and traditions, etc. The Afghan people fit these characteristics to an absolute “T.”

Nothing is inevitable, however, and it is also possible that political realities can be created which make it the path of least resistance for the ruling class to give those vulnerable Afghans asylum. However, such realities must be created, i.e. there must be organized pressure in favor of giving our Afghan allies asylum. So far, there has not been a great deal of such pressure, but it is possible to change that, and the real question is whether or not sufficient pressure can be created.

If this does not happen (and it is at this time an open question whether or not it will), then we will soon see another moral outrage added to the long list of such outrages committed by Western imperialism.

Published at 09:56 on 7 July 2021

This is Not Over

Worldwide, the vast majority of individuals have yet to see so much as a single dose of vaccine, and the numbers of new cases and deaths are comparable to spring and summer of last year, when everything was shut down due to the risk. Yes, in the First World things are returning to normal, but the First World is not the entire world. Far from it, actually: the First World is a tiny sliver of wealthy nations. The vast majority of the world’s people live in poverty or near-poverty.

Not Over, Part II

Not only is the virus circulating widely, new variants are continually evolving. So far, the existing vaccines seem to do a good job of protecting against those new variants. There is, however, no guarantee that this will hold into the future. Influenza viruses continually evolve to the point where new vaccines must be continually developed to protect against them.

So long as COVID-19 continues to circulate, and particularly to circulate unimpeded in the Third World, the pandemic is not over. It will not be over until it is over for all. Seen in this light, aid to developing countries is not mere charity; it is self-interest.

Hard to Feel Sorry for Most Refuseniks

Then we get to the First World, where a not-insignificant chunk of individuals, particularly in nations like the USA that are plagued by widespread backwardness of thought, refuse to get vaccinated at all.

First of all, this is their choice: forcing people to get a medical procedure is anti-freedom and should be off the table. This has two sides, however: forcing people to associate with the irresponsible is also anti-freedom and should also be off the table. If businesses and other organizations wish to have vaccine mandates, they should be free to do so. If this causes the refuseniks difficulty in their personal lives, so be it. Choices have consequences.

Secondly, it is very hard to feel sorry for most of the refuseniks that get sick and/or die as a result of their behavior. To reiterate: choices have consequences. COVID vaccination is a rare example of something done very right in the USA. Instead of vaccine access depending on social privilege, the vaccine is available to all, free at the point of delivery. Nobody has to decide between their children having enough to eat and getting a shot. The standard point about many being victims of their unchosen circumstances does not apply this time.

Yes, there are groups that are mistrustful of the medical establishment because of past history (type “Tuskeegee experiment” into your search engine of choice for one such example). And there are people for whom it is just plain unsafe to receive a vaccine. But those cases are a minority of those refusing to get vaccines. I chose my wording carefully: it is hard to feel sorry for most refuseniks.

I Blame Trump, Too

No, he’s not president anymore, but he is still very much politically relevant. Anyone who doubts the latter statement need only consider how much the GOP is still cowering in fear of his every word, refusing to so much as entertain the idea of investigating the January 6th insurrection. Trump created and weaponized the sort of know-nothing-ism that the anti-vax crowd is part of.

There is nothing stopping Trump from agreeing to star in a public service advertisement or two targeted at his demographic, encouraging people to get vaccinated. This would almost certainly be a huge help in increasing the vaccination rate, and Trump himself is vaccinated, proving that he has no objection in principle to vaccination. Yet he insists on running a death cult and killing his followers.

Then again, those followers chose to be followers. The USA is not North Korea; Trumpism is not a mandatory state ideology. Again, it is hard to feel sorry for most of those getting sick and dying as a result of their own personal bad decisions.

Published at 11:16 on 6 July 2021

Is the process of cutover to my new hosting solution (i.e. self-hosted) done? We shall see.

One wrinkle is that my self-hosted email server seems to be DNS blackholed. Hopefully I can resolve that. This is a virtual host, and the IP address it possesses may have been used by an incautious or abusive site in the past. Unfortunately, it is not possible for me to preserve my old, known-reputable IP address. This is yet another instance of a problem where abusive Internet users cause headaches for the vast majority of non-abusive users.

Update. Almost done, it turns out. The emails from the new server are being rejected by both Apple and Google, because my new static IP address is for some reason on a blacklist. Guilty until proven innocent, oh joy. Now I must argue to have my address un-blacklisted. Mostly I blame spammers and not Apple or Google; I have used such blacklists myself in the past and may well do so again in the future. Abusers of the Internet have ruined so much of it for honest users.

Published at 07:41 on 2 July 2021

Remember him? He is (or rather was) the Evergreen State College professor who got his undies all in a knot the time their annual Day of Absence asked White students to consider staying off campus for a day.

The organizers of the event had asked the same of students of Color for decades, and Weinstein had never raised a peep about it. He only objected the one year when they thought to reverse it. That latter fact caused many leftists, including Yours Truly, to conclude that, despite Weinstein’s protestations to the contrary, white fragility was at the root of his objections.

At the time, I pointed out (not on this site, but in conversations), that I considered him for the most part a “nutty professor” who was himself responsible for most of the brouhaha he found himself involved in. This was not to say that I supported everything done by his opponents (which degenerated at times into threats of physical violence).

Anyhow, where is this nutty professor today?

Answer: promoting COVID vaccine denialism and quack remedies, and as such causing YouTube to exercise editorial discretion by removing many of his videos. Then, of course, playing the victim card and acting like he’s being “censored” due to YouTube’s act of free speech. And yes, part of free speech is the right to not say something, and to be free from others forcing you to say what you do not want to say.

You think I’m making this up? Go to his Twitter feed and see for yourself.

Oh, he also famously once tried to lecture the International Chess Federation about chess rules and strategy:

Looks like my earlier characterization of him as a nutty professor was spot-on.

Published at 10:49 on 1 July 2021

I knew a heat wave of the sort the Pacific Northwest just experienced was going to happen eventually, I just thought eventually would take a lot longer than the year 2021 to arrive. Yet here we are.

It started about a week out, when one of the weather forecasting models started predicting simply insane temperatures. Instead of being a blip, an outlier, the other main accurate model quickly came on board, and then both models stuck with that forecast as the time approached. It was both surreal and frightening. By the time the forecast was within three days, it was clear that it was going to happen, for the simple reason that I have never seen a time when the forecasting models were this consistent, both from model to model and run to run, and not seen the modeled forecast come true at that time frame.

And come true it did, with absolutely surreal high temperatures. Portland came close to reaching the all-time record high for Las Vegas, and Seattle got hotter than Atlanta ever has. Beyond the immediate human cost is the ecosystem cost: our forests simply were not evolved to deal with such conditions, and already there are many reports of widespread tree injury of death. At this early stage, it is difficult to tell injury from death, but even if it is the former, the latter probably will not be that far behind, because the summers here are already warmer and drier than long-term norms, so even less-dramatic conditions can logically be expected to continue stressing trees until many succumb.

I do not see much evidence of this in my immediate area, but this area had both higher dew points and lower temperatures than most parts of this region during the heat wave, so it is to be expected that the immediately observable effects would be less here. There are plenty of reports of more dramatic and noticeable tree damage in other parts of the region out there, and I have no real reason to doubt them.

There is little, if anything, that I love more than the native forests of this region, and the realization of their impending demise fills me with both grief and rage simultaneously. May the future have mercy on our souls.

Published at 13:10 on 25 June 2021

In a recent post of his, he claims, regarding extreme heat waves:

There is no evidence that such a wave pattern is anything other than natural variability (I have done research on this issue and published in the peer-reviewed literature on this exact topic).

This is a recurring pattern with Mass: passing off a topic on which there is debate in the scientific community, as something that is settled, with his own personal opinion in the debate as the settled truth. Actually, there is some evidence of the sort Mass denies:

“This is a weather system that can be very persistent, it can last for many days,” said Dim Coumou, a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “It brings clear skies, very high temperature[s].”

While climate change has already warmed the planet about 1.2C since pre-industrial times, scientists such as Coumou believe it has also shifted atmospheric patterns.

His research shows that a gradual weakening of the jet stream during summer makes these high-pressure systems more persistent, resulting in longer heatwaves. The jet stream, a band of fast-moving wind high in the atmosphere, greatly influences weather patterns in the northern hemisphere

Source.

Edit: And his grasp of statistics is all wrong, too.

Published at 10:48 on 24 June 2021

Mind you, this is distinctly a positive development, but contrary to Pelosi’s assertion, Congress does not have “as long as it takes.” It is imperative that a substantial part of the truth be uncovered and released to the voting public in advance of the November 2022 elections. Voters must be informed as to just how institutionally complicit the GOP was in the insurrection. Failure to do so would be a gross disservice to the Republic and its Constitution that Pelosi has sworn an oath to defend.

Also, it must be understood that the goal of having the investigation be bipartisan is in tension with the one of having it be thorough. At this stage, not many House Republicans can be trusted to act in good faith. Ones who, like Peter Meijer and Adam Kinzinger, have demonstrated their faith to Constitutional norms, are acceptable. The vast majority, however, have demonstrated by their own words and actions that they are fascists loyal to to their führer Trump and nothing or nobody else. As such, it is absolutely unacceptable to place such individuals in positions of power sufficient to sabotage the necessary work of the Committee.

Published at 17:04 on 23 June 2021

Really, this is simply terrible. There are only two choices: uphold standards, or set precedents that the old standards do not apply anymore, and it appears Garland is choosing the latter option. This will only compound the Democrats’ coming loss in 2022, as it creates yet another reason for left-leaning voters to be cynical and apathetic about electoral politics.

Not much else to say but to repeat two bleak observations I have made before:

1. When the historians of the future write about the USA’s transition to fascism, they will fault the Democrats almost as much (for failing to oppose it) as they do the Republicans (for pursuing it).
2. It’s almost bad enough to make one seriously wonder if the Establishment “left” isn’t all just a deliberate charade to promote right-wing dominance.