Blackcap Blog

Published at 23:14 on 22 June 2021

Earlier I offered one particular reason why the Democrats are likely to lose in 2022. Here are some additional, more general ones:

The political cycle. Remember when I started getting bullish about the Democrats’ chances in 2018? A lot of it was based on the normal political cycle: a party that’s in power tends to lose a big chunk of it during the midterms. It’s been a very persistent trend in American politics for many decades now, and this time that trend is not in the Democrats’ favor.

Redistricting. The Democrats have continued their record of not doing as well at state and local levels as they have at the Federal one. The result is that most states are under Republican control. Republicans have never been shy about using their control of the redistricting process in their favor, and their rhetoric in this direction is getting increasingly bold. They are almost certain to pick up a half-dozen or more seats due to this one reason alone.

Voter suppression. Scores of state laws are being passed to make it disproportionately harder for Democrats to vote. It is reasonable to expect that such laws will bear fruit, particularly because (with a few exceptions, like in Texas), Democrats have generally been afraid to fully confront such tactics. The latter gross political malpractice brings up the final reason…

General incompetence. The post mentioned at the start of this entry was but a specific example of this. Not only won’t Democrats play hardball with legislative maneuvers, they won’t play hardball on the campaign trail, either: they are generally too timid to go negative. It goes beyond an unwillingness to play hardball, however. Democrats tend to labor under the delusion that voters are well-informed, care about the issues, and will automatically reward them for their positions. These assumptions are hilariously wrong, and bear little if any resemblance to the actual reality of the voting public. The Republicans understand this, base their campaigns on simple, repetitive messaging, and as such tend to reap the natural and expected rewards of doing so.

Conclusion. None of this proves the Democrats will do poorly next year, but it sure makes such an outcome likely.

Published at 11:39 on 21 June 2021

No right-wing judge would have the least hesitancy about doing so. In fact, most in a comparable situation would have probably done so already (or very soon).

Only the judges on the Establishment “left” are so totally situationally unaware as to fall for the selfish temptation to serve as many years as possible. This is huge part of why institutions tend to lean right. If one side always brings knives to gun fights, the side that brings guns will tend to win.

It is part of the reason why I couldn’t join the great RBG Admiration and Eulogy Society when she passed away. If she had not selfishly clung to the desire to serve until age ninety (despite not only a cancer diagnosis, but a pancreatic cancer diagnosis), she could have retired during Obama’s second term.

At times, 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.

Published at 16:54 on 20 June 2021

Really, now, this should be Exhibit A in any argument made by an Establishment type of how radicals are needlessly divisive and impractical.

At a time when the country is undergoing a transition to fascism that desperately needs to be interrupted, the DHS wants… not to drag the putschists and discredit them, but to seek common cause with them by demonizing anarchists as well as fascists.

Listen, you fucking morons: Anarchists did not violently invade the Capitol. Anarchists are not phoning in death threats to election officials who won’t ignore the vote totals and declare the fascists the winners no matter what. Fascists are doing those things. The fascist party wants to destroy you. It is not interested in allying with you!

Maybe act a bit more strategically, for once? Listen, I get it: I don’t expect you people to have any love for radical left politics. I don’t expect praise for anarchism from you. But you don’t have to: all you have to do is shut the fuck up about anarchism and focus on fascism. Fascism is Priority No. 1.

Churchill even managed to shut the fuck up about his many disagreements with Stalin and ally with him. Stalin! Surely you can STFU about anarchists, can you not?

Original document here.

Published at 19:03 on 19 June 2021

I might (finally) be (almost) done with this blog upgrade. We shall see.

I will say that WordPress does not make it easy to move a blog to a new server. There is a defined processs for purportedly doing this. Pity it does not work very well:

1. It has a rather silly 2 megabyte limit, one for which the recommended process does not remove. I eventually found a post from another user who had fought the same battle that explained how to do it, but wait, there’s more.
2. The pathetic P.O.S. does not preserve permalinks! Congratulations, every internal link to another blog post is now broken.
3. For some reason, it gratuitously replaces paragraph breaks with line breaks. WTF?

This is more than a little bit disappointing, because one would expect WordPress to be able to properly import from another site running the exact same software. I’m lucky, because I’m a computer geek. My solution was to go into the MySQL command prompt and do some database surgery:

1. Make sure the two blogs are running the exact same version of WordPress.
2. Drop all existing tables.
3. Restore from a database dump taken on the old system.
4. Go into the wp_options table and set siteurl and home to reflect the blog URL on the new host.

The average user, however, would be S.O.L. Most people don’t even know what SQL is, let alone know enough of both it and general database design principles to be able to engage in the sort of hackery I just did. They would be stuck not being able to move their blog, stuck with a broken, damaged new blog, or stuck with the lengthy and painful job of repairing their damaged new blog completely by hand.

Published at 11:19 on 17 June 2021

Earlier I wrote (emphasis added):

The Republic is basically dead already. Most don’t know it yet because the corpse has not started stinking yet, but it is dead. Nobody much believes in (or abides by) its core professed principles, and this goes for the Democrats about as much as it does for the GOP. The lack of any meaningful, substantial outrage over 1/6 proves it.

Many people realize that emphasized point on some level. Many pundits do, too, but refuse to say it aloud because of the fear that it will demoralize left-leaning voters. If I were a prominent pundit, I would have that fear, too. It is only because I am a random nobody with a blog of approximately zero national political import that I feel comfortable saying it.

But whether it is said or not, a non-trivial number of people feel it, and it does not take a whole lot of demoralized voters abstaining to change the outcome in a system where power is as balanced between two parties as ours is.

The remedy, of course, is for the Democrats to grow a pair and start using what power they do have to pursue accountability. Conveniently, this will be an exercise in basic law-and-order which will appeal to Never Trump moderates and conservatives approximately as much as it will appeal to liberals and leftists. The logical effect will be to inspire and energize a Big Tent base of support in the coming elections.

In other words, that which is best for world as a whole is also best for the short-term political fortunes of the Democratic Party. The question is: are enough Democrats capable of realizing this, and escaping the comfort zone of their timeworn battered wife role, always blaming themselves for the fact that the opposition never loves them?

My money is solidly on this particular old dog being unable to learn any new tricks, but I certainly hope I am wrong.

Published at 08:52 on 16 June 2021

Almost three weeks on from the filibuster of the 1/6 commission and there are no signs of the House or the Executive Branch lifting so much as a pinky finger to pursue accountability for instigating the coup attempt.

By any reasonable and objective measure that I can conceive, today’s USA has less commitment to the basic principles of democracy and the rule of law than the Weimar Republic did. Remember, within two days of the Beer Hall Putsch, a putsch that failed to take over a defense ministry because the ministry was so well-defended, the top instigators were in detention awaiting trial. By contrast, it has now been over six months since 1/6, yet nothing.

The Republic is basically dead already. Most don’t know it yet because the corpse has not started stinking yet, but it is dead. Nobody much believes in (or abides by) its core professed principles, and this goes for the Democrats about as much as it does for the GOP. The lack of any meaningful, substantial outrage over 1/6 proves it.

Late last year, I had an estimate that the USA was within a dozen years of completing a transition to an authoritarian fascist state. The lack of meaningful response to 1/6 indicates I was being overoptimistic in that estimate. A far more realistic estimate is that the USA will become fully fascist within five years.

Published at 17:56 on 15 June 2021

This is probably going to be part of a series about the curve balls Ubuntu 20.04 LTS throws at the veteran Ubuntu Linux user.

When you install MySQL with:

apt-get install mysql-client mysql-server

You will get an oddly-configured MySQL server that uses a newfangled thing called auth_socket authentication for the root user. The upshot is that you will not be able to log in to mysql as root unless you are already the root Linux user, and in the latter case you will always be able to log in, regardless of what password you supply, or even if you supply a password at all.

If, like me, you are logged in as the root Linux user (and why wouldn’t you be, if you are doing a system install), then it appears as if authentication is completely disabled, and your mysql server’s root account is wide-open. At that point, you will try doing Internet searches to uncover the cause of the problem, and if you are like me, you will spend hours trying different keyword variations and finding exactly nothing pertinent.

The fix is to change the root user to use caching_sha2_password authentication and set a password for it, e.g.:

ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH 'caching_sha2_password' BY 'iSpQ7U9c8kGz';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

(And no, that is not my actual root password.)

Published at 19:57 on 14 June 2021

This is a post I was planning to make about a year ago, to complete the ones I made about two other native carnivorous plants of Whatcom County. I had a location all set with multiple herbarium records of it and everything.

I went there, and nothing. I searched for hours in vain. Either it was growing in a remote part of the lake in question, one which I could not readily access, or it had died out. Frustratingly, one of the records was for an easily-accessible dock area, where there were now none to be seen. I made a mental note to try again next year, then forgot about it.

Just this evening, while on a bike ride in my neighborhood, an photogenic clump of tule catch my eye. Hoping to get some shots of their flowers (which are not showy, but still are flowers, and which I have none of in my library of images), I notice something at the base of the clump:

There are in fact quite a lot of them blooming across the surface of this little pond:

This is the plant I was hoping to find last year, the Common Bladderwort (Utricularia vulgaris). Being an aquatic plant, the real action is happening below the surface (they sort of blend in with rest of the leaves, but look carefully, they are there):

Here we see the bladder-like traps that give this plant its common name. They prey for the most part on zooplankton, and are some of the most rapidly-moving plant structures known, capable of acting in under a millisecond and subjecting their prey to forces of 600 G, approximately 200 times faster than the traps of the Venus Flytrap (that link contains a slow-motion close-up action shot of a bladderwort trap in action).

What a treat, finding these in my own neighborhood!

Published at 08:57 on 5 June 2021

Make no mistake, Flynn is a disgusting fascist who did just advocate a fascist coup. If he were still actively serving, he could and should be prosecuted under military law.

But he is retired. Any use of “Gen.” in front of his name has to be followed with “(ret.).” Retired officers are not officers; they are civilians.

There is no evidence that Flynn has any ability to immediately put his coup in motion. As such, what he said lacks the immediacy to pose any real threat of sedition. What he said was noxious, but it still appears to be free speech.

Those who think otherwise should be careful of what they wish for. Prosecuting Flynn will set precedents for prosecuting political speech, and those precedents will soon enough be used by the right against the left.

Deplatforming is, of course, an entirely different matter. Fascists like Flynn deserve all the deplatforming they get. Flynn is free to hold whatever opinions he wants, but other private citizens are free to distance themselves from having anything to do with his opinions. Having an opinion does not entitle anyone to automatic respect or agreement on the part of others.

Published at 23:16 on 31 May 2021

I do not have much good to say about how seriously most Democrats are treating the current situation, but I will give credit where it is due. The Democrats in the Texas Legislature demonstrated a willingness to bring actual guns to gun fights when they walked out at a strategic time and prevented a fascistic vote-suppression measure from being enacted.

When they did so, they rightly announced that this was being done due to the extraordinary nature of what they were opposing, and that such actions would not be suitable to advance the agenda of mere shiny things. The Texas Democrats also tellingly called on President Bidan and other Democrats in Washington to follow their lead.

Whether or not they do may well prove to be decisive in determining if the fascists win.

And yes, protecting voting rights, while not quite as important for those in Washington to pursue as accountability, is still pretty damn important. It is not a distracting shiny thing. I thought I had mentioned this in my earlier post but I had not.