Blackcap Blog

Published at 18:34 on 6 January 2021

Not a Surprise

Really, can anyone say this all is a surprise, after all the garbage that Trump and his enablers have been spewing about a “stolen” election? Because if an election really is being stolen by those intent on destroying freedom, then an insurrection is totally justified.

Of course, there was only a very tiny amount of fraud, nowhere near enough to change the outcome. As is usual. (And yes, fraud is usual. This is Planet Reality, not Cloud Cuckoo Land. Some people will do crooked things.) So the whole thing is nothing but a gigantic exercise in gaslighting: those clamoring “Stop the steal!” are the ones actually advocating for a stolen election.

But still, if you get a bunch of people to believe the election was stolen, things like what happened at the Capitol today are pretty much to be expected.

In fact, independent journalist Robert Evans cataloged all the signs of the coming storm, being openly posted and talked about on the Internet.

The Obvious Discrepancy

I’ve been to lots of demonstrations, and witness lots of confrontations at police barricades. Typically, the cops will try at least five times as hard to defend a barricade that protects some windows at Niketown (just the windows, because Niketown had been closed) than I saw them try to defend the one protecting Congress (not just the Capitol, Congress which was in session at the time) today.

In fact, some cops have even been videoed posing for selfies with the fascists, inside the Capitol building.

But, but, they were understaffed, some say. They couldn’t defend those barricades; circumstances compelled them to make a strategic retreat. But, but, it’s just a few bad apples, some say.

That does not answer my point. Suppose they were understaffed. Why were they understaffed? Why was a right-wing mob threatening people automatically judged to be less of a threat than a left-wing one threatening mere property?

Individual cops to not get to decide whether or not to deploy at a protest. Those higher up in the command structure make those decisions. That they evidently did not points to the rot and bias in policing being structural and systematic. Far from being a defense of policing, any understaffing at the Capitol today serves as a further indictment of it.

Accountability is Critical

Will Trump be held to account for all he did to incite today’s attempted putsch?

Ideally, he should be impeached post-haste, then investigated for sedition and whatever other charges seem to have probable cause. Then, assuming convincing evidence is found, comes prosecution and finally conviction.

Not just for what happened today, but for every law he has broken while president.

Accountability is Unlikely

But this is the USA. I have not once in my adult life ever seen a person at or near the apex of the social hierarchy be held truly accountable for his or her misdeeds.

I do not expect this to change, because I can not reasonably expect it to change.

There is a hierarchy of authority in all class societies, and that hierarchy is particularly severe here. It is why, unique amongst the most affluent nations, the American political system has steadfastly refused to guarantee health care to all as a right. The property of those on top is held to be more important than the lives of those below, and the lack of universal health care is but an expression of this guiding principle.

The richer you are, the whiter you are, and the further to the poltical Right you are, the more your life matters. The poorer you are, the browner you are, and the more to the political Left you are, the less your life matters.

This is why the police posed for selfies with the brownshirts. This is why they did not defend their barricade, if they were not understaffed. If they were understaffed, this is why they were understaffed.

One Foot in the Grave

There is a message in all this. The message was sent when Nixon was pardoned. It was sent again when Oliver North got off scot-free, and nobody higher up was held to account for Iran Contra. It got sent again when nobody got seriously held to account for lying their way into the Iraq War, or for using torture as official state policy.

There is no rule of law for the political Right in the USA. If you are on the Right, and in power, you can do basically whatever you want, and get away with it.

The American Republic has one foot in the grave. Very few realize just how sick it really is.

Soon: A Corpse

Given all that, why not do whatever you want, if it looks politically profitable? Why leave money and power on the table?

If, as is likely, Trump is not impeached, and nobody suffers consequences for what happened today, what is the lesson in all of it? Simple: once again, the rule of law doesn’t matter. The Right gets to do whatever it wants.

At that point, the Republic becomes a corpse. It may take a while (as in: a few years) for the stench and the bloat to get to the point where nobody can ignore it any more, and the oblivious may pretend otherwise until then, but a corpse it will be. Its constitution and its laws might still technically exist, but their irrelevance will have been incontrovertibly demonstrated.

The next coup attempt — and there will be one, sooner rather than later — will, in all likelihood, be successful. The inevitability of it will be obvious to historians, who will wonder how those enmeshed in it all could have been blind to the signs.

Unless

Unless, that is, tradition is broken with and the USA starts holding the powerful to account.

Published at 18:48 on 28 December 2020

First, the bomber is probably not a right-winger because he tried to limit the effect of the bombing to property damage by using a PA system to broadcast warnings to evacuate. Right-wing terrorists generally do not care about human life. Consider the Oklahoma City bombing or the 9/11 attacks as two examples.

In fact, I was originally going to speculate that it was likely a left-wing group behind the bombings, specifically because of the warnings. For example, both the Provisional IRA and the Weather Underground Organization specialized in calling in warnings to evacuate areas where they had placed bombs.

Except now we are learning that it was a lone wolf attack. Most left-wing bombings have groups behind them, so I now believe, by process of elimination, the bombing is be motivated by personal grudges. The target seems to have been the AT&T building in Nashville.

AT&T is a big, bureaucratic business with many customers. It is not hard to imagine that the bomber was harboring a grudge against AT&T for some past business dealing that went wrong, or some act of corporate malfeasance.

That is just one possible reason; the motive could easily be a moonbat conspiracy theory, or a grudge against some other business in the same immediate area. Mental illness is also a possibility, given that it was evidently a suicide bombing.

But it does not appear at this stage likely to be politically-motivated terrorism.

Published at 14:02 on 16 December 2020

Of course, it matters because will give Democrats control over the Senate. Everybody knows that much. However, I don’t think everybody knows just how important that will be.

First, if we know anything about the Republicans, we know that they will be dead-set on obstruction to the max if they retain control of the Senate. Nobody aware of Mitch McConnell’s antics over the past five years can plausibly argue otherwise. If the Republicans control the Senate, Biden will probably not be able to appoint anyone other than actual, pro-Trump, pro-fascist Republicans to any Senate-confirmed position. He will not be able to pass any laws except the laws Trumpers want.

Government will lurch from crisis to crisis, and the Republicans will blame it all on the chief executive and his party. Because voters are by and large stupid, and because Democrats are by and large incompetent when it comes to messaging, voters will overall fall for the Republican lie hook, line, and sinker.

Because Biden’s cabinet nominations will be frustrated, he will resort to doing what Trump did and nominate acting secretaries. In fact, he will largely resort to doing what Trump did in other ways. Doubtless he will use executive power to direct spending without Congressional approval, much like Trump did with the border wall.

In doing so, Biden will cement, by bipartisan consensus, that Trump’s innovations in the way of greater executive power were legitimate and establish precedent for an increasingly imperial presidency. Sooner rather than later, a Trumpy fascist will win the White House again, and at that point it will be Game Over for democracy.

All of this is likely should Democrats not win the two runoffs in Georgia. This, not just some lack of breathing room when it comes to enacting policy, is the real stakes at play in the Georgia runoffs.

In fact, the breathing room afforded Biden on policy really won’t be that great. The Senate will be split 50–50; Democrats will prevail only because the Vice President gets to cast a tie-breaking vote. Anything that passes the Senate will therefore have to get ayes from the likes of Joseph Manchin III, Angus King Jr., Jon Tester, and Kyrsten Sinema. That is aside from the fact that Biden himself is no progressive.

But none of that matters so much. Putting a brake on the runaway train to fascism, not enacting any progressive wish list, is the real reason those two Georgia seats matter.

Published at 08:56 on 7 December 2020

Of course, he probably will be made so, and that is a huge problem, because it continues the long, sad, and highly dangerous American tradition of never holding the most powerful in society to account.

While there are a few voices calling for the right thing to be done, some quick Internet searching using the term “prosecute Trump” indicates they are distinctly in the minority, which indicates the likely course of action. Or should I say, the likely course of inaction.

Trump only happened because past precedent (Nixon was pardoned, Reagan got off the hook for Iran/Contra, no high-up Bushies were prosecuted for lying their way into Iraq or establishing an official policy of torturing prisoners, etc.) indicated that in the USA, the most powerful are almost never held to any standards. If this dangerous and disgusting precedent is allowed to stand, there will be another right-wing authoritarian regime, soon, and it will be far worse than the Trump regime ever was.

Published at 12:12 on 2 December 2020

Introduction

Stories like this one are circulating in the local news.

What we actually have here is the nexus of several factors:

• A prosecutor trying to make those whom s/he is accusing look as bad as possible (as prosecutors always do),
• A reporter ignorant of the basics of railroad signaling and railroad operations in general,
• Broadly-worded post-9/11 anti-terrorism legislation, and
• A couple of activists who badly neglected their homework.

What we do not have is a gang of hardened and depraved eco-terrorists willing to cause significant human and ecological damage in order to make their point.

First, we need to look into just what the “shunting” these two are accused of actually does. In order to do that, we must delve a bit into the basics of railroad signaling.

The Basics of Railroad Signaling

There is much talk these days about “smart” vehicles and “smart” highways, and how these offer the possibility of vastly safer road transport in the future. Well, railroads have been creatively using late nineteenth-century technology to minimize the likelihood of crashes basically ever since… the late nineteenth century! It’s one of the reasons rail is such a safe transport mode, compared to highways.

What they do is called automatic block signaling. The railroad track is divided up into a series of electrically-isolated blocks and small opposing electrical charges, typically around a volt or so total, are applied to the two rails in each block. Even though the rails are not very well-insulated from either the ground or each other, the small voltage means that very little current will flow between them.

That is, unless a train is present. Then, a current will flow up through one steel wheel, across the steel axle, and down through the other wheel, completing the circuit. This current will trigger a relay. The presence of a train has been detected.

It is then a simple enough matter to use electromechanical logic to cause signals to turn red, disallowing two trains from occupying the same block at the same time. If one successfully does that, crashes between trains become impossible.

The same principle can be used to activate signals at grade crossings. (Although, to be technical, what is now done at crossings is rather more sophisticated, allowing the distance and speed of the approaching train, as well as its mere presence, to be detected.)

These days, most signals have been upgraded to computerized and electronic controls more sophisticated than the old electromechanical ones, but the basic principles remain the same: voltage is applied to the rails, and when current can easily flow between the rails, it is interpreted as the presence of the train and signals are set accordingly.

If you wish to see a diagram of how this all works, go here.

The Basics of Shunting

Of course, if one were to connect a sufficiently thick wire between the two rails, and electrically bond the wire to the rails with low-resistance connections, one would create a short between the rails that mimics the presence of a train. This is all that shunting does, no more, no less.

Phantom Trains

Remember how I mentioned that the two rails are not well-insulated from each other? Well, it turns out that sometimes moisture or metallic debris can cause an accidental and unwanted electrical connection between the rails.

Either way, we now have a phantom train on the block. The signaling system thinks a train is present, even though none is. Railroad operations are being disrupted.

This happens frequently enough that railroads have a procedure for dealing with it. After the train stops, the dispatcher can tell the engineer to proceed through the red light. The catch is that the train has to proceed very slowly, slow enough so that, if there is something on the tracks, the train can be stopped before it hits it.

The real solution, of course, also involves dispatching a repair crew to locate and cure the root cause of the problem. Making trains stop, contact the dispatcher, and creep through a block needlessly slowly still costs time and money.

What Shunting Can, and Can Not, Do

Now that we know the basics of what the two have been accused of, and how railroads operate, we can delve into some of the supposed adverse consequences of the alleged crimes.

Shunting Will Interfere with Railroad Operations

How could it not? It causes signals to needlessly turn red and stop trains. That was, of course, the whole point.

Shunting Will Not Cause Crossing Gates to Fail to Drop

Shunting works by mimicking the presence of a train. In order to make crossing gates fail to drop, one must mimic the exact opposite: the absence of a train. Shunting will therefore cause lights and bells to activate, and gates to drop, if done on a block containing a grade crossing.

Suppose the railroad has some way to disable the crossing signals in such a situation, and chooses to do so. In this case, it is not the shunt that caused the signal to be disabled, it is the railroad. Moreover, there is still a phantom train on the block. In order to enter it, trains will have to stop, contact the dispatcher, and proceed through at a very slow speed.

If there is a way to disable the crossing signal, there will also be a way to re-enable it. Any failure to so re-enable the crossing signal after talking the train through the red light will thus be the fault of the railroad and not those placing the shunt.

Suppose that worst case happens anyhow. The train is only creeping through the crossing; it is not approaching at maximum speed. The train has a horn, and will still use it, so there will still be some indication of it.

The horror scenarios of trains sailing through crossings at full speed, with no advance warning whatsoever, as a result of shunts are therefore pure bullshit.

Shunting Does Not Typically Cause Emergency Stops

Railroads do not like emergency stops, because they often cause minor damage to the stopping train. The most common form of damage is flat spots on the wheels caused by them locking and skidding. (The affected wheels and axle must then be removed from the truck and turned back into round on a big lathe.) Sometimes the couplings between cars get damaged as well.

Since emergency stops are bad, railroad signals have indications in advance of occupied blocks, so that engineers will not encounter a red signal by surprise and instead be able to gradually bring the train to a routine stop. A shunt will cause these advance indications much the same as an actual train would.

The only way a shunt can cause an emergency stop is if one is placed on a block immediately in front of a running train, which will then see an unexpected red signal.

Emergency Stops Do Not Often Cause Derailments

The most frequent adverse consequences of them are, to reiterate, flat wheels and damaged couplings. Neither is a derailment. Neither endangers the public or the environment from errant rolling stock or spilled cargo.

Emergency stops are strongly correlated with derailments, but they do not typically cause them. Consider the following scenario: a rock slide blocks the tracks. The engineer rounds a bend and sees it, immediately putting his train into an emergency stop. It is hard to stop a train, so the train does not stop in time. It hits the slide and derails. There was both an emergency stop and a derailment, but the cause of the derailment was not the emergency stop.

Enter the PATRIOT Act

It is a huge piece of legislation hurriedly passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, containing enhanced penalties for just about anything that can conceivably be construed as terrorism. One of these things is tampering with railroad signaling systems. Installing an illegal shunt is a form of electrical tampering with a signaling system, therefore in the eyes of the law it is prosecutable as a terrorist act.

The main intent here was to prosecute other types of tampering, ones intended to produce false green signals that sent trains to their doom, but the way the law was written, any tampering is prosecutable.

Those Two Did Not Do Their Homework

But, fair or not, it doesn’t matter now. The law is the law, and it allows them to be aggressively prosecuted as terrorists for what they did.

If you are not willing to accept the consequences of something, you should not do it, whatever that something is. This is basic Direct Action 101 sort of stuff: always do your homework.

If you wish to make a point by stopping trains, there are ways to do it that, while still unlawful, do not entail the high legal risk that shunting does. It is not difficult to figure out some of these ways. Why needlessly expose oneself to legal risk? Why impose on one’s comrades the burden of defending against needlessly serious charges?

And that, not “terrorism,” is what those two saboteurs are really guilty of: failing to do their homework.

Published at 10:21 on 12 November 2020

Back during the GOP primary process for the 2016 elections, there was widespread speculation that, in the unlikely event that Trump ever won both the primary and the November election, he would get nowhere while in office. This is because so much of what he wanted flew in the face of the established positions of both parties at the time. Instead, the rest of the GOP fell in line, and surprisingly easily.

At that point, speculation (including on this site) was made of events that might prompt the GOP to abandon Trump in a tipping-point scenario. As time passed, various triggers for such a scenario were put forth. The tipping point never happened.

The current presumed tipping point involves growing acknowledgment of the fact that Trump lost the 2020 election. While there have been more defectors than usual in this iteration, the vast majority of the Fascist Party is still squarely behind Trump and his insistence that he has not lost the election (at least not yet).

Jennifer Rubin is correct: at this stage, the most plausible time line going forward involves the Fascists continuing to, by and large, line up squarely behind their führer. Given that, what is such a future likely to be like?

A brief digression: In general, runoffs in Georgia have been won by the candidate with a plurality. In both Senate runoffs, a Fascist has the plurality. Therefore the most likely outcome is that Fascists will win both seats. So Moscow Mitch will remain Senate majority leader.

What does this mean? Maximum obstruction. Biden will not be allowed to so much as choose non-Trumpist cabinet officials if he wants to get them through the Senate confirmation process. Also forget about passing any legislation that deviates much from Trumpist desires. His will be a do-nothing caretaker administration.

An effective campaigner might be able take two years of such unreasonable obstruction in the Senate and use the resulting negative partisanship to engineer a highly unusual midterm election that results in the party controlling the White House walking away with more power. There is nothing to suggest that this outcome is likely. All available evidence suggests that Biden is a doddering old fool who firmly believes that he can re-create a vanished era of bipartisanship by the sheer force of his own will. He will be unwilling to engage in the sort of bare-knuckled rhetoric needed to delegitimize the opposition’s tactics and motivate support in the midterms.

What Biden does will be accomplished via executive order. Much of what Trump did was accomplished via executive order, so Biden can (and will) take a chain saw to those Trump-era orders. However, keep in mind the previous paragraph: Biden won’t be allowed to appoint a cabinet of his choosing. Instead, he will be compelled to do what Trump did and appoint a series of acting officials. The absence of the ability to get any legislation of consequence through Congress will also compel Biden to innovate and push the envelope on the boundaries of executive power, much like Trump did.

The most important thing we need to do in the post-Trump era is to scale back the power of the imperial presidency. Instead, we are going to get the Trumpist notion of an increasingly powerful imperial presidency cemented into place by bipartisan precedent.

Such executive power won’t be enough to save the Biden Administration. The Fascist party, unlike the Democrats, believes strongly in its principles (primarily führerprinzip, the alleged virtue of following a strong leader of their own), and are willing to fight hard for what they believe in. Instead of only timidly and reluctantly opposing the chief executive, the GOP-led Senate will vigorously oppose him. This opposition will work, and Biden will be a failed president.

The most likely outcome in 2024 will therefore be a victory for the Fascist Party, inheriting a stronger imperial presidency than ever. Even if the Fascist victory does not come in 2024, it will come no later than 2032. No party has held the White House for longer than twelve years in the post-World War II era.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

Published at 08:24 on 11 November 2020

This is because the sacked individuals are traditionalists who despise the notion that the military has an active role to play in domestic politics. The recently fired Mark Esper took offense when Trump ordered the military to repress protesters.

I was going to say that Trump is planning ahead, sees unrest growing as he presses onward to remain in power despite losing the election, and is attempting to create a more compliant military in advance. However, that is giving Trump way too much credit: he is a childish sociopath who cannot plan ahead.

Instead, he has probably already asked the military to do something grossly inappropriate in the past few days, and received a firm “no” in response. That’s right: Trump has already attempted to literally stage a coup d’etat. It failed, of course, because such a thing runs counter to both the law and to over two centuries of military culture. Any reasonably intelligent person could have foreseen that, but Trump is too consumed by his elephantine ego to act reasonably or intelligently. So here we are.

The sackings of top officials in the Department of Defense won’t accomplish what Trump desires, either. He may end up with compliant appointees on top, but the generals below them will still balk.

The result won’t be as bad as a full-blown fascist coup d’etat, but it will be bad enough. The result will basically be chaos: some more pro-fascist generals will comply, but most generals will be traditionalists and resist. The pro-fascist media will then portray the resisting generals as rebelling against Trump and attempting a pro-Biden coup d’etat. Then when Biden takes office as a result of winning the election it will be portrayed as Biden being installed by a leftist coup.

The result will be a country more bitterly divided than ever, with the fascist side more certain than ever that tactics like military coups d’etat are legitimate.

Published at 08:36 on 10 November 2020

I am of course using “coup” very loosely here; they are not planning to have the military impose its will by force. Most of the top brass is highly averse to the idea and moreover harbors personal animosity towards Donald Trump. When personal desire aligns with institutional policy against an idea, that idea has no chance whatsoever.

So this leaves a metaphorical coup and not a literal one. Interestingly, Hitler did not take power via a literal coup, either. He was voted into the chancellorship by the proper constitutional process, then used existing provisions for declaring a state of emergency to make himself dictator. Likewise, a legal coup is the most likely route here.

A coup via the courts is unlikely to succeed, for reasons already elaborated on.

That leaves a coup via the state legislatures, which per the Constitution have the power to appoint electors. In all states, they have chosen to use this power to pass legislation requiring electors to be chosen by popular vote. So changing this will require the Fascist Party (a more accurate name than Republican Party, so I will use it for the remainder of this article) to pass legislation repealing or nullifying the existing provision for choosing electors.

This will require a Fascist majority in both houses of the state legislature, and a Fascist governor. The only states Biden won that satisfy this requirement are Georgia and Arizona. If both of them successfully appoint slates of Fascist electors, Biden’s electoral vote total drops from 306 to 279. He still has enough votes to become president.

At that point, the Fascist-controlled legislature in Pennsylvania might by vote proclaim 20 Fascists to be Pennsylvania’s electors. Note I said “proclaim” and not “pass a bill.” The governor of Pennsylvania is a Democrat, so any such bill that ends up on his desk will get vetoed. Instead, both houses of the legislature must pass proclamation, then the Fascists will go to the Federal courts and argue that their electors are the real ones, because they were chosen by the legislature, as the Constitution literally says.

To which I say: good luck with that. Again, the courts are unlikely to rule the way the Fascists want. There is extensive precedent, going up to the Supreme Court, backing up the legislation that states have passed requiring their electors to vote the way popular majority in their state (or, in the case of two states, their Congressional district) voted. This is how electors have been chosen since the turn of the nineteenth century, i.e. for over 200 years. Its legality is a settled matter.

The Fascists’ hand is not strong enough — yet — to force a coup. Their goal is not to stage a coup now, but to pave the way for the next Fascist president (and there will be one, in 4 to 12 years) to stage a coup later. It is to delegitimize elections in the eyes of their base. And it is working.

The Fascists will eventually get their coup, and those of us who oppose fascism need to use the intervening years until they get it to plan how to resist it. But they will not get their coup this time.

Published at 16:38 on 6 November 2020

It’s clear that Biden has won, and it’s probably not going to be a squeaker in the electoral college, either. In fact, many pundits are speculating that it already would have been called, were it not for the particular circumstances of this election.

At any rate, it’s simply a matter of time, and it is certain to get called sooner than the 2000 presidential election was. That was the famous Bush/Gore tie, which was not called until mid-December.

Unfortunately, the rest of what I wrote remains. Trumpist fascism has not been repudiated, but has instead proven itself to be an astoundingly popular and successful ideology. While it is a minority opinion, it is the opinion of a large minority, one that is exploiting faults in our antiquated constitution to give it disproportionate power. The majority is, by and large, too weak and timid to challenge this state of affairs; American liberalism is approximately as rotten an institution as the overall society it resides in.

The American empire seems well into the process that caused the Roman one to decay, and because the pace of history moves faster these days, our decay will transpire in a matter of decades rather than centuries.

Published at 21:22 on 3 November 2020

At this stage, odds probably favor Trump winning a second term.

They are just odds, and not certain, however. Biden should definitely not concede! There are lots of mail-in votes to be counted. Long odds are not zero odds.

The trouble is, even if Biden wins, America very much still loses. A Trumpism that almost wins despite a badly mismanaged pandemic is an amazingly successful and resilient platform. It is a very different thing from a Trumpism that loses resoundingly, which would have prompted a recalculation.

What was the most likely problem? I think it was the tactic of making this a referendum on Trump. The opposition in Italy tried to make elections a referendum on Berlusconi. They failed. The opposition in Venezuela tried to make elections a referendum on Chávez. They failed. I was worried about this tactic early on, then let those worries go, prompted by the siren song of negative partisanship (which always made a great deal of sense to me).

It turns out that lessons learned from bitter experience with actual campaigns against actual authoritarian populists were more relevant than academic theories.