Blackcap Blog

Published at 22:41 on 13 July 2024

Assassinations (or attempted assassinations) seldom work out the way the assassin (or would-be assassin) thinks they will.

First, assassination attempts, like this one, might fail. They typically fail, in fact. The biggest targets (and ex-presidents are certainly a big target) all have professional security teams. And the Secret Service is one of the best. Failure is by far the most likely option.

In fact, such attempts happen all the time, and fail, due to law enforcement (primarily the Secret Service) foiling them. We don’t hear about them because:

1. The Secret Service lives up to its name.
2. In the name of not inspiring copycat attacks, the media cooperate by refusing to cover foiled attacks, unless (like this one) they get way too close to being successful and as a result become basically impossible to suppress coverage of.

It failed, so the logical result is to benefit the would be target via the sympathy effect.

But it’s worse than that. This particular would-be target has a fantasy about seeking revenge on his political enemies. He now has ammunition in pursuing this fantasy: those enemies are violent and tried to kill him.

The Nazis used assassinations and attempted assassinations to rationalize their own political violence. Kristallnacht happened in response to an assassination.

That’s right, even when they “succeed,” many assassinations, in the final analysis, fail.

There’s already some conspiracy theories emerging that Trump and his security team deliberately allowed the assassination attempt to happen. I would not be surprised to soon hear claims that it was all an inside job.

So far, there is no evidence of this, other than poorly-argued circumstantial evidence (“how could he circumvent Secret Service measures?”).

The Secret Service is indeed very good at what it does (to reiterate, assassination attempts are foiled all the time), but it is not perfect. Mistakes happen. We will probably hear how they slipped up and failed to secure the roof that served as the sniper’s nest in this one.

Time will tell, and maybe good evidence that it was, in some sense, an inside job will emerge. But so far, it has not. It is entirely possible that this thing was all sheer luck. In fact, that is currently the most plausible explanation.

Published at 20:44 on 10 July 2024

In other words, will Biden step aside or not?

Biden is clearly being a stubborn old man and refusing to see the obvious, but the voices clamouring for him to step down are pretty loud.

It’s been interesting to watch. One thing is clear: the leadership clique of which I wrote recently has not been uniting around Biden despite it all. His debate performance was so bad that it got even their attention.

Rather, it seems to be Biden’s inner circle (and a few allies of that inner circle) versus just about everyone else. And those allies of Biden are not just his fellow centrists.

What’s distressing to me is how Trumpy the president and his allies are getting. Biden is clinging tightly to his selfish goal of being a two-term president, and engaging in all sorts of rationalizations that fly in the face of self-evident facts to do so. And suddenly, questions about the basic fitness to serve are being swept aside by Biden’s allies, much like Trump’s allies have long swept aside such concerns. It doesn’t seem to matter so much as long as they can use Biden for their ideological purposes.

It’s all making it increasingly likely I cast a protest vote for Vermin Supreme this November. At least he knows he’s a clown.

Published at 12:44 on 7 July 2024

Published at 20:22 on 5 July 2024

The good news is that Biden wasn’t totally out of it like he was at the debate last week. The bad news for Biden is that he needed to really hit it out of the park, and he didn’t. He still came off sounding like an old man.

Some were worried that Stephanopoulos would only ask softball questions. He didn’t. He asked numerous pointed questions and was quite persistent when Biden evaded answering them forthrightly.

Of particular note is that Biden admitted that he has not yet watched his debate performance. It as if deep inside, he knows the uncomfortable truth of how much he has aged, how this affects his fitness for the office, and that he does not want to face it.

It was not a live interview, which limits how convincing it can be. It is difficult to definitively refute accusations that some senior moments ended up on the cutting-room floor, although I suspect they did not, for the simple reason that Stephanopoulos has a stake in this: he is a lifelong Democrat, and has reason to be concerned about Biden’s electability. This is probably why he was also not shy about asking his interviewee pointed questions.

P.S. The more I think about it, the more that Biden has been unwilling to watch his own debate performance is revealing, and not in a good way. It means he has serious mental hangups about assessing his own competence. That is not something we want to see in a president.

Published at 17:48 on 2 July 2024

Have I told you recently just how much I despise the Democratic Party leadership clique? I don’t mean all Democrats (although I am to the left of that party), I mean the leadership clique. The people who decided Hillary Clinton was a viable candidate in 2016. The people who decided to coronate Biden as nominee instead of having a primary competition this cycle. Those people.

They have the unmitigated gall to smugly act as if they are the responsible adults in the room. This, despite blunder after overwhelming blunder.

This brings us to the Vice-President. Unlike the leadership clique, she is one of the party’s liberals, not one of its centrists. Biden, a centrist, nominated her because he had to nominate a liberal as a running mate in order to maximize his ticket’s appeal to the progressive base.

Now that Biden has demonstrated his unfitness for office, Harris is the logical choice for someone to fill his post. Because of course she is. Just read the United States Constitution.

Biden has to plain old resign. If he doesn’t resign, if he stays in office for the remainder of his term while trying to coronate a centrist replacement at a brokered convention, it is going to piss off Blacks and progressives and cost Biden votes. We know dirty pool when we see it.

That puts the leadership clique in a quandary. They don’t like Harris. They really don’t like Harris. She is not one of them, she is a heartbeat away from the presidency, and they can’t stand it. So many of them are saying that Biden can’t resign, because Harris is, in their words, “unelectable.”

Listen, you morons: Biden just blew a presidential debate worse than any candidate has ever blown such a debate in my lifetime. Quite possibly, he blew it worse than any candidate in any presidential debate in all of United States history. This is no exaggeration, it is cold, hard fact.

Yet somehow you think this disaster of a candidate, who has manifestly exhibited his unfitness for the office he occupies and seeks reelection to, is less of a lift to reelect than a Vice-President who is 59 years old, in good mental and physical health, but just happens to be a bit too far left for your personal political tastes?

Suck it up, buttercups. You don’t get to call all the shots all the time. Either a fascist goes to the White House or a liberal does. Your choice.

I don’t normally ascribe to conspiracy theories, but if there was one I would buy in to, it is that the Democratic Party exists primarily as a conspiracy to control, contain, and disempower the Left, and that those who run it know this and are deliberately in the game to do so. I will note that the current line on Kamala Harris fits this narrative like a glove.

Published at 22:56 on 1 July 2024

Six fascists on the Supreme Court.

It’s dead, Jim. The Republic is dead.

Published at 20:37 on 28 June 2024

First, if Biden really was sick, why did we only learn this after the fact, when his team was desperate to make excuses for his poor performance? Why didn’t the White House warn us beforehand, so that expectations could be tempered?

Second, it is conceivable that he might have indeed had a cold (his voice was hoarse, after all), and his team wanted him to persevere because they were afraid of the damage admitting frail health might do.

Third, it doesn’t much matter in the end analysis whether or not Biden had a cold. He works at, and is campaigning for another term of, the hardest job in the world. One of the things that makes it a hard job is its physically demanding nature. You really don’t get much of a chance to rest and recuperate during physical illness. You are generally expected to plow through periods of sickness and keep working a demanding schedule.

Those are the terms of the job, and Biden just showed to all that he is no longer capable of them. And that is the most favourable honest assessment possible of Biden’s performance. If, as is more likely than not, he was not actually fighting a cold, he is even less up to the physical and mental demands of the job.

Published at 08:08 on 28 June 2024

1. Growing power of reactionary populism.
2. Insurrection by right-wing populist movement.
3. Elected government unwilling or unable to punish insurrectionists effectively.
4. Frail octogenarian selected to be president by pro-democracy forces (we are here).
5. Transition to fascist dictatorship.

Published at 22:04 on 27 June 2024

Really, Biden just about ticked all the boxes in the “frail old man who has no business running for the most difficult job in the world” department. Because that is precisely what he came off as.

F*ck you very much, Democratic Party leadership. First Hillary in 2016 and now a Biden second term attempt. You people have a talent for running sure losers. Yet you continue to act as if you are the smartest people around, and talk down condescendingly to anyone who dissents.

It doesn’t bode very well for a last-minute course correction.

Published at 16:47 on 25 June 2024

The same Go program I had to fight with for two days to get to the point where it was still unfinished, but:

• I had satisfied my curiosity that it was, indeed, possible to do the particular thing I was struggling with in Go, and
• It had been painful enough to prove to me that I should not consider Go a language of choice.

… Has now been coded to the same stage of completion in C++. It took half the time, half the effort, and under half the lines of code that it did in Go.

And that is as an absolute novice C++ programmer, writing his second C++ program ever. I had been experimenting with Go for about a year before I recently gave up on it.

It’s not that C++ is good, mind you. It’s a total cruft fest that should have been put out of business by something more modern at least 15 years ago. But it’s still possible to do things in C++ without the language and/or standard library persistently getting in your way like they do in Go.

Go is so bad it is literally worse than C++.