Blackcap Blog

Published at 21:04 on 3 February 2015

Basically, they are dead set on pissing as many people as possible off, and their ideology prevents them from being able to acknowledge this. So they’re doomed to gather increasing numbers of enemies, and increasingly provoke said enemies, until those same enemies feel compelled to crush the Islamic State. It’s precisely the same reason why Hitler was doomed to fail.

A look at their English-language magazine should be enough to convince one of that. It’s packed with rhetoric about how what they’re doing is God’s will. So any criticism of their aggressive expansionist doctrine amounts (in their eyes) to criticizing the Almighty, which is of course a capital offense according to their ideology.

And, unlike with Al Qaeda (a non-state actor), war will be possible to wage against the Islamic State. It’s an actual nation-state (albeit not an internationally recognized one). It has an identifiable territory which can be attacked, invaded, and conquered. The well-understood concept of war can be easily applied.

And what sort of state is it? A landlocked one, in control of a badly conflict-scarred infrastructure, surrounded by nations which hate it. And which it is fated to provoke even more.

It’s doomed.

Published at 21:18 on 29 January 2015

The top-down sort of state socialism that the late Hugo Chávez implemented had its inefficiencies, but it survived for two reasons:

1. Venezuala is a petro-state and could afford to throw enough money around to (mostly) paper them over, and
2. The status quo Chávez upset had such gross inequalities that it didn’t matter for most Venezuelans that there were shortages of certain key consumer goods from time to time, since access to same had still improved for them (they had gone from often not being able to afford things to much less often occasionally running into shortages).

But with the collapse in oil prices, the strains are now starting to show.

Unlike Saudi Arabia which has a lot of oil and only a few people, the situation is reversed in Venezuela. Maduro isn’t sitting on piles of money that he can draw on in the lean times. Plus, despite some of first Chávez’ and now Maduro’s admittedly authoritarian policies, Venezuela is still much more free and open a society than Saudi Arabia.

As a result, Nicolás Maduro’s popularity is now plummeting. So it’s safe to make a prediction that his days are probably numbered. Absent an unexpectedly sudden turnaround in oil prices, I expect him to be out of power within two years.

Hopefully that can happen without a total sell-out to the forces of imperialism and class rule.

Published at 07:08 on 21 January 2015

Random stuff, because I’m still very much alive despite not posting much here recently:

Charlie Hebdo. Yes, their cartoons do have a well-established history of being crude and insensitive. That’s absolutely no justification for the violence (though it does help explain it; justification and explanation are two different things). There is no right to not be offended. What probably sucks more than the loss of life, however, is that France does not seem to be taking the same moral high road Norway took after their recent terrorist attack. There’s way too much talk of “war” happening in France. Neither Al Qaeda nor terrorism is a country with a defined land mass (the first is a non-state actor, the second is a tactic), therefore it is is pointless to wage war on either. I’ve discussed this latter point before, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Construction at home. It’s was a week of not really having my home to myself, because I’m having the carpet replaced with hardwood flooring. And it looks like this disruption is going to last longer than expected, because the adhesive used to attach the stair tread really stinks, so I’m now coping with that issue for at least a week after the work ends.

Durian. Speaking of strong smells, I did finally have time to treat myself to a durian smoothie in celebration of moving and defeating the bedbugs. It was every bit as satisfying as I remembered, and now that the experience is fresher in my mind the addictive urge resurfaced. I actually tasted an almond aspect to it this time, which I believe is a first. One of the joys of durian is that it never tastes quite the same twice.

Sometimes, it’s best not to even try. That’s a statement that will make every motivational speaker cringe, but it’s true. One’s plans must be at least somewhat realistic. Consider the fate of the Kalakala. This historic vessel was “saved” from its fate of housing a fish-processing plant in Alaska by being towed back to its old home to await historic restoration. Alas, that latter part of the plan was very expensive, and funds to perform it never materialized. The vessel ended up bleeding its owners white in moorage fees year after year. Its current owner has decided to end the financial bloodbath and recoup at least some of his losses by scrapping it. If it had been left in Alaska, it would either still be a fish processing plant, or be sitting there abandoned (because in a rural area the moorage would be cheap or free and the cost to tow it south for scrapping would exceed the scrap value). It would, in other words, be waiting indefinitely for the right restorer to show up.

Sometimes, one has to try harder. Realism again. It’s a fact of life that some misfortunes, like bedbug infestation, are extremely difficult and expensive to manage. The “experts” will tend to lie to you about the effort and expense required in an attempt to manage the shock value. Absent being one of the lucky few who resolves the problem with minimum effort, the effect of the lies is to draw out the process, because instead of making the full effort needed, weeks and then months get wasted on half-efforts. It’s a lesson I learned the hard way battling scabies, and one I put to use again last year on bedbugs. I hit them harder than the experts recommended, and planned for the initial treatments to fail (which they did). I took stronger precautions than recommended to prevent infesting my new place. I might still be battling them if I hadn’t followed that strategy.

Published at 20:09 on 21 December 2014

How dare they!

That’s basically what comes to mind when gripes like this catch my attention.

And before anyone complains: No, I am not celebrating anyone’s death. I am merely pointing out that well-established historical patterns have expected consequences. It may be politically incorrect to say so in Establishment circles, but that doesn’t make it any less of a fact.

Published at 08:23 on 12 December 2014

That’s long been my estimate (even before I made that linked post) of how much the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement boondoggle is going to end up costing. And it’s an open question as to whether or not there will be a usable tunnel after pouring all that money down that rat hole.

The latest in the saga of foibles is that the access tunnel is that the access pit they are digging to repair the damaged tunnel boring machine is causing a whole neighborhood to start subsidng. That’s going to be a healthy chunk of change just to compensate all the affected property owners right there.

Remember, this is a unique and never-before-attempted project. Nobody has ever used a tunnel boring machine this large. Nobody has ever dug a tunnel this deeply through saturated soil. So nobody really knows how difficult it actually will be.

Anyone who said it would cost $1 billion, tops, was either a liar or a rank idiot. Or both.

Published at 15:03 on 8 December 2014

In addition to being morally reprehensible, torture actually makes the USA less, not more, secure.

Published at 10:38 on 25 November 2014

I think not. Cops who kill are almost always exonerated.

I cannot offhand readily think of any counterexamples to the above fact. I’m sure they exist, but they are rare. Very rare.

Unfortunately, rioting tends to be very little deterrent to such things happening. In fact, it’s a common outcome, yet the killing persists, decade after decade.

Again, this is not a surprise. Rioting is not rebellion. It is unfocused, unplanned, rage. It typically takes the form of the downtrodden destroying their own neighborhoods.

If the reaction took the form of more organized actions, and groups like the Black Panthers of old formed and persisted as part of the reaction, then one might expect the Establishment to take such things seriously, because the reaction to them is posing a more serious risk to that same Establishment.

But already pretty tatty neighborhoods becoming even more rundown (as a result of rioting-induced damage) is of little or no threat to the Establishment. So don’t expect things to change until the rage matures into a more focused effort to challenge the overall system as a whole.

Published at 07:48 on 15 October 2014

It’s happened a second time in Dallas.

Now the line is starting to shift to “Well, there must be something wrong with that hospital’s (as opposed to just that nurse’s) protocol, but it’s still not super-contagious, trust us.”

Wonder how long that revised version of the lie is going to last.

Published at 21:25 on 13 October 2014

One thing seems clear: it’s obviously significantly more contagious than the Establishment media claims it to be. The fact that health care workers contact it so readily despite being aware of the dangers and taking precautions proves that. Now that that has happened here in the USA, such indidents can’t all be waved off due to inadequate conditions and resources in Third World hospitals.

We’re obviously being lied to by the Establishment in order to maintain the façade that they have everything under control. They don’t, and the pressures of capitalism ensure that it’s very hard for them to do so (because effective precautions would probably take hundreds of billions of dollars).

It may not end up being a horrible global pandemic, but the combination of a globalized economy, rampant inequality, and health care being a privilege instead of a right is needlessly putting all of humanity at risk.

Published at 09:06 on 4 September 2014

Recently, those involved in the campaign for higher wages for fast-food workers have started employing the rhetoric “whatever it takes”.

It’s a sentiment that’s been sadly absent for too long on the Left in the USA.

Because, really, those in the ruling elite are always doing whatever it takes to continue their rule. That includes often ignoring the same rules that they themselves wrote to their advantage in the first place.

If you’re not willing to use whatever it takes to get the sort of world you want, then you’re a sellout and a fraud who places more priority on obeying the ruling elite than on your own principles.