Blackcap Blog

Published at 21:59 on 7 February 2018

At the age of four I moved from California to Illinois, a land of prairies and broadleaf trees. The only local conifer was the Eastern Red Cedar, and there weren’t many of those.

Several hours away was White Pine State Park which has the only forest of Eastern White Pine trees in Illinois. There were white pines elsewhere in the state, such as at Starved Rock, but just occasional trees mixed in with the broadleaf ones, not a solid forest.

There were no wild pines in the western suburbs of Chicago, where I lived, something that I regretted. I have always been interested in plants, and the tree books talked about a closely-related pine found in the West, which I was curious to see some day.

When I moved to Seattle and was biking through my neighborhood several months later, there it was. A tree that was obviously a white pine, yet obviously not the Eastern White Pine I knew from Illinois. And another, and another, generally in the more unkempt areas, like greenbelts and the margins of back yards. A quick look at a range map confirmed that yes, the Puget lowlands from about Seattle north were in the range of the Western White Pine.

It’s the only place in the world where that species comes to meet the Pacific; it’s mostly an inland and mountain species. It both provides a sense of home and memories of my childhood in a place where its close relative was one of the only native conifers.

Last week I noticed one coming up in one of my hedges in the front yard, underneath a rose bush. It’s not a complete surprise, as its likely parent tree looms large just a fraction of a block to the south. No doubt a winter windstorm carried a winged seed from it to under my rose bush a few seasons ago. But it’s not exactly where I’d want a large tree to grow, which is the conundrum.

Where do I put it? Mine is a small lot, so most people wouldn’t plant something so large there in the first place. The place where it has the most room to grow already has a grand fir volunteering, another species I love, because of the distinctive citrus-like fragrance of its needles, and no way is there room for both there.

I suppose I could dig up and give away one of the two trees, but I’m attached to both. Right now I’m leaning toward digging up and gifting (or just guerrilla transplanting) the grand fir and moving the pine to that area, but my thoughts keep changing. Thankfully, there’s no great hurry; I have about a year to make a decision.

Published at 16:46 on 4 February 2018

There’s a ham band at 220 MHz, but in most places its uses are limited to obscure control links, even though the band has frequencies allocated for repeater and simplex use. It was actually used where I lived as a teen and young adult in northern New Mexico (there was a very nice wide-area-coverage repeater with autopatch on that band). That was long enough ago that autopatch was still quite the thing (cell phones existed, but were very expensive, and most of New Mexico was outside of cell coverage). So I naturally grabbed a used 220 rig when I saw one for sale at a hamfest.

Sadly, I then proceeded to destroy said rig by hooking it up incorrectly to a power supply within a year of purchasing it. Then I left New Mexico to move out on my own and didn’t much think of getting anything to replace it for a while; I was living in a dorm room and it was tricky enough to put just one VHF antenna up for the 2 meter band.

I assumed when I moved to Seattle that given how as sparsely-populated a place as rural New Mexico had a useful (and used) 220 repeater, there would definitely be activity on that band in Seattle as well. So when I upgraded my mobile rig, I got a 2m/220 dual-bander, and also proceeded to snag an inexpensive older 220 HT at a hamfest when I saw one in good shape being offered for a good price.

Incorrect assumption; while there were repeaters on the 220 band up this way, they were virtually never used. All the local activity was on 2 meters and 70 centimeters. The old HT couldn’t do CTCSS tones, either, which at that time were increasingly needed to access repeaters, so it quickly found itself relegated to my spare parts box. The mobile rig just got used on 2 meters.

When I moved to Bainbridge Island, I learned that there were no 2m repeaters on the island, because by the time the island’s ham radio club had thought to erect a repeater of its own, all the local 2m frequency pairs had been allocated. So they put a repeater up on 70cm instead. That prompted me to sell the old mobile rig and upgrade to a new 2m/70cm dual-bander.

Last month, I started hearing about there being increasing activity (actual QSOs, not just control links) on 220 locally. There was even a weekly net that some people started talking about. For a moment I cursed my decision to sell the mobile rig then I remembered that old (by now about 35 years old) HT which by then had been sitting completely unused for well over 20 years. Would it even still work? It took some rummaging through my collection of old spare parts to assemble it: the battery packs were in one box, the antenna was in another, and the body of the radio was in a third.

I sprang for 6 new alkaline AA cells at the hardware store (not worth throwing money at expensive rechargeables for a radio that’s probably dead), plopped them in the battery holder, and put the holder on the radio. It sprang to life as a working receiver! But I couldn’t use it on any repeaters, because the radio can’t generate CTCSS tones and all repeaters are on tone squelch these days.

I arrange a simplex test with one of my ham radio friends in Seattle one weekend. Darned if I didn’t get an excellent signal report; it transmits just fine, too! So I purchase a third-party CTCSS board and install it. The latter required adjusting signal levels on a service monitor at another ham’s house, which also showed that the overall signal coming out of the radio was nice and clean.

Next came a base station setup: a simple ground-plane antenna built around a coax connector, followed by my taking apart one of the long-dead NiCd rechargeable battery packs for the thing and turning it into a battery eliminator by installing a simple voltage regulator (an LM7810 and two capacitors) inside its case.

It’s a low-powered base station; the HT comes from the days when the “high power” setting was only 1.5 to 2 Watts. Not that it matters; when doing some tests on the repeater of greatest interest, I dropped my power to the 0.5 Watt low setting and continued getting the same full-quieting signal reports. So on low it will tend to stay.

Published at 07:12 on 3 February 2018

First, let me begin by repeating (for those already unaware) that I am queer myself and that even if I wasn’t I’d totally support LGBT liberation, because it’s part of the struggle for human liberation. But, reread that last bit: it’s only part of the struggle for human liberation. Such can be said about any identity politics issue.

The Democratic Party in particular and the Left in general have in the USA tended to focus mainly on identity politics issues in recent decades. This has overall been nothing short of a disaster, as many members of the white working class have been presented with very few messages explaining how left-wing politics are in their own best self-interest.

Which brings us to this campaign. If it succeeds, it will be seen by many as nothing more than another brick in the wall of an elitist corporate/liberal conspiracy to keep the heartland poor and backward. If it fails, it will be celebrated as a victory in “making America great again” and a triumph over the same conspiracy.

Part of the problem is the broader context that the campaign is being conducted in. What if instead there was a large and powerful organized labor movement participating in it, because many of those same anti-LGBT states are also anti-organized-labor?

However, even though organized labor is currently nothing but a shell of its past self, unions still exist, and of course it’s still possible to articulate a more class-and-labor-based argument against Amazon moving to most of those same states. Yet that wasn’t done; the site’s opening page is completely silent on labor issues, despite Amazon having not precisely the best record on these (just type “Amazon warehouse workers” into your search engine for a whole bunch of examples).

As a political enemy of mine might conclude in one of his tweets: Sad!

Published at 13:46 on 31 January 2018

That it was considered a success illustrates how low Trump has set the bar. It was good only relative to how awful the norm is for him. Had any other president delivered that speech, s/he would be now receiving withering criticism for its numerous lies and its racist stereotyping of immigrants.

Published at 09:08 on 30 January 2018

“Attacks” in quotes because despite the hyperventilating news coverage, there’s been no hard evidence that the mystery ailments besetting US diplomats there are the result of deliberate attacks. A far more accurate description of the story would be the Cuban mystery.

Could the symptoms conceivably be the result of deliberate attacks? Of course. But it’s important to stress that such attacks really don’t serve the interests of the Cuban government, which has a lot to profit by improving relations with the USA and so restoring the tourist economy that was disrupted decades ago when US/Cuban relations swirled down the toilet after the Cuban Revolution.

If the attacks are deliberate, the most likely culprit would be rogue elements in the Cuban government’s security apparatus, of which there’s plenty of room for, given that the island is run by a large and intrusive surveillance state. A plausible guess would be hardcore types that are worried about Raul Castro’s desire to have Cuba depart from Fidel’s orthodoxy in favor of a more Vietnamese or Chinese inspired model. But the key word here is guess. At the present time, this is just a guess, nothing more.

Another guess would be some sort of mysterious disease which is causing those symptoms. If that’s the case, Cubans have doubtless also fallen victim to it, so the Cuban government (which runs the health-care system) is aware of the disease and has chosen to conceal evidence of it (most likely because they are worried about its impact on the tourist trade should it be officially acknowledged). This is also just a guess, of course.

However, the second guess seems more plausible to me. That story above hints at (just hints at, mind you, read it fully and you’ll see that the correlations between the symptoms of tourists and those of diplomats have not been well-confirmed) tourists falling victim to the same ailments. What plausible reason would Cuba have for deliberately targeting tourists, particularly given how important tourism is to their economy? A disease makes much more sense.

Earlier I mentioned hardliners and interests being served. The USA also has its hardliners with interests, and I will close by pointing out that trying to paint the ailments as the result of attacks deliberately being carried out by the Cuban government serves their interests perfectly.

Published at 10:51 on 25 January 2018

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists doomsday clock, that is. When it was last 2 minutes, the leaders in the nuclear standoff were Dwight D. Eisenhower and Joseph Stalin. Stalin was a truly awful guy, but he was not mentally unstable like both Kim Jong-Un and Donald Trump are. The danger of nuclear war is thus far, far greater this time.

Two mentally stable leaders, both with nukes versus two mentally unstable ones, both with nukes. No comparison. In making the clock two minutes to midnight, the Bulletin is guilty of normalizing Donald Trump.

Published at 20:19 on 23 January 2018

He definitely let himself be played by the Russians and used to strategically release information timed to do the most damage to Hillary Clinton. At the least he’s a Kremlin asset, in the same sense that James Clapper observed Donald Trump is a Kremlin asset.

Beyond that, it’s impossible to say. I tend to lean to saying he’s in over his head, partially due to his own personality defects. I think it’s pretty obvious that he has a personal grudge against Hillary Clinton. As someone who’s harshly critical of Hillary Clinton myself, I understand some of that grudge, but it’s important not to let oneself be blinded by one’s grudges.

I also think that Assange ended up provoking the USA far more than he thought he would; I don’t think he believed the US would try to jail him for his political activities. The shock of that doubtless has influenced his antipathy towards the US empire.

I have antipathy to that empire, too, but it’s important to keep in mind just what forces you are aiding in your activism. There are wannabe empires in the world, and just because the US empire has been bad doesn’t mean that the wannabes will necessarily be better.

In the case of China and Russia, all available evidence indicates they will be worse. At least the more open political environment in the USA leaves the US empire significantly more vulnerable to being shamed.

Published at 19:15 on 21 January 2018

What’s up with Glenn Greenwald and others on the left who generally deny the possibility that Russia successfully interfered in US domestic politics, tipping the election?

I think part of it is the desire to avoid facing an unpleasant fact; namely, the fact that the preponderance of evidence indicates that Russia acted in a hostile way that merits serious consequences in return. Note that this does not mean war; it does however mean an end to any sort of normal, routine relationship that one would have with a non-hostile nation.

If you emotionally invest a great deal into a political theory which paints the US military/industrial complex as nothing but a conspiracy to inflate foreign threats in the name of sucking down tax dollars, then it might be awkward to have to admit that some threats from abroad actually do exist. It can be even harder if you remember a time when bloated military spending (and thoroughly evil imperialistic interventionism) were being justified on the basis of a military confrontation with the (largely ethnic Russian) USSR. It can be harder yet if your name is Glenn Greenwald and when you were a reporter for the Guardian, you helped Edward Snowden expose some crimes of the US national security establishment.

Of course, a more nuanced view that allows room for there to both be actual threats from abroad and for there to be mostly fake ones hyped up by a self-serving national security state is also possible. But it tends to be emotionally very easy and seductive to operate in a world where actors get reduced to simplistic good or evil characters, even if on an intellectual level one knows better (Greenwald is not stupid).

It’s not the first time that many on the left have fallen into such a trap. In the 1930s, many pacifist leftists found it impossible to admit that Nazi Germany was a military threat. For many of those leftists, opposing World War I was a defining experience, and there was much merit in the claim that WWI was largely a result of the foibles of an imperialist ruling elite first squabbling over how to best steal land and oppress Africans then siding with the side their bankers had lent a lot of money to. One of the reasons Neville Chamberlain found it so easy to appease Hitler is that appeasement had broad support from across the political spectrum in the UK.

None of this is to say that the US ruling class is blameless in all this. As I’ve written before, the US and its allies basically laid the foundations for the current state of affairs, by encouraging and supporting Boris Yeltsin when he staged a coup against parliament and proceeded to create a strong presidency in Russia. Putin simply inherited that presidency and started putting it to uses other than the originally intended (by the West) one of ramming through a transition to a fully capitalist economy.

Likewise, Britain was not blameless in the rise of Hitler. Together with the rest of the European Triple Entente countries, the UK ended the war on terms extremely humiliating for Germany. This undermined the German economy and created a fertile environment for demagogues like Hitler to arise. Such humiliating peace terms (and their paving of the way to a later, more brutal war) were in fact correctly predicted by socialist Rosa Luxemburg in 1915.

But that no more proved that Hitler wasn’t a threat than the US history of intervention in post-Cold War eastern Europe proves Putin isn’t a threat.

Published at 14:09 on 8 January 2018

I mean, sure, she’d almost certainly be better than the current occupant of the White House, but “better than Trump” is an extremely low standard to set.

Plus, judging by the speech she gave, her candidacy would represent a doubling-down on identity politics (and a continued de-emphasis of class politics) on the part of the Democrats, which is just about the last thing we need.

Published at 11:41 on 7 January 2018

Washington Monthly has a new article out detailing how harmful Facebook is and some ideas for liberal, big-government fixes for that. (Personally, color me skeptical about it; I’m not sure I want to give a government selected by populace stupid enough to select Trump more power to manage the information I see.) That’s after Facebook’s former chief technologist came out and said the platform is designed to promote addiction, and another Facebook techie boldly told his audience they were being programmed.

None of this is much surprise to me after having tried Facebook under an assumed name. My initial hopes of being able to follow what friends were doing via that platform were quickly dashed when I realized how fundamentally useless it is for such a purpose. Well, useless if one’s desire is to quickly keep tabs on what friends are doing; it buries that signal under a huge amount of noise.

It was pretty easy to tell the “noise” was there in an attempt to maximize the time I spent on the platform. In fact, I fell for the clickbait more than once. The overall impression it created was one of frustration at being suckered into wasting my time instead of accomplishing my initial goals for being there. Overall it lends a stench of sleaze to the whole site.

I occasionally check in, maybe once or twice a week, but that’s it. I can’t really imagine Facebook ever doing much to create significant improvement in my life.

Contrast that to the bicycle headlight I bought when I first moved to the Island. I knew I needed a different sort of light for my bicycles, one that lights up the road so I can see as opposed to one that mainly exists so I can be seen by others. I didn’t want it to depend on changing or charging batteries; I really liked my generator lights and how they were just always there, ready to be used when it got dark, much like the headlights and taillights on an automobile.

The obvious solution involved LED’s, because light-emitting diodes turn approximately 90% of the energy fed into them into light, instead of 90% into heat like for incandescent lamps. And sure enough, some research showed that such things had become available since I last researched the issue (and found to my disappointment such things didn’t exist).

They weren’t easily available in the USA, but I found a dealer for them that very conveniently was closing out the previous generation of such headlights, which lessened the cost (somewhat; they were still not inexpensive). And they worked as well as expected.

One piece of new technology has little or nothing to offer me, so I eschew it. The other fit nicely into my existing life, so I embraced it. I don’t have much use for religious superstition in my life, but I do have a great deal of respect for how the Amish have decided to deal with technology, by evaluating it and deciding if it offers a net improvement instead of mindlessly embracing it.