Blackcap Blog

Published at 17:51 on 26 July 2016

1. There hasn’t been any definitive evidence linking their release to the Russian government. Yes, the DNC servers were hacked from Russia. They were also hacked from outside Russia (they were hacked more than once). The nature of the internet means that even the hacking that appeared to come from Russia might have actually originated elsewhere. Furthermore, even if the leaked messages did originate from Russia, they could have come from a non-government hacking group.
2. Thus, all the hyperventilating from Democrats about it being a Putin plot appears at this point to have at least a whiff of conspiracy-mongering in it. Sad to see people who’d slap down cheap 9/11 or Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories be so eager to jump on such a thing themselves, but it just goes to show what a total joke Establishment politics is (now more than ever).
3. Hillary Clinton’s State Department was a key player in backing a coup d’etat that destroyed democracy in Honduras. As such, she doesn’t have any moral ground to stand on when it comes to condemning interference in another country’s democratic processes.
4. All that said, a garden-variety Establishment hypocrite is still vastly better than a fascist like Trump.

Published at 08:22 on 25 July 2016

There’s now a definite pattern of shooters who are not a tight part of the ISIS network claiming ISIS as the inspiration for their crimes.

The grim news is that there’s very little that can be done about such attacks. Attacking ISIS itself directly won’t help much. Even if one successfully denies ISIS over the control of any land area, it will still exist as an underground organization, and still be there to inspire certain individuals to do dastardly things. Even if that underground organization is effectively neutralized, some other organization with similar views will arise to take its place.

When it comes to acting as a mere source for inspiration, it’s very hard to stop something from having an effect. There’s no formal network that can be attacked top stop news from traveling, save for news-reporting organizations themselves. And that’s not compatible with the values of an open society.

Published at 09:25 on 24 July 2016

Michael Moore is exaggerating when he states that Trump will win. This is belied by how he closes his article:

(Next week I will post my thoughts on Trump’s Achilles Heel and how I think he can be beat [emphasis added].)

So he’s merely using hyperbole to try and get attention. He’s doing so for good reason: he’s right. Trump can win. Hillary’s tone-deaf V.P. choice shows that plainly.

That the talking heads of Establishment politics can’t see it just proves how irrelevant and out-of-touch Establishment politics (which couldn’t see Trump winning the GOP primary) has become.

Published at 10:54 on 23 July 2016

I’ve become involved in a discussion about self-driving cars on an Internet forum, and the expected techno-utopian who thinks they will be a sea change which obsoletes mass transit has popped up. To summarize a past post, no, they won’t:

• They will increase the capacity of existing freeways, but that’s nothing that building or expanding freeways doesn’t currently do, and such increased capacity falls victim to the induced demand problem. There is absolutely no reason to expect that the extra capacity furnished by self-driving cars will magically function differently than that furnished by more traditional means.
• It’s actually worse than the above. By automating driving, self-driving cars will make driving easier. When you make something easier, the natural expectation is that people will do more of it. In other words, self-driving cars will themselves be a significant new inducer of demand for road space.
• Some of the worst congestion is found on surface streets in commercial areas, where there isn’t much (or any) room for more cars on the existing streets. Self-driving cars will do nothing to alter this fact; automation does not repeal the basic laws of geometry. Quite the contrary; by increasing the capacity of freeways to deliver vehicles to such areas, they will exacerbate this congestion.

In fact, there’s a good chance that self-driving technology will make mass transit more relevant:

• As demonstrated above, it will make congestion tend to get worse, thus increasing the need for alternatives to personal vehicles.
• One of the largest costs for transit agencies (in fact, it’s typically the largest cost) is the labor cost for operating the transit vehicles. Self-driving buses will therefore enable significant savings for such agencies.
• Labor costs are a big part of the reason why only big buses and not minibuses are used (the latter save very little money for agencies, because labor costs and not equipment or fuel costs dominate). By enabling minibuses to economically replace larger ones, self-driving buses will enable better, more frequent service to low-density areas that are difficult to serve well with traditional mass transit.
• Self-driving cars will further help the ability of transit to serve low-density suburbia by making it easy for riders to get to train stations without requiring huge, expensive park-and-ride garages (which tend to fill up early). Riders can send the car back home after it drops them off; this won’t exacerbate congestion because travel will happen in the opposite direction, and residential streets (unlike freeways and commercial streets) typically don’t suffer congestion issues anyhow.

On top of all that, there’s energy efficiency and the need to reduce fossil fuel use. Self-driving cars still require several tons of steel to often carry just a single person around. The general wastefulness of the personal automobile remains unchanged.

Published at 19:02 on 22 July 2016

You think a purveyor of the discredited doctrine of bank deregulation makes a good VP choice? Really?

What are you trying to do, lose this election? Didn’t your disastrously wrong decision to support the Iraq War teach you anything about the perils of pandering to the right wing of your party?

Published at 08:15 on 22 July 2016

Trump’s big speech last night was full of lies and half-truths, but:

• That’s only to be expected in a major party political speech, particularly in a right-wing candidate’s speech, and especially in a Trump speech.
• It was, regardless of truth value, very polished and on-message.
• As such, the guy has a real chance of winning if he stays on that message.

However, that final point is an extremely big if. Donald Trump has a well-established reputation of having very little self-control over what he says. I doubt the leopard can change his spots.

Published at 08:13 on 21 July 2016

It took me a while to figure out what this guy is about. The home page of his site is full of all sorts of gold bug stuff, yet when you dig a bit you find all sorts of urbanist and ecological articles that are not what one would expect from the typical gold bug (who tends to be a fairly garden variety right-winger).

But Lewis is not a garden-variety right-winger. He seems to be what can best be characterized, without prejudice, as a reactionary: he generally admires earlier ways of doing things, be they building cities or establishing a monetary system, and wants to return to them.

In the case of cities, he has something of a point; many of the recent innovations in architecture and urban design have been pretty stupid. As someone who’s never traveled outside of North America (I think I should do a post on that soon), it was something of a revelation to me that every city I have experience with, with the possible exception of inner Santa Fe or Boston, is in a sense an example of dysfunctional modernist design.

With respect to the gold standard, not so much. Money is not an easy thing to get right, but I can’t see how that justifies a childlike faith that the amount of easily-mineable gold the Earth’s crust happened to be formed with is magically the correct amount of an exchange medium for an economy whose size keeps changing.

Just for openers, in the face of a growing economy a gold standard will simply reward and strengthen the social pathology of the class hierarchy; as money gets more relatively scarce, it gets more comparatively valuable, so those who already have a lot of it will get richer by doing nothing more than sitting around and watching their gold get more valuable. Why create and reward a class or rich idlers?

But still, some of the guy’s urbanist ideas are worth a read, at least if like me you don’t personally have experience with Old World cities.

Published at 08:15 on 20 July 2016

Democrats should stop being so smug about the Trump phenomenon being just a GOP problem. Because it’s not. It’s a problem of class society, a society in which both major political parties play a role in maintaining.

The Democrats have been co-participants in that society getting more unequal and hostile to working people. If you go here, you can see how certain key trends such as income inequality and union membership, started getting worse (from a leftist point of view) not under Reagan, but under Carter, and that this worsening trend did not substantially change during the presidencies of either Clinton or Obama.

It’s not for nothing that the right-wing (and they are right-wing, not “libertarian,” they continually cheer on the power of the rich to infringe on the liberties of everyone else) Mises Institute has good things to say about Jimmy Carter’s economic policies.

And it’s not just Carter. Clinton was an aggressive free-trader, helping ram NAFTA through Congress over the objections of many congressmen in his own party. NAFTA turned out pretty much like those of us on the Left said it would: it increased, not decreased, desperation in Mexico, resulting in more, not less, illegal immigration to the US.

Then you have the failure of the Democrats to hold anyone in the Bush Regime responsible for their excesses. Nobody important was prosecuted (or even seriously investigated!) for war crimes like orchestrating a system of systematic torture and abuse of detainees.

Finally, there’s how neither Clinton nor Obama did much to undo the damage of Reagan’s deregulation of broadcast media, a policy that has allowed an increasingly rightward tilt in same. So you end up with overall economic situation in which the working class is both doing significantly worse and is being more heavily propagandized by right-wing voices.

To all this you add how, as I observed a long time ago, there’s a natural tendency of bourgeois states to sometimes turn fascist. And given that all three of the following are or have happened (as we have seen above):

• A worsening of the economic condition of the working class.
• An increase in the amount of right-wing propaganda directed at the working class.
• Real-world evidence the rule of law doesn’t matter and that leaders who ignore it will get away with it.

Is it any surprise that someone like Trump has appeared on the scene and been so successful?

Published at 08:14 on 19 July 2016

If you go here and scroll down, you’ll get to a picture of Inner Southeast Portland showing some old houses adjacent to a newer factory captioned “Bullseye Glass Company’s proximity to residential properties is born of Portland’s desire to avoid urban sprawl, and has neighbors worried about its effect on their health.”

This is right-wing BS, and it’s sad to see a news outlet like The Guardian (which normally doesn’t fall for such things) fall for it. The factory may be newer, but the houses reveal the age of the neighborhood, which has always, since its founding in the nineteenth century, featured factories close to homes. There’s plenty of old brick factory buildings in that part of town. I should know; I lived there myself.

Oregon’s Growth Management Act dates from 1973. That’s about 100 years after the factories started being built next to homes in inner Portland. Any city that’s been around for over 120 years as a larger city features factories next to homes. Before the widespread use of either automobiles or electric mass transit, homes had to be built next to factories, for the simple reason that there was no means of transport affordable to the typical factory worker other than walking.

Late 20th century planning efforts have very little to do with problems like the one discussed in that Guardian article.

Published at 09:03 on 18 July 2016

I’ve been out of town for a few days, and was listening to the news from Turkey on the radio yesterday afternoon as I drove home.

As someone pointed out here, it’s a strange coup. Priority Number One for any military that stages a coup d’etat is to deal with the leadership the coup is unseating. Priority Number Two is to make sure as much of the military as possible is going to support the coup.

The “attempted coup” in Turkey failed miserably at both of these priorities, yet it was staged by a military that has ample experience in staging successful coups d’etat. It was staged against a government with an authoritarian streak, one that has in the past used alleged coup attempts to engage in repressive measures.

It’s enough to really make one go “hmmmmm.”