it was indeed automatic.

it's in the mail...

the letter says "you may start using the program as soon as you receive and activate your new card".

that sort of suggests it's in the mail.

i really wish people would be more clear.

the border agent couldn't answer the question, though. she took my number and promised to call me back....

you can call me a media critic.

but, i criticize all media - i'm not aligned with any party or group.

i don't even have a cell phone. i use google to call out.

but, the reason i got off social media is that i got sick of correcting all of the nonsense people were posting. i felt like i was just wasting a lot of time with it. and, i realized it was a bad source of data.

youtube can, in theory, be a source of quality journalism, and there have been some good sites out there over the last few years, but there appears to be some powerful people trying to shut it down and turn it into a source of lightweight commentary that acts as a propaganda arm for the party machinery.

journalists need to try to find ways to evade that as best as they can. and, trust me - if i can track you down, if i can find you, i'll watch you. get yourself out there. i don't want to watch the mindless garbage on youtube, and i won't - that's why i gave up cable in the 90s.

it's very sad to see amy goodman reduce herself to a propaganda outlet for a cfr stooge. but, if you watch her, she seems to get giddy about lying, as though she's emancipated herself from the shackles of honest journalism. but, she's not a good liar - you can see it in her facial expressions.

i don't want to say it's sad to lose her, because she should be retired, anyways.

i think there were some financial transactions behind the scenes, there. it's a shame. but, this is what capitalism does.

i don't actually read social media. i don't have a twitter account, and while i still use facebook for local show listings, i don't actually read any feeds. i have a total of zero friends on facebook. i haven't sorted through a social media feed of any sort in five or six years. these ideas are my own.

...but if you think that i'm aligning with certain personalities on the right, you're actually just wrong. that's just another baseless smear by people that make a lot of money from routinely smearing people.

what does the young turks do? they're not journalists. they don't write articles, they don't do research. rather, their job is to smear people; they're professional gossip clowns that traffic in lies and misrepresentations. and, cenk uygur is an actual, legit rush limbaugh wannabe - something i've pointed out on many occasions in the past.

there seems to be some money floating around behind the scenes that is essentially trying to align all of these other media sources - democracy now, the real news, etc - with the young turks, using a series of shady shell operations like pacifica radio. i've only seen some cursory reports, but i've watched the coverage shift dramatically and i am convinced there's something pretty awful happening.

my best guess is that there's a fear that media coverage leading up to the next election might lead people away from the democrats. so, they're trying to get all of these alt-left sites aligned with the party line.

but, let me be clear - i'm not repeating the views of other people, here. i think for myself, and i produce my own ideas. that is a typical, cynically right-wing (and terribly wrong.) idea of how people behave, and i'm happy to sit here and poke giant holes in your flawed concept of "human nature" all day, if you insist on it.

so, go ahead and read through this, and then read through the views presented by those on the populist right, and tell me if you think they're even consistent. they're not.

why do they key on me, though? why don't they just ignore me? if i'm so wrong...

my hypothesis that the deep state was out to get hillary clinton (and prop up donald trump) started taking shape in early 2016 and is developed in posts to this site over late 2016 and early 2017, when i stepped away from it. i was claiming they'd never let her win as early as 2013. i have accused the nsa of rigging the election in favour of donald trump, and then blaming it on the russians as a distraction mechanism. i have called donald trump a pawn of the deep state, a creature of the intelligence agencies and a front for the cia - all before he was inaugurated.

is that what those other people are saying? or is it actually the precise, exact opposite position?

some of these people are no doubt working for the same groups that rigged the election for him....

think for yourself, people. it's critical. don't let other people define things for you, and when it comes to what these dishonest smear artists say, just consider the source - which does not have a good track record for honesty or fact-based reporting, at all.

there seems to be this movement in jazz right now to kind of over-simplify it and water it down to the level that any musical illiterate can get into.

i don't think this is how you build a wider audience....

personally, i need more than this - when you convert jazz into simple pop, it means i can't get into it for the same reason that i can't get into any other type of simple pop music.

https://luckychops.bandcamp.com/

i gave this an honest chance, and also sorted through some of her older stuff, which i thought i might like better given the write-up, and it's just not doing it for me - it's lacking any concept of verticality, in contrast to some of the other stuff i've heard recently from youngish black female composers. a commonality with the other singers is that this is fundamentally pop music, and it's not entirely fair to analyze it outside of that spectrum.

i want to draw attention to the specific claim that she's drawing from sudanese music, though, because, if i didn't know any better, i might think she's actually drawing rather heavily from the white fiddling culture of the deep south, which would have a heavy celtic slant to it. while i've brought this up before - celtic music is pentatonic, and consequently sounds "ethnic" when compared to church music, which went out of it's way to destroy certain intervals that it considered "satanic", something that was based on the math rather than anything ethnic - i don't actually think this is a coincidence so much as i suspect that the marketing is trying to gloss over the truth of it in order to present more of a "black" or explicitly "african" identity to the music. this is probably a smart marketing decision, but i'm a stickler for actual honesty and i doubt that this music is substantively informed by anything sudanese at all.

i would expect sudanese music to sound vaguely arabic, perhaps with somewhat of a substrate of major keyed africanisms. worse, a cursory google search suggests that the violin was only introduced to sudan during the colonial period.

does that actually matter? well, it doesn't matter much to me, no. but, i know it matters a great deal to certain other people. maybe it shouldn't....

there's also good reason to challenge the idea that she's self-taught.

as mentioned, it's a bit poppy for me, and i wish she'd extrapolate a bit more on the instrumentation, rather than use the violin as a sort of a gimmick. maybe i should leave it at that.

https://sudanarchives.bandcamp.com/album/athena

i wish this was a bit more uptempo.

others will no doubt disagree.

here's some more of that contemporary jam band stuff i mentioned.

it's interesting on the surface, but a little too campy for me. it's really mostly the vocal style that i just can't get into...

if it was, like, one song....but most of these songs have vocals....

https://lespecial.bandcamp.com/album/2019-12-31-rams-head-live-baltimore-md