rap news 34

mostly spot on. the way this works is like this:

0) people like donald trump write trade treaties like nafta.
1) nafta allows a us factory to move from arizona to mexico, where it can pay workers a third of the price.
2) the workers at that factory lose their job.
3) the factory blows up the local economy in that region of mexico, forcing the locals into poverty.
4) that sets off a chain reaction of migration that pushes people out of mexico and into the united states, partially because
5) sub minimum wage pay in arizona is still more lucrative than work in mexico.
6) this benefits producers that create products for export but it reduces the pool of possible labour opportunities in arizona, creating structural unemployment levels.
7) what low education white arizonans are able to physically see and intuitively understand is that illegal mexican immigrants have jobs and they don't.
8) donald trump (carefully avoiding neatly shaved mustaches) stands up and blames it all on zee mexicans, in an attempt to generate a political base and distract from his own guilt and responsibility. mass unemployment creates social unrest that needs to be controlled.
9) the media agrees, in an attempt to construct a subscription viewer/reader base and further control the social unrest.
10) low education white arizonans vote for donald trump, but they do not expect him to reverse the policies that set off the chain of reactions.

it's a bit of a stretch to suggest it was planned from the start. but power has a tendency to perpetuate itself by profiting from it's own crises.

thoughts on the new son lux record

this disc is dramatically gabrielesque, and that's nice to hear in the wave of 80s copycats.

yup. it's the cord.

or at least interference. which explains the randomness, and why it seems to work better at night.

excuse me while i line the walls with aluminum foil...

it wasn't happening before, so i probably just knocked in a weird position or something.

i should be able to get it right by playing around with it.

hopefully.

if not, the other cable seems to work better. which is a little counter-intuitive. i was connecting with quasi-fancy gold plated rca cords. the ones that seem to work better are a step down. the thing's just gotta conduct, and it's not like i'm putting it under any pressure, so i can't imagine how it could have gotten damaged.

lol. i guess google wants me to pay for ads. i lost around 60,000 views a few months ago, and have yet to figure it out. now, it's consistently getting close to 250K, then falling back to 240K. i guess that's the limit, before you have to pay up (or, perhaps, allow advertising).

reaction to canada day

parade outside my door. not this kind of parade. wish it was...

an interview with cornel west

he's consistently so great to listen to. that part at the end made my day.

rap news 33

the papacy nowadays is a kind of a supreme court of the church, rather than an executive or legislative branch. what it does is codify perspectives that are already in practice. he's saying this now because followers of the catholic faith - and let's not forget that catholicism is a minority religion in the heart of the empire, which is based on protestant values - have already come to this conclusion. it's leading from behind. preaching to the choir...

likewise, if he ever comes out in favour of restricting oppression to homosexuality, it will be because it's already established.

infallibility? decrees of god's will? hardly. it's just a reaction to the grassroots. you could even call it a type of crude democracy.

the effect will be minimal.

i mean, the moonseed perspective is exaggerated here, but the broad view amongst american christians remains that the pope is an agent of satan. that's hardcoded into virtually all of the protestant denominations. american christianity is and always has been a violent reaction to catholicism. the more the pope speaks like this, the more the dominant narrative is upheld, about climate change being a globalist/satanist plot - because the pope is their guy.

conversely, insofar as this is relevant in latin america and africa, what the church provides is a place for organizing movements, rather than any guiding principle. and, if it starts meddling too much into something that is happening independent of it's control, it's more likely to act as a co-opting and dispersive force.

in order to be effective, this movement needs to be secular. that doesn't mean rejecting religious people. it just means keeping religion out of it.

it maybe exposes a cynical truth, though: perhaps all we have left is prayer. perhaps we're at that base level of hopelessness.

ZYX
+deathtokoalas It is a good set of Commandments to live by for humanity. For those of either secular & religious persuasion. I salute Pope Francis for reminding us

I am an atheist , but believe we should take heed these words, regardless of the source. The Pope has over a billion followers. We cannot divest them of their religious beliefs, nor why we would want to.This message is so clearly a universal force for good, not dependant on religious persuasion.

deathtokoalas
+ZYX well, i think there's a lot of reasons to want to, but it's not the point. the church is approaching this from a "bait and capture" approach. you want to think of it as a type of "green capitalism".