twitter navel-gazing

Posted a new music release -- embeds to follow. Have been "promoting" these on twitter but feel increasingly uncomfortable doing that. One, because twitter is a horrible cluttered mess of photos, media and ads these days, swallowing up expression. Two, because twitter is becoming "Orwellian," or more Orwellian, as discussed by comedian/commentator Jimmy Dore: [hooktube video]

As Dore notes (quoting Mark Ames), anyone to the left of Hillary Clinton could qualify as a Russian disinformation agent, so Twitter may be arbitrarily suppressing legitimate dissent. Who wants to be in that environment? Mark Ames, obviously, but who else?

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Certain friends and former friends believe that (i) the US had no problems under Obama, (ii) Hillary Clinton was an acceptable alternative to orange cheetoh-head, (iii) all the problems in the US began with the Orange One's election, (iv) the Deep State is our friend because it wants to depose Orange Cheetoh-head, (v) allegations of Russian disinfomation are good, noble, and true, because they serve the cause of deposing the orange one. These people are to be pitied; some may still be friends when they come to their senses and quit parroting CNN talking points.

Joe Biden Backed Bills Making It Harder for Americans to Reduce their Student Debt

Friendly, funny ol' Uncle Joe (who wants to be President) isn't much of a friend to American millennials. David Sirota has a detailed account of Biden's efforts over the years to make student debt survive bankruptcy, by (among other things) pushing the myth of epidemic strategic defaults by college graduates.

Biden helped the banking industry promote the negative portrayal of debtors. During [a] 2000 [Senate] debate, he said the goal of the bankruptcy bill he was backing was “to assure that those who have the ability to pay do not walk away from their legal debts.”

Various bills attempting to protect banks from these nefarious cheats (in reality about 1% of loan defaulters) floated through Congress over the years. Finally, with Biden's pushing, student loans were excepted from bankrupty protection. Writes Sirota,

In 2005, though, lawmakers and financial industry lobbyists resurrected a new version of the legislation -- one that included provisions to make it more difficult for students to get bankruptcy protections not just for their government loans but also for the loans they received from private financial firms. This time around there was no [Paul] Wellstone, a liberal icon who had died in a 2002 plane crash, to lead the Democratic opposition to the initiative. With Biden’s support, the bankruptcy legislation sailed through the Senate in the first few months of the new congressional session. In April, it was signed into law by President George W. Bush, whose top campaign contributor had become MBNA [credit card company and Biden backer].

Kara Hammond drawing + Discogs dedication

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Artwork by Kara Hammond, from her blog.

I would like to dedicate this to the selfless, hard-working Discogs volunteers, who, no matter how wrong they are nor how shallow their reading of the Discogs rules, work night and day to keep the Discogs database free from corruption by removing the contributions of casual users who have not accrued vote power.

See also: hall proctors

my show at Honey Ramka extended to Jan. 28

Many thanks to artefuse for this Instagram photo of my show at Honey Ramka gallery. The run of the show has been extended to January 28, 2018.
Am not on Instagram due to a limited supply of dopamine but I appreciate the pics of the show posted at #tommoody (which can be captured and "returned to the commons," at least until Zuck can figure out how to disable screengrabs in people's devices).

Here is a capture of the original post:

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“Viewing photos with many (compared with few) likes was associated with greater activity in neural regions implicated in reward processing, social cognition, imitation, and attention” --PubMed