OK, though, I’ll stop for today after this one. I’m really trying to gather the energy to bake something. It’s supposed to snow some more today, though it is, I’m thankful, warmer today. Maybe a little more reading, then I’ll figure out something to bake. I saw a chocolate graham-looking cooky over on MPS last night, and I’ve been craving chocolate grahams since then.
https://www.gocomics.com/broomhilda/2025/01/09
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2025/01/09 (seems as if an entire Calvin snowpeople post is possible!)
https://www.gocomics.com/cestlavie/2025/01/08
https://www.gocomics.com/closetohome/2025/01/09
https://www.gocomics.com/darksideofthehorse/2025/01/09
https://www.gocomics.com/frazz/2025/01/09
https://www.gocomics.com/freerange/2025/01/09
More on the GoComics page, or wherever you read comics. A person needs their daily comics!
It’s a very short, well-written read. Seems important, to me.
| January 9, 1964 Anti-U.S. rioting broke out in the Panama Canal Zone, resulting in the deaths of 21 Panamanians and three U.S. soldiers. The immediate issue was whether both the U.S. and Panamanian flags would fly at Canal Zone facilities, as ordered by President John F. Kennedy. James Jenkins, a 17-year-old senior at Balboa High School in the Canal Zone: “I guess you could say I’m the guy that started this whole thing. I’m sort of the ringleader. I circulated the petition to keep our flag flying. Then me and the others raised the flag. The school authorities left it up because they knew we’d walk out.” On the third day, demonstrating Panamanian students entered the school grounds and sang their national anthem, but the Balboa students blocked them from raising their flag. there was a scuffle — and the Panamanians retreated in outrage, claiming that their flag had been ripped by the Zonians.  |
| January 9, 1967 Julian Bond, elected more than a year before, was finally sworn in as a member of the Georgia House of Representatives.The legislature had refused to allow him to take his seat because of his opposition to the Vietnam War and specifically his endorsement of a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) statement accusing the United States of violating international law in Vietnam. Bond had been the director of SNCC. Following his election in 1965, the Georgia House refused to seat him. He was re-elected to his “vacant seat” and the House refused again. He was then elected to the same office for a third time. But not until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in his favor was the legislature forced to relent.  Julian Bond in 1966 waiting to be seated in the General Assembly |
| January 9, 1987 The White House released the presidential finding – signed by President Ronald Reagan on January 17, 1986 – which authorized the sale of arms to Iran (to encourage the release of hostages) and ordered the CIA not to tell Congress. This was done retroactively after several shipments, including 18 HAWK (Homing-All-the-Way-Killer) surface-to-air missiles, had already been transferred to the Iranians, then at war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Read the actual document authorizing the arms sales More Outline, key players and selected Iran-Contra documents from the National Security Archive |
January 9, 1991 Sam Day The day after the start of the U.S. bombing of Iraq, ten peace activists were arrested at Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, for handing out written warnings to military reservists about participation in war crimes. Long-time peace activist Sam Day was sentenced to four months for his participation. Remembering Sam Day |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryjanuary.htm#january9
10th anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo killings by Ann Telnaes
On January 7, 2015 the editorial cartooning community suffered a horrible blow Read on Substack
The attack at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo left 12 people dead, including five cartoonists, and set off a worldwide debate about free speech and satire.
The 2003 entry is one of my very favorite things!
January 8, 1912 =The African National Congress was founded in South Africa. The ANC (now multi-racial) was the first black political organization in South Africa. It was formed to combat the racially separatist system known in the Afrikaans language as apartheid. The ANC is now the majority party in the South African government. African National Congress history ================================== January 8, 1961 The people of France voted to grant Algeria its independence in a referendum. This followed more than 130 years of French colonial control of the north African country. The result was a clear majority for self-determination, with 75% voting in favor. Read more =================================== January 8, 1973 U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho resumed secret peace negotiations near Paris. After the South Vietnamese had blunted the massive North Vietnamese invasion launched in the spring of 1972, Kissinger and the North Vietnamese had finally made some progress on reaching a negotiated end to the war. However, a recalcitrant South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu had inserted several demands into the negotiations that caused the North Vietnamese negotiators to walk out of the talks a month earlier.  Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger ================================== January 8, 2003  Three activists, including Kate Berrigan (daughter of Phil) and Liz McAlister, rappelled down a 32-story skyscraper near the Los Angeles Auto Show and unfurled a banner reading “Ford: Holding America Hostage To Oil.” They had chosen Ford due to its having the lowest average fuel economy of any auto manufacturer, and that it was not living up to the reputation it put forth as being an environmental car company. Frida Berrigan tells the story |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryjanuary.htm#january8
Personally, I don’t think it’s surrender on the part of Meta, nor any of the other media moguls. It’s all of one piece-they’re all in it together with the new 47th president. I’ve read this from others, too, both last night and this morning. We the people are not part of the club. Anyway, here is this.
“I really think this a precursor for genocide,” a former employee tells Platformer
Jan 7, 2025 — 12 min read
Snippet:
I. The past
Donald Trump’s surprising victory in the 2016 US presidential election sparked a backlash against tech platforms in general and against Meta in particular. The company then known as Facebook was battered by revelations that its network dramatically amplified the reach of false stories about Trump and his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and was used as part of a successful effort by Russia to sow division in US politics and tilt the election in favor of Trump.
Chastened by the criticism, Meta set out to shore up its defenses. It hired 40,000 content moderators around the world, invested heavily in building new technology to analyze content for potential harms and flag it for review, and became the world’s leading funder of third-party fact-checking organizations. It spent $280 million to create an independent Oversight Board to adjudicate the most difficult questions about online speech. It disrupted dozens of networks of state-sponsored trolls who sought to use Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to spread propaganda and attack dissenters.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg had expected that these moves would generate goodwill for the company, particularly among the Democrats who would retake power after Trump lost in 2020. Instead, he found that disdain for the company remained strongly bipartisan. Republicans scorned him for policies that disproportionately punished the right, who post more misinformation and hate speech than the left does. Democrats blamed him for the country’s increasingly polarized politics and decaying democracy. And all sides pilloried him for the harms that his apps cause in children — an issue that 42 state attorneys general are now suing him over.
Last summer, the threats against Zuckerberg turned newly personal. In 2020, Zuckerberg and his wife had donated $419.5 million to fund nonpartisan election infrastructure projects. (Another effort that had seemingly generated no goodwill for him or Meta whatsoever.) All that the money had done was to help people vote safely during the pandemic. But Republicans twisted Zuckerberg’s donation into a scandal; Trump — who lost the election handily but insisted it had been stolen from him — accused Zuckerberg of plotting against him.
“We are watching him closely,” Trump wrote in a coffee-table book published ahead of the 2024 election, “and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison.”
By the end of 2024, Zuckerberg had given up on finding any middle path through the polarized and opposite criticisms leveled against him by Republicans and Democrats. His rival Elon Musk had spent the past year showing how Republican party support can be bought — cheaply.
In business and in life, Zuckerberg’s motivation has only ever been to win. And a doddering, transactional Trump presented Meta with a rare opportunity for a fresh start.
All they would have to do is whatever Trump wanted them to do.
II. The announcements
On Tuesday, Meta announced the most significant changes to its content moderation policies since the aftermath of the 2016 election. The changes include:
Zuckerberg announced these changes in an Instagram Reel; Joel Kaplan, a Republican operative and longtime Meta executive who last week replaced Nick Clegg as the company’s president of public policy, discussed the changes in an appearance on “Fox and Friends.” (See transcripts of both here.)
One way to understand these changes is as a marketing exercise, intended to convey a sense of profound change to an audience of one. In this, Meta appears to have succeeded; Trump today called the company’s changes “excellent” and said that the company has “come a long way.” (“Mr. Trump also said Meta’s change was ‘probably’ a result of the threats he had made against the company and Mr. Zuckerberg,” dryly noted the Times’ Mike Isaac and Theodore Schleifer.)
Whether this will be enough to get Trump to end the current antitrust prosecution against Meta, or otherwise advocate for the company in regulatory affairs, remains to be seen. By the cynical calculus of the company’s communications and policy teams, though, one assumes that Trump’s comments inspired a round of high-fives in the company’s Washington, DC offices.
But these changes are likely to substantially increase the amount of harmful speech on Meta’s platforms, according to 10 current and former employees who spoke to Platformer on Tuesday.
Start with the end of Meta’s fact-checking partnerships, which perhaps generated the most headlines of the company’s changes on Tuesday. While the company has been gradually lowering its investment in fact-checking for a couple years now, Meta’s abandonment of the project will have real effects: on the fact-checking organizations for whom Meta was a primary source of revenue, but also in the Facebook and Instagram feeds of which Meta is an increasingly begrudging steward. (snip-MORE. Go read; he left Substack because of the nazis, and made Platformer to get his writing to people. It’s free to read, and you don’t have to subscribe, either.)
https://www.gocomics.com/darksideofthehorse/2025/01/07
(I just got my first debit card this past Nov.)
https://www.gocomics.com/frazz/2025/01/07
My kind of place, this is!
https://www.gocomics.com/freerange/2025/01/07
https://www.gocomics.com/jim-benton-cartoons/2025/01/07
https://www.gocomics.com/super-fun-pak-comix/2025/01/07
Those who have snow, and those who don’t-enjoy, anyway! This one is on a Substack I follow.
The Snowfall Is So Silent Miguel de Unamuno1864 –1936
translated by Robert Bly
The snowfall is so silent,
so slow,
bit by bit, with delicacy
it settles down on the earth
and covers over the fields.
The silent snow comes down
white and weightless;
Snowfall makes no noise,
falls as forgetting falls,
flake after flake.
It covers the fields gently
while frost attacks them
with its sudden flashes of white;
covers everything with its pure
and silent covering;
not one thing on the ground
anywhere it escapes.
And wherever it falls it stays,
content and gay,
for snow does not slip off
as it rains,
but it stays and sinks in.
The flakes are skyflowers,
pale lilies from the clouds,
that wither on earth.
They come down blossoming
but then so quickly
they are gone;
They bloom only on the peak,
above the mountains,
and make the earth feel heavier
when they die inside.
Snow, delicate snow,
that falls with such lightness
on the head,
on the feelings,
come and cover over the sadness
that lies always in my reason.
The snowfall is silent
The snowfall is silent,
slow thing;
little by little and gently
rests on the ground
and shelters the plain.
The snow lies silently
white and light;
the snowfall makes no noise;
falls as oblivion falls,
flake by flake.
Softly shelters the fields
when the ice harasses them;
with its flashes of whiteness;
covers everything with its cloak
pure, silent;
does not escape on the ground
anything.
Where it falls, there it stays
light and light,
because the snow does not slip
as the rain slides,
but it stays and sinks in.
Flowers from the sky the flakes,
white lilies of the clouds,
that wither on the ground,
They come down in bloom,
but they are soon
melted;
They bloom only at the summit,
over the mountains,
sorrow of the earth,
and in their entrails they perish.
Snow, soft snow,
the one that falls so lightly
over the head,
on the heart,
come and shelter my sadness
the one that rests in reason.
From Roots and Wings: Poetry from Spain 1900-1975 , translated by Robert Bly, edited by Hardie St. Martin, and published by Harper & Row. © 1976 by Hardie St. Martin. Used with permission. All rights reserved.
January 7, 1953 President Harry S. Truman announced in his State of the Union address that the United States had developed a hydrogen (fusion) bomb.  |
| January 7, 1971 The U.S. District Court of Appeals ordered William Ruckelshaus, the Environmental Protection Agency’s first administrator, to begin the de-registration procedure for DDT so that it could no longer be used.  DDT being sprayed next to livestock It was a widely used pesticide in agriculture (principally cotton). This happened nine years after the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”, a book which cautioned about the dangers of excessive use of pesticides and other industrial chemicals to plants and animals, and humans.  Rachel Carson Read more about Rachel Carson |
| January 7, 1979 Vietnamese troops seized the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, toppling the regime of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian Communist party. Pol Pot and his allies had been directly responsible for the death of 25% of Cambodia’s population. When he seized power in 1975, capitalism, Western culture, city life, religion, and all foreign influences were to be extinguished in favor of an extreme form of peasant Communism. All foreigners were thus expelled, embassies closed, and any foreign economic or medical assistance was refused. The use of foreign languages was banned. Newspapers and television stations were shut down, radios and bicycles confiscated, and mail and telephone usage curtailed. Money was forbidden. All businesses were shuttered, religion banned, education halted, health care eliminated, and parental authority revoked. Thus Cambodia was sealed off from the outside world.All of Cambodia’s cities were then forcibly evacuated. At Phnom Penh, two million inhabitants were evacuated on foot into the countryside at gunpoint. As many as 20,000 died along the way.  Pol Pot’s legacy: Skulls of the killing fields |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryjanuary.htm#january7
Scottie's Playtime 