Mike's Blog Round Up

As Big Tech scrambles to placate Donald Trump before he reassumes office, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his company would replace their fact-checkers with user-generated Community Notes, beginning in the United States and then rolling out globally. Zuckerberg said in a video and in an announcement on Threads that the shift—largely the same system that Twitter/X uses—represented a return to the company’s roots and way of “restoring free speech.” He acknowledged, however, that the change “means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff,” adding, “but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.” Even as the incoming president threatens news outlets, Zuckerberg gave Trump a specific shoutout. In his pre-recorded video and in his Threads post, Zuckerberg said the company planned to “simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.” He pledged to “remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action.” In a particularly curious detail, he also announced plans to “move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized a rule on Tuesday that will bar medical debt from being included in credit scores. Medical debt impacts people’s ability to qualify for home mortgages, car loans, and even renting. The rule will go into effect 60 days after it has been published in the Federal Registrar, which has not happened yet. The rule was proposed in June, and there was concern after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election that the Biden administration would not have enough time to finalize it.

Maria Bartiromo cosigned Don Junior's claim that many people he knew in New York who were anti-gun, now want to buy a gun and learn how to use them. Whenever Junior talks about speaking to "people," he's not discussing actual working-class Americans, but rich elitists. Whenever he claims to be speaking to "people," it's just a ploy he uses to bash normal Americans in defense of MAGAts. Bartiromo tells her audience she also is training to learn how to use a gun.

Above, It's all Groundhog Day. In 1905 George Santayana write, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Well, here we go again! The Dean's Report says it is right from Hitler's playbook. Civil Discourse remembers January 6, 2021. No More Mister Nice Blog refutes that everyone agreed on January 7 2021. Anil Dash presents Understanding DOGE as Procurement Capture. Bonus Track: Miss Cellania goes to a photo shoot. Round-up by Tengrain who blogs at Mock, Paper, Scissors.

Seven-year-old Abdullahi Shongolo fled the Somali civil war in 1992, walking through dense African jungle for two weeks. He encountered hyenas, lions and violent militias before reaching a Kenyan refugee camp. During the twelve years he and his nine siblings lived in the camp, he learned enough English to plead his family’s case to become refugees eligible to resettle in the United States. Shongolo and his family arrived in Denver in 2004. Twenty years later, Shongolo runs the register at the international grocery store he owns in Denver, blocks away from the dwelling where he and his family first got their start in America.

Littleton city leaders are ready to cast a final vote Tuesday on a proposed change to its land-use code that could spur the construction of denser housing types — like duplexes, triplexes and cottage-style homes — throughout the southern Denver suburb. But the idea isn’t going over well with many in the city of 45,000, where neighborhoods made up exclusively of detached single-family homes could become a thing of the past. “I think rezoning would take neighborhoods that have a nice country feel and quaintness to such a mixed mess that outside buyers and visitors will scratch their heads at the building plans and rules of Littleton,” said Earnest Mathis, a 34-year resident of the city.