cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/35817976

Peter Dreier
Sep 07, 2025

For more than a decade before Jackie Robinson broke the sport’s color line in 1947, black newspapers, civil rights groups, progressive white activists and sportswriters, labor unions, and radical politicians waged a sustained protest movement to end Jim Crow in baseball. They believed that if they could push the nation’s most popular sport to dismantle its color line, they could make inroads in other facets of American society. They picketed at big league ballparks, wrote letters to team owners and Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis demanding tryouts for Black athletes, and interviewed white players and managers, most of whom expressed a willingness to integrate major league rosters. Most white newspapers ignored the Negro Leagues, but black newspapers (and the Communist Party’s Daily Worker) covered their stars and games, including exhibition contests between Black teams and teams comprised of white major leaguers, many of which were won by Negro League players.

Peter Link

2025-09-07 16:34:27

80 Years Ago, A Jewish Radical and Two Negro League Stars Led a Crusade to Integrate Baseball That Paved the Way for Jackie Robinson | Common Dreams

Peter Dreier
Sep 07, 2025

For more than a decade before Jackie Robinson broke the sport’s color line in 1947, black newspapers, civil rights groups, progressive white activists and sportswriters, labor unions, and radical politicians waged a sustained protest movement to end Jim Crow in baseball. They believed that if they could push the nation’s most popular sport to dismantle its color line, they could make inroads in other facets of American society. They picketed at big league ballparks, wrote letters to team owners and Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis demanding tryouts for Black athletes, and interviewed white players and managers, most of whom expressed a willingness to integrate major league rosters. Most white newspapers ignored the Negro Leagues, but black newspapers (and the Communist Party’s Daily Worker) covered their stars and games, including exhibition contests between Black teams and teams comprised of white major leaguers, many of which were won by Negro League players.

80 Years Ago, A Jewish Radical and Two Negro League Stars Led a Crusade to Integrate Baseball That Paved the Way for Jackie Robinson

The little known story about Sam Nahem, Leon Day, and Willard Brown who in 1945 played on a field in the shadow of Adolph Hitler's Nazi Germany and broke down historic barriers.

^{peter-dreier (Common Dreams)}

cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/35817976

Peter Dreier
Sep 07, 2025

For more than a decade before Jackie Robinson broke the sport’s color line in 1947, black newspapers, civil rights groups, progressive white activists and sportswriters, labor unions, and radical politicians waged a sustained protest movement to end Jim Crow in baseball. They believed that if they could push the nation’s most popular sport to dismantle its color line, they could make inroads in other facets of American society. They picketed at big league ballparks, wrote letters to team owners and Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis demanding tryouts for Black athletes, and interviewed white players and managers, most of whom expressed a willingness to integrate major league rosters. Most white newspapers ignored the Negro Leagues, but black newspapers (and the Communist Party’s Daily Worker) covered their stars and games, including exhibition contests between Black teams and teams comprised of white major leaguers, many of which were won by Negro League players.

Peter Link

2025-09-07 16:34:27

80 Years Ago, A Jewish Radical and Two Negro League Stars Led a Crusade to Integrate Baseball That Paved the Way for Jackie Robinson | Common Dreams

Peter Dreier
Sep 07, 2025

For more than a decade before Jackie Robinson broke the sport’s color line in 1947, black newspapers, civil rights groups, progressive white activists and sportswriters, labor unions, and radical politicians waged a sustained protest movement to end Jim Crow in baseball. They believed that if they could push the nation’s most popular sport to dismantle its color line, they could make inroads in other facets of American society. They picketed at big league ballparks, wrote letters to team owners and Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis demanding tryouts for Black athletes, and interviewed white players and managers, most of whom expressed a willingness to integrate major league rosters. Most white newspapers ignored the Negro Leagues, but black newspapers (and the Communist Party’s Daily Worker) covered their stars and games, including exhibition contests between Black teams and teams comprised of white major leaguers, many of which were won by Negro League players.

80 Years Ago, A Jewish Radical and Two Negro League Stars Led a Crusade to Integrate Baseball That Paved the Way for Jackie Robinson

The little known story about Sam Nahem, Leon Day, and Willard Brown who in 1945 played on a field in the shadow of Adolph Hitler's Nazi Germany and broke down historic barriers.

^{peter-dreier (Common Dreams)}

Peter Dreier
Sep 07, 2025

For more than a decade before Jackie Robinson broke the sport’s color line in 1947, black newspapers, civil rights groups, progressive white activists and sportswriters, labor unions, and radical politicians waged a sustained protest movement to end Jim Crow in baseball. They believed that if they could push the nation’s most popular sport to dismantle its color line, they could make inroads in other facets of American society. They picketed at big league ballparks, wrote letters to team owners and Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis demanding tryouts for Black athletes, and interviewed white players and managers, most of whom expressed a willingness to integrate major league rosters. Most white newspapers ignored the Negro Leagues, but black newspapers (and the Communist Party’s Daily Worker) covered their stars and games, including exhibition contests between Black teams and teams comprised of white major leaguers, many of which were won by Negro League players.

80 Years Ago, A Jewish Radical and Two Negro League Stars Led a Crusade to Integrate Baseball That Paved the Way for Jackie Robinson

The little known story about Sam Nahem, Leon Day, and Willard Brown who in 1945 played on a field in the shadow of Adolph Hitler's Nazi Germany and broke down historic barriers.

^{peter-dreier (Common Dreams)}

Hi, I would like to look for an instance primarily based on which other instances it doesn't federate with/block or whatever the term is. But clicking on the URL of a few instances, I can't find this information anywhere.

Thanks for any and all help.

An estimated 1,500 people in London have taken part in one of the largest acts of mass civil disobedience in British history, to protest the ban on Palestine Action. The Metropolitan Police arrested just over half of them, in what has been described as a “huge embarrassment” for commissioner Sir Mark Rowley.

At around 8:30pm on Saturday, a DoJ spokesperson said: “This is a huge embarrassment for Sir Mark Rowley, who claimed the Met would arrest every person who held a sign saying ‘I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action’. They have failed to arrest the majority of sign holders and it’s no wonder – there are simply too many people who oppose this utterly dystopian ban and the government’s complicity in Israel’s genocide to arrest us all.”

An officer told Novara Media that anyone holding a sign breaking the proscription could simply put it away and leave. People were not searched on the way out, no kettle was in place and protesters were witnessed walking away with their signs in full view.

Police Fail to Arrest Two-Thirds in Biggest-Ever Protest Against Palestine Action Ban

Over the course of eight hours, the Metropolitan Police only managed to arrest around one-third of the approximately 1,500 protesters holding signs expressing support for proscribed group Palestine Action.

^{Novara Media}

I've been facing issues lately. A few weeks ago I kept having "lockups" where the keyboard and mouse would stop working. It turns out my crappy mouse was causing all USB ports to stop working. I noticed that the PC would still go to sleep and the clock was still working.

Yesterday I was having a weird issue with a site where I couldn't download files. It worked on every other device I own so I decided to restart. After restart the PC would boot to a black screen. The actual monitor was still on just not displaying.

I already back up my home folder to a second drive automatically so after searching for an answer to this issue and finding nothing I just decided to switch to fedora and see what that's all about.

It seems like it's one thing after another lately and I just needed to use my PC. I guess a fresh install every once in awhile isn't a bad thing.

Zionists often insist that the use of the word “genocide” to describe Israeli actions in Gaza cheapens other past crimes. Yet in both scale and in intent, Israel’s destruction of Gaza conforms closely to historic genocides.

The Genocide in Gaza and Those Who Deny It

^jacobin.com

Sensitive content Clicca per aprire/chiudere

• SpikingBrain Technical Report: Spiking Brain-inspired Large Models.
• GitHub.

China unveils brain-inspired AI that could redefine efficiency

Chinese researchers have developed a new AI system, SpikingBrain-1.0, that breaks from the resource-hungry Transformer architecture used by models like ChatGPT. This new model, inspired by the human brain's neural mechanisms, charts a new course for

^{Gong Zhe (CGTN)}

https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/myanmar-china-watch/mastermind-of-chinas-great-firewall-powering-myanmar-juntas-digital-repression-report.html

cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/6058319

At Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, Manal Zaqout accompanies her 6-year-old daughter, Aya, for treatment. Aya had been moved to the hospital from the al-Mawasi areas east of Khan Younis after a continuous cough, fever, and fatigue that refused to resolve itself. The child was diagnosed with the flu, but the symptoms were far more severe than regular influenza.

On Sunday, the Gaza Government Media Office said that a “new strain” of the virus is spreading across Gaza amid a severe shortage in medicines due to Israel’s blockade of humanitarian assistance to the Strip.

“The rapid spread is attributed to extreme overcrowding, lack of water and ventilation, and the deterioration of healthcare services due to the war, in addition to restrictions imposed by the occupation,” the Government Media Office said in the statement.

Full Article

Amid ‘unprecedented’ rise in respiratory disease in Gaza, famine is making routine infections life&

Local authorities in Gaza have identified a “new strain” of respiratory virus in Gaza amid worsening conditions of famine and severe malnutrition, which threaten to cause even routine infections to turn deadly.

^{Tareq S. Hajjaj (Mondoweiss)}

I decided to purchase a one-way pager, a programmer, and a paging subscription to satisfy my curiosity about pagers.

In this post, I am explaining my thought process and describing some of what I have learned about how pagers work. This is especially relevant to the national paging network in the Netherlands, but hopefully others also find it interesting.

The cellular network

Cellphones give us the ability to reach others and to remain reachable regardless of our location if within a network's coverage. The network infrastructure is continuously evolving in ways that make it more efficient, secure, and reliable.

One way that the network becomes more efficient is by improving its device tracking abilities to reduce the amount of radio broadcasting resources needed to deliver data to the recipient. Security and reliability are improved by having two-way communication between the network and devices such that devices can be authenticated, data correctly encrypted, and message delivery confirmed.

A participant within this network must accept one or more of their device's unique identifiers (at the very least the IMSI, often also the IMEI) is associated with an approximate location.

Since I do not want to accept these terms, I do not carry a phone with a SIM card on me.

A burner phone and an emergency pre-paid SIM card gives me the opportunity to connect to the network in the case that I need to contact someone immediately.

However, this does not give the opportunity to others to reach me in the case that they need me or worry about me. This is not common, but there have been cases in which being reachable would have been good.

LoRa / Meshtastic

Last year I learned about LoRa radios and the Meshtastic network implementation. These devices allow one to send encrypted messages directly between devices. The range is decent, especially if there is a line-of-sight between devices. With Meshtastic it is possible to create a network of nodes that route messages, and to make use of tunnels over the internet to connect nodes that are very far apart.

So far, my favorite use-cases for Meshtastic are communicating with my partner as I approach an area to meet them, communication during festivals/events, and when travelling in a small town or camping.

It is a great tool in some contexts, but I cannot be reliably reached with it.

The Pager

I am currently living in the Netherlands and so what I say is most relevant to the Dutch paging network 'KPN Nationaal 3'. Messages are broadcast using POCSAG 1200 at 172.450 MHz. I know that the situation with paging networks vary across the world, with paging networks being no longer available in many countries, but I don't know the details. It may be that the system here is rather special and unique.

The paging network is considered a legacy broadcasting system. Messages to the network are broadcast by transmitters distributed across the full coverage range. The message that is broadcast contains the RIC (Receiver Identify Code) and the message in plain text.

Anyone with an SDR (Software Defined Radio) device can decode and log all of the unencrypted messages. Here is an example using SDRConnect + multimon-ng:

Using a programming interface, a user can select the RIC codes that they want their network-tuned pager to be responsive to. The pager will beep and display on the screen messages sent to that RIC. In my case, the seller of the pager assigned a new RIC from their pool to me and programmed the pager to listen to it.

A pager does not have a built-in transmitter, and so it does not reveal any information to the network.

A subscription to the paging network works the following way:
- You get assigned your own 'RIC', which is publicly broadcast with every message
- You get assigned a private number (0665xxxxxx)
- While your subscription is active, you send an SMS or an e-mail to a specific address with your private number + message, and the network provider will broadcast it with the RIC as the recipient.

Then, anyone who knows your private number is able to reach a pager listening to your RIC. The public RIC is not enough information to request a message to be sent to you.

Registering to the network has a monthly cost (typical current pricing of 8 € - 20 €) depending on whether you want to be able to recieve text messages, numeric messages, or only make the pager beep. Your identity and banking information are known to the network provider. I was able to register as an individual without needing to provide any company information. I had to fill-in a short form and send it over e-mail with a photo of an ID to register.

So:
- The network provider knows your identity
- The service has a monthly cost
- The unencrypted message content, when they are sent, and the recipient's RIC are public information
- The network does not confirm delivery
- Inefficient for the network (all transmitters broadcast every message)
- Being a legacy system, the network may not remain alive for too long

But:
- It is possible to reach you at all times without needing to broadcast your location to the network

The pager is a technology that I looked at early on when I started thinking about privacy and I quickly discarded the idea. Giving my identity to a network provider and broadcasting unencrypted messages publicly did not seem logical to me.

Today, I see the value of having a receive-only device that is supported by a network with national coverage. A paging message would contain only enough information for me to know how urgently I need to find a way to communicate - whether I need to activate the burner phone immediately, or whether I can spend some time to go find another way to communicate.

For me, it was a pleasant surprise to discover that this legacy system fills the specific gap of reachability without tracking.

I also recently became aware of the existence of paging networks that rely on volunteer HAM radio operators (like DAPNET), and would like to explore these systems in the future.