Discussion

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@MikeDunnAuthor/117139797548980716

The French demanded $21 billion (In today’s dollars)
in exchange for peace and recognition of Haiti as an independent nation.

The debt was financed through French banks and the U.S. bank, Citibank.

The Haitians finally paid it off in 1947.

However, the huge interest payments for their independence debt,
and the debt incurred through the corruption of the Duvalier dynasty,
have made Haiti one of the poorest nations in the western hemisphere.

Prior to independence, Haiti was the richest and most productive of all of Europe’s colonie

On Tuesday morning, a coalition of leaders and members from labor, community, and faith organizations in Minnesota
denounced Operation Puppet Master,
an alleged campaign by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to spy on Minnesotans during Operation Metro Surge earlier this year.

In a press conference held outside of Target’s headquarters in downtown Minneapolis,
the coalition urged Minnesotans to continue standing in solidarity with one another,
and demanded companies headquartered in the state sign the business for democracy pledge.

The call comes after the New York Times published a report on August 13 about the campaign by DHS.

Details were made public in a motion for discovery filed by Kevin Riach,
an attorney for healthcare worker Isaac Sant.

According to the motion, federal agents
“surreptitiously recorded dozens of conversations with ordinary people who were simply exercising their First Amendment right to protest ICE’s lawless rampage in our state.

The agents gathered information about Minnesotans from law enforcement databases and internet searches,
and created dossiers that are apparently now available agency-wide.”

The documents describe surveillance and infiltration of union and community meetings during and before Operation Metro Surge.

Eighteen organizations, including labor unions, were listed in a chart
connecting them to Direct Action Minnesota (DAMN),
a group of individuals who resisted what coalition members call a
“terror campaign” by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Operation Metro Surge.

Sant is one of 15 individuals who were indicted and charged by the federal government
for conspiracy
in what organizers have called an act of political repression and retaliation.

More than half of the 15 are rank-and-file union members,
and now the federal government is claiming labor organizations to be part of the alleged conspiracy.

The motion continues:
“With no evidence, the government alleged to the grand jury that this conspiracy in this case extends far beyond the defendants to include the AFL-CIO,
the Minneapolis Federation of Educators,
the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees, Monarca,
Veterans for Peace,
and the Grease Pit bicycle repair shop,
among others.”

In addition to the AFL-CIO,
Minneapolis Federation of Educators (MFE) Local 59,
and Minnesota Association of Professional Employees (MAPE),
SEIU Local 26 is also named by DHS
along with the Workers Solidarity Circle
and Black Cat Workers Collective.

The motion also states that Homeland Security Investigations subpoenaed financial records for several labor unions,
including SEIU locals in Minnesota
and the Communication Workers of America (CWA).
https://workdaymagazine.org/a-manufactured-conspiracy-minnesotas-labor-movement-denounces-federal-surveillance-operation/

Florida opens first jellyfish museum in the U.S.
The facility, opened by Ukrainian refugees Alex and Yana Yanovsky, features more than 20 species of the aquatic creatures.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/2026/08/20/first-jellyfish-museum-united-states-opens-florida/
#globalmuseum #museums #jellyfish

a "geist" refers to a cognitive bias where person-like mental states are attributed to non-person entities. for example, asking whether a nation "wants" something is turning the nation into a geist. wondering if a chatroom has an "opinion" or a "belief" is another example. usually these questions can be reworded to be more concrete: "does the median person in this nation want X?" or "do the people in the chatroom have a consensus on Y?" but sometimes, once you reword your geisty thoughts into non-geisty terms, you'll realize it's not quite what you'd meant originally. and that's because you were thinking about the geist. and the geist is not real.

THE FEDIVERSE CERTAINLY HASN'T
ABOLISHED ARSEHOLES 💎

I spent part of this morning answering a fairly large pile of comments on my posts. And somewhere between my breathwork, lighting the fire and drinking my coffee, I noticed something.

NOBODY WAS BEING HORRIBLE.

People disagreed with me. People corrected things I said. People brought different experiences and different political views. There were jokes, arguments, questions and tangents. But almost none of that peculiar tension I became accustomed to on the big closed social platforms.

YOU KNOW THE FEELING.

Someone says something mildly contentious, and suddenly twelve strangers are preparing for the next Battle of Facebook. I haven't experienced much of that here. Perhaps I've simply been lucky. The Fediverse certainly hasn't abolished arseholes. Give humanity sufficient time, and I'm confident we'll manage to decentralise those too.

But I wonder whether something structural is happening? The giant platforms discovered that anger, fear and outrage are extraordinarily good at keeping human beings engaged. Conflict isn't necessarily an unfortunate side effect of the system. It can be profitable.

Here, there isn't one enormous corporation deciding what billions of people should see next in order to keep them scrolling. And perhaps that changes the temperature of the room.

THERE'S ANOTHER POSSIBILITY TOO.

Maybe our communities become partly what we practise in them. If disagreement is treated as conversation rather than combat, people begin behaving accordingly. I don't need everyone here to agree with me.

IN FACT, THAT WOULD BE TERRIBLY BORING.

I just rather like being somewhere where disagreement doesn't automatically require a body to reach for a flamethrower. So far, the Fediverse feels less like an audience being managed... and more like people talking.

I hadn't realised how much I'd missed that.

@3goodthings
@DigitalCoup
@meditation
@economics_that_works

#Fediverse #Mastodon #SocialMedia #OpenWeb #Community #people #flamethrower #ARSEHOLES #talking

Autocrats often tell us what they intend to do, and Trump was no exception.

He ran for president on a platform of helping some of the world’s most murderous leaders.

During his campaign, he repeatedly “joked” about becoming a dictator himself,
and declared at a June 2024 rally that
a “smart president” would not consider North Korea, China, and Russia as enemies,
and would “make them do great.”

In case this message was not clear enough, he asserted in October 2024 that America’s
“enemy from within…the people actually running the government,”
—United States Democrats
—were “more dangerous…than Russia and China and other people.”

Then came the blitzkrieg tactics of early 2025.
I spent those months writing essays to help us understand the unthinkable:

America was being wrecked from within, at record speed,
and was shifting from deterrent to enabler of autocratic expansionism.

I forecast a “dialing back of America’s global soft and hard power footprint in the world”
to “create a vacuum of American power and influence in the world that China, Russia, Turkey and other autocracies can fill.”

https://lucid.substack.com/p/trump-sabotaging-america-so-that

Woohoo! I just hit "publish" on my second #PersonalEssay!

The Music Doesn't Sound the Same Anymore was sparked when I learned that Clyde Stubblefield's 20 second drum improvisation on James Brown's Funky Drummer has been sampled over 1,000 times.

He was never paid any royalties.

Read it, and let me know what you think!

#motown #music

@Bibliothecaris@social.edu.nl I know it's been a minute, but what did y'all decide?

His confidence was palpable. The comments section was full of “thanks for this info” and “I'm so glad you took the time to research this for us”. It was easy to imagine hundreds of people nodding along, sharing with friends, and accepting this information as fact.

But that was just it. Everything didn't quite add up. A quick web search confirmed it. He was spreading pseudo-science to hundreds of people.

Confidence Is Not the Same as Truth: What my mother, social media influencers, and AI hallucinations have in common

@meditation

#ai #socialmedia

Caught in the Spider's Web

#Nature #Photography

Rain

#LeafScrolling #Nature #Photography

@fesshole@mastodon.social What about 'print to pdf'?

TYGER, TYGER, BURNING BRIGHT 💎

I went looking for some good news again this morning.

I found a tiger.

Her name is Umit. It means HOPE.

On 31 July 2026, Kazakhstan released her into the wild beside Lake Balkhash, where tigers had disappeared more than 70 years ago.

And this wasn’t somebody just opening a cage and hoping for the best.

For more than a decade, people have been preparing the land. They created a protected nature reserve, restored habitat and water systems, brought back kulan, deer and wild boar, and worked to rebuild the prey base a tiger would actually need.

They also trained people to track the animals and deal with encounters between tigers and humans.

Then finally they brought in Umit, a wild Amur tiger from the Russian Far East, fitted her with a satellite collar...

...and opened the gate.

She walked out.

The tiger that originally lived there, the Caspian tiger, is extinct. But genetic research showed that Caspian and Amur tigers were extraordinarily closely related.

So this isn’t Jurassic Park.

It is something much more achievable and, to me, much more beautiful.

We damaged an ecosystem badly enough to lose one of its great predators.

Then people spent years repairing that ecosystem sufficiently to invite tigers back.

The plan is eventually to have about 50 wild tigers living beside Lake Balkhash again.

There is still plenty that can go wrong.

But this morning, somewhere in Kazakhstan, a tiger named Hope is walking through country where no wild tiger has walked for more than seventy years.

I think that deserves a little attention too.

@3goodthings @DigitalCoup @meditation @economics_that_works

#GoodNews #Tigers #Rewilding #Conservation #Kazakhstan #Habitat

@datarama@hachyderm.io @futurebird@sauropods.win That video was absolutely incredible! Thank you for sharing!!

You don’t get to 50 million people in South Carolina even if you include all the dead ones.

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:t6ubj2wlhc34awzcymh3qpur/post/3mtfmq62h222v

Frequently Asked Questions

1. what the fuck

The Transparency Report was an Airtag

When somebody is consuming material wholesale and nobody will tell you where it is going, eventually you stop asking.

You put a tiny snitch inside the merchandise. 404 Media did exactly that.

A bookseller had received a suspicious order for roughly 1,000 books through Biblio. With the seller's cooperation, 404 Media hid an Apple AirTag inside one of them and followed the shipment across the country.

The dot stopped at Amazon.

@3goodthings@fedigroups.social

Three good things this day

1. My chaste tree is blooming
2. Hummingbirds are visiting my tree
3. School is back in session #3goodthings

Couldn’t have said it better.
#USpol
#WorldPol