By the calculation of the Aristide administration in 2004, the French indemnity extracted between $22 and $40 billion from the national treasury.

By the late nineteenth century, 80 percent of Haiti’s wealth was devoted to serving external debts, first to France and then to financial institutions in Germany — and, most notably, the United States. By the turn of the century, the relatively independent and sovereign Haiti had become entangled in a web of debt held by American financial firms.

https://jacobin.com/2017/01/haiti-reparations-france-slavery-colonialism-debt/

Kamala calling Trump a landlord

Somehow that game is considered more woke than the game with actual gay marriage.

I thought the one on the right was Pence and I was confused because I thought he had fallen out of favor (until I realized that it was RFK).

According to the Oklahoma State Department of Education website, the teacher who assigned the paper was Erich Richter, a football coach at SHS who has his emergency certification in English that expired on June 30, 2024.

Prior to teaching, Richter ran for Tulsa County sheriff but was disqualified due to embezzling funds from Taco Bueno, according to The Frontier.

Beyond parody

There was an article a while back about hospitals run by Catholic organizations that would ban doctors from offering services that violate religious rules (i.e. abortion and contraception), even if the doctors do not personally hold those beliefs. While it’s probably not the case with all Catholic-coded hospitals, it’s still something to be aware of. They may also pressure non-Catholic hospitals into accepting these rules as they formed mergers with them, so it’s a potential issue even for hospitals that don’t seem like it.

I have never heard of a muslim, hindu or buddhist hospital in “the west” though these of course exist elsewhere.

Jewish hospitals in the US were founded in large part because many other hospitals would refuse to employ Jewish doctors or treat Jewish patients in the past. I would imagine that there aren’t hospitals specifically for other religions in the US because they are an even smaller minority and there hasn’t been an explicit need to the same extent.

I remember some hysteria being spread about pro-Palestinian protesters wearing face masks, hence the rhetoric around “criminal” and “dangerous” people wearing masks to conceal their identity (given that left-wing college students are more likely to wear them for health reasons anyways). Probably not the main reason but I think there’s an element of that.

Extremely critical support to the engineers who made US warships touchscreen-controlled.

Conservatives: “Western values are under attack!”

Also conservatives: “NOOOOO how dare you celebrate one of the foundational events of Western liberalism!!!”

This unlimited customization dangerously blurs the boundaries of gender and sex, and, especially considering the predominantly young player base of Minecraft, can be very confusing in terms of gender. One of these confused young people is my son, now 21 years old, who, it turns out, had been using the default “girl” skin of Minecraft, often shown in marketing alongside a more fitting masculine character. While this is not concerning on its own, having done so since the age of 11 will surely have contributed to his gender confusion.

Most games have some form of gender customization/selection at this point. How are you supposed to stop someone from choosing an “incorrect” gender? By requiring a genital scan or something?

Also the “girl” skin is pretty clearly intended to be gender-neutral and is based on a real-life man.

Sabine Karin Doris Hossenfelder (born 18 September 1976)

In July 1977, a senior scientist of Exxon, James Black reported to the company’s executives that there was a general scientific agreement at that time that the burning of fossil fuels was the most likely manner in which mankind was influencing global climate change.

Exxon’s research confirming the existence of manmade climate change is almost as old as you are.

how many players are using an adblocker enough to make an impact?

Given the context in which Modrinth was created, it’s likely that their userbase is significantly more likely than average to use adblockers.

Not pictured: the fact that there are actually 95 and 100 people on the tracks and that the Democrats helped sabotage any other tracks at every juncture.

I am certainly no fan of George W Bush, but what I’m saying is that every single sensible person that can come out against this orange nutboy, the better. Even if 1,000 people who thought George W bush was awesome reconsiders their vote, it’s a good thing.

Hey, you guys have been doing great with Arab and Muslim voters recently, right? I’m sure that more than 1,000 of them would change their vote after seeing you be friendly with Bush. Surely nobody would finally come to realize that Democrats really stand for nothing after seeing that.

Machine translators make heavy use of machine learning/LLMs on the back end. This is necessary to an extent since the same phrase can have different meanings depending on context, but it also means that the usual biases from machine learning can crop up easily. The most famous example is that if you translated something like “I waved to the doctor” and “I waved to the nurse” to Spanish, it used to give the masculine form/pronouns for the first sentence and the feminine form/pronouns for the second sentence, even though there is no indication of gender in the English version. So there’s a good chance that the context of who is kicking who can cause Google Translate to interpret the same phrase differently due to this bias.

Oh yeah for sure. I just thought it was funny that in addition to destroying Shinzo Abe’s legacy, he also stopped America from exporting its transphobic propaganda to Japan at the same time.

Oh god, they named it “XGPT”. This has got to be the fastest I’ve seen marketers devalue the meaning of a word.

MSNBC columnist and former U.S. attorney Joyce Vance called Trump’s scrutinizing of Haley’s citizenship “an offensive question that’s contrary to American values.

“The Founding Fathers imposed a restriction, but it’s hard to believe that it was meant to burden a second generation of American citizens born on American soil like Nikki Haley,” Vance added. "But nonetheless, the question of the term ‘natural born citizen’ has not been fully fleshed out in the courts, and it may be that Trump is relegating us to more meaningless discourse in this area just like he did with the birther lies about Obama.”

Love how when a racist and xenophobic law is invoked to make racist and xenophobic political attacks, their response is not to point out that such a law should not exist in an actual democracy, but to argue that the Founding Fathers only intended to be xenophobic towards first-generation immigrants and not second-generation immigrants. I’m pretty sure that if the Founding Fathers heard about this they’d be more offended to learn that women and non-white people were allowed to run for office in the first place.