Cal

@skyquake.bsky.social

564 Followers 284 Following

Likes: history, horror, video games, religion(s), and staring at pictures of space! he/they. Queer. 🏳️‍⚧️

The cover of Far Cry 5 with the antagonist Joseph Seed seated behind an American flag spangled with his cult’s cross surrounded by his siblings and other cult members. Guns abound. A man with SINNER carved into him kneels before the table.
Another 2020 retweet argued for democratic worker control of wealth, dismissing ideological labels by concluding: “You can call that communism, you can call it socialism, you can call it pancakes.” And previously, CNN had surfaced an April 2020 post where Avila-Chevalier said that while most of the political theory she had read was communist, “the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me,” punctuating the remark with a laughing emoji
A medieval illuminated image of Jesus giving birth to the church through the wound in their side while four bystanders look on. I am not presently certain who is receiving the partly-covered-by-it’s-placenta crowned baby.
Skeet from Corey Atad: to go back to the start, the issue here isn't about political bubbles (there's plenty of political disagreement on Bluesky). it's more like bubble boy kind of bubbles. a desire to be online and exposed, but within a personalized sense of safety. the result is a lot of it feels a tad uptight. (the comments are visibly turned off)
A woman pounding on the floor of a swimming pool which is above her head because there is no direction from which to escape the pool.
So when the financial crisis comes in 2008, people then become convinced that this inequality that’s been building up is not God’s law — it’s the choice of the establishment to do it. And so the left began to campaign to take inequality into account, and they did surprisingly well. By the end of the decade, most Democrats were ready to deal with inequality, as Biden was, and they were acknowledging that the left was right. But instead of, sort of, taking yes for an answer, some people on the left, who believed there was a lot more wrong with America than simply economic inequality, said: See? We were right, and we’re not going to stop with economics. We’re going after all these racial and cultural things.
Victims positioned as oppressors, the powerful playacting as the powerless, lies told with the smirk of people who love to get caught because they know they will not be punished. The Trump administration was the culmination of America’s worst tendencies, a consequence of institutions so rotted they needed to be gutted and reborn. People used to admit this when Trump was still in office. They have stopped now that Biden is president and the rot has only festered. The Biden administration has continued Trump policies while refusing to hold Trump and his backers accountable, to the point that Trump can run for president again like Mafia Grover Cleveland. That Biden was a placeholder president – a stop gap to streamline an aspiring American autocracy into an entrenched one – was obvious by mid-2021. The first, rather large clue was the lack of urgency toward sedition.
Online Supplementary A)Socio-Political Attitudes a. 1) Items used in SurveyThinking about the USA today, please indicate the extent to which you agree with each of the following statements: Item 1) Abortion should be illegal.Item 2) The government should take steps to make incomes more equal. Item 3) All unauthorized immigrants should be sent back to their home country. Item 4) The federal budget for welfare programs should be increased. Item 5) Lesbian, gay and trans couples should be allowed to legally marry. Item 6) The government should regulate business to protect the environment. Item 7) The federal government should make it more difficult to buy a gun. Item 8) The federal government should make a concerted effort to improve social and economic conditions for African Americans.
Image of the speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, Democrat Melissa Hortman, who was assassinated in her home.
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
Cover of Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict by James Crossley and Robert J. Myles
Then, in the third period, Delia began cramping up. Jimmy Heintzelman, an equipment assistant, was radioed to alert Foster in the locker room. "I had to actually tell him twice," Heintzelman recalled last year. "He was kind of in shock. He didn't really say anything, just sat there. So I say it again, slowly: "He's ... coming ... off. ... You're ... going ... in." Says Foster: "That's when a lot goes blank, like, instantly dark. There's a lot of people running around and, like, commotion happening, but it's one of the classic cases of it just being quiet. You can only hear the one person that's speaking to you, and maybe you don't want to hear them."
A post censored by a “graphic media” label by @moderation.bsky.app The surprise is that when I expanded it it was the popular meme where one man on the gallows fitted with a noose asks the other “First time?” from the comedy The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
It’s time for me to reframe my initial post. The first part (the “good points”) is clearly debated and not that important in my view What I’m more interested in is the dynamics behind the toxicity: how it spreads, how it alters the discourse, etc.
The Fulfillment of the Law 17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19 Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.
A chart showing the comparative voting records of the senators during Doug Jones' tenure which shows he is right of center, in fact slightly to the right of the dot representing Senator Susan Collins of Maine who was the Republican to most often vote with the Democrats during this period.
Truly one of the most important documents of post Y2K life. And don't forget: Nihilism and irony are really neat until you're dead and the only person who remembers you is your weed dealer.
A 3D printed steampunk themed book which is actually a box in purple and gold on a shelf full of random artsy finds
A post by Rage Against the Machine in the wake of George Floyd’s death reading: Killing In The Name • Recorded in 1992 • Regrettably just as relevant in 2020 Hashtag fuck you I won’t do what you tell me It has a picture of Floyd’s killer looking at the camera as he kneels on his blurred out victim and is captioned with lyrics from “Killing In The Name” which read “You justify those that died by wearing the badge. They’re the chosen whites.” (I most often see the song quoted for its chorus, “Some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses.”)
Cover of the book Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism by Greg Grandin reading above the title "The American Empire Project" and under the title "with a new afterword on the Obama Doctrine." The blurb by Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, reads "Grandin has always ben a brilliant historian: now he uses his detective skills in a book that is absolutely crucial to understanding our planet."
A fairly incoherent version of a Jean-Léon Gérôme painting with something that might pass for a work with a huge human mouth and an eye emerging from a shadow above something like a stone patio with a background resembling a stone wall and window captioned: Yesterday I told it to do "A painting of a woman screaming in the dark by Jean-Léon Gérôme" because his popular paintings are all like naked women coming out of a well or in a pit in the center of the painting and it gave me this which has about the right composition as well as style. 😂
Occassionally I go back to the Steam store page to read people dragging games that don't ship with a whole game there with microtransactions, but this guy talking about BG3 being AAA size but actually finished... Man, like Disco Elysium, Dredge, Hades, Pentiment, this... I am happy people are making games I really want to beat that are also like, idk, do what they are supposed to do completely? Even Dredge has a badass little plotline in there.
I love “bad” endings I just need a massive list of stories where all I know is awful things happen at the end 🥺 …like that list in r/horror I started watching through I should get back to
A mangled output resembling warped trees and mountains generated by an early algorithm of what's now mis-named "artificial intelligence."
Iraq war was illegal and breached UN charter, says Annan The United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, declared explicitly for the first time last night that the US-led war on Iraq was illegal. Mr Annan said that the invasion was not sanctioned by the UN security council or in accordance with the UN's founding charter. In an interview with the BBC World Service broadcast last night, he was asked outright if the war was illegal. He replied: "Yes, if you wish." He then added unequivocally: "I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN charter. From our point of view and from the charter point of view it was illegal."
You can look to the president-elect himself for a vision of what is to come. He has told you his plans all along, though most chose to downplay or deny them. You can even look back to before his candidacy, when in February 2014, he went on Fox News to defend Russia. Why a reality TV host was on Fox News defending Russia is its own story, but here is what he said about his desired outcome for the United States: “You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then you’ll have a [chuckles], you know, you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great.” This is what “Make America Great Again” means to Donald Trump. It is how he has operated his businesses, taking advantage of economic disasters like the housing market crash for personal gain.
Mexico in 1824 with the boundary line with the U.S. from the 1818 Adams-Onís Treaty that Spain negotiated with the U.S.
Dodder is a significant problem for many farmers; it often attacks crops like alfalfa, flax and potatoes, and as it sips nutrients, the host plant grows weaker and weaker. The host plant may die from lack of nutrients, or it may just grow weak enough to be felled by some other virus (sort of the same way immunodeficiency works in humans). Or, crazily, dodder can also spread diseases from one plant to another. It’s a true villain of the plant world. Westwood’s research looked into what happens when dodder sticks its haustoria into its host, and found something that few had even suspected: The plants are communicating by transferring RNA. Specifically, it’s sending mRNA, or messenger RNA, which was previously thought to be too delicate and short-lived to survive a transfer from one plant to another. But, Westwood’s research proves that the dodder sends mRNA to its host, which could be used to command the host to do all kinds of things: lower its defenses, say.
A picture of an item from Fallen London, a garish necktie of diverse colors named “Unjustifiable Necktie,” with an item description: 'A crime so vivid, so abhorrent, that it ought forbid from us the very idea of clothing... having seen this abomination in silk, I am taken by an impulse to set my dresser alight and abandon civilization altogether.' — The Magazine Formerly Known as the London Magazine
Moore told NPR in an interview released Tuesday that multiple pastors had told him they would quote the Sermon on the Mount, specifically the part that says to “turn the other cheek,” when preaching. Someone would come up after the service and ask, “Where did you get those liberal talking points?” “What was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, ‘I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ,’ the response would not be, ‘I apologize.’ The response would be, ‘Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak,’” Moore said.
In a March 31 interview by Rachel Johnson on the British channel LBC, he revealed that he now identifies as a “cultural Christian.” He then explained what that means: “I’m not a believer, but there is a distinction between being a believing Christian and a cultural Christian. … I love hymns and Christmas carols and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos, and I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense.” But his declaration came as he opposed another religion whose growing visibility in the West disturbed Dawkins. It was, unsurprisingly, Islam. He was “slightly horrified” to see that Oxford Street in London was promoting Ramadan, the Islamic month for fasting, instead of Easter. “If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single time,” Dawkins added, only to claim that the former is “a fundamentally decent religion, in a way that I think Islam is not.” https://www.cato.org/commentary/richard-dawkins-takes-step-beyond-god-delusion
Doug Jones majority Republicans voting record.
I attended that meeting as a critic who was arguing against republican dissidents. I said they were wrong, nostalgic and increasingly illiberal. My brief opening comments were mostly focused on the issue of the Independent Review of Parades in Northern Ireland (which a year later would become the Parades Commission). I argued that in backing the state banning of Orange Order marches, as made clear in their submissions to the review, Irish republicans were behaving in a similar way to the British state that once sought to outlaw civil rights marches. My argument then, as it is now, is that state curbs on freedom of speech and freedom of association are never a good thing. As you can imagine, this did not go down well — at all. I essentially defended the Orange Order (an organisation I am not a fan of) in front of a small gathering of Irish republicans. There was much hostility to my comments. I remember this well because this was one of the first public talks I ever gave and I was very young and incredibly nervous.
tweet by @hermit_hwarang: "american *sees something american happening americanly in America*: what are we a bunch of ASIANS?!?!???"
A map showing that the Southern United States is characterized by its high percentage of Black Americans per capita. The area is uniformly purple to represent the high percentage while the rest of the country is almost entirely grey.
Exceptional Story for May: The Why of Eels By Luke van den Barselaar, April 24th, 2025
Cover of Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict by James Crossley and Robert J. Miles
An image of the character Ralph Wiggum from the Simpson sitting passively on a bus captioned “(chuckles) I’m in danger.”
“Then, we both get through at the same time,” he said. “And I just go, ‘I think my girlfriend’s trying to call, too.’ And she, at the same time, about 20 feet away, says, ‘my boyfriend is stuck in the sand.’” At that point, he said, they became a couple. “That was literally the first time we defined our relationship. It happened with two separate 911 operators at the same time.”
AP article with photo of mentioned candidate headlined “Ramaswamy proposes raising voting age to 25, unless people serve in military or pass a test” with image subtitle “Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy speaks during the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition Spring Kick-Off, Saturday, April 22, 2023, in Clive, Iowa.”
A plain strider: a naked ostrich with a big dinosaur-like crested bill, bright pink surge of color about the eyes and going down the neck, long blue underside of the throat, and grey body. There's a feathered fringe on its neck that falls over its shoulders. It has its head thrown back, calling out, standing on the plains with shadowed mountains in the background and a blue sky with sunset colored clouds.
A mauve box Conspiracy & Hate Flags including the Three Percenters Flag, US Civil Flag Truthers, VDARE / Patriot Party, Boogaloo Bois Flag, the No Quarter flag in question (a black and grey American flag), and the National Socialists USA flags.
Three complete shotgun shells with the metal ends facing us, two match the shells used for the cross in the above image. These have four number 12’s punctuated by four stars. The other says “Swartklip 12.”
A wooden shelf containing various curios. Standing centered in the picture is a wooden board with about 54 shotgun shells nailed in the shape of a cross
“The 21st century's most desirable currency is impunity,” I wrote. “Impunity, the sadist's conception of freedom, mainstreamed and marketed as the new American Dream.” Victims positioned as oppressors, the powerful playacting as the powerless, lies told with the smirk of people who love to get caught because they know they will not be punished. The Trump administration was the culmination of America’s worst tendencies, a consequence of institutions so rotted they needed to be gutted and reborn. People used to admit this when Trump was still in office. They have stopped now that Biden is president and the rot has only festered. The Biden administration has continued Trump policies while refusing to hold Trump and his backers accountable, to the point that Trump can run for president again like Mafia Grover Cleveland. That Biden was a placeholder president – a stop gap to streamline an aspiring American autocracy into an entrenched one – was obvious by mid-2021. The first, rather large clue was the lack of urgency toward sedition. Under Biden, the United States became the first country to face an attempted coup and not only fail to punish the coup plotters but allow them to hold office and make laws. There is no parallel in world history. Even Hitler had a prison interlude between his putsch and his presidency. The only thing approaching an equivalent lies in the American past: the refusal to punish confederates and instead let them regroup under new names, leading to the decimation of Reconstruction and the birth of Jim Crow. But that effort took decades. The backtrack of the Biden administration – and its accomplices, the Vichy Democrats in Congress -- took months. Policies that voters feared the Trump administration would enact were often enacted by Biden.
User profile Username: [blacked out] A Fallen Londoner since Wednesday 18 August 2010
You're not "late to the party" when you enjoy an old book for the first time. Books don't have an RSVP deadline. The party started long ago, and guests show up when they're meant to.
In addition to capitalizing Black, CSSP has also made the decision to capitalize White. We will do this when referring to people who are racialized as White in the United States, including those who identify with ethnicities and nationalities that can be traced back to Europe. To not name “White” as a race is, in fact, an anti-Black act which frames Whiteness as both neutral and the standard. In sociologist Robin D’Angelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, she writes, “White people get to be ‘just people,’” without having their race named, whereas people of color are often described with their race. We believe that it is important to call attention to White as a race as a way to understand and give voice to how Whiteness functions in our social and political institutions and our communities. Moreover, the detachment of “White” as a proper noun allows White people to sit out of conversations about race and removes accountability from White people’s and White institutions’ involvement in racism. We are also reckoning with the threatening implications of capitalizing “W” in “White,” often used by White supremacists, to establish White racial dominance. The violence of capitalizing White in this context makes us grapple with the history of how Whiteness has functioned and thrived in the United States; acknowledging that, yes, White people have had power and still hold power in this country. While we condemn those who capitalize “W” for the sake of evoking violence, we intentionally capitalize “White” in part to invite people, and ourselves, to think deeply about the ways Whiteness survives—and is
There are 427 second homes across Denbighshire, a local authority with a population of 98,500. The council said the aim of the tax was to encourage more house sales, to improve stock in the area, tackle homelessness and increase the supply of affordable housing.
Mark S: Nancy Pelosi and Schumer have been toxic forces enabling billionaire power to coalesce and infect the Democratic Party for years. Pelosi handpicked the feckless Hakeem Jeffries to replace her and she sidelined the dynamic AOC from the Oversight Committee. Schumer seems to be going nowhere. Is there any sign the Democrats are rejecting the Pelosi/Schumer lock on Dems? SK: Democratic voters are certainly rejecting it; you see it in the polls and hear it in the mass frustration over their inaction. The Democratic elite are trolling the public by tweeting as spectators while the nation burns. They refused to use their power to stop Trump over the past decades and they refuse to use it now. But the stupor of savior syndrome that has long gripped Democratic voters is slipping away. While it is sad that it is happening late, better late than never. There is no timeline on the truth. Unfortunately, there is a timeline on consequences. Every official you named is an enabler of Trump’s network. If you examine their finances and foreign ties, you will find a great deal of overlap. The better folks grasp this, the better chance we have of saving our country — not saving a party or its corrupt leaders, but our country and their victims: the American people.
The cover of Walter Farley’s The Island Stallion Races, featuring a race track with horses breaking from the opening gates except a red stallion in the foreground wearing no saddle rearing, refusing to run.
A chart from govtrack.us showing that Doug Jones leaned right with the furthest right Democrats and furthest left Republicans.
A map of the US showing that the South has by far the highest density of Black Americans per capita.
little weird that people who have been entirely unable to build a popular movement are criticizing hundreds of thousands of people in the streets but what do i know
I’m suspicious that the Krasnov story is bogus and is being spread as an attempt to delegitimize solid research on Trump’s ties to the Kremlin and its oligarchs. There are many concrete examples of Trump’s illicit activity that were meticulously documented but played down by media and never investigated by officials — some of whom turned out to be on the Kremlin oligarch payroll. Nothing about this crisis is new. The most important question is why every administration, most recently Biden’s, enabled it.
A map showing that the South is the area of the country where counties are likely to have a high proportion of Black Americans, with a scale from grey to purple being almost uniformly grey across the rest of the country.