Saúl E. González

Former diplomat now working at an international development agency in communications/recovering dogmatic fundy/progressive politically but tries empathy

[yolanda @NOREGRETS65]

Not once

[Morgan J. Freeman @mjfree]

🚨 Trump’s ICE Death Squads don’t just kill — they CREATE the kill shots.

Masked agents ambush cars, spook drivers, then gun them down when they flee. Speeded-up videos, racial profiling, families forced to watch executions.

Maine. Houston. Minnesota & more... while Trump golfs.
This is state terror.
Vote them out in November.
FREE PISSED OFF Substack →https://t.co/dL4PBaDMJS

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Trump Bingo: The Likes of Which You’ve Never Seen

On Thursday the President will once again stand in front of a microphone and produce sounds. Not sentences. Sounds. And since nobody’s listening to the content anyway, we might as well make ourselves useful.

So here it is: the Gandalv Trump Bingo card. The rules take three seconds to learn. He says “Tremendous”, you cross it off. He says “Many people are saying”, you cross it off. Five in a row is Bingo. The full card is a Total Landslide, Frankly, at which point you may pour yourself something strong.

The centre square is a free space. It says “China”. That’s not a joke, it’s statistics.

Best of all, the card is fully reusable for every speech from now until the end of time. The world changes. The material never does.

Good luck on Thursday. You won’t need it.

[ArchaeoHistories @histories_arch]

She was a white Southern girl descended from slave owners — raised by a mother who believed in segregation. At nineteen, she threw all of that away, and it landed her on death row. And that was only the beginning of what she was willing to lose...

Her name was Joan Trumpauer, and she grew up in Arlington, Virginia, on the comfortable side of every line the segregated South had drawn.

Her family had once owned slaves in Georgia. Her mother was a staunch segregationist. Everything about Joan's world was arranged to reward her for looking away — to keep her safe, protected, and silent inside a system built for people who looked like her. The path in front of her was the easy one: finish school, marry well, live quietly, never make trouble.

But Joan couldn't stop seeing what that comfort was built on. Raised in the church, she kept colliding with the unbearable contradiction between what she'd been taught about justice and the injustice she watched every day. And at some point she made a decision that would cost her nearly everything: she would no longer stand on the comfortable side of it.

In 1961, at nineteen, she joined the Freedom Riders.

Their idea sounded almost mundane. Black and white Americans would ride interstate buses together and use the same waiting rooms and counters, regardless of race. No weapons, no threats — just a refusal to obey laws built on inequality.

In 1961, that refusal could get you killed. Freedom Riders were beaten in broad daylight, buses firebombed, mobs waiting at stations with chains and clubs.

Joan knew all of it. She boarded the bus anyway.

When she reached Jackson, Mississippi, she was arrested almost immediately. And then she was offered the easy way out that would follow her for years: pay the fine, leave Mississippi, go home, forget the whole thing.

She refused.

So they sent her to Parchman Farm — the Mississippi State Penitentiary, a place designed not merely to punish people but to break them. And here is a detail that tells you everything about what she endured: because Parchman had no women's wing, nineteen-year-old Joan was held in a cell on death row, crammed in with seventeen other women.

She spent about two months there. The heat was suffocating. The guards leaned on psychological cruelty as much as physical confinement, subjecting the women to invasive, degrading "examinations" designed purely to show they could do anything they wanted. They were making clear, Joan said, that they had total power — and probably would use it.

And through all of it, the guards reminded her of the one thing they thought she'd forgotten: she was white. Unlike the Black prisoners beside her, she could leave anytime — she only had to say she was sorry.

She never did.

Most people, after Parchman, would have gone home. Joan went deeper.

She dropped out of Duke and enrolled at Tougaloo College in Jackson — the first white student at the historically Black school. Her reasoning was pure, defiant logic: if whites would riot over Black students integrating white colleges, what would they do about a white student integrating a Black one? At Tougaloo she worked alongside Medgar Evers, met Martin Luther King Jr., roomed with the writer Anne Moody, and became the first white member of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority.

Her family couldn't understand it. Threatening letters arrived. And to the segregationists of Mississippi, her real crime was never simply breaking their laws — it was choosing empathy over the privilege she'd been handed at birth.

Then came May 28, 1963 — and the moment that would put her face in history books.

Joan was one of roughly fourteen activists who staged a sit-in at the whites-only lunch counter of the Woolworth's in downtown Jackson. Anne Moody was there. So was professor John Salter, and chaplain Ed King. They sat down. They ordered food. That was all.

#archaeohistories

[The Intellectualist @highbrow_nobrow]

Melania Trump on her husband: "He would like to have a country where all of the people can walk down the street and not be harassed or murdered or women raped…”

FC: Trump was found civilly liable for sexual abusing E. Jean Carroll. @atrupar (2026)

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Trump’s government committed up to $1.6 billion of your tax dollars to a tungsten mine in Kazakhstan. Then the sons showed up.

Eric and Don Jr. tied to a 20% stake. Lutnick’s sons also cashed in.

The fathers negotiate, the government pays, the children profit. They are not even hiding it.

[Dream for America @DreamAmerica_]

THOMAS MASSIE: “It’s ironic that we control the House, Senate, Supreme Court, & the White House -- and we're yelling 'election fraud'? We won all the damn elections.

What are we doing with that? We’re bankrupting the country. We’re starting new wars. We’re violating the Constitution. We’re not cracking down on the fraud. The problem is not the elections. We won the damn elections. The problem is that we’re wasting the opportunity voters gave us."

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

In 1962, Brendon Grimshaw purchased Moyenne Island in the Seychelles for roughly $11,000. At the time, the small island was completely barren and uninhabited.

Over the following decades, Grimshaw dedicated his life to restoring its ecosystem. He personally planted more than 16,000 trees, created walking trails, and reintroduced endangered species — most notably giant Aldabra tortoises — transforming the once-desolate island into a lush, thriving nature sanctuary.

Despite numerous offers from wealthy developers eager to turn the island into a luxury resort, Grimshaw consistently refused. He famously rejected a $50 million bid, determined to keep Moyenne Island as a protected natural haven open for people to enjoy rather than a private commercial venture.

In 2009, his vision was permanently secured when Moyenne Island was incorporated into the Sainte Anne Marine National Park, becoming the smallest national park in the world.

Grimshaw lived on the island until his death in 2012, leaving behind a remarkable legacy of conservation and environmental stewardship that continues to protect this unique paradise for future generations.

[Chris D. Jackson @ChrisDJackson]

Isn't it funny how the mainstream media suddenly loses interest when the truth destroys one of its favorite anti-Biden narratives.

Yes, you read that right: @HunterBiden won a defamation case over bullshit claims that he was corrupt.

And remember the FBI informant who claimed Joe and Hunter Biden took bribes from Burisma? He pleaded guilty to lying. But you probably didn't know that because it only made it to the back page headlines at the time.

The press gave the accusations endless headlines and wall-to-wall coverage. But when the stories collapse, the accusers are exposed, and the Bidens are vindicated?
Crickets.

Because the lie was profitable. The truth was inconvenient.

The lie gets the headline. The Bidens get smeared. The truth gets buried.

[Archaeo - Histories @archeohistories]

The earliest consistent use of swastika motifs in archaeological record is dated to Neolithic. For example, symbol has been found on a number of shards in Khuzestan province of Iran and as part of "Vinca script" of Neolithic Europe of 5th Millennium BC. In Early Bronze Age, it appears on pottery found in Sintashta, Russia. Swastika-like symbols also appear in Bronze and Iron Age designs of northern Caucasus (Koban culture) and Azerbaijan, as well as of Scythians and Sarmatians. In all these cultures, swastika symbol does not appear to occupy any marked position or significance, but seems to be just one form of a series of similar symbols of varying complexity.

Swastika symbol also has an ancient history in Europe appearing on artifacts from many pre-Christian European cultures. Indo-Aryans, Persians, Hittites, Slavs, Celts and Greeks, among others, extensively used it as a decorative symbol. In more modern times, swastika experienced a resurgence in Western world following archaeological work in late 19th century of Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered symbol in site of ancient Troy. Following his discovery, and after consulting two leading Sanskrit scholars of day, Emile Burnouf and Max Müller, Schliemann concluded that the Swastika was a specifically Indo-European symbol. Later discoveries of the motif among the remains of Hittites and of ancient Iran seemed to confirm this theory and thereafter associated symbol with ancient migrations of Proto Indo-Europeans. Schliemann also connected it with similar shapes found on ancient pots in Germany, and theorized that swastika was a "significant religious symbol of our remote ancestors", linking Germanic, Greek and Indo-Iranian cultures.

By early 20th Century, these discoveries, and the new popularity of the swastika symbol, had led to a widespread desire to ascribe symbolic significance to every example of the motif. In many European countries, examples of identical shapes in ancient European artifacts and in folk art were interpreted as emblems of good-luck and success linked to Indo-Iranian meaning. Schliemann’s work, however, soon became intertwined with völkisch movements, for which swastika was a symbol of "Aryan" identity - a concept that became equated by theorists such as Alfred Rosenberg with a Nordic master race originating in northern Europe. Western use of symbol, along with attached religious and cultural meanings, was subverted after its adoption as emblem of Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (Nazi Party). With its conveniently-geometrical and eye-catching simplicity, swastika was highly effective for associating Nazism with the Aryans as historical forefathers of modern Germans and instilling racial pride. It well worth remembering that many Roman symbols were co-opted by the Nazis to blatantly associate the ‘Reich’ with ancient Rome as its imperial forebear. One need only look at flags (vexillae), eagles (aquilae) and fasces on display in parades (e.g. Nuremburg and Munich) and on all government buildings to see obvious parallels. Since then, of course, swastika is almost exclusively associated in much of West with Nazism, fascism, white supremacy and racism, Axis powers in WWII and Holocaust.

Today, version of swastika above right remains a core symbol of Neo-Nazi groups. How sad then that its original use as a ‘lucky charm’ has been so thoroughly corrupted. Perhaps it is high time that we, as historians, experimental archaeologists and Roman enthusiasts, begin process of educating future generations to accept swastika without prejudice and for what it has always represented.

📷 : Roman Swastika Mosaic (1st Century AD), from Villa Armira, near Ivaylovgrad, Bulgaria 🇧🇬

#archaeohistories

[Morgan J. Freeman @mjfree]

🚨 ICE thugs in Illinois just caved a man’s skull in — hands already cuffed behind his back — then turned on legal observers like animals.

They slammed his head into stone. Fractured his skull.

When they spotted the cameras? Full meltdown — assaulting witnesses, threatening to tase them, one clown waving the taser gangster-style like a wannabe gangster.

Taxpayers funding skull-cracking goons who freak out the second someone films their abuse?
No bodycams.
No restraint.
Pure power trip.
How many more skulls before someone actually gets held accountable?
This is tyranny wearing a badge.

Drop your thoughts.

[Turnbull @cturnbull1968]

This costs about $3M per day to have 5000 guardsmen in Washington DC.

There are 924 days until Inauguration Day so it’s going to cost taxpayers about $2.7B for this ridiculous stunt.

Wasting money is Trump’s signature economic policy.

[Dan Pfeiffer @danpfeiffer]

Trump took $1 billion of your money and gave it to his family

[Valy 🎩🎭 @liderfiscal]

#URGENTE Las imágenes que nos llegan de todas las detenciones y redadas de #ICE son de verdad criminarles.

¿Cómo puede justificar el gobierno de Donald Trump este actuar de su Gestapo?

¿Acaso esto no debería de ser motivo de fuertes críticas y exhortos de organismos internacionales para que Trump respete los Derechos Humanos? @hrw @UNHumanRights @Claudiashein

#UrgenteCOMPARTAN #RTMasivo

[Gianl1974 @Gianl1974]

- The East Wing is Ruble.
- The Reflecting Pool is green.
- The Country is $39T in debt.
- We destroyed the Middle East.
- Ukraine & Russia are Fighting even more.
- Everything is unaffordable.

It’s everything you’d expect from a convicted felon and rapist who bankrupted multiple casinos.

[Hoodlum 🇺🇸 @NotHoodlum]

“For years to come, there are many people on the right, in the media, and voters at large who are going to have to explain and justify how they fell into the trap of supporting Donald Trump.” — Marco Rubio, 2016

Courtesy of @RpsAgainstTrump

[Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump]

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board tears apart Trump’s tariffs in a blistering editorial:

“The President is right that his tariffs are at work—in destroying U.S. jobs and raising prices. The U.S. has lost some 75,000 manufacturing jobs since January 2025, including 25,900 in motor vehicle and parts production...

there’s no question his tariffs are raising costs for U.S. manufacturers.…Mr. Trump and his advisers claim that foreigners pay his border taxes, but the evidence shows that U.S. companies, workers and consumers are picking up most of the tab.

The Anderson Economic Group estimates that auto tariffs on Canada and Mexico alone added about $1,600 to the cost of each car made in the U.S. last year. While auto makers absorbed some of the Trump tariff costs, they also passed on a large share to customers…Call it the Trump tax.”

[Sarrah Bellus @sarrah_bellus]

They actually said this on Fox news today. It's like another dimension 😵‍💫

[Alex Cole @acnewsitics]

This is why Republicans think there is rampant voter fraud; they are the ones doing it.