FairAndUNbalanced.com

 
From Glenn Geist at MadMikesAmerica:

“. . . and forgetting long-passed mischiefs, we mercifully preserve their bones and piss not upon their ashes.”

-Thomas Browne-

Stephen Foster’s songs and ballads earned for him an honored place in the music of the United States,” or so says the Encyclopedia Britannica, but that must have been written some time ago before America got “woke” as they say in le nouveau dialecte. His name is now mud because of course, according to our new standards, he’s a racist, as of course am I, as a secular humanist of European extraction. His statue in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly but ephemeral and conditional love, is now being removed from public view.

Having died in 1864 with the war still on and the ink on the Emancipation Proclamation still wet, he spoke the English of the time. He grew up in the United States that included slave states and he spoke the same American English that every other American spoke and that included words we don’t use today out of respect for those enslaved people. I’m pretty sure Washington and Jefferson, as well as the Abolitionists, didn’t balk at common usage of the time.

– More –
 

 
From Jon Perr at PERRspectives:

And what noble cause and lofty principles inspired this bestial, bloodthirsty cruelty? Why were Dangerfield Newby’s ears cut off as trophies after John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid of 1859, as were the ears, nose, and genitals of Sam Hose during his torture and dismemberment in 1899? Why did Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest butcher hundreds of surrendering black Union troops at Fort Pillow in 1864 and white militiamen slaughter 100 African-Americans in Colfax, Louisiana, who were merely trying to safeguard the results of the local elections there in 1873? As Jane Coaston recently explained (“Confederate Memorial Day: when multiple states celebrate treason in defense of slavery”), Alabama Confederates like Stephen F. Hale made no secret of the obvious in December 1860:

What Southern man, be he slave-holder or non-slave-holder, can without indignation and horror contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and daughters in the not distant future associating with free negroes upon terms of political and social equality, and the white man stripped by the heaven-daring hand of fanaticism of that title to superiority over the black race which God himself has bestowed?

– More –
 

 
From Tommy Christopher:

Trump has overseen a drop in America’s standing as a safe place for a free press. And his Justice Department has gone so far as to remove a section on the “need for a free press” from its manual.

On Sunday, BuzzFeed reported that it has been tracking changes to the DOJ’s “US Attorneys’ Manual,” after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein ordered a review of the document. BuzzFeed noted the removal of an entire subsection entitled “Need for Free Press and Public Trial.”

Prior to its removal, that section said that “careful weight must be given in each case to the constitutional requirements of a free press and public trials as well as the right of the people in a constitutional democracy to have access to information about the conduct of law enforcement officers, prosecutors and courts, consistent with the individual rights of the accused.”

– More –
 

 
From Jonathan Bernstein:

When the media reports on climate change, it’s usually built upon the scientific community’s consensus on the issue. Partisans and pundits might reject that consensus, but the media tends to put the evidence first and the politics second. That is precisely how the press should cover what could be the nation’s next gigantic story.

President Donald Trump may not fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. But if he does, the critically important story would be the president versus the rule of law and the basic structure of the American republic, not Trump versus the Democrats (or however he’ll frame it).

– More –
 

 
From nojo Stinque:

Somehow we had grown up thinking truth was something to be valued, that facts trumped fantasies. Somehow we were under the impression that this was a value we shared with other sentient beings who lived under our flag, that of course everyone was interested in the truth, that of course we all wanted to know the facts at hand.

And then, as we cast our first national vote, Americans elected a charming liar as President, and the wheels started coming off.

It was a few years later that we found an expression for it: “aggressive ignorance”. We’re fine with ignorance as such — we’re all born with it — but while some of us feast upon the world we’re born into, many others do everything they can to avoid it. They live a lie, they enjoy living a lie, they insist upon living a lie, even when the truth is made available. They don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to see it.

And there are enough of of them to take the rest of us down with them. Just look where we are now.

– More –
 

 
From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:

Comedian Michelle Wolf stepped to the podium at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner and verbally eviscerated everyone: The President, The Press, Mike Pence, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kellyanne Conway.

MAGA Nation, unsurprisingly lost their collective minds.

By their wild histrionics, you would have thought she murdered a crowd filled with concertgoers with an arsenal of high-powered weapons. (Actually, that probably would have been cause for less indignation.)

– More –
 

 
From PZ Myers:

Remember Kevin Williamson, the pundit who tweeted that women who get abortions should be executed by hanging, and lost a job at The Atlantic over it? I’m not sure what should be done with such horrible people, but not being hired as an opinion writer ought to be the least of it. But guess what the Washington Post has done? They’ve given him an opportunity to write on their opinion pages! A one-time thing, I hope, because I’d rather just see him vanish.

But no. Now he gets a prominent space to rehash his ugly views. I’m going to go find a puppy to kick so I can get space where I can write more about puppy-kicking.

– More –
 

 
From Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit:

One of the side-effects of a war between adversaries with first-world comparable EW gear will be a loss of the GPS network. Whether it will be world-wide or localized to the combat area(s), whether the GPS constellation itself will be disrupted is a matter of speculation.

But what will also likely happen is a disruption of the global air traffic system. The short-sighted beancountrs in the FAA have been pushing the decommissioning of a large chunk of the VOR network and shutting down VOR/DME -based approaches.

– More –
 

 
From Frances Langum:

There are many Republican lies that float about in the media, and one of the most frequently spouted by Republicans (apart from “both sides do it”) is that Democrats don’t have any policies, they just hate Trump.

As Driftglass said on last week’s Professional Left Podcast, we don’t just hate Trump. We hate that he’s destroying the policies we supported. We Democrats are pro-EPA, pro-women’s rights, pro-human rights, pro-science, pro-Emoluments Clause.

And yeah, the fact that Trump is against all those things and also a colossal liar and likely criminal, yeah we kinda hate him. But it’s based on policies as well as a personal dislike of the guy.

– More –
 

 
From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

My hatred for talking on the phone finds its nexus in my preaching days. Long before email and texting, there were rotary (and later push button) dial telephones. For a pastor, having a phone meant that he was on-call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. There were days when I would be gone until late in the evening, only to arrive home and be greeted with numerous phone calls I had to return. Rarely were these calls of any great importance. Most calls were from congregants who either wanted advice or just wanted someone to talk to. I preferred they make an appointment to see me at the office, but, hey, I’m sure the preacher won’t mind if I call him at 10:00 P.M. after he has worked a twelve-hour day, is how many church members thought of the matter.

As thoughtful pastors are wont to do, I chose to put the wants and needs of congregants before my own. No matter how tired I was or what I had planned, if Sister Billy Jo or Brother Billy Bob called, I accepted their calls and politely listened to whatever it was they had to say. Some of these conversations would go on for an hour or more, and on more than one occasion my wife had to nudge me because I was starting to fall asleep.

You might be wondering, Bruce, why didn’t you just tell them you had to go? Good question.

– More –