Well, now, rules are alright if there's someone left to play the game.

 Okay, then. I'm going to get this done before tomorrow morning. There's just no excuse for that. It's going to be mostly filling up the white space, but you get what you pay for.

 It was a fair-to-middling week for the News, though whatever severe laziness - that is, worse than the baseline incredibly lazy - has started to affect that, too. Ah, well. Monday we looked at some of the legal peccadillos the state of Mississippi is responsible for, from a possibly catastrophic U.S. Supreme Court case deciding abortion to more rage at the state Supreme Court's ridiculous decision. Yes, I'm still pissed off about that. We looked at the ramped-up investigations into Trump's possibly criminal shenanigans Wednesday, and Friday was a touch on the Israeli/Palestinian ceasefire as well as the increasingly pitiful attempts by Trump cultists to keep the Big Lie alive.

 Now, another thing that brewed this week that I never had the time for was the business between the University of North Carolina and Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist responsible for putting the excellent 1619 Project together in 2019. Guess I'm giving away which side of that kerfuffle I'm on. Long story short, back at the end of April Hannah-Jones accepted a position at UNC and it wasn't too long before local conservatives went ape shit.

 Why? They hate the 1619 Project. Why? Well, I don't know, really, but their whining worked. Hannah-Jones still has a job there but they rescinded tenure. To put it in a nutshell, she now has to be more careful as to what she says without the protection of tenure, plus she knows conservatives are gunning for her and smell blood in the water.

 As far as I can really tell, no one objects to the actual facts presented in the Project. They object to the focus Hannah-Jones took. They said it put too much emphasis on the idea that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery and that slavery was a capitalist venture. One thing they objected to was the perception that chattel slavery was a uniquely American sin. Again, nothing particularly was counterfactual, they who objected were doing so because they had issues with the Project's focus.

 I'm no historian, granted, and I have only a layman's interest in early American history. I do know most of the stuff we were taught in school was biased bullshit from the get-go. The Founding Fathers could've eliminated slavery. They could've told the slave states to go screw. They could've set a sundown on the practice. They didn't. Instead, they made sure Black folks were counted as 3/5 a person in the census while not allowing them to vote, to say the least.

 It's known that Great Britain didn't care for the Colonial practice of slavery. Dictionary inventor Samuel Johnson said, with a cutting edge, that "the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes." That is a burn. Now whether or not the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery in the Colonies is probably a bit much but it's not so crazy a stroke. Hell, Texas' independence came because folks there wanted to own slaves and the Mexicans thought that was just nasty.

 There's a regular stroke people who defend the Confederacy use and that is it wasn't founded with slavery in mind. That is, of course, horseshit. It's in the Constitution. The South pushed for more and more power in the area, even going so far as breaking other states' laws to retrieve runaway slaves.

 And it wasn't just enshrined in the government. The whole reason we have Southern Baptists in the first place because the rest of the church wanted to get rid of slavery. Indeed, there was a serious "ailment" called drapetomania. It was the affliction that made slaves run from their masters. Think about that. This was that world.

 Here's the cold, hard truth. America does not want to acknowledge its sins no more than most of us do. Slavery is probably the worst, next to the genocide of the American Indian, and nothing, nothing, in the 1619 Project didn't happen. Conservatives just don't like the focus, they say. But that's bullshit, y'all. They don't want to acknowledge the sin of slavery at all. It's rare the American History course in high school that gives it more than a passing mention, and the only time we hear of it being taught is when some goofball teacher assigns essays about the "good side" of slavery.

Thing is, though, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube and history won't be bulldozed over. That's why there's so much pearl-clutching over "woke." That's nothing more than the screams of folks who want to believe the fairy tale of history or ignore the changes in society. Conservatives, in other words.

Final thought. Interestingly, the people who fight hardest against what the 1619 Project represents are also the ones fighting hardest for state's making voting more difficult in the wake of the highest turnout of African American voters in modern history. Funny how that works out, ain't it? Have a nice weekend.