Paul Scanling

Husband, Father, Music Director @atlconcertband & Mars Hill Pres, @Braves fan, @FloridaState alum, @Pompey supporter.

[Paul Scanling @pscanling]

@ajc Seen a classroom crammed with 30 students? How about the hallway during a class change? The cafeteria? Social distancing is impossible.

[Paul Scanling @pscanling]

@Conservagator @DudespostingWs Leaving the stadium, riding a bus around the stadium, then touching Howard's doorstop as they run down a hill is a lot of things, but it's not really that cool.

[Paul Scanling @pscanling]

@Trailingarm @RealCJ10 You’re disagreeing with a first ballot hall of famer?

That’s a bold choice.

[Paul Scanling @pscanling]

@WhiteHouse No matter how often you repeat the lie, it won’t make it true.

[Paul Scanling @pscanling]

@dotsonc Not bad, but he is snapping his fingers on 1 & 3.

[Paul Scanling @pscanling]

@DanClarkSports I disagree that ASG selection should be based on stats. It is an entertaining game for the fans. Let us choose who plays.

[Paul Scanling @pscanling]

@Suzierizzo1 Removing it is a political slogan.

[Paul Scanling @pscanling]

@emmitonair Not even top five.

[Paul Scanling @pscanling]

What an amazing story!

[The Husky @Mr_Husky1]

In 1945, a sixteen-year-old girl in New Orleans sat in a classroom and listened to teachers describe Black people as inferior, ignorant, and dangerous. She knew it was a lie. And she decided, then and there, that she would spend her life proving it.
That girl was Gwendolyn Midlo Hall.
By the time she was seventeen, she had already helped organize the New Orleans Youth Council — a bold, interracial group fighting for African American voter registration in the heart of the segregated South. She marched, she organized, she was arrested. She did not stop.
But her most extraordinary act of defiance came decades later — not in the streets, but in a courthouse.
While conducting research in Louisiana in the 1980s, Hall opened an old ledger written by 18th-century notaries. Inside were names. Hundreds of them. Names of enslaved Africans — their origins, their skills, their families, their rebellions. Details that English colonists almost never recorded. Details the world had assumed were lost forever.
Hall was astounded.
She spent years traveling between archives in Louisiana, France, and Spain, piecing together fragments of stolen lives. With the help of five dedicated assistants, she built something the world had never seen: the Louisiana Slave Database — a searchable record of over 107,000 enslaved individuals, documenting their names, ethnicities, occupations, family relationships, and places of origin.
What she found also shattered a long-held assumption in academic circles. Scholars had believed colonial Louisiana was shaped primarily by Haiti and the French Caribbean. Hall's database revealed the truth: most enslaved Africans brought to Louisiana came from Senegal and Gambia — a finding that forever changed how historians understand the roots of Creole culture.
But perhaps the most profound impact of her work is the most personal.
Families — for generations separated from their history by the deliberate erasure of slavery — could now search a database and find an ancestor. A name. A face in the darkness of history, finally brought to light.
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall passed away on August 29, 2022, at the age of 93. She is remembered at Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, where two long walls bear the names of every person she found — 107,000 lives, no longer forgotten.
She gave them back their names. And in doing so, she gave us all a more honest history.

[Paul Scanling @pscanling]

@PTSportsFix False. Ruth was an outstanding pitcher as well.

[Paul Scanling @pscanling]

@madisonian_the @WillyJSullivan @wil_da_beast630 Also mentioned as the cause of secession in every single state secession document. They themselves called slavery the reason for secession.

[Paul Scanling @pscanling]

@LucasSa56947288 Thoughts and prayers.

[Paul Scanling @pscanling]

@nut_history Mark Grace

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

No, sweetie.

Donetsk was a city of a million roses when its own Ukrainian flag flew above it.

Back then, it was also the fastest-growing and most rapidly prospering city in Ukraine -- home to what was the finest regional airport in Eastern Europe, one of the world's best football stadiums, a state-of-the-art railway terminal, and one of the cleanest, best-maintained cities in the region.

Its elites were running Kyiv, and every time I visited Donetsk as a student, riding the famous trolleybus Route No. 2 through the city, I was amazed by how many new office buildings were appearing, how much money was flowing into the city, and how many international companies were opening their doors there.

Fifteen years ago, to us kids from Donbas, Donetsk felt like the center of the universe because it had everything one could possibly dream of. It was a young city of universities and libraries, where the overwhelming majority of boys and girls from across Donbas went to study, including those from my own small hometown an hour away by bus.

Names like Liverpool or Detroit Rock City may mean nothing to you, but our Ukrainian Donetsk was a city of great rock clubs and unforgettable concerts. We traveled there to see Western bands perform.

We bought rock merchandise at the legendary Right House store near Krytyi Market. Scorpions, Rihanna, and Beyoncé performed at the famous Donbass Arena. Schoolchildren from across Donbas were bused in to watch Shakhtar Donetsk matches. The city even had a famous monument to The Beatles.

It was a city where we sang songs on guitars in its beautifully maintained parks and along the Kalmius embankment before heading out to buy the famous "green Donetsk burgers." Our older friends moved there after graduation, formed rock bands, recorded full albums, and held wedding celebrations in the squares around Donbas Arena. We traveled there to visit the legendary Radio Market in search of films, music, and books.

And then you arrived.

And you turned the wealthiest, most prosperous Ukrainian city into a piece of shit.

You deceived many of its people with sweet promises of Russian oil-fueled prosperity broadcast from television screens, but what you brought instead was war.

You transformed a thriving city into a criminal wasteland ruled by ethnic gangs from Russia, into a kingdom of Stalinist terror straight out of the 1930s, complete with torture chambers in the infamous Izolyatsia prison camp. You turned the magnificent Donetsk Airport into lifeless gray rubble, while the vast stands of Donbas Arena have spent a second decade slowly being reclaimed by weeds instead of hosting Champions League finals and Metallica concerts.

You swept away an entire generation of the city's men through your forced mobilization and threw them against Ukrainian machine guns until there were barely enough people left to keep basic municipal services running. Because of you, prosperous Donetsk became a withered desert without reliable water, because your war destroyed the canal system that carried water from the Siverskyi Donets River into Donbas. For years now, people have lived with chronic water shortages and have been reduced shitting into plastic bags forever.

You dragged Donetsk back like seventy years in time. You turned it into a depressed backwater, devoid of hope and future. Even ten years ago, tens of thousands of people, the most active, the most talented, the most entrepreneurial, fled the city and found refuge in Kyiv and elsewhere in Ukraine. Many of them still remember our Donetsk with tears in their eyes, the Donetsk that existed before the arrival of the "Russian World."

You transformed it into something that even my pro-Russian acquaintances are shocked to see when they return after years of occupation.

It was you who trampled the million roses of our Ukrainian Donetsk into shit beneath the tracks of your tanks and the boots of your death troops, turning them into a foul swamp of death and despair.

And that stain will forever remain on the conscience of fascist Russia, which brings nothing but destruction, decay, and death wherever it goes.

[Paul Scanling @pscanling]

A fascinating story of how one man could do so much damage to so many simply because he refused to acknowledge limits.

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

Hermann Göring grew up in a medieval castle in Austria owned by a half-Jewish man named Hermann von Epenstein, who was simultaneously his godfather AND his mother's open lover for 15 years. While the affair played out in the castle's upper floors, Göring's own father, a retired colonial diplomat, was quietly moved to a separate cottage on the grounds. Nobody seemed to discuss it. The boy grew up in the castle, calling Epenstein his second father, hunting the grounds, absorbing the aristocratic life.

That shaped everything that came after.

At 18 he enrolled in military school. By the time WWI broke out he had transferred to the air corps and was flying combat missions over the Western Front. He finished the war with 22 confirmed kills and was given command of Jagdgeschwader 1, the celebrated fighter wing previously led by Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, the most feared pilot in history. Göring was the man chosen to carry that legacy forward. He wore the Pour le Mérite, Germany's highest military honor, around his neck.

After Germany's defeat he drifted to Sweden, working as a commercial pilot for a fledgling airline, barnstorming aristocrats around Scandinavia. At a castle called Rockelstad he flew in a Swedish count, and at a party afterward he met the count's sister-in-law, a woman named Carin von Kantzow, a Swedish baroness from an old military family. She was married. She was also, by every account, instantly captivated. She left her husband and her young son for Göring. The two married in 1923 in a ceremony that Scandinavian society considered a scandal.

He brought her back to Germany and straight into chaos. That same year he was shot in the groin marching alongside Hitler in the failed Beer Hall Putsch. Carin nursed him across three countries as he recovered. During that recovery he was given morphine. He never stopped taking it. At his peak he was consuming 320mg per day, a dose that would stop most hearts, while running the most powerful air force on earth and hosting foreign heads of state for dinner.

Carin died of tuberculosis and heart failure in 1931, before she ever saw what he built. He was reportedly inconsolable. When he finally had money and power, he constructed a vast estate in the Schorfheide Forest outside Berlin and named it Carinhall in her memory. Then he had her body exhumed from Sweden and reburied in a specially built mausoleum on the property, so she could be with him permanently.

Carinhall grew into something out of myth. The main hall was filled with stolen masterpieces. Endangered animals roamed the grounds. He kept pet lion cubs borrowed from the Berlin Zoo, seven over the years, raising each one until it was too large to be safe, then returning it for a new cub. In the attic he built a massive model train set complete with miniature aircraft that dropped tiny wooden bombs. King Edward VIII visited and played with it. Göring wore a red toga with a golden clasp to breakfast. He had a medieval hunting costume made for himself. He changed his personal uniform up to five times a day and received guests in a white fur coat while carrying a jeweled baton he had designed for himself because no existing rank in the German military was high enough to satisfy him. He invented a new one: Reichsmarschall. It had never existed before. It has never existed since.

He spent the war years making personal visits to the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris roughly 20 times, hand-selecting from a collection of over 1,400 looted artworks for his private collection. Rembrandts. Renoirs. Tapestries. Sculptures. His collection was valued at over $200 million in 1945 dollars. One of the prizes he loved most was what he believed to be a rare original Vermeer. It was a forgery, painted by a Dutch con man named Han van Meegeren who had been quietly selling fake Old Masters to the Nazi high command for years. The crown jewel of Göring's entire collection was a fraud. He never knew.

As the Reich collapsed and Soviet forces closed in on Berlin, Göring sent Hitler a telegram from Bavaria. It said: if you are incapacitated or lose your freedom, I am ready to assume total leadership of the Reich. Hitler read it as a betrayal. He stripped Göring of every title, expelled him from the party, and ordered his arrest. The man who had been his designated successor for over a decade was declared a traitor in the bunker's final hours.

At Nuremberg, Göring walked into the courtroom and immediately dominated it. He was calm, lucid, sharp, and by multiple accounts the most formidable mind in the room. He sparred openly with the prosecutors, anticipated their moves, and gave answers so composed that the tribunal repeatedly struggled to regain control of the proceedings. He held court over the other defendants at lunch, coached them on how to answer, and was eventually separated from them specifically because his influence was considered too destabilizing. Psychologists found an IQ of 138. The chief psychiatrist described him as a man who had simply decided the normal rules did not apply to him, and had spent his entire life proving it.

He was sentenced to hang.

On October 15, 1946, two hours before the execution, the guard found him dead. He had bitten a cyanide capsule. How he obtained it is still debated. A second capsule was found in a jar of his hair cream. A US Army lieutenant was investigated and quietly transferred. A private was suspected of delivering it inside a fountain pen on behalf of a German woman. Göring's own note claimed he had concealed the capsule on his person the entire time, through every search, every intake, every strip-search across months of the most closely monitored imprisonment the Allied powers had ever conducted.

He grew up in a castle that wasn't his. He flew under a dead ace's name. He loved a woman so much he reburied her in his garden. He kept lions as pets and played with toy trains and wore gold and fur and invented his own rank because nothing real was grand enough. He was addicted to morphine for 23 years and nobody ever fully stopped him doing anything. And when they finally had him in a cell with a date and a time and a rope, he decided that wasn't how it was going to go.

He was right.

[Paul Scanling @pscanling]

@StarWarsDaily_

[Paul Scanling @pscanling]

@HawkEmDownChris Field of Dreams

[Paul Scanling @pscanling]

@highbrow_nobrow @atrupar Mikey isn’t even trying to lie well. He just needs to repeat the stupid lie to keep Trump happy.

[Paul Scanling @pscanling]

Exactly! They don’t think fraud will occur this fall either.

[Machine Pun Kelly 🇺🇦 @KellyScaletta]

It is important to understand this one thing: No Republicans actually believe there was fraud in California's voting.

This is all a pretext to sabotage the November elections.

[Paul Scanling @pscanling]

@Jim_Jordan They are following the law, Gym.

[Paul Scanling @pscanling]

@therealroseanne No matter how many times you say it, it still isn’t true. If it was, MAGA would have put forth evidence for it.