My one ESPN+ post this week covered the James Paxton trade, which included one of my favorite pitching prospects in the minors, lefty Justus Sheffield. I didn’t hold a chat this week due to the holiday.
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And now, the links…
- Longreads first: The best thing I read this week was this Washington Post article that tells two narratives in parallel: a liberal satirist who baits right-wingers with insane (fake) stories, and a retiree who believes all of it is true.
- The New Yorker‘s Bill McKibben looks at how climate change and its extreme weather effects are shrinking the planet, reducing the habitable and arable land through rising sea levels, increasing temperatures, and water shortages. He also looks at the ongoing fight to “muddle” public opinion on climate change, spearheaded by Republican officials, oil change executives, and pollster Frank Luntz.
- WIRED looks at the shady business of paid influences on Instagram and Youtube.
- A survivor of the 1978 Jonestown Massacre in Guyana spoke to the BBC about surviving the cult and mass suicide, and living with that memory for the last four decades.
- An author complained that he had a hard time publishing his (apparently not very good) novel because of sexism against men or something. Wonkette tears his rather naïve complaint to shreds. It’s hard to get a novel published unless you’re already published or otherwise famous, and gender bias or political correctness have nothing to do with that.
- A Vancouver, Washington, man broke Indian law and died while trying to ‘bring Jesus’ to the North Sentinelese people, one of the last uncontacted tribes on the planet. His questionable religious intentions aside, visiting an isolated population with all of your developed-world germs is unbefuckinglievably irresponsible. The natives likely have no antibodies for many of the pathogens he was carrying.
- A nurse working at a hospital in the path of the California wildfires called her two daughters to say goodbye as the flames approached.
- Researchers may have discovered evidence of somatic gene recombination in the human brain, a process of retranscription that appears to occur in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s, although the authors were explicit that they can’t say this is a cause of the disease.
- One of the country’s largest oil refiners has donated over $1 million to Mitch McConnell’s dark-money group One Nation.
- In 2015, Ohio Congresswoman Marcia Fudge (D) wrote a letter to defend the character of a judge who beat his wife badly enough for her to require reconstructive surgery on her face, saying that it was a one-time event and not the man she knew. Last weekend the judge stabbed his ex-wife to death. The revelation appears to have ended Fudge’s bid to replace Nancy Pelosi as the lead Democrat in the House; it should also end her tenure in Congress.
- Seven women are suing Dartmouth, alleging serial harassment and sexual assault by three professors in the psychology and brain sciences departments.
- There’s a chicken pox outbreak in very liberal Asheville, North Carolina, a stronghold of anti-vaxxer morons.
- And there’s a measles outbreak among the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, thanks to a group calling itself Parents Teaching and Advocating for Children’s Health that has been going to residents’ homes and scaring parents with hoax stories about vaccines.
- The mother of a child who has survived cancer tweeted about what exposure to measles meant for her child during chemotherapy, when her immune system was compromised.
- America’s new political backwater is Georgia, where the Governor-elect oversaw his own election and purged over a million voters from rolls, many of them persons of color. I have no idea why everyday Georgians are tolerating this subversion of their civil rights.
- A dark-money group posted ads on Facebook, using Bernie Sanders’ image, to encourage Democrats to defect to the Green Party on election day. The group in question failed to file required paperwork with the FEC, and Facebook refused to remove the ads when Sen. Sanders’ office requested that they do so. The group’s Facebook page is still active as of Friday night.
- Several companies have asked Republican Senate candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith to refund their contributions after she joked about public hangings. She’ll face Mike Espy (D) in a runoff election on Tuesday in Mississippi, where African-Americans make up the largest percentage of the population of any of the fifty states.
- Speaking of Mississippi, federal judge Carlton Reeves struck down its abortion ban as unconstitutional, and he had some shit on his mind about the “pure gaslighting” of state legislators over this law and the state’s long history of oppression of women and minorities.
- Mumbai-born Garima Amora, a chef in Bangkok, became the first Indian woman to win a Michelin star this month for her work at the restaurant Gaa.
- And finally, Our Dear Leader made some utterly ridiculous statements about Babe Ruth – everything short of calling him a black man – but Toronto Star writer Daniel Dale was there to set the record straight.