Weekend link dump for July 15

There Won’t Be a Single Moment When We “Discover” Alien Life.

“Serena Williams’ French Open ordeal proves maternity rights in pro sports have a long way to go”.

“For many, the conversation of black baseball and civil rights begins and ends with integration. The hardships endured by Jackie Robinson as he broke the color barrier, along with the slow march to integrate other greats of the Negro Leagues, occupies much of the popular imagination. But the story is much much older than that. African-Americans were playing baseball at least 100 years before Jackie donned Dodger blue. Baseball, which played a vital role in northern Black communities before the Civil War, and was an important part of camp life during the war, was tied to African-American agitation for civil and political rights following the war.”

“The media has treated the notion that Russia has personally compromised the president of the United States as something close to a kook theory. A minority of analysts, mostly but not exclusively on the right, have promoted aggressively exculpatory interpretations of the known facts, in which every suspicious piece of evidence turns out to have a surprisingly innocent explanation. And it is possible, though unlikely, that every trail between Trump Tower and the Kremlin extends no farther than its point of current visibility. What is missing from our imagination is the unlikely but possible outcome on the other end: that this is all much worse than we suspect.”

Twitter is finally getting serious about purging fake accounts, and is now providing a warning about accounts that may be fake.

Keep Scott Pruitt Moist: The Dramatic Reading. Well worth the five minutes to listen to it.

The professional soccer troll is dying off.

How Is NATO Funded? And other questions Donald Trump can’t answer.

Hey, you want tightly controlled borders, you live with the consequences.

Brett Kavanaugh was basically created in a lab for Donald Trump.

“This combination of facts—a president who is under scrutiny choosing a Supreme Court nominee who he certainly knows is disinclined toward holding presidents to account—is not merely unsettling. Without an absolute and unequivocal commitment to recuse from any deliberations involving Trump’s alleged wrongdoing, which no one expects Kavanaugh to make, this nomination cannot possibly be seen by Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, as a credible choice to serve on the Supreme Court. Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination must be understood as the product of a corrupt process that is, by its nature, disqualifying.”

“The issues you talk about are the issues I care about as well. The problem is in a primary – and you and I are just talking off the record frank – they don’t give a (expletive) about those things. OK. In the general election, they care about it. OK. But they don’t care about it in a primary. This primary felt like it was who had the biggest gun, who had the biggest truck, and who could be the craziest.”

Good for you, Maude Gorman.

Some potential Game of Thrones prequel news, if you’re into that sort of thing.

“[The Bachelorettes’s] recent controversies illustrate the challenges of contestant vetting in 2018. Is there a way to fix the system—or has reality finally invaded reality TV?”

IHOB, we hardly knew ye.

RIP, Tab Hunter, 1950s movie idol.

“Just to make sure you get that: Republican tax cuts since 2000 are responsible for nearly the entire federal deficit. Repeal them all and the budget would be almost balanced.”

“In a way, this is something of a bookend to that other play involving the Astros. The universe owed them something to make up for the abject humiliation of the last time, and we’re required to study it in the same way.”

Rick Astley loved that Westworld season 2 rickroll, in case you were wondering.

Cut your taxes, buy yourself a yacht with the savings.

“What we know is that a team doctor likely sexually abused hundreds of student athletes over a period of decades, that many people knew about it, and that he was never stopped. We know that one of the men who is accused of knowing about this abuse is one of the most powerful men in America. And we now know that, at the end of the day, said power is more important to him and to those in his party than the suffering of the victims.”

“And so here, for your perusal, is a full list of all the people who have admitted to being tricked by Sacha Baron Cohen so far—organized from best to worst sport.”

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