America hates immigrants’ guts-literally

Donald Trump, the Republican party, and their propaganda arm Fox News have been relentlessly promoting xenophobia by arguing that immigrants are coming to the US to kill people. But researchers Pajau Vangay and Dan Knights noticed something interesting and that is that the microbes in the guts of immigrants have a much greater microbe diversity than those of Americans. But the longer the immigrants live here, their guts change to match more closely the narrower gut diversity of the locals, and this narrowing gets more pronounced in the guts of their children. This is not necessarily a good thing because wider microbe gut diversity seems to be good for your health.
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The Fox problem

Fox News has long since abandoned any pretense to being a news organization. It is now an unapologetic propaganda arm of the racist, white nationalist, neo-Nazi, Republican movement in America that has reached its apotheosis in Donald Trump. Long gone are the dog whistle codes to provide a face-saving façade. As Jon Schwarz points out, Fox News has done more to incite domestic political violence than Trump, and he discusses the history of how the network was designed to serve this purpose.
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The story of the book of Revelation

I have referred several times to the weird book of Revelation in the Bible, particularly how it has become the go-to source for the Rapture-lovers. I just learned that my colleague Tim Beal in the Department of Religious Studies at Case Western Reserve University has published a new book titled The Book of Revelation: A Biography that dishes the dirt on this last book in the Bible that has produced such a lot of head scratching and been the source of so many weird fantasies.
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Hasan Minhaj’s new show is brilliant

I just watched the first two episodes of Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj on Netflix and was blown away by them. Each show focuses largely on one issue, somewhat like John Oliver does, but whereas Oliver mixes hard news and analysis in the form of a news show with him as the anchor seated behind a desk, Minhaj uses a high-energy stand-up comedy format to mix hard news with analysis, with him moving around on a stage with large screens behind and below him and talking in a fast pace. He, like Oliver, provides lots of facts and background information that one does not often hear even on news shows but interspersed with plenty of comedic analyses. It really kept me glued to the show. The fact that I agreed with everything he said on both shows may had aided my enjoyment.
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