FXBG ADVANCE FRIDAY 7/17/26 NEWSLETTER
The Far-Right Spammers of Falmouth Bottom. Clash of the Titans 3.0. When Destroying Habitat Is ‘No Harm,’ People Become the Endangered Species. Fredericksburg Ultimate Player in Worlds Final.
The Far-Right Spammers of Falmouth Bottom
By Steve Watkins, ADVANCE EDITOR
The Far Right Spammers and Scriveners of Falmouth Bottom are still in operation, though judging by the mostly-empty parking lot hidden between their two buildings in south Stafford County, their numbers have shrunk considerably since we first reported on their activities a couple of years ago in Pie & Chai Magazine—a report we’re reposting below. Gone is the Shrine trailer with the clown cars. Gone are the Priuses and black SUVs and older-model Camrys, and a dozen other middle-class sedans.
Still present on the west side of 101 Washington Street are an outdoor grill, a picnic table, and a locked employee entrance where a former Free Lance-Star classified ad manager named Opal Curtis, identified on ZoomInfo as the company president of Saber Communications Inc., pounded on the door one recent afternoon to be let in after she had scurried off down Washington Street halfway to the Belmont Estate and then back—presumably once she thought the coast was clear—to avoid speaking to a reporter.
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When Destroying Habitat Is ‘No Harm,’ People Become the Endangered Species
By Phil Huber, ADVANCE COLUMNIST
We used to send a canary into the mine to warn us when the air turned deadly. Today, the Trump administration wants us to pretend that suffocating the life around us is no longer “harm” at all.
At stake is one word in one law: harm, in the Endangered Species Act. For decades, that word has included significant habitat modification or degradation that kills or injures wildlife—destroying nesting grounds, salting spawning beds, paving migration routes. Scientists and the Supreme Court alike have treated that definition as the heart of how the law works.
Now Trump’s Interior Department would remove habitat from the idea of harm. Under the new rule, you are only “harming” a species if you directly kill or injure an animal—pulling a trigger, setting a trap, poisoning a nest. Bulldozing the forest it feeds in or draining the wetland it breeds in would no longer count.
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Clash of the Titans 3.0
By Drew Gallagher, ADVANCE COLUMNIST
For a moment, we can put some of the conspiracy theories to rest regarding the World Cup, which ends Sunday with a clash of the titans—Spain versus Argentina—and is more the 1981 Harry Hamlin movie version and not the 2010 remake which was the very definition of lame and unnecessary. (The Harry Hamlin version was just lame.)
Spain, the tournament favorite, is in the final. and the only people I know who are rooting for them are retired UMW Professor Allyson Poska, who once wrote a book about 16th Century Spanish domestic women, and that chubby 3-year-old they keep showing at the games because he’s cute and he’s Lamine Yamal’s little brother. FIFA’s propaganda arm (and FIFA is octopus-like in having propaganda arms that will grow back if severed) has been ambivalent about Spain’s presence. Spain beat France in a semifinal which, of course, would have been much sexier had France won, but no one at FIFA cared enough to have their finger on the scales for that side of the bracket.
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Fredericksburg Ultimate Player and U.S. Junior Mixed Team in Final at Worlds
By Paul Cymrot, ADVANCE COLUMNIST
Logroño is a city of warm stone buildings that radiate out from a fine cathedral and plaza near the south bank of the Ebro River. It is 150 miles south of Bilbao and the Bay of Biscay, in northernmost Spain, which I’ve heard of but know nothing about. In the summer it is hot and always has been; the main streets are split by colonnades, so you can walk in the shade or the sun, depending on the time of day and year. As you move away from the cathedral plaza, you go from cobblestone to brick underfoot and then to concrete pavers and asphalt. The buildings are 7 stories tall with balconies and very serious retracting metal shutters to keep out heat and potential invaders.
On the south side of town the boulevards are made for cars, and the apartment blocks for a utopian future, and there is a red-roofed football stadium with seats for 10,000 fans. It is called the Estadio Municipal Las Gaunas, and it will host the 2026 World Junior Ultimate Championship games at the end of the tournament.
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