Comments for Black Skeptics

Comment on Call for Papers: Women of Color Beyond Faith Anthology by blackskeptics

blackskeptics — Mon, 20 May 2013 05:37:08 +0000

If you’re interested in contributing and need further information please contact us at the email provided in the post.

Comment on Call for Papers: Women of Color Beyond Faith Anthology by R. Walker

R. Walker — Mon, 20 May 2013 05:23:42 +0000

This anthology will be sold for profit I take it and where do the proceeds from the sales go? Are the women who contribute going to be compensated? How?

Comment on Call for Papers: Women of Color Beyond Faith Anthology by blackskeptics

blackskeptics — Tue, 14 May 2013 16:47:10 +0000

Yes, as per the stated focus of the proposal, it is primarily for women of color in the U.S., although international contributions that emphasize intersectionality are welcocme.

Comment on Call for Papers: Women of Color Beyond Faith Anthology by NORM ALLEN

NORM ALLEN — Tue, 14 May 2013 15:27:09 +0000

Is this call for papers going out to non-theistic women of color all over the world, or is it primarily for women of color in he U.S.?

Comment on Slaves like Us: American Atheists on the Plantation by Mormon Apologist Uses Photo of The Dead Bodies of Lynched Blacks As A Gag Prop

Mormon Apologist Uses Photo of The Dead Bodies of Lynched Blacks As A Gag Prop — Fri, 10 May 2013 21:07:51 +0000

[...] atheist group’s billboard did last year) is exploitative and trivializing and, in Sikivu Hutchinson’s judgment, participates in an unseemly cultural pattern of objectifying black bodies in [...]

Comment on Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels NOW AVAILABLE by fredericksparks

fredericksparks — Fri, 10 May 2013 20:54:11 +0000

great, I wil grab the kindle download; that seems to be the only way I can manage to read these days!

Comment on Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels NOW AVAILABLE by blackskeptics

blackskeptics — Wed, 08 May 2013 22:04:29 +0000

If you can wait a week or so it will be on Kindle. Otherwise there is a discount on Createspace. Sorry for the lag and thank you in advance!

Comment on Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels NOW AVAILABLE by Mattir, Another One With Boltcutters

Mattir, Another One With Boltcutters — Wed, 08 May 2013 21:17:39 +0000

I went right off to purchase it, only to discover that there’s no ebook format yet. Will there be one, or should I just buy the hardcopy one?

Comment on Mad Science or School-to-Prison? Criminalizing Black Girls by richardelguru

richardelguru — Wed, 08 May 2013 14:37:11 +0000

Yup, and things were even more lax in the past. I’m 66 and did some daft things when in highschool.
did an essay on the radio about it a few years ago:
Busts or Booms? (2007-04-17)

Ahh! First loves!—And no, I’m not waxing sentimental about Mandy Erlenbach , or that girl that time in Barcelona near the Sagrada Familia, nor Bettina Wirtz on student exchange from Hannover or was it Hamburg: no … no … you see the other day I saw an article on a news site about some teenager or other who was arrested for making explosives; and it immediately reminded me of my first love…

Chemistry!

Back when I was young, many a long and torturous year and mile ago; back at school in England; back when one of my kinder nicknames was ‘Professor’ often (boys being of course boys in their dealings with the more original thinker) with the co-cognomen of ‘Leery’; back in my rooty East Anglia-of-the-beautiful-Broads (not the aforementioned girls, but rather small and lovely lakes); back (to make a long story less long) around 1960 there was, in nearby Great Yarmouth, a chemist’s shop.
Now an English chemist’s shop was (in fact still is) what you Americans would call a pharmacy. And this one; independent, dark and seemingly from an age even earlier than that of my tale; was a rich and sparkling cave of delight to a lover of chemistry.

Being myself at the time a member of the boys-will-of-course-be-boys-brigade my love of chemistry, and my main claim to fame at school, centred on making things that went, if not bump in the night, then bang at preferably the most unexpected of times.
I made gunpowder, and chlorate’n’sugar, and some really quite exotic explosives—all of which, or at least the ingredients for all of which, could be bought at that chemist’s shop in profusion and often in quite obvious and promiscuous proximity. Why on a time projecting to create that simple (simple at least to make), but extremely unstable and high, explosive Nitrogen Triiodide , I went in and purchased Iodine crystals and .880 Ammonia and a packet of filter papers to collect the precipitate—not since that old joke about the little shop on the corner where you could buy a big bag of rat poison … and a rat … has such obtuseness been observed in the commercial sector—I mean, I mean, short of asking him outright if he had anything that I could spread, when damp onto, say, the bottom of a toilet seat, that when dry would explode loudly enough to induce abject hysterical diarrhoea into anyone using said seat, could I have been any more obvious? We are talking here of a compound that in tiny quantities, when dry and prodded gently with a fairly long stick, would leave the ears ringing unanswerably.

The list of chemicals so purchased frightens the mature me: I got red and yellow phosphorous, sodium and potassium and magnesium and powdered aluminium metals, conc. (indeed fuming) H2SO4 and HNO3 and a whole pharmacopœia of other nasties.

Then there was the incident of Mike and the matchlock. Mike Playle (or Bucket as we hypocoristically hypo-lambdacised his last name) was into engineering (and indeed survived and is an engineer to this very day) and our Bucket built a matchlock rifle (though it was actually smooth bored) and I made gunpowder for it, a good batch—a damn good batch; and one day, out on Aldeby Marshes, to test it he took careful aim down a long water-filled dyke, fired, sent his slug to splash … Oh a good hundred yards down the dyke—and the end-plug of the gun (thank goodness he must have flinched as he fired) to whistling past his ear almost as far behind him. Now THAT was what I called a good batch of gunpowder, and a bit of good luck that day for Mike, who of course just managed to avoid kicking the bucket.

Now-a-days no doubt I would be arrested as a potential terrorist or worse, but even back in those less paranoid times, of course, things still came to a head—quite literally, and indeed to mine! When working on some solid rocket fuel and wearing a safety mask like a wimp I raised the grubby thing for a moment for a clearer view of my work at the exact moment that the mix chose to demonstrate how unstable both it and my fate could be. I ended up in a lot of pain and hospital, with eyes like frosted glass and a face like a jack-o-lantern long after halloween.

That was a pretty good batch too.

Finally: I suppose if they HAD been a bit more strict in those days both my eyes would now work as Nature and the makers of Jaws-3D (not to mention those horrible red and green lensed glasses) intended, but what can you do…

Cheerio for now
from the quasi-monocular
Richard Howland-Bolton

http://howlandbolton.com/essays/read_more.php?sid=338

Comment on The NRA, the KKK, and the 2nd Amendment’s Black History by Christopher Bingham

Christopher Bingham — Tue, 07 May 2013 01:22:54 +0000

Except the best estimates of of defensive uses of guns start at 106,000 (Brady group) and go all the way up to 4 million+ (Lott)

Given that the number is likely somewhere in the middle, more crimes are stopped by people defending themselves with guns. Criminals look for the easy mark. How many more rapes are we willing to accept if we limit people’s right to defend themselves with guns?