For the September Fundraiser: A special preview and an auction! (Non-fiction)

The lawsuits are settled, but the legal bills still need to be paid.  So Freethought Blogs will be hosting a fundraiser.  I’ll be contributing two things.

First, I’ll be auctioning off a PDF collection of Babbler articles published before I moved the FTB.  Some of them haven’t been online in years.  I’m still putting it together, but I’m pretty sure it will include the infamous “Bank of Roger” article and one of my favorites, “EvoPsych House.”  The tentative title is God to Smite Bolingbrook: The Best of the Bolingbrook Babbler 1998 to 2017.

Here are the rules:

  • Bidding starts at $1
  • You can place a bid in the comments for this article or by email. I will post the amount of an emailed bid in the comments. 
  • The auction will run from 9/14/20 to 9/27/20 11:59 PM.
  • The winner will only have to pay $1 more than the second-highest bid.
    • For example, if the highest bid is $100 and the second-highest bid is $75, the winner will only have to pay $76.
  • I reserve the right to refuse or reduce bids.
  • After the auction, the winner will need to email proof of payment to receive the PDF. 

(Thanks to Marcus for the rules.)

Second, I’ll be reading an excerpt from my in-progress novel: The Rift: A Bolingbrook Babbler Story.  If the fundraiser reaches $250, I’ll post a recording.  If it reaches $500, I’ll do it live!  You can make a donation through PayPal.  

Many of the other FTB Bloggers will be hosting auctions, participating in panels, and other events during the fundraiser.  The schedule is here.  It will be a fundraiser in the defense of free speech and a fun virtual conference.  I hope to see you there!

Rebecca Watson video on terrified conservatives (Non-fiction)

Rebecca Watson from Skepchick just posted a video about a study into how people determine what kinds of protests are they consider “extreme:”

 

I don’t believe conservatives hide in fear all the time, but I agree there is an element of fear when I hear conservatives talk or read their writings.  Like how a new tax will ruin the economy, or how granting a “special right” will harm heterosexual whites, or how atheism will destroy society.  What they fear evolves over time, but there is always that element of fear in their beliefs.

Thoughts?

Say their names (Non-fiction)

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinal recently posted profiles of the victims of Kenosha, WI shooting, and, refreshingly, it wasn’t a hit piece.

Anthony Huber, 26, of Silver Lake

Friends described Huber as a happy and laid-back guy who loved to skateboard.

“He was always a really sweet person. Always had a smile on his face,” said Max Seebeck, who grew up skateboarding with Huber in Kenosha.

From what I saw in the video, I believe he saved at least one person’s life when he charged at the shooter, Kyle Rittenhouse.  It’s disgusting that the right-wing media has tried to portray Huber as the attacker.  Especially when some conservative writers call bystanders cowards for not charging at a shooter during a shooting spree.  There is a GoFundMe page for his partner.

Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, of Kenosha

According to social media posts from friends and family, Rosenbaum is a Texas native. He moved to Kenosha within the last year.

Rosenbaum was shot in the head, a friend said.

There is a GoFundMe page set up to raise money for burial expenses.

Gaige Grosskreutz, 26, of West Allis

Grosskreutz was shot in the arm and is expected to survive.

Grosskreutz was in Kenosha on Tuesday with the Milwaukee-based social justice group the People’s Revolution Movement, spokeswoman Bethany Crevensten said…Grosskreutz had volunteered as a medic at Black Lives Matter protests across Milwaukee this summer, according to WTMJ-TV.

There’s a GoFundMe page set up to help cover his medical expenses.  The last update on the page says he won’t lose his arm, but will need more surgeries.

All three of them peacefully protested that night for social justice.  Their lives were more valuable than a boarded up gas station Rittenhouse claimed he was defending.  We should be saying their names too.

Video: Rebecca Watson on the so-called ‘Neck Gaiter’ study (Non-fiction)

Rebecca Watson recently released a video detailing the study behind the news reports claiming that neck gaiters are worse than not wearing a mask.  Basically, the study wasn’t about the effectiveness of various kinds of mask, but about a possible method to test the effectiveness of masks:

As this article from ScienceNews points out, the type of material, thickness, and the environment are the most important factors to the effectiveness of any face covering.  Droplets don’t tell the whole story, and hopefully, more studies will be conducted to determine which face coverings, aside from N95 masks, are the most effective.

I think I’ll stick with the cloth and coffee filter masks my wife makes for personal use.

Ed Brayton’s last blog post (Non-fiction)

 

Ed Brayton

Ed Brayton, a co-founder of Freethought Blogs and a blogger at Patheos, died last night. I never met him, but I did appreciate both his blog and Facebook posts.  He understood that disbelief in God wasn’t enough.  His answer to the question of “So what?” was to work for social justice.  Which why he helped create this network, and he continued that work on his blog, as well as through various humanist organizations.

I never meet him, but if I had, I would have thanked him for his work, and for creating the platform that I’m currently on.  I did say that his memory would be a blessing, but I don’t know if he ever read it.

He wrote in his last post:

Don’t be sad about this, be hopeful. I got to make the decision myself and spare others from that awful task. I did it while still of sound mind, if not body. That means the world to me. I maintained my self-determination until the end.

In closing, let me just say thank you again. You made my life better, richer and more fulfilled and who could ask for more? Goodbye, one and all. I will miss you as I hope you will miss me. Be good to each other along this incredible journey.

Many of us will miss him, and, in a universe without a God or higher cause, being missed is one of the signs that you lived a good life.  My condolences to those who knew him better than I did.

(Link) New Scientist article on what caused the Beirut explosion (Non-fiction)

The New Scientist site has an article, that’s not behind a paywall, about the Beirut explosion.  Despite what Trump initially said, it wasn’t a deliberate attack, nor was it an attack by Israel, nor was it an atomic bomb or any other rumors.  It was most likely caused when a fire ignited 2750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate.  It had apparently been sitting in a port warehouse since 2013.  The ammonium nitrate wasn’t properly stored, and port authorities had been trying to get rid of it for years.

I will admit that when I finally saw the videos, I wondered if it was a dirty bomb.  But, as with most disasters, first impressions can be wrong, and rumors spread around the world before any investigation starts.  As Matthew Gault at Vice points out, there are people who are still insisting it was an atomic bomb because it formed a mushroom cloud.  But nuclear explosions aren’t the only things that can create mushroom clouds.  As long as there’s an apparent anomaly, someone will use it to question the “official story.”  Sure governments lie, and there are powerful people in the world, but sometimes an industrial accident is just an industrial accident.

USA Today offers this article on how to help the victims of the explosion.  Also according to the article, 5000 people were injured, and over 200,000 people may be homeless.

 

(Link) Ed Yong’s ‘How the Pandemic Defeated America’ (Non-fiction)

Ed Yong’s excellent article in the Atlantic, “How the Pandemic Defeated America,” is a devastatingly honest account of why the United States has the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the world:

Despite its epochal effects, COVID‑19 is merely a harbinger of worse plagues to come. The U.S. cannot prepare for these inevitable crises if it returns to normal, as many of its people ache to do. Normal led to this. Normal was a world ever more prone to a pandemic but ever less ready for one. To avert another catastrophe, the U.S. needs to grapple with all the ways normal failed us. It needs a full accounting of every recent misstep and foundational sin, every unattended weakness and unheeded warning, every festering wound and reopened scar.

Yong details how the combination of an inept President, an inadequate health care system, decades of racist policies, and early reopenings as reasons for the widespread outbreak in the US.  Even Coronavirus Task Force member Dr. Deborah Brix admits that the virus is “extraordinarily widespread,” even into the rural and urban areas.

Eventually, COVID-19 will be manageable either through treatments or vaccines.  We will be able to get close to one another, go out to places, and travel again.  But as Yong shows in his article, it will take a very long time for the country to recover from the economic and social problems exposed and exacerbated by the pandemic.

Justice for Saraya Rees (Non-fiction)

Iris over at Death to Squirrels has a post about Saraya Rees, a teenager who had a mental health crisis, and is now serving an 11-year prison sentence:

Well that all sounded pretty fucked-up to me, but this was just a summary. Even before my morning coffee, it occurred to my sleepy, chemo-addled brain that there were pieces missing in this story, some of which could be enormously consequential and thus color the true picture, in one way or another. So rather than sign-now-with-a-click and move on in the direction of my coffee pot, I read the rest of the email. And readers? When those gaps were filled in, the picture became so much uglier and far more disturbing than anything I could have imagined.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Oregon…

FTB’s real on the ground reporter in Portland (Non-fiction)

Crip Dyke, who blogs at Pervert Justice, is posting her eyewitness accounts of the Portland protests. Including this account from July 21:

But the cops made no effort to arrest peacefully. From that first arrest pinning someone down, it was about overwhelming force. When the tear gas comes 80 seconds later, no one has been warned. This is not an attempt to safeguard people. The cops were safe inside the building. It’s not an attempt to safeguard property – they spend more money on the defense than they could possibly spend on cleaning bill or replacing a door. This was an effort to punish. And punish they did.

That first effort sent tear gas just barely across the street from the courthouse, and caused people to pull back no more than 3 blocks. They did eventually advance tear gas through most of that park block, but except for my and my slow-ass self, they appeared to be shooting the tear gas behind the line of retreat just to keep people moving west, not to trap them (or at least most of them) in the smoke. The front ranks were only a block and a half away from the courthouse while the first round of gas was clearing. They maintained a presence there for a half an hour, then slowly returned to the Fed Building Justice Center for a bit of organizing, speaking and chanting. It took me longer to return close to the front because I had been so badly affected by the gas.

She’s at ground zero of what I feel is a test run for outright authoritarianism in the United States.  We cannot tolerate masked officers in unmarked vehicles snatching up civilians and detaining them without charges.  Nor should we tolerate the officers’ attempts to brutally dominate a population of a city.   With Trump deploying officers to other cities, what is happening there, could very happen in other US cities.

So I’ll be reading Crip Dyke’s accounts, and I hope you will too.