Happy Halloween! Check out our schedule!

Yay! It’s an excuse to party — quietly, alone in our homes, spurning human contact — so I hope you’re all taking advantage of it. Here at Freethoughtblogs we’ve been assembling a few party favors over the past week, all listed on our fundraising page. A few highlights:

Don’t send us candy treats, though. Send money. Or join my Patreon. Please don’t TP our web server.

First they come for Milo, now they’ve come for Amos

The alt-right just loves those yahoo edgelords who push the boundaries well beyond civilized behavior, but there are limits. Milo Yiannopoulos flamed out when started babbling about how pedophilia wasn’t really that bad; then there’s this one strange fellow who was briefly embraced by right-wingers, Amos Yee (Mythicist Milwaukee tried to bring him to their ugly conference, before they woke up to his brand of flaming). Yee was openly advocating for sex with small children, even talking about sexual acts with infants; he was quite clear that he thought children would be capable of consent even when an adult is pressuring them or lying to them about sex. People like Sargon of Akkad and Count Dankula — you know, just those names ought to clue you in that these are ridiculous clowns — were supporting him. He was just trolling, you know, which makes it OK.

But now Yee has been arrested. I guess he pushed beyond just trolling.

A blogger from Singapore who was granted asylum to stay in the U.S. faces child pornography charges, according to prosecutors.

Amos Yee appeared Friday in court in Chicago on solicitation and possession of child pornography, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. He was being held on $1 million bail.

If the 20-year-old is convicted, he could lose his asylum status. He was taken into custody Thursday at his Chicago home.

In 2016, Yee was detained at O’Hare International Airport after fleeing Singapore. His online posts mocking and criticizing the Singapore government twice landed him in jail. He was granted asylum i n September 2017.

Prosecutors alleged he exchanged messages with a 14-year-old Texas girl last year that included nude photos. He also allegedly used his now-defunct YouTube channel to advocate for pedophilia, according to prosecutors.

Goodbye, Yee. Please drag down some more of those other wingnut trolls with you.

Bob Murray is dead!

Perhaps you recall John Oliver’s hilarious expose of the evil coal baron, Bob Murray, which prompted Murray to fling a SLAPP suit at him, that ended badly for Murray, with Mr Nutterbutter awarding him diddly.

Murray was notoriously litigious, and he had a lot to hide. He was a callous exploiter of coal miners, who opposed legislation protecting the health of his employees, even while expecting government benefits for black lung for himself.

At least that much is admitted in a tepid obituary for the old monster.

While Murray applied for black lung benefits, bankruptcy enabled his company to avoid obligations to employees diagnosed with black lung, shifting its $74.4 million liability to the federal government’s Black Lung Disability Trust Fund, according to Labor Department estimates provided to Congress.

Good riddance, Bob! Now you’re even more dead than the coal industry!

The story chain begins!

As a writing exercise and as part of our Halloween fundraiser, several of us here at FtB are participating in a short story chain. William Brinkman started us off with some scene setting in FTB Presents: A Dark Intellectual Web (Episode 1), and Freethinkingahead expands on a couple of characters and gives us intimations of trouble awaiting us in A Dark Web: Part Two. You’ll have to check in every day as a different blogger builds on the story, reaching a climax in time for Halloween.

I’ll be reading with a particular anxiety, because they cruelly assigned me the job of writing the final bit, and I have no idea where the story is going. It’s all a surprise! I suggested that one possible final chapter would be, “And then a giant spider leapt out of a tree and killed them all! The End,” but apparently that would be cheating and not very satisfying.

Would it be cheating if readers suggested angles I could take in the comments?

How are those policies working out for you, North Dakota?

It’s a bit scary living only 50 miles from a plague state. North Dakota is just the worst.

The Czech Republic currently has the most confirmed COVID-19 cases per million people worldwide. But if North Dakota was its own nation, it would surpass the per capita COVID-19 case count of the central European country, according to a Financial Times database.

The database, which tallies COVID-19 cases in each country using data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Tracking Project and other governmental agencies, shows the seven-day rolling average for the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the Czech Republic, when broken down per million, totals 810 per million. However, North Dakota surpasses that at almost 919 COVID-19 cases per million for its seven-day rolling average.

Fargo is a lovely city, but I don’t think I’ll be visiting it for a while.

Cass County, which includes Fargo and West Fargo, has 1,351 residents known to be infected with the illness — the most of the state’s 53 counties. It announced an additional 97 cases Wednesday.

Ward County, which encompasses Minot, announced an addition 90 positive cases on Wednesday which now brings the county’s active cases to 586.

About 8% of the 6,176 residents tested as part of the latest batch received a positive result, but 20% of residents tested for the first time got a positive result.

I wish I could be smug about the fact that Minnesota is doing relatively well, but borders aren’t real and culturally, my part of Western Minnesota shares a lot in common with the Dakotas, so I see a lot of lazy neglect and willful sabotaging of basic hygiene rules going on around here. We have many students from the Dakotas as well, so there’s going to be a churning and mixing of populations over the holidays, which is why our semester ends before Thanksgiving this year, and doesn’t resume until late in January. We are not anticipating that infection rates will decline in December.

His bedside manner left much to be desired

Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain, and the cannibal castrators lop off testicles in their backwoods chop shops…would you believe this cute couple belong in a horror movie?

Two men were accused Wednesday in a criminal charge of performing an illegal gender reassignment surgery on a volunteer at their cabin in the woods and then keeping the body parts in a freezer, possibly to eat later.

Bob Lee Allen, 53, and Thomas Evans Gates, 42, were arrested Oct. 15 after going to the hospital in McAlester to try to visit the victim, Le Flore County Sheriff Rodney Derryberry said Tuesday.

That’s not “gender reassignment surgery”: it’s crudely chopping off body parts while lying about what they’re doing. It’s just castration, carried out by a couple of yokels. They’ve been getting away with it for years!

The victim reported Allen claimed to have 15 years of experience and that he “videos the procedures for personal use,” according to the affidavit. The victim also reported “Allen told him that the surgery wouldn’t cost him anything.”

The victim told investigators that Allen performed the removal Oct. 12 on a covered makeshift table at the residence and that Gates helped by handing over the surgical equipment, according to the affidavit. The victim said he was awake for the two-hour surgery after being injected “in the needed areas.”

The victim “stated that after the surgery was over that Allen said that he was going to consume the parts and laughed and said that he was a cannibal,” according to the affidavit. The victim also said that Allen then talked about “the time he worked on someone that he described to be crazy and that he left the male opened up to die overnight.”

I wonder how many people they actually maimed in their 15 years of butchery?