One more week, maybe

Chuck Wendig makes his election predictions for next week. Spoiler: he has no idea.

Neither do I, and that’s the terrible thing. I’ve been through awful elections, like when Reagan was anointed as president, and while I was disappointed and unhappy, I knew one thing about election day: the election wouldn’t be a problem. Voting would go smoothly, ballots would be counted, and on election night, you’d get the results and one party would concede and the other party would celebrate. That ended with Bush/Gore. It’s much worse now. We have early voting in some states, and the lines go on for blocks, because the Republicans have been killing polling places; we have swarms of people, like me, voting by mail because we have no confidence in our voting booths any more. That’s tragic for a democracy. You’d think we’d look at absurdly long lines for voting and realize there’s something fucking wrong with the system, and do something about it, but for some reason we’ve turned a blind eye to this failure of simple voting mechanics.

I’ll be braver than Wendig and make some horrible predictions.

  • There will be incidents. Armed yahoos will try to intimidate voters at multiple polling places. The police will do nothing about them.
  • There will be no resolution of the election on the night of 3 November. Or the 4th. Or the 5th. It will drag on interminably. Even if there is a clear Democratic winner, the Republicans will find reasons to waffle about, calling into question any and all results.
  • If the Democratic candidate does not have a strong majority, and the Republicans whine a little bit, the Democratic party will collapse like a ripped bladder and concede.
  • The Supreme Court will find a way to interfere.
  • If he actually loses, the Current Occupant will continue to hold rallies and incite his followers right up until 20 January. There will be more violence.
  • I have no idea what the USA will look like on 21 January. The Occupant could be dragged out on meathooks and the Republic will persevere a little longer, or the entire country could be reduced to burning rubble with us civilians fighting it out for scraps.

I will not be watching the news next week at all. Leave me a comment if civil war breaks out so I know to bunker up and seal up all the windows and doors.

Yeesh, but I detest Collin Peterson

Collin Peterson does not belong in the Democratic party.

It’s an election year, so naturally I’ve been flooded with Republican attack ads against our local representative, Collin Peterson. He sides with Nancy Pelosi 4 out of 5 times! He’s too liberal! It’s the only reason I voted for him this time.

I wish I could retract that vote, and I’ll never make that mistake again. Peterson has come out with a rebuttal ad, in which he touts how truly conservative he is: he voted against the Trump impeachment! The NRA loves him!

Fuck Collin Peterson. I’ve got no shortage of Republicans to vote for, and if I wanted to vote Republican, I wouldn’t have voted for his lying ass.

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?

Called out by someone I never heard of

By chance, I just stumbled across this curious announcement:

Saturday Oct 30th ‘SPECIAL EDITION’ 1PM US Central/7PM UK on Quantum Eraser Channel –

Professor PZ Myers and Atheist Round Table: ‘DEBUNKED’ !

This “Quantum Eraser” guy is some kind of flat-earther, but otherwise I know nothing about them. I have a couple of questions, though. How do flat-earthers explain time zones? Also, do they use a different calendar than we do, since on my globe-shaped planet, 30 October is a Friday.

I’m also curious about how I got on the flat earth radar. Do they just assume, reasonably enough, that anyone with a science degree is going to find flat-earth BS to be absurd?

The blame was fixed the instant protests against injustice began

You can’t possibly be surprised to learn that the violence accompanying the recent protests was generated by happy white fanatics who wanted to use it to disrupt the country.

In the wake of protests following the May 25 killing of George Floyd, a member of the Boogaloo Bois opened fire on the Minneapolis Police Third Precinct with an AK-47-style gun and screamed “Justice for Floyd” as he ran away, according to a federal complaint made public Friday.

A sworn affidavit by the FBI underlying the complaint reveals new details about a far-right anti-government group’s coordinated role in the violence that roiled through civil unrest over Floyd’s death while in police custody.

The Boogaloo Bois hate the police, too, but the reason is rather different: it’s not because the American police are forces for oppression and injustice, but because they threaten the Boogaloo Bois’ desire to rule the countryside with heavily armed right wing militias; they want chaos because that would allow these wannabe bandits and warlords to run amuck. They want to be the ones with the guns and tanks.

The Star Tribune has been following these guys for a while now, since they seem to be active here in Minnesota. A previous article profiled several of these goons.

Solomon, who manages the maintenance division for a local property management company, called himself “an armed redneck” who joined the Boogaloo movement after dabbling in right-wing conservatism, libertarianism and militia activity. The police bulletin that named Solomon noted that he had a “III%-er” militia sticker on his truck.

In an interview, Solomon said his allegiance rested with the Boogaloo movement and that he had neglected to remove the armed militia sticker. Like many Boogaloos, Solomon also said he now recants his past support for President Donald Trump. Now, Solomon views himself as an “anarcho-capitalist.”

The good news: support for Trump is declining among these fanatics. The bad news: they’re libertarians and ancaps.

The good news: they say they are against racism and white nationalism. The bad news: they still think shooting up a police station and letting the black community take the blame is just fine.

We’ve been suffering with these violent clowns for centuries, thanks to our institutionalized policies of injustice. Don’t be fooled by people who claim to be for equality, yet eagerly enjoy the privileges of structural racism and take advantage of a convenient pool of scapegoats. Watch Cody explain the whole grand problem.