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?

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: It was a tuck

We watched the notorious movie last night, including the infamous closing scene with Rudy Giuliani.

Sorry to disappoint you, but yeah, he was just tucking in his shirt.

It was still stupid and inappropriate, just not as scandalous as everyone was imagining. Giuliani was smarming it up with a pretty reporter, smirking and flattering her. Nothing wrong with that, I guess, except for the condescension and DEAR GOD GIULIANI SHOULD NEVER SMILE. He looks like a creepy skull.

He is then invited into her bedroom for a drink. And he took her up on it! Extremely unprofessional and sleazy! I’ve done many interviews in hotel rooms, and if at the end I was invited to go into the bedroom for a drink (never happened, my interviewers were professional too), I would have said, “No thank you, I’ve got to go” or, if we wanted to continue the conversation, I’d have suggested that we meet in the bar in a few minutes.

Then there was a scene where the two of them were fumbling around removing each other’s microphones. Unprofessional again; yes, you thread the wire from the lavalier mic under your shirt to the transmitter, but it’s not a big production. A reporter would find this part of her daily routine, while a guy like Giuliani has done this a thousand times. He wouldn’t need assistance, and neither would she. I’ve done it a hundred times, usually standing up on a stage, sometimes right in front of everyone. It doesn’t involve taking off my pants.

It does, however, sometimes involve unbuttoning a shirt, and then tucking it back in. That’s what I saw Giuliani doing. It wasn’t a big deal at all.

Also, remember, there was a cameraperson recording it all. What Sacha Baron Cohen caught on film was a creepy politician being condescending and unprofessional, nothing more. It was disappointing, actually, and was simply some unflattering editing of an already unpleasant character who thinks he’s attractive and endearing, when he just gets more repulsive the harder he tries.

The attention that bit is given also detracts from the rest of the movie. The truly horrifying parts where when he got his audience of good ol’ salt-of-the-earth Americans to go along with his prompts: an audience of rednecks grinning like feral hyenas as he gets them to sing along to a bad tune he was making about gassing their political opponents to death; the casual and easily elicited antisemitism; the QAnon fans babbling their conspiracy theories; the weird debutante ball where the Southern gentlemen were locked in rigid politeness as Borat’s daughter does a fertility dance celebrating her menses, and the most they do is hiss, “call her an Uber”.

As is usual in a Sacha Baron Cohen movie, the real freaks we should pay attention to are ourselves, not the clown with a funny accent capering on the stage. Borat couldn’t make Giuliani more of a spectacle than he routinely does to himself on Fox News every day, so I thought that bit fell rather flat.

Also, it was an out-loud, unapologetic feminist movie. Let’s not forget that in all the noise about the final setup.