What is the 146 Club?

I subscribed months ago to the Wyoming Eclipse Festival Newsletter.

The Wyoming Eclipse Festival is the official title for the festival taking place in Casper, Wyoming from today. Friday, August 18 to Monday, April 21 - and there are a lot of fun events taking place for both science enthusiasts and enthusiasts of fun - and the two aren't necessarily exclusive, of course!

Always at the bottom of these emails was a banner ad saying, Spend $146 and join the 146 Club.

Every time I'd click on it to see what the 146 Club was, it would take me to an Event Brite page that would say, "Event Past."

"What is this 146 Club?" I thought, so I googled, "146 Club."

And the first 146 Club that came up was one that fights human trafficking, although it was called Love146 Club.

Turns out the Wyoming Eclipse Festival's 146 Club was so named because Casper is going to have 146 seconds of totality on August 21, 2017, so the similarity of the names is just a coincidence. (And as an aside, the Wyoming Eclipse Festival could have done a better job promoting this club. Apart from a Facebook post from August 2016 - one year ago - I saw no advertising for it (in my belated research of a couple of days ago!)

Check out Eclipsecasper.com and there's no mention of the 146 Club at all, there's just a banner ad on the email newsletter they send out.

Still, the coincidence was serendipity of a kind.

In looking for Casper's 146 Club I learned about the Love146 Club.

https://love146.org/

The Love146 Club is so named because a couple of undercover agents went into an auction where young girls were being auctioned off to be sex slaves. Each girl had a numbered tag pinned to her dress so the buyer could choose her by number, and the only one of these girls who was still "defiant" after months of sexual abuse had the number 146 pinned to her dress.

According to the website, because these agents were undercover they couldn't do anything at this sex auction, when they finally returned with their warrants the girls, including number 146, were gone, never to be found again.

It's important that parents, and of course teenagers themselves, learn of this danger right in their own back yards.

There's human trafficking for sex slaves of young girls and boys - right here in the US. (Though this is not exclusively a US problem, of course).

Below is a post from 2015 - this organization has been in existence since 2000.

10 Reasons you should start a Love146 Club

This is an important subject. The percentage of sex slaves as part of our population as a whole may be very small, but it still amounts to probably hundreds of thousands of girls and boys forced into this awful life.