Weekend solutions

The CDC has recommended the resumption of the Johnson & Johnson covid vaccine, even though there were fifteen negative reactions out of about seven million recipients.  All the problems, including three deaths, involved women.  I'm just an old country blogger and not a scientist, but it seems like the answer is to stop giving it to women.  

For years Native Americans have struggled to recover the relics of their ancestors from museums and other institutions, including boys clubs like the notorious Skull & Bones Society at Yale, rumored to possess the stolen skull of Geronimo.  These items were confiscated decades ago, before any thought was given to the significance they might hold for indigenous people.  Now we know better.  So what in the actual fuck did anthropologists at Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania think they were doing, using the bones of African American children as teaching props?  These children died in 1985 when the Move! house (along with several surrounding blocks) was bombed and burned* by the Philadelphia police; they have living relatives who definitely did not give permission, nor were they asked.  A suggestion:  Stop dehumanizing people and maybe you won't be so quick to kill them.

Another form of dehumanization is scalping.  Jurnee Hoffmeyer is a beautiful seven-year-old who had her hair cut off against her will by a classmate on the school bus.  Then a teacher decided to "even it up" by cutting the other side.  Her father is outraged and Jurnee is depressed -- hair is important to a little girl.  It will grow back but she won't forget how other people took away her autonomy and her self-esteem.  

Alexei Navalny went on a hunger strike twenty-four days ago because prison authorities denied him medical care.  They finally allowed him to be treated by non-prison doctors because he was near death and might have been more trouble to the government dead than alive.  So the dissident wins this round of Mortality Chicken.  Amnesty International, take note.

Priorities.  Oklahoma's got them.  Caron McBride, who used to live in Norman, is wanted for renting a VHS tape of Sabrina the Teenage Witch in 1999 and never returning it.  The rental place is gone and so is McBride, who claims she never watched that tape; she thinks the daughters of the man she then lived with may be the culprits.  The Cleveland County DA is not pursuing the felony embezzlement of rented property charge.  Maybe they learned from the case of Lonnie Perry, who rented Ted in 2014 but lost track of the DVD when he subsequently became homeless.  Four years later the DA demanded $218, only $44 of which will go to the store (this is the way backward or "red" states finance themselves -- exceed the speed limit in Tennessee and see what happens).  I can't find out the disposition of Perry's case, but he told ABC7 news the movie wasn't worth the $5 he initially paid.  Maybe he's on the run with a copy of Ted in his trunk.  If you don't want to be disparaged as "flyover country" by coastal people, maybe stop acting like Evil Mayberry.

When you're invited to a "gender reveal" party in a disused quarry, you can anticipate a bad result.  A family in New Hampshire announced their very important news by detonating eighty pounds of Tannerite, an explosive designed to make target-shooting more thrilling.  In this instance it cracked the foundations of neighboring houses and triggered reports of an earthquake.  Although there were no fatalities this time, Jenna Karvunidis, described as a "pioneer" of the gender-reveal movement, has suggested dialing it back.  When her daughter was conceived she went old-school:  cake with pink icing.  I would suggest that thinking everyone cares about the sex of your baby is dangerously narcissistic, but that's just me.

   

*A police department deploying C4 from a helicopter in a residential neighborhood is a good explanation for the "Defund the Police" movement.