(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog’s Favorite Living Canadian)
The case of the Michigan school shooter went around the bend on Friday. First, the local prosecutors took the unusual—but, to my mind, completely justified—step of indicting the shooter’s parents for involuntary manslaughter. From the Detroit Free Press:
As news broke Tuesday of a mass shooting at Oxford High School, the mother of the teen suspect sent her son a text message."Ethan, don't do it," Jennifer Crumbley wrote… The parents are now each facing four counts of involuntary manslaughter. Both are scheduled to be arraigned by video in 52-3 District Court in Rochester Hills later Friday. During a hearing that started around noon before Judge Julie Nicholson, a lieutenant with the Oakland County Sheriff's Office said the parents were not in custody.
According to the prosecutor, Mom and Dad bought Junior the gun and, as is customary now, immortalized the moment on social media.
She said James Crumbley purchased a 9mm Sig Sauer SP 2022 used in the shooting at a gun store in Oxford on Nov. 26. She said a store employee confirmed Ethan Crumbley was with his father at the time. She said social media posts by the teen that day show the handgun along with the caption: "Just got my new beauty today." The next day, McDonald said, one of Jennifer Crumbley's social media posts read: "Mom and son day testing out his new Christmas present."
Does it get worse? Of course, it does.
The day before the shooting, a teacher at the high school observed the teen searching for ammunition on his cell phone during class and she reported it to school officials, McDonald said. Jennifer Crumbley was contacted through voicemail and email about her son's web search. Later, McDonald said, the mother texted her son: "LOL, I'm not mad at you, you have to learn not to get caught.”
Does it get worse? Of course, it does.
The next day, the day of the shooting, the teen's teacher saw an alarming note on his desk, McDonald said. The note contained a drawing of a semiautomatic handgun pointing at the words: "The thoughts won't stop, help me." She said it also contained a drawing of a bullet with the words "blood everywhere" and a drawing of a person who appeared to be shot and bleeding… "Both James and Jennifer Crumbley failed to ask their son if he had his gun with him or where his gun was located and failed to inspect his backpack for the presence of the gun, which he had with him," McDonald said. She said the parents resisted taking their son out of school and left without him."He was returned to the classroom," McDonald said.
Whereupon he killed four people.
Get that. The kid is sitting in the principal’s office with his parents with the gun in his backpack. Nobody checks the backpack and they send him back to class, with the backpack, and the gun. Whereupon he kills four other kids. And by late afternoon, the parents were on the lam and fugitive warrants for them had been issued. It was all about the gun, and how easy it was to get the gun, and how blasé the family was about having a deadly weapon in the house as though it were a MixMaster or a basset hound.
Meanwhile, in Georgia, this happened. From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
He ordered everything he needed online to make guns, including semi-automatic weapons. Then, the 13-year-old boy sold them on the streets to others, Douglas County Sheriff Tim Pounds said Wednesday. But when a man tried to take a gun without paying for it, the teenager fired a shot with one of his homemade weapons, Pounds said. The shot killed the boy’s 14-year-old sister, Kyra Scott, described as a “beautiful, kind soul.”
And everybody is so amazed at the horror of it all.
“A 13-year-old kid, doesn’t weigh but about 80 pounds, was able to make a weapon from start to finish,” Pounds said. “At 13 years old.”
No shit, Sheriff. But why are you surprised? This country has decided, through political enthusiasm on the one hand and political apathy on the other, to indulge its insane lust for firearms outside of all regulation and common sense. And now we’ve entered the DIY stage of the proceedings so that, even if we were to come to our senses and crack down on the unlimited private ownership of firearms, and on the industry that promotes it, we’re already running behind a teenager who hits PAUSE on the Gameboy long enough to manufacture a weapon for sale. I mean, seriously, this country is out of its damn mind.
Remember a few years back when Houston mega-church pastor Joel Osteen took a lot of heat for not allowing victims of Hurricane Harvey to crash in his mega-church? Turns out he might have had an additional reason, beyond being a heartless goon. From the Houston Chronicle:
A man named "Justin" in November called into the KILT-FM radio show 100.3 The Bull claiming he had found "about 500" envelopes filled with cash and checks hidden behind tile and insulation while repairing a toilet at the megachurch on Nov. 10. "We went to go remove the toilet and I moved some insulation away and about 500 envelopes fell out of the wall and I was like 'Oh, wow,'" the man said. "I went ahead and contacted the maintenance supervisor that was there and I went ahead and turned it all in," the man told KPRC2.
First of all, let’s all commend “Justin” for being the most honest damn plumber in the world. Second, let’s all point and laugh at Lakewood Church’s official explanation.
A Lakewood Church representative confirmed the discovery Thursday, stating that an amount of money had been discovered on the church premises and the authorities had since been contacted. "Recently, while repair work was being done at Lakewood Church, an undisclosed amount of cash and checks were found," the statement said. "Lakewood immediately notified the Houston Police Department and is assisting them with their investigation.”
While the amount of money found remains unknown, the discovery comes seven years after $600,000 in cash and checks were reported as having been stolen from a safe in the church in March 2014. Police never made an arrest in the case, and a $25,000 award offered by Crime Stoppers for information revealing the culprits' remains unclaimed.
Hmmm. Church reports that 600 Gs worth of cash and checks has been robbed from a safe. Nobody ever finds the culprit(s). Nobody even goes for the $25,000 reward. So, the case goes cold for seven years, during which time, perhaps, the church possibly has reported the theft to its insurance company. Now, suddenly, a stash of money and checks is found in the wall of lavatory in the church itself. Church is mystified by this strange turn of events.
And an old dog snoozes on the porch, declining to hunt.
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Hell Or High Water” (Katie Webster) Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathé Archives: Here’s some of the first footage of the attack on Pearl Harbor, 80 years ago next Tuesday. Whoever wrote the narration needs an editor and a strong tranquilizer. “The paradise of songs and lovers has been swept into the vortex of modern mechanistic hell.” Wowser. There’s also just a touch of We-Told-You-So from the Brit narrator. Still, it’s a good reminder that the attack wreaked havoc all over Honolulu, and not just in the harbor. History is so cool.
I’m sure the Substack Free Speech Warriors are all over this, from PEN America:
The following books will be removed from the reading choice curriculum and classroom libraries.
• Brave Face: A Memoir by Shaun David Hutchinson
• The Handmaid’s Tale The Graphic Novel by Margaret Atwood and Renee Nault
• In the Dream House A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado
• None of the Above by I.W. Gregorio
• The Nowhere Girls by Amy Lynn Reed
• Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Pérez
• Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson
• Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery The Authorized Graphic Adaptation by Myles Hyman
• Shout by Laurie Halse Anderson
• V is for Vendetta by Alan Moore
• Y: The Last Man Book One by Brian K. Vaughan
Tell me about cancel culture again, preferably from some of your many lucrative media platforms. I need a good laugh.
Yeah…no. From Smithsonian:
Since their original study, the team has been working to harness the power of these tiny robots—named "xenobots" after the clawed frogs' genus Xenopus. In a new development, the team announced that xenobots can now reproduce in a way that is completely different from any plant or animal known to science: by scooping up free-floating cells and assembling them into new clusters, Nicola Davis reports for the Guardian. The team published their findings this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Frogs have a way of reproducing that they normally use but when you ... liberate (the cells) from the rest of the embryo and you give them a chance to figure out how to be in a new environment, not only do they figure out a new way to move, but they also figure out apparently a new way to reproduce," co-author Michael Levin, a biologist at Tufts University, tells CNN.
If it’s all the same to everyone, since Tufts isn’t that far from this very laptop, I’d like to slow the development of claw-footed mechanical frog-beasts until we know what the hell’s going on.
Is it a good day for dinosaur news, Smithsonian? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news! In fact, it’s a double-good day for dinosaur news. New species have been uncovered and are celebrating their first Second Birthdays, one in Missouri and one in Chile.
After comparing the bones from the 1940s, others collected in the past eight decades, and the specimen recently unearthed in October, researchers had enough evidence to determine that the new fossils are officially part of the new genus and species, USA Today reports. The new bones included the skeleton of a juvenile and adult dinosaur belonging to a species of duck-billed dinosaur called Parrosaurus missourenisis.
Ankylosaurs were herbivores that lived during the Late Cretaceous period. They had distinct plates of bone riddling their bodies and heads called osteoderms for defense against other carnivorous dinosaurs, reports Chen Ly for New Scientist. Various species of ankylosaurs sport club-like tails and barbed skulls, but researchers have never seen a tail like the one found on S. elengassen. The dinosaur also had less body armor, and its limbs were more slender than others of the same species.
The dinosaur sports features from both ankylosaurs and stegosaurs. It walked on all fours, stood less than two feet tall and measured less than seven feet from head to tail, National Geographic reports. The pelvis of S. elengassen even looks nearly identical to that of a stegosaur. However, the jawbones confirmed that the skeleton did in fact belong to an ankylosaur, New Scientist reports.
I’ve always thought the ankylosaurs were the most dinosaurish of all dinosaurs. They were built like little tanks, covered with armor plating, and had a seriously weaponized tail. In their artist’s renditions, they looked like evolution had just thrown a bunch of spare parts together and sent it on its way to live then just to make us happy now.
Now that Mitch McConnell has graciously allowed us to have a government until Valentine’s Day, everybody will beat feet out of Washington having done fck-all about voting rights. Don’t get me started. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snakelike, wear the damn masks, get the damn shots and, for god’s sake, get your damn booster. I did. And they’ve made the microchip much quieter since I had my initial vaccination. Honest.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
