1. This Time, Blame The Victim (3/24/2020) and High Noon Ethics Showdown, 4/2/2020: Reality Dawns

From the National Review:

Arizona police are now conducting a homicide investigation into a woman who claimed she gave her husband fish tank cleaner after President Trump claimed the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment for coronavirus.

Wanda Lenius told NBC News last month that she and her husband Gary consumed fish tank cleaner because it contained a chemical that Trump suggested might be an effective prophylactic and treatment for coronavirus. The cocktail, which contained four teaspoons of fish tank cleaner mixed with soda water, put Wanda in the ICU and killed Gary. “My advice,” Wanda explained, is “don’t believe anything that the President says and his people because they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

When I wrote the first post about Wanda Lenius, who, she said, persuaded her  husband to swallow fish-tank cleaner because the President had promoted chloroquine, one of the ingredients, as a promising treatment for Wuhan virus infections, commenter Joe Fowler suggested that the story sounded to him as if she had figured out how to bump off her husband, writing,

Am I alone in finding it suspicious that the couple that consumed the fish tank cleaner is presumed to have done exactly what the wife is claiming? The husband is dead in bizarre circumstances, poison in fact…. The “Trump told us to do it!” nonsense is just too perfect a narrative for the corrupt media, They can’t help but use it.

Blogger Ann Althouse also suggested that foul play might be involved, and so did my wife. later we learned that far from being a robotic Trump-follower, the woman was, in fact, an active anti-Trump donor. She and her husband had a contentious relationship that had include a domestic abuse complaint.

Stay tuned...

2. First They Came For Tiger Lilly, And I Said Nothing. Then They Came For The Land O’Lakes Girl…(4/22/2020)

This was the post about Land O’Lakes killing its iconic Indian maiden logo—the name of the maiden was “Mia”– on its butter packages, finally capitulating to pressure from Native American activists. I wrote,

I couldn’t care less what the logo on butter packages is. I do object to eliminating all references to our history in art, commerce and popular culture as soon as someone sees a benefit to complaining about it. It won’t be long, after all the sports teams and commercial products, state legislators, the theatrical producers, movie exhibitors and the rest have banished every hint of Native Americans from our culture, that future generations will know about as much about them as they’ll know about Robert E. Lee.

Now Dalton Walker of Indian Country Today writes in part,

…The legacy of Ojibwe artist Patrick DesJarlait goes well beyond Mia and Land O’Lakes. DesJarlait was employed by the advertising agency Campbell-Mithun in Minneapolis when he was given the assignment to market the farmer-owned cooperative. The original brand of “Mia” had been refurbished twice since its launch in 1928. DesJarlait was tapped to create a third version. He reimagined a more human character, adding detail to Mia’s face and floral motifs on her dress. Subtle changes that mattered. That was the brand that stuck for seven decades.

But the real legacy of DesJarlait is his body of work, some 300 pieces of art across the U.S. in museums and private collections. For many, especially for Red Lake Ojibwe in Minnesota, DesJarlait’s artistry impact remains nearly 50 years after his death.

On his Facebook page, [DesJarlait’s son ]Robert said many Ojibwe people shared their perspective of Mia while growing up Native. “Basically, it was giving the previous generation a sense of almost empowerment to see a Native woman on a box of butter. It gave them a sense of cultural pride,” he said. …

The design, besides Mia, shows a lake with two points of land that Robert DesJarlait said represented Red Lake and an area on the reservation known as the Narrows, where lower and upper Red Lake meet. Another homage, one that is hard to see on the products, on Mia’s dress are Ojibwe floral design patterns.

“My father was working it both ways – he was strengthening the Land O’Lakes name by placing Mia at the lake and he was integrating a deeper Ojibwe connection to the environment in which they lived. Trees and lakes are part of our identity. As such, his art, and Mia, was a visual reminder of our connection to our homelands,” Robert DesJarlait said in a Facebook post.

3. The US Soccer Equal Pay Law Suit: No, Megan, Truth Is Not Misogyny (3/15/2020)

The post was one of a couple that discussed the lawsuit  filed by 28 women’s national team players last year against the US Soccer Federation seeking $66 million in damages under the Equal Pay Act. NowFederal Judge R. Gary Klausner has rejected the women’s team’s argument over receiving lower pay than the U.S. men’s team.

As his reasons, Klausner pointed to differences in the structure of the men’s and women’s contracts  which the teams agreed in collective bargaining. “The WNT [Women’s National Team] rejected an offer to be paid under the same pay-to-play structure as the MNT [Men’s National Team] and … the WNT was willing to forgo higher bonuses for other benefits, such as greater base compensation and the guarantee of a higher number of contracted players,” Klausner wrote. “Accordingly, Plaintiffs cannot now retroactively deem their CBA worse than the MNT CBA by reference to what they would have made had they been paid under the MNT’s pay-to-play structure when they themselves rejected such a structure.”

The judge said the women’s contract guarantees players will be paid regardless of whether they play. The men are paid if they are called into camp to play and then participate in a match. On this point, Klausner said, the plaintiff’s statements “were insufficient to establish a genuine dispute.”

The women say they will appeal the ruling. Meanwhile, Joe Biden, given a chance to pander and grandstand—it is unlikely that he knows anything about the substance of the law suit, —but simply is grabbing a chance to “believe all women”– told the team to not “give up this fight”, adding: “This is not over yet. To US Soccer: equal pay, now. Or else when I’m president, you can go elsewhere for World Cup funding.”