Work, Play, and Be Merry

Hope you're having an amazing holiday season so far, reader!

Really glad I had the chance to catch up with Will and Elliott last week!


I'm pretty sure he rebuilt the hard drive in my office at Seattle U., but it seems to be fine—maybe even a little faster:

I share that office with three other contingent/adjunct/non-tenure-track faculty members. Encouraging to me that our voice seems more likely to be heard on campus lately.

In what is perhaps a parallel effort, some of my colleagues have been pursuing unionization. There's been a big move in that direction across the US—read more about it with the help of the two most recent posts on the SU College of Arts & Sciences Faculty & Staff Assembly blog: http://sufacultystaffassembly.wordpress.com/.

Recently I've been thinking that this is too important to go on behind the scenes. And when the Provost's Office issued a statement asking faculty to stop pursuing the option of joining a union before having any public discussion, I decided it was time to call in a favor from our old friends at CHS.

If you ask me, they did a great job with the story. That story in turn got the attention of KUOW. I told them they'd be better off interviewing someone more directly involved, which they did. Take a listen here.

Meanwhile, these happy workers enjoyed last week's Sisters of Providence Provincial Administration Christmas party:


But all work and no play, as they say... So Franklin and I continue our Friday visits to the Volunteer Park Playground, rain or shine:


No amount of sunshine or puddles for splashing would have helped, however, when we visited Santa:


At least Franklin can say he's carrying on a family tradition:


Christmas cards are also a fun tradition; happy to see Franklin enjoying the ones we've received. This one especially:

Hoping by the time we see Baby Rose on New Year's Day we can get a "Happy New Year" out of him :)

We didn't do a photo card this year, but please accept this blog post as our photo card. First, Yancy's most recent headshot:


And Franklin's school pictures. Our favorite is up top, but here's another:


And the whole class:

Note how everyone really wants to be looking at Emily, who is standing just off camera :)

All right, reader. If we're going to do this holiday, I'd better get back to work.

See you soon, and until then, the Merriest!

Clearing the Air

You know what I wish? I wish this was another lame post with cute pictures of my baby.

Okay, instead, I'm going to try putting this all together in one place, if only to make my thoughts feel organized.

So, first of all, the news is horrible, and the facts are clear. Thanks to the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, for putting it nice and bluntly:
"The people who fight and lobby and legislate to make guns regularly available are complicit in the murder of those children."

And the solution is also quite clear: as various and repeated studies show, more guns means more killings.

Indeed, this academic study about Australia provides a detailed and concrete example:
Australia’s 1996 gun law reforms were followed by more than a decade free of fatal mass shootings, and accelerated declines in firearm deaths, particularly suicides. Total homicide rates followed the same pattern.

Oh, and in case you're worried that the homicides and suicides by other methods would increase, they didn't: "No substitution effects occurred for suicides or homicides."

But, someone might object, Australia doesn't have a Second Amendment guaranteeing individuals the right to own guns! Neither do we!

At best our current understanding of the Second Amendment dates to Reconstruction, as discussed in the Washington Post. Rather than a statement of a right for individuals to have guns, "Originally, the Second Amendment is very much about local militias keeping check on a federal military establishment."

Again, according to Jeffry Toobin on the New Yorker website, for over 100 years, "according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon."

The current reading, on the other hand, is a product of political—and therefore reversible—decisions in the 1970's and 80's:
it is clear that the scope of the Second Amendment will be determined as much by politics as by the law. The courts will respond to public pressure—as they did by moving to the right on gun control in the last thirty years

On the vexed question of just how to begin, I've seen a compelling case on Slate for following Michael Bloomberg's lead and treating this as a public health issue, just like smoking and such. After all, if we can pass other laws for our own protection, why would we settle for absurdity and leave guns out?

Patrick Radden Keefe presents just such a consideration on the New Yorker site:
Ponder, for a second, the fact that I cannot walk into a C.V.S. today and purchase half-a-dozen packages of Sudafed, but I can walk into a gun dealership and purchase a .50 caliber rifle of the sort that U.S. snipers use in Afghanistan. In fact, I can buy six or ten—there is no limit imposed by law.

And lest this talk of health distract us into a conversation about mental illness, let me just say, as clearly as I can, that mental health reform, though important, is secondary and on its own grossly insufficient, as just this one bit from a recent New York Times article makes clear:

Even though we know from large-scale epidemiologic studies like the E.C.A. study that a young psychotic male who is intoxicated with alcohol and has a history of involuntary commitment is at a high risk of violence, most individuals who fit this profile are harmless.

In any case, public health isn't the only or necessarily even the best way to frame the terrible situation we face. Firmin DeBrabander, for example, argues, in a New York Times blog post, that the proliferation of guns in the US threatens the core of our civil society. Rather than focus on the second, his concern is for the First Amendment: "Guns do communicate, after all, but in a way that is contrary to free speech aspirations: for, guns chasten speech."

Finally, however, I am inclined to agree with Adam Gopnik most of all. He argues, in the piece I mentioned at the start, that what we face is a moral choice. A clear moral choice.

Meanwhile, it's Wednesday, so the flags are no longer at half-mast for those children. So, speaking of mourning, thanks Magen for pointing me to this excellent piece in the Economist. Before I go give Franklin yet another hug, I'll quote the last section for you:

So unless the American people are willing to actually do something to stop the next massacre of toddlers from happening, we should shut up and quit blubbering. It's our fault, and until we evince some remorse for our actions or intention to reform ourselves, the idea that we consider ourselves entitled to "mourn" the victims of our own barbaric policies is frankly disgusting.

Woo!

UPDATE: How about that victory speech? Oh, you weren't still up at like 2am Eastern? Guess that's one nice thing about living on the west coast... Anyway, here you go:


Great night for the US!

All kinds of interesting statewide results here in Washington and beyond, but for now, how about a shot of the cupcakes we took to the election party:

Yum!

and Yay!

Reading Materials

Well, Merrica was wondering how the Workshop went, and that's inspired me to post a few bits of text for your reading pleasure today.

First, I've posted my handout from last week, containing a few juicy quotes that I think together suggest that Aristotle might view large systems and patterns (my particular concern in this project is with climate) as operating not at random or even as byproducts of individual things pursuing certain purposes, but for a purpose of their own:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/106467305/NWAPW-2012-Handout

I got some tough questions, but that's for the best in the long run. Fun, friendly group... and the prof. who hosted things invited us all to his house to try his homemade wine: very Oregon :)

My interest in this project stemmed from my fascination with Aristotle's brief but mind-blowing discussion of natural selection (note: Aristotle died thousands of years before Darwin was born). Just so happened that that brief discussion was mentioned in the issue of the New Yorker that I was reading on the train to Oregon.

Great article/book review (by Anthony Gottlieb, former editor of the Economist, speaking of Merrica) about new research (or should that be "research"?) in evolutionary psychology, and I highly recommend it.

Which makes me feel funny about quoting the ending, but it's just too clever to leave unquoted:
Barash muses, at the end of his book, on the fact that our minds have a stubborn fondness for simple-sounding explanations that may be false. That’s true enough, and not only at bedtime. It complements a fondness for thinking that one has found the key to everything. Perhaps there’s an evolutionary explanation for such proclivities.
Full article here.

My other train reading was, of course, the Times, where I read a fascinating review of the new FDR Four Freedoms Park in New York City:

Space sounds super cool, and it's a fascinating story, since the park was built so long after the designer's death. And that Four Freedoms speech isn't too shabby either!

Huzzah for people named Franklin!

Speaking of, in our unexpected but seemingly unstoppable drive to fill his shelves with 80-year-old books, we recently picked up a copy of one of my very favorite books from my younger years:

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel

Okay, well, you've been very patient, so how about a quick look at some of the fun had back home in Seattle while I was away at the Workshop:

Smiles All Around

Of course the biggest thing to bring the biggest smile to my face came from the other Washington this morning. Who knew that I'd be here today saying Way to go, Supreme Court!? But hey, I'll take it. Huzzah!

But if you're looking for something else to smile about, how about Franklin's second (maybe it was third) real laugh:

He sure seems to like that zipper!

Also worth a smile or two: colorful produce from the Farmers Market!
Potatoes:


And some rainbow chard, appropriately purchased and eaten after the Pride Parade:


Speaking of Pride, Bria took some great photos, including a few of a handsome young man named Franklin: take a look.

There should also be one parade pic in this slideshow of some recent photos of said Franklin:

Amazed

You're probably not checking my blog for the latest updates on Egypt...

But just in case, here's live video:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

http://www.youtube.com/aljazeeraenglish is also excellent, but I don't think I can embed it.

And here are Obama's remarks:


New York Times live blog also very good.