Shorter Howard Schultz: "I'd ask my baristas to keep armed gun nuts out of Starbucks, but I'm afraid they'd get shot" http://t.co/f2OFMvpW7H
— billmon (@billmon1) September 18, 2013
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What’s on the agenda in your neck of the woods?
Anne Laurie has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2009.
This post is in: Excellent Links, Gun nuts, Open Threads
Shorter Howard Schultz: "I'd ask my baristas to keep armed gun nuts out of Starbucks, but I'm afraid they'd get shot" http://t.co/f2OFMvpW7H
— billmon (@billmon1) September 18, 2013
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What’s on the agenda in your neck of the woods?
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Don't Mourn, Organize, Education
I should probably put a trigger warning on this, for anyone who’s ever worried about dying alone because they’re too proud to ask for help. Via commentor Manyakitty, Daniel Kovalik, senior associate general counsel of the United Steelworkers union, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
On Sept. 1, Margaret Mary Vojtko, an adjunct professor who had taught French at Duquesne University for 25 years, passed away at the age of 83. She died as the result of a massive heart attack she suffered two weeks before. As it turned out, I may have been the last person she talked to.
On Aug. 16, I received a call from a very upset Margaret Mary. She told me that she was under an incredible amount of stress. She was receiving radiation therapy for the cancer that had just returned to her, she was living nearly homeless because she could not afford the upkeep on her home, which was literally falling in on itself, and now, she explained, she had received another indignity — a letter from Adult Protective Services telling her that someone had referred her case to them saying that she needed assistance in taking care of herself. The letter said that if she did not meet with the caseworker the following Monday, her case would be turned over to Orphans’ Court.
For a proud professional like Margaret Mary, this was the last straw; she was mortified…
While adjuncts at Duquesne overwhelmingly voted to join the United Steelworkers union a year ago, Duquesne has fought unionization, claiming that it should have a religious exemption. Duquesne has claimed that the unionization of adjuncts like Margaret Mary would somehow interfere with its mission to inculcate Catholic values among its students…
As amazing as it sounds, Margaret Mary, a 25-year professor, was not making ends meet. Even during the best of times, when she was teaching three classes a semester and two during the summer, she was not even clearing $25,000 a year, and she received absolutely no health care benefits. Compare this to the salary of Duquesne’s president, who makes more than $700,000 with full benefits…
According to the student newspaper, Duquesne University Chaplain and Director of Campus Ministry Daniel Walsh has contested the details of Kovalik’s “alternative agenda“.
In a just world, a proud person like Professor Vojtko would not have been reduced to choosing between medical treatment and self-sufficiency. In this world, let me just remind everyone: It’s a mitzvah (or in the Catholic tradition, a minor gift of virtue) to ask for help when you need it, even if you think “nobody wants to know”.
The Way We Live Now: “Death of An Adjunct”Post + Comments (85)
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., KULCHA!, Open Threads
Hey, look, news in the NYTimes Dealbook that doesn’t make me want to hang someone:
Just over 10 years ago, the private equity mogul Glenn Hutchins was on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard. With his 25th Harvard College reunion near, he was thinking about how to put some of his wealth to good use.
One afternoon, clad in a T-shirt and board shorts, he stopped at an old whaling chapel, where Henry Louis Gates Jr., the prominent professor of African and African-American studies at Harvard, was leading a symposium….
Since then, Mr. Hutchins has strengthened his connection to Mr. Gates and the Harvard program. Their bond will become stronger on Wednesday, when Mr. Hutchins is expected to announce a gift of more than $15 million to create the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research, solidifying Harvard’s program as one of the top in its field…
The men took Mr. Hutchins’s nonagenarian mother to the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington last month. Afterward, Professor Gates took Mr. Hutchins’s younger son to a meeting with President Obama. The financier’s older son took a class with the professor last school year, though the son concluded that while Professor Gates was “entertaining,” the course’s other leader, Professor Lawrence D. Bobo, was “really smart.”…
Now their work and Mr. Hutchins’s money will create the Hutchins Center, named at the insistence of Professor Gates. It will unite nine entities, including the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research, the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute and the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art.
All will be housed in a building on Harvard Square with a street front facade designed by David Adjaye, the prominent Ghanian-British architect, chosen at Professor Gates’s urging…
The new institute will hold a ceremony next month honoring individuals for their contributions to African and African-American studies, including Steven Spielberg, the director; Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court justice; Representative John Lewis, the civil rights veteran; and David Stern, the departing commissioner of the National Basketball Association. (It helps that Mr. Hutchins is a part owner of the Boston Celtics.)…
Yeah, it might be asked: Why Harvard, not Howard? But then, Harvard (and Boston) could certainly use a Big Serious Academic Statement that African & African-American studies are important, “real” fields of study, not just popcult timekillers for trustafarians and aspiring tokens. (And the whole process has undoubtably given Larry Summers another big sad, too.)
This post is in: Excellent Links, Gun nuts, Open Threads
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Philip Bump, at the AtlanticWire:
The next mass shooting will take place on February 12, 2014, in Spokane, Washington. It will be committed by an emotionally disturbed, 38 year-old white man who will kill seven people and wound six more at a place he used to work using a semi-automatic handgun he purchased legally in the state.
That, at least, is what a look at the data on past such shootings might indicate. We’ll say at the outset: Every assertion in the first paragraph is a function of probability, not fact. The next mass shooting — which will happen somewhere, sometime — will almost certainly not be in that place at that time. But a look at the historic data on such killings, compiled and shared by Mother Jones magazine, makes each of those predictions defensible….
Our sincere hope is that every prediction we made is wrong because no mass killings should happen again. The probability of that happening is not statistically significant.
This post is in: Because of wow., Excellent Links, Science & Technology
Carl Zimmer, in the NYTimes, discusses the surprising commonness of genetic chimeras:
… [S]cientists are discovering that — to a surprising degree — we contain genetic multitudes. Not long ago, researchers had thought it was rare for the cells in a single healthy person to differ genetically in a significant way. But scientists are finding that it’s quite common for an individual to have multiple genomes. Some people, for example, have groups of cells with mutations that are not found in the rest of the body. Some have genomes that came from other people.
“There have been whispers in the matrix about this for years, even decades, but only in a very hypothetical sense,” said Alexander Urban, a geneticist at Stanford University. Even three years ago, suggesting that there was widespread genetic variation in a single body would have been met with skepticism, he said. “You would have just run against the wall.”
But a series of recent papers by Dr. Urban and others has demonstrated that those whispers were not just hypothetical. The variation in the genomes found in a single person is too large to be ignored. “We now know it’s there,” Dr. Urban said. “Now we’re mapping this new continent.” …
Chimerism, as such conditions came to be known, seemed for many years to be a rarity. But “it can be commoner than we realized,” said Dr. Linda Randolph, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles who is an author of a review of chimerism published in The American Journal of Medical Genetics in July.
Twins can end up with a mixed supply of blood when they get nutrients in the womb through the same set of blood vessels. In other cases, two fertilized eggs may fuse together. These so-called embryonic chimeras may go through life blissfully unaware of their origins.
One woman discovered she was a chimera as late as age 52. In need of a kidney transplant, she was tested so that she might find a match. The results indicated that she was not the mother of two of her three biological children. It turned out that she had originated from two genomes. One genome gave rise to her blood and some of her eggs; other eggs carried a separate genome.
Women can also gain genomes from their children. After a baby is born, it may leave some fetal cells behind in its mother’s body, where they can travel to different organs and be absorbed into those tissues. “It’s pretty likely that any woman who has been pregnant is a chimera,” Dr. Randolph said.
As scientists begin to search for chimeras systematically — rather than waiting for them to turn up in puzzling medical tests — they’re finding them in a remarkably high fraction of people. In 2012, Canadian scientists performed autopsies on the brains of 59 women. They found neurons with Y chromosomes in 63 percent of them. The neurons likely developed from cells originating in their sons…
Much more at the link. I do believe that “the universe is not only stranger than we know, it is stranger than we can know”, but there’s such joy in prying new info-bits loose from the tangles of the Great Web of Being!
This post is in: Gun nuts, Open Threads, Assholes
Per Dave Weigel, tomorrow’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on stand-your-ground laws (which would have given Rep. Louie Gohmert a chance to question Trayvon Martin’s mother) have been postponed due to the Navy Yard shooting.
This post is in: Music, Open Threads, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome
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Commentor Raven linked to this the other night, and it just seemed appropriate.
Besides mourning, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Monday Evening Open Thread: Trouble Every DayPost + Comments (73)