Memorial Day, again...

OK, once again it's Memorial Day, the day when we "honor" and "thank" those who have lost their lives in our many military adventures over the years.  And, as usual, I post a photo of my Mom and Dad, getting married during World War II.

WWII may or may not have been a war that we entered for good reasons.  After all, the event that put us in the game, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, was an attack on an American colonial outpost in the Pacific, not on America itself.  But I'll leave that discussion, if I may, for another time.

If we grant ourselves WWII, that still leaves numerous activities that are far more easily labeled "wars of choice": Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, the first Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq...  In every case, many many lives and much resources could have been saved if our involvements in these places had been carried out differently. In some cases, if not all or at least most, we are looking at war crimes and crimes against humanity.  Do we really want to keep sending people to be maimed or die while committing such crimes, crimes ordered by people who who are taking no risk themselves since they don't recognize the jurisdiction of the relevant international judicial bodies?

It just seems to me that rather than "honoring" and "thanking" our fallen, we should be apologizing to them and their families and friends, telling them we are sorry that we have done this to them.  And then we should stop doing it.

A simple (?) question

I just gave the students in my summer Introduction to Anthropology class a "practice test" to make sure they are familiar with Blackboard, which I use for online testing, communicating, and discussing things with students between our class sessions.  One of the questions was:

Which is the most valid statement regarding human evolution?

1. Humans evolved from chimpanzees.
2.  Humans evolved from theropod dinosaurs.
3. Humans evolved from lobe-finned fishes.
4. Humans evolved from bats.

Interestingly, 100% of the students answered (1), chimpanzees.  The correct answer is (3), lobe-finned fishes.  Humans did not evolve from chimpanzees, humans and chimpanzees both evolved from a common ancestor that was neither a human nor a chimpanzee.  And this common ancestor, like all tetrapods, evolved from lobe-finned fishes.

Students didn't lose any points over this, but it is instructive. This is a sort of snapshot of the level of general awareness and understanding of evolution that people have, if they are forced to think about it.  I wonder what would have been the result if I had included a choice like "Humans evolved from Adam and Eve, who were created in the Garden of Eden some 6,000 years ago."

Happy Mother's Day!

I found this photo of my Mom and me, taken in August 1950.  We were living in a little cottage in the pass over South Mountain, Washington County, Maryland, just off US 40.  Now, Interstate 70 also goes over the same pass. The house was less than half a mile from the Appalachian Trail.

Pete Seeger's birthday!

A clip from a 1994 interview with Bill Moyers:

End of semester: The good

This is Kiersten Bradley and me, after our reception Friday for our anthropology graduates. Kiersten is our Outstanding Anthropology Graduate for 2012-13, and after doing way more linguistics-related credit hours (12) with me than anyone probably should, she's off to graduate school at the University of Colorado/Boulder in.... Linguistics!

In addition to our standard introduction to Linguistic Anthropology, Kiersten took a course on American English dialects, and also two independent studies.  In one she explored the evolution of the concept of  linguistic relativity (aka the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis).

In the second she began getting a handle on phonological analysis by collecting data from Korean speakers, transcribing, and looking for the sound patterns.  Although she may not know it yet, the most valuable lesson she might have taken away from this exercise is that analyzing a language is hard, and almost never goes smoothly. 

Anyway, over the years I've managed to send a small handful of students to graduate school, and it's always gratifying to be a tiny part of the stream of linguistic anthropology that began with Franz Boas, ran through my mentor, MJ Hardman, and, modestly, on through me.  So, MJ, meet Kiersten, your newest grand-student.

The terrorism of the Homeland

Driving to work this morning, I listened to Diane Rehm on NPR. Some guests were contrasting the "terrorism" committed in Boston with the "industrial accident" in West, Texas.

I'm sorry, but the explosion in West, which killed 14 people and injured a couple of hundred, is an example of state-sponsored terrorism against the American people.  This is the terrorism of the capitalist mode of production, aided and abetted by sociopaths in government who don't believe in regulating potentially dangerous industries or in safe zoning laws to ensure that people aren't living and working in harm's way of these facilities.

We are in far more danger from this type of home-grown, structurally pervasive terrorism than we are from any Islamic jihadists.

I agree with Bill Maher

Bill Maher said this on "Real Time" Friday night (April 12), and I agree:

"This is the problem with the gun debate is that it’s a constant center-right debate. There’s no left in this debate. Everyone on the left is so afraid to say what should be said which is the Second Amendment is bullshit. Why doesn’t anyone go at the core of it?"

Why indeed? This amendment is an anachronism. The firearms we have today can shoot more bullets in one second than people in those days could fire in five minutes. But that's not the main issue. The crucial point is that this amendment was added to the Constitution to satisfy white southern slaveowners, who wanted to be sure of having their arms handy in case of slave revolts. And, it was written at a time when the US, in its fledgling state, had no serious standing army. When the Framers wrote of a "well-regulated militia," they weren't thinking about whackjobs like Ted Nugent leading a force of white supremacists against imaginary black helicopters sent from Washington to enslave them.