harmonicminer

3.5 weeks old, and smiling at the world already. Obviously, God has already shared with her the results of the next presidential election, and things are about to change. Hope and change. That’s the ticket.

I’m hoping for change that my grandchild will get to enjoy as she grows up.

And you thought times were tough in the cities.

I thought this was just entertaining fiction until I read this.

The reverse lottery is when you suddenly have a large expense you didn’t plan for, and one that was exceedingly unlikely, but you’re the lucky one who “won” it anyway.

In my case, it’s my Toyota Prius.  It’s a 2005 model with a bit over 200,000 miles on it.  Toyota claims that “amost none” of its hybrid battery systems has failed.   So I guess you can place me in the “almost none” category.  Against all odds, the hybrid system/battery pack that powers the electric motor, and is charged by the gas motor, has failed.

Toyota says more Prius owners have been hit by lightning.  I’m thinking that maybe a lightning strike would give my battery pack a face-lift and make it work again.  But apparently not.

Toyota wants $4500 to replace the battery pack/hybrid system.  Hah.  On a car with that many miles on it, which is starting to use oil?  Where replacing the gas engine would be another $5000 or so?  Not likely….

So if I can’t find a Prius battery on the used market (maybe one that was in a front end collision?), I’ll be looking for another car, quite soon.  Like yesterday.

Anybody got any good ideas?

It seems that the National Labor Relations Board is now in the business of judging whether Christian colleges and universities are sufficiently serious about their Christian commitment to warrant the full protections of religious liberty from the First Amendment’s free exercise clause.  The matter in question is whether the NLRB can force Christian institutions of higher learning to accept unionization similar to that which afflicts state and secular private schools, and enforce other “non-discrimination” aspects of federal labor law (e.g, can Christian institutions be forced to hire or retain employees who are clearly living at variance with Christian moral expectations?).

According to Patrick J. Reilly, in Are Catholic Colleges Catholic Enough? – WSJ.com, the case hinges

on the Supreme Court’s ruling in NLRB v. The Catholic Bishop of Chicago, et al. (1979), which found that the NLRB had violated the First Amendment’s free exercise clause by requiring Catholic schools to comply with federal labor laws, thereby possibly interfering with religious decision-making. But that ruling didn’t stop the NLRB from claiming authority over most Catholic colleges and universities by arguing that Catholic Bishop protects only “church-controlled” institutions that are “substantially religious,” a phrase taken from Chief Justice Warren Burger’s majority opinion in the case. Many of the nation’s 224 Catholic colleges and universities are legally independent of the Catholic bishops or the religious orders that founded them.

So the NLRB has put itself in the position of judging schools’ religious character, and it has concluded over the years that many Catholic institutions are inconsistent in their application of Catholic principles to teaching, course requirements, campus life and faculty hiring. It’s a serious overreach by the government, though many Catholics would agree that colleges and universities often demonstrate inconsistent religious observation.

The erosion of religious identity in Catholic higher education over the past 50 years has been marked by theological dissent, hostility toward the bishops, and increasingly liberal campus-life arrangements such as co-ed dorms and lax visitation rules. These issues fueled the 2009 confrontation at Notre Dame, for example, when pro-life Catholics objected to the school honoring President Barack Obama.

The temptation to please the world is always there in Christian higher education.   Many initiatives undertaken by ostensibly Christian universities seem to be very similar to those that get excited attention at secular schools, but there are things that Christian higher ed talks about less and less (abortion-on-demand, for example) while it holds countless workshops on hot topics like human sex trafficking (as if there was something controversial about it, as if there was someone, somewhere, who thought it was a good thing).

Catholic educators are now awaiting the result of Manhattan College’s appeal to the NLRB regulators in Washington. Their appeal relies heavily on an argument put forward in 1986 by future Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Writing for half the members of an evenly divided D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Breyer argued that the NLRB had contravened the Catholic Bishop ruling by establishing a “substantial religious character” test to determine whether a college meets sectarian standards.

The D.C. Circuit has formally embraced Justice Breyer’s reasoning twice over the past decade, instructing the NLRB to stop interfering with any college or university that “holds itself out to students, faculty and community as providing a religious educational environment.” In ruling against St. Xavier University and Manhattan College, NLRB regional staff seem to have ignored that instruction.

Protestant and evangelical Christian colleges and universities, take note: the candidate of hope and change you helped elect, possibly as part of your diversity initiatives, has his sights set on making you follow the same federal employment rules as any other school.  You may be forced to hire people who do not “model the Christian life” for students…  unless, of course, your notion of the Christian life has recently undergone radical revision.

Here’s an article from Heather McDonald in National Review:

Pepper-Spraying Taxpayers

As protesters festively (oops! I mean “heroically”) rally on college quads across California in the wake of the gratuitous macing of a dozen Occupy Wall Street wannabes at University of California–Davis last Friday, UC Berkeley’s Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion declared that the rising tuition at California’s public universities is giving him “heartburn.” It should, since Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion Gibor Basri and his fellow diversity bureaucrats are a large cause of those skyrocketing college fees, not just in California but nationally.

Yep. Given that the real costs and budget allocations are often pretty opaque even to university “insiders” like faculty, it’s pretty hard to know just how much the essentially leftist political goal of diversity is costing higher education under the guise of fairness, or openness, or whatever. I suppose it’s different in different places. But private schools certainly have their share of this problem, too.

This paragraph is especially on point:

The Big Lie of the campus diversity industry has been that without constant monitoring by diversity bureaucrats, faculty and other administrators would discriminate against minority and female professors and students. In fact, anyone who has spent a day inside a university knows that the exact opposite is demonstrably the case: Hundreds of thousands of hours and dollars are wasted each year in the futile pursuit of the same inadequate pool of remotely qualified underrepresented minority and female applicants that every other campus in the country is chasing with as much desperate zeal. The hiring process has been thoroughly corrupted. Faculty applicants are brought onto campus who have no chance of being hired, either because the hiring committee incorrectly assumed from their names or résumés that they were the right sort of minority (East Asians don’t count) for a position set aside for just such a minority, or because, although they were the right sort of minority, their qualifications were so low that their only purpose in being interviewed was to fill an outreach quota.

The whole thing is worth reading. Click the link at the top.

One thing I have to point out, in all the diversity talk: I haven’t heard any real concern expressed over the disproportionate female tilted gender balance of incoming students. It’s 60/40 female to male in lots of universities, and 55/45 almost everywhere else.

I haven’t heard anything about affirmative action for admissions of white male students. But numerically speaking, in the quota-think of the left, such a thing is surely needed.

But maybe that time will come.

Or not.

It’s much more fun to prattle on about white male privilege than to wonder why more white males aren’t in the university to hear themselves being accused of being white males.