Meanderings, 11 May 2024
Good morning from Kris and me to you!
Photo by Adrian Swancar on Unsplash
It was a normal end to the school day in late April for Acie Holland III, an eighth grader at Glen Hills Middle School in Glendale, Wisconsin.
He followed his routine and got on the school bus to go home. The bus driver joked with students, Holland said, before putting on her headphones.
Then things took a sudden turn.
From his seat past the middle of the bus, Holland said the bus driver looked a little sick or tired and her head dropped. He knew something was wrong when she continued to press the gas and missed a street.
“She turned the corner and there’s another street that we usually turn on. She pressed the gas and went past the corner, and I looked up,” Holland told CNN.
He walked to the front of the bus to check on her, but she didn’t respond, he said. She had temporarily lost consciousness and the bus was veering into oncoming traffic. Holland rushed to move her foot off of the gas. He said he applied the brakes and safely parked the bus.
“I wasn’t really scared, I was just trying to get the bus to stop,” he said.
After stopping the bus, Holland contacted 911 and his grandmother, who is a nurse assistant. He also instructed the other 13-15 students on board to call their families.
“Everybody was just like, ‘thank you’ because I saved their life,” said Holland, who hopes to one day own a barber shop or mechanic shop.
This just might be genetic — so true of us, and I write this just after a 15 minute nap:
Ever woken up from a nap and felt more tired? Or so discombobulated you forgot which planet you were on?
There's a term for that sleepy, almost-drunk feeling – it's called sleep inertia, says Dr. Seema Khosla, a sleep medicine physician and the host of Talking Sleep, a podcast from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. It's a sign you're overshooting your napping mark. It can slow you down in the short term and potentially sabotage your nighttime sleep in the long run.
To avoid that, you'll need to keep your naps "consistent, early and brief," says Jade Wu, a sleep medicine specialist and the author of the book Hello Sleep.
Administrative bloat — will never end because administrators make the decisions:
Last month, the Pomona College economist Gary N. Smith calculated that the number of tenured and tenure-track professors at his school declined from 1990 to 2022, while the number of administrators nearly sextupled in that period. “Happily, there is a simple solution,” Smith wrote in a droll Washington Post column. In the tradition of Jonathan Swift, his modest proposal called to get rid of all faculty and students at Pomona so that the college could fulfill its destiny as an institution run by and for nonteaching bureaucrats. At the very least, he said, “the elimination of professors and students would greatly improve most colleges’ financial position.”
Bureaucratic bloat has siphoned power away from instructors and researchers.
Last month, the Pomona College economist Gary N. Smith calculated that the number of tenured and tenure-track professors at his school declined from 1990 to 2022, while the number of administrators nearly sextupled in that period. “Happily, there is a simple solution,” Smith wrote in a droll Washington Post column. In the tradition of Jonathan Swift, his modest proposal called to get rid of all faculty and students at Pomona so that the college could fulfill its destiny as an institution run by and for nonteaching bureaucrats. At the very least, he said, “the elimination of professors and students would greatly improve most colleges’ financial position.”
Administrative growth isn’t unique to Pomona. In 2014, the political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg published The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, in which he bemoaned the multi-decade expansion of “administrative blight.” From the early 1990s to 2009, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew 10 times faster than tenured-faculty positions, according to Department of Education data. Although administrative positions grew especially quickly at private universities and colleges, public institutions are not immune to the phenomenon. In the University of California system, the number of managers and senior professionals swelled by 60 percent from 2004 to 2014.
How and why did this happen? Some of this growth reflects benign, and perhaps positive, changes to U.S. higher education. More students are applying to college today, and their needs are more diverse than those of previous classes. Today’s students have more documented mental-health challenges. They take out more student loans. Expanded college-sports participation requires more athletic staff. Increased federal regulations require new departments, such as disability offices and quasi-legal investigation teams for sexual-assault complaints. As the modern college has become more complex and multifarious, there are simply more jobs to do. And the need to raise money to pay for those jobs requires larger advancement and alumni-relations offices—meaning even more administration.
But many of these jobs have a reputation for producing little outside of meeting invites. “I often ask myself, What do these people actually do?,” Ginsberg told me last week. “I think they spend much of their day living in an alternate universe called Meeting World. I think if you took every third person with vice associate or assistant in their title, and they disappeared, nobody would notice.”
Bishop Todd Hunter on the wheat and tares for our time — be careful what you wish for:
In Jesus’ astute observation, the problem is everywhere: Wheat and tares grow together, sheep and goats stand next to each other in every aspect of life. If we believe Jesus, this mix is not going away: wheat and tares with sheep and goats are going to exist together until the climactic moment in which God—not fallen human leaders—insists on creation once again being what God intended.
As we see in the life of Jesus, God’s kingdom does not come through coercion. It comes only by hearing and saying yes to Jesus’ invitation: Come follow me. In seeking coercive earthly power, the Church gives up her truest and most powerful culture-making tool: being a sign, foretaste, and instrument of God’s world-healing love. When the Church tries to force the rule of God on a person or nation, we may temporarily get what we want, but we will no longer be the Church, the body of Christ.
A Christian nation is a fantasy. It is snake oil sold by those who are in error about God and how he works. Or worse, the idea comes from political and religious leaders seeking personal power by manipulating the Church with the promise that “I’ll put you back into your rightful place of social influence and political power.”
That is an old, false and losing ideal.
Electric vehicles are sometimes called "zero-emission vehicles." But the batteries that go into them are not zero-emission at all. In fact, making those batteries takes a lot of (mostly-not-clean) energy and hurts the environment in other ways, a fact that's become common knowledge after widespread media coverage.
Does that environmental damage cancel out the green benefits of giving up gasoline? Or, as Jennifer Sousie, who owns a Nissan Leaf, put it: "Does the manufacturing and ultimate disposal of the batteries completely negate all the good that the no-emission aspect of my car does?"
The answer is no. Here's why.
With all that's required to mine and process minerals — from giant diesel trucks to fossil-fuel-powered refineries — EV battery production has a significant carbon footprint. As a result, building an electric vehicle does more damage to the climate than building a gas car does.
But the gas car starts to catch up as soon as it goes its first mile.
If you look at the climate impact of building and using a vehicle – something called a "lifecycle analysis" – study after study has found a clear benefit to EVs. The size of the benefit varies – by vehicle, the source of the electricity it runs on, and a host of other factors – but the overall trend is obvious.
"The results were clearer than we thought, actually," says Georg Bieker, with the International Council on Clean Transportation, who authored one of those reports. (This is the group that busted Volkswagen for cheating on its emissions tests. Holding industries accountable for whether they're actually reducing emissions is the ICCT's whole thing.).
Building a battery is an environmental cost that's paid once. Burning gasoline is a cost that's paid again, and again, and again.
DENVER (KDVR) — A K-9 has been credited with helping Colorado police find a missing 85-year-old woman last week.
According to officials in Greenwood Village, located just outside of Denver, K-9 Mercury has been with their police department for just over a year. He is trained in narcotics detection, as well as searching for people.
On Thursday, Mercury and Officer Austin Speer were called in to help search for an 85-year-old woman who had been missing for two hours.
Mercury was able to lead Speer to the woman, who authorities said was “clinging to a tree down a steep ravine.”
In a video shared by the village on Facebook, Mercury can be seen tracking down the woman and receiving plenty of praise upon finding her.
“Hi, ma’am! This is a friendly dog, he found you. We’re going to get you home, OK?” Speer can be heard saying in the video.
History and contingency belong together:
The history of failure has always inspired me. My own dissertation was written on the failure of the Catholic missionary efforts in England in the 17th century. Maybe it is my kneejerk reaction to the prosperity gospel or being raised in a tradition that traced its roots to the Radical Reformation rather than the Magisterial, state-based Protestant Reformation. In either case, the history of lost causes, the failure of efforts worked for and sacrificed for is a crucial element in my teaching, preaching, and research.
Contingency is one of the most important lessons of history. Things don’t have to turn out the way that they do. This is hard for modern people because we are seduced by that narrative of progress. But things don’t always get better and the things we believe in don’t always win. As a Christian, this shouldn’t surprise me. My religious tradition was born in the context of oppression and minoritization. Jenkins’ observations about learning from Christianities that lacked power and dominance is one that rings true for all the causes I believe in. They aren’t guaranteed to succeed in the ways I dream of, but they are worth investing in and working toward anyway.
Thank you Scott I do appreciate your Saturday meanderings. They are both inspiring and thought provoking.
One of my favorite reads.