Musings from Brian J. Noggle

When you take a religious educational institution and put a layman in charge, you end up with a secular institution. Next case in point: Cardinal Stritch University:

Cardinal Stritch University has chosen Helen C. Sobehart, associate provost and associate vice president at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, to succeed Sister Mary Lea Schneider as its president, Stritch officials announced Tuesday.

Schneider, who announced her retirement last spring, will step down in June after leading the Franciscan university for 17 years. Sobehart, 60, will be Stritch’s first lay president since it was established in 1937.

Think I’m kidding? Check out the money quote:

“Reverencing creation,” she said, “is just another way to say sustainability and being green. And isn’t that the hot topic these days?”

Leaving aside an adminocrat who makes a word reverencing because it’s longer than revering, we’ve got someone who’s going to skip over the secularism and take this formerly Catholic university into the service of the Earth Mother.

Well, I hope he did since his killer got 34.5 years:

A 17-year-old who admitted killing a pizza delivery driver received a sentence of 34 1/2 years in prison Tuesday, according to online state court records.

When a downtown restaurant owner closes his business after 40 years so his location can become part of a parking garage for lofts, we get this blather:

But Jim Cloar, president and CEO of the Downtown St. Louis Partnership, said Dooley’s demise says less about the area than about how tough it is to be in the restaurant business.

Oh, spare us. St. Louis, like most municipalities these days, is eager to implement Central Planning and 10 Year Programs to dictate the local landscape and businessscape and doesn’t care that it has to steamroll individual, independent business owners who have organically grown the sort of businesses and location that the Urban Planners want to beam down from the planet Urtopia.

Vandals break windows at Islamic center here:

Seven windows were broken during the weekend at an Islamic religious center in an apparent act of vandalism, police said. They said it was the third act of vandalism in less than a year at the Imam Hussin Foundation building in the 5400 block of Lansdowne Avenue.

No doubt this will get more play than stories where vandals damage churches or synagogues.

St. Charles judges wonder if police should be armed in court:

Two St. Charles County judges have questioned the safety and fairness of police officers’ bringing their weapons with them to court.

Court security officers and bailiffs are armed, but other officers — some in uniform, and some in plainclothes — routinely enter the courthouse in St. Charles to testify, file paperwork or participate in their own personal cases. If they show their credentials, they are allowed to enter the courthouse armed. At a judges meeting earlier this month, Circuit Judge Jon Cunningham asked whether the policy should be changed.

Twits on the bench alert.

UCLA workers snooped in Spears’ medical records:

UCLA Medical Center is taking steps to fire at least 13 employees and has suspended at least six others for snooping in the confidential medical records of pop star Britney Spears during her recent hospitalization in its psychiatric unit, a person familiar with the matter said Friday.

In addition, six physicians face discipline for peeking at her computerized records, the person said.

Questioned about the breaches, officials acknowledged that it was not the first time UCLA had disciplined workers for looking at Spears’ records. Several were caught prying into records after Spears gave birth to her first son, Sean Preston, in September 2005 at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital, officials said. Some were fired.

Forget the anti-totalitarianist spin of central data repositories for a moment, and reflect on the common basics of nosy human nature. When you build these databases, you make it possible for common people who have some access to it for real purposes to access a bunch of it for their own prurient interest.

It’s an unforeseen consequence, no doubt, of actions our legislators and leaders take. The consequences, like most, are only unseen by the actual people tasked with Doing Something! but are quite obvious to those of us who know the nature of the human animal.

The first paragraph of a story in the San Francisco Chronicle (linked on the site’s home page as THE FORGOTTEN WAR, as though the Iraq War has slipped anyone’s mind), sort of supports one of the reasons for going to war:

The war in Iraq has gone on for five years now, but there is almost no sign of it in the Bay Area, a region where 7 million people live.

Well, that was sort of the point of the flypaper strategy, wasn’t it?

The rest of the piece is a creative writing assignment about how nobody’s protesting or the nation isn’t rising up or something. It does, however, feature this wonderful simile:

Yet the war is a presence in the Bay Area, like an underground river, like a storm just off the coast, like a deadly illness that will not go away.

But deadly illnesses don’t go away until, I dunno, you die.

Sounds like staff writer Carl Nolte is really saying Death to America, ainna?

I guess you could defend him by saying he’s a bad writer.

P.S. I did include your name, Mr. Nolte, so you’d catch this mockery next time you google yourself. Consider yourself mocked!

When St. Louis County Executive Charles Dooley removed the sales tax increase to support Metro, the local mass transit agency, from the upcoming election ballot, here’s the kind of shenanigans he wants you to forget before he tries again to convince you to pay more to support more such shenanigans:

As its lawsuit against a team of contractors dragged for years, the Metro transit agency saw its legal bills balloon — at times topping $1 million per month.

Among the bills Metro paid was a $624-a-night hotel room, and group dinners at high-end restaurants that topped $300.

The agency covered more than $30,000 in lodging expenses for one of its law firms, including two rooms at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Clayton that the firm used as a satellite office during the trial.

Agency leaders even paid out about $9,000 on a typo. That was the cost for a lawyer who billed for 76.9 hours of work — in one day.

The costs during the three-year legal battle soared to more than $21 million — shattering Metro’s own estimates of how much it would pay for the case. The Post-Dispatch reviewed many of the bills generated by the lawsuit.

The lawsuit, as you recall, was because Metro was shocked and embarrassed by how much cost overrun occurred on the recent extension of the light rail system. Funny, though, that Metro, with its seasoned professionals in mass transit and government teat-sucking, was astonished to discover the cost overruns whereas those of us who bash the government and its teat suckers were far less surprised that hundreds of millions of dollars disappeared into the ether.

Mo. politicians clash over photo IDs:

Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan tells congressional lawmakers that requiring photo IDs for voters won’t do much to stop voter fraud.

She says photo identification only helps in rare cases when someone tries to impersonate another voter.

The Democrat claims a photo ID requirement would do more harm by disenfranchising elderly and poor voters who lack proper ID cards.

Considering how many dead people and underage voters apparently vote in Missouri (story), Robin Carnahan seems to imply that the state of Missouri, in which she is supposed to be Secretary of State but instead seems to have the title of Democrat Party Mole, has already issued photo identification to that same set of the “population,” and that Mickey Mouse would only be caught when he tried to vote as George Washington.

Issuing photo IDs to the dead, to toddlers, and to people whose names match celebrities or cartoon character, I have to admit, seems to be a bigger problem than mere voter fraud.

Kevin Murphy reflects upon the Kirkwood shootings and sees beyond the handy racial template:

Kirkwood is suffering from a clash of aesthetics and has for a long time. All the big fights for the last 30 years (or more, I can only speak personally to 30 years) have all been over aesthetics. Usually its couched in terms of the effect on neighborhoods and property values but the majority of Kirkwood wants to keep the city a place of high end residential properties (nothing wrong with that) and if that limits what you do with your property, so be it. And that’s when the fighting begins – when you do something with your property that goes against the Kirkwood aesthetic. Tear down an old house to put up a new house – fine if the old house is one of the many old small ones and the new one fits in with the look and feel of Kirkwood. Tear down a charmer to put up a McMansion – Kirkwood explodes in red yard signs “Protect Historic Kirkwood”. Tear down a house to put in a parking lot – don’t even think about it Baptists.

Meachem Park has been thoroughly reconstructed since it’s annexation from Kirkwood. Law and order, and all that that entails, has been provided. And if the order that is imposed doesn’t conform to the locals desires, it does to the wider Kirkwood aesthetic. And no amount of jawboning about race, no amount of representation on the city council will change that.

Yes, but the handy racial template will keep the power-accumulating and power-abusing government officials from having to reflect on what they do that might make someone lash out violently. So they can go on, after the bread and circuses of racial harmony, stepping on the individual citizens.