Tag Archives: Academia

News

University of Kentucky pays $125,000 to settle anti-Christian discrimination suit

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From the radically leftist Washington Post. (H/T Evolution News)

Excerpt:

An astronomy professor who sued the University of Kentucky after claiming he lost out on a top job because of his Christian beliefs reached a settlement Tuesday with the school.

The university agreed to pay $125,000 to Martin Gaskell in exchange for dropping a federal religious discrimination suit he filed in Lexington in 2009. A trial was set for next month.

Gaskell claimed he was passed over to be director of UK’s MacAdam Student Observatory because of his religion and statements that were perceived to be critical of evolution.

Court records showed Gaskell was a front-runner for the job, but some professors called him “something close to a creationist” and “potentially evangelical” in interoffice e-mails to other university scientists.

“We never thought from the start that everybody at UK was some sort of anti-religious bigot,” said Frank Manion, Gaskell’s attorney. “However, what I do think this case disclosed is a kind of endemic, almost knee-jerk reaction in academia towards people, especially scientists, of a strong religious faith.”

A statement from University of Kentucky counsel Barbara Jones Tuesday said the school’s “hiring processes were and are fundamentally sound and were followed in this case.” The university does not admit any wrongdoing.

[…]After applying for the job in 2007, Gaskell said he learned from a friend at UK that professors had discussed his purported religious views. E-mails turned over as evidence in the case showed that university scientists wondered if Gaskell’s faith would interfere with the job, which included public outreach and education.

One astrophysics professor at UK told department chair Michael Cavagnero in an e-mail that hiring Gaskell would be a “huge public relations mistake.”

[…]Manion said documents and e-mail communications turned over by UK in the case showed strong evidence of religious bias, including a professor who surmised that Gaskell was “potentially evangelical.”

“The fact that somebody could say that without realizing the implications, speaks volumes,” Manion said. “Because all you have to do is substitute any other label – potentially Jewish, potentially Muslim. Nobody would say that.”

I think we should definitely de-fund these universities, put the money into the hands of taxpayers, and let the taxpayers decide where to send their children to college – or WHETHER to send their children to college.

News

Socialist Hugo Chavez begins to use his new dictatorial powers

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Are Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez very different?
Are Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez very different?

In Venezuela, Obama’s buddy Chavez is enjoying his new decree powers.

Excerpt:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez made his first use of new decree powers on Sunday to create a $2.3 billion fund for reconstruction after widespread flooding that left more than 130,000 people homeless.

The South American OPEC member nation’s socialist leader has infuriated opposition parties and been criticized as a dictator for assuming fast-track powers for the next 18 months that will enable him to rule by decree and bypass parliament.

Chavez has justified the measure as necessary to enable the government to respond to recent torrential rains that swept away houses, smashed bridges and roads, and also killed around 40 people in the nation of 29 million.

But critics say the president has cynically exploited the disaster as an excuse to outwit opposition parties who were due to take a larger share of seats — 40 percent — in the incoming National Assembly which convenes on January 5.

The problem with socialists is that they think that the people who actually make money will just keep on making money even though the government keeps confiscating a larger and larger share of it. Think about it. People on the left in academia, in government, or in the voluntary poor (single mothers, drug addicts) are basically subsisting by confiscating the wealth produced by others in business who have to start and run businesses or work in those businesses. They actually have contempt for people who take risks and take responsibility, because they think that those people are “stupid”.

What you have is one group of people with a tenuous grasp on reality who are acting as parasites on an increasingly over-taxed and over-regulated host. Eventually, the host gives up working – why work if you are constantly being abused by taxes and regulations? And that is why the policies of Obama and Chavez lead to catastrophes like North Korea and Zimbabwe. They don’t understand that their ability to spend money depends on the very people they hate the most, and understand the least.

I actually had one woman in academia recently telling me how she deserved to receive more money from businesses and workers to support her Ph.D studies in a non-engineering and non-scientific field. She also thought that the Comedy Channel was more reliable than Fox News. I produced two studies from UCLA and Harvard showing that Fox News was dead center in terms of news bias. I produced a survey showing that mainstream journalists donate almost exclusively to Democrats. She produced no evidence, but urged me to show more “critical thinking”. “Critical thinking” is the word that people on the left use to mean uncritical acceptance of whatever counter-factual assertions their inexperienced professors tell them about the world. They have to believe in these high-minded delusions – otherwise they cannot get research money, scholarships, or degrees. That is called “critical thinking”. And they want you to pay more to support them in their “critical thinking” so that they can have money to research how up is down, left is right, and hot is cold.

News

Is global warming the secular leftist equivalent of flat-earthism?

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Either you say that this is global warming, or you get no research money and no Ph.D.
Either you say that this is global warming, or you get no research money and no Ph.D.

Here’s the latest on the 20 inches of global warming being dumped on the global warming alarmists on the secular leftist East coast.

Excerpt:

The U.S. East Coast faces a second day of travel disruption after snowstorms blanketed cities from New York to Boston, closing airports and halting trains with waist-high drifts and blinding winds.

New York City’s Central Park had 20 inches (51 centimeters) of snow by 8 a.m., the most for the month since 1948, as the storm’s center shifted north and east, the National Weather Service said. Snowfall in the city eased by daybreak while the agency issued blizzard warnings for Boston and into Maine.

More than 5,000 flights were canceled in the region since yesterday as airports closed. John F. Kennedy International will reopen at 6 p.m., while resumption times for LaGuardia Airport in New York and New Jersey’s Newark Liberty are undetermined, according to the Federal Aviation Administration’s website.

“It is horrendous in the New York City area,” Tom Kines, a meteorologist at State College, Pennsylvania-based AccuWeather Inc., said by telephone. “This is about as bad as it gets. There may have been storms that equaled this, but it doesn’t get much worse than this. To get this much snow with the amount of wind that is accompanying it, that is devastating.”

And it’s happening in Moscow, too.

This isn’t a one-off thing, the same thing happened last year.

What is annoying to me is that people are making entire academic careers based on studying Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny using expensive scientific equipment paid for by taxpayers (who don’t share their beliefs in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny).

I understand that global warming advocates are concerned about implementing communism and and coerced abortions, but why don’t they just come out and advocate for communism and coerced abortions, and stop inventing fairy tales to deceive the public at taxpayer expense. You can have your delusions and your deluded research programs where you hide the decline, but please pay for it with your own money, and keep your hands off of my children’s worldviews.

The problem with the left in academia is that there is no room for critical thinking. If you oppose the idea that people in academia and government should be able to extract wealth from the productive proivate sector to fund their research into self-serving delusions, then you get bad grades, no research money, and no Ph.D. That’s called “critical thinking” by the way. By which they mean coerced uncritical credulity.