Free Republic

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden returned Wednesday to his longtime habit of gilding his academic credentials. Mr. Biden claimed to be an Ivy League professor at the end of a nearly 8-minute, rambling answer to a question from an 18-year-old on what he was doing to appeal to young voters who may favor Sen. Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination. “There’s a lot we can do. When I left the United States Senate, I became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania,” he said, bringing up that fact to claim that his professorship established a bond with college...

Americans remain shaky on the details of climate science even as they have grown increasingly concerned about human activity warming the Earth, according to a national poll by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) that probed the public’s understanding of climate change. The rising alarm is one of the poll’s most dramatic findings. In just five years, the percentage of people calling climate change a “crisis” has jumped from 23 percent to 38 percent. More than 3 in 4 U.S. adults and teenagers alike agree that humans are influencing the climate. The overwhelming majority of them said...

President Trump’s nominee for a seat on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has been vilified in recent days as a racist and misogynist by liberal pundits and organizations -- but conservative allies claim the attacks amount to a smear campaign and a gross distortion of his past writings. The attacks against judicial nominee Steven Menashi picked up last week with a segment by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, in which the host discussed a 2010 article Menashi wrote for the University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law, titled “Ethnonationalism and Liberal Democracy.” Maddow started off her discussion by comparing the term...

America great? Justice James Wilson "It is the BEST form of government which has EVER been offered to the WORLD" He was one of six founding fathers to sign both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. President Washington appointed him to be a Justice on the Supreme Court. His name was James Wilson. Born in Scotland, James Wilson was one of the first to argue against British dominance. In 1774, James Wilson wrote "Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament," reasoning that since the colonies had no representation in Parliament, the Parliament...

A recent study by University of Pennsylvania reseachers Danial J. Hopkins and Samantha Washington found that America is much less racist under President Trump than under race-baiting, whitey-bashing Democrat Barack Obama. The survey concluded that via most measures, white Americans’ expressed anti-Black and anti-Hispanic prejudice declined after the 2016 campaign and election, and we can rule out even small increases in the expression of prejudice.

The New York Times reports that a new study by researchers from Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Pennsylvania scanned 22,484 porn sites and discovered that they are riddled with tracking tools feeding data back to third party tech firms such as Facebook, Google, and Oracle. “Our results indicate tracking is endemic on pornography websites: 93% of pages leak user data to a third-party,” the study concludes. The study scanned the sites in March of 2018 and found that 74 percent of trackers came from Google or its subsidiaries, 24 percent came from Oracle and 10 percent came from...

The remains of a previously unknown pharaoh who reigned more than 3,600 years ago have emerged from the desert sand at South Abydos in Sohag province, about 300 miles south of Cairo... The skeleton of Woseribre Senebkay, who appears to be one of the earliest kings of a forgotten Abydos Dynasty (1650–1600 B.C.) was found by a University of Pennsylvania expedition... It rested in a four-chambered tomb amidst the fragmented debris of his coffin, funerary mask and canopic chest... Senebkay's tomb dates to about 1650 B.C., during Egypt's Second Intermediate Period, when central authority collapsed, giving rise to several small...

The English idiom "highbrow," derived from a physical description of a skull barely able to contain the brain inside of it, comes from a long-held belief in the existence of a link between brain size and intelligence. For more than 200 years, scientists have looked for such an association. Begun using rough measures, such as estimated skull volume or head circumference, the investigation became more sophisticated in the last few decades when MRIs offered a highly accurate accounting of brain volume.Yet the connection has remained hazy and fraught, with many studies failing to account for confounding variables, such as height...

The Ignorance Cultural Revolution continues. The glorious cultural warriors against literacy have triumphed at the University of Pennsylvania where Shakespeare was declared a non-person and purged by what was formerly known as the English Department. Then he was swiftly replaced with an angry black illiterate lesbian racist womanist.

A professor who has called Dr. Jordan B. Peterson an “incel” wrote a post Sunday saying that she “will not be silenced.” Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania philosophy professor Wendy Lynne Lee seemed not to be aware of the existence of Peterson’s wife and kids when she called him a “misogynist incel” on Twitter. An incel, or involuntary celibate, is shorthand for a man who has trouble attracting sexual partners and often checks out of the dating scene. Lee, who authored “Contemporary Feminist Theory and Activism: Six Global Issues,” reportedly has not stood for the Pledge of Allegiance, which she terms...

The diversity imperative demands dissimulation and evasion. The academic-achievement gap, the behavioral differences that produce socioeconomic disparities, and the ubiquity of racial preferences must all be suppressed in public discourse, since they undercut the narrative that white racism is the driving force in American society. This dissimulation was on display last week at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, when Dean Ted Ruger announced that law professor Amy Wax would no longer teach mandatory first-year law courses at the school. In a memo announcing his decision, Ruger accused Wax of “conscious indifference” to truth. It is Ruger, however, who has...

Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning has no misgivings about being the force behind what’s been called one of the most notorious leaks of classified documents in U.S. history. “I don’t have any regrets. You can’t go back in time and change things,” said Manning Wednesday night, speaking to a packed room at the Annenberg Center’s Zellerbach Theatre on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. “I made the decision to do what I did, so that’s it.” Manning’s somewhat laid-back response fails to capture the magnitude of the hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables from U.S. embassies and consulates...

Records shed more light on Elizabeth Warren’s minority status By Noah Bierman, Globe Staff A second law school, the University of Pennsylvania, has touted Elizabeth Warren as a minority faculty member in an official school publication, according to an online document obtained by the Globe. The University of Pennsylvania, where Warren taught at the law school from 1987 through 1995, listed her as a minority in a “Minority Equity Report” posted on its website. The report, published in 2005, well after her departure, included her as the winner of a faculty award in 1994. Her name was highlighted in bold,...

Asian American students may be at a distinct disadvantage when applying to highly competitive colleges, according to Sara Harberson, a former Ivy League admissions dean. In a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Harberson — the former associate dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania and the former dean of admissions and financial aid at Franklin & Marshall College — writes that there is always a reason for a college applicant's rejection. In many cases, students are denied admission because they don't have a "tag" associated with their application — what Harberson calls "the proverbial golden ticket for...

Washington — An alliance of Asian American groups on Friday filed a federal complaint against HarvardUniversity, saying that school and other Ivy League institutions are using racial quotas to admit students other than high-scoring Asians. More than 60 Chinese, Indian, Korean and Pakistani groups came together for the complaint, which was filed with the civil rights offices at the Justice and Education departments. They are calling for an investigation and say these schools should stop using racial quotas or racial balancing in admission. "We are seeking equal treatment regardless of race," said Chunyan Li, a professor and civil rights activist,...

Former New York Times Middle East bureau chief Chris Hedges said he was disinvited to speak at a University of Pennsylvania conference following a column comparing Israel to ISIS. Hedges, now a columnist for the Truthdig.com website, was to speak at an April forum on prospects for peace in the Middle East sponsored by the university’s International Affairs Association. Zachary Michael Belnavis, a student leader of the association, wrote to the lecture agency that his group didn’t see Hedges as a “suitable fit” for the conference. …

The University of Pennsylvania which had originally posted this has now pulled down the video from their site. But this is an attempt on the part of Jonathan Gruber and company to pull their pants up after they got caught. I think it's comical that these people still believe they can say whatever they want in public, but then flip out if anyone quotes them. It also appears that the Snopes.com mafia has been called in to cast doubt upon the incident as conservatives have reported it. They call this claim a Mixture of true and false. Here's their lame...