Free Republic

Citing “hundreds of millions of dollars” in losses, Penn State University will cut program budgets, furlough 2,000 employees at half pay, and president Eric Barron will return 10% of his monthly salary amid what he called “unprecedented” times. Further furloughs and layoffs are possibilities in the new fiscal year, he said, as Penn State faces $160 million in lost tuition revenue from likely enrollment declines, on top of more than $100 million in room and board refunds and other costs since March associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Neither Mr. Barron’s video remarks nor a university statement specified the number of...

A place where memories were made and Baja Blasts were had is no longer serving the community in State CollegeThe vigil was a solemn occasion, but Prajesh Patel still felt his taco costume was the most appropriate dress to express his emotion. Patel led a group of his fellow Penn State students Sunday in a memorial service of sorts for a beloved State College institution: The Taco Bell next to campus. "[He] led a moment of silence as well as leading several 'funeral' songs. It was crazy but it was so much fun," said Allie Bausinger, a journalism major at...

I know a couple of people who are going to be in trouble with the Woke Science Community. Colin M. Wright, an evolutionary biologist at Penn State, and Emma N. Hilton, a developmental biologist at the University of Manchester, have collaborated on an article published in the Wall Street Journal this week. They put forth the revolutionary and highly controversial theory that human beings are born as one of two distinct sexes, male and female. And no amount of philosophical meandering is going to change the incontrovertible medical fact that sex is binary and does not exist on some sort...

Hold on to your hats, skeptics. The study of alien existence is about to become a real scientific field. Pennsylvania State University is gearing up to make the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) an established field of scientific study. This means that a degree in Alien Research, no matter how outlandish it might sound, is soon going to be a real thing. According to a report, the university is planning on doing this by offering courses on the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life in its course catalog. It will also conduct actual research into the subject through it’s newly-established Penn...

READING, Pa. — Pennsylvania overhauled its child sexual abuse laws Tuesday more than a year after a grand jury report showed the cover-up of hundreds of cases of abuse in most of Pennsylvania’s Roman Catholic dioceses over the last seven decades. The central bill signed by Gov. Tom Wolf gives future victims of child sex abuse more time to file lawsuits and to end time limits for police to file criminal charges. The grand jury report spurred several states to change their laws and other states to begin similar investigations.

Penn State University is responding after an alleged letter from an alum criticizing the appearance of a football player went viral on social media. One of the player's teammates shared the letter on Twitter. The writer starts off by saying he and his wife are "older" graduates and follow all Penn State sports, and said "we miss the clean cut young men and women from those days." The writer goes on to criticize the player's hair, saying, "Don't you have parents or girlfriend who've told you those shoulder length dreadlocks look disgusting and are certainly not attractive." --snip-- Penn State...

This week, 250 news organizations around the world are colluding to produce global warming propaganda in the days surrounding the UN climate summit on September 23. Variety magazine is one of the publications involved and they reported on Hollywood’s efforts to combat global warming, wondering if the entertainment industry is doing enough to sway public opinion. For them to act like celebrities, reporters and politicians haven’t already been fear mongering about climate change for decades is laughable. As the Newsbusters’ TV Blog has documented over the years, global warming stories have flooded the airwaves. Here are the top 5 worst...

Some years ago, Dr. Tim Ball wrote that climate scientist Michael Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn State.” At issue was Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph that purported to show a sudden and unprecedented 20th century warming trend. The hockey stick featured prominently in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (2001), but has since been shown to be wrong. The question, in my view, is whether it was an innocent mistake or deliberate fraud on Mann’s part. (Mann, I believe, continues to assert the accuracy of his debunked graph.) Mann sued Ball for libel in 2011. Principia Scientific now...

Full header: Michael Mann, creator of the infamous global warming ‘hockey stick,’ loses lawsuit against climate skeptic, ordered to pay defendant’s costs Michael Mann, a climatologist at Penn State University, is the creator of the “hockey stick graph” that appears to show global temperatures taking a noticeable swing upward in the era when humanity has been burning fossil fuels and dumping CO2 into the atmosphere. The graph was first published in 1998, prominently featured in the 2001 UN Climate Report, and formed part of Al Gore’s 2006 movie, An Inconvenient Truth. The graph’s methodology and accuracy have been and continue...

Imagine it's late 2011. The world just found out about Jerry Sandusky, former assistant Penn State football coach who would be convicted of repeatedly raping children in 2012. Penn State higher-ups, in an attempt to turn the focus of the scandal away from the school, decide to turn an annual banquet into a celebration of those fighting child rape. They call up head coach Joe Paterno. They call up President Graham Spanier. They call up athletic director Tim Curley. All of them give long, brave speeches about the evils of sexual exploitation of children resulting in rousing applause from all...

A gunman killed three people and injured another in a shooting spree near Penn State University’s campus before shooting himself, police said. The shooter, identified by police as 21-year-old Jordan Witmer, killed 62-year-old Dean Beachy at P.J. Harrigan’s Bar & Grill in State College around 10:30 p.m. Thursday, State College Police said. Steven Beachy, 19, who was rushed to the hospital in critical condition, died Friday from his injuries. Nicole Abrino, 21, whom Witmer allegedly had a relationship with, was also wounded. She is listed in critical condition at Mount Nittany Medical Center. The bar is located about two miles...

A rapid rise in temperature on ancient Earth triggered a climate response that may have prolonged the warming for many thousands of years, according to scientists. Their study, published online in Nature Geoscience, provides new evidence of a climate feedback that could explain the long duration of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which is considered the best analogue for modern climate change. The findings also suggest that climate change today could have long-lasting impacts on global temperature even if humans are able to curb greenhouse gas emissions. "We found evidence for a feedback that occurs with rapid warming that can...

“A prior indigenous technological species might have arisen on ancient Earth or another body, such as a pre-greenhouse Venus or a wet Mars,” he wrote. ... Earth’s plate tectonics would effectively have “erased” the traces of a civilization that lived billions of years ago. Venus is in the grip of a severe greenhouse effect and also undergoes similar “resurfacing” that would scour it clean of artifacts. This leaves just a handful of places where archaeologists might find traces of a lost extraterrestrial civilization. “Remaining indigenous technosignatures might be expected to be extremely old, limiting the places they might still be...

An international team of geoscientists from the United States, Canada and Europe has discovered a large impact crater beneath the Hiawatha Glacier in remote northwest Greenland. A paper on the discovery was published in the journal Science Advances. The Hiawatha impact crater is approximately 19.2 miles (31 km) wide and lies under an ice sheet that is 0.6 miles (1 km) thick.The scientists believe this crater was formed by a 0.6-mile wide iron asteroid that slammed into the Earth at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, perhaps as recently as 12,000 years ago. ..." “Researchers were looking at the map...

On a bright July day 2 years ago, Kurt Kjær was in a helicopter flying over northwest Greenland—an expanse of ice, sheer white and sparkling. Soon, his target came into view: Hiawatha Glacier, a slow-moving sheet of ice more than a kilometer thick. It advances on the Arctic Ocean not in a straight wall, but in a conspicuous semicircle, as though spilling out of a basin. Kjær, a geologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, suspected the glacier was hiding an explosive secret. The helicopter landed near the surging river that drains the glacier, sweeping out rocks...

Pentagon research project called "Insect Allies." Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the project involves using gene-editing techniques like CRISPR to infect insects with modified viruses that could help make America's crops more resilient. If a cornfield were hit by an unexpected drought or suddenly exposed to a pathogen, for example, Insect Allies might deploy an army of aphids carrying a genetically modified virus to slow the corn plant's growth rate. According to the DARPA website, these "targeted therapies" could take effect in a single growing season, potentially protecting the American crop system from food security threats...

A new math course at Penn State University this semester has a bizarre focus on Hillary Clinton’s “strong character.” According to a report from Campus Reform, a new math course at Penn State University focuses on everything besides math. Professor Marc Fabbri’s “Finite Mathematics” course covers everything from Hillary Clinton’s “strong character” to the “cultural intolerance” to President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Clean Water Act. On the Penn State website, Fabbri’s course is described as an “introduction to logic, sets, probability.” But students who took Fabbri’s new course last spring say that the course is focused on other topics. Take for...

“There’s no politics here ….In fact, there's no clear no evidence that Hemingway was a Castro enthusiast, or critic, says Sandra Spanier, an English professor at Penn State University who is the editor of the Hemingway Letters Project. "He felt that it was important, as a guest living in another country, that he be apolitical," Spanier said in an interview.” (Los Angeles Times story on the restoration of Ernest Hemingway’s mansion Finca Vigia near Havana, Cuba, May 30.)  Got it, amigos? According to the Los Angeles Times a former KGB agent living in a KBG-founded and mentored Soviet satrapy while...

After logging enough miles to hike around the world more than four times, Penn State has decided it's too risky for the campus Outing Club to go on student-led outings. A risk assessment by the university led to the decision, says a statement on the Outing Club's web page. The club's outings were deemed to be "above the University's threshold of acceptable risk for recognized student organizations," said the statement. This spring, campus recreation, a division of student affairs, decided to evaluate its 79 student-led programs, said Lisa Powers, Penn State spokeswoman. It found 20 clubs had "elements of risk,"...

The entire trailer is framed as a question of Paterno’s guilt, ending with his son asking “Did you know?” This puts it in a similar league as Levinson’s last film for HBO, The Wizard of Lies, about Bernie Madoff and the familial aftermath of him being charged and jailed for his crimes. In both cases, the focus remains on an older man who has become famous due to incalculable amounts of cover-ups and shady dealings having to face the truth of his actions when confronted by his own children.Its a worthy subject but also feels a bit stale, considering that...