Black Conservative Headmistress Hits School Results Jackpot; Left Throws Tantrum

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Children at an inner London state school in one of the roughest, most deprived, ethnically diverse parts of Britain have won spectacular results in their exams.

But instead of celebrating the children’s success, the left is spitting blood:

Why does the success of the Michaela School so infuriate the left?

Because though the headmistress Katharine Birbalsingh is black, she’s the wrong kind of black: a conservative who doesn’t believe in playing the race card or identity politics.

Read the rest on Breitbart.

My Horrible, Horrible Encounter with a ‘Rape Culture’ Cry Bully at Cambridge University

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Reeeeeeeeeeee!
Truly it’s horrible and unnerving to fall victim to a point and shriek assault by an hysterical, vengeful, feminist Social Justice Warrior.

It happened to me the other day at Cambridge University. For more details, see here, but I’ll give you the short version:

I’d given an after dinner speech at the university’s Conservative Association (CUCA). Safe territory, I had thought, to rail against the lunacies of political correctness before a sympathetic audience.

As an example, I mentioned the compulsory consent classes you now have to attend as a first-year undergraduate (generally presided over by embarrassed second-years) in which you are lectured on how rape is a bad thing. Then later I made a flippant reference to Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris. [Non-British readers should know that these were successful children’s TV celebrities of the 70s and 80s, later revealed to be predatory sex offenders.]

To say it went down like a cup of cold sick would be an understatement. Several of the alleged “conservatives” at the dinner walked out in protest. (Though I do wonder whether some of them might have been plants or entryists who’d gone specifically to be offended so that they could make a political point afterwards.) One visibly distraught girl – escorted by her hissing mate – called out: “Disgusting!” as she left.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Snowflake University Scared by Rommel Quotation

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One of Britain’s leading universities has gone into a blind panic after discovering that a quotation it had used to motivate students originally came from the mouth of an actual World War II German general, Erwin Rommel.

Here is Rommel’s aphorism:

“One cannot permit unique opportunities to slip by for the sake of trifles.”

The quotation was one of a series sent out by Exeter University’s career department in an email to students. Not unreasonably, you might think, given that the sentiment expressed is both motivational and wise.

But the moment someone pointed out that the quote came from Rommel, the university began frantically retracting.

According to The Sun:

A spokesperson said: “This was a genuine error and in no way intentional, however we apologise unreservedly for any offence it may have caused, and have put additional processes in place to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”

They added that staff member who selected the quote did not know who Rommel was and the information was taken from a free to use website.

This is indeed an extremely shaming incident for Exeter University, though not for the reasons given in the article.

Most worrying, perhaps, is the sheer level of ignorance at an academic institution ranked among the world’s top 150 universities.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Penn State’s 98-Year-Old Outing Club Staying In: ‘Outdoors Too Risky’ Say Authorities

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Penn State University’s 98-year old Outing Club has been bannedfrom conducting outings. The university authorities have decided the great outdoors is simply too fraught with risk for students.  According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

A backpacking trip in the Rothrock State Forest and day hikes in the Laurel Highlands and Shenandoah National Park in Virginia were among the Penn State Outing Club’s 2018 spring-term events.

After this weekend, though, the 98-year-old organization has nothing on its calendar, and unless things change, it won’t.

The Outing Club isn’t allowed to go outside anymore.

According to an announcement posted by the club on its website last week, the university will not allow the club to organize and run outdoor, student-led trips starting next semester.

“This is a result,” the announcement said, “of an assessment of risk management by the university that determined that the types of activities in which PSOC engages are above the university’s threshold of acceptable risk for recognized student organizations.”

The Outing Club, founded 1920, is one of Penn State’s oldest clubs.

 

Read the rest on Breitbart.

Great News, Barbara Socrates–Oxford University Has Feminized Its Philosophy Course

Philosophers
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How many feminists does it take to ruin a philosophy course?
Oxford University will be letting you know shortly, once it has got the results of its latest politically correct academic experiment.

From now on, Oxford’s philosophy faculty has decreed, 40 percent of the recommended authors on its departmental reading lists must be female.

Also, academic staff have been asked to use philosophers’ first names rather than their initials when compiling reading lists, to make it clearer to undergraduates which ones are female.

This is great news for Barbara Socrates, Mandy Aristotle, Seraphina Wittgenstein, Nancy Descartes, Fifi Trixibelle Locke, Suzi Nietzsche, Bobbi Confucius, Ermintrude Plato, and Petronella Hume, to name but a few of the awesome female philosophical intellects who have been cruelly neglected by history because sexism, misogyny, and the oppressive phallocentric hegemony.

No, not really – I jest. In fact every one on the list of great philosophers I have named was a bloke.

So too were: Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Marx, Hegel, Marcus Aurelius, St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, Diderot, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Pascal, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Mill, de Tocqueville, and Voltaire.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

#Winning – Trump Slashes Budget of Global Warming Madrasa

climate nonsense
The Associated Press

Slowly but surely the Trump administration is draining the climate swamp.
Here’s the latest good news, courtesy of American Geophysical Union’s Eos, in a pieceheadlined “Prestigious Climate-Related Fellowships Rescinded.”

It reports on the reduction (by half) of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) “prestigious” Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship Program — or what I would call a madrasa for climate change alarmists.

Since 1992, at a cost of around $2 million per annum, the program has sponsored eight fellows a year in order “to help create the next generation of researchers needed for climate studies.”

The graduates’ list is a veritable Who’s Who of prominent climate alarmists.

Among the program’s alumni is Myles Allen, a man-made climate change specialist at Oxford University; Gavin Schmidt, now head of the notoriously climate alarmist NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies; and Heidi Cullen, who writes alarmist propaganda for the website Climate Central.

Not all alumni, it’s true, go on to shill for the great global warming scam.

For example, one alumnus — Chris Landsea, a meteorologist specializing in hurricanes — took the brave and principled decision of resigning in 2005 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report. Landsea objected to the way his views were being misrepresented by one of the report’s lead authors, Kevin Trenberth.

Trenberth wanted to promote the idea that “global warming” (as it was then known) would lead to an increase in intense hurricane activity.

Landsea was outraged because this contradicted all available scientific studies, including his own. So he resigned in protest, no doubt costing himself a well-paid career on the climate change gravy train.

But Landsea is almost certainly the exception rather than the rule.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

University’s ‘White Christmas’ Tweet Triggers Snowflakes

snowflake
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A leading university has apologized after a reference to “White Christmas” in one of its tweets triggered snowflake students who thought it might be a tad racist.

The original tweet from University College London was meant to be a friendly piece of advice about snow conditions:

But then various race-baiting SJW alumni and students claimed to take offense:

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Academic Says Saving the Planet May Require the End of Property Rights

AP Photo
AP Photo/Charlie Riedel

Only the abolition of property rights can save us now from the horrors of ‘climate change’, argues an Australian academic.

Dr. Louise Crabtree, a researcher at the University of Western Sydney, makes her claim in a piece for the leftist academics’ favorite online watering hole, the Conversationtitled“Can Property Survive the Great Climate Transition?”

Her question is, of course, purely rhetorical. No, apparently, it can’t:

If our cities are to become more resilient and sustainable, our systems of property need to come along for the ride.

and

We might also need to start thinking about our claims not being static but dependent on the web of relationships we are entwined in, including with non-humans. Some say that First Peoples might have a grasp of property dynamics that is more suited to the times we are entering.

So, making cities green might be the easy part. It remains to be seen whether property law and property systems are up to the task of transition.

This might sound like obscure, pseudo-academic, sub-Marxist gobbledegook. As indeed it is.

It would be nice to console ourselves that this dangerous thesis was written by a left-wing research student of no account.

Unfortunately, as Eric Worrall points out at Watts Up With That? there are people who take this woman’s lunatic redistributionary jottings seriously.

Her bio may raise the question—are we actually paying for this?:

Louise was awarded her PhD in Human Geography from Macquarie University in 2007 and has been with Western Sydney University since 2007. Her research focuses on the social, ecological and economic sustainability of community-driven housing developments in Australia; on the uptake of housing innovation in practice and policy; on complex adaptive systems theory in urban contexts; and, on the interfaces between sustainability, property rights, institutional design and democracy. Her recent and ongoing projects focus on two practical areas funded by a series of competitive research grants—community land trusts and participatory mapping methodologies. Both are being used to simultaneously foster social innovation and equity outcomes on the ground, and explore and build theory on multi-stakeholder governance, decolonisation, property law, resilience and citizenship.

But the scary part is the last bit:

Read the rest at Breitbart.

World’s Smartest Dog Peer-Reviews Science Papers

Staffordshire Bull Terrier
AP/Alastair Grant

Meet Dr Olivia Doll, the world’s smartest dog. Dr Doll is the formal professional name of Ollie, a Staffordshire terrier, who sits on the board of seven international medical journals and was recently asked to review a paper on the management of tumors.

According to Perth Now:

Her impressive curriculum vitae lists her current role as senior lecturer at the Subiaco College of Veterinary Science and past associate of the Shenton Park Institute for Canine Refuge Studies — which is code for her earlier life in the dog refuge.

Ollie’s owner, veteran public health expert Mike Daube, decided to test how carefully some journals scrutinised their editorial reviewers, by inventing Dr Doll and making up her credentials.

The five-year-old pooch has managed to dupe a range of publications specialising in drug abuse, psychiatry and respiratory medicine into appointing her to their editorial boards.

Dr Doll has even been fast-tracked to the position of associate editor of the Global Journal of Addiction and Rehabilitation Medicine.

Several journals have published on their websites a supplied photo of Dr Doll, which is actually of a bespectacled Kylie Minogue.

Professor Daube said none of them smelt a rat, despite Dr Doll’s listed research interests in “the benefits of abdominal massage for medium-sized canines” and “the role of domestic canines in promoting optimal mental health in ageing males”.

But just like the “penises cause climate change” hoaxers, Professor Daube is using humor to make a serious point about the reliability of research in academe.

The Canadian investigative journalist Donna Laframboise concluded something similar in a report last year for the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

“A journal’s decision to publish a paper provides no assurance that its conclusions are sound . . . Fraudulent research makes it past gatekeepers at even the most prestigious journals. While science is supposed to be self-correcting, the process by which this occurs is haphazard and byzantine.”

Laframboise was especially damning about the way “peer review” has been used to flatter dubious research in the field of climate ‘science’.

This has been a well-publicized problem with climate science ever since the Climategate emails leak showed the scientists at the heart of the global warming ‘consensus’ engaging in all manner of skullduggery in order to prop up their debased cod-scientific theory.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Do Penises Cause Climate Change? Discuss

The academic hoax that shows how generations of kids are paying good money to study pure, unmitigated, mind-warping drivel.

‘Why not think about Gender Studies?’ asked an advertorial aimed at prospective students in the newspaper I was reading. Actually, I can think of lots of reasons, starting with: what kind of employer in his right mind (or her right mind, come to that) would be insane enough to take on a graduate with an intellectually worthless degree indicative of shrill resentment, bolshiness, blue hair, lax personal hygiene and weaponised entitlement?

But two US academics, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, recently came up with an even better one. They managed to get published in a social sciences journal a paper arguing that the penis is not in fact a male reproductive organ but merely a social construct and that, furthermore, penises are responsible for causing climate change.

It ought to go without saying that their paper, ‘The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct’, was a spoof. Yet it was peer-reviewed by two supposed experts in gender studies, one of whom praised the way it captured ‘the issue of hypermasculinity through a multidimensional and nonlinear process’, and the other of whom marked it ‘outstanding’ in every applicable category.

Their model was the Sokal Hoax of 1996, when New York University physics professor Alan Sokal persuaded an academic journal to accept a similarly meaningless paper titled ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’. His aim was partly to mock the incoherence of post-modernist social science, and partly to demonstrate that humanities journals will publish anything so long as it is couched in the language of ‘proper leftist thought’.

Like Sokal’s, the latest hoax was careful to observe all the fashionable left-wing pieties. ‘We suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding, almost religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil,’ the authors later observed. So they included lots of derogatory language about men and male vices such as ‘manspreading’ — a complaint levied against men for sitting with their legs spread wide, which they described as ‘akin to raping the empty space around him’. This is funny, obviously, but it’s also a bit worrying for a number of reasons. One is what it tells us about the reliability of ‘peer review’, so often claimed in academe as the gold standard which independently validates research. But as Matt Ridley recently noted, all it really is is a way for ‘academics to defend their pet ideas and reward their chums’. He cited a report by Donna Laframboise, a Canadian investigative journalist, which concluded: ‘Fraudulent research makes it past gatekeepers at even the most prestigious journals.’ She was talking not only about social sciences but about the harder ones, such as medicine, where accuracy can be a matter of life or death. She quoted a US National Institutes of Health official’s claim that ‘researchers would find it hard to reproduce at least three-quarters’ of published medical findings.

There are similar problems with her particular area of interest, global warming. A scare industry worth an annual $1.5 trillion has been built on the notion that anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for unprecedented and catastrophic changes to the world’s climate. Yet the scientists promoting this hypothesis are a fairly small, closed shop who validate one another’s work in a process which has been nicknamed ‘pal review’ and whose response to criticism from dissidents is to bully them, smear them and have them denied access to mainstream science journals.

Read the rest at the Spectator.