NewsWatch

Penn State Professor of Climate Justice

TheCollegeFix.com, 10/27/23, “Penn State hiring ‘Professor in Climate Justice and Youth Movements’” [Excerpts]: Pennsylvania State University’s Department of Geography announced an open tenure-track faculty job in “Climate Justice and Youth Movements.”

The successful candidate will have “expertise in qualitative research with a focus on transnational youth movements, the intergenerational dimensions of climate change [and] decolonial relationships,” according to an ad posted to The Chronicle of Higher Education jobs board.

The professor will also be “expected…to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in Geography and EMS [Earth and Mineral Sciences],” the college which houses the geography department.

Geography Professor Jacob Shell of Temple University posted the ad to X Wednesday, noting that “the academic job postings are getting awfully…prescriptive.”

“Activist scholarship is inherently antiscientific,” he wrote. “There isn’t really a way around that.”

https://bit.ly/4a9NUg6

Created Languages

Creation.com, 10/24/23, “Languages” [Excerpts]: Language diversity presents a major challenge for evolutionists. A popular view is that all languages evolved from guttural noises uttered by our ancestors, into one or more prototypical languages. From a prototypical language many languages supposedly developed as mankind spread across the earth. This view is hard to sustain when the facts are considered. All languages have vocabularies of [thousands] of words and complex grammars. These complex systems of communication did not develop from grunts….

Language has every attribute of a system designed by an intelligent agent. There are at least 50 distinct language families. Each seems to have appeared with a fully developed syntactic and grammatical structure and cannot be traced to a common ancestral language. Many linguists have given up the search for an original mother tongue on the ‘tree’ of languages and instead speak of language ‘bushes’.

Older languages are more complex than newer languages, not less. Latin (with cases, genders, and declinations) is more complex than English, Greek (about 600 years older) is more complex than Latin, and Vedic Sanskrit is even more complex. These are all languages within the Indo-European family group. Languages lose information through time; there is decay and reduced complexity. For example, they lose pronouns (e.g., ‘thee’, ‘thou’, and ‘ye’) and verb forms. Also, they experience a decline in vocabulary, even though new words are coined regularly, and new ones are introduced in specialized intellectual domains. It is estimated that Shakespeare used about 35,000 words. The average English speaker today has an active vocabulary (vs. recognized words) of less than 20,000 words.

Although there are claims that the origin of language occurred about 60,000 years ago, there is no empirical evidence to support this claim. Many languages appeared suddenly around 2200 BC…. The Bible explains that God introduced languages in response to man’s rebellion of building the Tower of Babel (Genesis:11:7Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
See All...). Since then, some new languages have emerged within their respective families, but many more languages have gone extinct. This is another sign that everything is decaying.

https://bit.ly/3TeV908

Woman Arrested for Praying Silently Outside Abortion Clinic

WNG.org, 11/4/23, “Global Briefs: United Kingdom” [Excerpts]: West Midlands Police issued an apology to Isabel Vaughan-Spruce after arresting her for silently praying outside an abortion center. In September police announced they had dropped the charges and would take no further action against her. Police originally arrested Vaughan-Spruce in December 2022. A judge dismissed those charges, but police arrested her again in March.

The case gained worldwide attention as an attack on freedom of thought in the U.K. While she welcomed the apology, Vaughan-Spruce said, “I should never have been arrested or investigated simply for the thoughts I held in my own mind. Silent prayer is never criminal.”

[TBC: She has been released with no charges.]

https://bit.ly/3tbrH0u