PC Campus...

...Academia’s Top 10 Abuses of 2008

My favorite is the one involving the "Zimbabwe of American universities." Thank you Father Dease!

Reject credulity: affirm the creed!

In a study released in September, researchers at Baylor University found that adherence to "traditional . . . religion greatly decreases credulity, as measured by beliefs in such things as dreams, Bigfoot, UFOs, haunted houses, communicating with the dead, and astrology." By contrast, those who reject traditional religion - "self-identified theological liberals and the irreligious" - are "far more likely" to believe in superstition and the occult. Or other nonsense: Maher, for example, claims that aspirin is lethal, doubts that the Salk vaccine eradicated polio, and has praised the horse that threw Christopher Reeve.

Greenhouse gases will be our salvation...

...from the coming ice age. Perhaps fearing reprisals from the global warming fetishists, Dr. Crowley sticks to the the party line: yes, it's true that the global cooling heading our way will be catastrophic; and, yes, it's true that only CO2 emissions can save us from it; nevertheless, this "doesn’t obviate the need to curb such emissions." Now if only the GOP can hurry and add global warming to its platform before the global temperature drop destroys the two-party system.

When the surrogate is Grandma, the mess is less

So says Slate's libertarian bioethicist:

Mother and daughter share a genetic bond to each other and to the child. They're much more likely to work things out and give the child a stable family environment.

Now, if you really want to get icky, try it the other way around: Grandpa impregnates his daughter-in-law. You can pretty well deduce what he's supplying. No daughter-in-law would do this, right? Sorry. A British couple arranged it last year after discovering that the husband was shooting blanks. According to the Guardian, doctors "offered to provide sperm from an anonymous donor, but the couple wanted to use a member of their own family."