Penn State and Pizzagate: A Familiar Silence

By Professor Doom

     My recent revisit of Penn State, where over a decade of whispers about what was going on in the showers there was systematically silenced, led me to consider the most striking parallel with the current big whispering campaign, called Pizzagate.

     Now, before I go any further I’ll state that, looking at all the evidence, if I were on the jury, I would not convict. Regrettably, the reason I wouldn’t convict doesn’t involve a lack of belief that something criminal is occurring here, but simply that there isn’t enough evidence collected. There wasn’t enough evidence for Penn State for a decade, either, and I suspect the reason is the same for both: there’s a systematic cover up preventing a legitimate investigation.  I can’t prove such a thing, of course, but I want to talk a little about some of that evidence, to point out a few elephants in the room that nobody seems to see. 

     The first whispers of Pizzagate started with Wikileaks. Now, without going into technical reasons, Wikileaks e-mails are 100% accurate. They definitely were written, definitely were sent, are perfectly legitimate in that regard. Interpreting what the e-mails mean, of course, is up to the reader.

     The bulk of the e-mails appear to be written by normal people, using normal English. There are also quite a few that are mysteriously written, and those are the ones people are considering in detail.

     Let’s look at a few of the e-mails that started it all.

(emphasis added)

      Now, this e-mail was sent by an old man and to old men, and there’s an awful lot of excitement here about getting into a hot pool with little children...a curious thing for old men to be excited about. A pro-Establishment friend helpfully suggested that perhaps this is just a harmless birthday party amongst family friends, or something. Hey, it could be, there’s reasonable doubt here.

      But…wait. These children have names, and ages, provided. I know if a close (publicly named) family friend was publicly identified as sodomizing my (publicly named) children in a now-public document like this, I’d come forward and state unequivocally that this e-mail was being misinterpreted, and produce the children to show no harm has been done to them, and save the reputation of my close family friend. It’d take about 30 seconds, right? Most parents will take 30 seconds to spare their child a lifetime of shame and misery, and most decent people would do as much for a friend.

      Similarly, if I were accused of such lechery, I’d come forward, explain the confusion in the e-mail, and clear it all up in a few seconds. The author of the e-mail has done no such thing. Instead, he’s basically gone into hiding. Again this isn’t proof of guilt by any measure but…it’s odd behavior for an old man who otherwise handles his affairs quite competently. He’s silent here.

     I’m sure eventually the parents will show up to preserve the purity of their children, since that’s what a parent would do. For now, the parents are silent.

     Now, the major media could investigate this without difficulty. They have the resources to find people, and they could gain a bit of desperately-needed credibility by demonstrating that they are capable of doing even a small amount of investigating on these missing children. But we have instead…silence. Complete silence in the face of evidence of children being abused.

     It’s the official and widespread silence that worries me here.

     One e-mail, by itself, means nothing, but there are lots of strange e-mails like this, including a great number of e-mails discussing pizza and hot dogs. Let’s look at one of those:

     Gosh, they sure do like their pizza and hot dogs in DC. Who uses “channels” to buy such things? I reckon those pizzas probably won’t be very good after you ship them to DC all the way from Chicago, even by air (I mean, most pizza places won’t even deliver more than a few miles away). Does anyone else airlift pizza and hot dogs? Even if a relatively small amount, isn't this a strange use of taxpayer money?

      Of course, “pizza” and “dogs” could be code words for something else. Knowing the code will let these messages make more sense, if you’re the suspicious sort, if you use “pizza” and “hot dog” as code words that pedos are known to use. But it could just be a coincidence. It’s a shame there’s no investigation into what these messages really mean…that’s an awful lot of taxpayer money, if nothing else. But we have silence, instead. Complete silence by the media over, at the very bare minimum, a strange use of taxpayer money.

      Let’s do one more. Here’s a harmless looking e-mail about beanie babies:

Georgetown Law Faculty and Staff, My parents are visiting this weekend, and I need to sell my enormous collection of beanie babies! I've approximately 480 little creatures of joy, and I'm selling each one for $20.00. You must buy all 480, though. It is a collection (not an auction)... They are very respectful and amicable with one another, and they are (for the most part) cat and dog friendly. Some are sassier than others, naturally. Please let me know! My parents can't find out…

     Now, it looks innocuous, but there’s plenty of weirdness here. First, this is way over market value for Beanie Babies. Additionally, when you sell a collection, you highlight the valuable parts…not here though, strangely. You sure as *hell* aren’t going to let your collectibles be played with by a dog or cat. And if he’s worried about his parents, he could just shove the collection into a single $20 storage container and stick them in the attic without much effort, rather than have a last second fire sale. An adult lawyer sent this e-mail, not a teenager or total moron.

     The weirdness continues.

      This e-mail is being sent to a handful of people that, well, just aren’t the target market for beanie babies (being politicos and influential people). Again, if you know how code works, the message makes a bit more sense. One site offers a helpful translation, provided by a former dealer in recreational chemicals that knows how to communicate in this fashion (hypothetically, I might have a retired hypothetical dealer hypothetical friend who confirms the translation as reasonable):

Georgetown, the heat is on this weekend, and I need to get rid of my stash. I’ve got about 48 little “creatures” (I don’t even want to speculate) and they go for $20,000 each. You must get all 48, they’re priced as a lot, not per item. They’re ok to keep together, (cats and dogs only makes me think men and women), and some are intense. Hit me up on the down low.

--the translator’s additional comments are in bold. This translation makes a bit more sense than trying to quickly sell a bunch of chewed up toys for an exorbitant price of nearly $10,000 to a small group of people, none of whom would have any reason to want such toys. But it could all be coincidence, right? My hypothetical friend clarified/suggested that the message is saying the creatures are ok “being with” men and women…sorry to use such code in quotes, but, hey, I bet adults with knowledge of things know exactly what I’m saying here, right?

      Again, one such weird e-mail would mean nothing but…there are a lot of these strange e-mails, it seems reasonable to ask some questions.

     Now, some of my friends say it’s ridiculous to think all this pedophilia is taking place at a pizza joint; I don’t know where this misconception is coming from, as the above, a tiny sampling of the weird e-mails, clearly isn’t occurring at  a D.C. pizza joint.

      That said, I want to talk about the pizza place a little. It’s in D.C., where power is measured both in political clout, and in access. The owner of the pizza joint is reckoned one of the 50 most powerful people in DC, by GQ magazine. Either they really, really, love their pizza in D.C., or this guy is providing some sort of access that is highly desired. Is it really conspiratorial to ask why this pizza guy, in a city filled with senators, congressmen, and other major politicos, ranks above most all of them?

      I’ve been warned I shouldn’t write about Pizzagate, because some people go nuts about child endangerment, and might even do something violent about it, and I shouldn’t encourage them. A nutball conspiracy theorist even said there’d be a “false flag” event where the pizza joint would be attacked, and the attack would be blamed on the people investigating all the weird e-mails.

     Nine days after the crazy, ridiculous conspiracy theory prediction? Some guy shows up at the pizza place with a big gun, fires a shot, and surrenders…then he delivers the message claiming he was “investigating” based on what he’d read online about the e-mails. As is so often the case in these alleged false flags, the person involved is a professional actor, with an IMDB page and everything. Heck of a coincidence.

     Weird, and I’ve seen the “attack” used as justification for silence.

     One more tiny thing. The FBI helpfully provides a picture of the symbol that pedophiles use to know when they’re in like company. By an incredible coincidence, that pizza joint coincidentally happens to randomly have that “pedophile safe space” symbol in its logo. Proof? No, of course not. Besides, the logo was recently changed after people started to make the connection because the pizza place has nothing to fear by saying it’s merely a coincidence. Or something.

     I could write another half a dozen posts detailing the large amount of circumstantial evidence, whispers. I could even post some weird pictures, and I still don’t understand why the parents of the kids involved haven’t spoken out with their kids’ picture on the internet being used in this way. More silence from the parents of these children. The circumstantial evidence just keeps growing every day, although you really can’t get convicting evidence when you’re just some guy on a computer, it would take real money and real professionals to track down these kids and find out why their parents are silent. 

     Instead of further discussion of evidence, I want to get to my problem with all this.

     False flag or not, some guy firing a weapon in a pizza joint should have no influence on having an official investigation. The Federal Government justified the murders at Waco because they thought children were being abused. There was a massive craze in the 80s about child abuse in our day care centers; the hysteria helped the government to wreck lives across the country. Every day, government child protective services commit all sorts of atrocities to parents and children, and we as a people tolerate it because hey, we don’t want child abuse.

      The point I’m getting at here is our government consistently goes completely nuts when it comes to protecting our kids from child abuse, and never in the past has shown any restraint, has been quite willing to commit mass murder on the basis of even a hint of child abuse. But here we have far more than a hint and the response is…silence.

     Silence is special, in a way: all silence is the same. I mean, I know the sound of my mother’s voice intimately, I’ve heard it for years, after all. I can instantly distinguish it from any other voice. But one silence is indistinguishable from the next, right?

     In this case, I think not.

     Having listened to it for a decade, there is no doubt the victims of Penn State recognize the particular silence of Pizzagate.  Will they hear it for another ten years?

    

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

(Your) Penn State Scandal Cost At $237 Million

By Professor Doom

     So Sandusky’s son has been arrested on pedophilia charges. It’s curious how easy it is to get into these situations with underage girls…but you think this guy of all people would eschew just things. In addition, we should probably consider there's an infrastructure here--how exactly does he find underage girls to do this to? 

     The sins of the son are not today's concern: I reckon it’s time to tally up the damage at Penn State.

     It’s been painful watching the Penn State scandal play out, drop by agonizing drop. From revelations of the huge coverup, to the fat reward the Poo Bah received for the coverup, to the defamation lawsuit payoff to the assistant coach for refusing to cover it up, to the complete reversals of the punishments meted out to Penn State, to the complete silence from accreditation for this grotesque violation of the accreditation policies (I can’t link to this last claim, because there’s no punishment by accreditation for me to document…).

      After years of denials and court trials, we’re finally able to tally up a financial cost. How much?

Penn State child abuse scandal costing university over $237mn

 

      Naturally, the article fails to point out a few things. Foremost, of course, is mention of who is paying that bill. That’s you and me. Don’t get me wrong, what was done to those children was horrific, but I just don’t understand why the people most responsible for it can’t pay.

      Yes, Sandusky certainly bears responsibility, but there’s also the entire administrative staff at Penn State, who for over a decade simply refused to pay attention to complaints, even punished people that dared to say that maybe the sportsball team shouldn’t be used to protect a child molester. 

      These admin were paid very well for their silence. The Poo Bah, of course, is most outstanding, $2.3 million just for the last year of his service. I’m sure his money for over a decade of such service would add up to over $10 million, and he’s also being rewarded with an additional $600,000 a year for life, contingent upon him staying out of jail for the services he rendered. I don’t think it’s too much to ask to give some of that back. He certainly hasn’t offered, which is a little strange under the circumstances, and there are a half dozen, quite possibly more, admin who also had to have taken part in the coverup, and likely were paid in the low 7 figures as well.

      Now we toss in the sportsball team, which supposedly exists because it’s a money-making enterprise. Why is donation of the revenue to pay back some of these costs not on the table? If sportsball is not a money-maker, why can’t we just shut down the team and save the taxpayers some money there while simultaneously destroying a public enterprise that only served to help cover up hideous crimes?

      Why aren’t these questions being asked?

       The article helpfully highlights some of the many costs:

The eye-watering tally is a combination of various fees, including the recent $12 million payout to former assistant coach Mike McQueary, who won a whistleblower and defamation case against the school after he testified against Sandusky in 2012.

      I covered this before, but I want to highlight: Penn State didn’t do the defamation, actual human beings did, and did so as they were following the deep chain of command of associate deans, vice deans, deans, associate provosts, vice provosts, provosts, assistant vice presidents, and vice presidents at the school. Can’t some of these people pay a little for their crimes? Why is the system set up so that these guys get away free like this?

On top of that, the school settled out of court with 33 victims who allege they were molested by Sandusky, with a total payout of $93 million, as well as a $48 million fine from the NCAA.

     There are 33 documented victims here. We’re really just going to accept that they randomly deposited themselves in the showers and then randomly were taken away by…what, robots with “Penn State” stamped on them? Really, nobody thinks there’s a question or two worth asking about this?

Adding to the tally is $27 million in defensive legal fees, nearly $14 million is down to the three former administrators currently facing charges for their failure to report the suspected abuse,

      The reason why so few questions are being asked is because the answers are pretty scary. For example, here’s an obvious question: why is Penn State paying the legal fees for administrators that possibly engaged in disgusting, vile crimes? Admin sure made it clear that if I screwed up in class, they would not have my back if I put so much as a coffee stain on a student’s shoe. But they sure are caring for each other here. Why would they do that?

       The answer is obvious: because otherwise the administrators being charged might talk, and likely expose the entire network that, quite obviously, had to be involved in the coverup here.

       Ooh, what a scary, albeit obvious, answer. Does that make it a good thing nobody else wants to ask these kinds of questions?

$5.3 million has been spent on “crisis communications and other consultants,” AP reports.

       This is another delight that comes up so often when I cover university “scandals” (I feel the need to put the word in quotes because it strikes me as an understatement here). Not only does the taxpayer get to pay for all the legal penalties, the taxpayer actually gets to pay for the coverup. I assure the gentle reader, those crisis communications consultants aren’t hired to investigate what really happened and root out evil…they’re hired to spin, spin, spin away whatever the scandal abomination is.

Finally, the school was fined a record $2.4 million by federal investigators last November after a five-year probe uncovered evidence of noncompliance with campus safety law.

     I know it’s dark humor, but yeah, what happened at Penn State had to have been in noncompliance with a safety law. Or two.

      One final slap in the face of the average taxpayer:

Several insurance claims are pending, but so far insurers have covered $30 million of the university’s costs.

      I have good insurance, and I’m a cancer survivor. Every doctor visit, I had to shell out money, every drug, more money…and I, like everyone else, had to fight to get the insurance company to honor some of their promised coverage. Same when I had a car accident…a real battle, and I had to fight for each dime. Same thing for dental work, despite my insurance, because they only cover what they think I should have been charged, and only a percentage of that (and trust me, when you start multiplying fractions together, the percentage getting paid gets small quickly).

      I wonder how hard Penn State had to fight to get the insurance companies to actually honor their coverage? Probably a million or so man-hours of work, to judge by what it takes me based on my own experience with insurance companies. Those are administrative hours, so more millions indirectly spent.

      Oh wait, there’s one more insult here that the article failed to notice.  A look at Penn State’s history of tuition shows a tuition hike pretty much every year. But…these guys have $237 million to blow on the scandal.

      Once again I have a question nobody else asks: why do other schools always raise tuition? We’re told every year our schools are broke, no money, gotta raise tuition. 

      Ok, Penn State can justify their increases because of the scandal, I guess, though that doesn’t explain why they needed hikes before the scandal. It’s a safe bet many other schools could have paid out hundreds of millions of dollars as well…but didn’t. And yet, tuition is rising at schools that don’t have to pay out a few hundred million due to a scandal of their own creation. Why is that?

      Maybe I’m asking too many questions…

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

New York To Offer Free College…Sort Of.

By Professor Doom

     College tuition has been soaring for years but the expense of college is far worse than what we’ve been told. See, admin knows that tuition is tracked, and tracked carefully, and so has long since made a shell game out of college expenses.

      While college tuition goes up a few percent every year, book prices climb 10%, student “activity” fees climb 20%, cost of housing another 30%, computer registration fees another 50%....it really is ridiculous watching fees appear from out of nowhere and leap up without coherent explanation.

      Allegedly to combat higher college tuition, New York state has a plan to offer free college tuition to its students. I appreciate New York means well, but having seen so many good intentions for higher education perverted, I have to be a little suspicious. 

I’m hardly alone:

While well intentioned, it’s apparent that the New York State tuition-free public college plan will not accomplish its desired goals

     While the author above raises some good concerns, I feel the need to highlight and add to some things.

…For instance, at the State University of New York, the tuition for this year is $6,470, but the total cost is $24,630 for New York resident students not living at home…

     That’s quite the shell game, eh? How is it that housing costs are so high for a state supported institution? I mean, they get a free ride on the real estate taxes, the government owns the land already, it isn’t trying to make a profit. But, hey, tuition’s low, right?

       Let me explain what will happen here. Tuition will be free to the student. The university will be paid by the state a flat fee, say $6,000 per student as opposed to charging $6,470 for tuition. The university will then raise other charges to make up the $470 difference. But, for that one year, the students will be getting a break.

      The university, seeing that students are flowing onto campus for “free” now, will do whatever it takes to grow the student base. Granted, that’s what we’re doing now.

      But, the state will never increase that $6,000 per student payout. So, future tuition raises will just be shuffled off to more housing fees, more student recreation fees, library use fees…honest, it’s amazing how nobody sees this coming, even when it’s already arrived. Again, that’s rather what we’re doing now.

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders should know this, because he introduced a bill into the Senate last year that would have regulated tuition increases and would have also forced colleges and universities to spend more on instruction instead of administration.

      See, this is why Sanders should have been allowed to speak, he has some ideas that should be heard. Administrative costs are huge, every time someone does the math on costs, it’s clear only around 10% of tuition is necessary to pay the costs of education, and the rest just supports a bloated bureaucracy.

      Trouble is, Sanders’ idea would fail. See, admin gets to determine what costs are for “instruction” and what costs are for “administration.” They already play this game when it comes to calculating the faculty/student ratio, which has been unchanged for decades despite faculty numbers being level while student populations quadruple.

       How did admin accomplish such wizardry? Admin just reclassifies staff and admin as faculty. I’ve seen many administrators who have never set foot in a classroom or written a sentence of academic research nonetheless call themselves faculty, I’ve even seen them win “faculty” awards (chosen by admin, of course), while faculty are forced to applaud the success of the “peer.” 

      So, yes, Sanders is right that we should reign in administrative costs…but as long as administrators get to decide those costs, it won’t make any difference.

      It’s amazing to consider the numbers involved, and watching admin drool for MOAR:

CUNY has been at or near peak enrollment in recent years, totaling 274,357 students systemwide in 2015. But at least some college presidents said they could take a moderate increase driven by the Cuomo plan.

“I could take 5 percent -- I could probably even take a 10 percent increase in enrollment,” said Gail Mellow, LaGuardia Community College president. “I couldn't take 50 percent.”

      Oh, don’t be shy, Gail, I’m sure you’d find a way for 50% more students if you had to. I’ve been on campuses with this sort of growth (because these sorts of schemes pop up every decade or so), and seen the trailers get hauled on campus overnight in response to a fast increase in the “student” base, while admin tells me that I need to sacrifice quality for quantity yet again.

     Nowadays, I just don’t see how 50% more growth is possible, given  around 84% of the population gets sucked into college at some point. Why don’t our “leaders” in higher education understand that 50% growth is impossible when you’re already at 84%?

     I just don’t understand why “higher education” is such a huge government mandate. We already have a free library system and the internet, so before we expand higher education even further, we need to honestly ask:

     What exactly does higher education offer, over already existing free resources,  such that society won’t be satisfied until every citizen is shoved into it?

     I’m hard pressed to figure out an answer. We’re already at 84%...what could possibly be gained by making it 100%? We need to answer this question, because ultimately the goal of “free education” schemes is to put more people into college. Seeing as such schemes so far have created a massive higher education bubble and financially crippled more than 20,000,000 students, true leaders would be hesitant about growing such a failed system. Instead, they drool at the prospect of MOAR.

       Can anyone suggest why we need to grow a system that already sucks 84% of our citizens into it?

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Anti-Communists Not Allowed On Campus

By Professor Doom

     It’s weird how much my opinions have changed these last few years, regarding higher education. My own personal experiences caused me to focus on the corruption and incompetence but I must admit, when looking at the big picture, that likely there’s more to the unending debasement of higher education than “merely” great quantities of corruption and incompetence.

      In addition to the corruption and incompetence, there seems to be a weird bias against conservatism, or a strong Left bias, if you prefer. The latest demonstration of the extremity is simply…stunning.

      Universities have no problem in formally recognizing Satanist student organizations (weirdly, I thought I’d already written about this, but can’t find it on my blog already), even when those organizations indicate that their purpose is to make trouble for those who don’t agree with them:

“The newsletter mocks conservatives as bigots and groups them among necromancers in an article titled, “6 Reasons why Necromancy is Better than Bigotry.”

--anyone else getting tired of labeling like this?

     Perhaps the group isn’t taking their Satanism seriously, and perhaps admin is just showing how open-minded they are…I still think it’s a bad idea, but I (reluctantly) give the benefit of the doubt to a Satanist group working on campus.

     So what student groups are not welcome on campus? If Satanists are welcome, the standards must be pretty low, right?

Samford University recently declined to recognize a prospective Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) chapter because of the group’s “inflammatory” anti-communist stance.

      I’m stunned. It seems like it was just a generation ago that “hating commies” was perfectly socially acceptable, and now there’s no space for it on campus. What reason for denying these students official recognition on campus? It must be pretty serious if calling conservatives bigots and comparing them to people who cavort with rotting corpses doesn’t rate a ban, right? Not really:

Specifically, faculty members objected to a statement in the group's founding document, the Sharon Statement, declaring that communism is the greatest threat to individual liberties.

      Gee, whiz, that’s…terrible? Lots and lots of folks died under communism (more accurately, starvation due to communist policies, but bear with me)…is it so great a stretch to believe that death can put a real hamper on a person’s individual liberties? Perhaps this is an extremist view, but the Young Americans for Freedom aren’t attacking people, they’re attacking an economic and political system.

      I don’t understand the confusion of ideas that leads to “SATANISTS = GOOD, ANTI-COMMUNISTS = BAD,” but let’s see if there’s more to the story:

“…YAF’s founding document, the Sharon Statement…the professors interpreted as ‘not being kind to those who had a communist background.’”

     A reading of the Statement, from 1960, doesn’t seem to attack (or otherwise is “not being kind”) the unfortunates who had a communist background. Perhaps I’m being condescending by calling them “unfortunates,” but everywhere there has been communism, there have been people willing to risk death to escape it.   

  

     There was a time when people dying trying to cross the Berlin Wall was regular enough, when people building rickety boats to escape Cuba was a seasonal event. Perhaps that was in the past, but when we interview people who escaped the communist utopias of North Korea or whatever, they consistently indicate being happy to escape.

     On the other hand, it’s fairly rare for people to build boats, tunnel under barbed wire, or risk machine gun fire to escape from non-communist societies into communist countries. Has anyone risked death to escape a capitalist country, ever? In an era where "we are tolerant of everything because everything is equal" this is a strange lapse in behavior, but I digress.

 

    But I don’t see the YAF, or anyone else, as unkind to the victims of communism, and there’s nothing in that Statement to such an effect.

      This isn’t an outright rejection, to be sure, the university will reconsider the application, with a string attached:

A university spokesman, however, disputed the characterization of the Faculty Senate’s decision as a rejection of the club, saying the request had merely been “deferred” until the students could satisfy school officials that they will treat classmates, even communists, with respect.

      Weird. I’ve never seen a university concerned with treating conservatives with respect, and it seems my blog has quite a few cases where quite the opposite is true. Time and again it seems like the non-Left side has to work harder to get the same breaks as the Left. It’s not just my blog that shows there’s a strong anti-conservative bias on campus.

     This little rejection is minor news, I admit…but it’s one more piece of evidence that there may be more going on that can be explained by corruption and incompetence. One comment really sums up the situation:

Mitchell Baxter ·

Alexandria, Virginia

You know academia is out of control when professors in Alabama prioritize being kind to "those with a communist background." Alabama. Seriously. Alabama.

     Seriously.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

DeVos Confirmed As Education Secretary...And?

Just a quick post today.

Betsy DeVos is now our Education Secretary, and like everything else Donald Trump has done, the mainstream media is absolutely freaking out about it.

You know? Betsy DeVos IS completely unqualified for the position, and has no relevant experience.

And?

I don't care.

Look, our Education Department has been around since 1979, and in those nearly 38 years, our public education system has failed in every conceivable way. Every independent study of what goes on in our public school system has shown failure, and relative to the rest of the world, our students are pretty weak despite the fact we spend more per student than anyone else (often by multiples of what other countries spend, even though they nevertheless produce superior students).

And all of those years, our Department of Education has been run by people with extensive experience and qualifications.

Considering their perfect track record of failure, I don't see how Betsy DeVos can possibly be worse. Even if she's a total failure at the job, that would make her a pretty average Education Secretary...and thus this selection doesn't merit yet another primal scream of rage from the media. 

Just sayin'