Memos released detail initial BoT reaction.

Penn State bungled this thing from the minute the original Patriot-News story broke. They weren’t ready, they underestimated the backlash, and that sure as hell isn’t the media’s fault.

If you put yourself in the administrator’s shoes back in February or whenever, it’s easy to see that this is probably what happened. They had no idea that charges would be brought on Curley and Schultz. They knew that each of them had testified, and they probably didn’t even know that there were charges being investigated other than maybe the one that started it and the one from 2002.

The lack of preparedness is very consistent with them believing they handled this correctly in 2002 and that the only fallout they would be dealing with was that of a retired employee getting arrested for something they did on campus. I’m certain they didn’t consider that two people in the administration would get arrested and Spanier’s assertion of support was a reaction to believing that they had all handled the situation correctly and relatively OUT IN THE OPEN. If you suspend believing McQueary’s testimony for a minute, and instead believe for just a minute that maybe what he reported was actually not very clear, there appears to be no additional evidence of a cover up by anyone (including McQueary’s own testimony that he was never told not to talk about it).

Joe reported something to Curley/Schultz. Curley/Schultz reported something to Spanier. PSU reported something to Second Mile. Even if you think PSU is a bunch of bad apples, why report ANYTHING outside of your own organization if you are trying to cover something up? You immediately lose your plausible deniability by doing that.

There is no evidence of a cover-up other than the fact that McQueary and Curley/Schultz appear to disagree on the seriousness of what they talked about… and there is actually some evidence that the administration simply did not take McQueary’s evidence/account all that seriously (e.g., delays in meeting with McQueary, delays in reporting up the chain, Spanier’s account of what Curley/Schultz told him) and that they believed the actions they took were appropriate (e.g., according to his own testimony, McQueary never talked to the administration again about not feeling like their actions were appropriate based on what he witnessed).

Heap their unprepared reaction to the scandal into the mix and I have to conclude they simply failed to grasp the extent of the shit storm they were in for because they believed they had done the right thing.

If these guys were guilty of a cover-up and knew a storm was coming, I have to imagine they would have been more prepared… and there’s no way Spanier is dumb enough to confess support for two guys who he could have just let take the fall for the whole thing.

Schultz investigated, determined that nothing happened, end of story. I don’t believe that it ever occurred to them that they did anything wrong.

What I honestly believe occurred from Penn State’s end is summarized in 12 words.

there was a media frenzy accompanied by some lazy/incompetent reporting, but I don’t think it was a conspiracy.

McQueary may be transposing his current recollections of the situation onto his original memories. What he initially may have viewed as “weird, kinda creepy activity in the shower late at night with unidentified slapping noises” could easily morph into, “I saw Sandusky sexually assaulting a young boy in the shower” once he finds out about the other allegations years later.

Just like right now if you saw an old guy walking hand in hand with a little kid. Today you might think, “oh, look at that father and child sharing a tender moment. How cute.” Then tomorrow you see the picture of the man in the news and read a story about how he sexually assaulted half a dozen children in the area. There’s no possible way anyone looks back at their original memory in the same light.

BECAUSE HE DID NOT OBSERVE ANY

Are you as sure of this as you were that the perjury charges would be thrown out because of the layout of the locker room and showers in the Lasch building? More sure? Less sure?

There is no need for speculation about what MM observed. We now have is testimony under oath and his testimony is two 2 second glances and 3 slaps he decided to call rhythmic – even though no rhythm can be established from 3 slaps

This is entirely different from trying to imagine why 5 respected and accomplished adults would not find his account compelling enough to immediately run to phone 911 and launch and investigation – his own father included.

I am as certain as testimony under oath is certain. .

because it makes the line moves faster.

This summarizes a lot about our current cultural and societal states.

is much less scary for the average person than taking a long, hard look at all the other things that might be combining to cause such problems. You can make more restrictive ratings for video games after all.

Which seems unlikely.

Since no matter what you do, someone who believes in them will never be happy until their idea of the truth is revealed to them. It could be completely ridiculous conclusion but in their head it is the truth no matter how many facts or what amount of evidence is there to counter it. This is true for any and all conspiracy theories, they are all ridiculous.

Laid off due to company finances, but I know of no one that has ever been randomly fired. Can’t happen where I work. Like I said, if you are working under a cloud of needing to please the boss in more ways than job performance or you are getting fired for no reason then you work for a shithole company and should seriously look into finding other employment. There are good companies that do not operate that way. I have friends that started their own companies and now have 40+ employees and would never treat their people that way. They have fired people for performance and not showing up to work but they have never fired anyone because they didn’t like them.

with the repeal of Taft-Hartley — the point being that it is a choice that the polis could make otherwise.

They tried to do the “fire someone charged with a crime” thing and I brought up at the meeting that I would get someone to then file a complaint against anyone of their asses. A month later withdrawl the complaint but they would have lost their jobs. They looked at the company lawyer present and asked if this could happen and they said yes. Like I said before. Random firings may happen but they are much harder to get away with in large corporations.

I’m coming out of American pragmatism. And without getting too deeply into it, truth is what works. So, while there are no absolutes, we do nonetheless develop standards within a particular, historically-situated place that permit us to develop guiding values. That’s what makes me a pluralist rather than a relativist.

In short: transcendent for this particular time and place, but not transcendent in an “always has been, is now, and always will be” essentialist sense. The future will have to be renegotiated by those folks in that time.

He created the hockey stick graph that Al Gore crowed about in An Inconvenient Truth. The whole principle of the graph is based on the assumption that tree growth rates in Russia over the last thousand years were strictly a predictable function of local temperature. Several people have asked to see his original data, but he always hides behind intellectual property arguments – this despite the fact that he has the ear of the U.N..

I feel like I’ve already gone too far…

I understand and appreciate why you would want to do it, of course, but I also question whether, once that door was opened up, it could ever really be contained to just that thread. I’m not sure it could, and I don’t know that the potential benefits justify the possible costs of finding out. Merely my two cents.

Why can’t this be a blog where people talk about Penn State, and where Penn Staters talk about things with other Penn Staters. I don’t see why the standard rules of civility couldn’t apply, and you’d always be free to not read the posts.

it could have happened. There was about a weeks long thread about the Civil War and that didn’t get too bad, among other things like the proper role/duties of the NCAA that went on for a while in a very civil, thoughtful manner.

Now, I just don’t know.

Incidentally, I thought it was great fun and thought provoking to read/participate in those threads. Typing can be a plus when one takes time to reread and proof their statements for clarity and accuracy. Far more time than in a verbal dialog especially if emotions can be kept under control.

Bad idea. More bad would come than good. Even a well-fostered community like this one would trip up. And the segregation would be too difficult to enforce. Screennames’ track records, including content thrown into that thread, would still carry forward into the future, into other posts. Info & reactions learned in it would carry forward and affect future interactions.

There’s been a fair bit of cohesion here of late. People have been largely decent to each other, through all the shite that Penn State’s been going through. Permitting a politics discussion would introduce an unnecessary strain on that. Also, what’s next after that, religion, abortion, divisive subject #9?

Of course there’s always the flimsy ‘you don’t have to read it, or anything, here’ posturing that could ostensibly go with it. If it does, I’ll probably finally exercise that right.