Monsieur Macho represented himself in his trial for defaming climate change scientist Michael Mann cuz NOT ONLY IS CLIMATE CHANGE A HOAX BUT … BUT… BUT … MICHAEL MANN IS JUST LIKE A PEDERAST!
And not just any pederast – Jerry Sandusky!
Mark Steyn has to pay Mann one million dollars.
Set a mousetrap, catch a mammoth.
It all started innocently enough; the diligent staff at Seeger sought to end the practice of sanitizer theft by installing cameras.
The cameras right away picked up a Penn State professor fucking his dog.
Around 8 p.m. the following day, the camera captured multiple brief videos that allegedly showed a man later identified as [Themis] Matsoukas — who was naked, except for a ski mask, wrist watch, boots and backpack — masturbating near the women’s restroom and then engaging in a sexual act with a dog. The videos also showed that Matsoukas appeared to be recording himself with an iPad.
… Owners of two private camps surrounded by Rothrock also contacted state forest staff when they discovered images from their trail cameras of a man who was nude from the waist down, a ranger wrote. The six photos dated back as far as 2014 and investigators identified Matsoukas as the man in each, according to the affidavit.
Matsoukas again appeared on the DCNR trail camera on May 16 and he was identified by his vehicle registration.
Investigators executed a search warrant for Matsoukas’s State College-area home on June 9 and found an iPad, backpack, ski mask, watch and boots, all of which appeared to match those observed in the video. A dog at the home also had identical characteristics of the one in the video …
Matsoukas allegedly denied having the items when investigators first arrived, but then became upset and said “I do it to blow off steam.”
It’s not quite Sandusky in the showers, but Matsoukas in the park will no doubt take its own small place in the history of the school…
UD‘s wondering about that ski mask… You’re going to the trouble of repeatedly taking your sex life out of the privacy of your home and into a big public park (“Matsoukas’s location was within viewing distance of a road frequently used by visitors to the Alan Seeger picnic area, leased camps, Penn Roosevelt State Park and the Greenwood Fire Tower”) because (I guess) the risk of discovery heightens your excitement. Why then the ski mask? Do you use it at home too because you’re ashamed of what you’re doing? Surely the dog harbors no doubt of your identity.
Well, it’s actually a county lockup, but UD finds the tongue-twister irresistible.
Yes, the dusty Sandusky story needs to be dusted off for a moment while we note the failure of Graham Spanier’s endless efforts to avoid incarceration for his role in the child abuse scandal at his university, where coaches buggering little boys in the locker rooms was all in a day’s work.
The whole sordid tale, you recall (it’s okay if you don’t have the stomach to recall) was a testimony to the institution-enhancing greatness of big-time university football.
Football coach Greg Schiano is well on his way to being hired again at Rutgers. Feast your eyes on his past there, and look forward to the fun Rutgers will have defending Penn State’s most blind, deaf, and dumb employee.
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His old buddy Jerry’s in the news again.
All-male, all-football Ohio State University gets the full New York Times treatment as it generates the sort of outrageous scandals (see, most recently, all-male, all-football Baylor) all-male, all-football settings (see Penn State) tend to generate.
At the end of its article about local reactions to the most high-profile of its many current scandals (the wife beaters and the male buddies who ignore the wife beating scandal), the NYT reporters quote a guy saying “[we] don’t want Ohio State just viewed as a football factory.”
But look up at the opening paragraphs of the story: its culture of sports above all.
Sorry, babe. That’s the definition of a football factory.
Own it. And pay for it.
Lawsuits stemming from abuse cases have led to multimillion-dollar settlements at other universities. Earlier this year, Michigan State set aside $500 million to settle with hundreds of victims of Lawrence G. Nassar, a university physician who sexually abused hundreds of young women, including prominent gymnasts. A few years ago, Penn State agreed to settlements totaling nearly $100 million with more than 30 victims of the former football assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, who was convicted of sexually assaulting boys.
Get out your wallet. And keep it out.
Shades of James Tracy, Mike Leach, and other campus conspiracists.
Rather than simply acknowledging the Sandusky/Nyang’oro Principle at our most sports-obsessed schools – university administrators can’t and won’t control anything having to do with big-ticket athletics – Jim Jordan and his fellow conspiracists deny the fucking obvious and the obvious fucking at one more degenerate American university sports program.
Called to account for what happened at Ohio State, they reach way, way outside the orbit of anyone’s moral responsibility.
Indeed the Deadspin writer I quote in my headline is right: Eventually Jordan and Louie Gohmert and company will determine that like the “dead” “kids” of Sandy Hook and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, their accusers from the wrestling team are all crisis actors.
The propensity of America’s sleaziest university presidents to recruit/admit/hire/defend the sleaziest imaginable players and coaches now has a name: The Heimlich Maneuver.
Named in honor of Luke Heimlich, convicted child molester and, thanks to the eager backing of OSU president Ed Ray (so eager he’s talked himself out: a spokesperson tells a newspaper Ray is “not available for Luke Heimlich questions“), hero of the OSU baseball diamond, The Heimlich Maneuver designates the complex series of moves by which sportswhore presidents and their … uh … Andre McGees… do everything humanly possible to keep miscreants who can catch and throw balls students in good standing at their university. It really doesn’t matter what you’ve done, or indeed, now that you’re on campus, what you’re doing; block and tackle at a high level, and go ahead and drink drug bully rape assault steal cheat and shoot off your assault rifle to your heart’s content. We were all young once. Or, if we’re Jerry Sandusky, we’re all young at heart.
Even the majors are saying no to Heimlich; the only place he’s welcome is at the contemporary American university.
Big sports programs are such a boon to universities.
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Penn State: “Whew! We got off easy.”
[Pennsylvania State University’s former president’s defamation case against Louis Freeh] could be overturned if [the president] were to successfully appeal his March 2017 conviction of one misdemeanor count of child endangerment.
And should [Graham] Spanier win that appeal, [he] will continue to pursue his case against Freeh.
[Former vice president Gary Schultz and former athletic director Tim Curley] were both also convicted on the same misdemeanor count, and were sentenced in July to a mix of prison time, house arrest and probation.
Spanier, whose sentence has been delayed pending his appeal, was seen playing the washboard at the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts the same week the other two former administrators began their jail time.
A Potemkin Village is “a pretentiously showy or imposing façade intended to mask or divert attention from an embarrassing or shabby fact or condition.” The three Bloomberg writers who make this comparison – it appears in a long piece summarizing the ongoing national basketball scandal, which they call “the worst since college basketball players were caught shaving points for gamblers in the 1950s” – mean to suggest, I guess, that the glitzy University of Louisville basketball team masked whatever there was of the shabby non-basketball University of Louisville.
It’s quite a statement. Can we have gotten to the point where we’re not a tad astonished by it?
I mean, yes, one remembers the witty president of the University of Oklahoma back in the ‘fifties telling a senator he wanted to “build a university our football team can be proud of.” More recently, the president of Ohio State, “asked whether the school had considered firing embattled coach Jim Tressel, … said: ‘No. Are you kidding? Let me just be very clear. I’m just hopeful the coach doesn’t dismiss me.'” One has no trouble imagining how the puling little president of the University of Alabama feels about his stature vis-à-vis Nick Saban. And of course we know how the leadership of Penn State felt about that… curious couple, Sandusky and Paterno. Going to jail for them was a small price to pay.
Still…
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And does the analogy really work? For after all, as is the way with many big-time athletic programs, there was never a clear separation between the shabby embarrassing academic UL and the rich degenerate basketball UL. The squalor of college sports spreads itself all over the campus – literally, as in the way the University of Georgia campus for a long time looked the morning after big games; and figuratively, as in the establishment of a house of prostitution in a UL dorm for players, recruits, and the fathers of recruits.
It’s not really that you’ve got on the one hand the glitzy sports program and on the other the hidden humiliating university. The whole thing tends toward looking like the Calais Jungle.
Yeah, UD sees where Lisa Wade is going with this…
But two can play that game! Imagine a world in which everything was the same about higher education except that there has never been quasi-professional football and basketball on many campuses. An 18-year-old waltzes into a dean’s office and says ‘I want to start a corrupt and bankrupting enterprise which will bring anti-intellectuality, illegality, violence, and global derision to our campus, and will ultimately put our president, athletic director, and senior vp for finance in jail for criminal neglect.’
The NYT‘s Frank Bruni forgets that frats/quasi-professional sports represents “the total way of life of a people,” as Clifford Geertz put it, and you can’t just decide to extract one element of a total culture (fraternities, university-sponsored alcohol sales at stadiums, coach-sponsored on-campus houses of prostitution for recruits and players, general excitement at the spectacle of college students getting their heads concussed, decades of fake courses, the adulation of violent, mentally ill people if they can play football, the routine cancellation of scads of classes so that everyone can attend games…) that you don’t happen to like….
Ooh, you don’t feel comfortable with guns in fraternity houses! The thought of packs of young men, alcohol, secrecy, weaponry, and post-game rage makes you uncomfortable, does it? Well fuck you. It’s a way of life, and you don’t get to say ixnay on the guns but the sexual assault of scores of female students is okay… Not at all or all in all, as Tennyson says…
As we wind down toward December, this year’s fraternity-death totals are coming in, and they’re – as usual – awesome. Nothing kills eighteen year old American men in search of friendship and a college education faster than a night with the Sweethearts of Sigma Chi, professional sadists who have, over the long storied years of their chapter, perfected the art of murder by forced alcohol intake. Nothing bonds brothers like working together over many hours to make sure someone who’d like to join their club chokes to death on his vomit – unless it’s the scary manslaughter case that follows, a shared experience of adversity that brings together the boys, their adoring parents, and their supportive community, in another one of life’s tests of blood loyalty and the Greek way.
After a century packed with dead pledges, everyone agrees there’s not really anything our country can do about the Geertzian “deep play” of massive insane drunken football staging area universities like Penn State as they stagger from serial child rapist coaches, to post-game riots, to jock-on-jock homicide in the frat houses. The whole wild synergy put Penn State’s last president in jail, but this seems to have been viewed as the ultimate test of the school’s commitment to destroying the life of everyone who studies or works there without regard to status.
There are scads of universities like Penn State. There are scads of universities that make Penn State their role model.
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Because the blood and the violence in these football/frat cultures are beautiful. Remember what Professor Murray Siskind, a character in White Noise who teaches a seminar on car crashes in the movies, says about these ever more violent collisions. He is talking to one of his colleagues.
“All that blood and glass, that screeching rubber. What about the sheer waste, the sense of a civilization in a state of decay?”
… “I tell [my students] it’s not decay they are seeing but innocence. The movie breaks away from complicated human passions to show us something elemental, something fiery and loud and head-on. It’s a conservative wish-fulfillment, a yearning for naivete. We want to be artless again. We want to reverse the flow of experience, of worldliness and its responsibilities. My students say, ‘Look at the crushed bodies, the severed limbs. What kind of innocence is this?'”
“What do you say to that?”
“I tell them they can’t think of a car crash in a movie as a violent act. It’s a celebration. A reaffirmation of traditional values and beliefs. I connect car crashes to holidays like Thanksgiving and the Fourth. We don’t mourn the dead or rejoice in miracles. These are days of secular optimism, of self-celebration. We will improve, prosper, perfect ourselves. Watch any car crash in any American movie. It is a high-spirited moment like old-fashioned stunt flying, walking on wings. The people who stage these crashes are able to capture a lightheartedness, a carefree enjoyment that car crashes in foreign movies can never approach.”
“Look past the violence.”
“Exactly. Look past the violence, Jack. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun.”
Look past the teenager on life-support to the high-spirited innocent fun of the postmodern American campus, where advances in recording technology and a booming liquor industry promise Americans years of morbid viewing pleasure.
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For those who consider this a “problem,” which must be “solved,” UD says: Wisconsin. Concentrate the behavior in one state. Designate one American state whose universities may, with impunity, pick off their freshman males.
Why Wisconsin? It is well-located, right in the middle of the country, for ease of access. The state has a long glorious tradition of drunkenness, and is full of jock-centric state university campuses. All universities outside of Wisconsin would shutter their Greek houses, and they would make life so difficult for the remaining illegal off-campus fraternities that the lure of Wisconsin would become irresistible.
This blog has long written about how big-time athletics infects a university, attracting to it scads of unserious students, jocksniffer administrators, and rich, control-freak, alumni boosters. Eventually the university is run by the two guys with all the money: the alumni booster (Boone Pickens; Phil Knight) and the football/basketball coach (JoePa Of Blessed Memory and Cached Statue; Still-Uncached Statue Man Nick Saban).
Every now and then one of these hopeless little North Koreas, with their Dear Leaders who take students’ money in order to play the pointless war games (KILL AUBURN!) that keep students in a stupor, decides to improve itself, to look more like a university than an experiment in repressive desublimation. But whether it’s Penn State or the University of North Carolina, the systemic sickness of the jockshop (Professor Emeritus Sandusky puts PSU’s leadership in prison; Julius Nyang’oro’s depravity ushers in mandatory class inspections for all faculty) will always – as the UNC observer in this post’s headline notes – overwhelm any self-improvement efforts and reveal the sick joke at the permanent core of the place.
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UD thanks an UNC insider
for this post’s headline.
[If you didn’t expect this outcome, you’re like people who are still] stunned to learn that a game as inherently violent as football would lead to life-altering issues among players from repeated concussions and blows to the head.
Far worse, you’re like Louisville’s superscummy basketball coach, who says he’s “completely shocked” by the shocking corruption in university basketball. As completely shocked as he was by the whorehouse being run in a dorm lived in by basketball players and visited by recruits and their families.
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So here’s UD‘s take. American university students are being trained to be Italians. Italians are living the good life and they don’t give a rat’s ass that their entire world is howlingly corrupt. In a New Yorker article about the sordid Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair, Adam Gopnik noted French anxiety about
what many in Paris see as the “Italianization” of French life — the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor …
The University of Louisville is the avant-garde: Can you grow a university whose students heartily endorse, and fork all their tuition money over to, Rick Berlusconi Strauss-Kahn Pitino? His sextortion, his whores for sixteen year old recruits and their fathers, his stuffed envelopes for sports agents in Las Vegas hotel rooms? Can you guarantee a university whose students will rush to the bookstore and buy out Pitino’s many books about how to be ethical?
The entire financial foundation of the University of Louisville rests on a bet that there’s no bottom – that students and alumni will be able — FOREVER — to look at a guy who could give Jerry Sandusky a run for his money and say WE LOVE YOU RICK. TELL US HOW MUCH MORE YOU WANT US TO COUGH UP FOR YOUR SALARY.
It’s a solid bet. This is Kentucky, after all.
