An Inconvenient Truth at Penn State
Timothy Birdnow
This may be in poor taste, but a thought occured to me while reading about the sordid affair of Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky's rape and sodomy of young boys. http://wzakcleveland.com/national/michaelbaisden/shocking-penn-state-coach-allegedly-rapes-poor-black-kids-since-1994/ It has been alleged that the administration at Penn State was aware of the "problem" with Sandusky, yet continued to employ him - even though head coach Joe Paterno had personally informed his superiors about an incident. In other words, they KNEW about this and chose to ignore it.
What else has Penn State ignored?
They have kept a man on their staff who has purposefully lied about his research results in order to advance a political agenda. That man's name is Michael Mann, and his "Nature trick" subverted the IPCC report on Global Warming and nearly ramrodded through a worldwide economic plundering that involved massive redistribution of wealth via carbon taxes and international controls. Mann's "hockey stick graph" was widely touted as proof that Mankind was on the verge of a human caused apocalypse, and innumerable leftist groups sought to justify an ingathering of power to the U.N. and establishing world government to deal with the "crisis" - a crisis that was a complete fiction. Mann knowingly lied, and he symbolically raped millions of investors, taxpayers, and citizens.
Now, I know there is a huge difference between raping and sodomizing a child and lying about research results, but it suggests a pattern, a tendency to look the other way when confronted with ethical lapses. Penn State prefers to stand by their man (a bit too familiar a position given Sandusky's proclivities) and keep a rapist - or a fraudster - because they can make good press from them. It suggests an amorality that is becoming increasingly common in modernity. We saw this during the Clinton era where many - including the majority of the public - did not care that the President of the United States broke several laws because the economy was good. The man who swore to uphold the Constitution and the laws made by Congress perjured himself, subborned perjury, obstructed justice, all for the sake of winning a lawsuit. Yet the public didn't seem to care, because times were good.
But times do not stay good when inequity abounds in a nation, and many of today's problems can be traced back to the Clinton era. As ye sew, so shall ye reap, according to the Bible, and we have sewn the seeds of moral relativism. Is it any wonder that the Clinton-era update to the Community Reinvestment Act gave us subprime mortgages, which gave us the economic collapse and the terrible economy we are now in? We may not understand how these things twist and recoil, but lapses in moral standards inevitably come back to bite us.
And what has happened at Penn State should come as no surprise, because the University has clearly taken a path whereby they dismiss bad behavior. And in so doing they have gained prestige, but at what cost? The Bible says the wages of Sin is Death, and it does not discriminate about sins. Murder, adultery, rape, or lying, they are all the same in the Judeo-Christian ethic. Why? Because they all lead to the same thing. They may be very differnt actions, with very different motivations, and very different outcomes, but the end is the same. And Penn State has illustrated that we cannot ignore some bad behavior because we don't think it is bad enough. An inconvenient truth is still a truth, and evil is called by many names but it is still evil. Whether it involves violence, sex, or plain old lying, it is still the highway to Hell.
And Penn State has made lots of money from both it's football program and it's Climatological one. This from Ken Haapla at SEPP:
"The above quote from Robert Oppenheimer highlights a desperately needed attitude in today's society - including among academics and scientists. It is always too easy to go along and not question even when questions arise. Investigative reporting, such as Donna Laframboise's exposé of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), needed to be done years ago.
Often presidents of universities are chosen more for the business acumen than other qualities. They may treat certain programs as profit centers and may prefer to ignore issues arising within these programs. This week, the President of Penn State University was fired for failure to properly supervise one highly successful program, its football program.
Steve McIntyre and Andrew Montford suggest that the highly successful revenue generation of certain research programs may have resulted in the failure to conduct proper inquiries into the Climategate emails, and related issues. The source of the leak is immaterial; the propriety of the contents is what was important.
According to the Penn State University Budget Office the total funds allocated for research in the fiscal year 2010 - 2011 amounted to $804,789,000 of which $469,954,000 were Federal sponsored grants and contracts. McIntyre suggests such level of funding may have been sufficient to cause the university investigators to less than rigorously perform their duties. At the time of the findings, McIntyre was extremely critical of their performance. Please see links under "Climategate Continued" and
http://www.budget.psu.edu/factbook/Research20..."
End excerpt.
And the mission of any University was supposed to be uncovering the truth, yet the modern variant is more concerned with indoctrination and advocacy for a particular worldview - a worldview that refuses to accept any absolutes or standards as an assault on human freedom. Multiculturalism, moral relativism, all of the modern isms that infest higher education have come to dominate Truth, and post-modern beliefs that truth is unknowable have given us precisely this situation where we ignore a liar like Mann or a rapist like Sandusky because we do not think we have any right to judge, or even to question. Reality has become an imposition on the individual, and the notion that reality is different for different people gives us no right to impose our vision of reality on another, or so the thinking goes. There really is no truth, so we have no right to speak categorically. Who is to say Michael Mann has no right to lie? Who can tell Sandusky that he has no right to follow his personal desires? Who are we to judge?
I am mindful of Nietzche in Truth and Lie in an Extra Moral Sense:
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl201/modules/Philosophers/Nietzsche/Truth_and_Lie_in_an_Extra-Moral_Sense.htm
"What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins."
[...]
"Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency"C
End
Colleges and Universities have adopted this as their mantra, this view that reality is what we believe it to be and only that. The older view that Man simply perceives reality poorly has been subplanted by this new materialism, this view that there is nothing real because there is no God to decide reality. Nietchze was buttressed by Relativity and Quantum physics, both of which suggest that the observer is critical to an event or occurance. And if reality is subjective, we cannot possibly understand the reality of another.
When one stops believing in the universality of reality anything is possible. Higher education stopped believing in reality long ago.
And if there is no reality there is no moral law, but merely an agreed-upon convention that may or may not be applicable. It's why our schools refuse to discipline, refuse to assign grades, refuse to teach children right from wrong. It's why our jails are full of criminals. It's why our art has fallen into the most depraved and base of aspects. It's why Occupy Wall Streeters can openly advocate for socialism despite all evidence that it is catastrophic in it's effects. Because we have to believe, and it is so! Our world has become an enormous Land of Oz where clicking heels brings what we wish. The role of education, of media, of all avenues of disseminating information is to convince enough people to believe. It is ultimately idolatry, because it deifies the creative instincts of Man over that which is real.
Who are we to judge? That has given us Jerry Sandusky, Michael Mann, and the entire Obama Administration.
Timothy Birdnow is a St. Louis based writer. His website is www.tbirdnow.mee.nu
This may be in poor taste, but a thought occured to me while reading about the sordid affair of Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky's rape and sodomy of young boys. http://wzakcleveland.com/national/michaelbaisden/shocking-penn-state-coach-allegedly-rapes-poor-black-kids-since-1994/ It has been alleged that the administration at Penn State was aware of the "problem" with Sandusky, yet continued to employ him - even though head coach Joe Paterno had personally informed his superiors about an incident. In other words, they KNEW about this and chose to ignore it.
What else has Penn State ignored?
They have kept a man on their staff who has purposefully lied about his research results in order to advance a political agenda. That man's name is Michael Mann, and his "Nature trick" subverted the IPCC report on Global Warming and nearly ramrodded through a worldwide economic plundering that involved massive redistribution of wealth via carbon taxes and international controls. Mann's "hockey stick graph" was widely touted as proof that Mankind was on the verge of a human caused apocalypse, and innumerable leftist groups sought to justify an ingathering of power to the U.N. and establishing world government to deal with the "crisis" - a crisis that was a complete fiction. Mann knowingly lied, and he symbolically raped millions of investors, taxpayers, and citizens.
Now, I know there is a huge difference between raping and sodomizing a child and lying about research results, but it suggests a pattern, a tendency to look the other way when confronted with ethical lapses. Penn State prefers to stand by their man (a bit too familiar a position given Sandusky's proclivities) and keep a rapist - or a fraudster - because they can make good press from them. It suggests an amorality that is becoming increasingly common in modernity. We saw this during the Clinton era where many - including the majority of the public - did not care that the President of the United States broke several laws because the economy was good. The man who swore to uphold the Constitution and the laws made by Congress perjured himself, subborned perjury, obstructed justice, all for the sake of winning a lawsuit. Yet the public didn't seem to care, because times were good.
But times do not stay good when inequity abounds in a nation, and many of today's problems can be traced back to the Clinton era. As ye sew, so shall ye reap, according to the Bible, and we have sewn the seeds of moral relativism. Is it any wonder that the Clinton-era update to the Community Reinvestment Act gave us subprime mortgages, which gave us the economic collapse and the terrible economy we are now in? We may not understand how these things twist and recoil, but lapses in moral standards inevitably come back to bite us.
And what has happened at Penn State should come as no surprise, because the University has clearly taken a path whereby they dismiss bad behavior. And in so doing they have gained prestige, but at what cost? The Bible says the wages of Sin is Death, and it does not discriminate about sins. Murder, adultery, rape, or lying, they are all the same in the Judeo-Christian ethic. Why? Because they all lead to the same thing. They may be very differnt actions, with very different motivations, and very different outcomes, but the end is the same. And Penn State has illustrated that we cannot ignore some bad behavior because we don't think it is bad enough. An inconvenient truth is still a truth, and evil is called by many names but it is still evil. Whether it involves violence, sex, or plain old lying, it is still the highway to Hell.
And Penn State has made lots of money from both it's football program and it's Climatological one. This from Ken Haapla at SEPP:
"The above quote from Robert Oppenheimer highlights a desperately needed attitude in today's society - including among academics and scientists. It is always too easy to go along and not question even when questions arise. Investigative reporting, such as Donna Laframboise's exposé of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), needed to be done years ago.
Often presidents of universities are chosen more for the business acumen than other qualities. They may treat certain programs as profit centers and may prefer to ignore issues arising within these programs. This week, the President of Penn State University was fired for failure to properly supervise one highly successful program, its football program.
Steve McIntyre and Andrew Montford suggest that the highly successful revenue generation of certain research programs may have resulted in the failure to conduct proper inquiries into the Climategate emails, and related issues. The source of the leak is immaterial; the propriety of the contents is what was important.
According to the Penn State University Budget Office the total funds allocated for research in the fiscal year 2010 - 2011 amounted to $804,789,000 of which $469,954,000 were Federal sponsored grants and contracts. McIntyre suggests such level of funding may have been sufficient to cause the university investigators to less than rigorously perform their duties. At the time of the findings, McIntyre was extremely critical of their performance. Please see links under "Climategate Continued" and
http://www.budget.psu.edu/factbook/Research20..."
End excerpt.
And the mission of any University was supposed to be uncovering the truth, yet the modern variant is more concerned with indoctrination and advocacy for a particular worldview - a worldview that refuses to accept any absolutes or standards as an assault on human freedom. Multiculturalism, moral relativism, all of the modern isms that infest higher education have come to dominate Truth, and post-modern beliefs that truth is unknowable have given us precisely this situation where we ignore a liar like Mann or a rapist like Sandusky because we do not think we have any right to judge, or even to question. Reality has become an imposition on the individual, and the notion that reality is different for different people gives us no right to impose our vision of reality on another, or so the thinking goes. There really is no truth, so we have no right to speak categorically. Who is to say Michael Mann has no right to lie? Who can tell Sandusky that he has no right to follow his personal desires? Who are we to judge?
I am mindful of Nietzche in Truth and Lie in an Extra Moral Sense:
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl201/modules/Philosophers/Nietzsche/Truth_and_Lie_in_an_Extra-Moral_Sense.htm
"What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins."
[...]
"Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency"C
End
Colleges and Universities have adopted this as their mantra, this view that reality is what we believe it to be and only that. The older view that Man simply perceives reality poorly has been subplanted by this new materialism, this view that there is nothing real because there is no God to decide reality. Nietchze was buttressed by Relativity and Quantum physics, both of which suggest that the observer is critical to an event or occurance. And if reality is subjective, we cannot possibly understand the reality of another.
When one stops believing in the universality of reality anything is possible. Higher education stopped believing in reality long ago.
And if there is no reality there is no moral law, but merely an agreed-upon convention that may or may not be applicable. It's why our schools refuse to discipline, refuse to assign grades, refuse to teach children right from wrong. It's why our jails are full of criminals. It's why our art has fallen into the most depraved and base of aspects. It's why Occupy Wall Streeters can openly advocate for socialism despite all evidence that it is catastrophic in it's effects. Because we have to believe, and it is so! Our world has become an enormous Land of Oz where clicking heels brings what we wish. The role of education, of media, of all avenues of disseminating information is to convince enough people to believe. It is ultimately idolatry, because it deifies the creative instincts of Man over that which is real.
Who are we to judge? That has given us Jerry Sandusky, Michael Mann, and the entire Obama Administration.
Timothy Birdnow is a St. Louis based writer. His website is www.tbirdnow.mee.nu
posted by Timothy Birdnow | 5:33 AM
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