Penn State coach, AD, VP charged in child rape case

isn't campus police is the only PD in town & one of those that McQueary spoke to (Curley?) regarding the incident was head of campus security (IIRC).

 

If McQueary "put a stop to it," we'd have had this thread in 2003.



End of discussion.

 

http://www.yardbarker.com/college_f...om_outside_penn_states_beaver_stadium/8129743

Joe's statue is coming down.

 

Just heard that Joe Paterno transferred assets into his wife's name in July, presumably to shield his assets from a lawsuit.

 

Absolutely. He doesn't understand that people are not just questioning his actions that day, but every day of every year since.

Anyway, it doesn't sound ike the cops agree with him...

 

This is becoming uglier and uglier by the day. I have a feeling the people involved are going to look even worse by the time this whole sordid affair is over.

 

At what point will someone grab Franco Harris and tell him to shut the f##k up?

He is just embarrassing himself everyday, every time he opens his mouth to talk about the situation and JoePa. It's insane.

 

Never liked Franco Harris... and not just because he was a Steeler.

 

True, but to me that can be a cover up too...sad that no one can be trusted in PA...

 

Jason Whitlock's take on McQueary. His bragging about how independent he is is annoying but he does raise some interesting, although disturbing points about why McQueary and really so many people act cowardly in such a situation. I am wondering too if any Baylor grads here heard about the Abar Rouse case that Whitlock mentions? I've highlighted that paragraph.

http://msn.foxsports.com/collegefoo...ctions-in-penn-state-sex-abuse-scandal-111711

McQueary story says a lot about us

My sportswriting peers would correctly argue that I’m the most polarizing scribe within our industry. Many of my cohorts hate me. The reasons for and legitimacy of their animus vary.

I attribute most of the hostility to my decision to choose independent thought and action over allegiance to the established church of sports-journalism culture.

Having grown up in the 1970s and ’80s reading the god-awful Indianapolis Star, I entered the profession with an enormous level of skepticism about the competence, backbone and ethics of journalists, particularly sportswriters. As I’ve climbed the journalistic ladder, my cynicism has grown more acute.

My pessimism frequently spills out in my column and occasionally complicates my work situation.

I bring all this up because I think I understand the situation Mike McQueary faced when he walked in on Jerry Sandusky allegedly raping a 10-year-old boy in 2002. I bring it up because I believe many of the people loudly and quietly crucifying McQueary for apparently doing next to nothing to stop Sandusky would make the same choice as McQueary.

David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, brilliantly argued this point in a column earlier this week. Citing the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide and random American street violence, Brooks wrote that people "suffer from Motivated Blindness."

Not that I disagree with Brooks, but I believe he would’ve strengthened his column by referencing Motivated Blindne$$, America’s most powerful force when it comes to willfully ignoring lapses in ethics and adherence to law, common decency and morality.

Had McQueary walked in on Sandusky raping a child inside a YMCA locker room, the then-28-year-old McQueary very well may have beaten the then-58-year-old, weaponless Sandusky within inches of his life and rescued the young boy.

It was the workplace environment that ignited McQueary’s Motivated Blindne$$.

People, Americans in particular, are most cowardly when at work. For good reason.

In 2003, Abar Rouse, a young assistant coach at Baylor University, squealed on then-head coach Dave Bliss’ plan to portray murder victim Patrick Dennehy as a drug dealer to cover up “illegal” cash payments to Dennehy. Rouse hasn’t worked as a college coach since. He outed a coach who plotted to disgrace a murdered young person to cover his own rear.

“No snitching” doesn’t just apply to gang members. It’s the accepted and enforced policy in every work environment.

It cracks me up when I hear journalists complain about an institution, corporation, sports franchise or government agency circling the wagons and refusing to break a code of silence. We rip the police for their blue code. Media outlets have a yellow one. We’re hypocrites.

Hell, many of my peers are offended by respectful disagreement.

Last February, I erupted in disgust when my peers who participate in the Pro Football Hall of Fame process failed to induct Willie Roaf. I pointed out some of the flaws in the system and the obvious hypocrisy of the secret voting process.

Based on the reaction of some of my peers, you’d have thought I was Jerry Sandusky.

The Hall of Fame columns are insignificant in comparison to some of the bigger scraps I’ve been in for bucking the church of sports-journalism culture and confronting superiors in my work environment. There is no reason for me to recount more of the highlights. My point isn’t to beat my chest and insinuate that I’m morally superior to my peers. I’m not. I’m freer than most — wealthy, talented and unburdened by the responsibility of children.

No, my point is to illustrate that many of the journalists and non-journalists bragging about what they would’ve done in McQueary’s situation have never shown an inkling of that kind of courage in their workplace.

Man’s most basic instinct is survival. It generally takes precedence over all else. The firemen and firewomen who courageously ran up flights of stairs as the World Trade Center burned spent days, months and even years contemplating how they would handle a life-death situation. Courage, like almost everything else, requires preparation.

There was no way for McQueary to prepare for the moment when he walked in on Sandusky allegedly assaulting a child. McQueary panicked. His coaching career flashed in front him and he made a compromised choice. In all likelihood, he made a noise to reveal his presence and stop Sandusky’s apparent assault. McQueary then further compromised, according to the grand jury report, telling Joe Paterno rather than the police.

I don’t agree with or respect the choices McQueary made, especially his decision to remain at Penn State for the next decade. But I’m not so foolishly self-righteous that I believe I’m incapable of similar cowardice. I say that knowing I have a career resume filled with righteous decisions that jeopardized my career. But those decisions always came after some combination of deliberation, consideration and prayer.

Our most courageous and selfless decisions/actions are rarely instantaneous or instinctual.

In America, our instinct is to survive financially. We hate Mike McQueary because of what he and his decisions say about us.

 

Also here is the Brooks' column that Whitlock references.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/opinion/brooks-lets-all-feel-superior.html?_r=2

Let’s All Feel Superior
By DAVID BROOKS

First came the atrocity, then came the vanity. The atrocity is what Jerry Sandusky has been accused of doing at Penn State. The vanity is the outraged reaction of a zillion commentators over the past week, whose indignation is based on the assumption that if they had been in Joe Paterno’s shoes, or assistant coach Mike McQueary’s shoes, they would have behaved better. They would have taken action and stopped any sexual assaults.

Unfortunately, none of us can safely make that assumption. Over the course of history — during the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide or the street beatings that happen in American neighborhoods — the same pattern has emerged. Many people do not intervene. Very often they see but they don’t see.

Some people simply can’t process the horror in front of them. Some people suffer from what the psychologists call Normalcy Bias. When they find themselves in some unsettling circumstance, they shut down and pretend everything is normal.

Some people suffer from Motivated Blindness; they don’t see what is not in their interest to see. Some people don’t look at the things that make them uncomfortable. In one experiment, people were shown pictures, some of which contained sexual imagery. Machines tracked their eye movements. The people who were uncomfortable with sex never let their eyes dart over to the uncomfortable parts of the pictures.

As Daniel Goleman wrote in his book “Vital Lies, Simple Truths,” “In order to avoid looking, some element of the mind must have known first what the picture contained, so that it knew what to avoid. The mind somehow grasps what is going on and rushes a protective filter into place, thus steering awareness away from what threatens.”

Even in cases where people consciously register some offense, they still often don’t intervene. In research done at Penn State and published in 1999, students were asked if they would make a stink if someone made a sexist remark in their presence. Half said yes. When researchers arranged for that to happen, only 16 percent protested.

In another experiment at a different school, 68 percent of students insisted they would refuse to answer if they were asked offensive questions during a job interview. But none actually objected when asked questions like, “Do you think it is appropriate for women to wear bras to work?”

So many people do nothing while witnessing ongoing crimes, psychologists have a name for it: the Bystander Effect. The more people are around to witness the crime, the less likely they are to intervene.

Online you can find videos of savage beatings, with dozens of people watching blandly. The Kitty Genovese case from the ’60s is mostly apocryphal, but hundreds of other cases are not. A woman was recently murdered at a yoga clothing store in Maryland while employees at the Apple Store next door heard the disturbing noises but did not investigate. Ilan Halimi, a French Jew, was tortured for 24 days by 20 anti-Semitic kidnappers, with the full knowledge of neighbors. Nobody did anything, and Halimi eventually was murdered.

People are really good at self-deception. We attend to the facts we like and suppress the ones we don’t. We inflate our own virtues and predict we will behave more nobly than we actually do. As Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel write in their book, “Blind Spots,” “When it comes time to make a decision, our thoughts are dominated by thoughts of how we want to behave; thoughts of how we should behave disappear.”

In centuries past, people built moral systems that acknowledged this weakness. These systems emphasized our sinfulness. They reminded people of the evil within themselves. Life was seen as an inner struggle against the selfish forces inside. These vocabularies made people aware of how their weaknesses manifested themselves and how to exercise discipline over them. These systems gave people categories with which to process savagery and scripts to follow when they confronted it. They helped people make moral judgments and hold people responsible amidst our frailties.

But we’re not Puritans anymore. We live in a society oriented around our inner wonderfulness. So when something atrocious happens, people look for some artificial, outside force that must have caused it — like the culture of college football, or some other favorite bogey. People look for laws that can be changed so it never happens again.

Commentators ruthlessly vilify all involved from the island of their own innocence. Everyone gets to proudly ask: “How could they have let this happen?”

The proper question is: How can we ourselves overcome our natural tendency to evade and self-deceive. That was the proper question after Abu Ghraib, Madoff, the Wall Street follies and a thousand other scandals. But it’s a question this society has a hard time asking because the most seductive evasion is the one that leads us to deny the underside of our own nature.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 15, 2011

An earlier version of this column incorrectly described the nationality of the gang members that kidnapped Ilan Halimi. There were people from several countries in the gang, not just Moroccans.

 

Just finished reading the piece and was going to post it here but I see you beat me to the punch.

Agree that his self-aggrandizing is a bit annoying, but the piece is, overall, quite thoughtful. Whitlock really hits the nail on the head by referencing how frequently attrocities and crimes get committed with indifference/inaction being the response of those surrounding them. In hindsight, its easy to condemn, but at the moment, I'm pretty sure that many people would have acted just like McQueary did.

 

Not one person has collaborated anything McQueary has said. I don't believe him. You can bet the defense will attack him hard if put on the stand come trial time.

I seriously question if he ever told Penn State officials that it was anal sex going on in the shower.

 

Who took the boy home that night?

Yeah, he put a stop to it, for a brief moment.

 

Umm....


Promotional Penn State buttons removed after someone actually read them....

 

I have to Swoly D this one..

 

Probably deserves its own thread but...

Syracuse assistant hoops coach target of sex abuse investigation

Spoiler

 

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/storie...ME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-11-18-14-47-19

http://www.psu.edu/ur/2011/NCAA.pdf

http://www.ncaa.org/wps/wcm/connect...sident+Mark+Emmert+sends+letter+to+Penn+State

 

Sandusky's daughter-in-law claims he raped his grandson.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/penn-state-molester-accusation-includes-grandson/story?id=15019709