Joe Paterno offers us a chance to have an honest discussion about cultural obsolescence

[Workers at Penn State remove the statue of former football coach Joe Paterno]

Joe Paterno had the highest of standards, and paradoxically at the same time the lowest of standards. Paterno, who coached the Nittany Lions as an assistant coach beginning in 1950 and became head coach in 1966 and coached until he was fired in late 2011, was undeniably 'old-school.' An Ivy League product (from Brown,) "Joe Pa" made very sure his athletes graduated and got the academic help they needed to remain in school. Nowadays this would be less remarkable since the NCAA has made academic success a part of what is needed for football players and other athletes to remain eligible, but he did so from the day he began coaching, when there was little or no concern about academics in college football. "Saint Joe" literally had a halo painted over his image in a mural on the Penn State campus. For that matter, when the NCAA caught up with where Paterno had been for years and began to focus on academics and other rules, Paterno's program was able to avoid a single NCAA infraction. The idea of using bribery or other illegal methods to induce players to play for him was unthinkable. Besides academic success, Paterno preached lifelong character, and his players as well as many others upheld him and his unassuming, humble nature as a model of character.

All of which made the Sandusky scandal all the more shocking. It would have been shocking at any university, but at Penn State it was a scandal of monolithic proportions. It would have been no more shocking if the Vatican itself had been caught covering up for pedophiles in the priesthood (wait a second, let me restate that.)

For Paterno to be guilty of covering up such an awful crime as child rape was unthinkable. Except that it's true, spelled out right there in the Freeh report.

In contemplating how this could happen, I keep coming back to Paterno's age (he was 85 when he was fired, and died not long after.) Now, don't get me wrong. I'm 49 and in a few weeks when I turn fifty, I do plan to join AARP. One reason why is that AARP has a long history of fighting against 'ageism,' the term for discrimination against older people in the workplace and elsewhere. But to get to the root of ageism, we need to examine both the myths and the realities of age, and discuss a concern that is at the heart of ageism but is not often discussed because to do so is sometimes difficult.

This concern is simply put, that older workers may be obsolete. I know, you’re thinking this is a post about obsolete job skills. NO, IT IS NOT!! We all know that as the workplace is modernized, all workers of any age must update their career skills to adjust to new technology, innovations and other changes that go along with any job. And Paterno did so. Penn State has over the past two decades (since Joe Pa became eligible for Social Security) been a college behemoth. In every aspect of the game Penn State was an elite football program, often appearing in the top ten in recent years and winning three Big Ten championships after joining the league in 1993, most recently in 2008. Obviously he was still up to running a top level football program.

But it’s a more sensitive job issue that ‘obsolete job skills’ is sometimes used as a code word for. It is obsolete cultural skills.

Let me say that again: obsolete cultural skills.

Some years ago I was on an interview committee for a teaching position. One of the candidates was an elderly gentleman who had some teaching experience, though it was decades old. During the interview, he referred to female students as ‘co-eds.’ This is a term that hasn’t been in wide use since at least the 1970’s, and this and other answers led the committee to question whether he might unintentionally say something that would offend someone. Language is one aspect of cultural skills. The terms we use to describe people or groups of people change. For example, when I was growing up in the 1960’s, I first learned the term, ‘negro’ as a word for black people. However, today the term would be considered so out of date that it would be close to racist, and should never be used.

Returning to Joe Pa, he may have done a good job of adjusting to a more pass-oriented, faster paced offense or to new NCAA rules on recruiting, but he did a poor job of adjusting to a new world. Consider the world he began coaching in, in 1950. Surely child sexual abuse happened, probably at least as often as it does now. But it was never talked about. If something was said about it, most people at the time would (wrongly) assume it was likely a single (or even several) instances of easily correctable misbehavior, and a talk with the offender would have been good enough (with little or no thought given to the victim.) Whether Joe Pa ever had such a talk with Sandusky we will probably never know. One of them is dead, and the other will spend the rest of his life in prison and what he says from now on probably has no credibility at all. But whether he did or not, we now know that child molesters are never ‘cured’ (certainly not by a quick chat or word of warning.) And the crime itself has come to be taken much more seriously. In the 1950’s, very rarely would anyone be prosecuted for the rape of a child, unless perhaps the parents of the victim pressed charges (though the victim would often be too ashamed to acknowledge this in the first place.) People like Jerry Sandusky could count on that, and then he took advantage of troubled kids, who often did not have parents who would stand up for them to begin with.

This is not in any way to excuse Paterno. It is instead to point out that for older workers (whether they remain at their jobs or start new ones) the culture around them is changing. If you want to work until you are 85, as Joe Pa did, that’s great. I commend it. BUT, you have to do more than learn to use the newest computer program or new way to fill out a form. You have to keep up with the world, and adjust your thinking. And when you do, you have to act on it.

I believe that unspoken concerns about cultural obsolescence are at least as big a factor in the decision to pass over older workers as concerns about obsolete job skills. And until we can have an honest discussion about these concerns, we won’t really be able to make the job path smoother for older workers, even those who have a mind as sharp as a tack and who have kept up with every new technological development that comes down the pike.

Tragic

Sometimes there are no winners, only losers. That seems to be the case in Michigan, in which a father became so upset that his fifteen year old son raped a three year old girl that he shot him to death over it.

HIGHLAND PARK, Mich. - A 37-year-old father irate over hearing his 15-year-old son had sexual contact with a 3-year-old girl made the teen strip at gunpoint, marched him to a vacant lot and shot him to death despite pleas from the boy and his mother, a relative said.

Michigan authorities filed a first-degree murder charge Wednesday against Jamar Pinkney Sr. in the shooting death Monday of Jamar Pinkney Jr. in the Detroit enclave of Highland Park...

The boy's mother, Lazette Cherry, told the Detroit Free Press that her son told her he had improper sexual contact with the girl.

"I called and told his father. This isn't something you sweep under the rug," she said.

Cherry said the elder Pinkney arrived at the home with a gun, ordered his son to strip and marched him outside despite her protests.

"He got on his knees and begged, No, Daddy, No,' and he pulled the trigger," Cherry said.

I honestly don't know what I'd do if one of my kids turned out to be a child molester. I don't think that child molesters are ever curable (try changing your sexual orientation for a day-- you can't. Neither can they.) Likely as not the son faced a long, tough life behind bars, but it was not up to his father to take it upon himself to end it before that happened.

This is a case in which there are only victims.

John McCain would rather throw kids to pedophiles than lose an election

John McCain was confronted during an interview last night on "The View" by host Joy Behar.

She specifically mentioned an ad the McCain campaign has put out (including the legally mandated caption, "I'm John McCain and I approved this message") which accuses Barack Obama of supporting comprehensive sex education children starting in kindergarten.

The truth is that Obama as a state legislature sponsored a bill that mandated teaching kindergarten students to recognize what is inappropriate touching by adults and who they can report it to.

Behar pointed to that ad specifically and said that what McCain had said he stood by (calling this 'comprehensive sex education for kindergarten students') 'are lies.' She asked if he still stood by them.

McCain's response?

"They are not lies."

OK. So this guy claims that calling a program to educate children about child molesters is the same thing as 'comprehensive sex education' for kindergartners.

What is worse, the McCain campaign came out with a statement trying to justify the ad suggesting that this kind of stuff should be taught at home (apparently still using their stock answer for 'sex education' to discuss teaching about pedophiles.) Taking education for kindergartners about pedophiles out of the schools is very dangerous since most child molestation does happen at home, and obviously pedophiles who have children in the home would be the last ones to teach them that there is anything wrong with it, or who they could talk to about it.

This ad, and this ad alone (and McCain's refusal when confronted with the facts to repudiate it) should be enough to disqualify John McCain from any serious consideration for the Presidency.

Rudy Giuliani's confidante and partner: a pedophile priest

Rudy Giuliani has long been accused of not having exactly the finest circle of friends. We all know by now about Bernard Kerik, the former police commissioner with ties to organized crime, about whom Giuliani was briefed in 2000 before he became police commissioner and decided to let it go. Kerik of course has since been convicted of corruption and is a major embarrassment to Rudy.

Then he hired Thomas Ravenel to run his South Carolina campaign, and was embarrassed when Ravenel was caught dealing cocaine.

But is there a limit to who Rudy would hire?

Apparently not. I mean, if anybody would be radioactive politically, you'd think it would be a child molester.

According to 2002 testimony before a Suffolk County (NY) Grand Jury investigating abuses by the Catholic Church, Monsignor Alan Placa is referred to in reports as 'Priest F' If we read the specific report on Priest F, we read

In Priest F’s first assignment, he appears to have made feeble attempts at abusing a boy who was an alter server. Once, when he was working at the rectory on a slow evening, the boy was in the office watching TV, Priest F came in and asked if he could join him. He pulled up a chair next to the boy and put his right hand on his thigh. Slowly his hand began to creep up towards the boy’s genital area. Alarmed, the boy covered his crotch. After Priest F’s efforts to push his arm away failed, Priest F gave up and left. The boy remembered that Priest F was very nervous. He never told anyone at the time because he didn’t think anyone would believe him.

The conduct repeated itself within a week, only this time, the boy crossed his legs as soon as Priest F pulled up his chair. Even so, Priest F tried to push his hand between the boy’s legs. Throughout both encounters, Priest F never said a word. Even after this second incident, the boy never told anyone. He was embarrassed and didn’t want any of his friends to think he was a homosexual. This victim came forward decades later, only after Priest F denied sexually abusing anyone in a local newspaper story about sexually abusive priests.

Later on in the same report we read:

Once, Priest F approached one of the boys behind the school stage. He grabbed his crotch. The boy reacted violently, pushing Priest F away and warning him never to touch him again.

At one point, two victims complained to the schools’ rector, a priest, about Priest F. The complaint resulted from one boy’s suspicions, later confirmed to be correct, that Priest F was abusing another younger boy. The pair thought a complaint by two of them would have to be believed. It wasn’t.

The tragic death of a victim’s father led, finally, to the end of Priest F’s sexual abuse of him. At the funeral home, Priest F approached the boy, moving close to him. As he moved his hand towards his genitals, the boy told Priest F, “Don’t ever fucking touch me again or I’ll kill you.” This event was witnessed by another boy who saw the abusive conduct by Priest F and heard the response to it.

We also read this:

Priest F was cautious, but relentless in his pursuit of victims. He fondled boys over their clothes, usually in his office. Always, his actions were hidden by a
poster, newspaper or a book.* He talked continuously as he fondled them. Everyone in the school knew to stay away from Priest F.
Once, Priest F approached one of the

The footnote is even more outrageous:

One of the victims remembers the first incident of abuse taking place when preparations were underway to attend a right-to-life march on the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. The students were making banners with Priest F’s help. It was a banner that was used as the foil on this occasion.

Monsignor Placa is named in the Grand Jury report completed in 2003 as having both abused children himself and covered up abuse by other priests. Although the abuse happened long enough ago that the statute of limitations for criminal charges against Monsignor Placa had expired by that time it was fundamental in pursuing a suit against the Diocese of Rockville Center.

After the report was issued, Monsignor Placa was stripped of his authority and suspended from serving as a Catholic Priest. But who should show up to rescue him? None other than an old friend. An old friend whose first wedding he had been first man at, and then officiated at for his second wedding in 1984. An old friend named Rudy Giuliani.

Placa was hired in 2002 as a consultant by Giuliani Partners, a New York legal firm which is run by the former mayor. He remains on the payroll even today.

So if Rudy Giuliani is willing to hire a priest who has been disowned by the Catholic Church for child sexual abuse, then there are three questions we have to ask:

1. Is there anybody he wouldn't hire? He's already been willing to hire a mobster, a coke dealer and a child molester. Who does that leave? Osama bin Laden?

2. What kind of judgement does this show in a man who wants to be President? Even George W. Bush's defenders admit that his unyielding willingness to stand behind friends, everyone from Harriet Miers to Donald Rumsfeld in the face of stark evidence that they can't do the job, has resulted in some appallingly poor decisions. Wouldn't this kind of pattern suggest that Rudy could be more of the same?

3. We know that Rudy's own kids won't even talk to him because of how he treated their mother (who learned that he was planning to divorce her and marry his current wife via a televised news conference.) And now we see that he is willing to reward a man who hurt other people's kids. So if he becomes President, how much do you think he will care about what happens to your kids?

A President whose best friend is a child molester, and he rewards him for it with a job. I wonder, if Rudy is elected, do you think he will appoint Alan Placa as secretary of Children, Youth and Families?

Murder, yes it was. But this case screams for a lesser charge.

We know one thing. Matthew Booth's 13 year old daughter deliberately shot him in the face with a shotgun. And she is charged with an open count of murder, for which she will be tried as an adult and maybe spend the rest of her life in prison.

But she shouldn't.

If Matthew Booth was murdered, maybe it is because a system didn't care, despite his having been reported to Allegheny County Officials who didn't bother to follow up. And a trapped child, living with her brother in animal feces and sexually abused by her father, finally did about the only thing she could think of. She killed him.

BUENA VISTA, Pennsylvania (AP) -- A 13-year-old girl used a shotgun to fatally shoot her father in the head early Monday in a home overrun with animals and filth, police said.

The girl told investigators she used a 12-gauge shotgun to shoot 34-year-old Matthew Booth in the face while he was in bed, according to a police affidavit.

A police complaint did not identify a motive in the killing, but her mother, Michelle Fazek, who was separated from Booth, said she had complained several times to county child welfare officials that her daughter and her brother, 14, were living in squalor and that her daughter had been abused.

"I just want to see her," Fazek said. "She must be so scared."

Messages left for Allegheny County's Office of Children, Youth and Families were not immediately returned.

The Associated Press does not identify victims of possible sexual abuse.

The girl appeared in municipal court late Monday wearing a maroon county jail uniform, her hands and ankles cuffed, where she was charged as an adult with criminal homicide and ordered held without bail.

The house in Elizabeth Township, about 20 miles southeast of Pittsburgh was in deplorable condition, police said.

"They had a number of animals, dogs, cats and rabbits. They hadn't cleaned up after them," said James Morton, assistant superintendent of Allegheny County Police. The two-story frame house had dirty, peeling white siding, and a downstairs window was boarded up.

Yeah, I know. Maybe she should have run away. Perhaps, but to where? Life on the streets is pretty dangerous for a thirteen year old girl. Gangs, drugs, rape, forced prostitution, maybe becoming a murder victim herself-- that is what can be expected for a thirteen year old runaway. Of course if she ran to her (apparently non-custodial) mother, it is very likely that the police would look there first and that she would simply be returned home-- and I'm sure punished by her father in a horrible manner. Beyond that, a thirteen year old probably doesn't know enough about life to know about battered women's shelters or other places she could seek help.

The county officials will undoubtedly pat themselves on the back if they get a conviction, and chalk up another 'solved crime' brought to a successful conclusion. A statistic. They won't even think twice about the failure of the County's Department of Children, Youth and Families.

No, murder is never the right choice to get out of a situation. But a murder charge in this case is inappropriate. A charge of perhaps voluntary manslaughter, followed by a sentence to be served someplace where this girl can get the help she needs, is what the prosecutors should pursue.

Some questions about the McCann kidnapping:

Like millions of other people around the world, I am praying and hoping that they find four year old Briton Madeleine McCann, who was apparently abducted from a hotel room at a resort in Portugal on May 2. Or if it turns out she is dead already, we may hope that at least the perpetrators are brought to justice.

However, there are some hard questions that need to be asked.

For one, it is hard to criticize grieving, concerned parents, but it is a fact that while Madeleine was abducted, she was watching her brother and sister. Both aged two. Her parents had sauntered off for a leisurely lunch, leaving a four year old in charge of two two year olds (and in a foreign country, at that). To be honest, if they get her back I hope the next thing that happens is that Madeleine and her siblings are immediately taken into protective custody by the state. I mean, even forget about the possibility of such an abduction. There are plenty of kids that age who die just in accidents, drowning in the bathtub or pulling an appliance down on top of them while trying to climb on it. Or they could figure out a way to unlatch the door and wander out onto a busy street. Or they could guzzle down a bottle of liquid Drano. I could go on with a lot more, but you get the idea. This is parental negligence of the first magnitude, and I guarantee you that had Madeleine been found safely within a short time, today none of the kids would be living with the parents.

For another, I have to (once again) point a finger at the media. Are there likely to be any people in the United States who will know information that may help the police in Portugal, that justifies this kind of blanket coverage? It is sensationalist media at its zenith. And Madeleine is exactly who they like to cover-- a young, pretty blonde girl. If you got all your information from the news media, you'd think that only pretty blonde girls ever disappeared. But that simply is not the case.

To begin with, a 2002 study of missing kids sponsored by the Justice Department found that 54% of missing children are white. That means that 46% are not. But the missing children shown on television are almost all white. Is it more important to find a white kid than a black or Hispanic kid? Apparently so, according to a lot of news stations because they invariably show you the picture of the white kid.

Also, it turns out that 53% of missing children are male. But missing boys aren't usually as pretty so they tend to focus almost exclusively on missing girls. That is one reason wny child sex predator Michael Devlin was able to live with a kidnapped boy right in the middle of an apartment complex in Missouri for four years, and only got caught when he was seen abducting another boy.

I have no problem with coverage of missing children in general. But what I'd like to see is a local focus on missing kids that someone around here actually might know something about.

Texas considering the death penalty for child molesters

It seems that Texas, not happy with being the number one state in the country in executions is the latest state to propose the death penalty for some child molesters.

Now, I blogged last year on why the death penalty for child molesters was both a bad idea and a sterling example of political cowardice (which is linked here). In part, I wrote:

What could be more pleasing and more just, than to execute child molesters, right? Well, no actually. I know, it's tough to make any argument against doing something to a child molester, but I will make it here.

Begin with the gut reaction. Yes, what child molesters have done is horrible. And we have to protect our children ahead of any other consideration (one reason I recently added the Code Amber Alert ticker at the top of my screen). But is executing them the answer? It is true, after all, that child molesters are that way by nature, and that they can't be truly 'cured,' even if they want to be (there is ample scientific as well as criminal evidence to back that up.) However, let me make some points why executing them is not the answer.

Start with a bald fact that I have to state anyway and which overshadows the rest of the discussion: It won't hold up in court. That is pretty much conceded by nearly all legal scholars. No one has been executed for a crime other than murder in the U.S. since the Rosenbergs were executed for a 1950 conviction for treason, for giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. No one has been executed for a sex crime in the U.S. since the early part of the last century (and then child molestation wasn't even an issue, and the people executed were invariably black men convicted rightly or wrongly or raping white women.) So the courts will virtually certainly strike this down as 'cruel and unusual punishment' not proportional to the crime, and what is really infuriating is that the politicians know it better than anyone, but they are doing this to be popular...

But more to the point here is that it is exactly the kind of 'red meat politics' that has gotten us into the mess we are in today.

I used to live in Texas (only for a year, but it was an educational year, with 'Shrub' running for re-election as governor in a state that seemed to have lost its collective mind. A prime example was the race for railroad commissioner that year. One of the candidates (who ultimately won the race), instead of commenting on anything that had to do with being railroad commissioner ran ads touting his support for the death penalty. Now, it's hard to see what the railroad commissioner would have to do with the death penalty anyway, unless maybe they were considering using 'tying to the tracks ahead of the train' as a method of execution (think Snidely Whiplash) but no matter, apparently it doesn't matter if you get an unqualified lunk in the office, as long as he is pro-death penalty.

And that's the way the death penalty is in Texas. It's a little like when the Dallas Cowboys win on Sunday. People may be falling behind in their bills, have a leak in the roof and Little Johnny may be getting F's on his report card, but if the Cowboys win on Sunday then it seems like everyone in Texas feels much better on Monday. True that the bills still have to be paid, the leak still has to be fixed and Johnny still has to get caught up in school, but people think that because the Cowboys have won, their life is better somehow. The same thing with the death penalty. Never mind that everyone on death row is safely behind bars and away from the general population, or that the murder rate in Texas (6.2 per 100,000 population in 2005) is higher than the national average or for that matter than any of the twelve states that have no death penalty, nor does it matter that the man executed may not even have been guilty, nor the fact that if everyone on death row were executed tomorrow the prison population would catch up to what it is now within two weeks, the fact that some miscreant has been sent to the next life makes people feel better the next day. They still can't pay their bills, the roof still leaks, Johnny is still failing, but doggone it, we sure showed that loser a thing or two.

What is worse though is the cynical politicians who demagogue this issue (and the death penalty for child molesters, though it will be thrown out in court, is a demagogue's dream-- and when the courts throw it out then they can demagogue some more about 'liberal judges' or some such tripe and still avoid having to tackle anything that matters) because they'd rather pass this kind of bill and then bash the courts than deal with the really hard issues (and in Texas, there are a lot of them that need dealt with).

It does make the rise of Shrub a little easier to understand though.

Something to be grateful for-- two kidnapped boys found alive

For several months I have had the Code Amber ticker running up at the top of this blog. Just this week I read another Amber alert on the ticker, and it featured one of two boys who has been recovered alive in Missouri today.

Kudos to the police officers who noticed a rusty white pickup truck with a camper shell like that used in the kidnapping while they were visiting the building where it was parked on an unrelated case.

This is a superb outcome, and uncommon. One of the boys had been missing for more than four years, and I am sure that his family must be overjoyed at the news.

They haven't said it yet, but you can be sure that the man who kidnapped and held these two boys is a child molester.

As I've blogged before, (for example in a post called what to do about chronic child molesters,

we have to separate them from the rest of society. I believe that most of them are sick and sexually addicted, but since in society there will inevitably be children, it is not like they can be removed from continual temptation if they are out on the street. So we have to look at solutions that will keep them away from kids. And prison, while appropriate to the crime that was committed, is not a realistic permanent solution. In a post I wrote on the topic after Oklahoma and South Carolina had legislated the death penalty for child molesters (which is a stupid waste of taxpayer money for reasons I went into in the post) I summarized my position from earlier posts as follows:

1. People convicted of child molestation or rape should serve their full term in prison.

2. Ideally, if we are serious about keeping them away from children, we should create an institution (similar to the old mental institutions but more humane) which would offer more freedom than a prison (freedom on the grounds, freedom to have visits from family members regularly [of course minor family members only under strictly scrutinized conditions] , and perhaps some supervised group activities on the outside) but would remain secure (of course, it being better than a prison, prison would still remain as the place to send someone who committed a crime inside.)

3. Until we can implement such a plan, put on tracking devices similar to the one Martha Stewart wore (which of course she never should have had to wear, but it does make sense for sex offenders.)

Like chronic drunk drivers, I don't think that most child molesters want to be evil, but if they are unable to control their urges then it is incumbent on society to protect our children from them.