Unclear on the concept

Prosecutor Jack Smith has apparently told Congress that he had provided "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" regarding the alleged guilt of Donald Trump.   Weird me, I'd thought that conclusion was supposed to be brought about by a "jury", not a "prosecutor".  

Beaten again

One of the travails of being a Spartan is the frequency with which the University of Michigan beats us.  Yes, you've got the obvious losses on the gridiron, basketball court, and hockey rink, but then consider.  Michigan State embarrassed itself with its handling of Larry Nassar, but Michigan not only gave Nassar his bachelor's degree in 1985, but also trained him in athletic training with one Robert Anderson, who molested about 200 more people than did Nassar.  Worse yet, there's evidence that head coach Bo Schembechler used Anderson to keep football players in line. Wolverines for the win, so to speak.

We thought we'd done well with Mel Tucker getting fired for hitting on a sexual assault prevention consultant (Brenda Tracy), but then Michigan showed us again why they are "the leaders and best", as Sherrone Moore not only got fired for carrying on a physical relationship with a subordinate, but also got himself arrested for at least one felony as he threatened to kill himself with a butter knife after apparently breaking into his ex-girlfriend's home.

Not being a graduate of Michigan's esteemed general studies program, I'm not quite sure how one would kill oneself with a butter knife (maybe bruise yourself pretty badly?), but again, Michigan for the win.   

So here's the result of Moore's final days with Michigan.

• The fight song will be renamed "Jail to the Victors" (lyrics composed initially in honor of Gary Moeller, of course, after his drunken rampage)
  
• The Michigan prison system is going to start using Michigan swag as the new uniforms to save money, as incoming inmates already have it.
• Moore is a top candidate for the head coach of the Raiders, if the Davis family ("Just win, baby") can negotiate work release for him.

Seriously, I think the reality here is that Moore has a good lawyer, and he's likely to plea down to misdemeanors with no jail time, and the school will respond to any findings of the independent investigation by shrugging them off, just as they did with the half-billion dollar settlement with the victims of Robert Anderson.  It'll go on, really, until the alumni and donors finally get disgusted enough to close their wallets to Ann Arbor.

Update and side note; the paramour has lawyered up and is claiming Moore had a longstanding pattern of domestic violence.  We'll see where that goes, but Moore's got a bigger challenge now.

And really, the same applies in East Lansing, and all over the country.  I don't know that we can get college sportsball back to an Olympic ideal--training for an olive wreath--but there's got to be a better way than what we're doing now.

More entitlement from AOC

Apparently Congress-critter Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes has dropped, in campaign funds, about $50k to go to Puerto Rico to protest the entitlement of the rich.  Now the article makes a good point that those who protest the excesses of capitalism just might do well to avoid indulging in them themselves, but the thought that comes to me is the question of whether campaign finance law really ought to allow any politician to use campaign funds to buy things like luxury boxes at Bad Bunny concerts.  At the very least, her supporters really ought to ask themselves whether this kind of thing is really what they were voting for--AOC living high on the hog while her supporters scrape to find an affordable apartment.

It is, really, the same kind of Politburo behavior that observers of Communism have always noted.  The leaders live like kings (which they are in effect) while the peasants suffer.  If Karl Marx weren't already being tormented in Hell, he might find some time to spin in his grave over this.

This will leave a mark

Apparently the woman with whom former Michigan football coach had his affair received a 55% raise last year, but at the same point, an internal investigation did not show any flags.  Now perhaps she had received a promotion--which is problematic enough in itself--but generally speaking, 55% raises are not common unless one has gotten to executive ranks.

(update; no promotion, no increase in qualifications, and over three years, a 70% raise.  And apparently nobody that mattered ever asked "why is this woman getting such a big raise?")

I would dare say the failure to flag this is, absent some really exonerating evidence, evidence that (just like a few years ago up the road in East Lansing) institutional controls have completely failed in Ann Arbor, and it's even possible that this is linked to Michigan's well-known problems with NCAA compliance--impermissible payments to players, the sign stealing/cheating scandal, etc..  So it's very possible that this could get a lot uglier.

On another level, perhaps this is a sign that the collegiate athletic structure is out of control--I'm told that extremely long work weeks are common, and as a rule, this is not good for family life or spousal fidelity.  It's going to be really rough for Moore, especially if he's indicted and/or convicted for assaulting someone linked to this investigation, horrendous on his wife and kids, and is going to be pretty bad for the assistant coaches, many of whom will probably lose their jobs as a new head coach is hired.  For that matter, any assistant coaches who knew that something was going on, but did not speak up, could end up nearly as unemployable as their former boss. 

Sadly, I don't think that this is going to help colleges and universities re-evaluate their commitment to big time sportsball.  It will take a lot more to get our attention here.

Yikes

A sperm donor in Europe has apparently passed on a genetic disease  to no fewer than 197 children "fathered" by him.  Now the article discusses how things could be mitigated, which is fine, but one angle that we ought to see is "knowing how genetic disease, specifically hemophilia, is widespread among the royal families of Europe, shouldn't we have some reasonable limits on how many women receive a given donor's seed?".  After all, it's not as if we have no evidence of what happens due to inbreeding, not only in royal families, but also in domestic animals.  

Not that I'm deaf to the pleas of those who cannot conceive children in the ordinary way, but it seems reasonable that, yes, we ought to do some level of genetic testing, and perhaps more importantly (since genetic testing is imperfect at best), we ought to limit the number of recipients for a given donor to, say, a couple dozen or so?

More on college sportsball

Stung by being excluded from the CFP, Notre Dame has decided not to go to a bowl game at all--they were invited, apparently, to the Pop-Tarts Bowl.  Word on the street has it that their new fight song will be "I'll be Home for Christmas".   

Seriously, Notre Dame is not the only decent team to refuse a bowl game, as Iowa State and Kansas State have also declined bowl invitations, and I dare say part of the deal is that where previously, players would be seen by pro scouts at bowl games, the current system is that key players are already earning hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in school.  It's hard to maintain motivation when everybody's really comfortable already.  

The bright side here is that players in South Bend, Ames, and Manhattan are less likely to get injured in the bowl games they're not going to, and the bad side is that viewership of those games will drop without top tier teams in the game.  Another bad side is that the prospective opponents will then get a second tier opponent, and the players for that team are going to be more likely to get injured.

No easy way out except for watching real sports like cross country, I guess.

What's wrong with college sports...

....as exemplified by a $401 million gift to my alma mater, Michigan State.   Now perhaps I am old--at 56, yes I am--but I remember the good old days when Spartan Stadium was mostly bare reinforced concrete, and the athletics budget was, if memory serves, a "mere" $14 million.  Even that seemed excessive when we considered that the football coach was getting a then-massive $350,000 per year or so--far more than a good surgeon would take home at the time.  It was also irritating to pay $2/credit hour as an "athletic fee" to build the Breslin Center--an offense repeated when I went to Colorado for grad school.  Ah, the good old days when that was the extent of the problem!

And of course, it's not just Michigan State or Colorado; I'm told that a big player in Michigan's NIL money is Larry Ellison's wife's desire to help the stinky weasels beat the Buckeyes.  

Now yes, sportsball is big business, and yes, we shouldn't be taking four or five years of a young person's life and giving him Cadillac tastes and a Chevy budget (worthless or nonexistent degree), combined with lifelong injuries.  But at a certain point, I'd have hoped that the educational mission of schools would attract at least equal attention with the sportsball mission, as most of us have no prospects of earning a living in sportsball.

Perhaps more importantly, we need to remember what the point of sports is supposed to be; character, character that probably is diminished when a player has money coming in that allows him to buy a new BMW off the lot.  It's diminished when a player's tattoo budget isn't just for a single rose on his ankle to celebrate the 1987 Rose Bowl champions, but rather allows him to cover both arms with ink.  It's diminished when the coach's plea "get to class" is answered with "I have a couple million in the bank, coach."

I don't know what the fix is--a salary cap would be a great start--but things are seriously getting out of hand.