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.

Thoughts on Mark Kelly

The Trump administration is starting what can really only politely be called a vendetta against Democratic Senators who have made a public statement warning service members against carrying out illegal orders, and Senator Kelly is in the crosshairs because he's still in the reserves.  Now part of it is simply petty; the Secretary of Defense commenting on how Kelly was wearing his awards.  OK, Hegseth, are you trying to prove your career is about chicken manure?  

More significantly, as a young skull full of much, I tried (and failed) to get into the service academies, and one of the things I and others asked was something that was clearly on our minds as we'd learned about the history of the Vietnam War; what are cadets being taught about the proper response to situations like My Lai.

The response was not tense at all--the officers we were talking with had clearly been taught well that there are cases where the lowliest private gets to ignore the commands of someone with stars on their shoulders.  

And that is the thing that troubles me about Trump's response to Kelly et al.  Hegseth at least ought to make clear that Kelly has a point, and his main response ought to be something like "Senator Kelly, precisely what examples do you have in mind here?".  The fact that he does not do this is, in my mind, very damning about the culture he's trying to create in the Department of Defence.  It's as bad, really, as a Naval Academy graduate ignoring the Honor Code ("We will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those among us who do.") to help Michigan steal a national championship.  (OK, I shouldn't care about concussion-ball, but the fact that Stallions so blithely ignored that code suggests to me that it's not as big a deal at Navy as it used to be)

And really, the example that I've got in mind is the Trump administration hitting speedboats with missiles instead of apprehending them.  Now it is possible that this is difficult, and it is possible that the boats would go up in flames anyways.  But that said, hitting them with a missile destroys witnesses (the drivers are generally poor people, not drug kingpins) to where the drugs are being made and shipped, and of course puts the cargo into bazillions of gallons of water.  

So at the least, it's poor criminal justice, as well as poor international relations--apprehend the wrongdoers, yes, and let the world know who's sending drugs to the U.S. and Europe, absolutely.  But get the evidence.

And since you don't have evidence to justify the action that we know of, it's at least closer to My Lai than I would care to be associated with.  Perhaps a judge will sign off on it, but I still don't like it, and if nobody objected to the action, that troubles me a lot.

My family is a pandemic...

...according to the University of Minnesota, which is now publishing "student materials" claiming that whiteness is a "pandemic".   As the parents of six children and grandparents to one (and hopefully a lot more), my wife and I are of course contributing mightily to this problem.  Especially interesting to us is the fact that "The U", as it's affectionately called here, is saying that "colorblindness" is a symptom of white racism.  Weird me, I thought that Dr. King had advocated something about that in his epic "I have a dream" speech.  

It is also very troubling that "The U" identifies the family as one of the opposing features that they need to work against; quite frankly, we have over six decades of experience with what happens in communities where nuclear families are not formed, and our jails and graveyards are filled with the results.  

We might somewhat bitterly joke that since Minnesota is regulating the application of fertilizer to farm fields more strictly, all of the "bovine scat" is regrettably going to DEI offices at the U.  in St. Paul.

Update: we might also wonder what some of our black friends, devoted to the principle "they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the contact of their character", and devoted to their own nuclear families, might respond to the notion that they were somehow promoting white racism in honoring Dr. King's memory.  

Not that I'm out of shape

....but my "new to me" Garmin watch told me I'd reached my aerobic exercise target last night while I was kneading bread. I guess I need to cook more.  

A bit more on "improper payments"

When I think about massive amounts of NIL money being spent on athletes--I've heard estimates in the millions annually for some of the top earners, and even floors of $150,000 annually for the bench-warmers, my mind goes instantly to what I remember from college about fellow, um, "students" who we graciously and kindly referred to as "trust fund babies".  You know the kind I'm talking about--the kid was driving a late model BMW while we mere mortals were making do with bicycles or rusted out LeCars.  The kid who you wouldn't see in the dorm cafeteria because he (she) had the money to eat out every meal.

And with that kind of money, all too often, those kids didn't do the studying they needed to do to pass their classes, which could lead to "graduating to a lesser college" (i.e. flunking out), or if their parents particularly cared, getting a lot of tutors and some "come to Jesus moments" about how they could go from upper class to middle class or worse in a hurry if they didn't learn to work.

Often, we'd see them running out of money, because, as Dave Ramsey will tell you, no amount of money will cover up a spending problem.  And that is, in my view, what you're going to see with a lot of athletes bringing home big money when they're fresh out of high school with 680 points on their SATs.  Never having learned math well, let alone how to balance a checkbook, they're likely to run through that NIL money in a hurry, ending up with a lot of month to go before their next paycheck.

And now that same player comes in to the coach looking pretty hungry because, quite frankly, they got back to the dorm too late to get dinner, and asks the coach for something to tide himself over.  I don't know if this is what happened at Michigan State, but to me, it seems somewhat likely.  

What to do?  Well, the old system had a training table for the athletes, but the downside of it was that too many of them were getting to the end of four (five) years without a degree, injured, and with no prospects of going to the pro leagues at any level.  So you've got to compensate these athletes somehow, and so I wonder if NIL money ought to be--beyond being capped at a certain level--placed by default into investment accounts for the most part, instead of simply being given to the athletes.  No matter what, some serious attention needs to be paid to financial training for marginal students who are going to be getting huge sums of money.

Message received

The NCAA, fresh off issuing fines--but no forfeited games or probation--over the University of Michigan's sign-stealing scheme that netted the program about a dozen wins they otherwise would not have gotten--has ordered Michigan State to vacate 14 wins over about $10,000 in "improper payments" to six players, and to spend three years on probation.

Message is received; the NCAA has no clue, and that was proven a while back when they declared the stinky weasels had won their "national championship" "fair and square".  Um, no, the ban on stealing signs is there for a reason, and being in the right place on key plays is a huge deal.  

What it says, moreover, is that the NCAA seriously needs to upgrade its rules, as the $10,000 improperly spent by MSU pales in comparison to the $16.3 million + spent annually in NIL payments by Michigan.  Yes, the old system--you get your education and a few bucks for meals and such--was a huge injustice to the strong majority of players who had no prospects of playing in the big leagues, but nevertheless risked life-altering injuries on the field.  

What would I suggest?  First of all, no more "general studies" programs--we should be nudging pro leagues to set up farm teams in football and basketball for those athletes who really have no business in a four year college.  As illiterate All-Pro Dexter Manley could tell you, it's a big problem.  Next, there needs to be some limit on NIL funding in the same way that the pro leagues have salary caps.  Maybe a cap at $12 million plus insurance policies for life-altering injuries would be a good start.  You want more?  Go to the pro leagues.

Finally, the old system of investigating colleges when a coach buys a player a sandwich needs to be discarded.  The Pareto Principle ought to matter; when the average player is taking home over $150,000 annually plus his scholarship, that sandwich, or even an improper payment of a thousand bucks or so, simply isn't going to change things much.

How not to pass the bar exam

Apparently Ms. Kim Kardashian is blaming AI, specifically ChatGPT, for her failures to pass the California bar exam.  Somehow, the notion that one ought to study, say, law books in order to pass the bar escaped her, and she's learning the hard way that "hallucinations" (AI errors) leave a nasty mark when the exams are being graded.

It reminds me of a joke I learned in college: a young woman, dressed seductively, comes up to her professor and says "I'd do anything to pass your class", and then casually flips her hair.  The professor decides to play along, and says "Oh, you'd do anything, huh?".  Another hair flip, a breathy "yessss......", and the professor responds:

Would you.......study....? 

How not to make friends and influence people

As my legions (ha!) of readers well know, I am a died in the wool conservative with libertarian leanings, but on my Twitter feed, what I'm finding is that many people on the port side of the aisle actually like what I have to say--and it's not that I'm changing, but rather that we are finding we have something in common.

Along those lines, an interesting link I saw from one of these "likers" was an explanation of why the left didn't run away from Zohran Mamdani in New York City and the like.  It goes like this:

• If you have $0, you get welfare
• If you have over fifty million dollars, you get bailouts (and I might add, corporate welfare)
• If you have $2300 in savings, you qualify to fund the whole system and get lectured about how to budget better

 What's being illustrated here, really, is that what we have in our country is not capitalism with a safety net, but rather mercantilism--and it might be added a mercantilism that our President and his adherents fully support.  It is you and I, after all, that got stuck with the bill for Trump's six bankruptcies--those bankers taking the loss had to get that money from somewhere, and you have an account.

So we might infer that a way to reach the left, yes, even the progressive left, is to abandon mercantilism and go closer to classic conservatism.  WHen the progressive left sees that we are no longer subsidizing the rich, they're going to listen to us better when we point out that government run grocery stores and rent control lead to hunger and homelessness.

Brilliance in the judiciary

Faced with the impending end of SNAP (food stamp) benefits due to the government shutdown, a federal judge has apparently ordered workers from a to be determined federal agency that may not exist, and who are not currently being paid, to send out SNAP payments/checks from a fund to be determined that also may or may not exist.

Funny me, I'd thought that involuntary servitude was banned with the 13th Amendment, and that if you're going to be spending money, maybe that ought to start with Congress, per Article 1, and ought to be directed through federal departments that actually exist and from resources that are actually known.  One thing I know for sure is that when federal judges act against the 13th Amendment, they ought to be removed from the bench and disbarred.  Crazy chicanery like this needs to have a serious penalty.