“We are!” they’ve been shouting.

“Penn State!” they’ve been answering.

The shouts emanated from mobs that spread across the Penn State campus on November 9 overturning vehicles and screaming their rage into the night, and from the crowd of heart-broken students who gathered in front of Joe Paterno’s house after he was fired, and from stalwart fans at the Penn State vs. Nebraska football game three days later.

At least by then the hysterical Penn State community had worked their way around to remembering the real victims of the scandal.  Football players from both teams knelt together in silent prayer for the children raped and abused by Jerry Sandusky over the course of the last half century.  God alone knows how many of them became victims after Penn State learned about Sandusky’s “problem.”

After the prayer it was back to shouting the school’s iconic rallying cry:

“We are!  Penn State!  We are!  Penn State!  We are...”

Yes, they are.  Yes, they are exactly what they look like: a university where the level of morality is seriously deficient.  That deficiency isn’t news to anybody who watched Penn State deal with an earlier, more important scandal.

In this week’s issue of Sports Illustrated, senior writer Tom Verducci, a Penn State graduate and father of a current Penn State student, gnashes his teeth at the damage done to the reputation of “one of the nation’s great public universities.”

“The university has more Fulbright scholars on its faculty than any other school in the country,” brags Mr. Verducci.

As one of the largest public universities, Penn State is bound to accumulate some records that utilize the word “more” in their description but the most famous “scholar” the university has in residence is the infamous Michael Mann, whose scandalous fudging, obfuscation, and outright misrepresentation of climate data allowed a small cabal of inner-circle global warming alarmists to commandeer the common sense of governments around the world.

It was Mann’s discredited “Hockey Stick” graph that became the public image of the 2001 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report, and was later featured in Al Gore’s ridiculous propaganda film An Inconvenient Truth.  Despite the graph’s dubious scientific basis and erroneous statistical methodology, it was visually dramatic enough to help the IPCC and Al Gore earn the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Until Obama won the 2009 Peace Prize, nobody thought the Norwegians could sink any lower than that 2007 Peace Prize.

For the boys abused by Sandusky, nothing can outweigh the injustice of watching the entire Penn State hierarchy ignore what was happening to them, but to the world at large Michael Mann’s dishonest self-aggrandizing pseudo-science is more serious.  Much more serious.  Around the world, millions of people are starving, trillions of dollars that could have been spent on the betterment of human beings has been wasted, and western civilization has been stunted and handicapped relative to third-world third-rate civilizations—Islamic, communist, tribal—which harbor nothing but ill-will toward individual liberty and the rational advancement of mankind.

When history eventually judges, Mann’s evil will be seen to dwarf Sandusky’s.

In November of 2009, Michael Mann’s perfidy was exposed to the world when anonymous whistleblowers—or hackers—released years of email exchanges between members of the afore-mentioned cabal.  This release of emails was followed by similar releases through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in the United States, eventually leading to indictment of the scientific integrity of the entire climate alarmist movement.  The primary culprits: Michael Mann of Penn State, James Hansen of NASA, Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), Geoff Jenkins of the IPCC, and Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

The email exchanges exposed consistent attempts at manipulating climate data, refusing to share raw data with outside scientists, illegally trying to avoid FOIA requests, and actively preventing papers written by dissenting scientists from being peer-reviewed and published.  One of their favorite references was to “Mike’s trick” of “hiding the decline.”  The “Mike” was Michael Mann and his “trick” was constructing a graph which used proxy temperature data (data inferred from tree rings and such) until 1979, then switching abruptly to thermometer data.

Why?  Because until 1979 the proxy data was cooperating, but after 1979 the proxy data showed world temperatures declining... and Michael Mann is a proponent of global warming theory.  As they say in the hills surrounding Happy Valley, “Ain’t nobody gonna win a Nobel Prize fer climate warmin’ if the doggone planet ain’t heatin’ up, unnerstan’?”

Penn State received so many complaints and demands to investigate Mann’s conduct that they immediately launched a probe led by Dr. Eva J. Pell, Senior Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School.  Two months later, after calling only two witnesses—both of them climate alarmist insiders and allies of Michael Mann—the probe was finished.

The Penn State investigating committee announced that Mann was innocent of three of the four charges, and by golly they just weren’t the right people to rule on whether he engaged in “actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research or other scholarly activities.”  Not a complete exoneration, but enough for Penn State to save face.

If this sounds familiar, it should.  It’s remarkably similar to what happened in the late 1990s when Sandusky’s pedophilia was apparently discovered but hushed up to avoid damaging the reputation and hence the money stream that flows into university coffers from Penn State football.  Instead of firing Sandusky and placing their information in the hands of police, they fabricated a cover story and simply retired him.  Consequently, the crimes continued.

Like Joe Paterno and his football program, Michael Mann brings hundreds of millions of dollars to the university, in this case from government grants to study global warming.  Exactly like they did with Sandusky to save the Penn State football program, they did with Michael Mann to save the Penn State climatology program.  Consequently, the crimes continue.

Adding these two whitewashes together reveals a university lacking any sense of moral responsibility to society.

That is Penn State.



From Reno, Nevada, USA        Tweet

January 26, 2013 - Elsewhere you wrote: "This is a university that should not be allowed to recover its reputation until it deals with BOTH scandals." May I suggest you are too generous, by far. And that "This is a university that should not be allowed to recover its reputation." And that on the face of it -- and just for its complicity in the crimes of Jerry Mann and Michael Sandusky, Penn State deserves to be sued into extinction. - Brian R.A., Australia

November 28, 2011 - It speaks volumes about Penn State, but also society as a whole. It is our responsibility as adults to speak up for the innocent. It makes me scared to send my two daughters out into the world someday! - Samantha, Michigan

November 23, 2011 - Finally! People are seeing Penn State for what it is, the Happy Valley cesspool! - Buckeye Bill, California

J.P. replies: I’m afraid the cesspool encompasses all of our universities (with a few exceptions which include the military academies and certain unique private colleges like Hillsdale). Have you seen James O’Keefe’s latest expose, involving Rutgers professors willing to sell their integrity to the highest bidder?

November 23, 2011 - JP, thanks for your nice words on my blog. I've been waiting to see you as a commentator on FOX news. You'd be perfect on the FIVE. But they'd have to get rid of that slobby demo guy first. He's such a drooling pig. Happy Thanksgiving! - Boomer Pie, Michigan

J.P. replies: So, basically, you're comparing me to a drooling pig?

November 23, 2011 - I'm sorry to say, but I think this is just the tip of the iceberg with youth sports teams, schools, etc. Heard the teen victim in the Penn state scandal was outed and bullied at his high school [so much] that he left school. Understandable why kids are afraid to tell. - Boomer Pie, Michigan

November 23, 2011 - Everybody is picking on Penn State now but the more I read the more I think they deserve it. - Peter B., West Virginia