"Shame, son, is a gateway to grace." I say this as a Penn State grad who still lives up the valley from the university: shaming has educational, social and moral functions. Nothing and no-one ever changes without someone who's capable of it feeling ashamed of the way things are, the way they are, and doing something hard and real that might relieve them of that mortifying sensation of having done something shameful, or have allowed something shameful to continue.

It's not a guarantee, and many's the man who weaseled his way out of that discomfiting inner conversation through sophistry, cheap justification or mere rationalization, but shame, naked shame, is salvation to those willing to listen to that hectoring, mocking, damning sound.

We've all lived in this valley, and known that there was something unnatural about the position of power the football program was allowed. It was a snowball rolling down the slope of our acquiescence, and it was bound to hurt someone downslope, in some way or fashion. It could have been petty corruption, as at Ohio State, or student misbehavior, but for our sins, it was something worse. They're painting over murals downtown and bringing in retired FBI bureaucrats to whitewash the less tangible things, but it's all the same - a twisting away from an ugly set of facts, and a disinclination to see how far the rot has gone.

You don't fix dry-rot by painting it over, it must be dug out, and the planks too far-gone must be torn up, thrown away, and replaced. But before the replacement, listen to that shaming sound and tell me, what was it that allowed this rot to take hold? There must be no unanswerable icons, no secret, sunless gardens of privilege. Consider removing the policing power from the university as a step in the right direction - when the university's toy security detail answered to the administration instead of independently of the power-structure which itself was at fault, that, itself, was an obstruction. The police and the university ought to be, in some non-destructive fashion, at odds with each other, if the watchmen are to be properly watched.

But this can't be placed entirely at the feet of faceless bureaucracy. The football program was too beloved of the general public, too protected by sentiment, for a proper sense of shame to make any sort of impression upon those with wickedness brewing rot in their hearts. Sports should not occupy such a ritualized , pseudo-religious niche in the folkways of a healthy society. Is it because there's a lack of public religion in this college environment? Honestly, I don't know - I'm such an agnostic, I'm seriously detached from the religious life of the community. The football game pilgrimage was the one thing that united the increasingly-leftwing university/student community and the middle-of-the-road nonpolitical-sort-of-conservative alumni and county communities outside of the Centre Region townships and the borough.

Where do we find the social discipline to make right what men's crooked natures inevitably make wrong? A scourging may be necessary, some sort of bonfire of our vanities. It's easy enough, for one such as I, who never cared for the football program, to propose or endorse notions of a suspension of that program for a period of years. That's *easy*, and this should be hard - for everyone, not just the football people. What other solutions are on offer?

Welcome to the new aristocracy, as the New Class morphs into the second coming of the Whiggish gentry, entitled and arrogant. Except that the Adamses and their ilk put in decades of work in governance and diplomacy to back up their pretensions to the "natural aristocracy", with John Adams, his son John Quincy Adams, and *his* son Charles Adams between them logging more cross-Atlantic diplomatic travel time than anyone else until the advent of Kissinger's "shuttle diplomacy".

It wasn't until the effete fourth generation and Henry Adams' endless self-education that we even *approximate* the self-regarding uselessness of the modern "little princelings". What has Chelsea Clinton done in her life, other than follow in the train of her mother, who herself caught power like an STD from her ex-President husband? This dynastic crap is the reason I voted against Bush in 2000.

h/t

Ah, the joys of root canals. The anesthetic hasn't worn off yet, and I keep trying to answer the phone sounding like a Down's Syndrome kid.

There were scads of new people at last night's Otto's get-together. Two of them turned out to be a couple who had been in New York with the "Occupy Wall Street" mob getting arrested on Brooklyn Bridge. The guy was infuriated that I kept snickering at his righteous difference-making revolutionary status; apparently it makes up for his nowhere non-union job with the university. Funny thing is, he's being forced to work part-time because he won't join the union, and somehow that's the fault of The Man instead of the Teamsters. Real sense of cognitive dissonance there.

He's pissed about Obama too, and kept going on about not wanting "the lesser of two evils", and was yammering about how the Obamabots were trying to take over the Wall Street neo-commie campaign. Towards the end of the night, I said something about how I was a firm believer in the least of presented evils. One of the other new people asked in anticipatory horror who I'd vote for, and I admitted as how I'm still looking at Rick Perry. Apparently the WIC thing is a big to-do in Democratic circles. I got dragged into the discussion, but at the end I pointed out that in conservative new media, people are much more agitated about Green corporate welfare like Solyndra than actual welfare scamming, O'Keefe showboating about ACORN and similar organizations aside.

I should be more sympathetic to Joe Protester, because I had a rough late Nineties stuck in nowhere jobs, and I was pretty pissed and radical (for me, at least) about it. But the sympathy bleeds away when you start rambling starry-eyed about the wonderful "non-profit, non-profit" farming communes in Burlington, VT and how they give food away to the homeless and spend their free time taking care of the elderly and blah, blah, anarcho-commie blah. His wife/girlfriend was pretty quiet, and seemed to have a grad-student job with the Agriculture College with prospects.

The rest of the new people were law-clerk buddies of a friend of a friend. Wasn't able to talk much with them, I hate our usual table at Otto's, it's an echoing, exposed, cramped pen of a booth. You can't hear what somebody's saying three or four people over unless they're yelling across the table like Joe Protester.

Michael Yon has been on the front lines for the better part of a decade, but he still has an eye for truly beautiful, mad photography. I've never heard of kishmesh khana before, nor even that Afghanistan had any vineyards to speak of, let alone beautiful, fertile ones like the one Yon was photographing in the middle of a violent, close-quarters infantry campaign. The vineyards sound like the bocage in miniature.

Holy crap! Documentary evidence that the linear no-threshold model of radiation exposure ("no level of radiation exposure is harmless") was established upon systemic & deliberate suppression of contrary experimental results by a Nobel Prize recipient! That there was contrary evidence is not, today, surprising - actual experimental results have demonstrated otherwise since then - but the initial prestige-established no-threshold rule is enshrined by radiation paranoia and institutional inertia.

And the good people wonder why the rest of us are less and less willing to take the scientifically credentialed at their naked word!

h/t Ace of Spades headlines.

While I agree entirely with Ace's point about this really irritating anti-Stewart piece, it's hard to take

That's true but that is a rather minor problem compared to the first. And, in the scheme of things, someone might be justified in noting that both are comparatively minor problems to obsess about; that media criticism is, necessarily, a relatively trivial pursuit. Add into that that among the various ways one could engage this relatively minor topic, Stewart's chosen the least important way, and that means that for all his influence, his mission itself concerns the most trivial critique in a field that is already rather trivial.

from a guy who spent two obsessive weeks delivering hub-to-hub, time-on-target saturation shelling on the head of a minority-party congressman for using twitter to send pictures of his junk to female admirers. I can't think of a more trivial display by a major right-wing blogger, at least not this year.