The Nittany Turkey

Primarily about Penn State football, this is a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

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We’re Screwed!

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It’s a Penn State bye week, so no football this week. Instead, I call upon an old, retired, neurotic mouse to ramble on about our dystopian future and politics in the forthcoming presidential election year. With high visibility crap going on all around us: Immigration crises, Hamas attacking Israel, Ukrainian funding, abortion rights, and two shaky candidates for our highest national office, he focuses on the American elephant in the room, the one-way ticket to hell in a Chinese handbasket: our national debt. Let the Mouse begin. —TNT

Greed and Dependency, and No Way Out

Government spending (i.e., institutionalized vote buying) is the biggest existential threat to the United States of America today. Our national debt has increased $12 trillion during the past two administrations, an exponential acceleration due to spending binges. This untenable indebtedness will not improve until we stop fighting fire with fire (e.g. misnaming spending legislation ludicrously as “The Inflation Reduction Act”), but methinks it is too late for that. We will continue to fiddle with minutiae while we elect irresponsible leaders who care only about remaining in office while Washington consequently burns.

Does It Matter?

Whether we elect Trump or Biden as our next president is inconsequential to resolving the national debt morass. Their track records on spending and those of Congresses during their administrations suck big time. What we’ll get is spending in either case. Half of us will agree with the spending by either ideological figurehead. The other half will say their candidate would have done better. Both halves are wrong. Both sides drink from the same fountain of power, and both buy our votes in hopes of keeping the elixir flowing.

I focus on Trump and Biden, but I don’t see much of a chance that this will not be a rematch of 2020. I am discounting the chances of any of the other so-called candidates. Barring anything spectacular, like Trump being deported to Mars, Biden sailing off on a Viking ship, or Hillary Clinton charging into Washington on elephant back a la Hannibal, we’ll be stuck once again deciding on the lesser of two evils. Both Biden and Trump have more negatives than positives, but that’s what our system and our greed yields as a parody of “choice”. Both are representative of who we think we are, and what we are ain’t pretty, either.

Spend, Spend, Spend, or Lose

Regarding spending, no viable candidate would dare to threaten closing the floodgates, a prospect that would doom their election. We are in a spending frenzy of governmental and civilian overindulgence, so anyone who vies for the big job must show that they can spend more than the others to satisfy the demands of the electorate. We want handouts, direct or indirect, but we don’t want to work for them. Furthermore, we don’t want to pay for them via either taxes or inflation. They know it and they want to buy our votes, whether through direct payments or tax cuts. No one is saying how the debts will be paid; no one wants to hear about it. It’s all just vote buying at a time long past when we needed to get the national debt under control.

Sweeping Our Bills under the Rug

We need to pay our bills — no question about it — but no politician will dare to do anything about it. At best, they’ll pay fleeting lip service “reducing deficits”. Those reductions never amount to much, because they cannot amount to much. Discretionary spending is dwarfed by the twin realities of entitlements and interest, which cannot be slashed. Hell, we’re at the point at which we cannot pay interest on our debts without borrowing more to do so!

No one will be elected on a platform of pain, rationing, austerity, and responsibility. We want to have our cake and eat it, too. Mo’ money, less work, and more entertainment. Tax cuts buy votes. Big spending buys votes. Hell, Trump managed to do both — he ain’t no dummy! One way or the other the government carves out our hearts and souls and wallets while leaving us just enough pocket change to keep us content in our anesthetizing hedonistic pursuits. We’ll wind up on the scrap heap of history, but we’ll be happy campers during our last moments!

Tytler Said It — Or Not

The now well-known and well-worn words, presumably but not provably spoken by Scottish historian Alexander Fraser Tytler over two hundred years ago, apply: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.” Tytler might have said some or all of that at different points during his life. The concepts this pseudo-quote expresses are summed up pictorially below (courtesy of Wikipedia).

In any case, the so-called Tytler Cycle depicted above resonates with me. Our national attitude is somewhere between “Complacency” and “Apathy”, and we are diving headlong toward “Dependence”. We prefer to keep our heads up our asses and elect those who make us feel good momentarily. Our false dichotomy loving politicians cow us into believing that public welfare is superior to corporate welfare, or vice-versa, and we vote accordingly, while we collectively bend over and are screwed from both directions. As Ronald Reagan once said, “Government is the problem.”

Too Late, Baby?

Is it too late? This mouse thinks so. The Tytlerian point of no return is nigh if we have not already reached it. All the money floating around has distorted the value of everything, leaving us ripe for the taking. Modern Monetary Theory is a form of denial that legitimizes complacency for many anesthetized liberals, while many simplistic, monomaniacal conservatives merely ignore the debt issue. If Trump did it, it was good! Still others think the problem will resolve itself. Three heaps of different flavored mouse shit, I say. It’s bigger than all of us, so we throw our hands up in the air and conduct pseudo-intellectual ideological barroom debates, deluding ourselves by thinking it will be better when our guy wins. However, when we strip away all the bullshit and boosterism, finding the dust encrusted switch to our brains and daring to flip it to ON, we find no quick fix. Furthermore, our instant enlightenment reveals that our society, long accustomed to living beyond its means, will be unwilling to endure the hardship required to fix itself, so we quickly flip that switch back to OFF and hope it goes away.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Apathy and distraction never fixed a complex problem. That we spend trillions on entertainment while neglecting infrastructure, and that we divert more public funds to supplying disincentives to productivity than to promoting productivity are blaring billboards of societal deterioration. So is giving fringe elements of society standing for wacko causes by the hundredfold. We do not intend to give those things up, good or bad, no matter who we elect. And they don’t intend to change those dubious features of our advanced culture, so, they merely promise us more of the same. A chicken for every pot and a car for every garage. False prosperity has a distant echo.

We’re Screwed

Not only do we not know how we will pay the bills for the spending spree; we simply do not care. No one has a solution, so let us just keep fiddling. We have our football, our Taylor Swift, and our food stamps, all thanks to loose money and our beloved Federal Reserve. God forbid we should compromise any of that! Vote Trump! Vote Biden! They’ll give us more of the same, and future generations will pay for our excesses, because with complicity by corrupt Congress, they’ll both sweep the bills under the rug to be paid for by inflation. At the worst, financial chaos, scarcity, and perhaps revolution appear in my mouse-sized crystal ball. We’re screwed anyway I see it. We can only argue how more or less screwed we are within a small delta, but the major trendline of screwage marches immutably upward.

Just Frustration

Am I offering solutions? No, just frustration. We have descended into a pit that I loathe. While I fear similar consequences regardless of which of the two clowns running for President is elected, the big mess is far beyond the capabilities of either one of them in the first place. Am I advocating voting for no one? No, I am not. However, the two-party system is rigged to favor power entrenchment in government, and they all know that a house divided cannot stand. So they promote the ideological dichotomy knowing that they — government — will ultimately win, no matter who we elect. They win, we’re screwed.

My frustration will only end when I shuffle off this mortal coil; however, I fear the Orwellian consequences future generations of Americans will face due to the stupid decisions and greed of my generation and its successors.

If I haven’t driven you away with my frustration blather, I’ll be back with a preview of the UMass bye week.

Systemic Medicare Fraud

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I’ve thrown out many due to passed expiration dates. This collection is just those received in the past two months.

A while back, I opted in to the free Covid-19 at home rapid antigen test delivery, which was to provide me with eight tests. Clearly, I did not know what I was getting into! Now, I am inundated with piles of tests. Five’ll get you ten that each time I go to the mailbox, I’ll find a white plastic envelope filled with a bunch of Covid tests, each one coming from different suppliers in different parts of the country. They know where the money is, and they drank from the government fountain in big gulps.

I now have a stockpile of the damn things, although I have discarded many due to passed expiration dates. I expect that I will dump all of those in the photo within the next three months. Waste, fraud, abuse. All three words seem to apply here.

Huzzah! Huzzah! Pandemic Emergency is Over!

Now that the Pandemic Emergency is over, Medicare will no longer pay for over-the-counter tests not prescribed by a doctor. So, the gravy train for profiteering pharmaceutical suppliers and for the Chinese companies manufacturing the tests is now permanently at the station, and will be retired from service.

Quite noticeably, the suppliers amped up their deliveries once news of the cessation of Pandemic Emergency measures was announced. I received three shipments in the past week. According to my Medicare Claims Summary, Medicare paid $94.08 for each shipment. As of September 2022, over 65 million people actively received Medicare benefits. If even ten percent of these people opted in to the free Covid-19 at-home test program, each shipment would cost us taxpayers $611,000,000. I received three such shipments in the past week, and I don’t doubt that others in the program were similarly endowed. Do the math and have a wastebasket handy to throw up in.

Here, we have yet another institutionalized gross waste of taxpayer money, thanks to the past two administrations and our ever-loving, spendthrift Congress. One thing we can always count on is that Washington will waste huge piles of our money on useless things no matter who is in power.

The late Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois is famously quoted as saying, “A billion here, a billion there… pretty soon, you’re talking about real money!”

Disgusting.

Say It Ain’t So, Joe!

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You’ve all read the media take on the information recently released by the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas in the case of Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association, Penn State’s insurer, with the University. Whether Penn State was negligent in allowing the Sandusky molestations to occur was a central issue.

Sworn testimony by witnesses, if correct, opens old wounds and throws salt in them, revealing that Joe Paterno could have known as early as 1976 that Jerry Sandusky was a child molester, and at that time he had indeed waved the accuser away, stating that he didn’t have time for that kind of stuff, that he had a football season to worry about. Beyond Paterno, names that have never before surfaced in this case came to the fore as potentially having been aware of the Tickle Monster’s pedophilia. Those names include Tom Bradley and Greg Schiano, both of whom are now defensive coordinators at other universities, UCLA and Ohio State, respectively. They both deny everything.

The Penn State Administration has declined comment on the entire affair. President Eric J. Barron sent out a letter stating that there would be no comment whatsoever, stating that it had already been covered by media, and that the University’s overriding concern was for the victims of the Sandusky abuse. What else could he say?

Barron did provide a paragraph of hand-waving defense for Paterno, Schiano, and Bradley:

Although settlements have been reached, it also is important to reiterate that the alleged knowledge of former Penn State employees is not proven, and should not be treated as such. Some individuals deny the claims, and others are unable to defend themselves.

True, Paterno is dead and the others have moved on. It was particularly interesting to this turkey that Bradley, who had stated many times that he was a Pennsylvania boy who would not stray far from the Keystone State, wound up in Los Angeles. His first non-PSU job at WVU I could understand, but UCLA was out of character. Did he accept the UCLA job in the interest of getting out of Dodge or did he merely readjust his life goals when a top-tier opportunity arose?

I don’t consider myself gullible, but I can believe that Paterno swept lots of crap under the rug during his lifetime at Penn State, and it’s no stretch to include that 1976 encounter. Perhaps St. Joe’s halo is a bit tarnished now even among his staunchest and most reverent supporters. Even those who sanctify Joe and his achievements know that “Culture of Football” is an apt moniker for the damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead approach of the Paterno Era. If you’re offended by my saying so, tough shit, but you’re in denial if you think running a football program is all tailgating and cuddly puppies. There’s shit to be shoveled, too, and to succeed, you’ve got to stoke the shit furnace.

Perhaps it was a different age 40 years ago, but although society and its mores have evolved onto some strange paths in that time, one very relevant notion has remained constant. Child molesters were reviled then and they are reviled now. If a kid or a parent came to Paterno with a report of Sandusky molesting a kid in the shower, Paterno should have acted on it. He had a moral and legal obligation to do so. Brushing it aside only speaks to the imperial bearing of the Paterno Administration. President Richard M. Nixon shouldn’t have given Texas the presidential MNC blessing; what he should have done instead is to have awarded the Paterno Administration the Nixonian Medal of Duplicity.

I still believe that many of the ideals of the Paterno Era were real and good — really good: Success with Honor; The Grand Experiment;  superb graduation rate. These were great things. Things to be proud of. Things to live our lives by. I don’t think they were superficial or hypocritical; however, I’m nonetheless personally prepared to believe that in being so driven by the central theme of success of the field, Paterno could have easily brushed off someone making a serious allegation against one of his assistants — just as easily as he typically attempted to circumvent the student disciplinary process at Penn State in order to keep his players on the field. But then again, we ran Vicky Triponey out of town because she dared to suggest that St. Joe engaged in the latter. We believed in Joe’s rectitude, his judgement, his morals — the whole ball of wax. The godlike Joe would never let an incident like this get swept away because he had important football issues — or would he?

It is more than plausible that the anonymous witness making the 1976 allegation is entirely correct. I’m not even slightly incredulous over this possibility. No, I’m outraged that Joe did nothing.

Sort of sheds new light on the famous Paterno deathbed quote, “In retrospect, I could have done more.” Boy, does that ever ring truer than true now!

There will be some PSU homey cynics who handwave that media speculation is 180 degrees from the reality of St. Joe, whose halo will never be tarnished, by God! Some Paternoists will never believe in the slightest that St. Joe might even be fallible, let alone culpable. Some others will rationalize that it was overblown in 1976, when St. Joe properly dismissed the whole thing. I think these Paternoists make it an issue of faith in spite of the preponderance of evidence. Nothing bad ever happens at Penn State. Yeah, right.

If the sworn testimony is true, Mr. Paterno turned his back on Sandusky’s shower shenanigans for at least 35 years. That would include a lot of years when Sandusky was employed by Paterno and directly reported to him. This strips away one feeble defense, which was that Sandusky didn’t work for Paterno at the time; he was merely given space in the Lasch Building.

These revelations come at an interesting time. The lettermen had just publicly asked the Penn State administration to restore the Paterno statue to its former glorious position.

Fat chance of that happening now!