Looters (and other pond scum)

June 1, 2011

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It happens every time there is a natural disaster, and it’s happening in Joplin, Missouri.  As people try to put their lives back together, looters are looking through the rubble in search of anything that might fetch a few bucks.  Other than declaring open season on looters, I’m not really sure how this problem can be fixed.  If you’re stealing from people in the aftermath of a tragedy, you truly have no shame.  In the aftermath of the Iowa floods in 2008, there were instances of people the copper from inside homes.

Jim Tressel finally stepped down as the football coach at Ohio State.  He’s not the first football coach to cover up NCAA violations, and he’s not the first to lie to the NCAA about it.  However, in this case there was a smoking gun, and you can’t let one guilty person off simply because you have insufficient evidence to prove that other people are guilty.

The athletes are definitely no angels in this situation.  They should have known better.  However, they are young, and young people make mistakes.  The smart ones learn from those mistakes.  I’m certainly annoyed at the way the NCAA watered down the punishment by having it start AFTER their bowl game.  The players will miss relatively unimportant early season games.  Want to make suspensions less predictable?  Throw the names of all a team’s opponents in a hat and randomly choose which games a player will be suspended for.  It might be Central Southeast Ohio A & T … or it might be Michigan.

I’m sure some Buckeye fans will blame Christopher Cicero for the imminent collapse of the program.  Cicero is the Columbus lawyer who emailed Tressel to make him aware of the fact that his players were interacting with a known criminal.  For those Buckeye fans who feel that what has transpired is the worst that could have happened to the OSU football program … you are wrong.  The worst thing that could have happened was having a player getting mixed up in something really bad an ending up dead.  Put yourself in Cicero’s shoes – if you said nothing, and someone ended up hurt, could you sleep at night?  I know very little about Cicero outside of the OSU scandal, but if this is an indication of how his moral compass orients, I’d hire him as a lawyer if I needed one.  He had the best interests of the kids at heart.

And perhaps the mos bizarre pond scum incident from the past few weeks – Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund, sexually assaulting a hotel maid in his New York hotel room.  Strauss-Kahn was expected to be a leading candidate in the French presidential election.  Even if he were able to flee the country, I’m not sure how he expected this incident to remain hidden.  This wasn’t some anonymous rapist – it was really easy to figure out who it was – the registered occupant of the hotel room.  Goodbye job, goodbye French presidency, goodbye freedom.

4 Comments (+add yours?)

  1. Martin Kelly
    Jun 01, 2011 @ 14:46:50

    Kosmo, I am right with you on the Looters. Having lived in Texas, which has a property protection clause that allows you to be armed on your property to at least scare people away, although you do not have the right to just pick them off the top of the rubble pile, which I feel is a shame.

    On the other Pond Scum, so Cicero is the bad guy for telling Tressel, Tressel is a victim because he kept that information secret then lied about it. Makes sense to me. If the NCAA had given him a heads up, he could have escapted to another school before the sanctions hit (look at the SMU death penalty).

    Dominque is also a class act. Leave it up to the European press to be appalled that he was shown on TV when he was arrested. Apparently rape is no big deal among the elite of France.

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  2. Evan
    Jun 01, 2011 @ 16:10:05

    It really does shake one’s faith in human nature seeing looting occur. I don’t know how you fix that. Sort of reminds me of our education system – it all starts at home, and nothing we do on the outside is going to change how some people act.

    Regarding Tressel, I’m no Ohio State fan, but he always struck me as a decent guy. He’s either a great actor (i.e. not a good guy), or just got sucked in, and was in over his head before he knew it. He definitely made mistakes, and bad ones, but I’m not ready to completely condemn the guy.

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  3. kosmo
    Jun 01, 2011 @ 18:26:15

    I’m condemning Tressel because he failed to notify his Athletic Director and Compliance Director of potential violations. The role of Compliance Director exists for exactly these sorts of situations.

    Also, it’s not as if he has a squeaky clean track record. There were issues back in his Youngstown State days.

    I think he traded his integrity for wins.

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  4. kosmo
    Jul 01, 2011 @ 00:20:53

    I’m going to take a step back on Dominique Strauss-Kahn. While he does have a history of allegations from other women, it seems that prosecutors in this particular case are having some doubts that a rape occurred (the encounter was possibly consensual, and very different than the way the maid described it). Still a really bad lapse in judgment (remember, he’s married) but perhaps not a rape.

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