Ever since then I always regarded JoePa as one of the genuine good guys in college sports. That is, until recently.

   A colleague at the Deseret News told me my story just confirms what a tragic figure Paterno was — a good person with a horrible flaw, like King David and his Bathsheba problem.

   Human beings may never get beyond their weakness for the strongest or the fastest, or the ones who either perform physical feats at levels others only dream about or who can create winners year after year.

   Winners of the Olympics in ancient Greece were worshipped as heroes. No doubt they could get away with things the average people could not.

   In this country, abuses started almost as soon as someone began kicking around an inflated pig bladder.

   In the book, "Stagg's University: The rise, decline and fall of big-time football at Chicago," Robin Lester notes it was between 1895 and 1905 when student-players became "player-students." Back then, the University of Chicago sometimes enrolled good players before they could finish their high school courses.

   Today we call those things recruiting violations. They can earn a team severe penalties from the NCAA, including sanctions that keep the team out of postseason play.

   This week, the NCAA put pedophilia and its cover-up on the same level as a severe recruiting violation. It isn’t even in the same league.

   NCAA President Mark Emmert talked about the need to change a culture that made sports “too big to fail, indeed too big to even challenge.”

   I don’t think the punishment fit the crime. We will look at Penn State as if it’s a vehicle that has been in an accident but still can limp down the street.

   Like most people I’ve met, Paterno was complicated and flawed. But this scandal is big enough to eclipse anything he might have done in his football career.

   Sometimes, you just need to throw a broken car into the junkyard and try to build a new one. The NCAA should have put an end to football in Happy Valley for awhile.

In 2001 we learned we should have looked into the sky for passenger planes that were hijacked and turned into guided missiles.

Since then we have encountered a steady stream of mass murders that taught us to be wary of high school students who feel ostracized, of Norwegians who dress like police officers and show up at youth camps to administer death, of Army psychiatrists at Fort Hood and of seemingly quiet students at Virginia Tech.

Years ago Americans coined the term “going postal” to trivialize what seemed to be a connection between disgruntled postal workers and random murder. Today that seems hopelessly antiquated and naïve.

Now we add 24-year-old James Eagen Holmes to the list of people we wonder if we could have prevented from carrying out an assault on a movie theater as if he was Bashar al-Assad fighting rebels in Syria. As of Friday, authorities said the only time Holmes had any previous encounter with the law was for a speeding ticket, and that was five years ago.

What went on in Holmes’ mind? Did he think at all about the pain, the anguish or the tears? Did he ponder the loneliness, the empty nights and the painful holidays where loved ones cry to a merciful God for just one more moment, one more sound of a voice or one more caress?

What thoughts carried Holmes through his long preparations as he collected a helmet, gloves, leggings, gas mask, weapons, ammunition and the canisters of whatever gas it was he released before his deadly barrage? What tune played in his mind as he booby trapped his apartment, hoping to kill police and neighbors as people came to look at his stuff?

We can’t know, nor will any statement he makes in court bring it into focus or make it easier to stop the next person.

These aren’t new questions. Americans have been dealing with this since long before 1995.

In 1927, a man in Bath, Mich., was upset that he had to pay too much in taxes for public schools. He lined the basement of the Consolidated School building with explosives, then waited until 9:40 a.m. on a school day to detonate them. Forty-five people died, including 38 children. About 100 more were injured.

There was no TV or Twitter back then, but a nation still anguished. You can look it up.

Truman Capote’s landmark book, “In Cold Blood,” describes the seemingly dispassionate way a type of killer can calmly make people suffer without a hint of sympathy or remorse. He quotes a psychiatrist who describes one such man who suffered no delusions, “no false perceptions, no hallucinations, but the primary illness of separation of thinking from feeling. … And in his own seclusive world it seemed to him just as right to kill his mother as to kill an animal or a fly.”

We spend billions to send soldiers far away to stop terrorists, then are terrorized by some of our own who apparently walk among us like individual sleeper cells waiting for orders from within.

There are no answers except one. We cannot let them win.

We can respond with a resolve to spread hope the way Holmes allegedly spread bullets; to make comfort and compassion our weapons of choice.

It won’t help us understand the evil, but it will restore some perspective.  The good in the world outweighs the bad.

Even though the TSA regularly screws up, frisking toddlers while people testing the system get through with guns, this strategy has worked remarkably well.

But every now and then something really strange happens and we start wringing our hands about how the nation should be doing more.

The latest such incident happened this week in St. George, Utah, where a distraught SkyWest Airlines pilot suspected of murdering his girlfriend in Colorado broke through the airport’s perimeter security and tried to make off with a jet.

Brian Hedglin was his name. He didn’t get far before crashing the plane in the parking lot. He then seems to have killed himself with a shot to the head.

This type of thing doesn’t happen every day. I can’t remember anything like it ever happening. But that hasn’t stopped people from using it as an example of why we need tighter security.

Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz, for one, called for enhanced security at all airports.

But the kind of radar surveillance that would spot someone trying to get through a fence costs money. Airports would bear the costs, which likely would be passed on through higher landing fees and, ultimately, higher air fares.

And where do you stop? If a small airport in St. George must get such equipment, what about small non-commercial air fields? What’s to stop someone from stealing a Cessna and causing trouble?

For that matter, what’s to stop someone from sabotaging a train or a mass transit system during rush hour, or from shipping a weapon of mass destruction right into a major port on a freighter?

But keeping to the subject of aircraft, what’s to keep an American citizen from taking flying lessons with the sole intent of doing terrorism? A recent AP story said foreign nationals are screened before taking lessons, but not U.S. citizens. That doesn’t happen until they apply for a license – a formality a terrorist wouldn’t need.

One answer to all these questions is good law enforcement. A second answer is that you never can make the nation completely secure from problems.

The St. George incident raises questions. SkyWest, which made the clumsy PR move of painting over its logo on the disabled plane, needs to answer how Hedglin got aboard the plane, despite having his access card disabled, and how he was able to start it up.

But then, the TSA still has to answer as to why it doesn’t do well on random audits.

Let’s not overreact to one odd and extremely rare incident in a small town.

I never quite understood it all, but then I got the feeling he never expected someone of my mere-mortal stature to fully get it. Somehow, he placed the rocks in strategic locations around the desert, and their natural frequencies would affect jet streams.

One time he let me borrow a rock. I put it atop a dresser. When a series of large rainstorms hit the Midwest, he called in a panic, “Where on earth have you put that thing?” he demanded.

It’s easy to poke fun at the Iranians, whose leaders seem to be banking on the gullibility of their subjects to create a level of paranoia about the West and its evil designs.

But North Korea often follows the same path. Last year, after the North Korean women’s team lost to the United States in the World Cup, the coach blamed the defeat on his best players being struck by lightning during a practice. Maybe that was Jack, too.

And, really, how far is the leap from weather madness to some of the whoppers being thrown around on political ads in this country? The website Factcheck.org is filled with reports on the false claims coming out of both the Barack Obama and Mitt Romney camps.

Obama claims Massachusetts ranked 47th in the nation in job growth under Romney. In reality, it was 50th when he took over as governor and 28th when he left.

Romney has ads accusing Obama of steering grants and loans for green-energy companies to his political friends, but those assertions have yet to be proven.

It’s a wonder neither side has used global warming, or the inability to stem it through legislation, to explain our own droughts in this country.

Maybe, as Dale McFeatters of Scripps Howard News Service suggested recently, the Iranians believe we tested our new weather equipment on American farmers before deciding to point it abroad. If so, the government should tell Jack he can moved his rocks now.

Jack wasn’t the only eccentric I knew in Las Vegas. The town seems to attract them. A preacher named Yahnne Baptist used to drop by, driving a large white Cadillac with an Elvis Hood ornament.

Then there was the down-and-out alcoholic I met at a rally against a local zoning law. He kept telling me he had an original Goya hanging in his basement. I finally went to his house. He did.

And then there was Neil, who seemed to have inside knowledge about several local murders. He kept telling me to call Edna Buchanan, the crime mystery writer, who would vouch for him. I did. She told me he was nuts and that I should watch out.

I humored these people for their entertainment value. The Iranian people have no choice but to humor their leaders.

But if we humor our political candidates and vote based on one of their whoppers, we deserve what we get.

President Obama gave a speech back then saying the Republicans were certain to come up with a three-point plan, “Step one is drill, step two is drill, and step three is keep drilling. We've heard the same thing for 30 years.”

That was a nice caricature of the GOP. He, however, has been quick to blame speculators for pushing up prices, as if they get together and do so on a whim, and not as intelligent guesses that not only reflect world events but that help the industry prepare for future trends.

Where are those speculators now? Are they just off spending their money at fancy summer resorts? Can we expect them back in the fall to drive prices up again so they can save for Christmas expenses?

For their part, Republicans used the predictions to press for approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline from Canada to the Gulf Coast, as if its approval could immediately reduce prices.

The truth is much more complicated than politicians would have you believe. But that won’t stop them.

If you want to get dizzy, look at predictions of gas prices through the years. Way back in February of 2011, Shell Oil’s former president said we would be at $5 a gallon by the start of 2012.

Go back farther, a lot farther: Back in 1956, politicians sued 29 big oil companies, charging them with plotting to raise prices. A federal judge quickly dismissed that suit for the ridiculous stunt it was.

Earlier this year, tensions between Israel and Iran were sending prices up, as was an economy that seemed to be improving, leading to higher demand. But then tensions eased somewhat and the economy slowed down, and $5 gas became $3.45, the national average as of July 17.

The price of gas has fallen 6 cents or more on average during the past three weeks, but the experts say that may soon change. Or not.

So, what can we know for sure about the future of gas prices? Very little, except that Americans are now used to and comfortable with $3+ gas, and that we have no idea what the price will be a year from now.

The uncertainty ought to be enough to spur markets to shift toward natural gas, which enjoys huge reserves in the United States and would be cleaner and less susceptible to world events. Unfortunately, that won’t happen unless the price of gasoline really does hit $5 a gallon.

And if that happens before November, look for Romney and Obama to reload their ammunition.

Not all Mormons support Romney. That’s the sort of nuance that can get lost in a campaign. His religion remains a mystery to many. But is the magazine’s cover depicting a resurrected John the Baptist restoring the priesthood to church founder Joseph Smith Jr. and Olivery Cowdrey with the words, “..And thou shalt build a shopping mall, own stock in Burger King, and open a Polynesian themepark in Hawaii that shall be largely exempt from the frustrations of tax...” a fair illustration?

Well…

Let me tell you about my grandfather, Einar Strand. He lived his entire life in Norway. During World War II he led the Mormon congregation in Oslo without any contact with or help from any church leaders in Salt Lake City or anywhere outside his besieged nation.

I have a compilation at home of a magazine he edited during that time to bring comfort to church members and to teach doctrine. Twice the Gestapo arrested him. He worked for the underground and was a constant and anonymous source of frustration to the Nazis who occupied his country.

One of those arrests has a special place in our family history. He had promised a church member in the hospital to give her a special priesthood blessing of healing at a certain time. His Nazi captors took him to Victoria Terrasse, their headquarters in Oslo, and stuck him in a dark cell.

In that cell he prayed that God would release him so he could use his priesthood to bless the woman he had promised to see. His Nazi captors did so, without explanation and in time for that appointment. That sort of thing didn’t happen very often in Nazi prisons, and grandfather always saw it as a miracle.

Einar Strand was the priesthood leader for Oslo’s Mormon congregation during an especially dark time, and church members looked to him for hope precisely because they believed the priesthood he held had been miraculously restored to earth through angelic messengers of the sort Businessweek decided to depict for sport.

Bloomberg’s story about church finances is one thing. We can have a discussion about whether it falls short of providing a full and accurate picture, but church finances are fair game.

Instead, however, the conversation now focuses on a cover image that cartoonishly insults the depiction of something my grandfather’s congregation, and millions of Mormons today, consider a seminal and sacred event.

The cover devalues the work of the piece’s author, Caroline Winter. It makes the editors’ antipathy toward the Mormon religion apparent, and objective reporting doesn’t thrive well with preconceived prejudice.

Minimize harm? As Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, which is dedicated to excellence and integrity in journalism, told the Deseret News,  "I thought we were past ridiculing sacred images of other faiths, even radical Muslims, let alone our fellow Americans.”

For some, apparently, that journey remains to be trod.

Others led with the report’s more sober findings that, despite getting richer, our ability to move up and down the rungs of society’s income ladder is severely limited. If you define the American dream as the ability to pull yourself up through hard work alone, you’ll have trouble getting to sleep. Only 4 percent of those in this generation who were raised in the bottom income quintile were able to rise to the very top as adults.

What is sobering is that the trip isn’t that far. The upper quintile begins at $81,700 per year.

But few who reported on the study seemed willing to look at the bigger questions it raised, including some the report itself didn’t address.

The first of these is: What good was the “war on poverty” started during the Lyndon Johnson administration?

Don’t think that war ended with the ‘60s, or that it ebbed and flowed during Republican and Democratic administrations.

In congressional testimony last month, Ron Haskins, co-director of the Brookings Institute’s center on children and families, noted how Washington has dramatically increased spending on anti-poverty programs, by about $500 billion adjusted for inflation, between 1980 and 2011. The spending for each person in poverty jumped from $4,300 to $13,000 during that same time period.

And for what? So poor people today would have an even tougher time climbing up the ladder than in the ‘60s? Do politicians ever stop to examine the record to see where all this spending has gotten us?

The second question, also not covered in the report, concerns the role marriage plays in income. Here there is little room for debate. Data from the Census Bureau shows that the poverty rate among married couples with children in 2009 was 9.6 percent. Among women raising children on their own, it was 39.9 percent.

Children under 5 in households headed by single moms had a 55 percent poverty rate.

The third question was covered in the report. It has to do with education. The more you have, the better chance you have of rising up.

Of those raised in the bottom income quintile who earned a four-year degree, only 10 percent stayed there.

Haskins put it in stark terms. “Young people,” he said, “can virtually assure that they and their families will avoid poverty if they follow three elementary rules for success – complete at least a high school education, work full time, and wait until age 21 and get married before having a baby.”

Complete college, as the Pew report makes clear, and the picture gets much better.

The Pew study lays bare some stark realities a lot of Americans may want to avoid discussing. It is indeed a concern that people on the bottom rung of the income ladder have so little chance to move up.

It’s also disturbing to note the report’s findings on race. Black Americans have an even tougher time moving up, and have much larger chance of moving down.

If nothing else, the American dream has stood as a morality lesson about the value of hard work and initiative. If those on the bottom rung lose faith in that dream, it can create a disillusioned, cynical class of people who feel powerless.

But real solutions require public officials of all stripes to push policies that foster marriage and education, and that end or replace programs proven to be worthless. Don’t hold your breath.

The Doctor Patient Medical Association Foundation released a survey this week that contained the 83 percent figure. It’s gotten some play nationally, but it’s hard to know exactly how representative the figure is. The group sent survey questions in faxes to 36,000 physicians in active clinical practice. Only 16,227 of them were actually delivered, and of that only 699 completed surveys were returned.

I’m guessing the doctors who were upset by the Affordable Care Act were most likely to fill out the form and return it. So, with a 4.3 percent response rate and 83 percent of those people saying they are thinking about quitting … well, it puts things in a little different perspective.

Which is not to say doctors are thrilled with the new law or the thought of having to provide care to many people when, as the chair and co-founder of the organization said in an op-ed piece this week, they “can’t afford to see patients at the lowball billing rates.”

The Affordable Care act guarantees everyone insurance, not care. Don’t expect 8 of every 10 doctors to toss their stethoscopes and head for the door, though.

But a different angle on Obamacare is more interesting. While most people focused on the Supreme Court’s ruling regarding the individual mandate (which requires everyone to get insurance or pay a “tax”), the court also ruled that states cannot be forced into providing health care exchanges, which the law says should be set up to provide a marketplace in which consumers can shop for insurance.

The ruling also said states cannot be coerced into paying for an expanded Medicaid program.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry this week sent a letter to Washington saying his state isn’t going to do either of those things. Several others states are expected to do the same.

Washington will create health care exchanges for those states that won’t do so, but an argument has arisen over whether the federal subsidies to help poor people buy through these exchanges (amounting to $6,000 per person) apply only to state-run exchanges.

The answer to all this probably lies in the Department of Health and Human Services’ reply to Gov. Perry.  “We will continue to work with states to ensure they have the flexibility and resources they need to implement the Affordable Care Act,” it said in part.

What the court did, then, was to give considerable leverage to states, especially big ones like Texas. President Obama has hinted that the law may need tweaks and changes. Expect states to have a big hand in that.