Labels: American Jewry, comedy, Family Guy, holidays, Teh Silly

Ravi guilty on all counts in webcam spying trial


NEW BRUNSWICK — The deal was on the table months ago.


Plead guilty, prosecutors told Dharun Ravi, and you likely won’t go to prison.

Ravi, charged in a first-of-its-kind prosecution linking invasion of privacy to a hate crime, rebuffed the offer, opting to take his chances with a jury.

Today, in a New Brunswick courtroom filled to overflow, the 20-year-old Plainsboro man learned the consequence of his choice as a jury forewoman spoke his fate.

Guilty.

Guilty of invading the privacy of his Rutgers University roommate, Tyler Clementi, by using a webcam to remotely spy on an intimate tryst between Clementi and an older man. Three days after that encounter in September 2010, the distraught teen leaped to his death from the George Washington Bridge, catapulting the case into the national spotlight.

Guilty of witness tampering, hindering apprehension and tampering with evidence.

Most significant, guilty of bias intimidation, a second-degree felony indicating Ravi targeted Clementi because he was gay and knew his actions would hurt him.

In a precedent-setting verdict that legal experts and advocates say draws a firm line against bullying and harassment in a wired world, the jury convicted Ravi of 15 counts that could land him in prison for a decade. He also faces the possibility of deportation to his native India, from which he legally emigrated as a child.
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In December, the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office offered him a plea bargain including probation, 600 hours of community service and an offer to help avoid deportation, but Ravi, rejected it. His attorney said he rejected it because he is innocent.

In today’s news about more men who want to control women’s bodies, Georgia’s state representative, Terry England, wants to force us to carry stillborn fetuses to term–just like cows and pigs do, he says. Because, you know, women are just like barnyard animals.

England was speaking on the floor of the Georgia legislature in favor of HB 954, a bill which makes it illegal to obtain an abortion after 20 weeks, which is fine for him to take that stance and many people would even agree with that. However, he was pushing for that law to also apply to women who are carrying a stillborn fetus or one that is likely to die before it reaches term, making it illegal for women to have the dead fetus removed until their bodies do so naturally.

As if that insensitivity wasn’t enough, he then referenced the livestock on the farm where he once worked and how they had to sometimes deliver stillborn animals:

Life gives us many experiences…I’ve had the experience of delivering calves, dead and alive. Delivering pigs, dead or alive. It breaks our hearts to see those animals not make it.

In other words, if a cow or pig can give birth to a dead baby, then a woman should too. So what if it’s just plain cruel to force a woman to carry a stillborn fetus to term and then make her undergo labor. We are no different than cows or pigs, right? Yeah, that’s logic that just makes a lot of sense and is filled with so much compassion and understanding of women.

Labels: just another outrage, misogyny, The Republican War on Women

As the Chinese government forges ahead on a multibillion-dollar effort to blanket the country with surveillance cameras, one American company stands to profit: Bain Capital, the private equity firm founded by Mitt Romney.

In December, a Bain-run fund in which a Romney family blind trust has holdings purchased the video surveillance division of a Chinese company that claims to be the largest supplier to the government’s Safe Cities program, a highly advanced monitoring system that allows the authorities to watch over university campuses, hospitals, mosques and movie theaters from centralized command posts.

The Bain-owned company, Uniview Technologies, produces what it calls “infrared antiriot” cameras and software that enable police officials in different jurisdictions to share images in real time through the Internet. Previous projects have included an emergency command center in Tibet that “provides a solid foundation for the maintenance of social stability and the protection of people’s peaceful life,” according to Uniview’s Web site.

Such surveillance systems are often used to combat crime and the manufacturer has no control over whether they are used for other purposes. But human rights advocates say in China they are also used to intimidate and monitor political and religious dissidents. “There are video cameras all over our monastery, and their only purpose is to make us feel fear,” said Loksag, a Tibetan Buddhist monk in Gansu Province. He said the cameras helped the authorities identify and detain nearly 200 monks who participated in a protest at his monastery in 2008.

Labels: corporatism, human rights, Mitt Romney

Labels: Republican clown car, Teh Stoopid, The Firesign Theatre

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.

[snip]

When the history books are written about Goldman Sachs, they may reflect that the current chief executive officer, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and the president, Gary D. Cohn, lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch. I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival.

Over the course of my career I have had the privilege of advising two of the largest hedge funds on the planet, five of the largest asset managers in the United States, and three of the most prominent sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia. My clients have a total asset base of more than a trillion dollars. I have always taken a lot of pride in advising my clients to do what I believe is right for them, even if it means less money for the firm. This view is becoming increasingly unpopular at Goldman Sachs. Another sign that it was time to leave.

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.

What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.

Labels: corporate assholes, rant, Wall Street

Labels: bloggers, The Right Wing War on the Middle Class, writing

I phrase things the way I do because of the Firesign Theatre. I look at the world the way I do because of them. There might not be anything that had a bigger formative influence on who I am today when I really think about it!”

Labels: comedy, obituaries, pop culture

This is the monster in the Conservative basement that Liberals have been sounding the alarm about for the last four decades.

This is the monster in the Conservative basement that America's leading Conservative public intellectuals have spent virtually their entire professional lives pretending did not exist.

The entire focus of the modern American Conservative Movement has been to give goon like these enough political power to completely fuck up my country.

The last time these goons were given a free hand to fuck up my country, it took over two million Union soldiers and four years of bloody civil war to convince them it was a bad idea.

Maybe someone could ask leading America's Conservative intellectuals like Andrew Sullivan, David Frum and David Brooks to quantify the level of effort it took to hold themselves, year after year, willfully ignorant of fact that these goons are the bedrock on which their Movement was built.

Labels: American Idiots, Republican Confederate Party, Teh Stoopid