Octopus Overlords

Gregory and Travis McMichael, the White father and son convicted in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, were sentenced Monday to life in prison after their federal convictions this year on interference with rights -- a hate crime -- along with attempted kidnapping and weapon use charges.

Their neighbor William "Roddie" Bryan Jr., the third man involved in Arbery's killing, was sentenced by US District Court Judge Lisa Godbey Wood to 35 years, which will be served at the same time as his state sentence.
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Travis McMichael and Gregory McMichael were also sentenced Monday to 20 years on the attempted kidnapping charges, to be served concurrently with their state sentences, Godbey ruled Monday.

Travis McMichael also received an additional 10 years for the weapons charge to be served consecutively, while Gregory McMichael received an additional seven years on the weapons charge, which will also be served consecutively.

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Mon Aug 08, 2022 1:28 pm CNN

Travis McMichael, one of the three White men convicted in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, was sentenced Monday to life in prison plus 10 years after his federal convictions this year on interference with rights -- a hate crime -- along with attempted kidnapping and weapon use charges.

His father Gregory McMichael and their neighbor William "Roddie" Bryan are due to be sentenced later Monday at the same Georgia courthouse on convictions of the same federal charges. All three already are serving life sentences for their convictions in state court on a series of charges related to the killing of the 25-year-old Black man, including felony murder.
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Travis McMichael's life sentence, along with 20 years on the attempted kidnapping charge, is to be served concurrently with his state sentence, US District Court Judge Lisa Godbey Wood ruled Monday, with the additional 10 years on the weapons charge to be served consecutively. The judge ruled McMichael did not have the funds to pay a fine.

McMichael's attorney Amy Lee Copeland argued Monday for her client to remain in federal custody and to serve out his prison term with the Federal Bureau of Prisons rather than the Georgia Department of Corrections.

McMichael fears for his life in a state prison, Copeland said, telling the court he'd received "hundreds" of threats. Forcing him to serve the time in a Georgia state prison would essentially amount to a "backdoor death penalty" that could leave McMichael vulnerable to "vigilante justice," she argued, acknowledging the "rich irony."

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Mon Aug 08, 2022 7:03 pm I can be not OK with the shitty state of our prison system and yet get a little enjoyment out of them spending the rest of their natural lives in one of the worse places.

dbt1949 wrote: ↑Mon Aug 08, 2022 11:55 pm So our prison system is worse than Latin America? Asia, middle East, Africa?

dbt1949 wrote:I wonder how our prisoners would fare if we could transfer them somehow to European prisons?

I hate it when I see an inflammatory headline like that. I think the author is anti American and is looking for something to put America down.
Is there a person in the world who would rather go to a Bolivian prison over an American prison?
Russia, North Korea, Japan, Mexico, Zimbabwe, Iran?
If the headline had compared us to Europe that would be another story.

Holman wrote: ↑Tue Aug 09, 2022 6:49 pm Brutal nations use prisons to punish and demean criminals and political opponents. Prison inflicts suffering.

coopasonic wrote: ↑Wed Aug 10, 2022 10:09 am

Holman wrote: ↑Tue Aug 09, 2022 6:49 pm Brutal nations use prisons to punish and demean criminals and political opponents. Prison inflicts suffering.

Don't forget using prisoners as a source of cheap labor, or is that just us?

Something incredible happened today in a Hilton Garden Inn in Rochester, New York. A local couple, Nicholas and Mary Nicosia, and their attorney, Corey Hogan, held a nearly hour-long press conference with the goal of convincing the gathered members of the press that the Nicosias did not host a racist party at their home on July 7 of this year. At one point during this press conference, Hogan spoke the following words: “Mary Nicosia has a Twitter account. It’s racist. It’s wrong. It’s vile. Shouldn’t exist.”

If a BYU fan was loudly yelling racial slurs at the Duke player, why didn't the other BYU fans nearby do something about it?

Nearly two decades after the NFL enacted the Rooney Rule, teams’ hiring and firing practices still disadvantage Black coaches at every turn — and it’s getting worse, a Post investigation found.

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Since 1990, Black coaches have been twice as likely as others to be fired after leading a team to a regular season record of .500 or better.

Amid growing scrutiny of the issue, The Post compiled and analyzed three decades’ worth of data and conducted interviews with 16 of the 24 living current and former NFL head coaches who identify as Black, as well as dozens of other coaches, former players, team executives, agents and others.

The data quantifies the frustration felt by many of those coaches, which erupted into the public eye this year with a lawsuit by Brian Flores, fired by the Miami Dolphins in January, that accuses the league and its teams of racism in their hiring and firing practices. The lawsuit and its potential implications hover over the NFL as its new season unfolds with just three Black head coaches: Todd Bowles of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Lovie Smith of the Houston Texans and Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

That’s the same number as in 2003 — the year the NFL, under intense external pressure, introduced the Rooney Rule, which required teams to interview at least one candidate of color for open head coach and front-office jobs.

About Vigilante: Georgia’s Vote Suppression Hitman
A film by Greg Palast

Narrated by Rosario Dawson

Investigative reporter Greg Palast busts the most brazen, racist attack on voting rights yet — engineered by Georgia’s Brian Kemp to ensure victory in his rematch with Stacey Abrams. You’ll meet Kemp’s army of vigilante vote challengers.

One dresses up like Old-West vigilante Doc Holliday with a loaded six-gun six shooter, one of a posse of right-wing operatives who have challenged over a quarter million voters.

Grifman wrote: ↑Tue Nov 15, 2022 9:56 am How stupid can you be to think you could say this publicly to a group of HS students in class and get away with it:

LawBeefaroni wrote: ↑Mon Nov 14, 2022 11:36 am You say "dumb", I'll say "emboldened."

A student off camera asks, “So White is better than all?”

The teacher replies, “Let me finish. I think everybody thinks that. They’re just not honest about it.”

After some other discussion in the video, a student asks, “You said you are a racist, right?”

“I did, yeah, I’m trying to be honest,” the teacher replies.

It is unclear what was discussed before and after the recording of the videos.

CNN has not identified the person or people who filmed the videos circulating online and has not obtained the videos. CNN has obtained an audio recording of a portion of the conversation from a parent who said their child is shown in the videos.

In the audio, a student asks the teacher to repeat himself. The teacher says, “I said, ‘I am a racist.’ That’s what I said. Do you know what that means?”

Students’ responses overlap, and the teacher continues, “It means that deep down in my heart, I think my race is the superior race. That’s what it means to be a racist.”

In a statement Monday, Douglas Killian, the superintendent of the Pflugerville Independent School District, described the discussion as "inappropriate, inaccurate, and unacceptable" and said "this type of interaction will not be tolerated in any" of the district's schools.

"As of Monday morning, Nov. 14, the teacher in question is no longer employed by Pflugerville ISD and we are actively looking for a replacement," he said. He did not identify the teacher, who appears to be white. Tamra Spence, a spokesperson for the district, said Monday she could not confirm the teacher's race.

An increasingly active right-leaning nonprofit called Parents Defending Education filed a federal civil rights complaint against Newton North High School last month, alleging that a student-led theater production broke the law by limiting auditions to people of color only.

The same group sued Wellesley Public Schools last year for alleged illegal discrimination when Wellesley High School hosted a forum for Asian students and students of color to discuss a mass shooting at an Asian massage parlor in Atlanta. The teacher who organized the session wrote that it was “*not* for students who identify only as White.”

So far, the national group has identified 43 “incidents” in which they say Massachusetts schools inappropriately — or even illegally — taught students about race, sexual orientation, or gender, setting school districts across the Commonwealth on edge that they might be sued next.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before in all my years here,” said Wellesley School Superintendent David Lussier, who settled the lawsuit with the organization in February. “They try to go after superintendents and get people fired.”

Parents Defending Education did not return repeated requests for comment, but supporters say the group offers a vital counterweight to an education system steeped in liberal values.

“I think it’s good because, for a long time, education has been very one-sided,” said Jennifer McWilliams, a consultant to Parents Defending Education who runs her own advocacy group in Indiana. “Schools have decided that they need to teach children morals, values, attitude, and worldview over academics.”

The two-year-old organization, based in Washington D.C., urges parents across the country to report incidents in which they believe schools are dividing students on racial lines or inappropriately teaching students about sex or gender roles. The group states on its website that education must be based on “scholarship and facts” and says ethnic studies divide “children into oppressor and ‘oppressed’ groups,” while teaching white students “guilt and shame.”

And the organization has a sizable, well-connected staff to promote its agenda. Parents Defending Education’s website lists 13 staff members including Nicole Neily, former president of an organization affiliated with the Koch Brothers called Speech First, and Aimee Viana, a former Trump administration appointee.

Schools have long been battlegrounds in the nation’s culture wars, but experts say Parents Defending Education marks something new: an attempt to nationalize the agenda. The group has been promoting conservative values across the country, enlisting local groups with names like Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education along the way.

“We see increased coordination, national coordination among groups of all political stripes and partisan stripes, thanks to social media,” said Meira Levinson, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. “The right more than the left seems to have mastered techniques of developing language that then can be replicated in legislation or policy across different municipalities and state governments.”

A recent study shows that police agencies’ official social-media posts display racial bias and may help perpetuate stereotypes about who commits certain crimes.

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The authors—Ben Grunwald, Julian Nyarko and John Rappaport, of Duke, Stanford and Chicago law schools—gathered posts from almost 14,000 Facebook pages belonging to America’s local law-enforcement agencies. The authors used an algorithm designed by researchers at Stanford University to find posts about crimes that also identified the suspect by race. They then compared the frequency of these posts with information on actual arrest rates by the same police departments between 2010 and 2019.

The authors’ research focussed on posts about black suspects. Of posts mentioning a suspect’s race 32% mentioned a black person, despite black people accounting for only 20% of arrests. Black suspects were over-represented in all posts about serious crime with the exception of car theft (see left-hand chart). For violent crimes, such as rape and murder, black suspects were mentioned in police Facebook posts 40% more often than they should have been.

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The researchers found that Facebook users in counties that voted Republican in the presidential elections in 2012 and 2016 were likely to see the most over-reporting of black suspects (see right-hand chart). A few Democratic-voting counties, such as Los Angeles County, California and Cook County, Illinois (which encompasses Chicago), swung the other way, with fewer posts about black suspects than would be expected from crime rates.