Varsha Sabhnani: Jetsetting Slaver

"A federal judge in Central Islip ordered Varsha Sabhnani to jail Thursday, days after a jury found her guilty of enslaving and torturing two domestic workers at her Muttontown home."

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/crime/ny-bzslav21,0,7487285.story

http://indiequill.wordpress.com/2007/05/31/varsha-sabhnani-is-scary/







"Judge, please!" she said through tears after Spatt denied her attorney's request that she be allowed to remain home through Christmas. "Judge, please change your mind."

Christians and Crime

Here are statistics about religious affiliations of those in prison (which could be interpreted as an undesireable outcome, I would think)http://www.holysmoke.org/icr-pri.htm The Federal Bureau of Prisons does have statistics on religiousaffiliations of inmates.

I am willing to concede that the vast majority of folks who are on death row, the vast majority of people who do abortions and have abortions, and the vast majority of those that lie, cheat, steal, and get divorced in his country come from Christian households and call themselves Christians. But I consider these statisics to be interesting but not especially revealing as the definition of who is a Christian is so broad as to be probably meaningless.

Would you agree that as these people are self-identifying as Christian that they probably had at least a moderaterly religious background?

I don't know. In the US at least, "Christian" appears to be the default self-definition.

"Are you Jewish?"

"Nope"

"Are you Hindu?"

"Are you joking?"

"Are you atheist?"

"Whatzat?"

"Oh, you must be a Christian?"

"Whatever."

This kind of self-definition may mean nothing more than that person hears "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" every December. The "no true Scot" fallacy cuts both ways.

Are you saying that they are not "true Christians" because they engage in activities that fundamentalist Christianity disapproves of?

I"m saying that the phrase "true Christian" is not meaningful as an objective category.

I'm Thinking of a Number - Part II

The massacre in Virginia provokes wonderment. Where was the Department of Homeland Security? How can someone with a record for mental instability buy a glock with about as much ease as buying tickets to a basketball game? And what can be done to prevent this from happening again?

As to the first question: The answer is that the Department of Homeland Security is indeed impotent. Hurricane Katrina established that. It was only public pressure that caused the department to increase border security and shipping container verification.

As to the second question: I think enough Americans believe that the Second Amendment guarantees them the right to have their kids blow off their heads that I don't think that there will be any new gun restrictions. Not even the Democrats want to play around this third rail of politics. The human mind is still largely terra incognita. and predicitng violence is at best an imperfect science.

What can be done to prevent this from happening again? While Americans value their freedom, their are stronger countervailing trends, such as the trends towards diversity, mobility, computerization, and terrorism. I predict we will see shortly a behavior score, much like the credit scoring neural nets used by credit card issuers, that will be part of an individual's existence from the day they are born or immigrate into this country to the day they die or leave this country. This number will be the focus of interlocking databases consisting of crime and psychological reports and perhaps other kinds of reports that would throw up red flags and at least communciate more information than gun sellers now get. It will be the creation of a true permanent record. From a civil liberties perspective, I don't view this as likely soon, but it is inevitable-- something that society will embrace to by acclamation. Already, we are photographed about twenty times each day, and software now exists to cross-reference and correlate face image and behavior. I don't believe the presumption for civil liberties and privacy will prevail against the demand for increased security. The United States of the future is the People's Republic of China today.

The Bullied

(AP) - Long before he snapped, Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui was picked on, pushed around and laughed at over his shyness and the strange way he talked when he was a schoolboy in the Washington suburbs, former classmates say. Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho's turn, he just looked down in silence. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice.
As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, `Go back to China."

In incidents such as the Virginia Tech slayings, there is no single reason why a man to turns into a madman. But the way Cho's peers treated him is a factor.

Like Cho, I immigrated to America at an early age. Cho was eight, I was ten and we both had accents. In my case, that provoked sadistic glee from a certain percentage at Council Rock, a house of horrors that made the Stephen King movie Carrie look wholesome. Three decades haven't dimmed the misery of that shark pool-- a bovine-faced George Blackwell shaking me down for my milk money, the dwarf James Kilcoyne whose nose I bloodied after one tussel, and yet another greaser who threw me up against the lockers and was killed three days later with a knife in the ribs. Cho's sister graduated from Princeton, and I adopted the same strategy of escaping the bullies by excelling and achieving. The succession of failures and successes also increased my self-confidence and my generally boyant personality also cushioned me from the kind of despair that turned Cho into a psychotic murderer.

I have in my medical files the x-rays of my ten-year old son from 2003. It shows a broken clavicle-- a fracture of the collarbone admnistered by Michael Friedman, an especially vile classroom bully. I suppose it is both a right of passage to navigate the jungle of bullies but also a shock to realize that not everyone acts with decency. Whittaker Chamber's in his fine and frightening autobiography Witness recounts how in first-grade he watched a group of his classmates urinate on a lollypop and then offer it in innocent friendliness to a newcomer. "The watched him with birdlike intentness while he held it in his hand. As he put it to his mouth, they burst into shrieks of derision, doubled up with laughter, slapped their knees and whooped around him like Indians. I think it was at that point that I developed a deep distrust of the human race. It was not only the filthy act that disgusted me. Something else shocked me much more deeply: the thought that inspired the act, its absolutely unmotivated malice, and the complete boyish guileness of the faces watching the victim. From that moment I hated school and everything about it. I was always expecting somebody to offer me a lollypop in one form or another."

The Columbine killers were also victims of bullies. This shouldn't mitigate their crimes or in anyway diminish the human toll the murders exacted. But to prevent such actions from happening again, I think it behooves us to reflect on how we treat the Chos-- the most fragile and the most alienated-- that are among us. Ramping up on gun laws and inducing better living through chemistry doesn't address root causes of these human explosions. Nor do I think the answer is to eradicate mechanisms that differentiate the mediocre from the excellent, such as grades, honor societies, and wealth. But I do believe that people who for whatever reason are given advantages that elevate them in life should reciprocate by treating others-- including and especially the unlovely and the unsmart ---with kindness and efforts at understanding.

Memo to John Markell

Enjoy your $570. Brace yourself for a wave of wrongful-death lawsuits.

Markell, owner of Roanoke Firearms, sold Cho Seung-Hui the Glock 9-millimeter and ammunition that took the lives of thirty-two Americans.

We are a full service firearms and accessories dealer committed to serving our customers and
our community. Looking through our stock of over 350 firearms, you will find not only the brands and models discriminating enthusiasts demand, but also some of the newest cutting-edge items you won't find in many gun shops. Come on in and look around!

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"A Right to Bear Arms"

"The President believes that there is a right for people to bear arms," said White House Deputy Press Secretary Dana Parino, in reaction to the worst school massacre in U.S . "But," Miss Parino said, brightly, "all laws must be followed."

In the wake of this killing, we'll see the usual freak show. First will come the condolences from the Comforter in Chief, a blue ribbon panel, and perhaps a special on the Discoverer Channel. And then the NRA will trot out their usual talking points, the same ones that Ronald Reagan used after he was shot by another love-lorn kid. But nothing fundamental will change, and the killings and the terror will continue in this country that is awash in guns and violence, which perhaps at some diabolic level is precisely what this administration wants.

And what does the administration want as far as gun laws are concerned? It certainly is not an armed citizenry. When Hurricane Katrina and Rita struck New Orleans, police and national guard troops went from house to house confiscating guns on the orders of FEMA. But, in the meantime, Bush wants to feed its political base the red meat of gun ownership.

"I do believe in the constitutional right that everyone has, in the Second Amendment to the Constitution, to carry a weapon," said John McCain hour after the shootings. I doubt that the senator means that the insane, children, and criminals are entitled to that right. Bush may have no such qualms in restricting gun ownership to Texan children, a point that a reporter raised at Parino's White House briefing.

The Second Amendment reads as follows:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

My reading of the plain text is that the constitution places gun ownership in the context of a militia, which must be well-regulated and necessary to the security of a free state. In other words, it should be read subjunctively-- if you are in the militia, they will be no infringement on your right to have a gun. This right turns on how we define militia. If we define it narrowly, a militia is essentially the national guard. Or can we define it to include all citizens, whether they be liquor store owners or duck hunters? A strict constuctionist definition derives more likely from the former interpretation.

And then there is the question as to what is an arm. A slingshot? A thermonuclear bomb? In United States v. Miller, the Supreme Court sustained a statute requring regulation of sawed of shot guns under the National Firearms Act, noting that ''[i]n the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a 'shotgun having a barrel of less than 18 inches in length' at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well- regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense.'' Since this decision, Congress has placed greater limitations on the receipt, possession, and transportation of firearms.

My hunch is that the events that transpired at Virgina Tech will not give impetus to increased regulation and confiscation of firearms using the same argument. It will, however, erode a right that isn't explicitly defined in the constitution-- the right to privacy. It is exceedingly rare that this kind of violence is the result of someone snapping. Rather, inevitably, the person that commits such atrocities doesn't whisper a warning-- he broadcasts it. Sulleness, hatefulness, feelings of depression, morbidity, helplessness, depersonalization, and hostility are the hallmarks of such killers. But so are they the hallmarks of creative and harmless people as well. Consider the one-act play that Cho Seung-Hui, the campus killer, wrote. It's vulgar and sophomoric, but no more so than the efforts of many vulgar sophomores. The upshot of the violence in Virginia will be I believe more conformity and less privacy while national policy towards gun ownership will remain unchanged.

American Gothic

Violent crimes

-- There were 5.2 million violent crimes in the United States in 2005, up 2.5 percent from the previous year, the highest rate in 15 years.
-- In 2005, for every 1,000 persons age 12 or older, there occurred 1 rape or sexual assault, 1 assault with injury, and 3 robberies.
-- Murder, robbery and other violent crimes reported in the United States jumped 3.7 percent in the first half of 2006 over the same period in 2005, with robbery alone up by a starling 9.7 percent.
-- The United States has the largest number of privately owned guns in the world. In 2005, 477,040 victims of violent crimes stated that they faced an offender with a firearm. Campus shootings are rampant in the United States.

Crimes and Penalities

-- Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. Department of Justice has used the material witness warrant to imprison without charge at least 70 men.
-- Nearly three-quarters of terrorism suspects seized by the United States in the five years following the Sept. 11 attacks have not even made it to trial because of lack of evidence against them.
-- About three percent of the U.S. adult population, or one in every 32 adults, were in the nation's prisons and jails or on probation or parole. The federal prisons were operating at 34 percent over capacity.
-- The United States is the only country in the world that allows the use of police dogs to terrify prisoners. Each year, approximately 7,000 Americans died in U.S. prisons and jails. More than 1.5 million inmates are released each year carrying life threatening contagious diseases.
-- At least 13 percent of inmates in U.S. prisons had suffered sexual assaults and many have suffered frequent sexual abuses. The number of prisoners who had suffered sexual assaults over the past 20 years is likely to exceed one million.

Privacy

-- Two-thirds of Americans believe that the FBI and other federal agencies are intruding on their privacy rights. The use of electronic surveillance and search warrants in national security investigations jumped 15 percent in 2005.
-- Pentagon research team monitors more than 5,000 jihadist Websites, focusing daily on the 25 to 100 most hostile and active.
-- 76 percent of companies in the United States monitor employees' website connections, 65 percent block access to specific sites, and 36 percent track the content, keystrokes and time spent at the keyboard. More than half of employers retain and review e-mail messages.

Money Politics

-- In 2004, candidates for the House of Representatives who raised less than one million U.S. dollars had almost no chance of winning, The average successful Senate campaign cost 7 million dollars. In 2006, all state campaigns in the United States were predicted to cost about 2.4 billion dollars.
-- Seventy-four percent of respondents to an opinion research poll say the U.S. Congress is generally out of touch with average Americans, and 79 percent of the surveyed say they fell big business does have too much influence over the administration's decisions.
-- More than 1,000 government employees, including hundreds of police officers, have been convicted in FBI graft cases in the past two years.
-- Over the past five and half years, U.S. Republican and Democratic lawmakers accepted nearly 50 million U.S. dollars in trips, often to resorts and exclusive locales.
-- From January 2000 through June 2005, House and Senate members and their aides were away from Washington for more than 81,000 days - a combined 222 years - on at least 23,000 trips. U.S. lawmakers accepted thousands of costly jaunts to some of the world's choicest destinations: at least 200 to Paris, 150 to Hawaii and 140 to Italy.

Wealth and Poverty

-- The United States is the richest country in the world, but there were 37 million people, or 7.7 million families, living in poverty in 2005, accounting for 12.6 percent of total U.S. population, which means that one out of eight Americans was living in poverty.
-- 34.8 million Americans did not have enough money or other resources to buy food.
-- Currently, there are 600,000 or so homeless people nationwide, including 16,000 homeless in Washington D.C. and 3,800in New York City.
-- The number of American people without health insurance coverage rose to 46.6 million in 2005, accounting for 15.9 percent of the total population and up 1.3 million over 2004. Racial discrimination
-- White people's income was 64 percent more than the blacks and 40 percent more than the Hispanics.
-- Nearly one in five Hispanics lacked sufficient access to nutritious food and one in 20 regularly went hungry. Blacks took up 42 percent of all the homeless people in the United States.
-- The unemployment rate of the blacks was more than twice that of the whites: 8.6 percent for the blacks and 3.9 percent for the whites.
-- One out of 12 black men were in jail or prison, compared with one in 100 white men. Researchers pointed to poverty, a lack of opportunities, racism in the criminal justice system for the black-white prison gap.
-- The number of extreme racist and neo-Nazi organizations has increased by 33 percent in recent five years, rising from 672 in 2004 to 803 in 2005.

The Disadvantaged

-- The female-to-male earnings ratio was 76 percent in the United States with median earnings of women and men standing at about 32,000 and 42,000 U.S. dollars, respectively.
-- In 2005, 37 percent of the low-wage mothers had to give up necessary medical care, and a third had their electricity or phone turned off because they could not pay the bills.
-- During 2005, there were an estimated 93,934 female victims of forcible rape, or 62.5 out of every 100,000 women suffered from forcible rape.
-- Nearly 1.3 million American children who were homeless or fled home wandered in streets.
-- The U.S. Department of Justice received nearly 800,000 cases of missing children and kidnapping every year. And among the nearly 100 dangerous missing cases each year, about 40 percent of the missing children were killed eventually.
-- People with disabilities are nearly three times more likely to live in poverty than people without disabilities; 26 percent of people with disabilities had annual household income below 15,000 U.S. dollars, versus 9 percent those without disabilities.

Human Rights Abroad

-- More than 655,000 Iraqis have died in Iraq since war started in March 2003, meaning about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country.
-- Since August 2002, 98 prisoners had died in American-run prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the dead, 34 died of premeditated murder, 11 deaths were suspicious, and 8 to 12 were tortured to death.
-- In May 2006 human rights group Amnesty International condemned the detention of some 14,000 prisoners in Iraq without charge or trial.
-- A poll by the BBC World Service released on January 23, 2007showed that the image of the United States has deteriorated around the world in the past year. Some 73 percent of the total disapproved of U.S. government's handling of the military campaign in Iraq, with 49 percent of respondents saying Washington was playing a mainly negative role internationally.
-- An average of only 29 percent of some 18,000 people surveyed in18 countries over the last three months believed that the United States is having a mainly positive influence internationally, down 7 percent from the previous poll conducted a year earlier.