This is what happens to a cop who somehow has a shred of humanity left, the shred that says “your Brotherhood of Blue is evil”, the one that most cops embrace and enjoy.

In any case, despite Hilary’s grand pronouncements against censorship in places like Iran, the rate at which western countries are moving toward internet censorship is alarming. Of course, they are doing it to suppress immoral stuff like porn and violence that every single soul on the planet universally agrees has no social value (despite it’s overwhelming popularity), but mechanisms put in place to control porn, will eventually be used to control political speech. Even more worth protecting, the internet has the power to bring people together almost instantly, giving citizens the power for the first time in history to immediately threaten their government with extinction (through the voting process, of course…) if their wishes are ignored.

Things like this are why I am so suspicious of the murder case brought against an American woman, Amanda Knox, this past year. It reeked of anti American sentiment and even prosecutors here said they would not have brought so weak a case before a jury.

I will not be visiting Italy any time soon, with a legal system like that…

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_brill

*Looks at post 1* Shit, too late.

Man you propagandists are good.

Obama hasn’t got the balls, of course.

The second paragraph spells it out if you do the math. They only went after 0.13% of all teachers in the first place.

All they had to do was fire the one worst teacher out of 750. You’d think it would be a slam dunk, but even then, they only had a 4% success rate!

The government is truly pathetic.

I’ve seen a number of pieces about the Italian government’s desire to suppress free speech on the Web. Here’s a recent one.

Speculation: if, per their recent behavior in China, Google is refusing to assist the Italian government with repressive technology, might the conviction be a reprisal?

Appalling, yes. Surprising, no.

Where’s my pop corn?

Sadly, it seems they’ve actually sent people to prison for… pretty much nothing, apparently. I still can’t get myself too indignant, lest I remember that our local violence monopoly throws way more people in cages for pretty much nothing than the Italian one does.

That said, if I was an exec of an American company in Italy, I’d be thinking about plan B right about now.

New York City public school system has 55,000 teachers. They’ve managed to fire just three in two years for incompetence.

You got it wrong, Balko. The NYC public school system is so freaking awesome on the hiring end – attracting and hiring only the best of the best – that they’ve only had to fire three of them in the past couple of years. Their hiring practices should be documented and replicated!

Yeah, that’s it.

Due to the recent decision by Italian Procecutors (Include link to their gov’t site) to press unfathomable privacy charges against our executives, and the subsequent sentencing of these employees to jail time (Link to tarticle) by italian courts, Google can no longer provide video services to The country of Italy without exposing it’s innocent employees to criminal prosecution.

http://tinyurl.com/2lrx46