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The NAACP today voted to formally endorse gay marriage and commit to it as a civil rights issue. It comes about a week and a half after President Barack Obama’s earlier public endorsement of gay marriage. But he also said it should be left to states to decide.

“Civil marriage is a civil right and a matter of civil law. The NAACP’s support for marriage equality is deeply rooted in the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution and equal protection of all people,” said Benjamin Todd Jealous, President and CEO of the NAACP, in a statement.

The NAACP has opposed some high-profile issues involving gay marriage — including Proposition 8 in California and the recent passage of Amendment 1 in North Carolina.

But this is the first time the NAACP has taken a stance on the issue. It’s important for Obama because it could shore up support among his base, particularly African-American voters that have been less likely to support gay marriage. 

Two separate polls have shown that more people are less likely to vote for Obama than support him after his endorsement of gay marriage. The majority of people, though, said it wouldn’t have an effect on their votes for or against him. 

Here’s the full text of the resolution passed by the NAACP’s Board of Directors earlier today:

The NAACP Constitution affirmatively states our objective to ensure the “political, educational, social and economic equality” of all people. Therefore, the NAACP has opposed and will continue to oppose any national, state, local policy or legislative initiative that seeks to codify discrimination or hatred into the law or to remove the Constitutional rights of LGBT citizens. We support marriage equality consistent with equal protection under the law provided under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Further, we strongly affirm the religious freedoms of all people as protected by the First Amendment.

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May 19 (Bloomberg) — Morgan Stanley, the lead underwriter in Facebook Inc.’s initial public offering, stands to take a hit from a stock market debut that stoked disappointment among investors in the largest social network.

The bank stepped in to prop up the stock from dipping below its $38 IPO price yesterday, said people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the purchases were private. Morgan Stanley, based in New York, was the only underwriter among Facebook’s 33 banks with the responsibility to support the shares, the people said.

Underwriters “are acting like the cavalry to keep this thing going up,” Eric Jackson, founder of Ironfire Capital LLC, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Street Smart.” “They’re not going to be here a week from now, two weeks from now, a few months from now. It does suggest that there are going to be some rocky waters ahead.”

Days before the sale, Facebook and Morgan Stanley decided to bump the offering price range to one with $36 as a midpoint to persuade the company’s backers to sell more of their stock, one of the people said. Facebook and the bankers knew pre-IPO investors were willing to sell more, though not at the initial midpoint range of $31.50 a share, the person said. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Accel Partners were among backers that decided to sell additional shares in the IPO.

The IPO price, at the top of the increased range, prevented a first-day pop in the shares, which advanced 23 cents to $38.23 yesterday.

“It does indicate that investors are conscious of the risk, that the revenue model is still unproven, that operating costs are high and rising,” said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group LLC with a $30 price target on Facebook. “Those factors are weighing on the investors. The stock is greatly overvalued.”

Crossed Quotes

The debut was also marred by glitches at the Nasdaq Stock Market, where initial pricing of the first transaction was pushed back by a half-hour amid delays in trade confirmations, crossed quotes and signs that orders were mishandled.

Facebook executives and bankers met on May 17 to discuss the final IPO price, people familiar with the matter said. Among the underwriters, Morgan Stanley was the main bank handling pricing, the people said. Some co-managers of the offering advised Morgan Stanley against expanding the sale and price range because their clients’ demand didn’t support the move, two people said.

Pen Pendleton, a spokesman for Morgan Stanley, declined to comment. Jonathan Thaw, a spokesman for Menlo Park-based Facebook, declined to comment.

Market Value

Facebook raised $16 billion in the IPO selling 421.2 million shares on May 17, valuing the company at $104.2 billion. The offering price gave Facebook a market capitalization almost double the $60 billion United Parcel Service Inc., previously the biggest company to complete an IPO, was valued at when it went public in 1999, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and Dealogic.

That means Facebook bankers will split about $176 million for managing the social-networking company’s initial public offering after accepting a lower-than-average fee of about 1.1 percent. The biggest share of IPO fees typically goes to the lead underwriter on the deal, though the cost of propping up the stock in the first day of trading could potentially outweigh any underwriting fees generated from the sale.

Key Bankers

Dan Simkowitz, Morgan Stanley’s chairman of global capital markets, was one of the main bankers on the offering, said a person familiar with the matter. He also helped run General Motors Co.’s 2010 IPO that raised $18.1 billion.

Michael Grimes, global co-head of technology investment banking at Morgan Stanley, also played a key role. He introduced Facebook executives to investors at a lunch meeting last week in Palo Alto, California, part of a road show to pitch the deal to prospective buyers. Grimes became acquainted with Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg when he handled the IPO for Google Inc., her former employer. He meets regularly with investors in search of the next promising startup and is an avid consumer of his clients’ products.

Sandberg recused herself from picking bankers for Facebook’s IPO because she had relationships with several banks from her previous job at Google, one person said.

Facebook Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman was the point person on the deal, starting with the selection of the lead bankers, one person said. Sandberg and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg were involved in major decisions throughout the process, the person said.

The performance may hurt the entire IPO market in the short term, people said. Some technology companies considering initial offerings are readjusting timing and valuations based on the day’s events, one of the people said.

“I know a bubble when I see one,” Bill Gross, Pacific Investment Management Co.’s co-chief investment officer, wrote about Facebook in a posting on Twitter.

–With assistance from Ari Levy, Brian Womack and Douglas Macmillan in San Francisco, and Sarah Frier and Michael J. Moore in New York. Editors: Jennifer Sondag, Tom Giles

 

To contact the reporters on this story: Serena Saitto in New York at ssaitto@bloomberg.net; Jeffrey McCracken in New York at jmccracken3@bloomberg.net

 

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net

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You have to start thinking for yourself sometime.

Frankly, at some point you don’t have a choice. Life forces you. Maybe it’s when you take your first step as a toddler. Or maybe it’s when you take the SAT test as a young adult.

At some point, you realize that even though information is being thrown at you, it is up to you to interpret what you hear, to make your own opinions, and to do something about it.

Over time this becomes second nature.

It’s subconscious. You make decisions without even thinking much at all about what you are doing. Based on experience and memorable life instances, you apply judgment in real-time. As circumstances present themselves, you decide how to react.

And that is a tremendously exhausting experience. It demands emotional commitment.  You have to pick a side. You have to make hard choices. You have to filter truth from hyperbole.  So it is always easier is to stop the pain. To stop thinking on your own. To just let other people’s opinions become your own. To accept anger and frustration as fact and excuse.

And even though you’re not investing the emotional effort that you used to exert, you’ll find yourself just as confused, and perhaps more frustrated.

The answer is to do it the hard way.

You have to think for yourself.

It’s tiring. It demands focus. At times you’re frustrated and unsure. But it’s the key to breakthrough. When you stop thinking for yourself, who you could be gets lost in the mimicry of everyone else’s opinion.Simply, you lose your way unless you’re focused on finding it. Unless you deliberately decide to make the right choice, right now.It all comes down to a few simple uncompromising outlooks:

1. Challenge everything.
2. Trust your gut instinct.
3. Pursue creativity.
4. Look for what’s not there.
5. Decry mediocrity.
6. Focus on what’s important.
7. Keep trying.
8. Fight through the confusion.
9. Learn hard lessons the first time.
10. Don’t give in to peer pressure.

Demand more than implication and inference.

Think for yourself. 

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This isn’t going to be a popular thing to say, but it needs to be said. So here goes…

All this whining and umbrage about Facebook’s IPO is ridiculous.

When are people who voluntarily speculate on stocks finally going to take responsibility for their decisions?

Never, apparently.

On Thursday, Facebook priced its IPO at $38.

On Friday, the stock opened at $42, a 10% jump, and spent most of the day trading above $40. Then, thanks to heavy support from the company’s bankers, the stock closed just above $38.

In other words, even after the sharp selling at end of the day, Facebook IPO buyers were better off than they had been the day before. And if they were among those who took the abundant opportunity throughout the day to sell stock above $40, they locked in a nice overnight gain.

But to hear people bitch, you’d think they’d been swindled out of their life savings.

The New York Post captured the prevailing sentiment perfectly:

ZUCKERS!

They were Mark Zuckerberg’s cash cows.

Hordes of everyday New Yorkers played the fool yesterday to Wall Street fat cats and Facebook insiders, who used a bloated stock price to milk them of billions of dollars during an overhyped IPO.

With a $38-a-share price tag and forecasts for a 10 percent jump, mom-and-pop investors blindly bought in with dreams of instant riches that never came true.

Meanwhile, the social network’s hoodie-wearing CEO finished the day with a net worth of $19.25 billion. The average Facebook employee saw their on-paper wealth shoot up to $2.9 million.

Wow, sounds horrible.

And what happened, exactly?

Apparently, IPO buyers got less free money than they expected to.

The hope, presumably, was that–no matter where Facebook’s IPO priced–the enormous demand from suckers would cause the stock to “pop” when it started trading–thus allowing the shrewd IPO buyers to flip their shares at a profit only hours after buying them.

Of course, that’s exactly what the IPO buyers were given a chance to do. For about 4 hours yesterday, the IPO buyers could have locked in an instant 5%-10% gain. But apparently this wasn’t the 50%+ gain they were looking for.

Well, it’s time for people to grow up.

The $38 that Facebook IPO buyers voluntarily paid for the stock–emphasis on voluntarily–was already an extremely rich price for a company with decelerating revenue and only ~$0.35 of earnings last year. The only way these buyers were going to get a big “pop” from that price was if other investors seeking the same instant riches were even more aggressive and reckless than they were.

And it turned out that those even-more-aggressive-and-reckless traders stayed home.

So Facebook IPO buyers only got their 10% instant gain.

And a lot of them, apparently, did not take the opportunity to lock in that gain. Instead, they held on to the stock, either hoping that it would trade higher (likely), or because they are actually long-term investors.

And now, with the stock looking as though it will crash through the underwriters’ support and the IPO price on Monday, the IPO buyers are blaming their decision to hold onto it on Facebook, too.

So, what exactly were you looking for, folks?

Even more free money?

Just for pressing “buy”?

In what other normal universe would you ever expect that?

Facebook could not have been clearer about how it was going to emphasize the long-term at the expense of the short-term, and that’s exactly what it did in choosing its IPO price. Facebook now has a lot more cash at its disposal than it would have if it had lowballed the IPO just to give buyers a “pop.” That cash is valuable to the company, and it will help the company create more value over the long-term.

In the weeks leading up to the IPO, moreover, many analysts screamed from the rooftops that Facebook’s stock seemed extremely expensive. We even went to far as to call it “muppet bait.”

And when the stock opened on Friday at merely an extremely expensive price, instead of a ludicrous one, we were relieved. Because it meant that millions of investors weren’t buying it at absurd prices in the after-market… and thereby setting themselves up to get creamed when the hype faded.

But apparently those who did buy the IPO were expecting to get something for nothing. (And not just “something.” They were expecting to get a lot for nothing.)

And when they didn’t, they started taking their frustrations out on Facebook.

Trading stocks is a risky business. Perhaps it’s time for those who voluntarily choose to do it to acknowledge that.

SEE ALSO: And Now, If Facebook’s Bankers Can’t Hold The IPO Price, The Stock Will Crash To The Low $30s

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A British man of Asian origin was arrested in Thailand after police found him in possession of six human fetuses that had been roasted and covered in gold leaf in a black magic ritual, The Telegraph reports.

The man, Chow Hok Kuen, 28, confessed to police he had bought the fetuses from a Taiwanese man a few days earlier for 200,000 baht ($6,382), and he intended to smuggle them into Taiwan, where he would have been able to sell them for at least six times that amount.

While the fetuses were found in a separate hotel from the one Chow was staying at in Bangkok’s Chinatown district, they were in his luggage, according to The Independent.

The fetuses, which were tattooed and adorned with religious beads, showed development from between two to eight months, police said. The Guardian has photos from Reuters >

Worship of the fetuses is an ancient Buddhist practice called Kuman Thong. According to Thai black magic, they bring good fortune and protection from danger, and are often kept in shrines by parts of the Chinese community. The male fetuses are removed from the womb, dried as black magic incantations are said over the body, then covered in gold leaf. In practice, fetuses have been replaced by wooden effigies.

Chow faces one year in prison and a 2,000-baht fine if he is found guilty, the Guardian says.

The incident is the second strange dead-baby incident — South Korea captured a shipment of capsules full of dead babies earlier this month >

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