Month: October 2007

Cheap Thrills in the Name of Security?

It’s Friday night and I should be kicking back with a glass of wine after a long hard week, but this caught my eye and I had to pass it on:

A striptease of sorts at a federal courthouse has an Idaho woman fuming.

While passing through security, the woman was asked to remove her bra because it had an underwire. The undergarment set off a metal detector.

The woman says she had no choice but to have her husband shield her from others so she could take off her bra. However, the embarrassment did not end there.

“I had to place my bra on the conveyor belt to go through the X-ray machine,” says Lori Platto. “When I got to the end, well, one of the security officers said to me, ‘That’s a girl. Now you can go put it on.’ I was humiliated. I feel demeaned, because I was just… what was I to do?”

The U.S. Marshal’s office says its guards followed appropriate security protocol.

Considering how common underwire bras are, I have to wonder why this particular woman got asked to remove her bra; this can’t possible be the first time they’ve had a woman go through the metal detectors wearing an underwire bra. Were the guards looking for a a cheap thrill at her expense? If so, they should all be fired.

Hat tip, Peter at PR Differently.

The Older I Get, The Scarier This Is

I can take being rejected for a job because I don’t have the necessary skills, or because someone else was a closer match to the skillset in question. That’s business. But this is another matter altogether:

A state appeals court reinstated a fired manager’s age-discrimination suit against Google Inc. on Thursday, saying a jury should hear his evidence that a supervisor told him that his ideas were “too old to matter” and that the giant search engine company gave its older employees lower ratings and lesser bonuses.

[snip]

As part of the lawsuit, Reid presented a statistician’s study of employees and managers in his department at Google that found older employees consistently received lower evaluations than their younger colleagues, and older managers got bonuses that were 29 percent less than those awarded to managers who were 10 years younger.

Age discrimination is not new to Silicon Valley, but you’d think that as the industry matures we’d see less of it. Not yet, it seems.

With Friends Like These

by way of Tapped, here’s an NPR piece on the influx of Evangelical tourism to, and financial support of, Israel. With supporters like this, though, you have to wonder if they’re a blessing or a curse:

Leon Ferguson, an African-American from New York, wears a white skullcap and Jewish prayer shawl to the march, describing himself as a gentile with a Jewish heart. He is close to tears as he contemplates the possibility of an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.

“The true and living God wants his people to be in an undivided Israel, undivided Jerusalem,” he says. “There should be no more give-backs. Every time we give back the land of Israel, something happens in the United States. Katrina followed the give-back of the Gaza.”

Oy.

Not to mention the crux of the issue, which Gershom Gorenberg points out towards the end of the piece: support for Israel isn’t necessarily support for the Jewish religion or the Jewish people. After all,

many evangelical Christians want Jews to convert to Christianity.

“That vision is one in which the Jews eventually disappear,” [Gorenberg] says. “If you say that at the end of days, in a perfect world there aren’t going to be any Jews, what you’re saying, right now, is that you don’t accept the legitimacy of Judaism.”

Noted: The Pet Overpopulation Myth

As someone who spent 3+ years as a volunteer for the SF SPCA, I am a strong supporter of no kill shelters. There’s a great piece in the SF Chronicle today that addresses some of the issues around why there aren’t more no kill shelters in the US. Here’s an excerpt. Go read the rest:

“If a community is still killing the majority of shelter animals, it is because the local SPCA, humane society, or animal control shelter has fundamentally failed in its mission,” he writes. “And this failure is nothing more than a failure of leadership. The buck stops with the shelter’s director.”

Redemption makes the case that bad shelter management leads to overcrowding, which is then confused with pet overpopulation. Instead of warehousing and killing animals, shelters, he says, should be using proven, innovative programs to find those homes he says are out there.

[snip]

“If … motherless kittens are killed because the shelter doesn’t have a comprehensive foster care program, that’s not pet overpopulation. That’s the lack of a foster care program.

“If adoptions are low because people are getting those dogs and cats from other places, because the shelter isn’t doing outside adoptions (adoptions done off the shelter premises), that’s a failure to do outside adoptions, not pet overpopulation.

And yes, I’m aware that calling a shelter “no kill” is somewhat of a misnomer. Incurably ill or incurably aggressive animals are put down even in no kill shelters, and I’m completely OK with that. It’s the killing of otherwise adoptable animals that I have an issue with.

Twitter: 90 Day Review

I signed up for Twitter some three months ago. Unlike some of Twitter’s more rapturous fans (like Scoble), my feelings are more mixed. On the one hand, I “get” Twitter. I like the idea, I think there’s a lot of uses for the service, and I’m pretty happy with the feature set. I’ve found some people who are using Twitter in interesting ways, and two real-life friends also Twitter. When it’s good, Twitter can be a lot of fun.

On the other hand, using Twitter feels like shouting down a well most of the time. I can count on the fingers of one hand the people who’ve actually had any interaction with me on Twitter (including the friends). It’s hard to stay enthusiastic about something when you get so little feedback.

All in all, I’d give my first 90 days with Twitter a B. I’m not inclined to stop Twittering, but it’s in no danger of replacing my blog any time soon.