Senator Clinton, on DHS and civil liberties

While we’re talking about Hillary Clinton (well, we were yesterday):

I wrote my senators about the TSA’s policy on laptop searches, in the aftermath of the senate hearings. The other day, I received her (canned, of course) response. Here it is:

Dear Mr. Leiba:

Thank you for taking the time to write to me about your concerns regarding the protection of civil liberties.

As part of the war on terror, I supported our efforts to remove the Taliban and Al-Qaeda from Afghanistan. I also voted for the legislation that created the Department of Homeland Security because this legislation was designed to improve coordination among various federal agencies charged with security responsibilities and to create a stronger and safer America.

At the same time, however, I recognize the importance of being ever vigilant in protecting the civil liberties of all Americans. It is our civil liberties that help to make America the great country that it is. I am committed to doing all I can to protect the civil liberties of all our nation’s citizens while also fighting terrorism. We can, and must, do both. Although finding the proper balance is not easy, I am committed to doing all I can to pursue that goal and will weigh individual proposals carefully. Hearing from you reinforces this commitment.

Please check my website http://clinton.senate.gov for regular updates on this and other issues being debated before the United States Senate. Thank you again for sharing your concerns with me.

Sincerely,

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton

In other words: “We have to protect ourselves, and we have to maintain civil liberties, and we can’t always do both at the same time. And which side I come down on for this particular issue is not something I’m going to talk about here. Thank you for sharing.”

Actually, it seems that this is just her standard “civil liberties vs DHS” response, and isn’t directly related to the laptop-search issue.

On the other hand, Senator Schumer’s office hasn’t responded at all (other than to acknowledge receipt). But that’s consistent; I don’t recall ever getting a detailed response from Senator Schumer.

I told you so...

It wasn’t rocket science, and I wasn’t the only one that said it, but back in March, I said this:

What’s worse, though, is that she’s actually telling us that if Senator Obama winds up with the Democratic nomination, we’d be better off voting for Senator McCain. Sure, look at what she’s said: Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience behind him, and all Senator Obama has to offer us is one lousy anti-war speech. We’d have to be crazy to go for that over more than 70 years of experience!

Is that really the message she wants to leave us with, should she happen to lose her bid for the nomination?

And, well, yes, now Senator Clinton appears — not by her choice, to be sure — in a campaign ad for John McCain. The ad shows clips of Ms Clinton criticizing Senator Obama. The “lifetime of experience” comment that I noted in March is not in that ad, but it’s being re-aired along side it in news items about the ad campaign.

Senator Clinton’s office, of course, ignores the problem and says that the senator supports Mr Obama, as though she’s done so all along:

Hillary Clinton’s support of Barack Obama is clear. She has said repeatedly that Barack Obama and she share a commitment to changing the direction of the country, getting us out of Iraq, and expanding access to health care. John McCain doesn’t. It’s interesting how those remarks didn’t make it into his ad.

Yes, well. It seemed pretty clear that the attacks in the primary season were not going to serve the party well now. And they aren’t.

And I did tell you so.

Where does technology take us?

A couple of recent articles in the New York Times really make us think about some of the things we get from technological progress — some things that aren’t terribly obvious at first blush.

In one article, we see the technology in sports, and how it’s enabled this year’s Olympic swimmers to shatter speed records.

BEIJING — He swam so improbably fast, making up so much ground in a foaming, desperate attempt to reach the wall first in the 4x100-meter relay, that Jason Lezak not only won a gold medal for the United States on Monday, but he also helped to shatter the world record by nearly four seconds.

That race alone would have provided an astonishing day of swimming at the Summer Olympics, but it was the third world record of the morning and the seventh in three days of competition. An eighth record was set later Monday, matching the total number broken at the 2004 Athens Games.

[...]

Advances in training techniques, pool design and swimsuit technology have contributed to the increases in speed for swimmers, [...]

Training and physical techniques have, of course, improved performance in all sports over the years, and that’s a credit to the athletes and their coaches. At the same time, we forbid the use of drugs to enhance performance, and rightly so: with them, we’re measuring not the skill and technique of the athlete, but the effect of the drugs. Faster, higher, stronger drugs, more than faster, higher, stronger competitors.

How, then, faster, higher, stronger equipment? We’ve seen it many times before, with changes in baseball bats, tennis racquets, golf clubs, artificial turf... and now with swimming pools and swimsuits.

The pools are designed to reduce the effects of the water currents that the swimmers create as they race. The suits create less friction in the water and add buoyancy, to no negligible effect: it’s said that the new Speedo LZR Racer can shave up to 2% off the race times, and this in races that are often won or lost by hundredths of a second.

“When technology is used in a sport, it is important to be in control of the way it is being developed and where it might lead us,” Claude Fauquet, the technical director of the French swimming federation, said in reference to swimsuit technology.

Fauquet has called for more debate about the use of Speedo’s LZR Racer, the latest advance in the full-body suit craze popularized in the last eight years. The Racer has been worn in the setting of about four dozen world records since its introduction in February. The corsetlike suit is made by ultrasonic welding instead of stitching, can require a half-hour to put on and shoehorns the body into a more streamlined position.

Indeed. Nearly 50 world records broken this year alone, thanks in some significant part, it seems, to a newly designed swimsuit. Is that fair? I suppose that all current contestants can opt for the new suit if they want it (though I’m not sure about cost and availability issues), but it certainly makes the new records completely incomparable to the old ones. These are really new records set in a new sport: the sport of racing in a Speedo LZR Racer.

Shouldn’t they simply race naked? Then it’s the athlete alone, with less technological assistance (there’s still the question of the pool).

The other article points out how significant new communications mechanisms have become, as police now expect to get crime tips by text message, and are actively encouraging that.

For years, mayors, police commissioners, community leaders and others have sought to drill into the heads of New Yorkers a simple toll-free phone number to anonymously help in solving crimes: 1-800-577-TIPS.

Now, they want to enlist a younger generation of crime-busters. On Tuesday, the Police Department publicized directions for citizens on how to send text messages to the authorities, to provide the same sort of anonymous tips for investigators working on unsolved criminal cases.

The directions are simple, according to Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman. To initiate a conversation with detectives in the Crimestoppers bureau, callers must text the word CRIMES (or 274637 on a cellular phone).

Recognizing that many people, particularly young ones, prefer text messages to voice ones, the police have added that option in the hope of getting tips from citizens who wouldn’t have otherwise helped out. I do wonder how they can actually promise anonymity with this system, but if the public is willing to use it, I’m all for it. They shouldn’t (and they won’t) discontinue the voice option, of course. But adding more ways to help... can’t hurt.

Sophisticates

As I waited for my flight at JFK airport, the other day, I wandered into one of the shops that sells books and magazines. The magazines were arranged by category, and I scanned the racks and noted the various categories. News. Electronics. Home. Fitness, Fashion, Food.

And “Sophisticates.”

That section, unlike the others, used opaque dividers to obscure the covers of the magazines. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine the significance of that, and what sorts of magazines live there.

“Sophisticates.”

I find the choice odd. The word comes from the Greek “sophos,” meaning knowledgeable or wise. Where, I wondered, is the wisdom here; of what sort is the knowledge?

It turns out that “sophisticate,” the verb, can, indeed, mean “to make wise,” but it can also mean, “to alter, pervert, make less natural.” In that sense, it especially has a connotation of making, according to American Heritage, “less naïve, more worldly,” of meaning “to make impure, adulterate.”

A “sophisticate,” the noun, then, is, in that sense, “a worldy-wise person.”

And apparently, magazines intended for the worldly-wise must be hidden from hoi polloi.

Blog delay: Conference on Email and Anti-Spam

I'm at the Conference on Email and Anti-Spam today and tomorrow, so there'll be light blogging for a couple of days. Back soon. Here's a nice photo to tide us over.

Winnowing Whittling Whistling down the wire

The long-running U.S. soap opera All My Children is looking for a real Iraq-war veteran to play one on the show. The applicable plot line isn’t important here; listen to this short NPR item that tells about it, if you’re interested.

Many veterans have applied for the role, and the NPR announcer, Michele Norris, reports it this way:

Wilson [the casting director] says the next step is to winnow down the scores of applicants; a chosen few will be invited to New York for auditions.

I don’t know whether “winnow” was Ms Norris’s word or Ms Wilson’s, but it strikes me as the wrong one. Winnowing is the process of separating the heavy kernels of grain, which we want to save and eat, from the husks and other debris... usually by tossing the grain into the air and letting the wind blow away the lighter bits that we don’t want while the kernels fall back down.

Metaphorically, it means, in general, to separate things we don’t want from things we do. We can use the metaphoric sense in talking about spam filtering, where we winnow the mail stream, separating the wheat, the good mail, from the chaff, which we blow off into a spam pile somewhere.

But we don’t “winnow [something] down,” we just “winnow [something].” And, while we certainly can talk about winnowing a set of applicants, it does mean that we’re declaring those not making the cut to be “chaff”, undesirables, a nuance we’d usually prefer to avoid.

Maybe the word they’re looking for is “whittle”; we do “whittle [something] down” to make it smaller, and even though there, too, the bits that are whittled away are unwanted, the connotation isn’t as strong. It also has the sense that the reduction is done a bit at a time, not all at once, and that seems to make sense here too: they’ll likely be making a few passes through the list, reducing it with each pass.

Sex offenders and “date rape”

Last Friday, NPR aired an item about a former state legislator in Pennsylvania who has chosen to house three released sex offenders at his home:

All Things Considered, August 15, 2008 — Tom Armstrong, a former Pennsylvania state lawmaker, has taken three sex offenders into his home in Marietta. His actions have sparked anger in his community. Armstrong says his own thinking on the issue evolved after his brother’s incarceration and the word of God.

I’ve always found the sex-offender registry to be a dicey thing. On the one hand, I understand the statistics regarding the rate of recidivism among sex offenders, the fear that if they’re around you they’ll attack you or your children, and the desire to protect your family and friends regardless of the effect it has on these convicted criminals. On the other hand, I worry that we’ve released people who’ve served their assigned penalties for their crimes, and yet we tie around their necks a lifetime penalty of disdain from their neighbours, of being driven out of anywhere they try to live, of not being able to put their lives back together and put the horrible things they did behind them, if that is, indeed, what they want to do.

So I’m really pleased that Mr Armstrong is willing to take that bull by the horns and say that we have to give them a chance. Here’s an excerpt, the last minute and a half of Robert Siegel’s interview with him:

Armstrong: We have 400 sex offenders [who] already live in Lancaster County. Only four of them are actual sexual violent predators. None of my guys are sexual violent predators. And then I will also state, you still teach your children the things we were always taught: don’t get into cars with strangers.... But we’re saying, you watch these guys with a healthy skepticism, but give them a chance, and if they can prove themselves, then allow your own thinking and your own hearts to be open at that point.

Siegel: Something I want to ask you: I looked up on the Pennsylvania state registry of sex offenders, your town, and I found the names of the three men who now live at your house. You say they’re non-violent sex offenders.

Armstrong: That is correct.

Siegel: The names of the offenses that are listed on the registry are “sexual abuse of children”, “rape”, and “aggravated indecent assault”. The names of the offenses that are listed in the registry sound more menacing than if these were all non-violent offenders.

Armstrong: That’s very unfortunate; the labels themselves carry a picture, but if you actually dig into the truth of what the specifics are... when you say “rape”, it was actually a date-rape type of a situation. When you delve into the specifics, you understand that there were some stupid, stupid, stupid mistakes that some of these guys made, and if they want to build a new life, then there needs to be people out there that are ready to stand with them, walk with them, and see that new person come forth.

Absolutely: be skeptical, be watchful, but give them a chance, allow them to prove themselves, and help them rebuild their lives if they do. I like it, and I applaud Mr Armstrong for going out on a limb. I hope it works out for everyone.

 

But I want to take issue with one thing, here (you knew I would, yes?). I’ll re-quote it, to highlight it. In defending his contention that these are not violent offenders, Mr Armstrong says this:

[...] if you actually dig into the truth of what the specifics are... when you say “rape”, it was actually a date-rape type of a situation.

We’re brought back, here, to a refrain we hear over and over: that date rape isn’t “real” rape... moreover, now, that date rape is “non-violent”. No, let’s be clear about this, let’s put it in a paragraph by itself, and let’s be bold:

“Date rape” is rape, and it can be as violent as any other form of rape.

Date rape is rape. Spouse rape is rape. Platonic-friend-next-door rape is rape. The fact that you know your rapist does not make it all better. Rape isn’t only when someone with a knife jumps out of the shadows or follows you to your apartment.

Apart from that, many date rapes involve beatings and worse — do not make the assumption that they’re not violent. They can also be violent without weapons or beatings: what do you think it would be like to have someone hold you down and do things to you while you desperately wanted to get away?

In some ways, I think (and here I’m speculating, as an outsider) that date rape can be insidious, more damaging than the jump-from-the-shadows stranger: the rapist has violated not only the victim’s body, but the victim’s trust, as well. One has been attacked not by a stranger, but by someone one knows, a friend, a loved one. In addition, while rape is one of the most underreported, underprosecuted, underconvicted of all crimes, rape by dates, friends, spouses, and other family members is even more so. More, even, than with rape by strangers, these rapists have a very good chance of getting away with it.

Don’t downplay “date rape” as a lesser violation, or as a non-violent act that shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Work, instead, on convincing every man you can that men have to stop raping women.

The best feature of Firefox 3

When Firefox 3.0 was released on 17 June, they set it up with a plan to break the record for downloads in a single 24-hour period, and they succeeded:

Thanks to the support of the always amazing Mozilla community, we now hold a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. From 18:16 UTC on June 17, 2008 to 18:16 UTC on June 18, 2008, 8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3 and are now enjoying a safer, smarter and better Web.

Some of the new features touted for version 3 include better performance; a number of security improvements, including “web site ID”; an improved session manager that’ll automatically restore the tabs you had open in a previous session (this was available before, through extensions); and a convenient “zoom” feature that remembers that you’ve zoomed in or out on a particular site (very handy when a site thinks you’ll appreciate their use of a smaller font).

But here’s my favourite new feature: the smart location bar.

It’s not just an autocompletion thing, like every browser’s had for years. They just match the text you type to URLs. There’s way more than that here. You type something, and it searches for it in your browser history and your bookmarks, matching titles as well as URLs, and also matching user-defined tags. It’s really great! Things that I had to sift through the browser history for, or do fresh Google searches for, now just pop right up.

Suppose I wanted to get back to the article that I read the other day about a judge’s decision about guns at the Atlanta airport, but I hadn’t bookmarked it (and suppose I had’t put it in these pages, either). I can just type something like “airport guns” in the address bar. Or “atlanta airport”, or “atlanta guns”, or whatever... and a short list of things immediately appears under the address bar, one of which is the link to the article I’m looking for. I can’t tell you how much time this feature has saved me, in the eight weeks it’s been available.

If you’re not using Firefox 3 yet, that one feature is reason enough to switch to it!

Highlights

We’ve been staring at these pages since January 2006 — more than two and a half years, as I write this — and there’ve been close to 400 entries a year. That’s over 1000 so far (this is entry number 1065, in fact). The Search bar at the top of the page makes it convenient to find something specific, but if you just want to see what’s around, you have a lot to browse through.

To make it easier for new readers (and for me!) to find some entries that I consider to be particularly good, of lasting importance, or just representative samples, I’m creating this entry, which I’ll put on the front page and will update as new entries qualify. It’s roughly categorized, and is simply my own selection of the entries I want to highlight. Perhaps it’s a good place for a new reader to start, to see what I’m about and what I have to say. Within each category, the items are in chronological order, oldest first.

Read the list...

About Me, Including Rumination and Philosophical Thoughts

The questionnaire (the ten questions James Lipton asks)
Reassessment and prioritization
Plus ça change...
NYC anti-war march
Light Amplification through Stimulated Emission of Radiation
Professional courtesy?
Personal responsibility
The Competition
Cultivating fearlessness
Celebrate! Celebrate! Dance to the music!
Louis
On torturing terrorists
Max
Is it art?
Life’s too short...
Try, try again

Diversity and Feminism

What we think of Islam
Equal pay
Smart women, the continuing discussion
A word on Affirmative Action
Gender balance
Are rapists getting away with it?
Equality of rights under the law
Assimilation vs cultural diversity
On adopting minority children

Politics: The U.S. President

Outrage, and doing something about it
“I love free speech.”
Lügen and mensonges and mentiras, Oh my!
The court jester
For the right reasons?
Reality-based government

Politics: Civil Rights and Human Rights

“Marriage”, not “civil union”
Threats against the press
NPR listeners’ comments on habeas corpus
Presumption of innocence
Searching the constitution
Le Pen avoids the pen
My laptop, my home

Other politics, and law

Drop Out of the College
Supreme arrogance
“I forbid!”
Larry Darby and the Two Party System
What if you’d died before you were born?
Judicial accountability?
What can you do?
Qualifications for the job
Of course everyone has the right to own guns!
More on YouTube and Viacom
Technology and the Keystone Cops
Don’t tase me: more police excess

Atheism and Religion

Making monkeys out of teachers
Technophobia
No child left behind
Die Schöpfung
What God wants
Ham-handed arguments
Have we got a minyan for the election?
Fill my eyes with that double vision
Religion, atheism, and morality
Science and faith

Recreation: Art, Music, Dancing, Movies, Hobbies...

Hiking in the lower Hudson valley
Pink Martini
Modern Western Square Dancing
What fools these mortals be
Round dancing
“Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man”
Grounds for Sculpture
Hang up and listen to Zep
If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution
A Saturday afternoon in Washington Square
“Bleu”
The Dinner Party

Technology, Computers, and the Internet

Some of these are parts of a series (noted in the list), and they usually contain pointers to the rest of the posts in the series.

PKI, PKI, PKI (public-key infrastructure)
More on patents
Vote or Die...bold (Can computer voting work?)
Night of the Living Dead (a series on “zombie” computers)
Social networking
Digital technology
Digital signatures (a series)
Ah, but I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now
Why are passwords weak?
Privacy, technology, and research
On spam: the interview
Internet cafes and other public computers
Object-oriented programming
PayPal anti-phishing token
Email subject lines
Internet Architecture Board (explaining Internet standards)
Polling, computerwise
The good and the bad of top-level domains
Halt! Who goes there? (email challenge/response systems)
Aspects of computer security (a series)
Productivity and the Information Age
Logging in securely on the web
Is CAN-SPAM useless?
Anonymity, and levels thereof
Your privacy on the Internet
On replying to email
A word about “net neutrality”
Instant messaging vs email
Behind the lectern at Second Life (presenting via avatar)

Education

Prepared for college?
Teaching with technology
The PhD fraternity
Don’t know much geography...
Are you smarter than a high school senior?
What grade is an “F”?
Innumeracy: Why can’t Johnny add?

Language

Apostrophes
Between Scylla and Charybdis
Precedent for precedence
Misplaced modifiers
Mad hot verbing
In a manner of misspeaking

Miscellaneous Other Things

Do Americans know the US constitution?
Finding time to blog
Social connections, continued
Esprit de corps
A great idea for March!
I swear...
Careers
I, the jury
How not to give a presentation
Visualizing large numbers
Product packaging
He’s checking it twice...
Twelve angry men
You Must Read This
Gambling on insurance

A dead zone for headlines

Hm. Which of these headlines gives a significantly different impression from the others?:

1. National Public Radio: “Dead Zones” Multiplying In World’s Oceans
2. Science News: Coastal dead zones expanding
3. or the New York Times: Rapid Growth Found in Oxygen-Starved Ocean “Dead Zones”

Maybe it’s just me, but I interpreted the Times version as meaning that things were found growing — rapidly — in the dead zones. And if I hadn’t heard the NPR item on the radio yesterday morning, I’d have held that impression and thought it was a good thing (until I read the article, of course).

There’s a simple fix: Rapid Growth Found in Number of Oxygen-Starved Ocean “Dead Zones”

Unfortunately, the headline is already too long to add those two words. I think the headline writer for the Times needs some remedial work.

[The Science News headline’s not quite there either. It implies that the existing dead zones are getting bigger. While that’s also somewhat true, the real point, which they do get in their lede, is that there are more of them. NPR’s the only one that really gets the headline right.]

Pomp and circumstance

How long does it take to get through high school in the United States? That’s grades 9 through 12, four academic years. How many calendar years does that take?

It took me four, with some Advanced Placement courses, a Science Talent Search project, and a bunch of computer stuff that was rare at the time. Nearly all of my classmates took four years also. A few took three, a few took five, and some dropped out and didn’t finish at all. But my guess would be four years for at least 90% of the students in my class.

Isn’t that how it is?

So imagine my surprise at reading that New York City is thrilled at the progress they’ve made: in 2007, 52.2% of the students finished high school in four years, the first time it’s been over 50% — and statewide, it’s 68.6%.

For the first time, more than half of New York City’s high school students are graduating on time, according to 2007 graduation figures released on Monday by the State Education Department.

The figures showed that the rate of students graduating in four years had risen slightly for the fifth year in a row, to 52.2 percent. But the city rate continued to lag behind the statewide rate, which increased to 68.6 percent in 2007 from 67.2 percent in the previous year.

And the city’s dropout rate also surprised me: around one student in six drops out before finishing high school.

A key point in the graduation story is that several more percent finish within six years, taking the extra year or two to make up for basic skills that were missing when they started high school. Often, these are students who started whose English wasn’t up to what it needed to be, and that took some time to fix.

But poverty and social status play a big part: the four-year graduation rate for African American students is 47.2%, and for Hispanic students it’s 43.0%. Language issues are a factor for the latter group, but not for the former.

Improvements are certainly things to be happy about. Yet I’m very much surprised at how low these numbers are — which says something about the environment I’ve always been in, and about how unaware I really am about the problems with education in the cities.

It’s not a card game

Is Senator Obama “playing the race card”? Or is it Senator McCain who is? Who’s playing the religion card? The war-hero card? The age card? Or is it the youth card? I can't remember.

And how many cards are in this deck?

OK, so... here: Barack Obama is black, yes, he is. He’s African-American. On his father’s side, that is; his mother is white. He’s Christian. He’s lived in Indonesia and Hawaii. His middle name is Hussein. And he’s a few years younger than I am.

John McCain is white, and is also Christian. He’s divorced and re-married. He’s relatively old — he’ll be 72 at the end of this month — and his wife is almost 20 years younger than he is. He was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and he was tortured there. He was born in the Canal Zone.

And none of that makes any difference. None of it makes either one of them more nor less suitable to be president. So let’s stop with all these “cards”, and get back to the issues.

We’ve seen some of that, recently, as both candidates have talked about bringing science back out of the Dark Ages (officially, 20 Jan 2001 through 19 Jan 2008), and that’s good — it’s good that they’re saying that, and it’s good that we’re seeing the issues in the forefront some of the time.

So, yeah: issues. There are plenty of them. Science, medicine and health care, the economy, education, energy, civil rights, human rights, war and bringing the troops home, other foreign affairs... the list goes on, and we all need to know where the candidates stand on them so we can vote accordingly.

Carnivals!

It seems that George Bush has declared a lot of disasters during his time in office, more than Bill Clinton and way more than Ronald Reagan:

During his seven and a half years in office, President Bush has declared 422 major disasters — severe storms, tornadoes, wildfires and floods — or more than one a week. That is 11 percent more than President Bill Clinton’s disaster declarations and 130 percent more than President Ronald Reagan during their full two terms in office.

That doesn’t seem especially relevant to anything, but the article explains why it’s interesting, and it’s not a bad read. The only thing that strikes me is that the biggest disaster — Spurious George’s presidency itself — is one that hasn’t been declared.

Pointers to this fortnight’s blog carnivals:

• Skeptics’ Circle #93.
• Carnival of the Liberals #71.
• Carnival of Feminists #62.
• Carnival of Education #183.
• Carnival of Education #184.
• Carnival of Mathematics #38, including “Why Can’t Johnny Add?”.
• Carnival of the Godless #98 (coming Sunday, link will be updated then).

Quickies

Some folks are making a federal case — literally — of snowmaking at a ski area:

A federal appeals court has ruled that a ski resort’s plan to use recycled wastewater for making snow would not violate the religious freedom of Indian groups who had claimed that the practice would be blasphemous to a mountain they hold sacred. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, ruling in a lawsuit against the Arizona Snowbowl near Flagstaff that was filed by 13 tribes and the Sierra Club, overturned a ruling by a smaller panel of the court that said the plan would violate the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The 1993 act is intended to ensure that government actions do not infringe on religious freedom. Lawyers for the tribes and the Sierra Club said they expected to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.

 

An update on the Jena case (there’s some discussion of it in this post, from last year): It seems that the judge who was dealing with the five defendants still to be tried... was removed from the case.

Judge J.P. Mauffray Jr. had acknowledged calling the teens "troublemakers" and "a violent bunch" but insisted he could be impartial. Judge Thomas M. Yeager, who was asked by defense attorneys to review the case, found there was an appearance of impropriety and took Mauffray off the case.

 

An update on the nutso gun crazies in Georgia, who claimed that the new state law allows people to carry guns at the airport: a federal judge has said no, that really is as stupid as it sounds.

U.S. District Court Judge Marvin Shoob refused to grant a preliminary injunction that would have stopped the city from enforcing the airport gun ban. Shoob ruled against gun-rights group GeorgiaCarry.org and state Rep. Timothy Bearden (R-Villa Rica).

Bearden sponsored House Bill 89, which became law on July 1 and permits people with firearms licenses to carry guns in state parks, restaurants that serve alcohol and on mass transit.

But Shoob said allowing concealed weapons into non-secure areas of the world’s busiest airport will make the airport less safe and require it to substantially revise its security procedures.

 

Richard Wade Cooey was convicted of killing two University of Akron (OH) students in 1986. He was supposed to have been executed in 2003, but that was delayed by lawsuits. He’s scheduled again, for an October execution, and he’s trying once more, saying that he’s too fat:

Convicted killer Richard Wade Cooey III, who escaped death in 2003 because he argued he had bad lawyers, now says he shouldn’t be executed because he’s too overweight.

Cooey’s public-defender attorneys filed a lawsuit in federal court Friday contending that his weight, the difficulty of finding veins suitable for lethal injection, and a drug he’s taking for migraines and seizures mean that Cooey might suffer “unnecessary pain in the execution of the death sentence.”

 

[Note: All of these first came to my attention in Associated Press articles, but I sought and found other references. I won’t quote nor link to AP articles because of AP’s ridiculously strict stand on copyright to their headlines and text, and their refusal to acknowledge fair use.]

Giving one the Doing business

Some months ago, I made a mistake in booking a flight. The mistake resulted in my having to make a last-minute change (at the airport) to my “non-refundable” ticket, and for that I had to pay an extra $180 for a much worse flight schedule and was hit with a $75 change fee. Because the change wasn’t for my convenience — indeed, I had to spend an extra three hours in airplanes and airports, and go home by way of Atlanta instead of my original non-stop plan, all for $180 more — the $75 change fee felt like insult being added to injury. So I thought I’d ask the airline if they’d consider waiving the fee.

The airline was Delta.

After explaining what had happened, here’s what I said in my letter to them:

The error was mine, and your agents handled the situation well. I’m asking, now, for a favour: Will you please waive the change fee and refund it to me? I know you don’t have to, but I’m asking you to do it in the name of good will and customer relations — my goof was made bad enough by my having to fly home through ATL and get to JFK three hours later than I’d planned. It would really be helpful if I didn’t have the extra charge on top of that. Trust me: I never would have made that change on purpose.

Will you give me a break, to cover my mental failure? Thanks very much, in advance, for considering my request.

They wrote back promptly, and I’m sure no one reading this will be surprised that they said no. Here’s exactly what they said:

Dear Mr. Leiba,

Thank you for your e-mail. We appreciate your comments.

Discounted airfares have a number of restrictions. They are nonrefundable, nontransferable, and changes are only permitted by paying an administrative service charge plus any difference in fare. The charge is collected to cover some of the costs involved in reissuing reduced rate tickets. However, the total cost of the transportation, including the administrative service charge, often represents a substantial savings over the unrestricted fare cost.

I hope you will understand that the only way we can offer reduced rates is to follow the rules governing each fare. While we would like to offer special consideration in cases such as yours, we are unable to honor the many similar requests that we receive from others in equally deserving situations. We follow a consistent policy to ensure that Delta is fair to everyone who travels with us. Accordingly, we must respectfully decline your request for waiver of the change fee.

Again, thank you for writing. We recognize this was not the response you expected to receive and trust you will understand our position. We value your business and hope you will continue to choose Delta.

Sincerely,
[name redacted]
Manager
Customer Care

Well, no, I don’t understand their position. I expected it, but that doesn’t mean I understand it. I never understand inflexibility in dealing with customers, and pissing your customers off is rarely a good business decision that often leads to false ecomonies.

As in this case. I’ve made one trip since then, and just booked a second, for which I’ve adjusted my flight schedule to fly on other airlines than Delta, at about the same price — despite that the travel booking system offered me Delta flights that I might otherwise have accepted. By my reckoning, Delta has lost about $1500 worth of business from me so far, as a result of their refusal to refund a $75 change fee.

Now, I don’t necessarily think that any of the other airlines (in this case, Continental and American) would have done any better for me in response to my request. And I’m not saying that Delta did anything nasty. They’re within their rights to insist on the charge; they disclosed it in advance.

On the other hand, they could have been accommodating, and they’d have won my gratitude and my loyalty. Businesses used to go after that, but, too often, they do so no more. And so I’ll cast my vote the only way I can: with my money.

With my money, at least, Delta is reaping what they’ve sown.
 

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Update, 14 Aug: I sent a slightly edited copy of this blog entry to Delta Air Lines (edited mostly to change “they” to “you”, and such), on the theory that when one votes with one’s wallet, one’s vote is more effective if one says so. I selected the box that said I did not want a response. Nevertheless, today I got the following response:

Dear Mr. Leiba,

Thank you for your e-mail to Delta Air Lines.

I hope you will understand that the only way we can offer reduced rates is to follow the rules governing each fare. While we would like to offer special consideration in cases such as yours, we are unable to honor the many similar requests that we receive from others in equally deserving situations. We follow a consistent policy to ensure that Delta is fair to everyone who travels with us. Accordingly, we must respectfully decline your request to waive the change fee.

Again, thank you for writing. We appreciate your selection of Delta and will always welcome the opportunity to be of service.

Sincerely,

[same name redacted; at least he still has his job]
Manager
Customer Care

Look familiar? You think they're paying any attention at all?