Um ...

Here's what Inayet Sahin said after being ejected from the flight Thursday. She and her extended family and one friend -- all of whom are Muslims -- were ejected after fellow passengers became concerned about conversation between two regarding the safest place to sit on an airliner:

"We are proud Americans. You know we decided to have our children and raise them here. We can very easily go anywhere we want in the world, but you know we love it here and we're not going to go away, no matter what."

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/01/01/family.grounded/

I'm sorry, but that is just about the stupidest comment I have heard in a while. You're actually threatening to move elsewhere? Because we would miss you? My sympathy for your plight has just evaporated. Go ahead and move. I promise you this is the best place to live on this planet. Flaws and all.

My other thought: Air travel is a privilege, not a right.

One of these things is not like the other ...

Here is the comment by a NYT reader that I am mulling. I think it is intelligent. He has a point.

The “challenges facing Muslims in the United States”? One would think the freedom provided by these United States to practice one’s religion as vibrantly and enthusiastically as desired would be regarded as a virtue and a blessing. A little gratitude would also be in order for a transportation system that places the highest priority on safety, often at the expense of comfort and convenience.

I will trust Mr. Irfan at his word that he “not looking for some big payout.” But Mr. Hooper, on the other hand, I suspect, has other agenda items planned.

Kenton McCarthy

Muslim family ejected from AirTran Airways

My comments will come in a future post. I need to mull this. I'm thinking on a comment made by a NYT reader.







January 2, 2009 12:12 pm

Muslim Family Excluded From AirTran Flight

By Liz Robbins

On Friday afternoon, AirTran Airways issued a public apology to the nine passengers removed from Flight 175 on New Year’s Day, as well as others on the flight who were inconvenienced.

The airline acknowledged that the incident was a misunderstanding and offered to compensate the passengers.

Kashif Irfan, one of eight family members who were detained along with a family friend, told The Lede that the family was weighing the airline’s offer, but had not yet made a decision whether to accept it.

The full statement from AirTran:

Our goal at AirTran Airways is to offer a safe, pleasant and positive travel experience for all customers every day on every flight.

We sincerely regret that the passengers on flight 175 did not have a positive travel experience on January 1, 2009.

Security is a shared responsibility and this incident highlights the multiple layers of security that are in place in today’s aviation environment. While ultimately this issue proved to be a misunderstanding, the steps taken were necessary. Alert passengers reported to the flight crew what they believed were inappropriate comments allegedly made by one of the passengers onboard, and the flight crew notified the federal air marshals that were assigned to the flight. The federal air marshals onboard contacted local and federal law enforcement officials who came to the gate and escorted the individuals in question off the aircraft to ensure they posed no threat to the flight.

After deplaning the remaining passengers and performing a sweep of the aircraft and rescreening all passengers, crew, checked and carry-on baggage, the flight departed two hours late without the nine passengers who were detained for questioning.

We regret that the issue escalated to the heightened security level it did on New Year’s Day, but we trust everyone understands that the security and the safety of our passengers is paramount and cannot be compromised.

We apologize to all of the passengers — to the nine who had to undergo extensive interviews from the authorities and to the 95 who ultimately made the flight. Nobody on Flight 175 reached their destination on time on New Year’s Day, and we regret it.

The airline has refunded the air fares of the nine passengers detained for questioning, has agreed to reimburse the passengers for expenses incurred by taking another airline and has also offered to transport the passengers home to Washington, D.C., free of charge.

Original post:

The question seemed harmless, a nervous habit that Atif Irfan always had when flying. Mr. Irfan turned to his wife, Sobia Ijaz, as they boarded AirTran Flight 175 at Reagan National Airport near Washington Thursday afternoon, and wondered aloud where the safest place to sit on the airplane would be — the front? The rear? Over the wing?

But passengers sitting behind them evidently overheard the remark, saw Mr. Irfan’s beard and his wife’s head scarf, and grew concerned.

Mr. Irfan and his wife, along with six members of their extended family, are Muslims, and were on their way to a religious conference in Orlando when they boarded the flight. The worried passengers contacted flight attendants, who contacted Transportation Security Administration officials, and soon, Mr. Irfan and his wife were off the plane and being questioned in the jetway.

The six remaining family members in the traveling party were taken off the plane as well, along with a family friend who happened to be on the same flight and who happens to be a lawyer for the Library of Congress.

Next, the nine Muslim passengers — all but one are United States-born American citizens — were taken to a quarantine area in the passenger lounge where they were questioned by F.B.I. agents. Mr. Irfan’s three small nephews were denied access to food in the family’s carry-on luggage.

Before long, Mr. Irfan told The Lede in an interview Friday morning, the F.B.I. concluded that the incident was obviously just a misunderstanding, and told AirTran officials that the family was cleared to travel.

But he said AirTran still refused to rebook them, offering only to refund their tickets. The F.B.I. agents helped the family get on a later USAirways flight to Orlando, but those seats cost them twice as much. The incident, first reported by CNN and The Washington Post, was an uncomfortable reminder for Mr. Irfan, a lawyer and Detroit native who now lives in Alexandria, Va., of the challenges facing Muslims in the United States and the ethnic profiling that occurs in many contexts.

“To be honest, as a Muslim, we do understand how to deal with this, we realize this is an unfortunate aspect in our lives,” he said by telephone from Orlando. “Whenever we get on a plane, because of the color of our skin, people tend to look at us with a wary eye anyway. Of course it was very embarrassing.”

The most embarrassing part of all, Mr. Irfan, came when AirTran told everyone on the the airplane to disembark, so officials could sweep the plane; the passengers all walked directly past Mr. Irfan’s family in the terminal.

AirTran defended its handling of the situation. In a revised statement issued on Friday, the company says that when it denied the family rebooking, it had not yet been told they were cleared to travel:

At departure time, the Captain of flight 175 informed the airline that there were two federal air marshals onboard who contacted local and federal Washington law enforcement officials for a security related issue onboard the aircraft involving verbal comments made by a passenger and overheard by other passengers.

The airline then advised the Transportation Security Administration (T.S.A.). It was determined that all 104 passengers onboard must deplane and passengers, crew, baggage and the aircraft should be re-screened.

After the re-screening of the passengers, crew, bags and the aircraft, 95 passengers were allowed to reboard the aircraft and nine were detained for interrogation by the local law enforcement officials, the F.B.I. and the T.S.A. Flight 175 departed nearly two hours late and arrived safely at its destination.

Later in the day, six of the nine detained passengers approached the customer service counter and asked to be rebooked to Orlando. At the time, the airline had not been notified by the authorities that the passengers were cleared to fly and would not rebook them until receiving said clearance. One passenger in the party became irate and made inappropriate comments. The local law enforcement officials came over and escorted the passengers away from the gate podium.

AirTran Airways complied with all T.S.A., law enforcement and Homeland Security directives and had no discretion in the matter.

The nine passengers involved were all offered full refunds and may fly with AirTran Airways again after having been released from questioning from and cleared by the law enforcement officials.

The family, naturally, doesn’t see it that way. They have already been in touch with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy group. Ibrahim Hooper, director of communications for the council, said the organization is working with AirTran to resolve the matter in an amicable way.

“This was handled badly by AirTran — they were quite belligerent in the beginning,” Mr. Hooper told The Lede in a telephone interview. “But as they saw the facts come out, they have become more conciliatory.”

An AirTran spokesman, Tad Hutcheson, told The Washington Post that the airline’s better-safe-than-sorry approach was appropriate and minimized the ethnic-profiling aspect of the story:

At the end of the day, people got on and made comments they shouldn’t have made on the airplane, and other people heard them. Other people heard them, misconstrued them. It just so happened these people were of Muslim faith and appearance. It escalated, it got out of hand and everyone took precautions.

But Mr. Irfan said that at no time did he or his wife utter the word “bomb” or any other word that could be taken as suspicious. He said the two passengers who seemed to be taking note of his conversation with his wife were teenage girls.

Mr. Irfan said Friday morning that the family was waiting to see whether AirTran will do anything more to resolve the matter.

“We’re not looking for some big payout,” he said. “We just want something that would put us back where we started.”

[The airline later made an offer; see the update above.]

KILLER funny Mad TV skit and people I admire ...

Yes. I'll get to the serious matter of the Muslim family. Just have to note one more great Mad TV skit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZkdcYlOn5M&NR=1

I'll also note, in honor of the new year, two people I admire. Each of their bios I lifted from the page associated with the link above their names ...

http://www.timeinc.net/fortune/information/presscenter/fortune/bios/FOR_Leonard.html

Devin Leonard
Senior Writer
FORTUNE

Leonard is a senior writer at FORTUNE covering general business topics, with a focus on entertainment and media. He joined FORTUNE in January 2000 as a writer. Since then, Leonard has profiled such important business figures as Edgar Bronfman Jr., Conrad Black, Sumner Redstone, Jean-Marie Messier, Bob Wright, Mort Zuckerman, Mark Cuban and South Park's Matt Stone and Trey Parker. He wrote the exclusive story about the launch of Apple's iTunes store. Leonard's 2002 investigative piece The Adelphia Story about the Rigas family of Adelphia Cable Systems was included in The Best Business Crime Writing of 2002. Prior to working at FORTUNE, Leonard was a staff writer for The New York Observer covering real estate and politics. Before that he worked for SmartMoney, The Record of Hackensack, The Columbia Daily Tribune, and The Kennebec Journal. Leonard earned a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. He has appeared on CNBC, CNN and NPR and has written freelance articles for The New York Times, Philadelphia magazine and the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine.

(His wife Eileen Leonard is also awesome.)

http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ergsll/italian/faculty.html

Lynn Westwater
Assistant Professor of Italian
Director of Italian
George Washington University

Professor Westwater received her B.A. in Italian and English from the University of Pennsylvania and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Italian Literature from the University of Chicago. She joined the George Washington faculty in 2006. Her research interests include polemical writing in Early Modern Italy; Early Modern women's writing; convent writing; Venetian culture; the Italian Jewish experience; plagiary in Early Modern Italy; and cultural production in Italian border regions. She is preparing a book manuscript on the often fraught relations between male and female writers in seventeenth-century Venice. She recently co-edited a critical edition, in Italian, of seventeenth-century Venetian nun Arcangela Tarabotti's correspondence (Lettere familiari e di complimento, Rosenberg & Sellier, 2005), which she is also co-editing and translating for the University of Chicago Press's Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series.

One more KILLER funny story from The Onion

And one of my favorite Mad TV skits on YouTube ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4D0555EtAZ4

... then we will move onto serious matters (Muslims ejected from AirTran Airways flight



Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Executives at Google, the rapidly growing online-search company that promises to "organize the world's information," announced Monday the latest step in their expansion effort: a far-reaching plan to destroy all the information it is unable to index.

CEO Eric Schmidt speaks at Google's California headquarters.

"Our users want the world to be as simple, clean, and accessible as the Google home page itself," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt at a press conference held in their corporate offices. "Soon, it will be."

The new project, dubbed Google Purge, will join such popular services as Google Images, Google News, and Google Maps, which catalogs the entire surface of the Earth using high-resolution satellites.

As a part of Purge's first phase, executives will destroy all copyrighted materials that cannot be searched by Google.

"A year ago, Google offered to scan every book on the planet for its Google Print project. Now, they are promising to burn the rest," John Battelle wrote in his widely read "Searchblog." "Thanks to Google Purge, you'll never have to worry that your search has missed some obscure book, because that book will no longer exist. And the same goes for movies, art, and music."

"Book burning is just the beginning," said Google co-founder Larry Page. "This fall, we'll unveil Google Sound, which will record and index all the noise on Earth. Is your baby sleeping soundly? Does your high-school sweetheart still talk about you? Google will have the answers."

Page added: "And thanks to Google Purge, anything our global microphone network can't pick up will be silenced by noise-cancellation machines in low-Earth orbit."

As a part of Phase One operations, Google executives will permanently erase the hard drive of any computer that is not already indexed by the Google Desktop Search.

"We believe that Google Desktop Search is the best way to unlock the information hidden on your hard drive," Schmidt said. "If you haven't given it a try, now's the time. In one week, the deleting begins."

Although Google executives are keeping many details about Google Purge under wraps, some analysts speculate that the categories of information Google will eventually index or destroy include handwritten correspondence, buried fossils, and private thoughts and feelings.

The company's new directive may explain its recent acquisition of Celera Genomics, the company that mapped the human genome, and its buildup of a vast army of laser-equipped robots.

"Google finally has what it needs to catalog the DNA of every organism on Earth," said analyst Imran Kahn of J.P. Morgan Chase. "Of course, some people might not want their DNA indexed. Hence, the robot army. It's crazy, it's brilliant—typical Google."

Google executives oversee the first stage of Google Purge.

Google's robot army is rumored to include some 4 million cybernetic search-and-destroy units, each capable of capturing and scanning up to 100 humans per day. Said co-founder Sergey Brin: "The scanning will be relatively painless. Hey, it's Google. It'll be fun to be scanned by a Googlebot. But in the event people resist, the robots are programmed to liquify the brain."

Markets responded favorably to the announcement of Google Purge, with traders bidding up Google's share price by $1.24, to $285.92, in late trading after the announcement. But some critics of the company have found cause for complaint.

"This announcement is a red flag," said Daniel Brandt, founder of Google-Watch.org. "I certainly don't want to accuse of them having bad intentions. But this campaign of destruction and genocide raises some potential privacy concerns."

Brandt also expressed reservations about the company's new motto. Until yesterday's news conference, the company's unofficial slogan had been "Don't be evil." The slogan has now been expanded to "Don't be evil, unless it's necessary for the greater good."

Co-founders Page and Brin dismiss their critics.

"A lot of companies are so worried about short-term reactions that they ignore the long view," Page said. "Not us. Our team is focused on something more than just making money. At Google, we're using technology to make dreams come true."

"Soon," Brin added, "we'll make dreams clickable, or destroy them forever."

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/40076

One more (begin italics) really (end italics) fun one ...

Factual Error Found On Internet

LONGMONT, CO—The Information Age was dealt a stunning blow Monday, when a factual error was discovered on the Internet. The error was found on TedsUltimateBradyBunch.com, a Brady Bunch fan site that incorrectly listed the show's debut year as 1968, not 1969.

The shocking error.

Caryn Wisniewski, a Pueblo, CO, legal secretary and diehard Brady Bunch fan, came across the mistake while searching for information about the show's first-season cast.

"When I first saw 1968 on the web page, I thought, 'Wow, apparently, all those Brady Bunch books I've read listing 1969 as the show's first year were wrong,'" Wisniewski told reporters at a press conference. "But even though I obviously trusted the Internet, I was still kind of puzzled. So I checked other Brady Bunch fan sites, and all of them said 1969. After a while, it slowly began to sink in that the World Wide Web might be tainted with unreliable information."

Following up on her suspicion, Wisniewski phoned her public library, the ABC television network, and the office of Brady Bunch producer Sherwood Schwartz—all of whom confirmed that "Ted's Ultimate Brady Bunch Site" was in error.

Attempts to contact the webmaster of "Ted's Ultimate Brady Bunch Site," identified as Ted Crewes of Naugatuck, CT, were unsuccessful. The page has been taken offline by its host, Cheaphost.net, which released a statement Tuesday.

"We at Cheaphost were deeply saddened and disturbed to learn that one of the millions of pages we host contained a factual discrepancy," the web-posted statement read. "Please be assured that we are doing everything within our power to ensure that nothing of the sort happens again. We will not rest until the Internet's once-sterling reputation as the world's leading source for 100 percent reliable information is restored."

Paul Boutin, senior editor of Wired, said the error is likely to have a profound effect on how the Internet is perceived.

"Will we ever fully trust the Web again?" Boutin asked. "We may well be witnessing the dawn of a new era of skepticism in which we no longer accept everything we read online at face value. But regardless of what the future holds, one thing is clear: The Internet's status as the world's definitive repository of incontrovertible fact has been jeopardized."

Peter Luyck, 30, a Dallas-area graphic designer and frequent Internet user, was crestfallen.
"If it happens once, it can happen again," Luyck said. "I shudder to think that, one dark day in the future, misinformation could again make its way online. In fact, it may already have. How do we know that trusted sites like the Drudge Report and Fucked Company are as accurate as we instinctively trust them to be? Can we blindly trust that SpideyRulez.com is correct in its reportage that the upcoming Spider-Man sequel will feature Christopher Walken as Dr. Octopus? Pandora is out of the box."

Though the Brady Bunch error is the first confirmed instance of false information on the Internet, scares have occurred in the past. In 1998, an e-mail sent to a woman in Warner Robins, GA, made an unverifiable claim that she could earn thousands of dollars from an initial $5 investment. The claim was never conclusively proven false, and no charges were filed.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/27836

You gotta love The Onion ...

Second Life Makes Dream Of Owning Fictitious Coffee Shop Come True

HAILEY, ID — As a teenager, Kerry Jarrett never thought she would have the opportunity to own and operate a completely fabricated coffee shop and performance space. But thanks to Linden Lab's popular Second Life digital world, Jarrett, 31, has turned her dream into a virtual reality.

"As long as I can remember, I've pictured myself owning a multipolygonal 3-D representation of what a coffee shop might be in the real world," said Jarrett, who has invested hundreds of real dollars and thousands of actual hours in Never Bean, her digital pseudo-business in Second Life's popular Scurfield district. "Since I've never been too interested in inventory tracking, accounting, or interacting with people except inside a complex computer simulation, running this simulated coffee shop has been the greatest experience of my life."

Jarrett's shop is popular among Second Life regulars for its atmosphere, its 24-hour availability, and its location between the T-Mobile dealership and the 10,000-foot glowing green penis.

http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/second_life_makes_dream_of