THE DAILY BLADE: DIY Profiling
Pablo Gutierrez Vega, 35, a law professor at the University of Seville who has a long beard and dark complexion, was briefly forced off an Air Berlin flight during a layover on Mallorca by three German passengers who feared he was a Muslim terrorist, according to The Associated Press. The men told him that other passengers were frightened by his appearance, and wanted to search his luggage. When he realized the men were not undercover police officers, Gutierrez Vega refused to hand over his luggage. The pilot then led the professor to the runway, apologized for the incident and offered to remove the men from the flight. When Gutierrez Vega reboarded the flight, the pilot stowed his luggage in the cockpit to pacify the other passengers.
Recall that in late August nine airline security incidents occurred in a single week, one of which involved several passengers who got off a flight because they believed that two Muslim men who were acting suspiciously were terrorists.
In a new case that has come to light, architect Seth Stein, 47, was mistaken for a Muslim terrorist – he’s Jewish, by the way - and restrained in his seat by another passenger back on May 22nd. As the crew and other travelers on an American Airlines flight to the Turks and Caicos islands via New York City looked on, the passenger – who identified himself as being with the NYPD - grabbed Stein from behind and held him in a headlock. Airline officials later told Stein that he had been targeted because he was using an iPod, went to the toilet as soon as he got on the plane and looked like an Arab because of his tan, according to The Independent.
The Stiletto attributes such incidents to Western governments being too politically correct to concentrate passenger-screening resources on those people who are more likely to be terrorists than others. The more hay you add to the stack, the harder you make it to find the needle.
If professional anti-terrorism experts devised a profiling algorithm that flags religion, national origin and recent travel – among other factors – amateurs on airplanes would not feel the urgent need to use seat-of-the-pants profiling on fellow passengers, subjecting innocent people to humiliation or worse.
Study: Parental Notification Laws Reduce Risky Sexual Behavior Among Teens
Libs reflexively pay lip service to the piety about wanting abortion to be "legal but rare," but then use every means at their disposal - including sympathetic judges - to block state referendums and legislation that place any limits on abortion. Even commonsensical parental notification or consent laws for minors have been blocked by courts in several states.
The argument against parental notification or consent always invokes the apocryphal teenager who is impregnated by her father, and must face the horror of having to obtain permission from him to get an abortion. Never mind that in such cases, the courts can act in loco parentis, or that not a single parental notification case has ever involved an incest victim. Why let inconvenient facts get in the way of an urban myth?
Well, here’s another inconvenient fact in favor of parental notification and consent laws: They effectively change sexual behavior among teenagers.
Using the rates of gonorrhea among teenage girls as a measure of risky sex, a study concludes that laws requiring minors to notify or get the consent of one or both parents before having an abortion reduce risky sexual behavior among teens.
The researchers found that gonorrhea rates for girls under the age of 20 dropped an average of 20 percent for Hispanic girls and 12 percent for white girls in states where parental notification laws were in effect between the years the years 1981 through 1998. The results were not statistically significant for black girls. The study will be published in an upcoming edition of The Journal of Law Economics and Organization.
One of the researchers, Jonathan Klick, a Florida State University (Tallahassee) law professor, attributes the correlation to teens substituting protected vaginal sex or abstinence, so as to avoid telling their parents about becoming pregnant. Oral and anal sex do not result in pregnancy, but can still result in gonorrhea infection so researchers were able to rule out the possibility that teens were substituting these risky sex practices for unprotected vaginal sex.
Forty-four states have adopted laws requiring minors to obtain parental consent or to notify one or both parents before an abortion, but the laws have yet to be enforced in nine of them, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights.
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February 22, 2007
The Stiletto wrote:
The Belmont (CA) City Council is considering drafting an ordinance that declares secondhand smoke “a public nuisance” and extends the city’s current ban on smoking in workplaces and most public areas to any residence except a single-family detached home. The proposal, aimed at multi-unit apartment buildings, is meant to address the health concerns of elderly apartment residents who complained of complications caused by second-hand smoke, according to The Associated Press. The City Council of this Silicon Valley suburb of San Francisco is expected to enforce the ordinance by relying on ...
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