News Cut: October 27, 2009 Archive

Five at 8 - 10/27/09: Religion and football

Posted at 7:31 AM on October 27, 2009 by Bob Collins (13 Comments)

1) In Georgia, school officials barred the cheerleaders from hanging any banners that had Biblical verses on them. Since 9/11, cheerleaders painted the verses on giant paper banners that the football team ran through during pre-game introductions. The town responded. They bring God's Warriors signs to the games. In a battle between those wanting to keep church and state separate, and those who prefer it to be merged, the latter is winning this particular battle, the New York Times reports.

Why does football and religion seem to be linked more than say, the band and religion in schools? You don't usually see the band kids gather in prayer before the first song. Why not? Why doesn't the glee club put up posters that say, "Make a joyful noise."?

2) It's not easy being green glass. In Mankato, residents dutifully put green-colored glass in with the other recyclables. They might as well just toss them in the trash. Green glass can only be recycled into more green glass and there's no market for it. Still, the state requires that it be collected. Some people want to change that.

3) Bear expert Lynn Rogers of Minnesota is the focus of a BBC documentary that airs tomorrow night: He's getting some UK love today.

In the years Rogers has tramped through the Northwoods he has abandoned just about everything he knew, or thought he knew, about bears. They do not like honey. They are not even that crazy about berries or nuts - provided, of course, there is a nice rich stash of ant larvae in the vicinity.

And they are not ferocious. Rogers is adamant about that. He said he has never heard a bear roar or even growl, and that in all of his years of close proximity to the animals he has never been seriously hurt even though in his early years he displayed what he calls "bad bear manners".

Rogers was a guest on MPR's Midmorning last December.

4) The Washington Post has the story today of Matthew Hoh, who has resigned from the Foreign Service because, he says, he doesn't know why the U.S. is fighting in Afghanistan. He only joined the Foreign Service earlier this year:

"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan," he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department's head of personnel. "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."

The White House will be getting back to you on that, Matthew.

Meanwhile, WNYC's The Takeaway today looks at competing narratives of this week's helicopter "crash" in Afghanistan.

5) A nice catch by the New York Times today on the Northwest Airlines Flight 188 fiasco. The airline warned pilots at the start of the merger between Delta and Northwest that these sorts of things were possible. "While we cannot minimize distractions from our personal or professional lives, we can mitigate their effects so they do not affect the safety of our airline," the memo said. "Leave distractions about personal, corporate or other external issues outside of the flight deck."

Greg Feith, a former NTSB investigator, went on The CBS Early Show this morning and said not all pilots may have known about Delta's prohibition on laptops in the cockpit and said Northwest Airlines did not have such a policy. Perhaps the distraction was a conversation among the pilots about whether they could be surfing on their laptops.

Meanwhile, The Atlantic's James Fallows, a pilot, gets it right when he describes just how unbelievable the pilots' current story is:

The difficulty for the pilots is that the version of the story they're resisting -- that they simply fell asleep -- is less damning for them than any alternative version. If they fell asleep, that's bad, but they could argue some kind of force majeure. But if their "heated conversation" (previous story) or intense laptop use (current story) kept them from remembering their most elemental responsibility as pilots, that really is beyond the pale. The closest comparison would be, say, to an operating-room team that got so interested in watching a football game on TV that they sliced open a patient but forgot to take out his appendix. Forgetting where you are going is incredible enough on its own. And not having any back-of-mind nag saying, "Wait a minute, we haven't heard anything on the air-traffic control frequency for a while" also is outside any known experience of the professional flight-crew world.

In other words: Somebody's lying about what happened.

TODAY'S QUESTION

Citing the "rapid increase in illness," President Obama has declared a national emergency to help officials deal with H1N1 flu. How has the spread of H1N1 affected your workplace?

WHAT WE'RE DOING

This afternoon, I'll have another installment of the continuing News Cut series, "The Unemployed." If you're jobless and want to be included in the series, contact me.

Midmorning (9 - 11 a.m.) - First hour: Historians Ed Ayers and Brian Balogh both say they entered the profession to have a better understanding of how the world we live in came to be. That's the driving force behind their scholarship, and the basis for their radio show.

Second hour: You probably have plants in your garden, weeds that annoy you. Author Amy Stewart investigates the plants that kill, if you get too close.

Midday (11 a.m. - 1 p.m.) - Garrison Keillor, speaking at the Barnes and Noble in Edina about his writing, and reading from his new book, "Pilgrims: A Wobegon Romance."

Talk of the Nation (1 - 3 p.m.) - First hour: It's been three years since Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" made "green" good -- and put climate change on diverse agendas. Now a new Pew survey finds that concern about global warming is waning. What's causing this change in attitudes?

Second hour: Afghan politician Malalai Joya on her new book, "A Woman among Warlords."

All Things Considered (3 - 6:30 p.m.) - Where do Minnesota's legislators stand on the public option for health insurance. The U.S. Senate bill will give state's the option of opting out. MPR's Tom Scheck is on the story.

MPR's Tom Weber has a comprehensive look at what school districts are asking voters to approve this fall.

David Schaper has the story of what happened when some black students were kept out of a bar in Washington state because they were wearing baggy clothes.

NPR's Martin Kaste has the second part of his series on the end of privacy.

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Homeland Security chief avoids Flight 188 intercept question

Posted at 12:55 PM on October 27, 2009 by Bob Collins (5 Comments)

Janet Napolitano, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, punted today when MPR's Cathy Wurzer asked when FAA officials notified homeland security officials that a jetliner was heading for Minneapolis St. Paul and officials didn't know for sure who was in control of it.

"There are protocols in place for when actual military planes are used in situations like this," Napolitano said.

"What you're asking me involves a commercial plane involves another type of dimension and the NTSB is doing an investigation. Rather than announce it now, we should await the results of the investigation."

The NTSB investigation does not involve the response time or the coordination of air defense response to it.

By the way, here's what it looks like when military jets intercept an aircraft. If it's night-time, would those flares have caught the attention of a napping/Web surfing/laptop searching set of pilots?

The Northwest debacle, and a Delta jet that landed on a taxiway in Atlanta instead of the runway, has refocused attention on the "human factors" of getting us from Point A to Point B.

And so has the Air France crash months ago on a Brazil to Paris flight. Just this week, in fact, the debate internally over whether a crew error or faulty equipment cost the lives of hundreds of people spilled out in the open.

In a strongly worded internal memo, Air France has warned its pilots to be more vigilant about safety procedures and upbraided those blaming flight equipment for the crash of Flight 447 into the Atlantic in June.

No one knows what caused the accident, which killed all 228 people aboard and was Air France's deadliest crash. Pilots' unions said Saturday the company is trying to distance itself from blame -- and shift attention to the possibility of human error -- as the investigation drags on.

"Enough Scandals and False Debates about Flight Security!" reads the memo, sent to pilots Tuesday and obtained by The Associated Press on Saturday. It dismisses calls by pilots for new safety procedures following Flight 447's crash. "It suffices simply to apply our doctrine, our procedures," the memo says.

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The Unemployed: Chris Johnson

Posted at 4:11 PM on October 27, 2009 by Bob Collins (7 Comments)

Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of unemployed persons has increased by 7.6 million to 15.1 million. In Minnesota last month, 4,000 people gave up their quest for work. The unemployment rate isn't a number. It's individuals with life stories to tell. Here's one.

In the three years since Chris Johnson of White Bear Lake has held a "permanent" full-time job, she's encountered the reality of today's hiring process. "Human Resources is neither humane, nor resourceful," she told me today. "I can have some empathy. Those people are deluged with stuff. It's a numbers game."

But for today's job hunters, they rarely get to meet the people. "It's a black hole," she says. Companies tell prospective employees they have to apply for jobs online. "You go through this vortex that just asks questions. It asks if I have a college degree but there's nowhere to indicate I'm only 8 credits short." Maybe you'll hear back from a company, but probably not.

When a person doesn't get a job via this system, "there's no way to follow up or do a post mortem," she says. It makes it difficult to find out what to change when the next prospective job comes along.

Johnson lost her job as a volunteer and event manager (she jokes that she was a "pledge goddess") for Twin Cities Public Television in 2006. She helped coordinate membership drives. She's looking for work in marketing, community relations and has been focusing recently on event management and voice-over work.

"I thought I'd have a job by the end of the year (2006)," she says. "I keep hearing, 'You've got a great resume.' I've followed the rules -- networking, researching, calling, answering ads -- but nothing seems to click. I can't crack the system"

She's had part-time and temporary work since then; "enough to keep the wolf away from the door." But she's hardly an example of the destitution that often comes from long-term unemployment. "I live quite frugally and had saved/invested some money over the years." But she's got two mortgages on her White Bear Lake home, and one on a house in Little Marais that she rehabbed with her aging father (an experience she wouldn't trade for a job). She's been dipping into her retirement savings to get by, she gets a couple hundred dollars a week in unemployment, and her health care plan is a simple one. "I pray," she says.

She describes a litany of failed job interviews, including "the 20-something in pointed high heels" who icily looked her over when she showed up for an interview after a warm exchange over the phone. She's 52 and, apparently, sounds younger over the phone.

She says she overwhelmed a young man in a recent interview. "I don't think he expected to be interviewing his mother," she said, acknowledging "there is a bias" against the older work applicant.

"I like to think the universe is going to give me what I need," she says, then amends that statement to point out that so far, it has. "After three years, I suppose I should be living in a cardboard box, but the sun came out today, there's food on the table, and I'm finding a way to put gas in the car."

Unemployment, she points out, has allowed her to spend more time with her aging parents -- now both in their 90s.

She's noticed an increase in job postings in the places she looks, but the technology required for job searching these days doesn't lend itself to high productivity. "I'm on LinkedIn, but I still don't really know what LinkedIn is," she says, "and I'm impatient." She says Twitter, for example, requires one to waste a lot of time in order to -- maybe -- make a connection that can lead to employment. "If I put in this effort, I want to see the result. I'm not seeing the result," she says.

Her advice for people who will soon be in her position? "Don't panic," she says. "Cry, scream, get it out of your system. Feel it. Live it. Put one foot in front of the other and if something doesn't work, try something else."

"It's a crapshoot," she says.

(See more in this series. If you'd like to share your story, contact me.)

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Check out the map below to read what people in MPR's Public Insight Network are telling us about the job climate around them. You can find other stories in this series here.

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