We were anxiously hoping they would do so, and today they did. Hillary
Clinton and Barack Obama have released statements regarding hate-crime
slain Lawrence King. King was murdered in his Oxnard junior high
classroom for being openly gay. All of the country has been outraged
over the incident, and the two Democratic presidential candidates have
finally spoken about the atrocity.

 

"I was deeply saddened by the recent death of 15-year-old Lawrence
King who was killed at his school in Oxnard, CA. No one should face
intimidation or violence, particularly at school, because of their
sexual orientation or the way they express their gender identity. We
must finally enact a federal hate crimes law to ensure that gay,
lesbian and transgender Americans are protected against violent,
bias-motivated crimes. We must send a unified message that hate-based
crime will not be tolerated."

 

"It was heartbreaking to learn about Lawrence King's death, and my
thoughts and prayers go out to his family. King's senseless death is a
tragic example of the corrosive effect that bigotry and fear can have
in our society. It's also an urgent reminder that we need to do more
in our schools to foster tolerance and an acceptance of diversity;
that we must enact a federal hate crimes law that protects all LGBT
Americans; and that we must recommit ourselves to becoming active and
engaged parents, citizens and neighbors, so that bias and bigotry
cannot take hold in the first place. We all have a responsibility to
help this nation live up to its founding promise of equality for all."

 

 

Here's an excellent Article in the Wall Street Journal which articulates a position that I've had for most of my software career.  An interesting read.

 

-Dana

 

When David Fahl worked for an energy reseller, which bought and sold energy from generating companies, he noticed that getting things done right wasn't always as high a priority as making deadlines, meeting deliveries or being on budget.

"You can get all those things done without doing any good work," he says. It wore on him and didn't give him a sense of accomplishment. "Not even the marketing people could come up with a plausible explanation for why the company existed," he says.

In the information age, so much is worked on in a day at the office but so little gets done. In the past, people could see the fruits of their labor immediately: a chair made or a ball bearing produced. But it can be hard to find gratification from work that is largely invisible, or from delivering goods that are often metaphorical. You can't even leave your mark on a document in increasingly paperless offices. It can be even harder trying to measure it all. That may explain why to-do listers write down tasks they've already completed just to be able to cross them off.

"Not only is work harder to measure but it's also harder to define success," says Homa Bahrami, a senior lecturer in Organizational Behavior and Industrial Relations at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. "The work is intangible or invisible, and a lot of work gets done in teams so it's difficult to pinpoint individual productivity."

She says information-age employees measure their accomplishment in net worth, company reputation, networks of relationships, and the products and services they're associated with -- elements that are more perceived and subjective than that field of corn, which either is or isn't plowed.

Companies should create meaningful short-term goals. Instead, "managers create all sorts of surrogate measures that they can measure, like PowerPoint slide counts and progress charts," says consultant Tim Horan. "The person doing the landscaping has a better sense of accomplishment."

Jon Williams once worked in an auto-claims department where the number of new-claim calls, which could take a half hour, were tallied with the same weight as brief reminder calls to customers. Even so, his greatest sense of achievement was transforming an initially angry and frustrated customer into someone who was satisfied and even laughing. "That wasn't measured at all," he says.

The difficulty of putting your finger on what you've accomplished gives employees pangs. James Ault recently visited a municipal park where he worked in maintenance while in college. He saw the same signs he painted, the same electrical job he wired, and the same trees he planted 35 years ago. Now, he works on state energy policy where he spends countless hours debating policy issues.

"I've said to my wife on multiple occasions, 'It would be nice to be an electrician,' " he says. "You can take pride in what you've accomplished."

At closing time, work doesn't seem completed, just temporarily abandoned. As much as he loves his job, insurance broker Ryan Bowles envies Fred Flintstone's exit from work in the quarry at day's end. "He seems so happy sliding down that dinosaur's tail when the whistle-bird blows," he says.

Similarly, Jane Vawter, a management consultant, is jealous of ground-control engineers celebrating their spacecraft's first flight. "That must be a tremendous feeling," she says, "one I will never know."

She has learned how to garner a sense of accomplishment from the work she produces, instead of the response it receives. She loves to do needlework in her spare time just to control the process from start to finish.

The loss of such control over how and when a job is done is one reason the Industrial Revolution was resisted, says Gregory Clark, a professor of economics at University of California, Davis. "It seemed like the complete destruction of the value of work to people," he explains.

Consequently, many employers had to pay workers up to a 40% premium to live under the employer's control, he adds.

These days, we're one step further removed from the finished product. Employees have to wait for the gratification that comes with seeing a goal finally realized. "The average delay is much, much longer for the average worker today," says Robert Frank, a professor at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management. And behavioral science notes we have difficulty with a reward delayed.

Maybe that's why Home Depot's aisles are packed with do-it-yourselfers and why a colleague is complaining of soreness from spreading mulch.

Mechanical engineer Robert Schneider at least gets to see the ball bearings he designed being produced in the manufacturing plant downstairs from his office. But he spends a lot of time researching things that don't directly translate into a finished product. "Much of the work I do goes unnoticed by anyone but me," he says. "I need to rely on myself to know I am doing worthwhile work."

 

 

 

Source: Equality Maryland

 

by Rona Marech
Thursday, February 21, 2008

A Montgomery County measure intended to protect transgender people
appears headed to a voter referendum, setting up a potentially
divisive debate over how far anti-discrimination laws should extend.

The recently passed law protects transgender people from
discrimination in housing, employment, public accommodations, and
taxi and cable service, and was supposed to go into effect
yesterday. But it is on hold after opponents gathered 32,000
signatures in a bid to put it on the ballot this fall.

Citizens for a Responsible Government, the group that paid for
thousands of computerized calls to county households to further the
petition drive, says the measure infringes on the privacy of most
citizens while protecting just a few.

"Our primary objection is the impact this has on every other citizen
in Montgomery County," said Michelle Turner, a spokeswoman for the
group. "This legislation affects or was written for less than 1
percent of the population, with total disrespect for the safety,
well-being and rights of everyone else." Public restrooms, for
example, will no longer offer real privacy for each gender, the
group says.

But officials say the new law, which the County Council passed
unanimously and County Executive Isiah Leggett signed, does not
force changes at public restrooms. Furthermore, they say the
bathroom issue is an old scare tactic that unfairly takes attention
away from the measure's point: to protect people whose internal
sense of gender and biological gender at birth do not match.

"Have you ever heard of this being a problem anywhere? No, because
transgender people are going to use the bathroom where they're going
to be the safest and where they're going to blend in the most.
They're used to being subjected to discrimination and violence. And
they have no interest in making other people uncomfortable," said
Dan Furmansky, director of Equality Maryland. "It's a common-sense
bill about helping people live their lives."

Once viewed as a relatively straightforward matter of biological
category, gender has evolved into a far more complicated subject.
Transgender is an umbrella term that can include transsexuals as
well as people with a fluid identity that transcends traditional
gender categories.

Montgomery County and Baltimore City are among about 95
jurisdictions and 13 states that have passed laws protecting
transgender people, and the General Assembly has considered
extending the protections across Maryland.

Such a state bill failed by one vote in a Senate committee last
year; the Maryland Commission on Human Relations is working to
introduce a similar bill this year, Furmansky said.

Since last spring, three states have passed transgender anti-bias
laws, and Gov. Martin O'Malley has issued an executive order that
protects state employees from discrimination based on gender
identity and expression.

In 2002, when O'Malley was Baltimore's mayor, the City Council
unanimously passed its own version of a transgender anti-bias law.
About a dozen people have filed complaints with the Baltimore
Community Relations Commission since then, according to commission
director Alvin O. Gillard, but the bathroom problems that Montgomery
County critics have forecasted have not come to pass.

"If you're committed to fairness and equality, you can find a way to
accommodate everyone and protect their privacy," Gillard said. "It's
disappointing to know that you're refighting battles that you
thought that you'd already won."

Last year, the House of Representatives approved a bill barring
discrimination against workers based on sexual orientation, but
backers removed a provision covering transgender persons to help
pass the measure.

New York and San Francisco are among the cities that have adopted
such protections for transgender persons, and students at some
colleges have pushed successfully for gender-neutral restrooms that
do not have urinals.

The Montgomery County Council removed more explicit wording
addressing the issue.

The law now reads that the requirements do "not apply to
accommodations that are distinctly private or personal."

Turner says the language addressing access to restrooms or locker
rooms is too vague, but Patrick Lacefield, a Leggett spokesman,
disagreed. In the county's view, the bill provides an adequate
exemption that would allow businesses or other entities to restrict
the use of facilities, he said.

To spur interest in a referendum, the group sent messages to most
Montgomery County homes in recent days, said Turner, an effort that
cost more than $10,000. They need 25,000 signatures -- a goal that
appears within reach based on the percentage of signatures that have
been certified.

The measure's sponsor, County Council member Duchy Trachtenberg,
said she is "disappointed" by the opponents' campaign.

"I think it's really unfortunate that a campaign of misinformation
and bigotry has found its way into this wonderful community and
county," she said. Jim Morris of Kensington helped collect the
signatures.

"It's basic common sense," Morris said. "I wouldn't want a guy
dressed as a woman in the same bathroom as my daughter. That's not
so much to ask."

But people such as Maryann Arnow, a transgender woman who lives in
Germantown, sees such rhetoric as inflammatory.

"The scary part to me is there is no current federal or state
legislation that provides people like myself any recourse
whatsoever," she said. If the measure is overturned, she added, "it
has the possibility to continue to make things more difficult for
people like myself."

 

NASA will use its Deep Space Network to transmit a song across the universe. And fittingly, the song is “Across the Universe” by the Beatles. On Feb. 4 at 7 pm EST, the song will be beamed towards the North Star, Polaris, located 431 light years away from Earth, and will travel across the universe at 186,000 miles per second. Former Beatle Paul McCartney thinks this is a great idea. "Send my love to the aliens,” he said in a message to NASA. If there are any beings near Polaris, they’ll hear the song in about 431 years.

The song’s transmission will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the day The Beatles recorded the song, as well as the 50th anniversary of both NASA's founding and the beginning days of the Beatles. Two other anniversaries also are being honored: The launch 50 years ago this week of Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite, and the founding 45 years ago of the Deep Space Network, an international network of antennas that supports missions to explore the universe.

Feb. 4 has been declared "Across The Universe Day" by Beatles fans to commemorate the anniversaries. As part of the celebration, the public around the world has been invited to participate in the event by simultaneously playing the song at the same time as the transmission by NASA.

John Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, characterized the song's transmission as a significant event. "I see that this is the beginning of the new age in which we will communicate with billions of planets across the universe," she said.

Dear Family, Friends & Allies,

This has been a week of tragedy in our schools. Most people are aware
of the shootings on the campus of Northern Illinois University in
which 5 students were murdered and many others wounded. But there was
another school shooting this past week...one that has gone unnoticed,
under-reported and almost forgotten after the initial reports came
out.

At 8:30 AM this past Tuesday morning, 22 students at E.O. Green Junior
High School in Oxnard, California entered a computer lab for their
first class of the day. Within moments of arriving, 14-year old
Brandon McInerney came up behind 15-year old Lawrence King and shot
the youngster once in the back of the head and then once again in the
back. On Wednesday, Lawrence King was pronounced brain-dead but was
not taken off life-support as those who knew Lawrence were sure that
Lawrence would want to be an organ donor. Following the harvesting of
Lawrence's organs, life-support was removed and Lawrence was
pronounced dead on Thursday.

Brandon McInerney, 14-years old, is about to be charged, as an adult,
with premeditated murder. The prosecutor plans to also charge him with
committing a hate-crime. As a result of this, Brandon will be facing a
mandatory 50+ years in prison.

The reason Mr. McInerney is being charged with a hate-crime, and I
believe the reason the story of a fatal killing in a middle-school
stopped being covered by the media, is that it quickly became clear to
everyone that Lawrence King was shot...executed really, because
Lawrence was not only gay, but transgender.

The story of both of these young lives, and the influences and
prejudices they encountered deserves to be told. This did not have to
happen,. Not only did this not have to happen, it was an obvious
inevitability to anyone paying attention that it would happen and
sadly, will happen again if we don't take this seriously.

Please read the newspaper report below related to this tragic event,
and then please look for a follow-up from me soon with additional
information and a request for help in telling this American story. It
is a story we all will face and must face every day.

Peace & Unity,

Jenn Burleton
Executive Director
TransActive Education & Advocacy

West Coast Sector Coordinator,
Board Member, PFLAG-Transgender Network

School assistant principal Joy Epstein watches as students leave flowers and other items at a
makeshift memorial for classmate Larry King. Joseph A. Garcia / Star staff E.O. Green]

http://tinyurl.com/3yq5pv
seventh-grader Jocelyn Salinas, left, is consoled by assistant principal Joy Epstein on
Thursday after it became widely known on campus that classmate Larry King was

brain-dead. Joseph A. Garcia / Star staff E.O. Green]

Three weeks after his 14th birthday, the teen suspect in a deadly classroom shooting

made his first court appearance Thursday as officials announced he has been charged

with first-degree murder and committing a hate crime.

Four sheriff's deputies escorted Brandon McInerney of Oxnard into a nearly full courtroom

of people, including his family and a flock of reporters.

Prosecutors decided to try him in adult court because the law allows them to do so with

juveniles as young as 14 who are accused of serious crimes. Officials said McInerney is

facing a long prison sentence if he is convicted of shooting his classmate, 15-year-old Larry King.

"The first-degree murder carries 25 (years) to life. The use of a firearm

carries 25 to life, and the hate crime carries an enhancement of one to three

years," Senior Deputy District Attorney Maeve Fox said in an interview.

"In Ventura County, we've never had a school shooting like this. It is very tragic."

King, an eighth-grader at E.O. Green School in Oxnard, was pronounced

brain-dead at St. John's Regional Medical Center in Oxnard about 2 p.m.

Wednesday. He was taken off life support Thursday night, according to

hospital nursing supervisor Sue Crews.

Earlier in the day, Fox said prosecutors can charge a suspect with
murder if the victim is clinically dead as a result of the defendant's
alleged use of deadly force. "Brain death is the equivalent of actual
death," she said.

McInerney appeared in Ventura County Superior Court to be arraigned.
But at his attorney's request, his arraignment was postponed until
next month.

McInerney stood rigidly with his hands behind his back as he looked
straight ahead from behind a white metal door, the entrance to a large
"holding cage" where prisoners are held in the courtroom.

Push for juvenile court

Earlier Thursday afternoon, adult inmates were sitting there during
their court appearances. All the adult inmates were gone during
McInerney's court appearance.

His lawyer, Brian Vogel, said after the proceedings that if the
alleged crime had occurred three weeks ago, his client's case would
have been handled in juvenile court.

"And, there would be no option to file this case in adult court,"
Vogel said. "My client hasn't become an adult in the last three weeks.
We feel that it would be more appropriately addressed in the juvenile
court. We will make every effort to try and convince the district
attorney as well."

McInerney's family members, who sat in the second row in the
courtroom, were distraught, jittery, holding hands and weeping during
the proceedings. They stormed out of the courtroom after McInerney
left.

At one point, Judge Kevin McGee asked the youth, who wore a white
T-shirt and had his hair cropped short, whether he agreed to postpone
his arraignment until March 21.

"Yes, sir," he responded.

Vogel asked the judge to allow the postponement because the attorney
needs to review the reports and evidence against his client.

"We are not going to be commenting on the facts at this time," Vogel
told reporters outside the hearing.

Although McInerney is being tried as an adult, he will be housed in
the juvenile detention facility while he awaits trial. His bail has
been set at $770,000.

Both Fox and Vogel declined to elaborate on the details surrounding
the hate crime allegation.

'An equality issue'

Fox, however, said a hate crime in California involves an action taken
toward a person based on any of several criteria including race,
religion, nationality, gender or sexual orientation.

Jay Richard Smith, executive director of the Ventura County Rainbow
Alliance, told reporters that his organization was there to make sure
prosecutors consider all facets of the case, which, he said, could be
a hate crime involving gay or trans-gender issues.

"It's an equality issue, and we want to make sure that the district
attorney looks at this from all facets and all sides," he said. "We
are here to support others who are living in this county that may deal
with the same issues."

It is unclear whether police were able to get statements from
McInerney about the incident.

Fox and Vogel refused to elaborate on any details of the alleged crime
or the investigation into the highly publicized case.

Several news cameras were in the courtroom, but the judge denied
requests by news media personnel to take photos or make video
recordings.

McGee said there is a possibility that the case could be sent back to
the juvenile justice system, where defendants have greater privacy
rights.

Fox later explained the judge's decision to exclude cameras in the courtroom.

"Theoretically, if we (prosecutors) learn something that we don't know
now about the defendant in this case, if there were any really
mitigating circumstances that would cause us to rethink our decision,
that's a possibility and that's what he based his decision on," Fox
told reporters.

Vogel said his client was under a suicide watch in the juvenile
detention center until recently. Vogel said his client's mental state
is "better than it was before."

"What happened here is a horrible tragedy for everyone involved. My
client, Brandon, and the family are terribly sad that (King) has been
declared brain-dead," Vogel said.

Fox said McInerney isn't the only young murder suspect in the county's history.

In 2001, a 14-year-old boy was arrested on suspicion of helping to
kill a homeless man. Rocky Mattley was sentenced to seven years in the
California Youth Authority in 2002 after being convicted of murder.

Meanwhile on Thursday, stuffed animals and Valentine candy accumulated
by a flagpole outside E.O. Green School.

Students posted notes on the makeshift memorial, and someone had tied
red, white and blue balloons to the flagpole.

Attached to a potted ficus tree left nearby, someone had written the
lyrics to John Lennon's song "Imagine" on a poster.

Inside the school Thursday, students and employees spent a second day
trying to get back to normal, going to classes and meeting with
counselors.

Extra counselors on hand

About three-quarters of the school's students showed up Wednesday, the
day after King was shot. Administrators said attendance increased on
Thursday, climbing close to normal.

"We had extra counselors in," said Superintendent Jerry Dannenberg.
"They've been meeting with students all day long. They're reporting a
very healthy response."

After the last bell rang, students stopped at the memorial on their
way out, reading the messages. One boy knelt and prayed.

"We love you Larry," a student had written on a paper note, "1993-2008."

Thursday was the last day of school before a four-day weekend, and the
school sent a note home with numbers to call if anyone needed to speak
to a counselor.

State Sen. Sheila Kuehl released a statement on Thursday about the
shooting, which stated in part: "I recently learned that this shooting
will be prosecuted as a murder and a hate crime, which I believe to be
appropriate.

"We know that Lawrence King, the student who was shot, and who has now
been declared brain-dead because of the shooting, had already endured
a number of incidents of serious harassment based on his stated sexual
orientation and because others thought that his dress and demeanor
didn't fit conventional gender stereotypes," the lawmaker, who is
openly gay, added.

She said schools must take immediate action to stop discrimination and bigotry.

Officials said additional support for people under 21 can be requested
by calling the Children's Intensive Response Team at 1-866-431-2478,
and for people over 18 by calling the Crisis Team at 652-6727.

— Star staff writer Cheri Carlson contributed to this report.

(c) 2008 The E.W. Scripps Co.

http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2008/feb/15/14-year-old-faces-murder-charge/