Oh the horror!

La Times – November 25, 2008:

For decades, Claremont kindergartners have celebrated Thanksgiving by dressing up as pilgrims and Native Americans and sharing a feast. But on Tuesday, when the youngsters meet for their turkey and songs, they won’t be wearing their hand-made bonnets, headdresses and fringed vests.

Parents in this quiet university town are sharply divided over what these construction-paper symbols represent: A simple child’s depiction of the traditional (if not wholly accurate) tale of two factions setting aside their differences to give thanks over a shared meal? Or a cartoonish stereotype that would never be allowed of other racial, ethnic or religious groups?

“It’s demeaning,” Michelle Raheja, the mother of a kindergartner at Condit Elementary School, wrote to her daughter’s teacher. “I’m sure you can appreciate the inappropriateness of asking children to dress up like slaves (and kind slave masters), or Jews (and friendly Nazis), or members of any other racial minority group who has struggled in our nation’s history.”

Taliban says: Back to this, or else!

10 Arrested for Afghan Acid Attack – NYTimes.com — This just never ends with these creeps.

The police in Kandahar have arrested 10 Taliban militants they said were involved in an attack earlier this month on a group of Afghan schoolgirls whose faces were doused with acid, officials in Kandahar said Tuesday.

The officials said that the militants, who were Afghan citizens, had confessed to their involvement in the attack on the schoolgirls and their teachers on Nov. 12 and that a high-ranking member of the Taliban had paid the militants 100,000 Pakistani rupees for each of the girls they managed to burn.

The girls were assaulted Nov. 12 by two men on a motorcycle who were apparently irate that the girls dared to attend high school. The men drove up beside them and splashed their faces with what appeared to be battery acid.

For a while now, we’ve been noting that whenever you hear people warning about the impending broadband crunch, it’s politicians, consultants or lobbyists. When you actually talk to technologists, they point out that there’s no problem and that will keep everything just fine — even without having to do any kind of traffic shaping or violation of net neutrality.

Yet, that won’t stop the lobbyists, consultants and top marketing execs from claiming otherwise. A trade group heavily funded by AT&T is out yet again, warning that the internet will collapse by 2012 if “something” isn’t done — with that “something” being basically big government subsidies to the telcos. Consider it the telco bailout plan of 2009. Hell, if we’re already bailing out Wall St. and Detroit, why not telcos as well?

Canadian Role Model

globeandmail.com: RCMP probe B.C. teen for Facebook’s ‘kick a ginger’ forum — This is one weird story. What is wrong with these people? What kind of town is Prince George, anyway? What is the IQ of people who copy the cartoon characters on South Park? So many questions, so little time.

The RCMP in British Columbia are investigating the teenage administrator of a Facebook group that urged members to “get them steel toes ready” and kick a redhead.

The group – called “National Kick a Ginger Day, are you going to do it?” – had nearly 5,000 members and put schools and the RCMP on heightened alert Thursday to the possibility of redheaded children being assaulted. In one case, a redhead in Prince George, B.C., was kicked 18 times before being allowed to go home.

“It’s very disturbing,” RCMP spokeswoman Constable Tammy Douglas said yesterday. “Whenever you get a group, especially a large group of people like that, who are trying to incite violence toward a group of people, based on something as simple as the colour of their hair, it’s pretty disturbing.”

The idea for the group appears to have stemmed from an episode of the popular animated television show South Park. In the episode, the character Eric Cartman launches a campaign against “gingers” and calls them disgusting and inherently evil…

The day the group devoted to kicking a redhead came in the middle of Bullying Awareness Week.