Millions of Americans oppose SOPA and PIPA because these bills would censor the Internet and slow economic growth in the U.S.

They removed all references to Sturgis. Her photo doesn’t appear in the yearbook, her name doesn’t appear on a list of graduating seniors, there’s no mention of the academic honors she racked up.

Like Constance McMillen—another lesbian student who had the nerve to stand up for herself and to be herself—Sturgis was retaliated against by the small-minded bigots who run her school.

Time for an accountability moment: the website for the Wesson Attendance Center is here. Ronald Greer is WAC’s principal and you can email him here. Oscar Hawkins is WAC’s high school principal and you can email him here. The school’s phone number is (601) 643-2221. The school’s fax number is (601) 643-2458.

Copiah County School District spokeswoman Martha Traxler refused to comment on the school’s reason for excluding Sturgis from the senior page, and referred all questions to Copiah County attorney Olen Bryant, Jr.”

Martha Traxler’s email address is martha.traxler@copiah.ms. Olen Bryant Jr. works for Bryant & Rutland, PLLC, whose website is http://www.olenbryant.com/; they have a contact form linked under “Email Us” and their number is 601-894-4555.

By the way, Mississippi has a Human Development Index of 0.799, putting it underneath Kazakhstan at 0.804.

Another of Dan’s readers has written a fabulous “crib sheet” letter, in case you find yourself wordless at this egregious treatment of this young woman.  To make it easier to find and use, it’s reproduced below:

To Ronald Greer and Oscar Hawkins;

The most powerful and cruel way to dehumanize someone, to make them both invisible and unreal, is to take away their name. You erase their identity and their individual self-ness, that tiny flame we were all born with which makes us known to each other and to ourselves. Many powerful and terrible people have known this; concentration camp victims were given numbers in place of names, African American slaves’ names changed depending on the whim of each new master. These are serious and outrageous examples, and yet I think they are appropriate. Wesson Attendance Center’s complete failure to mention graduating senior Ceara Sturgis does not only withhold from her the same respect, the same honor that other students received when they were pictured, and named, celebrated. It is dangerous, because it was motivated by fear and hate, and it encourages others to also think of Ceara as a non-person. Remember the youth in your school who look to you for examples on how to treat their fellow human beings. Make the honorable, courageous choice, and right this wrong.

Sincerely yours,

Wheee!

I’ve always wanted to do metal sculpture, but have never before found a class for it.  The local junior college had a class, but every time I’ve signed up for it, it’s been canceled.

So, week one was mostly a “how not to kill yourself, or other people” intro of the various equipment in the studio.

I also had an adventure going into local steel and scrap yards in quest of things to turn into art.  Note to self: perhaps the middle of a lightening storm is NOT the best time to be standing in a junkyard with 30 foot towers of aluminum on every side…just saying.

This week I got to play with cutting torches and grinders.  It’s so great.  Love it.  Interestingly, the bit of steel that I was using to learn the torch, got super groovy looking as I was practicing, and I think it may be my first actual bit of metal art.

Next week we do welding and plasma cutters.  I’ve started sketching out designs on the metal that I’ve purchased for my piece.  I need to get pics.

Now, if only I could find a comfy pair of steel toed boots, I think my happiness with my latest obsession would be complete.

In some accounts, the recession is even described as the “great leveler”…. But the outlook is not so cozy when we look at the effects of the recession on a group generally omitted from all the vivid narratives of downward mobility — the already poor.

“A Homespun Safety Net”

So far, despite some temporary expansions of food stamps and unemployment benefits by the Obama administration, the recession has done for the government safety net pretty much what Hurricane Katrina did for the Federal Emergency Management Agency: it’s demonstrated that you can be clinging to your roof with the water rising, and no one may come to helicopter you out.

“Is It Now A Crime to Be Poor?”

In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually been intensifying as the recession generates ever more poverty. So concludes a new study from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, which found that the number of ordinances against the publicly poor has been rising since 2006, along with ticketing and arrests for more “neutral” infractions like jaywalking, littering or carrying an open container of alcohol.

via Metafilter

Best. Press. Release. EVER!

They hail from Austin, but Dallas natives claim them as their own…as Dallasites tend to do with things we like. Every time one of the favorite characters made an appearance, the audience clapped and cheered, but the guys seem to know the audience is going to do that, and the dialogue was spaced to allow for it.

The writing, fast paced dialogue, and costumes have only gotten better in the decades that Joe and Jaston have been defining the small town of Tuna, and this show was no exception.  I thought  was going to piddle, I laughed so hard when they came out dressed as showgirls.  Show girls pretending to be female impersonators.  Complete with snowman breasts and a giant turkey butt on one, and spinning flower boobs on the other.  Hysterical.

All of our old favorites were there, but a few new characters got added: Anna Conda – harridan performer/hustler from the days of the first Brat Pack, a tough thug named Shot who got his nickname because Frank shot him in the bottom when he was a baby, Charlene’s 4 new babies, and of course Elvis number 42, and Elvis number 11.  (You can’t do Vegas without Elvis.)

Aunt Pearl strikes it rich and discovers adult movies, Vera Carp has her thumbs threatened by loan sharks, and the Baptists find joy in rubber sheets and bathing suits.  All in all, it was a really fun way to spend the evening.

If you get a chance to see them on tour, you should go.  You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll go out and buy a squirt gun for your favorite Baptist.

Instructables, the community craft blog of the handy set, has moved to a closed pay-only model, and the timer is ticking for legacy accounts. After 90 days from implementation rollover, people who do not pay for an Instructables “Pro” account will have their accounts “crippled”. Non-paying accounts will no longer be able to view entire instructables at once, print out projects or get a PDF, have a “favorites” list, and most perniciously, people won’t be able to view “secondary” images in instructable steps that have multiple images. (Even if you happen to be the person that created it.)

Some creators suggest that this new pay model breaks the Creative Commons license that most writers used on their projects, but Instructables says that creators don’t understand that the CC applies to everyone *except* the site where the content is published.

For my part, I’m removing my content from Instructables and will republish it elsewhere.  For those of you who would like PDFs of the projects, please drop me a line or message here, and I’ll email them to you until I can get the projects republished.

For the record, there are a lot of reports listing Yettaw’s name as being spelled “Yeattaw”, so I’ve added that tag as well. He also seems to have a mostly unused travel-blog under the name John7children, with just a few pictures of the Great Wall. Someone with that same name on ebay recently purchased a couple of cell phones without contracts, a camera phone that looks to be the same model that shot the pictures of himself wearing the flippers he used to get to Mrs. Kyi’s house, and a breathing trainer.

Oh…but wait…the story just keeps getting weirder:

Apparently, John and his first wife divorced, and he got custody of their 6 kids. He remarried, to a woman named Betty, but reportedly, Betty wouldn’t let the first wife’s kids live in her house, so those four kids, ranging in age from 17 to 10) lived in a trailer in the woods. John apparently just left the kids there alone when he went to Asia.

Very odd, indeed. (As a snarky aside, what sort of evil stepmother refuses to let the first wife’s kids live in her house? And what sort of man marries a woman who makes his kids live in a trailer in the woods? I mean, wtf?)