Katie Learns Star Wars Fans Have Her Covered

I'm really jammed for time right now, but this was such an interesting moment of solidarity I had to share it.

A young Chicago girl named Katie got intimidated and bullied by some boys at her school because she brought a Star Wars water bottle to school with her. Fearful of being an outsider and of being taunted, she began to hide from the problem, but her fearless mom took the problem in hand and the result was a galaxy of support for Katie and an online avalanche of appreciation.

Her mom posted:

"Katie loves Star Wars, and she was very excited about her new items. For the first few months of school, she proudly filled her water bottle herself and helped me pack her lunch each morning.

But a week ago, as we were packing her lunch, Katie said, "My Star Wars water bottle is too small. It doesn't hold enough water. Can I take a different one?" She searched through the cupboard until she found a pink water bottle and said, "I'll bring this.

"I was perplexed. "Katie, that water bottle is no bigger than your Star Wars one. I think it is actually smaller."

"It's fine, I'll just take it," she insisted.

I kept pushing the issue, because it didn't make sense to me. Suddenly, Katie burst into tears.

She wailed, "The first grade boys are teasing me at lunch because I have a Star Wars water bottle. They say it's only for boys. Every day they make fun of me for drinking out of it. I want them to stop, so I'll just bring a pink water bottle."

I hugged her hard and felt my heart sink. Such a tender young age, and already she is embarrassed about the water bottle that brought her so much excitement and joy a few months ago.

"Katie, it is okay to be different. Not all girls need to drink out of pink water bottles," I told her.

"I don't want to be too different," Katie lamented. "I'm already different. Nobody else in my class wears glasses or a patch, and nobody else was adopted. Now I'm even more different, because of my Star Wars water bottle."

Over 1,200 comments have been left in support of Katie, to encourage her to be herself and be strong, to realize she's not done anything wrong and to celebrate herself and not fear the witless taunts of foolish boys.

Thousands upon thousands of Twitter folk now rally to her. Many celebrities are picking up the banner too.

A Google blog search today brings some 300,000 hits mentioning her and her defeat of the bullies.

The official Star Wars blog celebrates Katie too:

The Force is strong with Katie.

We got your back, girl!

Obama's Biggest Mistake

Writer and historian Rick Perlstein nails it - Limbaugh uses one tactic, lies, which the Obama camp has failed to challenge, thinking it would be wrong to respond, to "drop to his level of uncivil discourse". But he's very wrong.

"We live in a mendocracy.

As in: rule by liars.

Political scientists are going crazy crunching the numbers to uncover the skeleton key to understanding the Republican victory [in the last primary elections].

But the only number that matters is the one demonstrating that by a two-to-one margin likely voters thought their taxes had gone up, when, for almost all of them, they had actually gone down. Republican politicians, and conservative commentators, told them Barack Obama was a tax-mad lunatic. They lied. The mainstream media did not do their job and correct them. The White House was too polite—"civil," just like Obama promised—to say much. So people believed the lie. From this all else follows.

---

"When it becomes "uncivil" to call out liars, lying becomes free.

And dammit, the essence of Obamaism as an ideology is that it is Uncivil to Call Out Liars.

So you find him at a press conference, the day after the midterm elections, saying with all apparent sincerity that he agreed the majority of Americans participated in a "fundamental rejection of his agenda"—who, that is, implicitly believe he raised their taxes.

When he really lowered them."

More here on the needed smackdown of media/political PR liars. And more here.

A stack of media headlines reading: "President Calls Limbaugh A Liar" would be a good start. The cost of doing otherwise should be vividly obvious.

The New E-Tomb

Because I could not Tweet for Death, Death kindly Tweeted me ....

One of the more popular design sites on the internet reports about the E-Tomb, powered by it's own solar panel, in great detail:



Faster and faster, we run to our digital heavens:

"We used to talk about the "digital divide" between rural and underserved communities v. the rest of the broadband-enable world. Now the digital divide is really a generational divide between younger generations raised in an electronic world of interconnected information who have no problem giving up their privacy to stay connected v. us cranky old geezers who just want to be left alone."