Picture of the day

From some bullshit protest, a picture that sums up for me every single trust fund anarchist, smashing up a storefront in the name of whatever: some early twenties asshole in designer, pre-ripped skinny jeans and sandals, raging so hard against the police that their trendy white sunglasses fall off and they sweat up their $120 faux-vintage t-shirt. I bet she was screaming something about corporations when this all went down.

Fuck all these G-20/Greek protest people, the police cannot beat them hard enough.

Positive trends

We all worry about the Klan and other fringe white supremacist groups. Are they doing OK? Is membership on the rise? Is this vital part of America still thriving? In recent years that answer has sadly been a definitive "no". But thankfully that trend is reversing.

According to the SPLC, there has been “a 244 percent increase in the number of active Patriot groups in 2009, growing from 149 groups in 2008 to 512 groups in 2009. Newsweek also notes that recent years have seen a resurgence in membership in the Ku Klux Klan:

Fear of “the other” has long fueled hate crimes, from the torture and lynchings by the Ku Klux Klan beginning in the late 1800s, to the violence of the 1950s and ’60s, to the virulent anti-immigrant groups today. In 2008 the Census Bureau announced that whites will make up only half the U.S. population in 2050. “That was a big deal,” says the SPLC’s Potok. In recent years white-power groups mushroomed and the Klan reversed declining membership.

Gee, I wonder what triggered that rise? /sarcasm Oh sure, black President and all, but who knew that statistics projections and mathematical models from the Census did some of the heavy lifting as well. I thought we were all supposed to be in a "fear the Census they're collecting information for some nefarious means" mode, not a "boy, they do have some useful tools to fuel my racism" mode.

I shouldn't give all the credit to the half of this country that elected a black and the method by which we apportion our representative government. Who can forget the role conservative media sources have played in stoking flames and portraying whites as some aggrieved minority?

Now I know some are going to jump right to the tea baggers and the tea party movement and say "Are they counting them in these figures too?" I'm guessing not. But if there's one thing we learned about them over the past few days is that they're too focused on porn and bestiality to focus too hard on the racism part. Isn't that always the way? Plus they've got that Turner Diaries style militia to build in Oklahoma, more time to spend claiming kinship with the confederacy, and they've got to dangerously co-opt the military. Busy, busy, busy.

So congratulations to America. We have responded to a historical election and continued economic problems in the way we know best: with dim-witted hysteria and by retreating into fringe racist organizations with such staggering speed that it alarms non-profits that track that sort of thing. Well done.

Broken In Brief: Man to market puppies based on cute breed name, unholy science

GREEN BAY—Today area dog breeder Stephen Walden announced that he was about to undertake an extensive operation to breed hundreds of dogs for the mass consumer market, based entirely on the cleverness of the breed name he thought up.

“It has become apparent to me that Americans are no longer satisfied with mere Labradors and retrievers,” said Walden in his announcement in the local Penny Saver. “No, they must have some breed name that is so cute and frilly and so sugary sweet that in damn near rots your teeth out. I am of course referring to labradoodles, yorkiepoos, schnoodles, poochons, and various and sundry abominations against God. It is in this vein that I would like to announce my newest creation: the Bagel. Orders will be taken at $500 bucks a puppy.”

When contacted for further comment, Walden was quick to admit that the proposed combination, that of the Lord’s two cruel jokes on dog-loving mankind, the basset and the beagle, didn’t sound in the least bit like a good idea. But he noted that in these tough economic times and with some new cutesy named “-oodle” breed cutting into his golden retriever puppy business every week, that simple marketing warranted this new step, creating a horrible new breed be damned.

Walden hopes to have the new dogs ready for sale after the gestational process is completed, “whenever that is”, and anticipates families regretting their purchase and lamenting their trend-based animal buying within a month after taking the dogs home, when the animals begin to exhibit symptoms of a long, painful series of debilitating genetic shortcomings.

Quote of the day

John de Nugent on trying to distance his sector of the white supremacist movement from that of James von Brunn, the man who shot up the Holocaust Museum yesterday.

De Nugent called von Brunn a genius but described the shooting as the act of “a loner and a hothead.”

“The responsible white separatist community condemns this,” he said. “It makes us look bad.”

I'm not one to quibble with the accuracy of that statement as, yes, shooting up a Holocaust Museum, or really any museum or just any place in general, makes white supremacists look bad. But what exactly are the things that make white supremacists look good? I'm going to need that pointed out for me. Maybe they're running some sort of after school reading program for disadvantaged white kids or maybe some sort of free day care where they entertain children with hand puppet renditions of the Turner Diaries. But otherwise I'm pretty sure that nothing the white power/neo-nazi/fascist movement does makes them look particularly good.

One thing though, after this shooting, the Tiller murder, and the Unitarian Church shooting, the shotting of Pittsburgh policemen, not to mention the Oklahoma City bombings, Montana Freemen, and Waco incidents of the 90's, isn't time to start taking that DHS report on right-wing terrorism a little more seriously? I'd certainly be better than denouncing it as nonsense and as liberal fascism against decent Americans, like what happened when word broke of the report. Just a thought.