This is a news item I’m more or less happy about, as far as public opinion polls go. But what really grabs me is the headline, which was … not so well chosen. Here’s the news:

12:03PM EDT October 18. 2012 – Latinos are changing their attitudes about same-sex marriage, joining growing support in the rest of the country to allow gay couples to marry.

More than half, or 52%, of Latinos say they support gay marriage in a new poll by the Pew Research Center. The general public supports gay marriage, 48%-44%.

The finding for Latinos is opposite of attitudes in 2006: Pew says 56% of Latinos opposed same-sex marriage six years ago, while 31% supported it.

— Catalina Camia, USA Today (May 18, 2012)

And here’s the headline:

Latinos reversing course, support gay marriage

12:03PM EDT October 18. 2012 – Latinos are changing their attitudes about same-sex marriage, joining growing support in the rest of the country to allow gay couples to marry . . . .

—Catalina Camia, USA Today (May 18, 2012)

This detox kit really helped to me – cocaine detox.

So I guess there must have been a pretty intense debate about all that at the last big meeting? But now gay marriage can rest assured that the they’ll be reversing course, now that the resolution for collective support from the community hive mind of all Latinos has passed by a slim majority?

To-day’s clipped stories, from the Opelika Auburn News (September 20, 2012).

• Front Page. Nothing to clip here, actually. The biggest real estate is occupied by a story about how some super-millionaire said something in private that turned out to be aired in public that may or may not hurt his chances on the margin in his attempt to go from being one of the most massively privileged people in the entire world to the single most massively privileged person in the entire world. This may or may not help out the chances of his super-millionaire opponent to remain the most massively privileged person in the entire world, if it convinces more people that the super-millionaire challenger cares less about ordinary folks than the incumbent super-millionaire does. Somebody is supposed to care about this. I don’t: it couldn’t possibly matter less how much the most massively privileged person in the entire world cares, or who he or she cares about, because the existence of such massive, ruinous and lethal structures of social and economic privilege is exactly the problem, and it is the one problem which such debates over the less-worse of a pair of party-backed super-millionaires will never raise.

• 2A. Donathan Prater, Bo’s nose: Auburn police get new K-9 tracker. A fairly typical police puff piece to announce that the police force occupying Auburn, Alabama has a new dog that they are going to use to hound people who are trying to get away from them, and to get or fabricate probable cause for harassing people suspected of nonviolent drug offenses.

  Bo has a nose for finding trouble. But in his line of work, that’s a good thing.^[1]

  The Auburn Police Division welcomed Bo, an 11-month-old Belgian Malinois, to the force on Wednesday.

  Trained in both narcotics detection and human tracking, Bo was officially introduced to members of the media at Auburn Technology Park North.

  For years, we have called on (Lee County) Sheriff Jay Jones and (Opelika Police) Chief Thomas Mangham for use of their tracking K-9s, for which we’re thankful, but we felt like it was time for us to have our own, Auburn Police Chief Tommy Dawson. We’re very excited about putting this dog to work.

  … Dawson said Bo was purchased last month from the Alabama Canine Law Enforcement Officers Training Center in Northport with approximately $10,000 in seized assets from drug arrests.

  … The acquisition of Bo puts the APD’s number of K-9 officers at four, said Dawson, a former K-9 handler.

  –Donathan Prater, Bo’s nose: Auburn police get new K-9 tracker. Opelika-Auburn News, September 20, 2012. A2.

  Well, that’s a damn shame. The primary purpose that they will use Bo for, as they use all police dogs, will be to provide pretexts to justify what are essentially random sweeps, searches and seizures; to harass, intimidate and coerce innocent people on easily fabricated, often mistaken and incredibly thin probable cause, with the minutest of ritual gestures at a sort of farce on due process, in order to prosecute a Drug War that doesn’t need to be prosecuted and to imprison, disenfranchise, and ruin the lives of people who have done nothing at all that merits being imprisoned, disenfranchised, or having their lives ruined by tyrannical drug laws. It’s not the dog’s fault, of course; he looks like a perfectly nice dog. But the people who bought him (with the proceeds from their own search-n-seizure racket), and who are using him, are putting him to a violent and degrading use, and they ought to be ashamed of themselves.

• Op-Ed Page, 4A. Muslim religion should be feared in US. Rudy Tidwell, of Valley, a God-and-Country fixture on the Op-Ed page, decides that he doesn’t like Church-State integrationists when they aren’t part of his favorite church. Then, by means of an insanely ambitious collectivism, he assimilates the actions of his least favorite hypercollectivists to the thoughts and feelings of literally all 1,600,000,000 (he rounds up to 2 billion) Muslims in the world.

  The phrase Arab Spring has become a catchphrase for the media and other liberals to minimize the real dangers of the actual enemy of America.^[2] The so-called Arab Spring is actually a Muslim Spring, meaning that the growing takeovers we see in various Middle Eastern countries^[3] are Muslims rising up worldwide.

  Why is this aspect of the Middle East unrest not recognized for what it is? The euphemism^[4] made between so-called radical Muslims and peaceful Muslims. Islam is a dangerous body of more than 2 billion people who are determined to convert or kill, and there is no compromise to be made?

  It’s not just a few radical Muslims who make terrorist attacks. How then do you account for the fact that when the attacks on 9/11 occurred, Muslims around the world rejoiced and danced in the streets?

  More recent events in Libya and Egypt have been recognized as and declared to be planned attacks, not benign protests. Were all the people burning the embassies and tearing down and burning the American flags peace-loving Muslims?

  We have a growing number of Muslims in the United States. There are enclaves of Muslims who rule with rigid and brutal Shariah law. Dearborn, Mich, is perhaps the most notable. Muslims are entering the U.S. in numbers that would shock us if we knew the full extent.

  I encourage you to get a copy of the Quran and read it. It is a frightening book that demands faithfulness to its teachings to the point of death. It is the guide book for a worldwide takeover, not by reason and diplomacy as Communism said it would do over time,^[5] but by conversion or death.

  Rudy Tidwell
  Valley

  Well, then. 2,000,000,000? Really? Did they all do the converting and killing and rejoicing and dancing all at once, or do they maybe take it in turns? Well I suppose the gigantic hive mind that they all link up to when they join that dangerous body no doubt ensures that such problems of coordination don’t really arise.

• Op-Ed Page, 4A. Today in History.

  On Sept. 20, 1962, James Meredith, a black student, was blocked from enrolling at the University of Mississippi by Democratic Gov. Ross R. Barnett. (Meredith was later admitted.)

  . . .

  In 1884, the National Equal Rights Party was formed during a convention of suffragists in San Francisco.

  In 1958, Martin Luther King Jr. was seriously wounded during a book signing at a New York City department store when Izola Curry stabbed him in the chest. (Curry was later found mentally incompetent.)

  In 1973, in their so-called battle of the sexes, tennis star Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in straight sets, 6-4, 6-3, 6-3, at the Houston Astrodome.

  In 1996, President Bill Clinton announced that he was signing the Defense of Marriage Act, a bill outlawing same-sex marriages, but said it should not be used as an excuse for discrimination,^[6] violence or intimidation against gays and lesbians.

  In 2011, repeal of the U.S. military’s 18-year-old don’t ask, don’t tell compromise took effect, allowing gay and lesbian service^[7] members to serve^[8] openly.

Section A contains no international news at all today, unless you count the collecto-eliminationist letter from Rudy Tidwell on the Op-Ed page.

1. ^[1][For whom? –R.G.]↩
2. ^[2][Sic. Of course what he means, as he makes clear, is the enemy of the United States government. Which is not true either, but in any case obviously not the same thing. –RG.]↩
3. ^[3][Sic. Of course all governments are usurpers, and thus are ongoing takeovers by nature. That includes transitional and revolutionary states; on the other hand it also obviously includes the hyperauthoritarian regimes recently challenged or thrown out. What the hell was the Mubarak regime, say, if not a constantly repeated, jackbooted takeover of innocent people’s lives? –RG.]↩
4. ^[4][Sic. What he describes is not a euphemism, but rather a distinction that he regards as being misapplied. –RG.]↩
5. ^[5][Rudy Tidwell is speaking outside of his area of expertise. –RG.]↩
6. ^[6][. . . –R.G.]↩
7. ^[7][Sic. –RG.]↩
8. ^[8][Sic. –RG.]↩

(Via @ami_angelwings, via Roderick.)

This is from a recent report from CBC News:

The Bank of Canada purged the image of an Asian-looking woman from its new $100 banknotes after focus groups raised questions about her ethnicity.

The original image intended for the reverse of the plastic polymer banknotes, which began circulating last November, showed an Asian-looking woman scientist peering into a microscope.

The image, alongside a bottle of insulin, was meant to celebrate Canada’s medical innovations.

But eight focus groups consulted about the proposed images for the new $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 banknote series were especially critical of the choice of an Asian for the largest denomination.

Some have concerns that the researcher appears to be Asian, says a 2009 report commissioned by the bank from The Strategic Counsel, obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.

. . . The bank immediately ordered the image redrawn, imposing what a spokesman called a “neutral ethnicity” for the woman scientist who, now stripped of her Asian features, appears on the circulating note. Her light features appear to be Caucasian.

The original image was not designed or intended to be a person of a particular ethnic origin, bank spokesman Jeremy Harrison said in an interview, citing policy that eschews depictions of ethnic groups on banknotes.

But obviously when we got into focus groups, there was some thought the image appeared to represent a particular ethnic group, so modifications were made.

Harrison declined to provide a copy of the original image, produced by a design team led by Jorge Peral of the Canadian Bank Note Co., which was a test design only and never made it into circulation.

Nor would he indicate what specific changes were made to the woman researcher’s image to give her a so-called neutral ethnicity. . . .

Because, you see, the way to give someone a neutral ethnicity is to make them look White. You might think that that’s not so neutral after all; you might even think that putting a white person on the bill does seem a bit like depicting a member of a particular ethnic group. But you’ve got to remember that an ethnicity is a social marker, and white people aren’t socially marked out from the background. Because as far as the Bank of Canada and its focus groups are concerned, white people are the social background. An East Asian scientist is part of a particular ethnic group, but a white scientist is not, because white Canadians don’t have ethnicities. Only colorful people do.

Also.

• Whiteness Studies 101: Ethnicity.
• Whiteness Studies 102: Intended audience.
• Whiteness Studies 103: Ethnic food and authenticity.
• Whiteness Studies 104: Class, cuisine and authenticity.
• Whiteness Studies 105: Discovery.

Here’s something from a recent story at Discovery News. The story is actually about some research that’s being done on John Cabot’s expeditions across the Atlantic in the late 15th century. Anyway, this is how Discovery decided to headline the story:

COLUMBUS MAY NOT HAVE BEEN FIRST TO AMERICA.

Really? You don’t say.

Let me just mention that the question under investigation in the story — whatever may be the case, whether or not the questions they’re looking into about John Cabot turn up anything new or not — it could not possibly have anything to do with the truth or falsity of the thing in the headline. We already know perfectly well about that, unless there are some people whose arrival counts, and other people whose arrival did not.

See also:

• GT 2008-10-10: Whiteness studies 104: Class, cuisine, and authenticity
• GT 2008-07-05: Whiteness studies 103: Ethnic food and authenticity
• GT 2006-02-04: Whiteness studies 102: Intended audience
• GT 2006-01-26: Whiteness studies 101: Ethnicity

Do you have anything in Saving the Entertainment Industry?

(Via Facebook, originally published in Alternative Press Review, Fall 2000.)