Russian neo-Nazis mistake bubble blowers for gay pride marchers, beat them up

The Moscow Times, eternal font of all weird Russian things, has this dispatch from the motherland:

Young people who gathered to celebrate spring by blowing bubbles at an annual flash mob in central St. Petersburg were attacked by a group of suspected neo-Nazis who mistook the gathering for a gay pride event, flash mob organizers said.

Some 500 people stood blowing bubbles on the steps of Gorkovskaya metro station and in the surrounding Alexandrovsky Park at about 4 p.m. Sunday — the agreed time for the start of the flash mob — when about 30 men ran up and started beating them and firing rubber bullets.

Several people fell to the ground before the attackers fled at the sight of approaching OMON riot police officers. A reporter saw officers detain at least one attacker. Police also detained about 30 bubble-blowers for five hours on suspicion of walking on the grass, a charge that they denied, organizers said.

Emphasis mine. True story: I've actually been vaguely threatened with arrest by Romanian police officers because I was standing on the grass (an Eastern European euphemism for mud, as far as I can tell). I think they were shaking me down for a bribe (or at least sizing me up/priming me for one), though eventually they left me alone.

In this specific case, I think the, uh, "mix-up" was probably genuine and not directed on high, but I think the Kremlin deserves ultimate responsibility for the rise of Russian neo-Nazism generally. And not just for indirect reasons like a poor economy and the government's political scapegoating of immigrants; rather, the Russian is literally training them:

Human Rights researchers in Moscow have published documents showing "Nazi skinheads are being encouraged, organized, and used by Russia's ruling circles in their own interests." And Isvestiya reported that "Nazi skinheads from an openly fascist organization, the NNP (People's National Party), were being trained at the Moscow OMON special-purpose police detachment facilities and that they were being trained specifically by OMON coaches." Several years ago Russian historian Vladimir Ilyushenko asserted that "some parties view skinheads as their reserve. The process of encouraging fascist sentiments in Russia is steered by government officials."

Overreach of the day

A professor at Tufts has an op-ed in the NYT in which he laments the increasing regimentation and scheduling of children's lives, framing it around the idea that some school districts are looking to hire – *shudders* – "recess coaches." All well and good, until he gets to this part (emphasis mine):

Now that most children no longer participate in this free-form experience — play dates arranged by parents are no substitute — their peer socialization has suffered. One tangible result of this lack of socialization is the increase in bullying, teasing and discrimination that we see in all too many of our schools.

Huh?! First of all, I see no link or evidence presented. But even so, it's at least possible that bullying and teasing are up (though I doubt it) – but discrimination? Seriously? I grew up in the 1990s so hey, what do I know about new-fangled kids these days, but I sort of doubt that there's more racism, homophobia, and anti-semitism on today's playgrounds than, say, oh...any time in the past??

Gay men: protecting you from dying from karaoke in the Philippines

The NYT, in an article whose premise is too ridiculous to summarize (I'll try: Filipinos get really violent about their karaoke songs):

But in karaoke bars where one song costs 5 pesos, or a tenth of a dollar, strangers often rub shoulders, sometimes uneasily. A subset of karaoke bars with G.R.O.’s — short for guest relations officers, a euphemism for female prostitutes — often employ gay men, who are seen as neutral, to defuse the undercurrent of tension among the male patrons. Since the gay men are not considered rivals for the women’s attention — or rivals in singing, which karaoke machines score and rank — they can use humor to forestall macho face-offs among the patrons.

In one such bar in Quezon City, next to Manila, patrons sing karaoke at tables on the first floor and can accompany a G.R.O. upstairs. Fights often break out when customers at one table look at another table “the wrong way,” said Mark Lanada, 20, the manager.

“That’s the biggest source of tension,” Mr. Lanada said. “That’s why every place like this has a gay man like me.”

Jews and taxes in Berlin, ca. 1900

Arnold Kling writes about a book called Capitalism and the Jews, says some interesting things about a link between Keynes' economic theories and his anti-Semitism, but here's an unrelated fact that I liked:

By [1900], Jews, who constituted about 4 percent of the inhabitants of Berlin, paid 30 percent of the municipal taxes.

Harry Reid's hopeless isolation

So as you surely know by now, Harry Reid said, during the 2008 campaign, that Obama was electable due to his lack of a "Negro dialect" and light skin tone. This is of course course literally true – Obama is just white enough (culturally and genetically) that he's clearly the anti-Willy Horton – but the word "Negro" has thrown a lot of people into a tizzy. But honestly, I don't think the crime is so much that Reid said something that's mildly offensive – it's that he said something so hopelessly out of date. Calling someone a "Negro" isn't an insult, it's just old-fashioned, and in a way that someone as powerful as Harry Reid shouldn't be. It indicates a sort of out-of-touchness with the world that shouldn't be acceptable in politicians, but is inevitable with that many years of "service." When's the last time the man engaged with the world outside of DC and North Dakota Nevada politics?

Eastern European inferiority complex

The NYT's website is currently featuring an interesting article about an ethnic German politician in Romania, and it touches on something that I've always found interesting about Eastern Europeans: they have a tremendous inferiority complex vis-à-vis the West. The article is about Klaus Johannis, mayor of the town of Sibiu (Hermannstadt auf Deutsch), who very well might become the country's prime minister.

Mr. Johannis also benefits from the positive stereotypes Romanians associate with the German population, known as Transylvanian Saxons, who have called the region home since the 12th century.

The Saxons, known in German as Siebenbürger Sachsen, are considered hard-working, precise and uncompromising, an attractive mixture in a country tired of mismanagement and corruption, and one of the hardest hit in Europe by the economic crisis. It also does not hurt that the country experienced some of its best moments under German kings more than a century ago, even though the monarchs were unrelated to the local German population.

“I think it’s a real advantage that he’s German,” said Bianca Florea, 18, a student, as she passed through the main town square in Sibiu on Friday. “Well, not exactly German, but Saxon.” Asked why, Ms. Florea responded, “We Romanians are a bit lazy, that’s my opinion.”

Romania's once large German minority mostly moved back to the Fatherland (sold by Ceaușescu to West Germany for a couple thousand bucks each), so Johannis is a bit of a novelty. Despite its power, the Eastern European inferiority complex apparently doesn't override Eastern European pessimism:

But like most of the dozen residents interviewed here, she was skeptical about Mr. Johannis’s prospective move to Bucharest, despite praising his work as mayor.

“He could go there and do a good job for a while or he could be a puppet for others,” Ms. Florea said. Mr. Johannis belongs to none of the major parties, but instead to the small German Democratic Forum, which represents the 60,000 ethnic Germans remaining in the country.

A teachable moment

You may have seen this story about a black professor of African-American history at Harvard who was arrested while he was trying to break into his own house, but I'll bet you didn't read this far down:

Professor Gates said Tuesday that he did bring up race during the confrontation but that he was not disorderly. He also said he wanted to make a movie about what had occurred and take other steps to keep it from happening to someone else.

The Telegraph spouts the Chinese government line on Urumqi Uyghurs

To provide a counterpoint to what I wrote earlier today, Peter Foster at the Telegraph is reporting from Urumqi that the Chinese government's story checks out:

There was a presumption among the foreign media - made from afar as correspondents scrambled to get to Urumqi - that most of the 156 victims of Sunday’s riot were Uighurs. The implication being that they had been killed by security forces - another Tiananmen, if you will.

This never quite stacked up, as very few witnesses reported that the police had opened fire. In fact most reported the use of batons, electric prods and tear gas and other non-lethal methods to disperse the riot.

And why, if security forces had been responsible for the bulk of the deaths, would China be facilitating such unprecedented access to hospitals, holding press conferences (planned for later today) and allowing reporters to tour the city.

There are a couple problems I have with what he is saying. First of all, earlier in the piece he talks about how the Chinese government has "corralled the large international media presence in a single hotel," but that doesn't appear to him to be a sign that the government has something to hide.

But more importantly, where is he getting his information? He repeats some Chinese government numbers – "of 274 patients being treated in the People’s hospital 233 were Han" – but he admits that he got them straight from the government and that he hasn't been able to find any "firm details." Could it be – just maybe – that the "unprecedented access to hospitals" is actually the government trying to...I dunno...hide something?!

And why is there no mention of the president of the World Uyghur Congress' accusation that there are over 500 deaths, mostly Uyghurs? Surely Rebiya Kadeer is not a totally unbiased source, but then again, neither is the Chinese government.

Given that the Christian Science Monitor did a whole story on how difficult sources were to find in Urumqi and how residents and scholars absolutely refused to speak to the foreign press, I'd be curious to know what Peter Foster's secret is to reporting on what the CSM believes is unknowable to Westerners at the moment.

Urumqi death toll may be as high as 500, mostly Uyghurs?

Exiled Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer, accused by Beijing of orchestrating this weekend's violence, says she believes the true death toll is more than 500:

Chinese authorities have accused Kadeer of inciting violence between Muslim Uighurs and ethnic Han Chinese, in which at least 156 people have been killed. The riots broke out Sunday in China's Xinjiang region.

Kadeer disputes the number of fatalities, saying she believes at least 500 people have been killed in the riots.

Interestingly, the AP in this article doesn't mention that the 156 figure comes from the Chinese government, despite mentioning Kadeer's opinion of the purported death toll.

Previous Urumqi riots coverage here, here, and here.

Rebiya Kadeer has a pretty interesting story herself, summarized in this Times of India article:

Kadeer has emerged as a somewhat unlikely foe of China's government. In the 1980s and '90s, she became a symbol of the prosperity that China's newly launched market reforms were creating after decades of Communist poverty. The entrepreneurial mother of 11 built up a successful trading company and was named to a prestigious government advisory body. Government officials often took visitors to the department store she founded in Urumqi to show that Uighurs were also getting rich.

Also, in following with my investigation of who exactly has been the victim of the violence (the Chinese government claims it's mostly innocent Han Chinese, the Uyghurs claim it's their people), that same Times of India article gives Kadeer's opinion:

She said she and her organizations mourn the loss of life of both Uighurs and Han Chinese, but she estimated that more than 90 percent of those killed have been Uighurs.

Anti-Uyghur propaganda from Xinhua

Xinhua, the official Chinese press agency, has a hilarious piece of propaganda up today. In response to the demonstration by Uyghurs in Urumqi that allegedly turned lethal (which I've covered in two posts), Xinhua has some statements supposedly by Uyghurs involved in the violent brawl between Uyghurs and Han Chinese that sparked the protests this weekend in Urumqi. The whole article is pretty funny, but here are some highlights:

"The rioters used our injuries as an excuse for their violence," said Atigul Turdi, 24, who was injured when she was running out of the scene of the fight on June 26 in Xuri toy factory in Shaoguan City, Guangdong. "I firmly opposed the violence in the name of taking revenge for us." [...]

"I believe the government will handle the brawl appropriately," Turdi said. "Why did the rioters destroy our beautiful and peaceful Xinjiang region in such cruel manners?" [...]

Turdi said she would stay in Guangdong to work after recovery. As one of the first workers to arrive at Xuri factory from Shufu County of Xinjiang on May 1 [a big Chinese holiday], she missed the happy days to work with her colleagues harmoniously. [...]

"They have damaged my health and ruined my prospect to find a good job. I have no idea why the rioters claim to be pursuing happiness for us."

This part, though, is the scariest. The Chinese have worked very hard in cultivating the image of Uyghurs as Islamic terrorists, in an attempt to get the US to buy into their oppression of this Muslim people. It's not unlike what Putin did with the Chechens and the Uzbeks did with the Adijan massacre – both quite successfully.

Xinjiang Communist Party of China (CPC) chief Wang Lequan said Monday the riot in Urumqi revealed the violent and terrorist nature of the separatist World Uyghur Congress leader Rebiya Kadeer.

"The riot has destroyed the spiritual support with which the terrorist, separatist and extremist forces cheated the people to participate in the so-called 'Jihad'," Wang said. "The incident also revealed Rebiya's nature of fake human rights, fake democracy, true violence and true terrorism."

Fortunately for the Uyghurs, the West does not appear to be inclined to believe China's accusations of homegrown terrorism among its ethnic minorities (at least not any more). When you accuse the Dalai Lama of suicide bombings, you kind of lose your credibility.

Urumqi update – death toll and media reporting

Yesterday (and throughout the day today) I posted about the unrest in Urumqi, the capital of the Uyghur region of China known as Xinjiang. Since then I've been very interested in the death toll, and the Western media's reporting of it. The Chinese state media continues to claim that over 100 have been killed (156 is the latest figure), although it hasn't specified how many of those were rioters, how many were the victims of rioters, and how many were police. The NYT article says that an American living in Urumqi saw the violence but saw no signs of deaths, and it does seem a bit odd that a protest involving only about 1000 protesters would result in over 100 deaths.

Despite these incongruities, the Western media has generally reported the figure without much qualification, and it figures prominently in headlines and subheads about the event. The Times article does a passable job, reporting the number along with its source (the Chinese government), but doesn't directly address the fact that there isn't much evidence that that many people actually died, and doesn't really discuss who died. The Guardian is completely uncritical, and reports the number as straight fact without even mentioning the source, nevermind that the source has obvious prejudices. The BBC is a little better, reporting the figure uncritically but at least mentioning that it's unclear who died.

The Christian Science Monitor gets the award for most candid coverage, admitting the difficulty in reporting facts right in the headline: "Sources in Urumqi? They’re (very) hard to come by." They also accurately portray the difficulty in teasing out who were the victims and who were the aggressors:

The key question is: Who died? Muslim Uighur demonstrators, cut down by the police, as Uighur exile groups claim? Or innocent Han Chinese bystanders, butchered by a mob of Uighurs, as the government-owned media are making out?

I should mention that the Christian Science Monitor ceased publication of its print edition a couple of months ago, and is now a web-only publication (with the exception of a weekend magazine, I believe). Just keep that in mind when someone tries to tell you that the death of the printed newspaper will spell the end of foreign reporting.

Uyghur riots in Urumqi

There's been unrest among the Uyghurs in Urumqi, China over the weekend. Urumqi is the capital of the Xinjiang, a massive province in the west of China, and home to the Uyghur people, a non-Han minority which has accused China of trying to Hanify its homeland:

Uighurs are the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang but are a minority in Urumqi, where Han Chinese make up more than 70 percent of the population of two million or so. The Chinese government has encouraged Han migration to the city and other parts of Xinjiang, fueling resentment among the Uighurs. Urumqi is a deeply segregated city, with Han Chinese there rarely venturing into the Uighur quarter.

Xinjiang is an absolutely enormous province – it takes up one-sixth the size of China and is larger than the entire nation of Mongolia – and the Chinese government is scrambling to turn it majority Han, so that if one day they lose their iron grip on the country, they'll have one more excuse not to let the Uyghurs, who are more closely related to the Turkic Central Asian peoples than to the Han Chinese who rule the prosperous coastal regions in the east, secede.

Update: I wouldn't take this at face value, but Reuters is reporting that the Chinese state news agency is reporting some deaths caused by Uyghur rioters. First they claimed "three ordinary people of the Han ethnic group" were killed, but later amended that to one police oficer and "a number of innocent members of the public." I suspect what probably happened is that the Chinese propagandists realized that they'd gone too far in stoking ethnic tension by accusing the Uyghur rioters of killing Han, so they backtracked. I'd be surprised if any police officers or innocent Han civilians were killed.

Update II: The NYT is now reporting that Chinese officials are putting the death toll at over 100 (!!), however neutral observers say they haven't seen any bodies in the streets (which would be expected if that many people died). Also puzzling is the fact that news agencies put the number of protesters at about 1,000, which would mean that one in ten protesters was killed...which doesn't seem likely.

Update III: The aforelinked NYT article says that Xinhua has upped the death toll to 156, and that the Chinese have learned their lesson from recent events in Iran and have disabled Twitter (along with the rest of the internet):

Local Internet service was largely disabled, and online bulletin boards and search engines across China were purged of references to the violence. The social networking service Twitter, which effectively rallied demonstrators in Iran last month, was also disabled. China Mobile, the nation’s largest cellphone provider, curtailed service in Urumqi, and cellphone calls from some Beijing numbers to the area were blocked. But Chinese television carried images showing some of the violence.

Update IV: Enough of this. I made a new post that concentrates on the death toll and the Western media's coverage of the protests.

Dying on the floor of the Senate

So I know that when two old geezers almost die during an inaugural luncheon you're supposed to act solemn and respectful, but my only feeling is contempt for people who feel so entitled to their job that they remain in office so long after their health has clearly precluded them from serving effectively. Do they honestly think that they – with their seats guaranteed to their parties – are really so indispensable that some other toe-the-line Democrat couldn't do it just as well?

It's ridiculous that they're still in office, but not at all surprising. Each successive wave of Kennedys seems to feel more entitled than the last, and all the pre-death eulogies and paeans to the glory of the Kennedy dynasty aren't making Ted Kennedy's ego any smaller. And then there's Robert Byrd, former Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan, who as late as 2001 was on Fox News talking about "white niggers."

Kwanzaa: dead or "more relevant than ever"?

Michael Moynihan of Reason says Kwanzaa is dead and proclaims good riddance, whereas Michael Eric Dyson in a Washington Post "guest voice" proclaims that Kwanzaa is "as relevant and necessary now as it's ever been." Dyson doesn't put up much of a fight, deftly avoiding saying that Kwanzaa is particularly popular, only that it's "relevant" and "necessary." Even his uncited and seemingly high number of 40 million is of people who "embrace" Kwanzaa – I can only imagine he means that's how many people celebrate it, but it's an odd choice of word. I sure would be interested to see his source, though, on the number of Kwanzaa revelers.

Parallels between Indian and American gun control laws

A few days ago I wrote about how gun control laws hampered Mumbai hotels' ability to properly defend their guests, and not soon after India's business community – led by tech multinational Infosys' chief security office – petitioned the government for the right to bear arms, including automatic weapons. The Indian government's aversion to permitting weapons seems to run so deep that even armed police officers were reluctant to shoot at the Mumbai terrorists.

That got me to thinking about the roots of India's strict gun control laws, which led me to this op-ed by an Indian gun owner, in which he quite eloquently details the colonial roots of modern-day Indian gun control policy. The British were especially vigilant in disarming the natives, and peaceful Gandhi himself said that "history will look upon the [gun control] Act depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest" of the crimes of the British in India.

The history of gun control in America follows a similar path – after the Civil War, states began enacting laws disarming freed slaves, and as a Reason book review tells it, and the first gun licensing and permitting laws were "passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers... [and] never intended to be applied to the white population," as one Florida judge said at the time.

As with American gun control laws, which are mainly championed today by non-racist mayors of heavily-black urban areas, India has lost the underlying reason for the laws, and yet, the vice is as tight as ever. The malevolent and racist British were replaced with the uncompromising license raj, and the gun controls laws have stuck. Like in the US, where big city mayors advocate gun control despite the laws' obvious failure where they would seem to be needed the most, Indian politicians are trying to prevent a problem that doesn't exist: legal guns being used for illegal purposes. By the late '80s the Indian government was tightening its grip on legal arms markets, banning almost all imports – though as Singh's op-ed points out, black market guns in India are cheaper than legal ones, so there's really no incentive at all for anyone to buy weapons through legal channels. And sure enough, the Mumbai terrorists are reported to have had connections with Mumbai's underworld, and that's supposedly where they got their guns from.

Hopefully this appeal by Mumbai's business community for increased access to arms will break the traditional Indian authoritarian approach to gun control, but judging from the past experience, it doesn't seem likely.

The NYT on the black vs. African-American debate

The NYT usually, as far as I can tell, uses the term "black" instead of "African-American." The latter sounds a bit self-conscious and overly PC these days, with the former seeming to win over among blacks themselves. But I found this excerpt from an article about the riveting (not) discussion of which private elite school the Obamas will send their kids to, where the Times goes totally schizoid:

Washington is typically a socially segregated city, but the schools the Obamas are considering appeal to the elite across color lines. (Mr. Holder and Ms. Rice, the two Obama advisers, are African-American.)

Sidwell administrators say its student body is 13 percent black. Georgetown Day and Maret officials say their schools are 20 percent African-American. (Officials at the Laboratory Schools in Chicago say the population there is about 10 percent black.)

And for many black parents and students, the buzz has been thrilling. Dylan McAfee, an African-American girl in second grade at Georgetown Day, met Mrs. Obama last Monday and has been star-struck ever since. “I touched her hand and she smelled like cherries,” she said.

The pattern we have here is African-American/black/African-American/black/black/African-American. I know what the idea is – to avoid word mirrors by not repeating the same word so many times – but it's just a little jarring to see two words repeated so often that are usually mutually exclusive in a given text.

The NYT rehabilitates the payday lender

The New York Times Magazine has a fascinating and uncharacteristically libertarian feature called "Check Cashing, Redeemed" – pretty self-explanatory. In it, Douglas McGray traces the history of Nix Check Cashing – a "ghettoized" bank that's become the biggest in Southern California. "Ghettoized financial services," as one expert calls it, is an $11 billion industry in America. Through the story of Nix, the author discovers that the appeal of check cashing is the simplicity of the transactions. Traditional banks are seen as tricky and unreliable:

But he pays a fee to cash his paychecks. Then he pays even more to send a Moneygram to his wife. There’s a bank, just down the street, that could do those things free. I asked him why he didn’t take his business there.

“Oh, man, I won’t work with them no more,” Enriquez explained. “They’re not truthful.”

Two years ago, Enriquez opened his first bank account. “I said I wanted to start a savings account,” he said. He thought the account was free, until he got his first statement. “They were charging me for checks!” he said, still upset about it. “I didn’t want checks. They’re always charging you fees. For a while, I didn’t use the bank at all, they charged like $100 in fees.” Even studying his monthly statements, he couldn’t always figure out why they charged what they charged. Nix is almost certainly more expensive, but it’s also more predictable and transparent, and that was a big deal to Enriquez.

Marlo Lopez had no broad gripe with banks, but his experience was similar. He moved to the United States from Peru a couple of years ago (with a visa) and got a job as a mechanic at a food-processing plant. Lopez opened his first bank account last summer. A couple of months later, out for dinner, he overdrew his account by 18 cents and got hit with a $35 penalty. It was his fault, he said; he thought he had more in the account than he did. Still, losing that money all at once unsettled him. He kept the account but returned to cashing his checks at Nix.

Check cashers benefit from their smaller scale and lack of bureaucracy that keeps banks from adapting to the needs of the poor:

Nix’s cashiers also try to never say no. Take photo identification. A lot of customers don’t have a driver’s license. Nix stores have accepted high-school yearbooks. They’ve been known to cash a McDonald’s paycheck if someone comes in wearing a McDonald’s uniform. They even have a phone in the lobby, so a cashier can call a customer’s job site and then patch the customer in, listen to him talk to his supervisor and decide if they sound like a legitimate boss and employee. Nix says he loses as much as 5 percent of his check-cashing revenue on bad checks, but it’s worth it, he says, to be known as a place that says yes.

And at least some of the customers use the high-interest loans in financially sound ways, in order to avoid even higher fees for nonpayment of debts. Nix explains why he went from check cashing to the more villified payday lending:

In the late 1980s, when a few check cashers started to accept postdated personal checks and advance cash for a fee, Nix thought it was a sleazy scheme. He thought so even after California legalized the practice in 1997. “I didn’t want to be a loan shark,” he told me. “But the reality is, customers wanted it.”

He told Lagomarsino why. A bounced check, a fee to reconnect a utility, a late-payment fee on your credit card, or an underground loan, any of those things can cost more than a payday loan. And then there are overdraft charges. “Banks, credit unions, we’ve been doing payday loans, we just call it something different,” Lagomarsino says. “When it starts to get used like a payday loan, it’s worse.”

The spread of Nix has challenged payday lenders, check cashers, credit unions, and other "ghettoized finance" outlets to lower their rates, and seems to have energized the industry:

Kinecta’s executives decided to keep the payday loan and change the terms. Starting with three stores in the spring, and eventually across the entire chain, Nix is increasing the maximum loan from $255 to $400. They are dropping the fee from 18 percent ($45 for a two-week $255 loan) to 15 percent ($60 for a two-week $400 loan). And they will rebate a third more ($20, in the case of a $400 loan) into a savings account, after six months, if you pay your loans back and don’t bounce any checks. People get payday loans because they have no savings, Lagomarsino explained. After six months, heavy payday borrowers will accumulate a small balance. Enough, she and Nix say they hope, to convince them they can afford to save more. Later, they say, they intend to drop fees further for borrowers who always pay back on time.

Once Kinecta finishes rolling out its new payday loans, Lagomarsino has promised to open Nix’s books to outside researchers and publish data on its profits and losses. In the meantime, Kinecta will be under enormous scrutiny. “Some people said, ‘Why does it have to be so visible?’ ” Lagomarsino told me, and laughed. “One or two branches wouldn’t make a difference. This is the beauty of buying Nix. They were the largest alternative financial-services company in Southern California. If they change their fee structure, everyone has to change.”

The Wikipedia article has an interesting comparison of payday loans to different forms of late payment fees.

One black man vs. hundreds of thousands of gay couples

Radley Balko at Reason's blog has an interesting post up about the paradox of last night's elections: while blacks helped Obama become the first black president in US history, they also happen to have been far more bigoted than whites when it came to gay rights. Though a single black man might have become president, hundreds of thousands (millions?) of gay Californians lost rights, likely because of the historic turnout by black Americans. Radley Balko sums it up:

In California, the Proposition 8 ban on gay marriage actually failed among white voters, 51-49. It was the 70 percent support from black voters that put the measure over the top.

Florida's ban would have passed among white voters 60-40. But it passed among blacks 71-29. [...]

Kind of a sad irony if in helping achieve one civil rights milestone, last night's historical black turnout also helped perpetuate state-sanctioned discrimination against gay couples who wish to marry.

Edit: It turns out, this is actually not the case – despite blacks being by far the most likely minority to vote yes on Prop 8, it seems that at 10% of California's population, there weren't enough of them to have matter. Were blacks to vote in the same proportions as the rest of Californians, the outcome still would have been the same.

The Kremlin's neo-Nazi ways

Something that the Russian regime often uses to legitimize its rule is railing against "extremism." Often, the extremists are Islamic terrorists (which the Kremlin often creates). But sometimes, the extremists are neo-Nazi fascists. The ideology is supposedly on the rise in Russia, and Russian cities are indeed dangerous places for "blacks" (a generic Russian catch-all for Caucasians, Central Asians, sub-Saharan Africans, and whatever other unfortunate non-European looking person happens to find themselves in non-Siberian Russia). But who really benefits from this? The Kremlin seems to think it does, because according to the Huffington Post, it supported several of these skinhead groups:

Human Rights researchers in Moscow have published documents showing "Nazi skinheads are being encouraged, organized, and used by Russia's ruling circles in their own interests." And Isvestiya reported that "Nazi skinheads from an openly fascist organization, the NNP (People's National Party), were being trained at the Moscow OMON special-purpose police detachment facilities and that they were being trained specifically by OMON coaches." Several years ago Russian historian Vladimir Ilyushenko asserted that "some parties view skinheads as their reserve. The process of encouraging fascist sentiments in Russia is steered by government officials."

Showing that the alternative in Russia to Putinism is fascism is a good way of making Putinism look good. And keeping fascism alive is near and dear to the Kremlin's heart, because one of the big founding myths of the Soviet Union was its fight against the Nazis. As little sense as the fascism/communism dichotomy makes, it was very important to the USSR during World War II and in the years afterwards. While obviously Russia's terrorist machinations are nearest to the siloviki's hearts at the moment, keeping the fascism thing on the backburner is a good way to hedge against unexpected hiccups in legitimacy.

Ethnic cleansing in South Ossetia

Now that the war's over, you'd think that South Ossetia would calm down. Right? Wrong. According to reports by Human Rights Watch, relayed by Radio Free Europe, the South Ossetian government and Russian troops have been engaged in a systematic campaign to burn the houses of South Ossetia's sizable Georgia minority (which, before the war, made up one-third of South Ossetia's population).

"For a month we have observed the systematic destruction of houses in Georgian enclaves and villages in South Ossetia," says Tatyana Lokshina, a Russia researcher with Human Rights Watch (HRW).

HRW has also released satellite images that show "widespread torching of ethnic Georgian villages" in the breakaway region.

The South Ossetian authorities don't deny what's going on, and de facto President Eduard Kokoity has implied that the ban on Georgians returning to their homes in South Ossetia is revenge for when Georgians supposedly did the same thing to South Ossetians after the wars in the early '90s.

In addition to expelling Georgians from their homes and then torching them, Georgian civilians have also faced torture, abuse, and "extrajudicial executions" in camps where they're being held.

"We have learned that hundreds of civilians from Georgia were detained in holding cells in South Ossetia. These included women and the elderly," HRW's Lokshina says. "We know that these people were held in inhuman conditions, crammed together in one space. They were practically not fed. They were forced to work. They cleaned streets. The men were forced to bury the corpses of Georgian soldiers."

According to a September 21 report posted on HRW's website, detained Georgian soldiers were punched, kicked, beaten with hammers, machine-gun butts, and metal rods, and were burned with cigarette lighters, starved, and threatened with execution. At least one soldier was executed with a shot in the back of the head and other detainees were forced to carry and bury his body.

"After fleeing our village, we spent a week hiding in the forest," Jemal Khetagashvili, a former civilian detainee, tells RFE/RL's Georgian Service. "But then the Ossetians found us and arrested us. We spent 10-12 days imprisoned in Tskhinvali. They forced us to work, to clean the streets and sidewalks."