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Filtering the Inauguration

Cartoon. Frame 1 shows an Internet hosting company traffic monitor, as a huge overhead pipe passing through filter rings connected to meters reading, in sucession, Spam, Porn, Free Music, and Terror. The pipe ahead of the Spam filter is bulging and about to explode. One of many cables from the input of the pipe runs into Frame 2, where it enters the back of a laptop. The laptop is operated by a white-robed Ku Klux Klan member, who is typing 'He is not of the White race, and our country is not for HIM! We shall cleanse'.

I was going to title this Spam in a Klan, but decided it would give too much away. On the day Obama's victory was announced, one of my customers phoned urgently about problems with his Web site. One of these turned out to be a spamspike.

We do sometimes get these, his hosting company's owner told me, and spam typically shoots to ten times normal level. And this spike, he continued, was hate-mail and death-threats against Obama, courtesy of the American Far Right. Perhaps in my drawing I'm being unfair, symbolising them as I did: if so, I apologise to the Ku Klux Klan.

But not, I feel, to all of it. Read down to the end of the Imperial Klans of America International Headquarters page. It is scary.

I can never remember whether to say "Klux" or "Kux". But now it's easy to remember, because Wikipedia tells me the name is from κύκλος, Greek for "circle". Also, I have never been inside an Internet hosting company. So some details in my drawing may be wrong.