Tag: Sea Monkeys

My wife and I were in Toys R Us a few weeks ago helping my daughter pick out doll clothes for her Cabbage Patch Kid. In the science toy area, they had a pretty good selection of Sea Monkey stuff, and I was very tempted to snatch several items up as waves of childhood nostalgia swept over me.

I changed my mind at the last minute, reasoning that I still hadn’t opened the Mr. Potato Head I bought at Kaybee a couple of days before. Now I’m glad I didn’t know after Boing!Boing! linked to an LA Times story that establishes beyond any doubt in my mind that the inventor of Sea Monkeys is an active promoter of racist hate theories, and that it is very like that some of the profits from the purchase of Sea Monkeys finds its way into the hands of groups such as the Aryan Nations (which will need the money after they lost a recent $6.3 million lawsuit after security guards employed by the Aryan nations beat up a black couple outside the group’s Idaho compound).

The weird thing is that Sea Monkeys inventor Harold von Braunhut is ethnically Jewish, which didn’t stop him from saying at a 1995 Aryan Nations meeting that Jews are “the bacillus of the decomposition of our society.” Actually it isn’t unheard of to find ethnic Jews, though rarely practicing Jews, among hate groups. If I remember correctly from Deborah Lipstadt’s book, Denying the Holocaust, one of the prominent Holocaust deniers is a non-practicing Jew.

Regardless, I think I can do without Sea Monkeys until there is absolutely no possibility that my money’s going to get funneled to a hate group.