Bouphonia

Friday Hope Blogging

2012-02-10T17:30:00.000-08:00

In recent weeks, "conservatives" have proposed that cops should not be able to arrest people (i.e., men) for domestic violence unless they witness it, that U.S. school textbooks should be purged of references to slavery, and that we must act now to keep aborted fetuses out of our soft drinks. For some reason, I'm reminded of this old Onion article.

Much like "trangressive" music acts in any number of genres, social conservatives have been tying to outdo each other in striking shocking, uncompromising poses. And like any other form of witless adolescent attention-seeking, this eventually gets boring...not just for outsiders who wonder why the fuck these socially maladroit oddballs can't lighten up, but also for the target audience, many of whom are less true believers than lazy consumers exploring a fantasy. To extend the musical metaphor, today's social conservatives are a bit like teenagers who've abandoned Scandinavian black metal in favor of white-supremacist power electronics. For people who are committed to plumbing the depths of their own inhumanity, it's a new thrill that'll temporarily excite a jaded palate. But for most other people, it's the point at which extremity starts paying diminishing returns and 1970s singer-songwriters start sounding comparatively good.

My point being, this competition for political capital is inherently self-defeating for the simple reason that most people aren't really ruthless sociopathic assholes, even if it sometimes pleases them to pretend otherwise. The more Teabaggers flex what they imagine are their muscles, the less they overawe people. That's "power" for you. And I can only hope that they hold on to what's left of it long enough to pull the GOP's temple down on their own heads.

Meanwhile. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has come up with the daring theory that discrimination for the sake of discrimination is unconstitutional:

Reinhardt, joined by Judge Michael Hawkins, invoked two past U.S. Supreme Court rulings. One was a 1973 decision overturning a federal law that barred households of unrelated people, such as "hippie communes," from qualifying for food stamps. The other, in 1996, struck down a Colorado initiative prohibiting local governments from enacting civil rights laws protecting gays and lesbians.
In both cases, the high court said the government violates equal protection when it withdraws rights in order to harm a politically unpopular group or express disapproval of a vulnerable minority.

So it's the hippies' fault? I knew it. Even when I thought it was the gays, I knew it was the hippies.

Here's my favorite part of the decision:

Schools teach about the world as it is; when the world changes, lessons change. A shift in the State's marriage law may therefore affect the content of classroom instruction just as would the election of a new governor, the discovery of a new chemical element, or the adoption of a new law permitting no-fault divorce: students learn about these as empirical facts of the world around them. But to protest the teaching of these facts is little different from protesting their very existence; it is like opposing the election of a particular governor on the ground that students would learn about his holding office.

Washington has passed a same-sex marriage bill:

Governor Christine Gregoire plans to sign newly passed legislation on Monday to legalize gay marriage in Washington state, making it the seventh with a law on the books to recognize same-sex nuptials, her office said on Thursday.

Here's what Republican state representative Maureen Walsh had to say on the matter. Read it and weep.

You know, I was married for 23 years to the love of my life and he died 6 years ago. I think of all the wonderful years we had and the wonderful fringe benefits of having 3 beautiful children. I don’t miss the sex, and to me that’s kind of what this boils down to. I don’t miss that… I mean I certainly miss it, but it’s certainly not the aspect of that relationship, that incredible bond I had with that human being, that I really really genuinely wish I still had. And so I just think to myself: how could I deny anyone the right to have that incredible bond with another individual in life. To me it seems almost cruel.

See, that's a person who has an actual, functioning conscience. By contrast, someone who demands taxpayer funding for discriminatory policies is simply a constitutionally illiterate grifter. I'd really like to spend my declining years in a country whose media can tell the difference.

Speaking of which, what if bigots threw a tantrum and no one cared?

On "CBS This Morning," Thursday, jcpenney chief executive officer Ron Johnson, said the company "shares the same values" as DeGeneres and that the decision to have her as a spokesperson was a "no-brainer."

"We don't look at it like a controversy. One of the great things about America is people can speak their mind. And you know, the organization that believes one thing has spoken and it was great to see Ellen share her views yesterday. And we stand squarely behind Ellen as our spokesperson and that's a great thing. Because she shares the same values that we do in our company. Our company was founded 110 years ago on The Golden Rule, which is about treating people fair and square, just like you would like to be treated yourself. And we think Ellen represents the values of our company and the values that we share."

As part of its terrifying reign of environmental terror, the EPA is forbidding ships from dumping their waste in California coastal waters, just as France did when they removed the pillar of God-given rights and told you who you were and it became the guillotine!

A federal rule banning ships from flushing their sewage into the sea within 3 miles of the California coast was approved Thursday by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The prohibition, which will go into effect next month, means cruise and cargo ships will no longer be able to discharge treated or untreated effluent or gray water anywhere along the coast, a practice that regulators blame for spreading bacteria and disease in marine mammals, fish and people.

Five years after San Francisco transformed itself into a dystopian hellscape by restricting the use of plastic bags, its Board of Supervisors is preparing to pound a final eco-friendly nail into civilization's coffin:

Almost five years ago, San Francisco became the first American city to ban plastic shopping bags from supermarkets and chain pharmacies. Now the city is poised to expand that ban to all retail stores and restaurants within the city limits. Only certain products, like newspapers, fish, poultry, fresh flowers, and bulk goods are exempted from the ban. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to expand the ban, and it’s expected to be officially approved next week.

Soon, plastic bags will be illegal for everything but hi-def BDSM videos. What would the Founding Fathers say (Ben Franklin excepted)?

In related news, the Obama administration has just made it illegal to drink water while hiking in the desert Southwest:

As a Climate Friendly Park, Grand Canyon National Park's staff, partners and stakeholders have made a commitment to take a leadership roll in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and educating the public about what they can do to reduce their impacts on the park. In order to reduce plastics in the park's waste stream, litter along trails and walkways and green house gas emissions Grand Canyon National Park will soon be eliminating the sale of water packaged in individual disposable containers and encourages everyone to reduce, reuse, refill.

The inevitable next step? Restricting our intake of "unhealthy" foods in order to protect the coyotes who'll gnaw our bones after we die of thirst.

Toronto's tough-guy mayor Rob Ford has suffered a well-deserved humiliation:

In a stunning blow to Mayor Rob Ford -- who, on his first day in office in 2010 scrubbed the "Transit City" plan in favor of an ill-thought out and unfunded subway scheme -- the Toronto City Council has quashed his plans and resurrected the old one....

[Ford] ignored the host of transit experts who called his vision nonsense. He refused to take his plans to city council, bypassing the city’s supreme democratic body. He spurned the [Toronto Transit Commission] manager and TTC chair who dared to question him. But on Wednesday, council struck back, handing the mayor his worst defeat and rubbishing his transit blueprint.

Scott Walker and his cronies have some additional woes this week:

Nearly all of Wisconsin's Republican state lawmakers took the unusual step of signing a legal agreement in which they promised to not comment publicly about redistricting discussions while new GOP-friendly maps were being drafted, a newspaper reported.
The agreement was included in newly released documents in a federal lawsuit challenging the new district lines. Also included in the documents was a GOP memo outlining talking points that stressed anyone who discussed the maps could be called as a witness in the case. The memo also warned Republicans to ignore public comments about the maps and focus instead on what was being said in private strategy meetings.

As does Rupert Murdoch:

The editor of Rupert Murdoch's Times of London conceded today that the newspaper misled a British public inquiry in 2009 regarding an incident in which a Times reporter hacked into the email of an anonymous blogger who wrote about police activities....

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that the FBI if focusing its investigation into allegations that British tabloid employees, working for the U.S.-based News Corp., may have violated American law by paying police officers in exchange for news stories.

Rice University is experimenting with nonprofit textbook publishing:

According to Inside Higher Education, OpenStax plans to compete with pricey $200 hardback texts from for-profit publishers by offering digital books for five common introductory classes for free, starting with sociology and physics texts this spring. OpenStax is beginning with introductory texts because the information in them is relatively basic and less likely to change year to year. Publishers are frequently accused of filling their coffers by updating textbook editions at random and then convincing professors to adopt the new version. If the OpenStax plan works, the multi-billion-dollar textbook industry could be in trouble.

Vehicles became 14-percent more fuel-efficient over the last four years:

After what seemed like an eternity of mostly stagnation, average fuel economy for new vehicles has been going up in the United States. Researchers at the University of Michigan have conducted a study showing that for current model year vehicles, fuel economy is 14% higher than just four years ago, which might not sound like much, but it's much better than what we've got in the recent past.

Spain now has a second solar tower:

Clean tech company AROA recently installed their second energy-generating Solar Tulip power tower in Spain, and the soaring flower-shaped power plant just went online this week. The beauty of the system stems beyond the elegant solar energy capturing tower - the system is designed to be modular, unlike any other concentrated solar power (CSP) electrical generator out there. The system also uses much less water than steam solar generators, enabling it to conserve precious resources on its hot desert site.

This is a fascinating idea:

The Oral Citations Project is a strategic research project funded by a Wikimedia Foundation grant to help overcome a lack of published material in emerging languages on Wikipedia. The idea behind the project is a simple one. Wikipedia privileges printed knowledge (books, journals, magazines, newspapers and more) as authentic sources of citable material. This is understandably so, for a lot of time and care goes into producing this kind of printed material, and restricting citation sources makes the enterprise workable. But books - and printed words generally - are closely correlated to rich economies: Europe, North America, and a small section of Asia.

Word on the street is, Obamacare is forcing small businesses to set up fascist lactation chambers, which will almost certainly be presided over by gay communist lactation panels:

Tom Stemberg, co-founder of the Staples office supply chain, complained in a recent interview that the Affordable Care Act (known by opponents as “Obamacare”) will cost jobs by mandating that employers set up “lactation chambers.”

You can set this clever fellow straight by clicking here.

Oh, and lest I forget...the GOP is attacking contraception. In an election year. And a recession. For the benefit of a small and wildly unpopular base. I'm looking forward to their late October campaign against female drivers, which will be based equally on scripture and 1970s "Lockhorns" cartoons.

Now, then. The Moist Towelette Museum. Portable signs of rural America. Dr. Seuss: pedantic literalist. Gay gay gay! Vintage Mexican ads. Photos by Arthur K. Syer. And photos by E.O. Hoppé.

Impossible cameras. The song of a Jurassic katydid. The wooden work boats of Indochina. Anatomical cross sections made with quilled paper. And a gorgeous survey of advertising and commercial photography:

Broken houses (via things). Jewish children's books. Our three-dimensional moon. Polaroids by Mikael Kennedy. A scrapbook from Tajikistan. And images of the frozen Black Sea:

(Painting at top: "Hidak Bridges" by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 1921.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2012-01-27T08:50:00.000-08:00

In an important ruling, the Supreme Court upheld 4th Amendment privacy rights:

On Monday the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision protecting privacy in the digital age. In U.S. v. Jones, a unanimous Supreme Court held that the police and FBI violated the Fourth Amendment when they attached a GPS device to Antoine Jones’s car and tracked his movements for 28 days. While the case turned on the fact that the government physically placed a GPS device on Mr. Jones’s car, the implications are far broader. A majority of the justices acknowledged that advancing technology, like cell phone tracking, gives the government unprecedented ability to collect, store, and analyze an enormous amount of information about our private lives.

Congress has reauthorized the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act:

A coalition came together at the last minute to pass the legislation. With vital support from the White House, the group spanned traditional partisan lines and included leaders from conservation as well as the commercial and recreational fishing communities.

Initially, the discussion stalled on technical matters, as many debates in Congress do. In the end, however, the effort led to a well-considered compromise that balanced the many competing needs and pressures on our oceans. The linchpin was a new federal mandate promoting more sustainable practices on the water and embracing the usage of strong, science-based catch limits to restore and maintain fish populations at healthy levels.

It's better to preserve old buildings than to build new "green" ones:

[A] new report from the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Preservation Green Lab concludes that constructing new, energy-efficient buildings almost never saves as much energy as renovating old ones. Renovated buildings outperformed new buildings on energy savings in every category: single-family homes, multifamily complexes, commercial offices, “urban village” mixed-use structures, and elementary schools. Though the conclusion may seem counterintuitive in an age of ambitious LEED standards in many new buildings, consider that it uses more energy and creates more impact to construct an entirely new building than to fix up one of the same size for the same purpose.

In related news, protecting wetlands is better than restoring them:

Even after 100 years have passed a restored wetland may not reach the state of its former glory. A new study in the open access journal PLoS Biology finds that restored wetlands may take centuries to recover the biodiversity and carbon sequestration of original wetlands, if they ever do. The study questions laws, such as in the U.S., which allow the destruction of an original wetland so long as a similar wetland is restored elsewhere.

OMG COMMUNISM!

The U.S. Department of Transportation wants to give more weight to factors including affordable-housing policy in deciding which local mass-transit initiatives will get federal money....
Under the proposal, the agency would consider a project’s effects on air pollution, energy use, greenhouse-gas emissions and safety, and “social equity impacts” such as affordable housing and job creation.

One of Scott Walker's staff members appears to have struck a deal with investigators:

Two staffers who worked directly for Gov. Scott Walker while he was county executive were charged Thursday with illegally doing extensive political work while being paid by taxpayers to do county jobs.
One of the two, Darlene Wink, cut a deal with prosecutors under which she agreed to provide information in a related investigation about the destruction of digital evidence and to aid in further prosecutions.

Georgia will restrict harvesting of freshwater turtles:

The Georgia Department of Natural Resources Board of Directors today unanimously approved its first-ever state rules regulating the commercial collection of wild freshwater turtles. Georgia had been the only state in the Southeast without limitations on harvest or regulations on the export, farming and sale of native freshwater turtles. The new rules help address population declines of native southern turtle populations caused by unregulated harvest and export for international food markets.

Also in Georgia, a local rattlesnake roundup is being replaced with a wildlife festival:

The Evans County Wildlife Club is replacing its annual rattlesnake roundup with the Claxton Rattlesnake and Wildlife Festival, which will feature displays of the imperiled eastern diamondback rattlesnake and other native wildlife. Educational programs, entertainment and a variety of other activities will be offered at the event, held during the second weekend in March.

Make of this what you will:

Scientists from the University of Bristol have developed a soap, composed of iron rich salts dissolved in water, that responds to a magnetic field when placed in solution. The soap’s magnetic properties were proved with neutrons at the Institut Laue-Langevin to result from tiny iron-rich clumps that sit within the watery solution. The generation of this property in a fully functional soap could calm concerns over the use of soaps in oil-spill clean ups and revolutionise industrial cleaning products.

In other news, please take a few moments to read about Google's new "privacy" policy, if you haven't already. My personal opinion: Fuck these goddamn jackals in both eye sockets with 800 megatons of white-hot bituminous death. If you feel the same way, let them know. (But do it politely. Otherwise, you may end up getting targeted with ad content based on phrases like "fuck you goddamn jackals in both eye sockets with 800 megatons of white-hot bituminous death.")

You are here. Nearby attractions: The deep. The Ouleds-Nails. The Corricks. The aurora. Volcanes de papel. The Kazakhstan subway. And the Museum of Water:

Also: The voice of trees. The poetics of space. Josephine the singer, or the mouse folk. New hope for the dead. The riddle of the sands. And the work of fire:

(Photo at top: "Crystal Palace, Hyde Park" by Benjamin Brecknell Turner, 1852.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2012-01-20T11:34:00.000-08:00

A busy day, but perhaps I can get a few links posted all the same.

Obama administration approves rule that guarantees near-universal contraceptive coverage.

Over 80 mayors unite to support marriage equality.

Massachusetts passes law protecting trans residents.

Catholic leaders tell Gingrich, Santorum "to stop perpetuating ugly racial stereotypes."

Majority of Latina/o population supports reproductive rights.

A new four-lane superhighway to be built only for bikes.

Old electric car batteries to find second life on the power grid.

Army destroying last chemical weapons in Utah cache.

Why Obama rejected Keystone XL.

Over half of Germany's renewable energy owned by citizens and farmers, not utility companies. (h/t: Karin, who also sent me this: Solar power lights up Bangladesh.)

More than 40,000 square miles protected for Pacific Leatherback sea turtles.

Indonesia to set aside 45 percent of Kalimantan for conservation.

Levi's new forest policy excludes fiber from suppliers linked to deforestation.

SOPA and PIPA votes delayed indefinitely.

That's it for now. I hope to do things "properly" next week.

(Image at top: "Evening" by Caspar David Friedrich, ca. 1824.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2012-01-13T14:54:00.000-08:00

The United Methodist Church has divested its stock in the private prison system:

Religious collusion with destructive forces is a horrible thing to openly confess and even more difficult to break.
So, it was stunning to begin 2012 learning that the United Methodist Board of Pensions, the board that controls the investments of the United Methodist Church, decided not only to divest from CCA and GEO Group entirely, but to permanently put into place a screen that will not allow us to invest in the future into any corporation that has gross revenues of 10% or more from private prisons.

Meanwhile:

Craig Stowell fought with the U.S. Marines in Iraq in 2004 and now is fighting for the right of gays, like his brother, to marry in New Hampshire....
"When New Hampshire extended marriage to gay and lesbian couples, two years ago, he finally felt accepted. He finally felt like he belonged. Since that day 1,800 loving and committed gay and lesbian couples have married."

As the New Hampshire Legislature prepares to vote on whether to repeal the law, HB 437, Craig Stowell - who serves as the Republican co-chairman of Standing Up For New Hampshire Families - has launched an online campaign to keep the law as it is.

Also:

Nine Native Americans have served in the Minnesota state legislature since the state's founding, and all of them have been men. But on Tuesday, The Land of 10,000 Lakes chose via special election its first ever Native American woman to serve on its state legislature, and the first Native American lesbian to ever serve in any state legislature anywhere.

Apropos of which, the anti-gay zealot Mike Goeke asks an interesting question:

Homosexuality is the only sinful behavior that has a cultural identity and movement surrounding it. What other sin is encouraged to be celebrated? What other sin has a “pride” movement attached to it?

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say greed. And wrath. And bearing false witness.

So far, Girl Scouts of America seems to be shrugging off a boycott of its cookies by sex-obsessed busybodies:

Last October, Girl Scouts USA welcomed a 7-year-old transgender girl among its ranks. The organization released a surprisingly but welcomingly progressive statement: “Girl Scouts is an inclusive organization and we accept all girls in Kindergarten through 12th grade as members. If a child identifies as a girl and the child’s family presents her as a girl, Girl Scouts of Colorado welcomes her as a Girl Scout.”

The action provoked outrage among cissexist parents, who have been– at least, as it appears in pro-boycott videos– teaching their daughters that these transgender girl scouts threaten the safety of others and the integrity of the program. These parents and scouts have indicated that it’s now easy for young “boys” to rape girls, since they simply have to pretend to be transgender at age six, then rape and assault other girl scouts while sharing a tent with them. Because it’s that easy to be a sexual predator who pretends to be trans, with your parents’ support, when you’re barely old enough to read.

This just in: When your ideology obliges you to demonize seven-year-olds, it's a safe bet that there's something seriously wrong with it. If you want to reward GSA's good behavior -- or punish the boycotters' bad behavior -- consider donating to Girl Scouts of Colorado. Failing that, you could always buy some cookies.

The Obama administration has finalized a 20-year-ban on uranium mining near the Grand Canyon:

Today’s Interior Department “record of decision” establishes a 20-year ban on new uranium mining and mining of current claims without valid permits across 1 million acres (more than 1,500 square miles). The ban will protect Grand Canyon’s springs and creeks, as well as imperiled species like the humpback chub, from uranium-mining pollution.
“This landmark decision closes the door on rampant industrialization of Grand Canyon’s watersheds,” said Roger Clark of the Grand Canyon Trust. “Uranium mining imposes well documented and unacceptable risks to the people and natural resources of our region.”

In 2011, no rhinos were killed by poachers in Nepal:

"This is the first time in 29 years that Nepal has gone an entire year without a single poached rhino, and it’s a testament to the efforts of the Government of Nepal, WWF and many partners," said Barney Long, Asian species expert at WWF. "We hope the new year will bring additional good news from other countries like South Africa as they continue to crack down on rhino poaching."

And India has gone a full year year without any reported cases of polio:

"It's an incredible milestone for polio eradication," said Rod Curtis, a New Delhi-based specialist with UNICEF. "But complacency is perhaps the biggest threat to the program today. You could get down to the last three children in the world, but unless you [immunize] those kids, it could explode again."

Behold our best and brightest:

Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio got schooled at his own game while Congress is at recess. Smith, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, may have underestimated the trolling habits of Internet techies scorned by his Stop Online Piracy Act....

Vice found that Smith’s official campaign website featured a background photo of a lush forest scene–without a photo credit. After a quick search, they found the image belonged to DJ Schulte, a photographer who captured the scene in Bear Creek, Texas.

I blame Teh Gays.

Citizens in Wisconsin have gathered enough signatures to recall Scott Fitzgerald:

Recall organizers still have the rest of today and all day tomorrow to increase their margin to help fight off any challenges from Fitzgerald.

This is the one they said couldn't be done. The Democratic Party and United Wisconsin both passed on this opportunity, so one local citizen, Lori Compas of Fort Atkinson, started the recall against Fitz on her own.

The EPA has launched a new website that allows you to identify the largest greenhouse-gas emitters in your area:

Carbon pollution is pretty abstract for most people, and they don’t where it comes from and who’s responsible,” said David Doniger, policy director for the Climate and Clean Air program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “These kinds of right-to-know tools are very popular and can make a difference. Once people know the level of greenhouse gases in their backyards, they will demand to know what company officials and elected officials will do about it.”

German researchers are working on an alternative to animal testing:

"We're basically using a test tube to study the effects of chemicals and their potential risks. What we do is take living cells, which were isolated from human and animal tissue and grown in cell cultures, and expose them to the substance under investigation," explains Dr. Jennifer Schmidt of the EMFT. If a given concentration of the substance is poisonous to the cell, it will die. This change in "well-being" can be rendered visible by the sensor nanoparticles developed by Dr. Schmidt and her team.

In Lowell, MA, veterans rallied around an Iraqi woman whose restaurant was vandalized:

An area veterans group pledged to fill every seat in Babylon, a downtown Iraqi restaurant where owners feared hatred drove a man to throw a 20-pound rock through a window last Wednesday....
Ahmed Al-Zubaidi said the incident drove his wife to tears, and prompted her to question whether the family should close the restaurant. The show of support from veterans and the community drove her to tears of joy last night, he said.
"This solidarity gives us the courage to stand," said Al-Zubaidi. "There is no more fear in my heart because there are such nice people behind us."

Gordon Hirabayashi, a brave Japanese-American who refused to report to an internment camp during WWII, died this week in Canada at the age of 93. His argument against obeying an unjust power bears repeating, at the very least:

“If I were to register and cooperate… I would be giving helpless consent to the denial of practically all of the things which give me incentive to live,” he said then. “I must maintain the democratic standards for which this nation lives. I am objecting to the principle of this order which denies the right of human beings, including citizens."

Photographs by Adam Magyar (take the time to watch the video; it's gorgeous and oddly moving). A Man Escaped, or The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth. Abandoned love hotels. Photographs by Hein Gorny. Contemporary pinhole photography. The photographic collection of the Austrian Geographic Society:

(Painting at top by Brion Gysin, 1959.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2012-01-06T08:22:00.000-08:00

Civil unions are now legal in Delaware and Hawaii:

Several same-sex couples came together in the first minutes of New Year's Day in Honolulu to become the first in the state's history to enter into civil unions.
"We really don't want to wait any longer because we have been together for 33 years waiting for the opportunity and our rights and everything that goes with it," said Donna Gedge, who was with her partner Monica Montgomery, speaking to CNN affiliate KITV. "So why wait?"

Virginity tests are now illegal in Egypt:

Forced "virginity tests" on female detainees were ruled illegal in Egypt on Tuesday, after a court ordered an end to the practice.

Hundreds of activists were in the Cairo courtroom to hear the judge, Aly Fekry, say the army could not use the test on women held in military prisons in a case filed by Samira Ibrahim, one of seven women subjected to the test after being arrested in Tahrir Square during a protest on 9 March.

Jamaica's new prime minister is taking a stand against homophobia:

Jamaica's newly elected first female prime minister, Portia Simpson Miller, says discrimination against gay people is wrong.

"No one should be discriminated against because of their sexual orientation," Simpson Miller said during a recent election debate, adding that unlike her predecessor she would be open to appointing a qualified gay person to her cabinet.

Read more here: http://miamiherald.typepad.com/gaysouthflorida/2012/01/newly-elected-jamaican-prime-minister-portia-simpson-miller-a-strong-advocate-for-gay-rights.html#storylink=cpy

Ha ha ha:

After a four-year legal battle, a black Baptist church in South Carolina now is the legal owner of a building housing the infamous Redneck Shop, which operates a Ku Klux Klan museum and sells KKK and other racist clothing.

The Rev. David Kennedy, a long-time civil rights activist and pastor of New Beginnings Baptist Church in Laurens, S.C., told Hatewatch today he can’t wait to turn the racist landmark “into a place of diversity.”

Furthermore, ha ha ha:

When the conservative Maine Heritage Policy Center launched its political blog last month, newly hired chief executive Lance Dutson predicted in an editorial that “we’ll no doubt have kinks to work out along the way.”

Well, a big kink developed this week when other Maine bloggers pointed out that one of the center’s newly hired writers, Leif Parsell, has a long history of espousing white superiority and may even have ties to neo-Nazi organizations.
Those revelations led to Parsell’s firing on Tuesday, Dutson confirmed today to Hatewatch.

Isn't it odd how few neo-Nazis seem to understand that Hitler was a lefty? It's certainly not for lack of spending time on Free Republic.

Speaking of which, Obama has made four recess appointments, just like Hitler!

Obama's decision to recess appoint both these NLRB members and Cordray to the CFPB doesn't just put qualified people into the government—it enables the government agencies themselves to function. That functioning, not the specific individuals, was what Republicans hoped to obstruct. It goes without saying that the GOP will be outraged all over again, despite the fact that the last three Republican presidents all made recess appointments to the NLRB. Kudos to Obama for braving the outrage and doing what needs to be done to keep government working.

The EPA is creating jobs, just like Hitler!

A new report released today by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation highlights the job creation numbers — 240,000 full-time jobs — expected to come from achieving new pollution goals set by the EPA’s “Total Maximum Daily Load” restrictions. Finalized in December 2010, these rules require a 25 percent reduction of pollution flowing into the Bay by 2025 and have already spurred state and federal investment in stormwater mitigation projects, upgrades at sewage treatment facilities, addition of power plant smokestack scrubbers, and improvements to management of agricultural runoff and livestock waste management.

And scientists have discovered various new species on the seafloor near Antarctica, just like Hitler!

"Hydrothermal vents are home to animals found nowhere else on the planet that get their energy not from the Sun but from breaking down chemicals, such as hydrogen sulphide," said Professor Alex Rogers of Oxford University's Department of Zoology, who led the research. "The first survey of these particular vents, in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica, has revealed a hot, dark, 'lost world' in which whole communities of previously unknown marine organisms thrive."

Highlights from the ROV dives include images showing huge colonies of the new species of yeti crab, thought to dominate the Antarctic vent ecosystem, clustered around vent chimneys. Elsewhere the ROV spotted numbers of an undescribed predatory sea-star with seven arms crawling across fields of stalked barnacles. It also found an unidentified pale octopus, nearly 2,400 metres down, on the seafloor.

The last asbestos mine in Canada has gone bankrupt:

Production at one mine has been halted until it can get refinancing, and another miner – Thetford Mines, Que.-based LAB Chrysotile –filed for bankruptcy Wednesday, leaving no active operations in Canada.

The wood stork population in the Southeast is recovering thanks to the ESA:

The Center for Biological Diversity said today that the wood stork should be downlisted from “endangered” to “threatened” because its population has grown dramatically since it was protected under the federal Endangered Species Act. The change will not reduce the species’ legal protections, but is an important step toward full recovery and removal from the Act’s oversight.

“The beautiful wood stork is just one of hundreds of species the Endangered Species Act has successfully put on the road to recovery,” said the Center’s Marty Bergoffen. “From the brink of extinction, the wood stork multiplied to 12,000 nesting pairs in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.”

While we were busy debating whether it's government's place to repair crumbling bridges, China built the world's largest battery:

China just took a massive step forward for renewable energy as it flipped the switch on the world’s largest battery, which will help integrate a solar project and a wind farm into a smart grid. Capable of storing 36 megawatts hours of power and taking up the area of a football field, the giant battery bank was built as a joint venture between solar and electric car company BYD and the State Grid Corporation of China to improve a large wind and solar electric installation’s efficiency by 5-10%.

Electronic coupons save paper, which saves trees:

Do your coupons often end up scrunched up and tossed into your garbage (or recycling) bin? Think about this: an estimated 1.135 million trees are cut down and processed to print paper grocery coupons every month.

That is roughly equivalent to 2,500 acres of woods. A total of 13.62 million trees are used each year to print coupons.
These days, more consumers are discovering a way to reduce such paper use, while gaining more convenience and reducing clutter. Instead of clipping paper coupons, they are opting for electronic grocery coupons.

Last, John McCain has refused to pass the official torch of unelectable douchebaggery to Rick "Everyone Hates Me But Teabaggers" Santorum. Instead, he bestowed it on his old pal Mitt "Everyone Hates Me Including Teabaggers" Romney in this touching ceremony:

[McCain] grimaced when he was introduced, and as Romney delivered his own stump speech, an increasingly impatient McCain pulled up his sleeve and checked his watch. McCain gave his endorsement address without mentioning Romney’s Iowa win until the end. “By the way, we forgot to congratulate him on his landslide victory last night,” he said, laughing. Romney ignored him.

May they walk many miles together.

Meanwhile: Chromolithographs by E.L. Trouvelot. Prints by James Gillray. Watercolors by John Abbot. Paintings by Curzona Allport. Illustrations by Lee Brown Coye. Photos by Mel Rosenthal. Photos by Seiji Shibuya. And photos by Hugh Mangum:

In addition to which: London, 1753. Comic strips, 1898-1916. Sheet music, 1800-1922. Oregon, 1940. Nineteenth-century children's literature. Nineteenth-century performers on the Overland Trail. Night thoughts of a baffled humanist. An ABC of travel. The Yukon delta. Photos by Graciela Iturbide. And photos by Clint Grant:

Therefore: Medicine and Madison Avenue. Arte publicitario. Dogon blacksmiths. Oregon trademarks. Yiddish sheet music. Texas postcards. North American panoramas. Botanical New York. Pictures of children. Pictures of showgirls. The Rocket Book. And photographs by William Gedney:

(Photo at top: "Foreleg of a male diving beetle" by Spike Walker, 2011.)

Protect the Queen!

2012-01-02T16:29:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, someone published some racially insensitive commentary under Dr. Ron Paul's name while he was out defending the Constitution. Ever since then, the Democrats, the RNC, the media, ZOG and the rest of the usual suspects have been using a desperate "guilt by association" strategy to link Dr. Paul with the writings published for years beneath his name and above his signature.

Unfortunately for the statists, this slander is doomed to fail because no hard evidence supports it. Where's your 48 kHz ADAT recording of Dr. Paul expressing solidarity with the KKK? Where's your hi-def video of him burning a cross on a black person's lawn in June of 1980? Where are his white-power tattoos? On which Skrewdriver album does he sing backing vocals? Where's his tweet that says "I hate darkies and I don't care who knows it"?

Face it: In the absence of compelling evidence, all you Paul-haters have is a bunch of racially charged rants published under his name for his direct financial and political benefit.

Which amounts to less than nothing, because Ron Paul is no racist, as evidenced by the fact that he can't be a racist because he isn't one, period. Ron Paul's supporters aren't racists either. When they found themselves receiving newsletters containing these arguably offensive comments, they immediately complained that someone was writing potentially horrible things under Dr. Paul's name. And as we all remember, Dr. Paul promptly reassured his subscribers by apologizing publicly for the articles and severing all ties with the person or people he paid to write them. Most important of all, he conceded that as the captain of his soul and the master of his fate, the whole dreadful episode was nobody's fault but his.

And I'm sure we all recall how shocked Dr. Paul was when he started getting letters and phone calls from subscribers saying things like "thanks for giving us God's honest truth about the nigras!" Once again, he identified the cause of this misconception, took Full Personal Responsibility™ for it, and announced that he'd prefer to do without the support of people who were praising him for hateful views that he doesn't actually hold.

To the limited extent that none of this actually happened, it's possibly because not only did Ron Paul not not not write the newsletters, but he also didn't mail them. Why? Because no one subscribed to them. Why not? Because subscription lists are a form of collectivism and the USPS is an outpost of Soviet Russia, where the mail checks you. To imply that Dr. Paul would use The Socialized Mail despite his steadfast adherence to the consistent principle of principled consistency is utterly beyond the pale, even for his reptile detractors. Furthermore, it's quite possible that when his subscribers received the newsletters they left them sealed on purpose. They probably said, "To open this newsletter and read it would be to subject Dr. Paul to an interrogation of sorts. It runs the risk of vandalizing the private property of his thought, without giving him the opportunity to defend it against my accidental misapprehensions or — God forbid! — my inadequate purity of intent."

That's what I'd do, anyway. And I don't flatter myself that I'm unique in that regard. If I'm right, as we have reason to believe, then not only did Dr. Paul not write the newsletters but his supporters didn't read them and the whole thing's a teapot in a tempest.

This is not to suggest that Ron Paul's views are necessarily in perfect lockstep with those of the multiculturalist elite, especially as regards homos. But consider this: He's a product of an earlier era and a different culture. Surely you don't expect the poor man to transcend these early formative experiences through the self-interested exercise of Willpower and Rationality? He can't help how he was raised! Cut him some slack, for Christ's sake.

And remember, a vote for Paul is a vote for peace in our time. There's no other unelectable third-party candidate you can say that about, anywhere. And even if there were, that person probably has some baggage too. After all, nobody's perfect!

And now, let us never speak of this again.

UPDATE I: I was perfectly well aware when I put the careful thought and ran the grave personal risk into and of compiling this unexceptionable summary of facts that only moral pygmies could deny, that the aforementioned moral pygmies would not only deny them, but also put their inquisitorial zeal on display by attempting to torture my words into revealing some consequence, some omission or some agenda that I could then be said somehow to have overlooked or attempted to obscure. These self-appointed Witchfinders General believe that by literally plunging their needles into my arguments, they will find some rhetorical devil's mark that will excuse them from the sad duty of facing the uncomfortable facts that shroud them in guilt. Regardless, ipso facto and notwithstanding, I will continue to speak the truth and literally let the chips fall where they may.

UPDATE II: Given their Manichean zeal to act as Lord Inquisitors against principled voices of dissent -- no matter how calm, rational or impossible for a good-hearted person to disagree with -- one can easily imagine the sort of Kristallnacht my bland statements of demonstrable fact are even now driving the Enemy to plan and launch. This robotic devotion of literally brainless shills to falsehood and viciousness not merely as political tactics, but as supreme ends in themselves, is the litmus test that distinguishes the Obama era's ever-dwindling authentic humanity from hyperpartisan personality cultists. Suffice it to say that the binary thinking to which these apologists for evil are prone typifies everything that any reasonable person must concede is wrong with people like that.

UPDATE III: It pains me to imagine the lengths some people will undoubtedly go to twist my remarks here into something other than what I have already repeatedly stated that I intend them to be; viz., an honest assessment of a situation that others have not only failed to examine in any depth — for reasons we hardly need to guess at — but also to notice at a time when noticing them was in fact a moral obligation of citizenship, properly so called. Has it really come to this? Q.E.D.

UPDATE IV: What can one even begin to say when the putatively highest soi-disant "principles" of one's opponents are manifestly the mere delusions of situational ethicists who literally wallow in the entrails of the foreign babies they murdered by proxy for the greater glory of the assassins who slaughtered these innocents in their name? All one can hope is that if these cultist shills can't bring themselves to agree with me when circumstances ineluctably demand it, they can at least be honest about their motivations. They can say, "I don't care who the President hunts down and kills in this Brave New World of foreign adventurism; it's all worth it because some coal plant got closed down in Kentucky, even if that's probably just a prelude to invading Wales." Is that too much to ask? Apparently so.

UPDATE V: I consider this matter closed. Those who wish to beat this dead horse are welcome to chase their tails in perpetuity, or until their batteries run down.

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-12-23T12:06:00.000-08:00

The EU is tightening export restrictions on materials used for capital punishment and torture:

As Catherine Ashton, High Representative for the Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the Commission stated:
“[T]he European Union opposes the death penalty under all circumstances. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union states that no one shall be condemned to the death penalty, or executed. In this regard, the decision today contributes to the wider EU efforts to abolish the death penalty worldwide.”
Sodium thiopental, a chemical commonly used in the three-drug cocktail used in American lethal injection, can now only be exported from E.U. countries with prior authorization by national authorities. The decision will likely increase the difficulty faced by states of procuring the already scarce drug for use in their executions. In addition, the Commission announced that the import and export of electric shock sleeves and cuffs, instrumental in the use of the electric chair, are now wholly prohibited from import and export.

A federal judge has blocked several provisions of South Carolina's anti-immigrant law:

District Judge Richard Mark Gergel blocked three parts of the law, known both as SB20 and Act 69.

The first section blocked makes it a felony to transport or conceal a person "with intent to further that person's unlawful entry into the United States" or to help that person avoid apprehension.

A second section makes it unlawful for an adult to "fail to carry" an alien registration card or receipt.

And the final section blocked would have allowed local law enforcement with "reasonable suspicion" to detain any person the officers believe is in the United States illegally.

A U.S. appeals court has ruled that retaliation against whistleblowers is a RICO violation:

The court's opinion gives life to a provision in the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) that makes it a felony to retaliate against whistleblowers who provide information about corporate fraud to law enforcement officers.

The European Court of Justice has upheld the EU Aviation Directive:

The EU Aviation Directive, the world's only mandatory program to address emissions from aviation, will take effect in January 2012. Today’s decision is the suit’s final ruling in the Court of Justice, and the case will now return to the UK High Court, where airlines had originally brought the suit challenging UK regulations implementing the law . The UK High Court will implement the recommendations of the Court of Justice ruling.

Bank of America has generously agreed to pay out some money for something or other:

Hundreds of thousands of Black and Hispanic homeowners...were saddled with higher mortgage fees and interest rates during the housing boom than White borrowers, federal officials say.

Now, those borrowers may have a chance to get a part of that money back.

A $335 million settlement with Bank of America announced Wednesday is the largest fair-lending settlement in history.

Now let's never speak of it again.

The Kroger grocery chain claims that it will no longer carry Asia Pulp & Paper products:

"After an independent review, The Kroger Co. and its family of stores have decided to discontinue the sourcing of products from Asia Pulp & Paper," said a statement posted on the retailer's web site. "Kroger has informed APP of our concerns about the impact of their business operations on deforestation."

Behold the post-apocalyptic hellscape that is São Paulo, Brazil, five years after it defied God and Nature by banning advertising signage:

Within months, city authorities had removed tens of thousands of ads both big and small—much to the dismay of business owners, who said the ban would surely ruin them. Five years later, have all the businesses in São Paulo gone under? Hardly. In fact, most citizens and some advertising entities report being quite pleased with the now billboard-less city. A survey this year found that a 70 percent of residents say the Clean City Law has been "beneficial."

An Indian inventor has designed a new sanitary napkin for rural women:

When Arunachalam Muruganantham hit a wall in his research on creating a sanitary napkin for poor women, he decided to do what most men typically wouldn’t dream of. He wore one himself--for a whole week. Fashioning his own menstruating uterus by filling a bladder with goat’s blood, Muruganantham went about his life while wearing women’s underwear, occasionally squeezing the contraption to test out his latest iteration. It resulted in endless derision and almost destroyed his family. But no one is laughing at him anymore, as the sanitary napkin-making machine he went on to create is transforming the lives of rural women across India.

It's a fascinating story, so read the whole thing. (h/t: Peacay.)

Food aid organizations are increasingly sourcing local ingredients:

Andrew Young, co-founder of One Acre Fund, drives home the importance of this shift toward local ingredients, and of ultimately building agricultural capacity in regions facing food insecurity. For those who don't know it, One Acre Fund is working to create agricultural markets in Africa and in doing so, to develop a more sustainable solution to some of the problems that create the need for food aid in the first place. Here's what he tells the Guardian:
"Famine is preventable," said Young. "Every famine should be a blaring red siren, reminding us that we could prevent the next one. Africa has the capacity to be a food supplier to the rest of the world, if only we would invest in agriculture more."

The Madison, WI School Board has rejected a plan to start a sex-segregated charter school:

The proposal was defeated largely on grounds that the school was to use non-union teachers with little school board oversight. Although those issues predominated at the hearing, the ACLU of Wisconsin made sure that the school board could not ignore the gender equality issues.

Teh Gays have graciously apologized for ruining former Minnesota Senate majority leader Amy Koch's marriage by forcing her into an adulterous relationship:

We are ashamed of ourselves for causing you to have what the media refers to as an “illicit affair” with your staffer, and we also extend our deepest apologies to him and to his wife. These recent events have made it quite clear that our gay and lesbian tactics have gone too far, affecting even the most respectful of our society.

Edward Wegman's plagiarism made it into The Scientist's list of 2011's top five science scandals:

A controversial climate change paper was retracted when it was found to contain passages lifted from other sources, including Wikipedia. The paper, published by climate change skeptic Edward Wegman of George Mason University in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis in 2008, showed that climatology is an inbred field where most researchers collaborate with and review each other’s work. But a resourceful blogger uncovered evidence of plagiarism, and the journal retracted the paper, which was cited 8 times, in May.

Wegman stands a very good chance of improving his showing in 2012:

From the 2006 Wegman report to Congress, up to this year’s “Colour Theory and Design”, so much of Wegman and Said’s recent work demonstrates extreme reliance on unattributed antecedents, as well as numerous errors and incompetent analysis.

2012 marks the 200th anniversary of the Luddite revolts. Luddites at 200 is planning appropriate celebrations:

[B]eing a luddite today means being a sceptic about the dogma of technology as progress, not about denying the real benefits of some technologies. It means insisting that the crucial decisions about which technologies are developed are made democratically, not just imposed by corporations and technocratic elites. And it means standing up for our own ideas of what progress really is.

I hereby endorse this event and/or product. Speaking of which, I complained some years ago about the common pejorative use of the term "Luddite" on the left; I included an 1819 quote from William Cobbett that bears repeating here:

Society ought not to exist, if not for the benefit of the whole. It is and must be against the law of nature, if it exists for the benefit of the few and for the misery of the many. I say, then, distinctly, that a society, in which the common labourer...cannot secure a sufficiency of food and raiment, is a society which ought not to exist; a society contrary to the law of nature; a society whose compact is dissolved.

Roll over Charles Fort, and tell William R. Corliss the news:

A large metallic ball fell out of the sky on a remote grassland in Namibia, prompting baffled authorities to contact NASA and the European space agency.

The hollow ball with a circumference of 1.1 metres (43 inches) was found near a village in the north of the country some 750 kilometres (480 miles) from the capital Windhoek, according to police forensics director Paul Ludik.

Metal prices being what they are, it may be time to mine the Super-Sargasso.

A public service announcement: Please be aware, this holiday season, that It's a Wonderful Life has some plot holes:

Well I like the movie except the angel is shown as a namby pamby when in reality they are awesome powerful beings. Also in reality the Building and Loan should have turned the corner with its success and been much more profitable. Oh, the plot holes!

I look forward to John Aglialoro's remake, in which Clarence will incinerate that whore Violet Bick with divine laser beams that come shooting out of his eyes.

All I want for Christmas: Drawing and optical devices. The Arctic Soundscape Project. Something I didn't realize I was nostalgic for until now: 1970s Estes catalogs (via Coudal). A ball of confusion. Scenes from the life of the pygmy hippo. A hummingbird in the rain. Archie out of context. Racing numbers. The East German Cinema Blog. And images from the Beazley Archive.

(Painting at top: "Miner and Dog" by Sidney Nolan, 1973.)

The Next President of the United States

2011-12-21T10:40:00.000-08:00

Roy Edroso recently made an offhand remark to the effect that if you want consistently conservative governance, a robot is your only man.

He's got a point. The problem is, robots come from Old Europe; they come from the pit of Hell. And while they may be a bit more gemütlich than Mitt Romney or Michele Bachmann, they require expensive maintenance and they're not as adept with stairs. It's bad enough that Obama bows to foreign dignitaries; the last thing we need is a president whose clockwork runs down in the middle of singing "Les Oiseaux dans la Charmille" to Hu Jintao.

The Commodore PET is a safer choice. It's adorably retro, hearkening us back to that simpler, more innocent time before all of us hated everything. It was made down home in Pennsylvania by square-eyed, steely-jawed men, so you know Peggy Noonan's gonna get on board. You can have a beer with it, or at least near it. It can repeat the numerals "9-9-9" with all the hebephrenic fixity of Herman Cain and twice the conviction. It blows Rick Perry out of the water with a whopping 8K of RAM. You can easily store replacement units at Mount Weather. And its dependency on the extraction industries is no mere metaphor; if you want the President to boot up in time for World War III, drill baby drill!

And of course, it's ideologically consistent. Bedrock principles in, bedrock principles out:

10 PRINT "FUCK YOU, HIPPIES! TAX BREAKS FOR THE RICH!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

The only downside is, when it inevitably turns on humanity, no one will notice.

The Righteous and the Wicked

2011-12-18T13:54:00.000-08:00

I've seen a number of obituaries for Christopher Hitchens today. They seem to alternate between two basic stances:

Yeah, he was an unrepentant warmonger and misogynist...but he sure did stick it to those goddamn Bible-thumpers and their invisible sky buddies!

Yeah, he was a hellbound atheist...but he sure did stick it to those goddamn peacenik hippies and their cult of diversity!

As you can see, things even out nicely. Granted, Hitchens' political miscalculations have a body count. But how about all those dragons he killed? (Or not actual dragons...but, y'know, the whole idea of dragons qua dragons, per se, in nuce, und so weiter. And not actually killed...but, y'know, personally disputed in some adamantine, ontically oppositional sense of not agreeing with 'em nohow, so there.)

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Who knows? Maybe angels don't even exist!

How many Iraqis died in the last nine years? Who knows? Let's look forward, not back!

When Hitchens called down brimstone and fire on Baghdad, that modern City of the Plain, at least it was based on tribalist hatred, gadfly posturing and preening first-world privilege rather than mere superstition. I mean, give the guy some credit. He may have been wrong — politically, historically, logically, scientifically and morally — but at least he wasn't stupid. And if you don't believe me, just look into this barrel full of invisible dead fish.

Anyway. Forgive me if I don't feel like eulogizing Hitchens, who shrugged off countless deaths with one laborious literary phrase after another. I would much prefer to praise good people like myself, who attempted to prevent countless deaths with one laborious literary phrase after another.

On second thought, let's change the subject. If we're talking about dancing angels, should thumbtacks count as pins?

(Image at top: "The Great Day of His Wrath" by John Martin, 1853.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-12-16T09:58:00.000-08:00

The FBI will broaden its definition of rape:

FBI Director Robert Mueller confirmed Wednesday that the agency would expand its definition of “rape,” which has not been updated since 1929.

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program currently defines rape as “the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” Rape without force is not included.

Home care workers will receive federal wage protections:

The Obama administration proposed regulations on Thursday to give the nation’s nearly two million home care workers minimum wage and overtime protections. Those workers have long been exempted from coverage.

Labor unions and advocates for low-wage workers have pushed for the changes, contending that the 37-year-old exemption improperly swept these workers, who care for many elderly and disabled Americans, into the same “companion” category as baby sitters. The administration’s move calls for home care aides to be protected under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the nation’s main wage and hour law.

The weed of crime bears bitter fruit:

Hours after the release of a Justice Department report that said that Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio fueled a culture of anti-Latino bias in his office, the Department of Homeland Security said it was kicking him out of an immigration enforcement program.

Secretary Janet Napolitano said Thursday the department is ending an agreement with the Maricopa County sheriff's office that allowed trained deputies to enforce immigration laws.

A district court has ruled that the Center for Reproductive Rights can sue Kathleen Sebelius for her antiscientific, tragically stupid and fundamentally immoral decision on over-the-counter sales of Plan B:

Nancy Northup, president and CEO of CRR, stated, "We intend to take every legal step necessary to hold the FDA and this administration accountable for its extraordinary actions to block women from safe, effective emergency contraception. It has been ten years of battling to bring emergency contraception out from behind the pharmacy counter. The FDA cannot simply continue moving the goal posts down the field for women's reproductive healthcare."

LOLOL, as we say on the Internets:

A 22-year-old man who shouted slurs at a lesbian couple before breaking the windshield of their car soon found himself in a vulnerable position – pinned to the ground by one of the targets of his vitriol.

The Institute of Medicine has called for an end to most medical experimentation on chimpanzees:

After nine months of deliberation, a panel of independent experts judged that most current experiments involving man's closest primate relative can safely be discontinued.

The director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, said he accepted the panel's recommendations and promised to name a working group to figure out how to implement them.

As part of its plot to impoverish and enslave us, the EPA has legalized the use of alternative refrigerants:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today issued a rule making greener refrigeration gases legal in household refrigerators and some commercial freezers.
The agency added three hydrocarbons as acceptable alternatives in household and small commercial refrigerators and freezers through EPA's Significant New Alternatives Policy program, SNAP, which evaluates substitute chemicals and technologies for ozone-depleting substances under the Clean Air Act.

Adding insult to injury, it also plans limit our access to the mercury our bodies need:

The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to approve a tough new rule on Friday to limit emissions of mercury, arsenic and other toxins from the country’s power plants, according to people with knowledge of the new standard. Though mercury is a known neurotoxin profoundly harmful to children and pregnant women, the air toxins rule has been more than 20 years in the making, repeatedly stymied because of objections from coal-burning utilities about the cost of installing pollution control equipment.

New technologies may reduce noise pollution in the world's oceans:

Several new R&D projects are underway by providers of ocean technology, each of which either aims to reduce the harmful behavioral impacts on marine creatures, or may limit harmful impacts as a byproduct of their innovations.

Solar-powered drip irrigation is working well in Benin:

This technological innovation means the women’s collectives can keep producing crops during the region’s six-month dry season, provide greater food security to their families, and start thinking about sending their kids to school. It also could help communities survive and adapt to climate change. The project is now expanding: At least eight more villages in Benin will start using the solar irrigation systems.

In India, solar power is apparently cheaper than diesel generators:

Renewable Energy News reports that solar is becoming cheaper than diesel generators in India as French-company Solardirect has bid to supply the energy grid with solar power at a rate cheaper than the average for diesel generators:

Scientists have found the world's smallest frog in Papua New Guinea:

Paedophryne dekot and Paedophryne verrucosa attain a length of only 8 to 9 mm (0.31 inches), slightly longer than a tic-tac mint. The frogs are about 2 mm smaller than the previous record, which belonged to other members of the same genus.

The Los Angeles City Council has voted unanimously in favor of a constitutional amendment against corporate personhood:

Every struggle to amend the Constitution began as just a group of regular Americans who wanted to end slavery, who thought women should vote, who believed that if you're old enough the be drafted, you should be old enough to vote. ... We're very proud to come together and send a message but more than that, this becomes the official position of the City of Los Angeles, we will officially lobby for this.

Folies elastiques. Antarctica starts here. Audubon's aviary. The deep ocean wilderness. Fabelvæsener. Photographs of Copenhagen. Czech film posters, 1930-1989 (via Coudal). Ooh. Wee. Faces. Marbled paper. And scenes from Zhuravlyonok:

(Photo at top by Frederic Lezmi, from his series "Poor Politicians," 2011.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-11-18T07:50:00.000-08:00

A Kansas judge has dismissed all 23 of the felony charges brought by Phill Kline against Planned Parenthood:

“While additional charges in this case remain, we are pleased the most serious charges have rightfully been dismissed. We are grateful Johnson County taxpayers and Planned Parenthood will no longer waste enormous time and money on these politically motivated allegations brought by now discredited prosecutor Phill Kline,” the organization said in a statement released Wednesday morning.

The Massachusetts legislature has passed a transgender rights bill:

On Wednesday, the Massachusetts state Legislature passed a bill designed to prohibit discrimination against the state's transgender population. The protects against employment, education, and housing discrimination and revises the state's hate crimes law to protect against crimes targeting people based on their gender identity and gender expression. The state House approved the bill late Tuesday and the Senate voted, with little opposition, to pass the legislation on Wednesday.

A federal judge in Texas has ruled that law enforcement agencies need a warrant to track cell phone users by location:

In a victory for the privacy rights of everyone with a cell phone, a court has held that law enforcement agents must get a warrant to access cell phone location records. The ACLU, ACLU of Texas and Electronic Frontier Foundation submitted a brief urging the court to adopt exactly this position. The Constitution requires nothing less.

The Arizona Supreme Court has ruled that Gov. Jan Brewer broke the law by firing redistricting commissioner Colleen Mathis:

In a brief order, the justices brushed aside arguments by Lisa Hauser, the governor’s attorney, that Brewer’s decision was not subject to court review.

More to the point, they said that Brewer’s power to oust a commissioner is limited to situations of substantial neglect of duty or gross misconduct. The justices said that nothing the governor alleged in her letter firing Mathis rises to that level.

Nevada's attorney general has indicted two title officers at Lender Processing Services for mortgage fraud:

The Office of the Nevada Attorney General announced today that the Clark County grand jury has returned a 606 count indictment against two title officers, Gary Trafford and Gerri Sheppard, who directed and supervised a robo-signing scheme which resulted in the filing of tens of thousands of fraudulent documents with the Clark County Recorder’s Office between 2005 and 2008.

A Pentagon whistleblower who lost his job has gotten it back:

A Navy review board has overturned a Marine Corps decision to strip one of its senior science advisors of his security clearances, intervening directly in a case that attracted attention among lawmakers on Capitol Hill and among advocates of enhanced legal protection for military whistleblowers.
Franz Gayl, who complained publicly in 2007 that the Corps had squashed an urgent request from U.S. soldiers in Iraq for heavily armored vehicles, was stripped of his clearances last year and suspended indefinitely with pay.

The Oregon Court of Appeals has extended the state's ban on wolf-killing:

The court reaffirmed an earlier court order prohibiting the killing of two members of the Imnaha pack by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, pending the final outcome of the court’s review of the state’s wildlife laws. Three conservation groups, Cascadia Wildlands, the Center for Biological Diversity and Oregon Wild, had petitioned for review of the wolf-killing rule.

This is interesting:

A Californian startup named Simbol Materials believe that it can extract lithium, as well as zinc and manganese, from the brine that is pumped by geothermal power plants. They expect to be able to compete with the lowest-cost Chilean lithium producers, as well as produce the world's purest lithium carbonate.

More redundantly wealthy capitalist exploiters like this, please:

Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength has been meeting with congressional leaders this week, continuing their push to raise taxes on the very richest Americans. “We want to pay more taxes,” said California millionaire Doug Edwards, a former marketing director for Google. “If you’re fortunate, and you make more than a million dollars a year, you ought to pay more taxes.” The group even told anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist that he should take his extreme positions and “move to Somalia.”

Apropos of which, it won't come as a surprise to you that the real horror of "job-killing regulations," to industry, is that they create good-paying jobs.

Last, it continues to be just barely conceivable that there may not be some unitary "natural" sexual relationship we can use as a standard for human behavior:

With monogamy so uncommon in the animal world, the idea of lifetime fidelity can seem a little strange, at least to evolutionary biologists.

But in greylag geese, which can live for 20 years and share those years with just one mate, biologists have found a benefit: stress reduction. During fights, males with mates have lower heart rates than their single brethren. If their partners are nearby, they’re even more relaxed.

Now that that's out of the way: Metrocake. Photos by Richard Mosse. Some remarks on Euplectella aspergillum, or the Venus flower basket. Landscape architecture vs. zoning for apartheid vs. the history of conceptual modeling (your Venn diagram is due in the morning). The digital Dead Sea Scrolls. Daily life in Greek and Roman Egypt. Daily life in Xiangtangshan. Daily life in Oxyrhynchus. The Royal Society and the origins of scientific communication. Magic in late antiquity. Vidéothèque du CNRS. Women with deadlines. Le Petit Journal des Refusées. Example of midcentury design from No Barcode. A new island (via Cheryl). Socket mapping. And volcano mapping:

(Image at top: "The Mysterious Bird" by Charles Burchfield, 1917.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-11-11T09:34:00.000-08:00

“If you think you’re going to stop us, you’re crazy. You will not stop us. We will beat you.” --John Kasich.

Or not:

The fight to defeat Ohio's Issue 2 was one more look at what a determined mobilization of the 99 percent can look like. And holy crap, what a victory it led to: with 99 percent of votes reporting, the margin is 61-39.

"I will not back off until we solve the problem of this illegal invasion. Invaders, that's what they are. Invaders on the American sovereignty and it can't be tolerated." --Russell Pearce

Sez you, tough guy:

In an apparent rebuke to his hard-line politics, Arizona state Senate President Russell Pearce was recalled by voters Tuesday. Senator Pearce was the author of the state's tough anti-illegal immigration law that has spawned copycat laws in several states from Utah to Alabama.

"I think the election is going to be about Michigan's past versus Michigan's future." -- Paul Scott

Give that man a cigar!

State Rep. Paul Scott, R-Grand Blanc, became the first state legislator to be recalled in a generation after he conceded defeat in a recall election today....

The recall of Scott is, "unfortunate," said state GOP chairman Robert Schostak. "But the voters have spoken and we have to live with it.

"People here in Iowa...were very offended that three judges substituted their opinions for the will of the people.” --Michele Bachmann

Apparently, they've gotten over it:

Pro-family groups in Iowa say hopes for a marriage amendment in that state have all but faded now that Tuesday’s election has left Democrats in control off the State Senate.

Speaking of the will of the people:

Openly gay and lesbian candidates endorsed by the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund won election to municipal, judicial and state legislative offices from coast to coast Tuesday night....
Candidates in Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Charlotte, N.C., made history, becoming the first openly gay or lesbian candidates elected to those city councils. In Virginia, Adam Ebbin became the first openly gay person elected to the State Senate, and in New Jersey, Tim Eustace became the first non-incumbent openly gay candidate to win a seat in the State Assembly.

Furthermore, 70 large companies have come out against DOMA:

Top U.S. companies including Google, Microsoft, and Starbucks took the unusual step on Thursday of legally documenting their opposition to the Defense of Marriage Act.

A brief filed in court comes from 70 businesses and organizations that want their voice heard on the constitutionality of DOMA, which bans same-sex marriage from being recognized federally and stops couples married in states such as Massachusetts from having their weddings recognized in less accepting places such as Alabama.

The companies paint the law as an overburdening government regulation that should be repealed.

Sorry, Michele, but that's capitalism for ya. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned!

Of course, Big Homo's outest and proudest victory was in Maine, where a mincing coterie of queer-friendly voters flagrantly gay-married themselves to the fruitiest faggotry of all:

Despite a warning from Maine’s Republican party that a gay rights group supported same day registration, state voters restored the option by a three-to-two margin Tuesday night.

The Will of the People also thwarted the GOP's attempt to raise zygotes to the God-exalted status of corporations:

An extreme measure that would have given legal "personhood" status to undeveloped zygotes failed among ultra-conservative Mississippi voters Tuesday night, after a history of being rejected twice in Colorado and a struggle to even get on ballots in nine other states. But Personhood USA fully blames the Mississippi loss on Planned Parenthood.

"It's not because the people are not pro-life," Keith Mason, a co-founder of Personhood USA, said on Tuesday. "It's because Planned Parenthood put a lot of misconceptions and lies in front of folks and created a lot of confusion."

Fair enough. Teh People are staunchly pro-life; they just happened to find the satanic sophistries of the baby-killers momentarily plausible. This figurative shotgun marriage will never last, unlike the real kind.

A new front has opened in the War on Christmas: Coastal academic elites are using junk science -- possibly involving stem cells from pre-born children -- to keep those filthy OWS hippies from freezing to death over the winter.

Because of time and funding constraints—not to mention the ban on flammable materials—they are focused on low-tech solutions. Engineers are testing various materials to wrap heated bricks that would give off heat without burning skin. They are also exploring different methods of keeping water hot over long periods of time beyond a simple thermos, which maintains, but doesn’t radiate, heat. And they’re experimenting with different canopy materials to keep snow off of the roofs of tents and create dead air space, which boosts temperature.

Their ultimate aim, undoubtedly, is to create a human/hippie hybrid that will be able to masturbate publicly even at subzero temperatures.

The Internet: Open for business:

Today in the Senate there was a major win for freedom of speech and the Internet. In a largely partisan vote Senate Democrats defeated a resolution introduced by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) which would have overturned the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) open Internet rules that are set to go into effect this month.

Australia will impose a carbon tax, which is being hailed as a death knell for civilization in the usual quarters. In a terrifying sign of things to come, scientists at MIT are working on some sort of parabolic trough for cooking fronds and bracken, which the pagan one-worlders will eventually force us to install in our gender-neutral caves:

MIT researchers say a hybrid solar-thermoelectric system they’re working on would provide a big advantage over conventional solar cells or solar thermal systems, particularly for household use: the ability to produce heat and electricity simultaneously. They propose accomplishing this mean feat through a clever reconfiguration of the standard parabolic trough.

The Keystone XL pipeline has been postponed:

"A done deal has come spectacularly undone. The American people spoke loudly and today the President responded, at least in part," said Bill McKibben, one of the major organizers of the fight against the pipeline. "Six months ago, almost no one outside the pipeline route even knew about Keystone XL. One month ago, a secret poll of 'energy insiders' by the National Journal found that 'virtually all' expected easy approval of the pipeline by year’s end. As late as last week the CBC reported that TransCanada was moving huge quantities of pipe across the border and seizing land by eminent domain, certain that its permit would be granted."

Meanwhile, California has installed 1 gigawatt of solar power:

California has hit a major renewable energy milestone: 1 gigawatt — or 1,000 megawatts — of solar power has been installed on rooftops throughout the state, according to a report to be released Wednesday by Environment California, a statewide advocacy group.

One gigawatt is … enough energy to power 750,000 homes. Five countries have hit the 1 gigawatt installation mark to date: Germany, Spain, Japan, Italy and the Czech Republic. California has installed more solar power than France, China and Belgium.

Bank Transfer Day went well, especially for the banks. Thanks to this largely symbolic display of public outrage, they will no longer have to sully their coffers with some parking-lot attendant's heirloom jar of Indian head pennies:

[T]he banks are going to be better off because they are getting rid of their least-profitable or not profitable clients. It helps them stem this tsunami of cash that’s been flowing in that they don’t know what to do with.

As Thoreau said, "Simplify, simplify." What bank wouldn't be grateful to purge this parasite from its money-clogged bowels?

Mike Fox Sr., a beer magnate and well-known philanthropist, is set to announce Friday that he is divesting his long-held personal Bank of America account, which contains several hundred thousand dollars, in an effort to promote social and economic justice.
Fox said Thursday that he has also asked his executive team to move a $4 million-plus line of credit held by M.E. Fox & Co. from Bank of America to another institution.

And what bank wouldn't welcome friendly competition like this?

Last week I posted on an appeal by UK-based Civilisedmoney, which was seeking investors for creating a peer-funded, transparent alternative to mainstream banks.
Now that appeal is over, and the company raised its target of £100,000 (about US$150,000) in 9 Days.

OMG SOCIALISM!!!1eleventillion:

As one might imagine, NASA employees utilize some serious high tech gadgetry. And as it stands right now, every time an engineer needs a microprocessor-controlled power tool or space-proof half-ratcheting torque wrenches for a specific project, they put in an order for a new one. That ends up creating a decent amount of redundancy, with different subagencies ordering the same high-tech parts, or failing to find suitable used ones.
So, one NASA employee has a bright idea -- start the most futuristic tool-lending library the world has ever seen. Matthew Ritsko, a NASA employee from Maryland has put the scheme forward as a cost-saving measure, as part of the Obama administration's SAVE initiative, which asks government employees to submit ideas for paring down federal expenditures.

The Laughable Game of What D'Ye Buy. Das Hofopernensemble der Ära Mahler Schellackaufnahmen, 1902 – 1912. Different voices from Wales, different modernists from Ireland, different prints from the Urals. Palladio and Britain. Firework packaging of the 1980s. Attentional landscapes. And ephemeral folk figures:

And so to bed.

(Image at top: "Election Night" by John Sloan, 1907.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-10-28T13:54:00.000-07:00

Word on this street is, Eric Cantor is attempting to humanize himself. It's the usual patter for the usual rubes: he dotes on his children, is happiest among his flowers &c. For some reason, this reminds me of the memoir I once read by a German camp guard, in which he said something like "no prisoner can truly say he was ever ill-treated in my home." Surely, this good man's reward will be great in Heaven.

Paul Ryan is also a tragically misunderstood champion of the downtrodden. Here, he informs us that "the safety net for the poor is coming apart at the seams and no one in Washington seems to care." (See that guy over there? He wants to steal your money! I'll hold your wallet while you kick his ass.)

Not exactly a cheery opening, I know. But sometimes, it's good to remember that it's better to lose than to be like the "winners."

In Yemen, women are burning their veils:

Thousands of women gathered in the capital, Sanaa, said witnesses. They carried banners that read: "Saleh the butcher is killing women and is proud of it" and "Women have no value in the eyes in Ali Saleh."

They collected their veils and scarves in a huge pile and set it ablaze -- an act that is highly symbolic in the conservative Islamic nation, where women use their veils to cover their faces and bodies. It's the first time in the nine months of Yemen's uprising that such an event has occurred.

One of Gov. Rick Scott's revenue streams seems to have dried up:

The court reaffirmed that testing urine for drugs is a search, that application for a public benefit cannot depend on an unconstitutional condition, and that the state of Florida had fallen woefully short of establishing any need to conduct suspicionless testing.

The judge's order also chastised the Florida legislature for failing to heed lessons it should have learned in a state-commissioned pilot study of TANF recipients in Florida: they are no more likely to use illegal drugs than the population at large.

In related news, a Missouri judge has ruled that "Linn State Technical College’s mandatory drug-testing policy is patently unconstitutional":

[T]he school had implemented mandatory, suspicionless drug-testing of all incoming students, as well as students who were returning to school after an extended absence. The policy came with little warning and a $50 price tag per test – paid by the students. In implementing the policy, Linn State sought foolishly to go where no public college had gone before – and where we hope none will go in the future, thanks to the judge’s ruling.

A federal judge has dismissed Jan Brewer's frivolous lawsuit against the gummint:

The Republican governor was seeking a court order that would require the federal government to take extra steps, such as more border fencing, to protect Arizona until the border is controlled.
Bolton said Brewer’s claim that Washington has failed to protect Arizona from an “invasion” of illegal immigrants was a political question that isn’t appropriate for the court to decide.

Scientists have apparently found a therapy for the Hendra virus:

A new treatment for the deadly Hendra virus has proven successful in primate tests — a major step forward in combating the virus, which kills about 60 percent of those it infects and has been implicated in sporadic outbreaks in Australia ever since it was first identified in 1994.

The BLE has blocked new uranium mining near the Grand Canyon for 20 years:

The announcement confirmed that the Obama administration was proceeding with a plan that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced in July and is expected to make final in 30 days. The decision withdraws a right to Western public lands that mining companies otherwise would have under the 1872 Mining Law

Here's yet another reason that Arctic drilling is a bad idea:

A study in the Alaskan Arctic, employing camera traps, has shown that oil drilling impacts migrating birds in an unexpected way. The study found that populations of opportunistic predators, which prey on bird eggs or fledglings, may increase in oil drilling areas, putting extra pressure on nesting birds.

Leaded gasoline has been almost completely phased out worldwide:

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), working with NRDC in the Partnership for Clean Fuels and Vehicles, today announced toxic lead has been removed from gasoline in more than 175 countries worldwide, representing near-global eradication. A new, independent scientific analysis shows the result of this achievement is a 90 percent drop in blood lead levels worldwide, as well as 1.2 million lives saved each year and $2.4 trillion generated in health, social and economic benefits annually.

The UN predicts that the fuel will be totally eliminated by 2013.

A number of banks have decided not to impose monthly fees for debit card use. However, they would like it known that this decision comes from a purely inward communion with the Absolute, and should not be taken to imply that consumer pressure works:

J.P. Morgan joins U.S. Bancorp, Citigroup Inc., PNC Financial Services Group Inc., KeyCorp and other large banks that have said in recent days that they won't impose monthly fees on debit cards. None of those banks said they made their decisions because of the outcry over Bank of America's fees.

This world is adorned in diverse ways, decorated with rare ornaments:

Imagine a one-celled organism the size of a mango. It's not science fiction, but fact: scientists have cataloged dozens of giant one-celled creatures, around 4 inches (10 centimeters), in the deep abysses of the world's oceans. But recent exploration of the Mariana Trench has uncovered the deepest record yet of the one-celled behemoths, known as xenophyophores.

Jack the Cat has turned up alive and well:

"Jack the Cat" is back from his two-month foray into the netherworld of JFK Airport in the New York City suburbs, the New York Post and other news organizations report.
The feisty feline, who gained international attention, escaped after owner Karen Pascoe checked him in at American Airlines to relocate to California....
Aviation staffers at JFK captured Jack on Tuesday as he tumbled through the ceiling tiles inside a Customs and Border Patrol room, the Post reports.

(h/t: Cheryl.)

There'd be more, but Blogger ate about a quarter of this post and I don't have the time or patience to rebuild it. Honest!

Books in books. Family planning posters from China. Drugs from the colonies. Leaves. The iconography of the ornamental map. The Society for Commercial Archaeology. The plural of Texas. An 18th-c. fold-in. An admonitory revenant. Native American audio collections. And Saturn's moons and rings.

(Photo at top by S. Gayle Stevens.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-10-21T08:44:00.000-07:00

The FBI is finally updating its definition of rape:

The Uniform Crime Report Subcommittee voted unanimously to change the definition of rape, which had not been changed for 80 years (!) and rape will now be defined as, “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”

San Francisco will require CPCs to stop lying:

On Tuesday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 10-1 to approve a city ordinance that would prevent crisis pregnancy centers from spreading false or misleading advertisements about their facilities. The ordinance requires that crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) display signs indicating whether they offer comprehensive reproductive health services, including abortions and contraception, and whether a licensed medical professional is on staff.

Speaking of which, Rick Santorum has vowed to put an end to contraception if elected, on the grounds that "it’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.” There was a time when this might have been an attention-grabbing stance, but as the Right thrusts itself ever deeper into the nether regions of sexual delirium, Santorum's in danger of being Left Behind. Who needs him when we've got Mark Driscoll?

[M]asturbation can be a form of homosexuality because it is a sexual act that does not involve a woman.

It's clearly time to bring back Dr. Moodie's apparatus for boys! If leather-and-chrome genital bondage devices can't stop this nation's epidemic of perversion, what on earth can? It'll create jobs, too: We've got a country full of unemployed steampunk designers who've been dying for an opportunity like this.

Anyway. An Oklahoma judge has blocked a particularly stupid and brutal anti-abortion law:

The temporary injunction prevents the bill from going into effect on Nov. 1. Passed earlier this year by the GOP-controlled Legislature and signed by Gov. Mary Fallin, the measure requires doctors to follow the strict guidelines and protocols authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and prohibits off-label uses of the drugs. It also requires doctors to examine the women, document certain medical conditions and schedule follow-up appointments.

Opponents of the measure say the off-label use of drugs — such as changing a recommended dosage or prescribing it for different symptoms than the drug was initially approved for — is common, and that the measure would prevent doctors from using their best medical judgment.

And a federal judge has blocked a DoE uranium-leasing plan on Colorado public lands:

In a major victory for clean air, clean water and endangered species on public lands, a federal judge on Tuesday halted the Department of Energy’s 42-square-mile uranium-leasing program that threatened the Dolores and San Miguel rivers in southwestern Colorado. Five conservation groups had sued to halt the leasing program, charging that the Department of Energy was failing to adequately protect the environment or analyze the full impacts of renewed uranium mining on public lands.

Apple apparently has some interesting solar technology patents:

The US Patent and Trademark Office just revealed that Apple has been granted 20 new patents which focus on next generation solar technology. According to PatentlyApple, the patents not only cover solar technology being used to extend the battery lives of personal devices, but will also see the development of a cool new product – a specialized back panel reflector that uses sunlight to illuminate laptop screens.

California has approved cap-and-trade regulations:

The most populous U.S. state is moving ahead with the plan years after federal regulators rejected a similar idea for the nation, partly on concerns of the effect on businesses.
The California Air Resources Board voted 8-0 to adopt the market regulations, which officials said are critical to the state's goal of cutting carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 -- about a 22 percent reduction from forecasted business-as-usual output.

A Koch-funded climate study group has driven yet another stake into Anthony Watts' shriveled heart:

Watts had famously promised “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong"....
But BEST just released a whole paper devoted to debunking Watts’ life work – his effort to smear climate scientists by accusing them of knowingly using bad temperature stations to rig their results.

Shockingly, Watts is not actually prepared to accept their results.

Nearly 300 large investors are clamoring for a climate treaty:

The group of 285 investors issued a joint statement emphasizing the urgent need for policy action which stimulates private sector investment in climate change solutions, creates jobs, and ensures the long-term sustainability and stability of the world economic system.
The statement represents the largest group, by both number of signatories and assets under management, ever to call for policy action on climate change. Signatories to the statement include financial institutions, state treasurers, controllers, pension fund leaders, asset managers, insurance groups, faith groups and foundations worldwide.

A federal judge in Brazil has ruled against the Belo Monte dam:

The environmental license for the controversial Belo Monte dam violates the constitutional rights of indigenous communities and is therefore illegal, ruled a federal judge in Brazil on Monday.

Judge Selene Maria de Almeida concluded that the 2005 decree that authorized the dam is illegal because Congress failed to carry out a consultation process with communities that will be affected by the dam. The consultation process is a right guaranteed to indigenous communities under Brazil's constitution.

Michelle Bachmann's NH staff has quit en masse:

Pindell scoops that Michele Bachmann's entire paid campaign team - roughly a half-dozen staffers - in New Hampshire has quit out of frustration with the campaign.
They were going to do it even earlier, he reports, but didn't because it would have harmed the candidate.

More schadenfreude, courtesy of Herman Cain and Marco Rubio.

Last, rumor has it that we may actually leave Iraq. I know intellectually that this is a good thing, but it doesn't make me feel much of anything beyond dull rage.

President Obama will address reports that all U.S. troops will be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of year in a statement scheduled for 12:45PM ET. President Obama's statement comes following a discussion he had with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Last week, reports indicated that the U.S. had abandoned plans to keep forces in Iraq past the December 31 withdrawal deadline and various cable reports now are indicating the decision has been finalized. 40,000 troops are currently in Iraq.

The Turconi Project (via The Bioscope). A throwable panoramic camera. Photos by Kim Keever (via Coudal). Jeu d’Herbes Medicinales. Photos of former battlefields by Peter Hebeisen. Images from Niels Klim's journey underground. The Light of Modernity in Buenos Aires (via wood s lot). Old and Interesting, "a history of domestic paraphernalia." Retro Tesco. Nigerian traffic control. Optical effects of special relativity. Ice cream and architectural loss. Russian postcards of St. Petersburg. Fire and smoke. And photographs by Ferdinand von Hochstetter:

(Photo at top: "Wendelstein" by Peter Keetman, 1950. Via Luminous Lint.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-10-14T11:50:00.000-07:00

This morning's planned eviction of Occupy Wall Street has been called off:

A confrontation between Occupy Wall Street demonstrators and New York City police was avoided after Brookfield Office Properties Inc. postponed cleaning its Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, where the protesters have been camping out for almost a month.

Donate. Send food. Get involved.

A church in San Jose, CA has withdrawn all its money from Bank of America:

Father Eduardo Samaniego announced that the parish is moving its $3 million account with Bank of America, where the church has done business for at least 20 years, to a community credit union.

In related news:

Remember back in August after the phoney "debt ceiling crisis" that the GOP ginned up? Standard and Poor's (S&P) downgraded the credit ranking of the United States. Two other rating agencies, Moody's and Fitch's, did NOT follow suit.

This morning comes news however that Fitch's has downgraded the Viability Rating to NEGATIVE of.....Bank of America!

November 5 is Bank Transfer Day. About time, too. Now, if we can just get people to cancel their cable service and send the monthly fees to Planned Parenthood....

Apropos of which, Phill Kline may lose his law license:

A professional ethics panel recommended Thursday that former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline have his state law license suspended indefinitely over his conduct during criminal investigations of abortion providers, saying he was “motivated by dishonesty and selfishness.”

Yahoo has pulled out of the US Chamber of Commerce:

Politico’s Morning Tech reported that tech-giant Yahoo “has quietly left the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.” The company wouldn’t give a reason for its departure, but has been clashing with the Chamber over the PROTECT IP Act, a bill that would limit activities on websites accused of using copyrighted material. According to U.S. Chamber Watch, more than 50 local Chambers of Commerce and a dozen major corporations “have abandoned or disavowed the U.S. Chamber for their radical positions and pay-to-play model.”

A number of media outlets seem to have developed some form of rudimentary spine:

As of this morning, 30 Ohio television stations had pulled the deceptive ad supporting the state's Issue 2, which would limit collective bargaining for public workers. The ad takes footage from an ad opposing Issue 2 and makes it appear as if the woman in the original ad supports the measure. Building a Better Ohio, the Republican group that released the deceptive ad, has insisted that it was totally kosher to appropriate the woman's image and words and reverse their meaning.

In California, Jerry Brown has finally signed the Fair Treatment for Farm Workers Act:

United Farm Workers President Arturo S. Rodriguez praised the governor’s decision to sign the bill stating, “Today, Governor Brown helped farm workers take their biggest step forward yet in the cause of fair treatment for farm workers by approving his proposal put into legislation by Sen. Steinberg. Under SB 126, if growers cheat during an election campaign, break the law and deny farm workers their right to have a union, then the Agricultural Labor Relations Board can certify the union.”

Brown also banned the shark fin trade:

California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill on Friday, that bans any sale, trade and possession of shark fins. The bill, which will come into effect on Jan. 1, 2012, was promulgated to protect the dwindling shark population.

Australia's proposed carbon tax has survived a crucial vote:

By a margin of just two votes (74-72), Australia's plan to put a price on carbon passed its toughest hurdle today. It is now expected that the Australian legislator will moved forward to put the carbon tax into law. The carbon tax, pushed aggressively by Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, was just as ferociously opposed by business leaders and opposition party leader, Tony Abbott.

Trouble in paradise:

A Tennessee lawmaker who is a major proponent of legislation allowing gun owners to carry firearms in bars was arrested on Tuesday and charged with driving under the influence and possession of a handgun while under the influence, Davidson County Sheriff's Office confirmed to TPM.

Ditto:

One of the top executives at the European branch of the Wall Street Journal, the flagship newspaper at Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corporation, has resigned amid a growing scandal that has called into question the paper’s journalistic ethics and jeopardized its reputation. Adding to the scandals News Corp. is already facing in Europe — alleged phone hacking, bribing of public officials — and a potential criminal investigation by the U.S. Justice Department, the Guardian reported today that Andrew Langhoff, the European director of Dow Jones and Co. (the subsidiary of News Corp. that owns the Journal), oversaw a massive scam that artificially inflated the circulation numbers in Europe in order to avoid losing investors, readers, and advertisers.

Also: Experimental Philosophy: Old and New. The voice of the turtle is heard in the land. Made in Czechoslovakia. The Book of Fixed Stars and other Treasures of the Bodleian. And some transparent playing cards, just in case we need to be reminded that "wolves never devour each other":

Donate. Send food. Get involved.

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-09-30T01:21:00.000-07:00

Briefly, 'cause it's late and I'm tired:

Walmart adds transgender protections.

Federal Bureau of Prisons makes major change in transgender medical policy.

Obama administration widens challenges to state immigration laws.

Women's rights groups praise new Afghan shelter regulations.

Saudi king gives women right to vote. (A better headline would be "Saudi king stops denying women's right to vote.")

DOMA repeal gets its first Republican cosponsor.

Pentagon to allow chaplains to officiate weddings for gay and lesbian service members.

Settlement requires Feds to act on protecting 82 coral species from extinction.

The golden age of motoring is over.

Work must halt on Belo Monte.

Massive Chinese-backed dam on Irrawaddy River halted by Burma's government.

Bolivia puts Amazon road project on ice.

Treasury of World's Fair Art & Architecture: A Digital Archive, 1851-1986.

The United States Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842.

Sugar tongs of the 18th century.

Russian landscape (via wood s lot).

Have a good weekend!

(Photo: "Night View of Trees and Streetlamp, Burgkühnauer Allee, Dessau," by Lyonel Feininger, 1928.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-09-23T08:51:00.000-07:00

OK, fine. You talked me into it. I'll sleep when I'm dead.

Let's see...DADT is no more. And here's what it means to you and me and the man in the next street:

Now homo’s can have homo parties in base. Men can wear dresses after work on base.

same sex can kiss and hold hands on base. Homo officers will give promotion to their homo.

women can buy strap on and both sexes can buy homo mags.

men forced to ahve showers with homos acting up.

The essential justice of these observations is borne out by Israel, where the incidence of homo's of both sexes using fag money to buy homo strap-on mags from gaylords in pervert stores has gone up 3 trillion percent since Homogeddon.

Let's just hope God doesn't stop smiling on our military ventures. Everything's been going so nicely up 'til now.

In other homo news, Alaska is forcing men to ahve showers with homos acting up:

Alaska’s same-sex couples are entitled to the same senior citizen and disabled veteran property tax exemptions as married couples, a state judge has ruled. Superior Court Judge Frank Pfiffner said in his decision that the state’s marital classification violates the Alaska Constitution’s equal protection clause.

Women acting up in the Peace Corps may get access to reproductive health care:

Since 1979, Congress has prohibited the Peace Corps from providing coverage for abortion services with no exception. The allowances for abortion coverage in cases of rape, incest, and life endangerment that are found in other federal health insurance plans are denied to women serving in the Peace Corps — despite the fact that these women often serve in countries where good and safe medical care is hard to come by, and the Peace Corps has acknowledged that it is in the midst of grappling with a serious sexual assault problem....
That's why today, for the first time in recent memory, the Senate bill that funds the Peace Corps program was voted out of committee with exceptions for life, rape, and incest in its abortion coverage ban. This is a first and crucial step toward ensuring that the health and well-being of Peace Corps volunteers is fully protected.

ObamaCare continues to exact its deadly toll:

Nearly 1 million more young adults have obtained health insurance since the 2010 health-care law began requiring insurers to let adult children stay on their parents’ plans until age 26, according to government data released Wednesday.

The jump in enrollment caused the share of young adults who are uninsured to drop from 34 percent at the start of 2010 to 30 percent — or 9.1 million people — by March of this year, according to a national interview survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Loggerhead sea turtles will finally get ESA protections:

The Obama administration designated the North Pacific loggerhead sea turtle as endangered under the Endangered Species Act today. Populations of this rare and ancient turtle, which spends much of its time off the coasts of Mexico and Southern California, have declined by at least 80 percent over the past decade. Although loggerhead sea turtles have been listed as threatened since 1978, today’s rule recognizes that some populations are nearing extinction from fisheries bycatch, climate change and marine pollution, including oil spills.

Twenty-four endangered birds will get their own Hawaiian island:

The tiny species of Millerbird, native to Hawaii's Nihoa island, has been teetering on the brink of extinction there for decades. But now, in an attempt to hedge the chances of the bird's survival, conservationists have gifted two dozen of them a new place to call their very own own -- a remote, 1,023 acres Hawaiian island that, naturalists hope, will become a Millerbird love nest.

And the Elwha Dam is finally being torn down:

[T]he first concrete was scooped away from the Elwha Dam over the weekend as part of the largest dam removal in U.S. history.
The dam removal includes the Elwha's two dams -- the 108-foot-tall Elwha Dam and the 210-foot-tall Glines Canyon Dam. It will cost roughly $27 million and take three years, said Don Laford, the project's construction manager.

Blog of Rights reports that a federal judge has upheld Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, "which requires states with a history of voter suppression to seek approval before implementing changes to their voting laws."

The court rightfully noted that the past 25 years have provided ample evidence of discrimination against minority voters. The judge cited a 1991 incident in which Mississippi state legislators opposed a plan that would strengthen minority voting rights, referring to the plan as the “black plan” and privately as “the n-plan.” The court also cited an incident where the chairman of the Georgia House Reapportionment Committee told his colleagues, “The Justice Department is trying to make us draw nigger districts and I don't want to draw nigger districts.” The court ultimately concluded that the reauthorization of Section 5 was a “congruent and proportional remedy” to the discriminatory behavior that filled the more than 15,000 pages of legislative history.

Karin passes this welcome news along:

Last week, activists working on the campaign to permanently clean up New Jersey's Ringwood State Park got major news. At a packed community hearing, state officials backed away from plans to transfer the ownership of contaminated areas of the park back to Ford Motor Company, responding to the campaign on Change.org to keep the park in public hands.

Bwa ha ha, as the saying is:

Farmers in one of Alabama's leading agricultural areas asked legislators Monday to make emergency changes to the state's tough new law against illegal immigration, saying millions of dollars of crops are at risk in coming weeks because of a sudden lack of hands for harvest....
About 50 growers packed a truck-stop dining room 45 miles north of Birmingham. They pleaded with three north Alabama lawmakers to amend the law and save what they called the lifeblood of the state's agriculture operations: The Hispanic workers who pick vegetables, gather chickens from poultry houses, pull sweet potatoes out of the ground and make the cardboard boxes that hold produce.

The World Bank has come up with an odd notion:

Leaked World Bank documents propose that rich countries should eliminate the $50bn a year they give in fossil fuel subsidies, in order to financially help poor countries address climate change.

And so has JSTOR:

JSTOR has announced that it is going to make all of its journal content published prior to 1923 in the United States (the date before which all works published in the USA are held to be in the public domain) and prior to 1870 elsewhere in the world (a reasonable assumption based on the calculation of 70 years after the death of the author for a creative work in European law) freely available to anyone, anywhere. This represents 500,000 articles from 220 journals, or around 6% of the entire JSTOR collection.

This is...interesting:

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have reconstructed the internal “movie” that plays in a person’s head. To re-create dynamic visual experiences, they used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the brain activity of volunteers (the other members of the research team) as they watched short movie clips.

Click through to watch the clips, which look a bit like an animated collaboration between J.M.W. Turner and Francis Bacon.

USSR in Construction. New York in construction. Photos by Jessica Hines. Drunken moose in a tree. La Biblioteca Magica (you'll want to turn the sound off). Beauty, Virtue and Vice. And photos by Kati Horna:

Canadian mail-order catalogues. Canadian newspaper comics. Canadian alphabet books. Canadian cook books. Canadian gardens. Canadian posters and broadsides.

Aboriginal sound recordings. Communicating reproduction. Russian fashion magazines. Woodcuts and Ovaltine. The DuPont Company Magazine and The Keller Collection (both via things). Expo 67 and Mondorama 2000:

(Image at top: Phenakistastcope disc published by Forrester & Nichol, Lithographers, Edinburgh 1832-1833. Via Room 26.)

And Your Wife

2011-09-15T07:40:00.001-07:00

As you all know by now, Michelle Obama was caught red-handed appearing to express something along the lines of the hate-filled rhetoric we would've heard on the infamous "whitey tape" if its owner hadn't joined Vince Foster in the Valhalla of political martyrdom.

While there's some doubt as to what she said, there's no doubt at all about who said it; if she wasn't insulting the flag (or "dissin' it," as Teh Blacks say), why were her lips moving? If she didn't intend to sully this most hallowed of days with her malign presence, why did she show up?

Intruders. There's no other word for Hussein and Moochelle, except for the one I'm thinking constantly, but can't quite bring myself to say. Yet.

In other news, here's the latest track from the Heatless.

One People

2011-08-27T09:45:00.000-07:00

Our President asks us to remember those dear dead days after 9/11:

We were united, and the outpouring of generosity and compassion reminded us that in times of challenge, we Americans move forward together, as one people.

This is dangerous nonsense. I lived in NYC before, during and after 9/11, and I can definitively state that "we" were not united. I rode the 9 train downtown a week after the attacks; there was palpable fear and suspicion of any remotely "Islamic"-looking person who boarded, from Sikhs to Peruvians. I ate in normally crowded Middle Eastern restaurants on Atlantic Avenue, which were empty despite the windows full of American flags. I heard elaborate conspiracies about the Jews (they all called in sick that day! they were dancing and cheering as the towers fell!), and I heard racial epithets hurled at Pakistani families in Jersey City.

Soon after the attacks, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blamed feminists, fags and the ACLU. Orrin Hatch and Dana Rohrabacher blamed Clinton. So did Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. John Leo called the NYC firefighters' response to 9/11 "a display of heroism by multiculturalism's villain class, white males," without pausing to wonder why most of the firefighters in a hugely diverse city were white.

When Bill Maher pointed out that "lobbing cruise missiles from two thousand miles away" was not necessarily brave, Ari Fleischer famously responded that "Americans...need to watch what they say, watch what they do." In some towns, people who didn't look like "us" paid for their effrontery with beatings, or with their lives.

Things were typical, in other words: A bunch of scared, angry people spouting ignorant opinions, stifling dissent, bellowing threats and beating up on darkies. America: Open for Business!

The small grain of truth in Obama's claim is that many people who had intelligent things to say about the reasons for the attack, or legitimate concerns about our response, felt compelled to keep their mouths shut. This was a matter of decorum and patriotism, to an extent, but some people also felt intimidated by an officially recognized outburst of "national unity," the main purpose of which was to steel people for the hard work of stamping out difference and dissent.

As usual, "we" were united only inasmuch as we hated "them." And an awful lot of Americans were "them" after 9/11. To the extent that we're less united now than we were then, it's largely because the post-9/11 media and blogosphere worked overtime to mainstream racism, xenophobia and violent political rhetoric, and did so precisely in the name of "unity."

The President himself is the natural heir to a lot of this abuse, so it's not exactly edifying to see him paying pious lip service to the abstractions and lies that inform the current attacks on him. The fact is, much of the national unity after 9/11 was national unity against people like Obama: people who look different, and have funny names, dubious worldviews and questionable allegiances. That's why the right views it as a Golden Age.

I'm not sure what's worse: the idea that he doesn't realize this, or the idea that he does.

Friday Hope Alinsky Blogging

2011-08-26T15:14:00.000-07:00

This week, the Alinskyites redoubled their efforts to force America under the yoke of Alinskyism. The most frightening approach taken by these fanatics is a seeming indifference to Alinsky's thought, or worse yet, a total ignorance of it. Needless to say, the Alinskyistas who favor these Alinskyist tactics are the most dangerous Alinskyites of all. That's why we must educate ourselves, here and now. Forewarned is four-armed!

Alinsky once said that "the enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength." It's probably just a "coincidence" that the DHS is working hand-in-jackboot with the ACLU:

The ACLU just scored a big win for freedom of speech from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). More than 2 years ago we filed a complaint with the DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (OCRCL) concerning an effort to collect and distribute information about lawful demonstrations. Earlier this month, we received a letter from OCRCL letting us know that they have resolved our complaint, and are adopting our recommendations!

It's the Chicago Way!

Undermining parental authority is central to the Alinsky program:

Hovering helicopter parents who restrict their kids' unstructured play may actually harm, rather than help, children according to the latest issue of the American Journal of Play, a scholarly journal which has gathered a distinguished group of experts to probe the near-extinction of free play and its effects on children and society.

As is the worship of Gaia:

Zoologists have discovered that a freshwater species of zooplankton will eat a fungal pathogen which is devastating amphibian populations around the world. It could provide a desperately needed tool for biological control of this deadly fungus.

And rewarding underachievers for failure:

A new administration in Peru is moving toward granting indigenous people long-sought legal rights, reports Survival International. Yesterday, the Peruvian congress approved new legislation that gives indigenous people free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) for any project on their land. If signed into law and enforced, the legislation would provide indigenous groups considerable clout in keeping industry off their lands if they choose.

"Community organizers" in Peru have created a new bird sanctuary:

San Marcos Private Conservation Area consists of 970 hectares (2,400 acres) of Polylepis forest, a high-elevation habitat that supports a wealth of bird species, including the Royal Cinclodes, White-browed Tit-Spinetail, and Ash-breasted Tit-Tyrant. Five new plant species and two new frog species have already been discovered within the borders of the San Marcos Private Conservation Area.

While these Alinsky-fanciers distract us with the gaudy spectacle of "Tit-Tyrants," we remain blind to the deadly plague of grand-abortion...just as Alinsky would've intended if he'd lived to hear about it:

Grand-abortions...are the babies who were never conceived in the first place because the humans who would have been their parents were killed before they were allowed to be born.

The human toll of great-grand-abortion is almost too terrible to contemplate.

While wallowing metaphorically in the figurative blood of theoretically slaughtered innocents, Alinsky noted that "any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people." Could it happen here? My sources say yes:

A celebration was held Thursday to mark the restoration of a river in the Tongass National Forest that was once renowned for producing salmon and trout but was damaged decades ago by the effects of clear-cut logging.
The Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Forest Service were partners in the multi-year project to repair damage done to the Harris River and its tributaries on Prince of Wales Island. Salmon are now swimming in pools engineered by restoration experts.

Thanks to some ruthless Alinskyesque jujitsu on the part of an overentitled underclass, a stretch of the LA River is now open to kayakers, Marxists, illegal immigrants and other terrorists:

For the first time in decades the Los Angeles River, once polluted and ridiculed, is open to kayakers and canoeists this summer under a federally authorized two-month program.

If this weren't a horrifying real-life example of Alinskyite practice, it would be a terrifying metaphor for Alinskyite theory:

A train could someday make a journey from New York City to London if a plan to build a 65-mile tunnel between North America and Asia comes to pass.

"Asia," of course, is a euphemism for Stalinist Russia, which Alinsky has often praised by means of condemnation, in a textbook example of Alinskyan Правда, or "opposite-speak."

In related news, Alinsky!

California pesticide regulators discriminated against Latino schoolchildren when they annually approved methyl bromide, a powerful pesticide used near their schools, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday.

Officials said the settlement is historic, because it's the first time the agency has issued a finding of adverse and disparate impact on a community in a civil rights case.

Alinsky!

The National Science Foundation has closed its investigation into Pennsylvania State University climatologist Michael Mann after finding no evidence of scientific misconduct related to his research.

It is the latest in a string of investigations to exonerate scientists involved in the so-called "Climategate" email scandal.

Alinksy!

An innovative concept of using solar panels as both sails and photovoltaic energy producers on ships is moving forward to the "detailed design" phase, according to developer Eco Marine Power. The Fukuoka, Japan-based company is promoting its concept as a way for shipping lines to green up their operations.

Aliskny!

Judy Flanagan's phone rang Tuesday with a call the Arizona immigration attorney wasn't expecting. A federal prosecutor suggested one of her clients -- a 22-year-old university student with no criminal record -- should ask to have her deportation case dismissed.
"That's never happened before," Flanagan said.

Immigration lawyers around the country hope those types of calls from federal officials will become more common under new deportation guidelines the Obama administration detailed a week ago.

To the man of action, the first criterion in determining which means to employ is to assess what means are available: A river beneath the Amazon River. Belgian crypts. Vertical panoramas. USSR in construction. The Infrasound Zoo. Expositions where the modern technology of the times was exhibited. Camel trains galore. National parks from space. And Dramatic Museum Realia:

"The age of guessing is passed away." Stereo scenes from the Goyder Expedition. Pictures of music. Old astronomy texts. The Periodic Table Printmaking Project (h/t: Cheryl). Books and prints by Albrecht Dürer. And photographs from the Meiji and Taisho eras.

That's it for this week. Best wishes to readers on the East Coast. Stay safe!

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-08-19T15:10:00.000-07:00

The best news I've heard this week is that most poor Americans have refrigerators. This means that if they can afford to buy food, they can keep it from spoiling, provided they're able to pay their electric bill. Compare this to the situation in Socialist Europe, where even the "wealthy" are obliged to drink warm beer, and you'll see that American exceptionalism is no joke.

Given that America's ~~poor people~~ underachievers enjoy advantages that would be well-nigh unimaginable to most 18th-century Baltic peasants, it's only fair to ask them to pull their ever-increasing weight. This site has also pointed out, more than once, that the tears of the poor could be a valuable source of microhydropower, to say nothing of water for processing tar sands. Not only does this make good economic sense, but it's also Biblically sound. For as Matthew 25:29 says, "unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not, even that which he hath shall be taken away."

Besides, it's not like we have a choice. The only alternative would be to tax the wealthy a little more. Or failing that, to haul these insufferably arrogant economic vampires before a People's Tribunal, seize all their assets and maroon them on Howland Island.

In other news, Democrats did pretty well in the Wisconsin recall elections:

Two Wisconsin Democratic state senators beat back Republican challengers on Tuesday in the last of a series of recall elections triggered by a fight over collective bargaining rights for public sector workers.

Both Democrats and Republicans were claiming victory on Tuesday in a series of nine summer recall votes in which Democrats unseated two incumbent Republicans but fell short of winning control of the state legislature.

A professor quoted in the article refers to these results as "a draw," because what the hell else would you call booting two corrupt GOP bullies out of office, without losing any seats yourself?

The Florida Supreme Court has dared to suggest that there are legal limits on Rick Scott's power:

The Florida Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that Gov. Rick Scott "overstepped his constitutional authority and violated the separation of powers" with an executive order freezing all pending rules until he could approve them.
In a 5-2 opinion, the court concluded that rulemaking authority belongs to the Legislature, not the governor.

The Virginia Department of Corrections will no longer shackle pregnant inmates during labor and recovery:

The new DOC regulations are sound public health policy. Restraining a pregnant woman can pose undue health risks to the woman and her pregnancy. Unrestrained movement is especially critical during labor, delivery, and the postpartum recovery. Women often need to move around during labor and recovery, including moving their legs as part of the birthing process, and restraining a pregnant woman can interfere with the medical staff’s ability to appropriately assist in childbirth.

The UK is taking steps to revitalize its canal system:

Britain's canal systems were once viewed as a throwback to a bygone age of freight transport, sidelined or abandoned in favor of faster road and rail links.
But as one major waterway undergoes a renaissance, shipping huge quantities of wine and other goods through two of the country's major trading hubs, the network could be poised to reclaim its original role and at the same time help cut pollution levels.

Urban crime rates have fallen in U.S. cities almost as sharply as they've increased in the imagination of hard-right "racial realists":

The Federal Bureau of Investigation released its 2010 crime statistics, known as the Uniform Crime Report, which showed that despite the tough recession, the number of violent and property crimes committed dropped for the fourth year in a row. Those cities with 1 million or more residents saw violent crime drop 5.1 percent; cities with populations between 500,000 and 1 million experienced a 5.6 percent drop; and those between 250,000 and 499,999 saw the biggest drop in violent crime, 6.9 percent.

In related news, U.S. states are increasingly reducing prison sentences:

“In Texas for the last few years we’ve been driving down both the crime rate and the incarceration rate,” said Marc Levin, the director of the Center for Effective Justice at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which helped draft the state’s corrections overhaul. “And it’s not just Texas. South Carolina, Kentucky, Arkansas and Ohio in the past year or so have done major reforms. These are certainly not liberal states. That is significant.”

See also here.

The ESA appears to have saved the Lake Erie water snake:

“Recovery of the Lake Erie water snake is cause for celebration both for this species and for the Endangered Species Act’s long record of success,” said Collette Adkins Giese, the Center for Biological Diversity’s herpetofauna attorney. “Before its listing under the Act, the snake faced intense human persecution and habitat destruction. Through the reasonable efforts of state and federal agencies and the public, the survival of this once-imperiled species is now assured.”

Things are also looking up for England's river otters:

During 2009-10 more than 3,300 sites were surveyed. Sites showing evidence of otters have increased from 5.8 per cent in the first survey of 1977-79, to an outstanding 58.8 per cent in this survey.

The Obama administration will adjust U.S. deportation policies:

The new policy is expected to help thousands of illegal immigrants who came to the United States as young children, graduated from high school and want to go on to college or serve in the armed forces.

And Chicago's O'Hare airport is home to a large apiary:

In May, the Chicago Department of Aviation partnered with a community group to start a 2,400 square foot apiary on-site. Now 23 beehives are up and running and are scheduled to yield 575 pounds of honey this year.

The project offers a creative, sustainable, and productive way to use otherwise wasted open space at mega-airports like O'Hare. The bees' new home on the east side of the airport campus had long stood vacant, so it was a natural spot for the bee program to begin. And if that's not enough benefit, the beehives provide employment opportunities for formerly incarcerated adults (similar to other projects that teach prisoners beekeeping).

Et cetera: Adventures in the Soviet Imaginary. Tokens of revolution. Town and country in miniature. (Related: Paper models of Prague, via things.) 100 objects. Fear of a black planet. Sounds of meteors. Tornado vs. rainbow. And photos by Sidney D. Gamble:

The Cambridge Illuminations. European maps of Australia. A bat billboard. Gay marriage among finches: a shocking exposé. Arkiva Tropica. Scenes from a peaceable kingdom. And photos by Pentti Sammallahti:

Still having YouTube problems, so that'll have to do it for this week.

(Image at top: "Laternenumzug" by Anna Sofie Petersen,ca. 1890.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-08-12T16:18:00.000-07:00

A federal appeals court has ruled against a Wisconsin law that denied medical treatments to transgender prisoners:

The 2005 Wisconsin law at the heart of this case was called the "Inmate Sex Change Prevention Act," and barred prison doctors from prescribing hormone therapy or surgery to transgender prisoners. The ACLU, in partnership with Lambda Legal, sued and got a preliminary ruling that any prisoners already on hormone therapy could continue their treatments. Last spring, the federal trial court struck down the law in its entirety, and last Friday, the federal appeals court agreed.

Next stop: mandatory sex change operations for all non-gay-married white males.

The socialist and/or corporatist dictator Obama will spend $100 million of our worthless fiat currency on Everglades restoration...probably so that it will be easier for Castro's forces, or perhaps FreedomWorks, to conquer Florida City via airboat.

The Obama administration will announce today that it's spending $100 million buying development rights from Central Florida ranchers and farmers to aid wetland restoration on nearly 24,000 acres in the Northern Everglades.
By purchasing the rights, the government prevents the ranchers from paving over the land — and also clears the way for restoring the wetlands that once carpeted the landscape.

This is the worst attack on American constitutional principles since that dream I had last night.

There's talk of turning foreclosed homes into rental properties:

Today the Obama administration will formally ask the public for ideas to help clear out the nation's stock of foreclosed homes and fix the housing market. The most prominent idea in the mix: turning foreclosed homes into rental properties.

Wishful thinking. If we really want to solve this problem, we need to 1) slash corporate tax rates; 2) gut entitlements; and 3) destroy civilization and ourselves in a crimson orgy of cocaine-fueled Sadeian ultraviolence.

Iowa claims to be getting 20 percent of its power from wind, even though this is impossible due to the First through Fourth Laws of Thermodynamics (and also the Chandelier Principle):

Iowa now ranks as the top state to receive the greatest percentage of its power from wind. According to the Des Moines Register is reporting, wind generation hit the 20% the second quarter of this year, and it looks like the state is working hard to increase this number even further.

Alright, enough of that. American cities are renovating rail lines:

The High Line park, built on an elevated railway trestle in Manhattan, has become both a symbol and a catalyst for an explosion of growth in the meatpacking district and the Chelsea neighborhood.
Now cities around the country, including Chicago, Philadelphia and St. Louis, are working up plans to renovate their aging railroad trestles, tracks and railways for parkland. Cities with little public space are realizing they badly need more parks, and the High Line has taught that renovating an old railway can be the spark that helps improve a neighborhood and attract development.

Six birds will gain ESA protections, finally:

In response to decades-old listing petitions and a series of lawsuits by the Center for Biological Diversity, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today designated six foreign bird species as endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act: the Cantabrian capercaillie, Marquesan imperial pigeon, Eiao Marquesas reed warbler, greater adjutant, Jerdon’s courser and slender-billed curlew.

OMG sand kittenz!!!1eleventeen:

The Israeli sand cat is extinct in the wild, so its only hope is breeding programs in captivity. The birth of this stupifyingly cute fuzzball at Safari Zoo in Tel Aviv is therefore really good news -- it could help put the species on the path to recovery and reintroduction.

Frogs, also:

Ten new species of frog have been discovered in India's Western Ghats according to two new papers in Biosystematica. Although human populations have farmed in the Western Ghats for centuries, the new discoveries prove that the rainforest still holds many surprises.

And blue iguanas:

The lizard went from an abundant population that roamed the island freely to practically assured extinction. In 2002, researchers estimated that two dozen—at best—survived in the wild. Despite the bleak number, conservationists started a last ditch effort to save the species. With help from local and international NGOs, the effort, dubbed the Blue Iguana Recovery Program, has achieved a rarity in conservation. Within nine years it has raised the population of blue iguanas by twenty times: today 500 wild blue iguanas roam Salina Reserve.

Guess what?

Pathogen populations fall as soon as farmers stop feeding prophylactic doses of antibiotics to poultry.

Also:

Karl Marx had it right. At some point, capitalism can destroy itself. You cannot keep on shifting income from labor to capital without having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand. That's what has happened. We thought that markets worked. They're not working. The individual can be rational. The firm, to survive and thrive, can push labor costs more and more down, but labor costs are someone else's income and consumption. That's why it's a self-destructive process

Last, regarding the riots in London, I'd just like to point out that if they continued for six months, and each rioter were equipped with an autogyro and a flamethrower, they couldn't do as much damage to civilization as the despicable fucking media hacks who are reporting on them. If these "journalists" want to point fingers at looters, perhaps they should start with their boardrooms, and the majority of their advertisers and guests.

The whole thing reminds me that I'm a pacifist not because I have some gentle, saintly nature, but because I'm frightened and appalled by how easily these people bring out the worst in me; the fact that I'm burdened with a desire to see the ruling elite frog-marched to the guillotine is one of the main reasons I resent them. The remarkable thing about the rioters is not their violence, but their restraint.

Anyway.

Paper dogs of Denmark. Sun Ra in Chicago. The Daily Climb (via wood s lot). First flights. Given the cultural and scientific trends in this country, it might not be a bad idea to brush up on phrenology (unless, of course, your bump of concentrativeness is insufficiently protuberant). Stationary voyages. More of the same (via Lilian Nattel). Faces of Keene. And trade union banners of UK transport workers:

Something I'd be writing about here if I had the time and willpower: "Internet-induced nostalgia and the pervasive 'fetish of the failed, forgotten and the marginal', and how it might be informed by 'a deeper sociological narrative, springing from a sense of dread or impasse with where we’ve arrived in recent years.'" Where it's all bound to end: Subsurface USA.

No movie today, partly because I'm exhausted, and partly because some friends forced me to leave the house and have lunch, but mostly because YouTube keeps crashing my browser. Next week, probably.

(Image at top: "Sea Serpent" by Hannah Hoch, 1937.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-08-05T13:06:00.000-07:00

Wisconsin's recall elections are coming up on Tuesday. If your politics are to the left of Glenn Beck's, or you earn less than $500K per annum, or you don't believe the 1870s were a golden age for women, or you suspect that climatologists know more about the climate than retired mining executives, or you'd rather see 10-year-olds in a schoolroom than in a coal pit, this is your fight. Please consider donating a dollar (at least) to each of the Democratic challengers, or participating in GOTV efforts.

While we're on the topic, here's a list of companies that are funding the annual meeting of ALEC. Why a retailer like Amazon would support a group whose goal is to leave the middle class with less disposable income is beyond me, but I'm sure one of Ayn Rand's books has some six-page paragraph that explains it.

In other news, the DoJ is taking action against Alabama's anti-immigrant law:

The government has filed a suit against Alabama’s draconian anti-immigrant law, which it said conflicts with federal laws and makes it too easy for police to detain people suspected of being in the country illegally.

Modeled on Arizona’s infamous SB 1070 but taking it to even greater extremes, the Alabama law is considered the most pernicious of a series of state anti-immigrant laws passed this year.

Incidentally, here's what Alabama's state constitution has to say on the matter:

[I]mmigration shall be encouraged; emigration shall not be prohibited, and no citizen shall be exiled.

The APA has come out in favor of same-sex marriage:

The American Psychological Association (APA) has endorsed gay marriage ahead of its annual convention in Washington. With a unanimous 157-0 vote, the APA’s policymaking body approved the resolution on Wednesday.

As has the Suquamish Tribal Council:

"We wanted to continue our values of being accepting and tolerant and generous to the rights of our people," Leonard Forsman, the tribal chairman, told me. "We want to allow our people to be happy and free. Our tradition is to be open"....
Thomas Mabe, 68, told me of having his hair cut off by the principal at the public school, and of the relative who came home from war, riddled with scars, only to be refused service at a local tavern.

All these years later, those things still sting. As a result, the Suquamish never want anyone else to hurt that way, to be singled out, or turned away or forced to suffer for being who they are.

Apparently, we have a new national fuel standard:

Building on the Obama administration’s agreement for Model Years 2012-2016 vehicles, which will raise fuel efficiency to 35.5 mpg and begin saving families money at the pump this year, the next round of standards will require performance equivalent to 54.5 mpg or 163 grams/ mile of CO2 for cars and light-duty trucks by Model Year 2025. Achieving the goals of this historic agreement will rely on innovative technologies and manufacturing that will spur economic growth and create high-quality domestic jobs in cutting edge industries across America.

Controversial new research suggests that public health spending may improve public health:

The study examined whether changes in spending by local public health agencies over a 13-year period contributed to changes in rates of community mortality from preventable causes of death, including infant mortality and deaths due to cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer.
The researchers found for every 10 percent increase in local public health spending, mortality rates from the four causes of death analyzed dropped anywhere from 1 percent to almost 7 percent.

To which the only rational response is: OMG SOCIALISM!!

Speaking of which:

Physicians in the United States spend nearly four times as much dealing with health insurers and payers compared with doctors in Canada. Most of the difference stems from the fact that Canadian physicians deal with a single payer, in contrast to the multiple payers in the United States.

More proof that freedom isn't free.

In Wyoming, ESA protections have been restored to an endangered field mouse, which demonstrates yet again that the real endangered species in this country is wealthy white males:

Effective Aug. 6, 2011, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will reinstate protections for the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act throughout its range. Protections had been removed for the mouse in 2007 in the Wyoming portions of its range, while it remained protected in Colorado.

In Tennessee, a rare flower has recovered from near-extinction:

In a rare, but hard-fought victory, officials announced plans to remove the Tennessee purple coneflower from the endangered species list. The flower had the unfortunate distinction of being one of the first plants placed on the list when it was added back in 1979 -- but that was just the first in series of conservation efforts that would take place over the following thirty years aimed at saving it from extinction.

Once the coneflower is officially delisted in September, it will be one of only five plants whose recovery has been so profound as to warrant a loosening of protections.

Atlantic cod seem to be on the rebound as well:

Comebacks. Sports teams and aging rockers have them. Fish rarely do. But in a bit of good news for fisheries scientists, one ecosystem devastated by overfishing off the coast of Nova Scotia is showing early signs of recovery, a new study suggests. Here, Atlantic cod and other predatory fish, whose numbers nosedived in the early 1990s, seem to be struggling back, pointing to the resilience of marine communities, researchers say.

H/t: Karin, who also passes this along:

Cash-strapped California is in the midst of a Solar Schools initiative that will help the state save over $1.5 billion in energy costs over the next 30 years. In partnership with SunPower, the California Solar Schools program helps K-12 and higher education institutions across the state take advantage of local solar subsidies that will partially fund the installation of solar panels on their buildings. In addition to helping the schools onto the clean energy boat, the initiative aims to teach kids in those schools about professions in the renewable energy sector.

Shell has admitted its responsibility for the disastrous oil spills in Nigeria:

After long denying responsibility for the massive 2008 spills, which sent 11 million gallons of crude oil into a region of the Niger Delta, Shell has finally taken responsibility for the disaster. A class action lawsuit was filed against the company, prompting them to admit that more than 275 times the amount of oil they reported was actually spilled. The U.N. has harshly criticized the oil company, and says that the region requires the world’s largest ever oil spill clean up which will take up to 30 years and cost potentially more than $1 billion.

But never mind about that. We must look ahead, not backward.

New York's city council has passed several bills that support urban gardening:

In an effort to ramp up support for the consumption and production of local food, the City Council passed a package of bills on Thursday to facilitate the building of rooftop greenhouses and free up land for urban gardens.

Under the legislation, a building’s rooftop greenhouse would not be considered an additional story by the Department of Buildings, and would be exempt from height limits, if it occupies less than one-third of the rooftop. The city would also begin compiling a database of property that it owns or leases so that it can better identify unused spaces to be turned into urban gardens.

Here's a sentence I didn't expect to be writing today: It's possible that Ukrainian bears will no longer be forced to drink vodka:

Some bars have a pool table or a dart board to entertain customers. Others might have a bunch of flat-screen TVs, or even a mechanical bull. In Ukraine, dozens of drinking establishments have a bear. A real, live bear. That gets forced to drink vodka for patrons' amusement. It's a cruel practice that the country's environment minister has vowed to bring to an end.

God's own Earth. The Cine-Tourist (could it be the greatest site ever?). A Philippa Schuyler moment. Flickr's hydraulic engineering pool. Juno's passengers. Metal on the plains of Mars. Star trails and fireflies.

Toys and souvenirs. Rockaway frolics. A tour of the stratosphere. Estonian book covers. A page devoted to "collecting blades for shaving and if to be more exact, that of labels (wrappers) from them." And posters by A.M. Cassandre:

Here's a cartoon, also:

(Image at top: "Harmony in Blue and Silver: Trouville" by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1865)

A Dangerous World

2011-08-03T13:52:00.000-07:00

Given the number and scale of the disasters underway in this nightmare country, I assumed that no further outrage could coax this mopey z-list blogger out of drunken semi-retirement.

But I had not reckoned with Joe Fucking Lieberman:

LIEBERMAN: I want to indicate today to my colleagues that Senator Coburn and I are working again on a bipartisan proposal to secure Social Security over the long term, we hope to have that done in time. To also forward to the special committee for their consideration. So, bottom line, we can’t protect these entitlements and also have the national defense we need to protect us in a dangerous world while we’re at war with Islamist extremists who attacked us on 9/11 and will be for a long time to come.

So to avoid "a day of horror like no other," we must commit ourselves to days of horror like every other...days on which hundreds of Americans find out that they can't protect "entitlements" like food, shelter and medicine while they're fighting disease or disability. In doing so, we'll torture and kill more Americans than Osama bin Laden managed in his wettest dreams. But as long as the networks don't show these commonplace deaths in a slow-motion loop at dinner time, I suppose we can occupy our minds with happier thoughts...like the relative risk of getting beheaded by some Palestinian kid, versus a Mexican drug lord.

You know what my definition of a dangerous world is? It's a world where people routinely lose their homes because they get sick. It's a world where you wind up eating cat food so that the guy who shipped your job overseas can get a tax cut for supporting the politicians who slashed your benefits. It's a world where we starve children so that we can afford to blast foreign wedding guests into bloody shreds, while patting ourselves on the back for being "exceptional" (and therefore not subject to the pretty moral axioms we impose on other countries at gunpoint). It's a world in which a sociopathic cipher like Joe Lieberman can strut around in the borrowed plumes of theological gravitas, to polite applause from his slack-jawed media courtiers. It's a world, above all, in which a cowardly, brutal, willfully stupid, morally and spiritually bankrupt country like the United States can hold up its grotesque anti-values and its hopelessly atomized version of "freedom" as things worthy of envy, let alone emulation.

It'd be terrible if the Islamic extremists took over, wouldn't it? Granted, they might have some cultural or religious prohibition against letting the elderly die in the gutter, or some limits on what they'd be willing to do for money, but think of the downside: The state oppression of gays and women. Bans on abortion and birth control. A theocratic attack on education and science. Imperious demands for public prayer. Harebrained conspiracies presented to schoolchildren as fact. A zero-sum approach to difference that promotes endless strife between races and genders. A violent hypersensitivity to real and imagined insults. And the unedifying daily spectacle of smug, vicious, power-hungry thugs trying to pass themselves off as God's right-hand men. Let's all pray it can't happen here!

I know it won't mean much, ultimately, but it ought to be said that our political and economic betters, whose "success" is due largely to the fact that conscience rarely tells them anything they don't want to hear, are the actual dregs of society, and a burden this country doesn't need and can't afford. To call them "vultures" would imply a utility in the scheme of things -- a grace and a purpose -- that they don't actually have. They're parasitic encumbrances, fifth wheels and exorbitant sponges. They're welfare cheats in the only morally meaningful sense of the term: people who rob the poor and the helpless of comfort and dignity. They are to politics, culture, religion, science and ethics what thumbtacks are to nutrition.

Among the poor, you'll routinely find people who will resist the urge to steal small change out of a blind beggar's pencil cup, despite living under stresses that are as unimaginable as honor to people like Holy Joe Lieberman. For our Galtian Overlords, however, the primary objection to stealing a blind man's loose change is that it doesn't pay enough to justify the millisecond drudgery of emptying his cup into your pocket. Fortunately, economies of scale are available to our best and brightest; with one stroke of a solid-gold pen, it's possible to rob thousands of blind people (and sick people, and children with autism, and teachers, and firefighters) at once. Yes we can!

Having presided for years over this shell game, these chattering husks are insisting yet again that we take a "realistic" look at programs like Social Security. These programs are threatened, y'see. And who'd be in a better position to know this than the people who've been piling sticks of dynamite in the vault?

I hold this truth to be self-evident: Most of us will never find ourselves on the business end of an Islamic radical. Many of us, however, will struggle to stay housed and fed if we're too old to work, or we fall seriously ill. "National defense" that focuses on cartoon figures of ethnic menace, as opposed to the prosaic and preventable disasters that cause most of the actual suffering and death in this country, is a cruel joke, and I suspect its extremely dark humor is not entirely lost on heartless neo-feudalist chatterboxes like Lieberman and Coburn.

I suppose I should be grateful that as Anders Breivik recently noted, socialists are on the brink of world domination. Otherwise, things would be looking much worse.

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-07-22T12:32:00.000-07:00

An independent review of the BBC has found that it pays too much attention to climate denialists:

The BBC is to revamp its science coverage after an independent review highlighted weaknesses and concluded that journalists boosted the apparent controversy of scientific news stories such as climate change, GM crops and the MMR vaccine by giving too much weight to fringe scientific viewpoints….

Commissioned last year to assess impartiality and accuracy in BBC science coverage across television, radio and the internet, the review said the network was at times so determined to be impartial that it put fringe views on a par with well-established fact: a strategy that made some scientific debates appear more controversial than they were.

Michael Bloomberg is donating $50 million to the Siera Club's anti-coal campaign:

Sierra Club's anti-coal campaign is one of the few national environmental initiatives to have substantial success in the last five years, blocking 153 coal plants and counting. And that was done while most of the establishment money and attention were going to the climate-bill effort. The anti-coal movement was bootstrapped and genuinely grassroots.

Congress has confirmed an openly gay federal judge:

The first federal judge to be an openly gay man was confirmed July 18 by a vote of 80 to 13....The vote and approval of Oetken went over with little fanfare – social conservatives like Tom Coburn, John Cornyn, Jeff Sessions, Jon Kyl voted for him.

What if they held a tea party, and no one came?

A Tea Party convention and straw poll scheduled for late September in Kansas has been called off amid sluggish enrollment and allegations of infighting. On the event's website, Freedom Jamboree chair William Temple accused local groups of a "preoccupation with prospering their own organizations at the expense of the 'grassroots' movement as a whole" and said "the spirit intrinsic in 2009 has diminished nationwide, and some lethargy and weariness persists."

Could be. But I think the larger problem is that THE PEOPLE OF THE WRONG-PARSE-SYNTAX-GRAMMAR-COMMUNICATION-TEACHINGS ARE WITH THE CLAIM OF THE TEACHINGS WITH THE LODIAL-CONTRACT-VOID = BY THE RULING-CLASS, GOV, KING, QUEEN, JUDGE, ATTORNEY, LAWYER, TEACHER, PRIEST, DOCTOR AND [PEOPLE JUST DO NOT KNOW!!!] OF EVERY-NATION ON EARTH WITH THE SLAVERY OF THE PEOPLE WITH THE CONTROL OF THE LICENSING-USURY AND TAXATION OF THE WATER, AIR, EARTH AND FIRE.

Speaking of which, the California Milk Processor Board has pulled an ad campaign that showed hapless men groaning under the yoke of the Premenstrual Woman. At the risk of shocking you, it turns out that the people who were smug and stupid enough to approve this campaign are also too smug and stupid to apologize for it properly:

"Over the past couple of weeks, regrettably, some people found our campaign about milk and PMS to be outrageous and misguided — and we apologize to those we offended," the California Milk Processor Board says on its website. "Others thought it funny and educational. It has opened up a topic that affects women, of course, but also relationships."

Or to put it another way, "it's too bad these humorless bitches couldn't look beyond our little joke about period-driven domestic tyranny, because we were actually making an important point about women being irrational and difficult." (Bonus points to MSNBC for putting "sexist" in quotes on account of Views Differ.)

Anyway. Toyota claims to have created an engine filter that will remove ground-level ozone from the air:

Toyota’s Central Research and Development labs have announced the development of a material that removes 95% of unreacted ozone from the air when used in an ozone filter. The material is called mesoporous two-line ferrihydrite or M2LFh (say that ten times fast) and is porous, which gives it a large inner surface area with numerous iron sites near the surface for absorbing ozone.

The conservative stronghold of Orange County has been crushed under the eco-friendly heel of atheo-Islamic envirosocialism:

Chevron Energy Solutions and the City of Brea today unveiled Orange County's largest municipal solar installation....By using the sun to generate its own power, the city has projected to reduce its electrical utility costs by an average 40 percent and its carbon emissions by 86,000 metric tons; comparable to removing 16,000 cars from the road. During construction, the project also provided more than 25 local jobs and 125 indirect jobs with an estimated $3 million boost to the local economy.

Portland, OR is the latest city to ban plastic bags:

Oregon's largest city has just joined a growing list of municipalities that are fed up with plastic bags -- It has just adopted an ordinance that will ban plastic bags from major grocery stores, as well as some big box retailers. Even better, the ban is slated to go into effect in a mere matter of months

An Ohio Republican who was pushing a restrictive voter ID law will step down:

Ohio state Representative Robert Mecklenborg announced Sunday that he is resigning after news of a drunk driving charge became public. Rep. Mechlenborg, chairman of the House Government and Elections Committee and sponsor of a controversial bill requiring voters to show a valid photo ID to register, was arrested in Indiana last April for allegedly driving under the influence of alcohol and with an expired driver's license. According to media reports, he was accompanied in his car by a young woman and was found with Viagra in his system.

Researchers have found a large population of northern white-cheeked gibbons in Vietnam:

Scientists from Conservation International made the discovery in Pu Mat National Park, near the Vietnam-Laos border, in an area of remote, dense forest that has been largely isolated from human activity. By recording the gibbons’ loud, territorial ‘songs’, the team were able to confirm a population of 130 groups, or 455 gibbons in total.

Previous work by Conservation International in other parts of north-central Vietnam had found no population of the northern white-cheeked gibbon larger than a dozen groups. The newly discovered population at Pu Mat National Park is therefore all the more important, as it represents over two thirds of the total population of this species in Vietnam and may be the only viable population left in the world.

In related news, conservation efforts have brought the blue iguana from the brink of extinction to...whatever brink the rest of us are teetering on:

With help from local and international NGOs, the effort, dubbed the Blue Iguana Recovery Program, has achieved a rarity in conservation. Within nine years it has raised the population of blue iguanas by twenty times: today 500 wild blue iguanas roam Salina Reserve.

Rupert Murdoch continues to have problems:

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) asked the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigations—currently investigating illegal activity in News Corp.'s American operations—to examine the details of the case, settled in New Jersey courts, between News America Marketing and Floorgraphics, which sold floor advertising in grocery stores (clients included Winn-Dixie and Safeway). Floorgraphics alleged that its rival hacked its computer system as many as 11 times in 2003 and 2004 to gain business.

The Birmingham city council has found a remarkable collection of silent film scores:

All the pieces, British, French and American (roughly a third of each), are uniquely written for cinema use, published by commercially operating music publishers and are nearly all in sets of parts for a band of 7-11 players (a ‘salon orchestra’ as it was known). They all have generic titles (‘Bizarre March’, ‘The Onslaught’, ‘Emotional Waltz’, ‘Desert Monotony’(!)) or numbers, and often suggestions for their use (‘for Eastern pictures’, ‘For Pathetic or Tragic scenes’, ‘Fire or Torture scenes’ etc etc).

Home movies by pigeons. A clockwork city. The return of the repressed. Ditto. Nineteenth-century microscope books. Sixteenth-century pyrotechnics. Images of universal harmony. Photos by Andrew Meredith (via things). Photos by Susan S. Bank. Pure blue animals. And photos by Terence Vincent Powderly.

And now, a word from our sponsor:

(Image at top: "Landscape" by Ralph Blakelock, ca. 1910.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-07-15T14:00:00.000-07:00

In California, Jerry Brown signed the FAIR Education Act:

California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has signed into law the FAIR Education Act, which requires California public schools to include the contributions of gays and lesbians in social studies curricula. The law is the first of its kind in the country.

In Wisconsin, Democrats defeated six phony primary challengers:

Democratic Wisconsin Senate candidates overwhelmingly defeated their fake rivals Tuesday night in the Democratic primary election....
The Wisconsin Republican Party entered six fake Democratic candidates into the race to force Democratic primary elections in Wisconsin and delay the general election.

The cost of this corporatist charade to taxpayers: About $400,000.

The cleantech sector is doing well:

Sectors like clean energy, green building, and efficient transport employ 2.7 million workers — more than the biosciences and fossil fuel sectors.
And guess what? They pay better than the average job too. Median salaries for cleantech-related jobs are $46,343, or about $7,727 more than the median wages across the broader economy.

Meanwhile, conservatives are promoting inefficient lightbulbs, and attempting "to prohibit websites that teach children about energy efficiency." (And, of course, praying for rain.)

The Murdoch Empire continues to crumble:

With investigations into News Corp. already underway in the U.S. and the U.K, the prime minister of Australia has expressed interest in launching Australia’s own investigation. PM Julia Gillard told the National Press Club today that she is “shocked and disgusted” at allegations of improper information gathering by Murdoch’s British tabloids and predicted a “long debate about media ethics in this country.”

Federal regulators have rejected an application for an idiotic dam in Southern California:

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission today dismissed a proposed dam and hydroelectric project in Southern California’s Cleveland National Forest that would have severely damaged the environment, wildlife habitat and the area’s rural character. The Lake Elsinore Advanced Pumped Storage Project, or LEAPS, has been beset with problems since its inception: Opposition has been continuous, while financial and regulatory difficulties have also plagued the project.
“This dam project was an ecological and economic catastrophe waiting to happen,” said Jonathan Evans of the Center for Biological Diversity. “Hopefully today’s decision dismissing the application will be the final nail in its coffin.”

A frog unseen for 87 years has turned up in Borneo:

Scientists are elated after the surprise rediscovery of a wildly-colored frog not seen for 87 years and never before photographed—until now. The Bornean rainbow toad, also known as the Sambas Stream toad (Ansonia latidisca) was rediscovered on Borneo in the Malaysian state of Sarawak by local scientists inspired by a 2010 search for the world's missing amphibians by Conservation International (CI).

Photo © Dr. Indraneil Das.

A Muslim man who was shot and partially blinded by a Texan death-row prisoner is attempting to prevent his attacker's execution:

Rais Bhuiyan opposes the execution. In fact, he is part of a movement for clemency for Stroman because he believes "in order to live in a better and peaceful world, we need to break the cycle of hate and violence." Instead, Bhuiyan is seeking to engage in a victim-offender reconciliation dialogue with Stroman, a right guaranteed to crime victims in the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure.

An appeals court has struck down an absurd "anti-prostitution pledge" that was hampering efforts to fight HIV/AIDS:

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the "anti-prostitution pledge," a part of the U.S. Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act. The law required nongovernmental organizations receiving U.S. funding for HIV/AIDS work to declare — or pledge — that they opposed prostitution. Most alarmingly, the pledge extended to all parts of an organization's work, even parts that didn't use U.S. money.

New research suggests that smaller wind turbines are more efficient than big ones:

The first field results from a Caltech research team led by John Dabiri have been published, and they suggest that Dabiri’s new approach to wind generation may be just what rural communities have been hoping for: the ability to proceed with widespread wind energy development without changing the character of local landscapes and soundscapes.

Neptune's first orbit since its discovery. Historypin. Cartographic octopi. Photos by Jonathan Williams. Dummy portraits (via Coudal). And farm animal portraits:

(Photo at top: "Longmont, Colorado, 1979" by Robert Adams.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-06-24T09:20:00.000-07:00

Saudi women are demanding the right to drive:

More Saudi Arabian women drove their cars in the streets of capital Riyadh Wednesday, continuing a campaign — largely rooted in social media — to push the kingdom into overturning a ban on female drivers. At the same time, one of the European Union’s top diplomats sent a long-requested message of support for their campaign.

The ILO has adopted a treaty that protects the rights of domestic workers:

Labor groups around the world celebrated last Thursday after the United Nations’ International Labour Organization adopted a historic treaty that increases protections for millions of domestic workers.
Household service employees, many of whom are migrant women or girls from underprivileged areas, are now provided fundamental labor rights that were previously not guaranteed due to the nature of their informal work.

In Spain, a solar plant is providing electricity 24 hours a day:

The innovative molten salt heat transfer technology deployed at the Gemasolar greenfield independent power project helps avoid fluctuations in power supply through a system that is capable of 15 hours of energy production without sunlight. This accordingly allows for generation of electricity 24 hours a day for many months of the year, even during the hours of darkness or poor daylight during winter.

A highway will not be built through Serengeti National Park:

In what is a victory for environmentalists, scientists, tourism, and the largest land migration on Earth, the Tanzanian government has cancelled a commercial road that would have cut through the northern portion of the Serengeti National Park. According to scientists the road would have severed the migration route of 1.5 million wildebeest and a half million other antelope and zebra, in turn impacting the entire ecosystem of the Serengeti plains.

The DoI has extended the ban on uranium mining in the Grand Canyon watershed:

The announcement quells fears that a two-year mining prohibition issued by Salazar in July 2009 would expire, opening the door to new mining claims and resulting mine development. Public lands around Grand Canyon National Park have been ground zero for new uranium mining that threatens to industrialize iconic wildlands and permanently pollute aquifers feeding Grand Canyons springs and streams.

Siemens has built a hybrid-electric airplane:

Siemens just unveiled the world's first hybrid-electric aircraft, the DA36 E-Star. It uses an unique power train to do the seemingly impossible: take off and land on nothing but batteries.

Shocking new evidence suggests that vaccines may actually work:

Vaccination against rotavirus, a major cause of severe acute gastroenteritis in children, dramatically decreased hospitalization rates for the infection among infants in three US counties, according to a new study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases....

Gotta run, sorry. Consolation: The Lost Collection (via things). Ge0-Cosmos. Pencil sculptures. Header vignettes. Photos of snowflakes. Heirloom technology. Scenes from La Vie Électrique. The Sathorn Unique. Photos by Metehan Özcan. The Lonely Beat. And photos by Sanna Kannisto.

Here's a cartoon, too.

(Image at top: "A San Diego beach scene drawn with an eight color palette of bacterial colonies expressing fluorescent proteins derived from GFP and the red-fluorescent coral protein dsRed. The colors include BFP, mTFP1, Emerald, Citrine, mOrange, mApple, mCherry and mGrape. Artwork by Nathan Shaner, photography by Paul Steinbach, created in the lab of Roger Tsien in 2006.")

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-06-17T11:30:00.000-07:00

Buried in work yet again. Here are some links, though:

UN adopts historic resolution on human rights, sexual orientation and gender identity.

The Department of Education teaches U.S. schools a lesson on LGBT rights.

Bankruptcy court declares DOMA unconstitutional.

Oregon adopts strictest standards in United States for toxic water pollution.

Rhode Island will no longer shackle pregnant women in prison.

California stops automatic delivery of White Pages.

Endangered Species Act protection reinstated for West Virginia northern flying squirrel.

Peru cancels massive dam project after years of protests.

Vietnam and the United States are collaborating to clean up unexploded bombs and Agent Orange.

Huge new boreal forest preserve in Manitoba.

Detroit’s school for young moms rescued from closure.

Panera's pay-what-you-want model is thriving (h/t: RMJ).

Campaign to repeal SB 5 collects over 714,000 signatures, 231,000 required.

Also, too:

The power of mesmerism.

Dear Photograph.

Arabick Roots.

Little Film.

(Image at top: "Storm Brewing" by Lyonel Feininger, 1939.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-06-03T12:54:00.000-07:00

Civil unions are now legal in Illinois:

A couple together for nearly half a century, two TV chefs and an official in new Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration were among the 35 gay couples joined in civil union ceremonies Thursday in a downtown Chicago park after a new Illinois law recognized their relationships for the first time.

"Never thought it was going to happen," said James Darby, who at nearly 80 was legally joined to his partner of 47 years in a ceremony presided over by Cook County Circuit Court Chief Judge Timothy Evans.

Apropos of which, here's a moving speech in favor of same-sex marriage by Republican representative John Kriesel:

Furthermore, the Republican governor of Nevada has signed two important anti-discrimination bills:

Yesterday Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval, a Republican, signed into law bills prohibiting discrimination in housing (SB368) and public accommodations (SB331) on the basis of gender identity or expression. Last week he signed AB211, a bill prohibiting discrimination in employment on the basis of gender identity or expression. Taken together, the three new laws represent fairly comprehensive anti-discrimination protections for trans people in Nevada.

And the ACLU reports that an Internet filter used in many public schools will stop blocking LGBT information sites:

Lightspeed's web filters are used in more than 2,000 schools in the U.S., U.K. and Australia, covering more than 6 million students, so this is a big deal.
Lightspeed made this move after several of its school clients received letters from our "Don't Filter Me" project, which combats unconstitutional censorship of pro-LGBT information on public school computer systems.

HHS Medical Administrator Don Berwick has warned, uh, Indiana that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms uh by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free and we were going to be armed:

Yesterday, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) notified Indiana state officials that an Indiana law prohibiting state agencies from contracting with clinics offering abortions violates federal law. Governor Mitch Daniels (R) signed the law on May 10, and in April, the state Senate and House voted to cut about $2 million in federal money that goes to Planned Parenthood, much of which is for Medicaid services. HHS Medical Administrator Don Berwick clarified, "Medicaid programs may not exclude qualified health care providers from providing services that are funded under the program because of a provider's scope of practice."

An attempt by Tennessee Republicans to defund Planned Parenthood has been aborted, pre-viability:

Republicans in the Tennessee Legislature have decided to forgo efforts to defund Planned Parenthood through an amendment to the state budget after they were advised that the measure is unconstitutional, according to a joint statement released last week by Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey (R) and House Speaker Beth Harwell (R), the Knoxville News Sentinel/Chattanooga Times Free Press reports.

New York will no longer participate in S-Comm:

In a huge victory for civil liberties, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday, June 1, 2011, suspended his state's participation in a federal deportation program that tore apart families, encouraged racial profiling and harmed public safety by creating mistrust between police and immigrant communities.

Manitoba is brutally violating the civil liberties of Ayn Rand's ghost by placing new restrictions on hog-waste lagoons:

Manitoba will tighten rules on expanding hog farms and ban manure spreading to cut the flow of phosphorus into the world's 11th-biggest freshwater lake, as Lake Winnipeg deteriorates from algae growth.
The western Canadian province, which has the country's third-largest pig herd, will also protect wetlands that filter out pollutants and force the capital Winnipeg to build a sewage treatment plant, Premier Greg Selinger said on Thursday.

A federal court has ruled against the Forest Service's attempt to open more of El Dorado National Forest to off-road vehicles.

A federal court has rejected the U.S. Forest Service’s plan to increase off-road vehicle use in the Eldorado National Forest. The court decision, released Thursday, found the Forest Service’s “travel-management plan” violated legal protections for fragile Sierra Nevada meadow habitat and the threatened California red-legged frog.

A freshwater limpet long thought to be extinct has turned up in Alabama:

a major mass extinction took place right here in North America in the first half of the 20th century, when 47 species of mollusk disappeared after the watershed in which they lived was dammed. Now, a population of one of those species—a freshwater limpet last seen more than 60 years ago and presumed extinct—has been found in a tributary of the heavily dammed Coosa River in Alabama's Mobile River Basin.

A vaccine seems to increase the lifespan of patients with recurrent glioblastoma:

In data presented at The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, cancer researchers found that the brain tumor vaccine HSPPC-96 for treating recurrent gliobastoma (GBM) has a favorable safety profile and extends survival by two to three times more than the current median survival rate. Patients in the study, conducted at University Hospitals Case Medical Center, University of California, San Francisco and Columbia University, were found to have a median survival of 11 months compared to current three to five month survival.

"The findings are very favorable for patients with this deadly form of brain cancer," said Andrew Sloan, MD, one of the authors of the study presented at ASCO and Director of the Brain Tumor and Neuro-Oncology Center at University Hospitals Case Medical Center. "The vaccine is one of the few immune therapies designed specifically for patients who are not newly diagnosed, and these encouraging results make this a promising therapy for a more extensive Phase 3 trial."

Dear dead days (via things). An online cinematheque (via The Bioscope). Animated anatomy. RIP Spirit. Et jardins romantiques:

Early work by Frederick Gerrish (see also here). Our rotating Earth. Photographs by Richard Shute. And images from the First International Polar Year:

Private die proprietary stamps. Robots and hierogylphs. Printed cuneiform. The Jorge Prelorán Collection. And vegetable anatomy:

And here's your goddamn movie.

(Image at top: "Le dirigeable dans le hangar" by Léon Spilliaert, 1910.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-05-20T10:56:00.000-07:00

One of Edward Wegman's plagiarized papers has been withdrawn:

The Wegman work is part of a flurry of "analysis" (at least one expert derides this particular paper as "an opinion piece"), that Wegman and Said conducted on behalf of U.S. Congressman Joe Barton (R-Texas), who was using the material to attack the climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann.

If you haven't been following this very entertaining story, proceed immediately to Deep Climate.

Apropos of charlatans, Mark and David Geier, who've been promoting chemical castration as a treatment for children with autism, have finally gotten some attention from the medical establishment:

On Monday, May 16, 2011, the Maryland Board of Physicians charged Dr. Mark Geier with numerous violations of the Maryland Medical Practice Act, and charged his son, David Geier, with practicing medicine without a license. The charges come three weeks after the Board summarily suspended Dr. Geier’s license to practice medicine, in order to prevent harm to the many autistic children entrusted to his care.

Maryland has passed its own version of the DREAM Act:

While Democrats in the Senate are still getting their efforts together at passing the DREAM Act -- which just barely fell short of passage in January, despite a relentless campaign of remorseless lying waged by Republicans -- legislators in Maryland have shown them how it's done -- simply get it passed, and watch the nativist Republicans reveal themselves as the hollow, lying hatemongers they are in the process.

The Homeland Security Department will discontinue the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS):

The program consisted of a series of controls designed to collect information, fingerprints, and photographs of certain noncitizens entering and living in the United States, and to monitor their status and movement once within the country's borders. From its inception, it was determined that NSEERS would only target male noncitizens of a certain age from predesignated countries.

The program drew criticism from various civil and human-rights groups, members of Congress, and at least one committee of the United Nations. Specifically, NSEERS was censured for its focus primarily on nationals of Muslim-majority countries, its alleged inability to identify terrorist threats, and the strict legal and immigration consequences put in place for participant noncompliance.

The DHS will also extend protected status for Haitians:

“It’s really good news for the community. We were all holding our breath and waiting,” said Marleine Bastien, founding member and executive director of Fanm Ayisyen Nan Miyami, or Haitian Women of Miami. “Some of our clients were already getting very anxious because of their work permits.”

Indonesia has finally imposed a moratorium on logging permits:

[T]he moratorium is seen as an important step toward Indonesia meeting its commitment of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by at least 26 percent from a projected 2020 baseline. Indonesia is presently the third largest greenhouse gas emitter after China and the United States due primarily to degradation of peatlands and deforestation.

An animal thought to be extinct has made an appearance:

The red-crested tree rat (Santamartamys rufodorsalis) had not been recorded since 1898 and was thought possibly extinct—that is until one showed up at 9:30 PM on May 4th at a lodge in El Dorado Nature Reserve in northern Colombia.

"He just shuffled up the handrail near where we were sitting and seemed totally unperturbed by all the excitement he was causing," said Lizzie Noble, a British volunteer with Fundación ProAves a conservation group in Colombia focusing on birds.

Photo by Lizzie Noble/ProAves.

In the UK, butterfly populations seem to be making a rebound:

Although Britain's butterflies remain in long-term decline, the populations of three-quarters of threatened species increased in 2010. This change in fortunes has been put down to targeted conservation action, combined with better weather last year after a series of disastrously wet summers. Butterfly experts hope that if Britain experiences a similar summer this year, some of the country's most threatened species could continue to make a significant recovery.

In Hawaii, the Kaua‘i Island Utility Cooperative will be forced to reduce its impact on seabirds:

“It’s unfortunate that two lawsuits were needed to get KIUC to take responsibility for its actions,” said Marjorie Ziegler of Conservation Council for Hawaii. “Corporations operating in Hawaii should understand their kuleana (responsibility) to protect our precious natural heritage.”

The permit requires the KIUC to carry out actions described in a “habitat conservation plan.” These include a schedule for the KIUC to lower its power lines, obscure them with fast-growing trees, or attach them to bridges to minimize bird fatalities in key flyways — Keälia, Hanapëpë, and Kapa‘a.

New York may ban cars from Central and Prospect parks:

The Regional Plan Association reported that closing the “Loop” in Central Park would force as few as 20 percent and as many as 60 percent of drivers to either change their mode of transportation or significantly modify their driving patterns, forcing people to reconsider driving as a luxury not a necessity.
The removal of cars from parks is not new. It has been on Mayor Bloomberg’s agenda since 2001 when he campaigned for the reduction in private automobile use and a complete removal of cars from parks. Parks in the city were originally car free, and if June’s board meeting goes as planned, the city could be one step closer to returning parks to their original state.

Speaking of Prospect Park, area residents and businesses have banded together to protect the park's geese from extemination:

A group of Brooklyn residents, business owners, and wildlife advocates have devised a program to stand guard over the Prospect Park geese at all hours of the day to prevent federal officials from using mass extermination methods as a way of maintaining the geese population. Armed with binoculars, cameras, and video recording equipment, the pro-geese group is determined to prevent another massacre like last summer’s.

Wuxtry, wuxtry! The California Chamber of Commerce frequently says things that are not true:

The chamber continues to promote its job killer list, despite the fact that its dire warnings of economic doom have been consistently wrong. And it does so despite the fact that Californians broadly support laws and protections that have made our air cleaner, our workplaces safer and our families more secure.

Research into the excretory behavior of forest-dwelling Ursidae is ongoing.

Deseret Chemical Depot has destroyed its stockpile of mustard gas (h/t: Cheryl):

The last of the bulk mustard gas stored at Deseret Chemical Depot in Tooele County was destroyed Monday, a milestone for the facility that has been incinerating aging munitions since 1996....
In addition, the depot also plans to destroy in coming months lewisite, a blistering agent, and GA, a World War II-era nerve agent recovered from German stockpiles.

Furthermore, in summation and notwithstanding: Student assignments and the Rapture. A Milky Way panorama. A gravity map. Unfortunate corporate logos. Bricks of the past. A gallery of monster toys, complete with battery-operated yeti. And homemade dams:

The National Jukebox is a new project from the Library of Congress. The Bioscope has already compiled a playlist of songs relating to early cinema. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any songs about early American monorails:

Visual indexes. Vintage cereal boxes. A map of Kibera (via things). Matchbooks. Portuguese book covers. Indian dragonflies. The complete works of Hassan Fathy. The Morton D. Barker Paperweight Collection. And scenes from General Carerra Lake (here's a soundtrack to go with it).

Also, not only that, but a movie as well, too. (Don't try this at home! Unless you feel like it.)

(Photo at top by Saul Leiter, 1957.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-05-13T12:22:00.000-07:00

The U.S. Department of Labor has added pregnancy and gender identity to the Equal Opportunity Act:

The U.S. Department of Labor announced late last week that a revision of the Equal Opportunity policy now ensures protections of federal government employees based on gender identity and pregnancy. Both protections have been added under sex discrimination, and will apply to hiring, disciplinary action, and promotion for agency employees.

The Presbyterian Church will accept openly gay clergy members:

[L]ast night the Presbytery of the Twin Cities (MN) cast the decisive 87th vote required to give the amendment the support of a majority of church presbyteries, or local governing bodies. “We applaud the Presbyterian Church for taking this historic step,” said Wayne Besen, Executive Director of Truth Wins Out. “It is our hope that other religious leaders and faith communities will choose to follow their example.”

Papua New Guinea has suspended a program that grants community lands to foreign corporations:

The move comes after local protest and complaints from prominent scientists, including the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC), the world's largest professional society devoted to studying and conserving tropical forests. Last month ATBC urged the government to declare a moratorium on SABLs.

ConocoPhillips will not drill for oil in uncontacted indigenous territory in Peru:

The withdrawal comes after pressure from indigenous-rights and environmental groups to leave two Peruvian oil blocks—39 and 67—alone, due to the presence of indigenous people who have chosen to remain uncontacted. ConocoPhillips and other companies have been warned they will 'decimate' tribes if they remain.

New England's Salem Harbor generation plant will shut down by 2014:

For years -- for decades, really -- environmentalists and politicians have been crusading to clean up or shut down the Salem Harbor electric generating station, a 60-year-old coal- and oil-fired plant that sends plumes of pollution over the coast and is considered a toxic eyesore in neighboring Marblehead.

But after years of having New England power-grid operators keep the plant open, saying it was critical to reliable electric supply, there's finally a firm date for the plant to close: June 2014, when plant owner Dominion says stringent new federal air-pollution laws will make the plant uneconomical to keep open.

China's reforestation efforts seem to be working:

China's response to large-scale erosion with reforestation is paying off according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS). The 10-year program, known as Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP), is working to turn some 37 million acres back into forest or grasslands after farming on steep slopes in the Yangtze and Yellow River basins had made them perilously susceptible to erosion and flooding....

The study, which describes the program as 'exceptional', found that SLCP had largely succeeded on its environmental goals, decreasing soil erosion by up to 68% in some places.

Apparently, the most terrifying words in the Japanese language are not "I'm from the government, and I'm here to build a tsunami barrier."

Japanese villagers are overwhelmed with gratitude for the former mayor who conceived of this gargantuan floodgate. Plagued by visions of the 1933 tsunami that killed hundreds of villagers, Kotaku Wamura insisted on the $30 million project completed in the 1970s. The residents of Fudai were completely opposed. It was ugly. It was huge. And it was expensive. But a few decades later, that very floodgate spared the lives of all but one of Fudai’s residents when the tsunami struck in March this year.

In India, vultures seem to be making a tentative comeback after the 2006 ban on diclofenac:

The ban on a veterinary drug which caused an unprecedented decline in Asian vulture populations has shown the first signs of progress, according to scientists. However, the recovery of the wild vulture populations requires efforts to see the drug completely removed from the birds' food supply.

In the Philippines, mobile phones are helping to reduce maternal mortality:

In the Philippines, where nearly 40% of the population lives below the poverty line, the equity gap is stark and wide. However, the ownership of a mobile phone is one of the few things that has crossed the income divide, making telecommunication relatively affordable and more accessible in this country of 7,100 islands. There are 70 million Filipinos who have mobile phones, compared to only 7 million installed fixed phone lines.

This is the basis for developing a program that uses text messaging to inform and educate pregnant mothers on safe motherhood. Aside from its mass appeal, mobile phones provide the advantage of two-way communication. Mothers are not just passive participants receiving information, but can also ask questions or communicate their concerns if they need to.

Reason #312 that chimpanzees are more qualified than John Boehner to be Speaker of the House:

Chimpanzees are self-aware and can anticipate the impact of their actions on the environment around them...according to a study released Wednesday.

Carlsbad Caverns is getting new and better lights:

The current lighting in Carlsbad Caverns is being replaced in favor of the new LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes). This is being done not so much as a cost-saving measure but rather because by using LEDs the exact light frequency or color emitted can be very carefully selected. Algae growing in the cave have been a problem since lights were first introduced. Algae blooms near and around the lights were not only unnatural and unsightly, but damaging to the cave as well. By adjusting the exact frequency of the light emitted to that which algae are insensitive, the algae can be stopped or greatly reduced. The park service has already converted one underground room as a test site and the results are very encouraging.

Amateur cylinder recordings. The Electric Pencil. Photos by Simon Roberts. A photoblog entitled Autant que Faire se Peut. And photos by Charles Nègre.

Hummingbirds. Pink hearts, orange stars, yellow moons and green clovers. The Federal Theatre Project. And photos by Serge Vargasoff.

Weird bridges and record players. Scenes from the post office railway. Photos of Moscow in 1909 (via things). And decay fibers.

And a movie.

(Photo at top: The Nebra Sky Disk by Dbachmann.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-04-01T16:11:00.000-07:00

First, this:

Traditionally a Republican constituency, police and firefighters are rapidly turning to Democrats after assaults on their union rights in Wisconsin, Ohio, and elsewhere. “Who are these evil teachers who teach your children, these evil policemen who protect them, these evil firemen who pull them from burning buildings? When did we all become evil?” asked the national president of the Fraternal Order of Police.

Once again, hard-right sociopathy provides a more compelling argument for progressive values than Democratic leadership. Perhaps when GOP governors unilaterally legalize unregulated medical experimentation on people who can't pay their hospital bills, we can consider taking another tentative look at the public option.

Anyway, the first recall petition has been filed in Wisconsin:

La Crosse area Democrats say they will file petitions today with enough signatures to trigger a recall election of Sen. Dan Kapanke, one of eight Senate Republicans targeted over votes to curtail collective bargaining rights for public workers. If approved, it would be just the fifth recall election of a Wisconsin legislator.

A co-chairman of David Prosser's campaign is supporting his opponent:

"I have followed with increasing dismay and now alarm the campaign of Justice David Prosser, whom I endorsed at the outset of his campaign and in whose campaign I serve as the honorary co-chairman," Lucey said in the statement. "I can no longer in good conscience lend my name and support to Justice Prosser's candidacy. Too much has come to light that Justice Prosser has lost that most crucial of characteristics for a Supreme Court Justice—as for any judge—even-handed impartiality. Along with that failing has come a disturbing distemper and lack of civility that does not bode well for the High Court in the face of demands that are sure to be placed on it in these times of great political and legal volatility."

And that may actually be the least of Prosser's problems.

What if they held a Tea Party rally, and nobody came?

Tea party organizers had high hopes for their rally today in Washington, DC—high enough hopes that they arranged for Fox to give it live coverage.
Then something sad happened. Just a few dozen people showed up.

Apropos of which, persecution complex is the defining modern psychosis. Or at least, that's what they want us to think.

Former U.S. Special Counsel Scott Bloch is going to jail:

The contempt of Congress charge is just one of the many lowlights of Mr. Bloch’s time as the head of the Office of Special Counsel. Considering all that Mr. Bloch did to make a mockery of his position, it’s fitting that he’ll have some time to reflect about his misdeeds in a federal prison.

Background info here.

Michael Mann is suing Tim Ball for libel:

Dr. Michael Mann, Director of the Earth Systems Science Center at Penn State University, is suing the climate change denier Dr. Tim Ball and the think tank/web site Frontier Centre for Public Policy for libel - and particularly for suggesting that Mann is somehow guilty of criminal fraud for his part in what has come to be known as "climategate"....
The suits are also stacking up for Ball, who is already facing a similar action from the Canadian climate scientist Andrew Weaver.

About time:

For the first time in its 98-year history, the Federal Reserve on Thursday identified banks that borrowed from its oldest lending program.
The Fed was compelled to name the banks that drew emergency loans during the financial crisis after the Supreme Court rejected a bid by major banks to keep that information secret....
A number of lawmakers, led by Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, pushed to open up the Fed after complaining that it had operated in secret for most of its history.
Sanders on Thursday called the Fed discount-window lending “welfare for the rich and powerful.” He said the disclosures are “lifting another veil of secrecy at the Fed."

Washington will recognize out-of-state same-sex marriages:

Basically what this is saying is that, no matter how you’ve codified your same-sex partnership, Washington will recognize it to the extent that their law allows, which is domestic partnerships, which, if you’ll remember, were voted on by the people and approved. Now, the legislature is bringing everything in line with their laws, as they currently stand, because if you’ll remember, Washington has a same-sex marriage ban remaining on its books. When that goes away [and it will], those couples who were married elsewhere should be bumped up to married status in Washington. Governor Chris Gregoire, by the way, has said she will sign this bill

Meanwhile, the Netherlands celebrates its tenth year of marriage equality. The traditional gift for a 10-year anniversary is apparently tin or aluminum. Perhaps we should all mail a ball of foil to Maggie Gallagher.

HSBC says we have 50 years of oil left:

The senior global economist at the world's second largest bank warned that the global oil supply might run out in under 50 years.
"Energy resources are scarce," wrote Karen Ward, HSBC's senior global economist in a research report that was obtained by CNBC. "Even if demand doesn’t increase, there could be as little as 49 years of oil left."

In the Midwest, paved roads are returning to the dust whence they came:

The paved roads that finally brought rural America into the 20th century are starting to disappear across the Midwest in the 21st. Local officials, facing rising pavement prices, shrinking budgets and fewer residents, are making tough decisions to regress. In some places, they have even eliminated small stretches of gravel road altogether.

In Borneo, an indigenous community has seized control of an oil palm plantation:

[T]he action came after months of inaction by IOI, following the March 2010 court decision that two concessions held by the palm oil company were planted on community lands. Despite the ruling, IOI continued to operate its plantations. It also broke its commitment not to appeal the court decision, according to RAN. So earlier this month, the people of Long Teran Kenan blocked the road and occupied the plantation. They have since started harvesting and selling the fruit to a nearby palm oil mill.

A federal judge has restored ESA protections for the West Virginia northern flying squirrel:

A federal judge reinstated endangered status for the West Virginia northern flying squirrel late Friday, holding that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had violated the Endangered Species Act by not following its own recovery plan for the species in its decision to remove protection for the rare animal.

Farmers are suing Monsanto, for a change:

Genetically modified seed giant Monsanto is notorious for suing farmers [PDF] in defense of its patent claims. But now, a group of dozens of organic farmers and food activists have, with the help of the not-for-profit law center The Public Patent Foundation, sued Monsanto in a case that could forever alter the way genetically modified crops are grown in this country....

If the suit is successful, not only will it limit Monsanto's ability to sue farmers, the company will have far greater responsibility for how and where its biotech seeds are planted. The regulatory free ride will be over.

Skype offers a new platform that connects classrooms around the world:

Good news for teachers looking to collaborate with their colleagues in other parts of the world. Skype has a new free service just for educators called Skype in the classroom, "a free global community created in response to, and in consultation with, the growing number of teachers" using the tool to help students learn.
Teachers already access the eight-year-old service for joint projects, global language exchanges, and guest lectures, but have had a hard time using it to find like-minded collaborators. Skype in the classroom solves that challenge by letting a teacher specify what grade or subject she teaches, and what kinds of projects she's interested in working on together, when she first sets up a profile.

If you want to reward me for my continuing labors on this semi-defunct z-list blog, you can buy me this (or failing that, this). Meanwhile: UTERUS UTERUS UTERUS UTERUS UTERUS. Photos by Richard Kolker (via Coudal). Mercury from orbit. Festival of colors. Ingenious Hebrew letter forms. And ingenious English letter forms:

Thanhouser Films Online (via the Bioscope). Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts (via things). Spiderwebs. Cars as sedimentary particles. The geoid. And photos by Lewis Baltz:

Google Body. A survey of aerial fields. Rain on Titan. A walk through Durham Township, Pennsylvania. A sound map of Tallinn (for Cheryl, natch). Electrosphere. Photographing an island. Early 20th-c. panoramas. And tiny scenes from the Age of Power and Wonder.

Also, a movie.

(Photo at top: "Violin-Making Machine" by unidentified photographer, c. 1912.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-03-25T18:20:00.000-07:00

With two deadlines here, and another one looming, FHB is not foremost on what's left of my mind.

Here are a few links to solace your existence, all the same.

Education cuts found unconstitutional.

Canada announces support for gay refugee committee.

Rodale data show organic just as productive, better at building soil.

Forward-looking power utilities support EPA air toxics rule.

US mayors speak out against tar sands pipeline.

EPA will revoke approval of potent greenhouse gas.

Vermont House passes bill calling for a single payer health care system.

Japanese engineers repair earthquake-ravaged road in only 6 days.

Oldest wild bird in U.S. survives tsunami.

New seabird discovered, first in 55 years.

Western snowy plover to get critical habitat protection doubled.

Harmful New Mexico forest road plan blocked.

Virginia overhauls its school textbook-approval process.

Apple dumps “Gay Cure” iPhone app.

Incredible creatures from Russia's White Sea.

Playtimes: A Century of Children’s Games and Rhymes.

As always, nobody's stopping you from posting good news in comments. It's the human thing to do.

(Photo at top: "Untitled" by Ralph Steiner.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-03-11T14:36:00.000-08:00

First things first: Click here to see how you can help victims of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. While doing so, bear this in mind:

Tucked into the House Republican continuing resolution are provisions cutting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, including the National Weather Service, as well as humanitarian and foreign aid.

Then, click here to tell the New York Times to apologize for its utterly grotesque reporting on an 11-year-old victim of gang-rape.

Last, please click here to contribute to the recall effort in Wisconsin.

Apropos of which, Wisconsin high school students are planning a walkout, and calling for students in other states to join them.

Wisconsin Students in Solidarity is asking for the nationwide walkout to happen this Friday, March 11, 2011 at 2:00 p.m. local time. Less than 12 hours after being formed, the Facebook event, Nationwide Student Walkout, has almost 2,000 "attendees" from across the country and student-led copycat groups and events are springing up on the social media hub.

And other activists are targeting Scott Walker's campaign contributors:

The blowback from Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s union-busting crusade has only just begun—and it may soon hit the governor where it really hurts: in the deep pockets of his biggest donors. Workers have begun organizing a “Move Your Money Campaign” against M&I Bank, whose employees are among his chief financial backers....
On Thursday morning, several hundred protestors surrounded an M&I Bank across the street from the Wisconsin State Capitol shouting “You Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out.” International Association of Fire Fighters Local 311 President Joe Conway, Jr., told me two union members marched in and pulled a combined $192,000 dollars out of the bank. “Hopefully this sends a message to the bank,” says Conway. “We wanted to illustrate how serious our threat is by having just two of our members pull their money out. “ The union said it plans to escalate actions and will soon begin handing out flyers at protests asking people to move their money.

Meanwhile, Seattle food safety attorney Bill Marler is calling on law firms to support public unions:

Marler is using social media to encourage other law firms to show support for public union employees in Wisconsin. Marler is closing his law firm early Friday as a gesture of solidarity and as a protest against the state's efforts to reduce collective bargaining power for Wisconsin public union employees....
“I believe we owe a debt to the union employees who keep our society moving,” said Marler. “Times are economically challenging, but it’s short sided and socially unconscionable to so greatly devalue the work of those who fix our roads, drive our buses, and, not to mention, educate our children.

And Iraq Veterans Against the War is planning a solidarity march:

Iraq Veterans Against the War calls on all veterans and peace organizations to mobilize to Madison, Wisconsin on March 19th, the 8th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, to stand in solidarity with workers organizing for their rights....

As military veterans, we call on our brothers and sisters in the Wisconsin National Guard to refuse and resist any mobilization orders. We believe military service members are public employees. It is dishonorable to suggest that military personnel should be deployed against teachers, health care providers, firefighters, police officers, and other government employees, many of whom are serving in the National Guard. The Wisconsin National Guard was sent in to repress workers fighting for the eight hour workday over a century ago. It is vital that our brothers and sisters know they have a choice and can fall on the right side of history this time by standing with the working people of Wisconsin.

In New Hampshire, organized protesters derailed a Republican attempt to deny voting rights to college students:

The New Hampshire House Elections Committee shot down an attempt to screw students out of the right to vote in their campus towns. Students, who have been organizing against this travesty since it was introduced in January, deserve full credit for their protests and letter-writing campaigns.

In tangentially related news, young Americans have sex.

Illinois has abolished the death penalty:

Gov. Pat Quinn signed into law Senate Bill 3539, ending Illinois' dysfunctional and broken death penalty system. The measure ends an embarrassing history in Illinois, during which 20 men sentenced to death have been exonerated and released from the state's death row....

After more than a decade of struggle, after 20 exonerations, after all the work and toil, today the death penalty system in Illinois has been eliminated. It is a good day for justice.

In Virginia, plans for the Potomac Appalachian Transmission Highline have been suspended:

This is great news for clean energy advocates—as the proposed PATH is a $2 billion proposal to build a 275-mile long 765-kV transmission line starting at the John Amos coal-fired power plant in West Virginia, which would go through West Virginia, Virginia, and Maryland.

Denver is using water fees for forest restoration:

Like many cities around the world, Denver gets its drinking water from rivers and reservoirs, which in turn get their water from forests. Many of those forests, however, are in trouble – thanks to funding cuts, climate change, and a horde of opportunistic beetles. That puts the city's water supply at risk as well, so Denver teamed up with the U.S. Forest Service to funnel money it collects from water fees into forest restoration. And it's not the only city to do so.

I'm skeptical about this scheme, but I can't help admiring its scale:

This eye-popping Hydra Tower aims to solve the hydrogen conundrum in the most ~~logical~~ awesome way possible -- by harnessing bolts of lighting to smash molecules of water into hydrogen and oxygen. The spire's sinuous exoskeleton is made from graphene, a carbon super-material that is 200 times stronger than steel and highly conductive to heat and electricity - the better to channel incredible amounts of energy straight from the sky.

Anti-Qaddafi protesters have seized his son's London mansion:

Calling itself Topple the Tyrants, a U.K. group has taken control of Muammar Gaddafi progeny Saif Al Islam Gaddafi's multimillion-pound mansion in Hampstead, London, a tony Inner London suburb. The activists now occupy the property and have taken to the 17-room home's roof with a Libyan rebel flag and several anti-Gaddafi banners. They also have a spokesperson who's talking to reporters: "We didn't trust the British government to properly seize the Gaddafi regime's corrupt assets, so we took matters into our own hands."

In the Philippines, women are marching for reproductive health care reform:

More than 6,000 women gathered near the House of Representatives building to urge lawmakers to pass the bill aimed at giving poor women more access to artificial birth control and better maternal health care.

Elizabeth Angsioco, chairwoman of the Democratic Socialist Women of the Philippines, said the passage of the Reproductive Health Bill would help prevent the deaths of 11 women daily from complications from pregnancy or child birth.

Why we fight: The Jane Austen Drinking Game (via Feministing). The Appalachian Trail. Up, up and away. Tourist photography maps. And the thrilling exploits of people seeking peace of mind through psychoanalysis:

Nineteenth-century travel albums (via Peacay). Terra Nullis. Photos by Vanessa Winship. Photos by Irina Werning. Illustrated newspaper supplements. And the Powerhouse Museum's International Women's Day set:

Nine eyes. Anamorphic writing. The Gerd Arntz Web Archive. Grassroots aerial mapping. The Maras Salt Mine. Lifecycle of the Common Jezebel. And Talinn's North Corridor.

Here's a song, too:

(Photo at top: "Rouages" by Germaine Krull, circa 1929.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-03-03T14:34:00.000-08:00

This week, we'll start with an amusing joke. See if you can find its grain of deadly truth.

A public union employee, a tea party activist, and a CEO are sitting at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies in the middle of it. The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, turns to the tea partier and says, "Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie."

New Haven has resolved to tear down an urban freeway:

In New Haven, Conn., a mistake of the past – one that displaced hundreds, razed a neighborhood, and physically divided a city – is finally set to be rectified: A highway is going to be demolished.
Some people in New Haven have been waiting to see this for 40 years, ever since it became clear that a modern roadway slicing through the heart of downtown would not bring the hoped-for suburban shoppers and revitalization.

Incidentally, George Will says that trains are an attack on American freedom and individuality. Three images come to mind.

Los Angeles has approved a plan that will create more than 1,500 miles of bikeways, and force the area's few remaining Real Americans™ under the pleather yoke of the metrosexual nanny state:

At its heart is the creation of three networks of bikeways, expanding total mileage from an existing 378 to 1,680. The "backbone network" would consist mostly of bike lanes painted on major arterials leading to employment centers, transit stations, retail and entertainment centers and parks. The "neighborhood network" involves local and collector streets that would be made more bicycle-friendly with the installation of barriers, roundabouts and other measures to limit car traffic. And the "green network" would consist of dedicated bike paths in recreational areas, such as along the Los Angeles River.

Noted 1337 h4xx0r Aaron Barr has apparently been permab& by HBGary Federal, just as he was about to reveal that Glenn Greenwald works from a secret bunker deep in the bowels of Fort Longcat:

HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Bar has resigned, doubtless cheering members of the elusive "hacktivist" group Anonymous who have targeted him in the past month....

Now, as Barr steps down from his post, House Democrats are calling for an investigation of HBGary Federal's "use of subversive tactics" to target progressive groups.

The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations don't have personal privacy rights:

The unanimous decision in Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T, Inc. reversed a ruling by a US appeals court in favor of the telecommunications company....
"The protection in FOIA against disclosure of law enforcement information on the ground that it would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy does not extend to corporations."

Researchers have found a new population of an endangered chameleon:

Scientists have discovered a new population of the Belalanda chameleon (Furcifer belalandaensis), boosting hope for one of Madagascar's rarest chameleons....

According to DICE professor, Richard Griffiths, the discovery is "very important for [the Belalanda chameleon], which is probably one of the world's rarest reptiles."

The world's rarest rhino is breeding:

There may only be 40 left in the world, but intimate footage of Javan rhino mothers and calves have been captured by video-camera trap in Ujung Kulon National Park, the last stand of one of the world's most threatened mammals. Captured by World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Indonesia's Park Authority, the videos prove the Javan rhinos are, in fact, breeding.

"The videos are great news for Javan rhinos," said Dr. Eric Dinerstein chief scientist at WWF, adding that "there are no Javan rhinos in captivity—if we lose the population in the wild, we’ve lost them all."

New York will require honesty from CPCs:

Yesterday the New York City Council voted 39 to 9, with one abstention, to pass a bill that would require crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) to disclose whether they provide emergency contraception and abortion services and whether they have a licensed medical practitioner on site. Evelyn Erskine, a spokeswoman for Mayor Michael Bloomberg (D) stated that she expected the major to sign the bill in the next few weeks. The new law will impact approximately 12 CPCs in New York.

Sabrina Shulman, political director of NARAL Pro-Choice New York, asserted, "It has been neither coincidence nor by accident that CPCs have been deceiving women about their true nature. Until now, deception has been their business model. This needs to stop. Today it will."

At a forum in Washington DC, black church leaders apologized to members of the LGBT community for being "judgmental":

Anthony E. Moore, pastor of Carolina, moderated the dialogue and stated up front that the forum was not intended to be one in which the church took a theological position on homosexuality....

Toward the end of the event, he reinforced the sincerity of the church's apology by pledging to continue the dialogue and to make concerted efforts to make his ministry more inclusive of members of the LGBT community.

(via Feministing.)

The SPLC has recognized Pam Geller and her followers as a hate group:

Stop the Islamization of America was included in the civil rights organization's annual roundup of extremist groups - a rogue's gallery that includes everything from the Ku Klux Klan to white supremacists and Nazis.

Canada will not repeal its law against lying on news programs:

Canada's broadcasting regulator has abandoned its attempt to change a regulation that prohibits the dissemination of false or misleading news.

[T]he CRTC's call for public input on the proposal resulted in a tidal wave of angry responses from Canadians who said they feared such a move would open the door to Fox TV-style news and reduce their ability to determine what is true and what is false.

A federal judge has extended the restraining order that prevents Bayer CropScience from manufacturing methyl isocyanate:

Given the limited record, including limited evidence of the defendant's history of safety violations, misrepresentations to the public, and multiple accidents and chemical leaks, and in light of the fact that the court has not had the opportunity to conduct a preliminary injunction evidentiary hearing, I FIND that the plaintiffs are likely to suffer irreparable harm in the absence of this temporary relief.

(h/t: Karin.)

The University of Arizona is working to improve the Navajo Nation's access to clean water:

Using power from the sun and a process known as membrane distillation, Ela and a team of student researchers are testing a prototype system on the roof of the UA Civil Engineering Building to see if it could be used on the reservation. Currently in its infant stage, the purification system resembles an oversized high school science project. Long rolls of tubing connect a drum of water to a complex arrangement of heat exchangers and a membrane module.

Almost done, migraine notwithstanding. Regional typography of Portugal (via Aqua-Velvet). A plain of jars. An interview with China Miéville (I'm agnostic — at best — on his novels, but he has some interesting things to say). A map of businesses opposed to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And life on the canals.

Crimean mud volcanoes. Dried stuff. Labelography of home recording discs. Art by Hubert Blanz. The Dartmoor Archive. Moon over Edmonton. Tintin's cars (via Peacay). British rock art. And images of everyday life in 19th-c. California.

Also:

Photo at top: "Incarnation" by Tilby Vattard, 2009.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-02-25T12:44:00.000-08:00

I'm insanely busy (or busily insane) this week, so I'll post what I can in the time allotted to me, and you — I'm hoping — will post any stories I missed in comments. Info on activism would be particularly welcome (e.g., a list of other rich and horrible people we could pretend to be in order to have a friendly chinwag with Scott Walker).

Alright, then. As you undoubtedly know, Teh Kenyan Usurper has taken an important step toward imposing sharia on these United States:

For the first time, the president of the United States and the chief law enforcement officer of the United States have said with one clear voice that a law which denies married same-sex couples equal protection under the Constitution is not only wrong but also unconstitutional.

Can federally mandated Tayammum be far behind?

Blog of Rights has more:

The government's shift of position is also amazing because of what it means not just for DOMA, but for LGBT rights more broadly. If the courts ultimately agree that heightened scrutiny applies whenever the government treats gay people badly, then it's not just DOMA that becomes hard to defend. So do state adoption and foster parenting laws that exclude gay people. And states' refusals to provide health care benefits or pension protections to the domestic partners of state workers. And public schools' decisions to ignore anti-LGBT harassment or exclude same-sex couples from the prom. And government rules like the military separation pay disparity that we've challenged in court. Heightened scrutiny will affect every nook and cranny of LGBT rights law.

Nine cave-dwelling invertebrates (and I don't mean these ones) have gained ESA protections:

In response to a lawsuit from the Center for Biological Diversity, Citizen’s Alliance for Smart Expansion and Aquifer Guardians in Urban Areas, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today proposed to designate nearly 7,000 acres as critical habitat for nine rare, cave-dwelling invertebrates in Bexar County, Texas. Today’s announcement reverses a previous Bush-era critical habitat designation of about 1,000 acres, which left out a number of places where the species live and failed to protect sufficient area around the caves.
“This nearly sevenfold increase in protected habitat gives these nine unique Texas species a chance at survival,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director for the Center. “With just a modest restriction on urban sprawl, these species that occur nowhere else on Earth may be saved.”

Yet another inquiry into the stolen CRU e-mails has cleared climate scientists of any wrongdoing:

U.S. officials on Thursday cleared scientists of charges that they manipulated data about climate change in e-mails that were stolen from a British university in 2009, triggering a climate scandal.
The Department of Commerce's Inspector General conducted the independent review of e-mails taken from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England, at the request of Republican Senator James Inhofe, a climate change skeptic.

Being as Republicans are passionately opposed to wasting taxpayer dollars, this will undoubtedly be the final investigation into this non-issue.

Apparently, it's still possible for hard-right rhetoric to go too far:

An Indiana Deputy Attorney General has lost his job after saying in a private Twitter that “live ammunition” should be used on union protestors in Wisconsin.

Deputy A.G. Jeffrey Cox “is no longer” with the Attorney General’s office, said a terse release. “Civility and courtesy toward all members of the public are very important to the Indiana Attorney General’s office,” it added.

Researchers in one of Madasgascar's forests have identified a new bird, whose Latin name I may well decide to bestow upon my firstborn:

The rich and unique biodiversity of Madagascar has a new member: a forest dwelling bird in the rail family, dubbed Mentocrex beankaensis. In 2009 US and Malaygasy scientists conducted a survey in Madagascar's dry Beanka Forest. They discovered several new species, of which the new rail is the first to be described.

The National Park Service has taken steps to restore the natural soundscape of California's Muir Woods:

A decade after the agency resolved to restore natural sounds to this park in a metropolitan area of seven million people, managers at Muir Woods, in Marin Country just north of San Francisco, have made big strides in vanquishing intrusive noise. Now the background sounds are dominated by the burbling rush of Redwood Creek, the soft sibilant breeze that stirs the redwood branches, the croak of a crow.

Maryland has suspended its grotesque policy of demanding Facebook passwords from job applicants:

The ACLU of Maryland sent a letter to Public Safety Secretary Gary Maynard informing him that demanding Officer Collins' Facebook password was a gross breach of privacy and raised significant legal concerns under the Federal Stored Communications Act and Maryland state law. We're pleased to report that yesterday, Secretary Maynard wrote back and informed us that he has suspended the social media password requirement for 45 days pending a review of this policy!

Lockbox!

Senate Democrats want to put the Social Security trust fund in a lockbox and insulate it from a broader budget-cutting package designed to reduce the national deficit....

Make of this story what you will:

Transphorm chief executive Umesh Mishra, a professor of electric and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, claims the startup's gallium nitride technology eliminates 90 percent of the energy waste when current is converted from AC to DC and back. Given that 10 percent of the United States' electricity production is lost when converted to different currents, Transphorm's technology could save terawatts of energy if widely adopted.
"Imagine taking the West Coast off the grid," he said, noting that Transphorm could save as much electricity as California and the Pacific Northwest consume.

While we await the long-heralded coming of our techno-Messiah, North Carolina's Carteret Community College has launched a fleet of bicycles:

The college’s Sustainability Committee unveiled its Green Bikes ride sharing program this month with a simple invitation for students and staff: See a green bike, ride a green bike.

The green-painted bicycles are now out and parked in bike racks or leaning against buildings, waiting for the next rider. If a green bike is sitting outside one of the buildings, it’s there for the next person heading to another class or switching buildings.

Tomorrow, cities all over the country will hold rallies in support of workers' rights. You can find a local rally, and sign up to attend it, by clicking here.

Apropos of which, a comment from Doug Hill:

I would rather be governed by the first five hundred people in the telephone book than by the CEOs of the Fortune 500.

Lest we forget: Street scenes, and a taxonomy of city blocks. The Pre-Cinema Project (via The Bioscope). Related: Giovanni Fontana's Castellum Umbrarum. A jape, or jest. Justice and public space. A visit to subterranean Helsinki. A visit to Scotia. The Daily Exposure. And who among us does not love microscopic snapshots? Or photos of wildlife?

Here's a song for you, as well:

(Photo at top by Todd McLellan, via things.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-02-18T14:12:00.000-08:00

Republican state Senator Cale Case is speaking out against an ~~anti-gay~~ anti-human bill passed by the Wyoming House:

“Gays and lesbians live and work among us. They’re also soldiers in the military,” he said. “They’ve been here and talked about their service in Iraq and … now you’re going to deny them the benefits (of marriage of civil unions)....

“When you go home, you’re going to look people in the eye,” he said. “You’re going to tell them you made them into second-class citizens today if you pass this. You can’t do that. We’re the Equality State.”

South Dakota legislators have shelved a bill that would have made it legal to kill abortion providers:

The House speaker, Val Rausch, said that the legislation had been shelved, pending a decision on whether to allow a vote, amend the language or drop it entirely. A spokesman for Gov. Dennis Daugaard said, “Clearly the bill as it’s currently written is a very bad idea.”

The Obama administration seems to have repealed elements of the Bush-era "conscience clause" for healthcare providers:

Today, the Obama Administration issued a final ruling on and guidance for a "provider conscience clause," first proposed by the Bush Administration in July 2008 and put into effect in the waning hours of the administration's existence....
As of this writing, we are still studying the new ruling published today by the Department of Health and Human Services. However, two things are clear. One is that the administration in no uncertain terms clarifies that providers may not refuse to treat persons even if "lifestyle," "sexual orientation," or other considerations offend their consciences.

The second is that the administration makes explicit that contraception can not be equated with abortion and therefore providing contraception is not covered by conscience provisions.

Hawaii has approved civil unions:

Hawaii lawmakers gave final approval to civil unions Wednesday and sent the legislation to Democratic Gov. Neil Abercrombie, who plans to sign it into law within 10 business days. Civil unions would begin Jan. 1, 2012, making the state the seventh in the nation to grant virtually the same rights of marriage to same-sex couples without authorizing marriage itself.

Popular outcry has forced the UK to withdraw a plan to sell off its forests:

Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman was contrite when she appeared in front of members of the British parliament.

"I'm sorry. We got this one wrong, but we have listened to people's concerns," she said, as reported by the Guardian adding that, "if there is one clear message from this experience, it is that people cherish their forests and woodlands and the benefits they bring. My first priority throughout this period of debate has been securing a sustainable future for our woodlands and forests...."

David Babbs, head of 38 Degrees, the campaign group that collected half a million signatures, told Reuters: "Some say signing petitions and emailing (Members of Parliament) never changes anything. But it did this time. This is what people-power looks like, and over half a million of us are feeling very proud."

Plans to build a coal plant on one of Borneo's beaches have been scrapped:

Environmentalists, scientists, and locals have won the battle against a controversial coal plant in the Malaysian state of Sabah in northern Borneo. The State and Federal government announced today that they would "pursue other alternative sources of energy, namely gas, to meet Sabah's power supply needs." Proposed for an undeveloped beach on the north-eastern coast of Borneo, the coal plant, according to critics, would have threatened the Coral Triangle, one of the world's most biodiverse marine ecosystems, and Tabin Wildlife Reserve, home to Critically Endangered Sumatran rhinos and Bornean orangutans.

HUD has reaffirmed the illegality of discrimination against domestic violence survivors:

Last Wednesday, HUD issued a memo to its regional offices describing how discrimination against domestic violence survivors can violate the federal Fair Housing Act...

The HUD guidance is another step forward in ending housing discrimination against domestic violence survivors because it enables survivors to vindicate their rights. And while the guidance does not specifically address the fair housing rights of victims of dating violence, stalking, and sexual assault, the same analysis should apply to protect the housing of all survivors of gender-based violence.

The IRS will allow nursing mothers to deduct the cost of breastfeeding supplies.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has long advocated for this change to the tax code. “For years, the AAP has been urging the IRS to recognize that breast milk is not just the best and most natural food for infants; it confers well-documented health benefits on both baby and mother that cannot be obtained any other way,” AAP said in a statement. “The IRS has finally acknowledged this medical fact, and we applaud them for changing their regulations accordingly.”

(Be it known: Like everything else this administration does, this modest tax cut is an intolerable instance of tyrannical Islamosocialist homofascism.)

The White House has issued a draft plan to protect the Grand Canyon from uranium mining:

On July 21, 2009, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar issued a two-year “segregation order” banning new mining claims across 1 million acres of public lands around the world-famous national park. Today’s draft environmental impact statement proposes a 20-year “mineral withdrawal” across the same 1 million-acre area, banning new claims and blocking new mining on existing, unproven claims.

“This is an important step in protecting the people, the water and the wildlife of the greater Grand Canyon area,” said Sandy Bahr, chapter director of the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter. “Now all those who support protecting Grand Canyon — tribal leaders, local communities, water districts, conservationists — must work to make sure the final decision for these lands is as protective as possible.”

The National Forest Service is finally undertaking minimal road planning:

The guidance memo directs all national forests to identify, through a science-based analysis, an ecologically and fiscally sustainable minimum road system by 2015....

For those interested in large landscape connectivity for wildlife, this initiative presents an opportunity to reduce road densities as well as protect and restore linkages and core habitat. For those interested in clean water and fisheries, it is an opportunity to improve water quality and watershed health. And for those interested in fiscal responsibility, it is an opportunity to identify a road system that the Forest Service can afford to maintain.

Inhabitat reports on Freshkills Park:

Mention "Freshkills" to any New Yorker and the reaction you'll most likely get is "P.U." The name has long been associated with the world's largest landfill, and has made life for many Staten Islanders (where the dump is located), well, stink. But what many people aren't yet aware of is that the long suffering of those folks is soon to be rewarded because a monumental new green space is being developed on the site of the old landfill, which received its last barge of garbage on March 22, 2001, and from what we've seen, it's incredible. At 2,200 acres, Freshkills Park is set to be almost three times the size of Central Park and will be the largest park developed in New York City in over 100 years. That's right, what was the world's biggest collection of garbage is being transformed into a beautiful green space for New Yorkers to hike, play and even ski - and with numerous sustainable strategies already in the works, it's also promising to be one of the most eco-friendly developments in the city.

Also: Fire insurance map typography. A consideration of Wendover (via things). Hakka houses. Photos by Toni Schneiders (via wood s lot). The Mississippi metro. The women of the Irene Mound. The Huntley Film Archives. And Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties.

No movie this week. Instead, click here to defend Planned Parenthood and Title X against Mike Pence and his cronies.

(Photo at top: "Indiana Harbor Belt RR, switchman demonstrating signal with a 'fusee' - used at twilight and dawn - when visibility is poor. This signal means 'back up.'" by Jack Delano, 1943.)

Friday Hope Blogging

2011-02-11T15:20:00.000-08:00

Good riddance to Hosni Mubarak:

“I’ve worked my whole life to see the power of the people come to the fore,” activist Rabab Al Mahdi told Al Jazeera through tears. “I never thought I would be alive to see it. It’s not just about Mubarak. It’s a protest that brought about the people’s power to bring about the change that no one, no one thought was possible.”
The euphoria is unimaginable. Peaceful protests, propelled but by no means determined by social media, dislodged a 30-year dictatorship in one of the most important Middle Eastern countries. Neither violent repression nor an Internet shutdown nor mass arrests of Facebook-fueled human rights activists could stop what’s become the #Jan25 revolution.

And Harrison Schmitt:

Ex-astronaut and current climate change denier Harrison Schmitt has withdrawn as the potential New Mexican cabinet secretary for the Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department.

Schmitt, whose climate inaccuracies (and his refusal to correct obvious errors) have landed him in a pack of trouble of late, may have been telling the truth about his reasons for withdrawing. Or not.

Either way, Schmitt and his Heartland Institute fellow travellers are likely to think twice before again challenging someone with the credibility of Sandia National Laboratories physicist Dr. Mark Boslough, the scientist who revealed Schmitt's most egregious recent false statement about climate change.

Illinois has approved civil unions:

Governor Pat Quinn today signs into law the Illinois Religious Freedom and Protection and Civil Union Act, making civil unions available for same-sex couples in Illinois. The law, drafted by lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, marks an important step toward fairness for thousands of gay and lesbian couples in Illinois. Illinois now joins a growing list of states across the country that provide legal protections to the unions of same-sex couples.

In response, Sam Ritchie at Blog of Rights has created an animated map showing the spread of "relationship recognition for same-sex couples."

In related news, Maggie Gallagher's harebrained bigotry has apparently compelled an opponent of gay marriage to switch sides:

The Senate Judicial Proceedings committee heard 7 hours of testimony last night on whether or not to legalize gay marriage, including from NOM’s Maggie Gallagher. Now one Senator, who was previously a foe, has said her testimony convinced him to support marriage equality.

Senator James Brochin (D) was one of the few Democrat Senators who was opposed to gay marriage. But after listening to testimony from Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization For Marriage (NOM), he’s said that her “demonization” of gay families has convinced him that he should side with marriage equality.

Speaking of which:

"It's really embarrassing, when you think about it. Just the fact that people in this century were actually saying things like, 'No, gays should not be allowed to marry,' and were getting all up in arms about it, as if homosexuals weren't full citizens or something. It's insane."

Female genital mutilation is on the decline:

A joint program between the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reported that over 6,000 communities in Ethiopia, Egypt, Kenya, Senegal, Burkina Faso, the Gambia, Guinea and Somalia have abandoned the practice of female genital mutilation/ cutting (FGM/C).

Nafissatou Diop, coordinator of the UNFPA-UNICEF program, stated, "We are working in 12 out of 17 priority African countries and have seen real results...In Ethiopia, the prevalence rate has fallen from 80 percent to 74 percent, in Kenya from 32 percent to 27 percent, and in Egypt from 97 percent to 91 percent."

As is the birth rate among US teens:

[T]he rates fell significantly for teens in all age groups and all racial and ethnic groups, pushing the rate for each age group and for nearly all race and ethnic groups to the lowest levels ever reported, according to the analysis.

The North Carolina Department of Revenue will no longer demand private customer information from online retailers:

This settlement is a great win for privacy. While the court's ruling concerned only the specific request issued to Amazon, the settlement covers requests to all Internet retailers who sell books, movies, music, and similar expressive materials. North Carolina has apparently issued similar requests to other Internet retailers, and previously indicated that it planned to issue more such requests in the future. We are pleased that North Carolina has agreed to take a new approach. Requesting information about what people are purchasing online causes real harm, to real people, and it is unconstitutional in these circumstances.

A federal judge has ruled that FOIA documents must have searchable metadata:

The federal government must provide documents "in a usable format" when it responds to Freedom of Information Act requests, a federal judge in Manhattan has ruled.

Southern District of New York Judge Shira A. Scheindlin, after faulting the government for offering "a lame excuse" for delivering non-searchable documents, ruled for the first time that federal agencies must turn over documents that include "metadata," which allows them to be searched and indexed.

The new food safety bill protects whistleblowers:

Food industry workers who become whistleblowers gained protection against retaliation from their employers with a little-noticed provision in the sweeping food safety law President Barack Obama signed last month....
The new law protects workers against retaliation for telling their employers or governmental officials about anything they reasonably believe violates the food safety act and for objecting to performing work they reasonably believe is illegal. The Department of Labor and federal courts can reinstate fired employees and award back pay, interest, attorneys' fees and other damages.

Kentucky will make an effort to keep mentally ill people from buying guns:

On the gun bill, the committee without debate approved House Bill 308, which would require Kentucky to notify the FBI when a court commits people to a mental institution or otherwise finds them mentally incompetent. The FBI would add the names of those people to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, used by federally licensed gun dealers to screen their customers.

Whooping cranes will be reintroduced to Louisiana:

Ten whooping cranes, the most endangered species of crane in the world, will be reintroduced in a Louisiana conservation area more than 60 years after the birds' numbers dwindled to near zero, the U.S. Interior Department said on Tuesday....
The total population, once believed to have numbered more than 15,000, fell to just 15 birds in the 1940s as a result of hunting and habitat loss, according to the National Wildlife Federation.
The entire Louisiana population had been wiped out or removed by the 1950s. The surviving birds all belonged to one flock that migrated between Canada and Texas and is still the only self-sustaining wild population of whooping cranes.
"That's as close to extinction as anything's ever come," said Heather Ray, director of development for Operation Migration. Her group and others have worked to re-establish the whooping crane.

Pacific loggerhead turtles have won some additional protection:

Fewer rare sea turtles will die on the swordfish industry’s longlines in Hawaii under an agreement between environmental groups and the government that settles a lawsuit challenging the feds’ plans to dramatically increase the number of turtles that could be killed. The Center for Biological Diversity, KAHEA and Turtle Island Restoration Network sued the National Marine Fisheries Service for allowing 46 imperiled Pacific loggerhead turtles to be hooked last year; the new court-ordered settlement caps the number at 17 per year. Meanwhile the Fisheries Service is weighing whether loggerheads need more protection under the Endangered Species Act.

As have endangered toads and lilies:

Responding to legal challenges by the Center for Biological Diversity, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today finalized critical habitat for the arroyo toad and thread-leaved brodiaea — a rare Southern California lily. The designation for the toad includes 98,366 acres in Monterey, Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange and San Diego counties. The designation for the thread-leaved brodiaea includes 2,947 acres in Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange and San Diego counties. The Bush administration tried to designate just 11,695 critical habitat acres for the toad and 597 acres for the brodiaea, but the Center’s legal challenges to both of those decisions led to today’s announcement of far larger areas.

Namibia has turned its entire coastline into a national park:

The Namib-Skeleton Coast National Park covers 26.6 million acres, making it larger than Portugal.
It stretches for 976 miles (1,570km), from the Kunene River, at the northern border with Angola, to the Orange River, on the border with South Africa, and is expected to be promoted as a unified destination. The protected coastline consolidates three national parks: Skeleton Coast, Namib-Naukluft and Sperrgebiet.

Giant rats and face carvings. How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen Cahokia? Photos by Fred Herzog (via wood s lot). And Irandokht: a survey of "devastated identity papers within urban waste of Statistic and Registration Administration":

Conundrums. Early valentines. Sand dunes of the Rub’ al Khali Desert. Biblical metaphors of knowledge in early modern Europe. A visit to Yubileiny. A visit to Sydney. A visit to Iceland. And photos by Peter Henry Emerson:

Radio Aporee. Photos by Fernan Federici (via but does it float). Photos by Chris Porsz (via things). An anomalous SETI signal. Quasicrystal diffraction patterns. Map your voice. And photos of Corpus Christi in the 1930s:

I've also got an animated film for you, believe it or not.

(Image at top: "Composition" by Theodoros Stamos, 1946.)