Friday Hope Blogging

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.)