Friday Hope Blogging

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.)