Farmers' Market Sues City over 'Pave or Vacate' Mandate

© Activist Post

Farmers' Market Sues City over 'Pave or Vacate' Mandate
June 18, 2013 | Activist Post | Heather Callaghan

A farmers' market in Mount Jackson, Virginia is causing an uproar by saying, "Yes, we're suing the town."

This little market bought an unoccupied former business building in Mount Jackson in an effort to improve the town and provide a fun place for all kinds of vendors. The market performs every year at a financial and emotional loss because they believe it's so important and rewarding to provide a market and a place for local fare. Otherwise, people have to go to the next town over for organic and the town remains more abandoned. They wanted downtown Mount Jackson to be like it was historically - where it's at!

For years, a gravel lot was effectively used for parking and by the owners for activities in and around the building. Plans were made by the market to improve the lot and building but extensions were needed to finish in order to continue the summer market - and because of economic hardship on the facilitators, namely, Gerald Forsburg. See a short news vid here.

Town council required them to have a paved asphalt or concrete lot at great expense - $15,000 - $20,000 - to the market, but the owners asked for an extension and to be able to continue the pending summer market. Council shot that down because of "ordinance" which apparently stems from "aesthetics." So, it was pave or get out.

Oh, where have we heard that gem before? Look up our articles on front yard garden shut-downs.

The market had to cancel summer events and the produce orders because of the requirements, cancel vendor agreements, and are at a loss for a whole year. So how can they ever get ahead at this point to even think about paving? Who runs this town - Mr. Potter of Bedford Falls? I mean just kick them down so they can't ever operate again! Suffocating people with permits, requirements, codes and ordinances is one way to kill fresh food access - and kill your town. The leaders of Mt Jackson are paid to run the town into a barren ground.

 And how can this claim be made with any conscience? It gets even crazier...

Mt Jackson city council was caught cherry-picking which businesses to hold to this ordinance for paving and which businesses they'd look away from with unpaved lots. Mt Jackson Farmers' Market reports:

Furthermore, there are businesses in the community that have NOT been required to pave their lots. The Council would likely state that those businesses have "on street" parking. Well, SO DO WE!

The market saw a bigger drop in funds when the council banned them from using sandwich board signs in 2011 to advertise the times and place even though other businesses were allowed.

 There's more - this is about the councilman who voted them down:

Yet, earlier this year, Mr. Holtzman demanded a bench decision from the very same Town Council to permit him to operate a newly purchased single family home as two units stating that "after purchasing the property, he found it not feasible to rent out to a single family. The Council was smart enough to send the request to the Planning Commission, who then was able to find a way "legally" to permit Mr. Holtzman's request. The new code implemented an "Overlay District" whereby the Town Council can permit, by special use, the conversion of a single family dwelling into a multi-unit occupancy. Of course, such a request is reviewed on a case-by-case basis.

Thus, exempting businesses is not permissible, nor is permitting extensions of time to meet requirements, but re-writing codes to benefit select businesses is?

So like Orwell's Animal Farm, some are more equal than others... Clearly, there's a bias here.

Why don't they just pave?

There are those in the community who say "Just pave the parking lot - we had to." To be sure, many have been required to pave their lots. However, many of those businesses were either in operation at the time the code was enforced, or given ample time to get their doors open and make a profit before being required to do so.

Check out the declaratory judgment and permanent injunction filed against the town and acting manager Charles Moore. It's not a suit for monetary means, it's to stop the town from prohibiting the market when there's a perfectly good hard surface that's been in use for years. Also read their Letter to the Editor. But the suit also calls for legal fees and this year's losses if the town continues to keep them out over freaking asphalt.

Heather Callaghan is a natural health blogger and food freedom activist. You can see her work at NaturalBlaze.com and ActivistPost.com. Like at Facebook.

Wildfires sweep through southern California

Wildfires sweep through southern California
May 3, 2013 | AlJazeeraEnglish

More than 900 firefighters are battling wildfires in southern California. A university and 2,000 homes have been evacuated. The biggest blaze started early on Thursday morning just outside Los Angeles - fuelled by strong Santa Anna winds. Al Jazeera's Alan Fisher reports.

Comet could hit, radically change Mars in 2014

Comet could hit, radically change Mars in 2014
Mar 3, 2013 | Phenomenica

New observations confirm that a comet heading toward Mars could collide with it in October 2014, possibly ushering in radical environmental changes on the Red Planet, astronomy experts said.

The C/2013 A1 comet may pass as close as 37,000 km from the surface of Mars, according to data published Wednesday by the New Mexico-based ISON-NM observatory.

“A collision scenario is becoming more likely, though its possibility remains low,” Leonid Elenin, a Russia-based amateur astronomer in charge of the remotely managed ISON-NM, told RIA Novosti.

More precise data will be available after further observation of the comet, said Elenin, who works at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics at the Russian Academy of Sciences and has already discovered two comets – though not the C/2013 A1.

That was first identified as a comet in January by the Australia-based Siding Spring observatory, which on its website confirmed the possibility of the comet’s collision with Mars.

 A possible impact would release up to 20 billion megatons of energy and leave a crater 500 km wide and two km deep, given that the comet is 10 to 50 km wide and moving at a speed of 56 km per second in respect to the planet, according to ISON-NM’s data.

A collision with C/2013 A1 could result in a radical transformation of Mars, said Robert Matson, an aerospace engineer and meteor expert who worked with members of the Finnish Fireball Working Group of the Ursa Astronomical Association, according to the UniverseToday.com space news website.

The impact could raise enough dust and release enough frozen carbon dioxide to radically change Mars’ atmosphere, Matson said in emailed comments Thursday.

The blow could either enhance the greenhouse effect, resulting in a thicker atmosphere, or cause surface temperature on Mars to plummet because the dust would obscure the Sun, Matson said.

The comet could also trigger volcanic activity at the impact site, he said.

Even if C/2013 A1 misses Mars, the planet will certainly pass through its coma, or gaseous envelope, which is 100,000 km in diameter, Elenin wrote on ISON-NM’s website. A NASA probe, MAVEN, is scheduled for launch into Mars’ orbit in September 2014. This will enable NASA to closely monitor the comet’s trajectory.

IANS

The Planned Obsolescence of Humanity

The Planned Obsolescence of Humanity
Mar 5, 2013 | Farms Wars | Barbara H. Peterson

Remember when things lasted a long time? I recall going with my dad to the hardware store, and being able to find just about everything needed to fix anything on the ranch. Need a gasket? Just get the gasket material and cut your own. Got a gadget that won’t work? Just get the part that’s broken, replace that one part, and the gadget works again. Not so, today. Today, we buy something, and if it doesn’t work, we simply throw it away and get a new one, because that is the way things are made.  They are not made to last. They are made to break and the sooner the better.



This is planned obsolescence, and it has been eroding our society ever since it was set in motion along with mass marketing and fast-tracked, courtesy of Edward Bernays, who set up the first “public relations” department for the express purpose of using propaganda as a tool to manipulate the public for profit. We are now strangling in its grip, oblivious to the reality behind the slogans and hype, and successfully programmed to think this is normal, standing proud in our ignorance.



With a need for instant gratification firmly entrenched in our nation’s psyche by an army of professional con artists out to make a buck, the concept of a throwaway society reared its ugly head to the delight of those behind the scenes, greedily rubbing their hands together in anticipation of the windfall they were about to receive – profit without end. And this is the society in which we now live. A society based on instant gratification and planned obsolescence.

I noticed that this nation’s “fix it yourself” mentality started changing years ago. Parts that were once easily obtainable became “no longer available.” Want a part to fix your whatchamacallit? Nope, can’t have it – gotta get a new one. The parts aren’t available anymore, and good luck getting your whatchamacallit open to replace anything in it. If it breaks, don’t fix it, throw it away and buy a new one.

Cars that were once made to be worked on by home mechanics now take a computer specialist to diagnose. Who cares? After all, if consumers buy a new car every couple of years or so, who needs them to last? Can’t wear the same dress to the party, gotta have a new one, along with shoes to match. Last year’s style simply will not do.

Yes, the corporations have programmed us well. We are a nation of wasteful consumers, keeping the gluttonous purveyors of gadgets, doohickeys and flash in champagne and caviar. Thank you, Edward Bernays, for your ever so helpful insight into enabling corporations to program the masses for wasteful spending in order to line the pockets of greedy, blood sucking leaches whose only purpose is to use us up and spit us out. You see, planned obsolescence does not merely apply to things. It also applies to people.

We are living in a world where very powerful people behind the scenes hold license to decide who is to live and who is to die. They get to pick and choose who the throwaway people are. The expendables. The ones who hold no worth in their eyes. Through some sort of arbitrary judgment – one lives, one dies, and the rules always change.

The rules change because the object has no say and no value – functioning merely as a piece on the grand chessboard. And if you happen to be the flavor of the month, you get to live. But only for a time, and only if you are nice. Really, really, nice and obey your masters. But it won’t be forever. Forever is much too good for the pawns. Pawns are meant to be sacrificed, just as we are being sacrificed on the altar of big business and decaying from whatever poisons the propaganda machine put forth by Bernays directs us to take.

We’re poked and prodded, drugged into submission, shot full of poisons, and fed toxic waste. We are, each and every one of us, a statistic in a planned obsolescence program. And while we are breaking down from stress, toxins, chemicals, GMOs, vaccines, and medical quackery, to name a few, we are generating a whole lotta cash for a whole lotta people, as well as providing valuable data while we serve as guinea pigs for experimental research in genetic modification.

But what the hey? After all is said and done, the puppet masters will survive! And they will garner more and more cash and power to play at immortality. The goal? Remaking the world and its inhabitants from the molecule up. We the people are living under planned obsolescence. And we don’t even know it because we are being systematically fed comfortable lies by a propaganda machine in the guise of public relations for the express purpose of profit, power and total control.

But it’s okay, our replacements are right around the corner. After all, the bodies we have can’t last forever. Let’s throw them away and get new ones. What say we make them bigger, better, smarter and more controllable than the obsolete model. The human model.

Why not build super soldiers that we can just replace when we feel like it? Expendable. Throwaways. Or factory workers, or maybe housekeepers, maids, miners, firefighters, police, truck drivers…. The possibilities are endless. One gives you trouble, just throw it away and get a new one. And when the time comes to shed this mortal shell, just hop right on into the artificial body of your dreams, courtesy of a brain transplant, or maybe your brain on a chip, implanted in that disposable body.

Natural humans would become as obsolete as last year’s iPod.



A powerful dream, eh? Complete control over life and death. Intoxicating. And also dangerous. Very dangerous. Not to mention foolish, disastrous, maniacal, insane, against nature and all that is right and natural and good. Man replacing man and nature. The same species that thinks nuclear power plants on fault lines are an okay idea. Go figure. But seriously, what could possibly go wrong?

©2013 Barbara H. Peterson

Huge Meteor Seen Above San Francisco Bay Area February 15, 2013

Huge Meteor Seen Above San Francisco Bay Area February 15, 2013
Feb 19, 2013 | AlienPeace1


Source: http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013...
On the same day that a massive meteor

Electric Discharge Scarring of Planets and Moons: Interview with Stephen Smith

Electric Discharge Scarring of Planets and Moons: Interview with Stephen Smith
Jan 13, 2013 | ThunderboltsProject

In this interview Stephen Smith, editor of the Thunderbolts Picture of the Day (TPOD) reviews evidence for a former epoch of planetary instability and massive electrical scarring of planets and moons. http://www.thunderbolts.info

Clever solution to stop the TSA from stealing valuable electronics out of your carry-on bag

Clever solution to stop the TSA from stealing valuable electronics out of your carry-on bag
Jan 8, 2013 | TheHealthRanger

3MIN News January 1, 2013: ISON, A Great Comet?

3MIN News January 1, 2013: ISON, A Great Comet?
Jan 1, 2013 | Suspicious0bservers

What is color? - Colm Kelleher

What is color? - Colm Kelleher
Dec 18, 2012 | TEDEducation

View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-do-we-see-color-colm-kelleher

Have you ever wondered what color is? In this first installment of a series on light, Colm Kelleher describes the physics behind colors-- why the colors we see are related to the period of motion and the frequency of waves.

Lesson by Colm Kelleher, animation by Vitreous.

David Talbott on Red Ice Radio

David Talbott on Red Ice Radio
Dec 15, 2012 | ThunderboltsProject

NEWS FLASH: "ELECTRIC UNIVERSE 2013: The Tipping Point." A breakthrough conference, Jan 3-6 in Albuquerque New Mexico. Wal Thornhill, David Talbott, Rupert Sheldrake, Gerald Pollack, Mae Wan Ho, Dean Radin, and many more, including most of the speakers highlighted in the ThunderboltsProject videos.
http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2012/09/02/eu2013-conference-the-tipping-poin...

Rare December Tornado: EF-1 in Edgewater, FL 12-10-12

Rare December Tornado: EF-1 in Edgewater, FL 12-10-12
Dec 11, 2012 | Sheilaalien

The Evidence - Electromagnetic Changes in our Solar System [A Review]

The Evidence - Electromagnetic Changes in our Solar System [A Review]
Dec 9, 2012 | Suspicious0bservers

Why Quick Thinking Leads to Bad Decisions

CREDIT: Shutter / VLADGRIN

Why Quick Thinking Leads to Bad Decisions
Nov 7, 2012 | Live Science

When people make hasty decisions, they tend to make more mistakes. Now, a new study on monkeys explains why: Brain cells become hypersensitive to new information, even bad information, making us likelier to draw faulty conclusions.

"When we try to do things too quickly, we tend to make more errors and then when we slow down we tend to be more accurate," said study co-author Richard Heitz, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University. "Your brain sees things differently when you're placed into a situation where you have to make snap decisions."

The findings, which are detailed in the Nov. 7 issue of the journal Neuron, could shed light on the faulty decision-making of people with schizophrenia or other mental disorders.

To explain the phenomenon, Heitz and his colleagues trained two macaque monkeys to play a game in which they had to pick out the letter L in a sea of Ts or vice versa.

Before each round, a colored circle flashed on the screen to indicate whether the macaques would be rewarded for speed or accuracy.

In the speed test, the monkeys only received a tasty squirt of juice if they found the right letter quickly. In the accuracy test, monkeys got a squirt of juice no matter how long it took for them to find the right letter, but had a "timeout" if they made a mistake.

The researchers then recorded the activity of neurons in the brain region responsible for higher reasoning, the prefrontal cortex.

When the monkeys learned the next trial would be a speed test, the electrical activity from those neurons increased even before starting the test, like cars revving their engines in preparation for a race. During the speed trials, the team found that neurons responsible for visual processing fired more strongly when the monkeys indicated they had found the right letter. The neurons were more sensitive, as if the objects on the screen actually appeared brighter to the brain when it had to make decisions quickly, Heitz told LiveScience.

That higher sensitivity may sound good, but "because they're amplified, you may react to them as if they're more important than they actually are," meaning even faulty answers could be seen as the correct ones, he said.

Aerial View of New Jersey Coast Line After Hurricane Sandy from the National Guard

Aerial View of New Jersey Coast Line After Hurricane Sandy from the National Guard
Oct 31, 2012 | TheNationalGuard

Puppies only pick up yawns when they're old enough to understand empathy

© Wikimedia Commons
Yawning Husky.

Puppies only pick up yawns when they're old enough to understand empathy
Oct 23, 2012 | Rebecca Boyle

Dogs catch yawns from humans, but not if they're too young. To perform this study, Danish scientists cuddled with puppies all day.

Dogs catch contagious yawns just like people, baboons and chimps, which can be used as a measure of empathy. But this is a behavior they learn after they emerge from youngest puppyhood, a new study says. Like people, young dogs show a developmental trend in their likelihood of catching yawns. This is the first time anyone has studied young-organism yawning in a species other than people.

Anyone who owns a dog knows you can catch a yawn from your pet, and vice versa. My dog, a 5-year-old border collie rescue, has this piercing yawn-peak squeal and head shiver that literally makes it impossible not to catch it. And I have seen her watching me, yawning after I do.

She would have started this after about seven months of age, according to this new study, authored by researchers at Lund University in Denmark. Elainie Alenkær Madsen and Tomas Persson took 35 Danish dogs between four and 14 months old and played and cuddled with them.

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Then they either yawned at the dogs' faces or gaped, mimicking a yawn. They wrote down what the dogs did in response, and found that puppies younger than seven months of age didn't really do anything.

About half of the dogs that did yawn got tired, the researchers say. Some of them got so sleepy that the experimenter had to prevent them from falling asleep.

This fits with the development track of humans, the researchers say. Kids start to demonstrate contagious yawns--demonstrating empathy--around four years old, when they develop cognitive abilities like identifying others' emotional states.

The researchers say the puppy yawns reflect a general developmental pattern common to humans and other animals. Affective empathy is something that develops slowly in very early youth, they say. The study appears in Animal Cognition.

UN Agenda 21 Exposed with Rosa Koire

UN Agenda 21 Exposed with Rosa Koire
Oct 20, 2012 | corbettreport



BEHIND THE GREEN MASK: U.N. Agenda 21

DECLINE, DECAY, DENIAL, DELUSION & DESPAIR

Waterlooning Bridge?

DECLINE, DECAY, DENIAL, DELUSION & DESPAIR
Oct 8, 2012 | Washingtons Blog

The majority of Americans seem OK with just waddling through life, accepting the lies and misinformation blasted from the boob tube and their various iGadgets by their owners, gorging themselves to death on Twinkies and Cheetos, paying 15% interest on their $10,000 rolling credit card balance, and growing ever more dependent on the welfare/warfare state to provide and protect them from accepting personal responsibility for their lives. A minority of critical thinking people have chosen to question everything they see and hear being spewed at us by the propagandist mainstream media, the corporate fascist government, and the powerful banking cabal that has an iron grip upon our throats as they choke the life out of the global economy in their never ending desire for more riches and more power.

The decline of the Great American Empire cannot be attributed to one factor or one bogeyman. There are a multitude of factors, villains, and choices made by the American people that have led to our moral, civil, social, and economic decline. The kabuki theater that passes for our electoral process is little more than a diversion from our imminent fate. Neither candidate for President has any intention of changing the course of the U.S. Titanic. Our rendezvous with destiny has been charted, and there aren’t nearly enough lifeboats. Those who built the ship and recklessly navigated it into a sea of icebergs will be the 1^st into the few lifeboats. The leaders we’ve chosen, the choices we’ve made, and our unwillingness to deal with facts and reality have set in motion a disaster that cannot be averted. It’s a shame the majority of Americans have the math aptitude of a 6^th grader, because the unsustainability of our empire can be calculated quite easily. Math is hard for Americans, but denial and delusion are easy.

Read more..

Quantum causal relations: A causes B causes A

© University of Vienna
A new framework for quantum mechanics
which does not assume a pre-existing
global time. It demonstrates the possibility
for two agents to perform a communication
task in which it is impossible to tell with
certainty who influences whom.

Quantum causal relations: A causes B causes A
Oct 2, 2012 | Fabio Costa

This press release is available in German.

One of the most deeply rooted concepts in science and in our everyday life is causality; the idea that events in the present are caused by events in the past and, in turn, act as causes for what happens in the future. If an event A is a cause of an effect B, then B cannot be a cause of A. Now theoretical physicists from the University of Vienna and the Université Libre de Bruxelles have shown that in quantum mechanics it is possible to conceive situations in which a single event can be both, a cause and an effect of another one. The findings will be published this week in Nature Communications.

Although it is still not known if such situations can be actually found in nature, the sheer possibility that they could exist may have far-reaching implications for the foundations of quantum mechanics, quantum gravity and quantum computing.

Causal relations: who influences whom

In everyday life and in classical physics, events are ordered in time: a cause can only influence an effect in its future not in its past. As a simple example, imagine a person, Alice, walking into a room and finding there a piece of paper. After reading what is written on the paper Alice erases the message and leaves her own message on the piece of paper. Another person, Bob, walks into the same room at some other time and does the same: he reads, erases and re-writes some message on the paper. If Bob enters the room after Alice, he will be able to read what she wrote; however Alice will not have a chance to know Bob's message. In this case, Alice's writing is the "cause" and what Bob reads the "effect".

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Each time the two repeat the procedure, only one will be able to read what the other wrote. Even if they don't have watches and don't know who enters the room first, they can deduce it by what they write and read on the paper. For example, Alice might write "Alice was here today", such that if Bob reads the message, he will know that he came to the room after her.

Quantum violation of causal order

As long as only the laws of classical physics are allowed, the order of events is fixed: either Bob or Alice is first to enter the room and leave a message for the other person. When quantum mechanics enters into play, however, the picture may change drastically. According to quantum mechanics, objects can lose their well-defined classical properties, such as e.g. a particle that can be at two different locations at the same time. In quantum physics this is called a "superposition". Now an international team of physicists led by Caslav Brukner from the University of Vienna have shown that even the causal order of events could be in such a superposition. If - in our example - Alice and Bob have a quantum system instead of an ordinary piece of paper to write their messages on, they can end up in a situation where each of them can read a part of the message written by the other. Effectively, one has a superposition of two situations: "Alice enters the room first and leaves a message before Bob" and "Bob enters the room first and leaves a message before Alice".

"Such a superposition, however, has not been considered in the standard formulation of quantum mechanics since the theory always assumes a definite causal order between events", says Ognyan Oreshkov from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (formerly University of Vienna). "But if we believe that quantum mechanics governs all phenomena, it is natural to expect that the order of events could also be indefinite, similarly to the location of a particle or its velocity", adds Fabio Costa from the University of Vienna.

The work provides an important step towards understanding that definite causal order might not be a mandatory property of nature. "The real challenge is finding out where in nature we should look for superpositions of causal orders", explains Caslav Brukner from the Quantum Optics, Quantum Nanophysics, Quantum Information group of the University of Vienna.

Publication:

"Quantum correlations with no causal order"
Ognyan Oreshkov, Fabio Costa, Caslav Brukner. Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2076.