Couple Fights to Bring Edible Gardens Back Into Orlando

Occupy Food Facebook

Heather Callaghan
Activist Post

Just over a year ago, Jason and Jennifer Helvenston were ordered to destroy their 25 x 25 micro-irrigated front yard veggie garden on their own property or else pay $500 per day in fines. That deadline of November 7th, 2012 and a second one in January 2013 came and went. The couple never budged - they toiled on despite the threat of burdensome fines, tiresome hearings and harassment from city workers of Orlando, Florida.

The couple asked everyone to join them in an online campaign called "Plant a Seed, Change the Law" that included free seeds. Jason had said:

They will take our house before they take our Patriot Garden.

The city had demanded they uproot and replace with appropriate ground cover (grass) for aesthetics' sake. In other words, there was no law in place restricting them.

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Russia's Participation in the U.S. Civil War

Historian Webster Griffin Tarpley talked about the contribution of Russian Tsar Alexander II to a northern victory in the U.S. Civil War. He said that the Imperial Russian government had issued an ultimatum to Britain and France specifying that if those powers should intervene on the side of the Confederate States of America they would immediately find themselves at war with the Russian Empire. Mr. Tarpley marked the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the Russian Baltic Fleet in New York City on September 24, 1863, and of the Russian Pacific Squadron in San Francisco on October 12, 1863. He argued that it was the presence of those fleets that provided the final deterrence. Russia was the only country to extend direct military support to the Lincoln government.


“Commemorating the Russian Fleets of Autumn 1863” was an event of the McClendon Group, held in the Zenger Room of the National Press Club.

ACCESS THE PROGRAM HERE

Alan Watt on the Vinny Eastwood Show

Oct. 25, 2013

Alan Watt on The Vinny Eastwood Show
(Originally Broadcast Oct. 25, 2013 on American Freedom Radio)
thevinnyeastwoodshow.com

LISTEN / DOWNLOAD Hour 1

LISTEN / DOWNLOAD Hour 2

10 More Years in Afghanistan

David Swanson
Washington’s Blog
November 26, 2013

When Barack Obama became president, there were 32,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.  He escalated to over 100,000 troops, plus contractors. Now there are 47,000 troops these five years later.  Measured in financial cost, or death and destruction, Afghanistan is more President Obama’s war than President Bush’s.  Now the White House is trying to keep troops in Afghanistan until “2024 and beyond.”

Image: US Troops (Wikimedia Commons).

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is refusing to sign the deal. Here is his list of concerns. He’d like the U.S. to stop killing civilians and stop kicking in people’s doors at night.  He’d like the U.S. to engage in peace negotiations.  He’d like innocent Afghan prisoners freed from Guantanamo.  And he’d like the U.S. not to sabotage the April 2014 Afghan elections.  Whatever we think of Karzai’s legacy — my own appraisal is unprintable — these are perfectly reasonable demands.

Iran and Pakistan oppose keeping nine major U.S. military bases in Afghanistan, some of them on the borders of their nations, until the end of time.  U.S. officials threaten war on Iran with great regularity, the new agreement notwithstanding.  U.S. missiles already  hit Pakistan in a steady stream.  These two nations’ concerns seem as reasonable as Karzai’s.

The U.S. public has been telling pollsters we want all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan “as soon as possible” for years and years.  We’re spending $10 million per hour making ourselves less safe and more hated.  The chief cause of death for U.S. troops in this mad operation is suicide.

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Afghanistan considers public stoning for adulterers

AFP
November 25, 2013

Afghanistan is considering bringing back stoning for adultery, Human Rights Watch and the justice ministry said today, possibly restoring a punishment in force during the Taliban’s brutal regime.

The penalty for married adulterers, along with flogging for unmarried offenders, appears in a draft revision of the country’s penal code being considered by the ministry of justice.

Ashraf Azimi, the head of ministry’s criminal law department, confirmed to AFP that stoning to death is included in the draft.

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Israel Launches Largest Ever Air Force Exercise Day After Iran Deal

Some see timing of drill as no coincidence
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
November 26, 2013

In what some would see as no coincidence, Israel launched its largest every international air force exercise just a day after the Iran nuclear “deal” which has left Tel Aviv fuming.

 

According to the Israeli Defense Forces blog, “On Sunday, November 24, for the first time in Israel’s history, the Israel Air Force launched the “Blue Flag” training exercise – an international air force exercise with participation by the US, Italian and Greek air forces.”

 

The exercise will run until Thursday this week and is designed to “improve Israel’s general air defense capabilities.”

 

However, the drill, which involves “simulated enemy forces,” will almost certainly test Israel’s offensive mettle given that it takes place just a month after an IAF long-range flight exercise during which the IAF’s ability to fly “exceptionally long distances” was put to the test.

 

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Iran nuclear deal: Israeli minister warns accord could end in suitcase bomb

Ben Lynfield
London Independent
November 25, 2013

An internationally isolated Benjamin Netanyahu termed the world powers’ agreement with Iran a “historic mistake” that advanced Tehran towards nuclear weapons capability.

“What was agreed in Geneva is not a historic agreement but a historic mistake,” the Israeli Prime Minister told his cabinet hours after the accord was reached. “Today the world became a much more dangerous place because the most dangerous regime in the world has made a significant step to attaining the most dangerous weaponry in the world.”

While the agreement limits Iran to enriching uranium by a maximum of 5 percent, it casts aside Israel’s demand that enrichment be eliminated entirely, something seen in the West as unrealistic.

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Egypt police disperse first protest since new law passed

Reuters
November 25, 2013

Egyptian protesters blamed Obama earlier this year for Morsi dictatorship.

.

Egyptian security forces fired tear-gas and dispersed university students who had defied a law passed on Sunday that restricts demonstrations, the state news agency reported on Monday.

Students of Al-Azhar University and Assiut University in Assiut province, south of Cairo, staged a protest in defiance of the new law, chanting protest against the army and police.
Separately, in the first move to implement the law, the Interior Ministry approved requests for protests by lawyers and political activists in front of the lawyers’ syndicate in Cairo and the State Council in Giza, it said.

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French foreign minister doubts Israel will strike Iran

Jerusalem Post
November 25, 2013

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told a radio station on Monday that he did not believe Israel would launch a preemptive military assault on Iran’s nuclear installations, Israel Radio reported.

Image: Laurent Fabius (Wikimedia Commons).

Fabius said that the European Union would likely begin lifting some of the sanctions against Iran beginning next month following the interim accord that was agreed upon between the P5+1 powers and the Islamic Republic.

Bracing for continued battle over the Iranian nuclear issue, a senior Israeli official said Sunday that Israel will continue to act in the “diplomatic arena” and “in other areas” to ensure that Iran does not get nuclear weapons.

“The ball is still in play,” the official said, as Israel digested the significance of the agreement signed in Geneva in the early morning hours that legitimizes Iran’s enrichment of uranium, but freezes the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program for six months in exchange for sanctions relief estimated at $7 billion.

Full article here

Obama and Kerry Must Disregard UK, France, Israel, Saudis and Work with Russia to Consolidate Modus Vivendi with Iran

Wall Street-CIA Rogue Network Implicated in Kennedy Assassination and Subsequent Parallel Government; Remedy is to Break Power of Financiers with Mass Traction Economic Demands

Webster G. Tarpley, Ph.D.
TARPLEY.net – World Crisis Radio
November 23, 2013

ACCESS THE PROGRAM HERE

Improved Non-GMO Corn Performing Better Than GMO Crops

Heather Callaghan
Natural Blaze

Despite genetically modified corn comprising up to 90% of corn crops in the United States, non GMO hybrid corn (often called conventional) has managed to hang on. There appears to be a steady rising market for non-GMO corn.

Spectrum Premium Non-GMO is an independent "genetic improvement" seed company based in Indiana and selling non-GMO seed in most states. They claim to have new and different hybrid genetics technology but without the complications of genetic engineering - and no GMO trait license agreements.

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Iran to Freeze Its Nuclear Program in Geneva Accord

gawker.com
November 24, 2013

After weeks of negotiations between diplomats from Iran, US, the UK, Russia, China, France and Germany, Iran has agreed to temporarily freeze its nuclear program while a larger deal is negotiated.

The international agreement would give negotiators time to iron out a deal that would ensure that Iran’s nuclear program would only be used towards peaceful ends, and not in pursuit of a nuclear weapon. Over the last few years, Iran has been enriching uranium to 20%, a level close to that which could be used in a weapon. Iran has now agreed to stop enriching at 5%, and dismantle links between centrifuges (which help enrich Uranium) and it has also promised to stop building new centrifuges.

“Diplomacy opened up a new path toward a world that is more secure,” President Obama said last night, “a future in which we can verify that Iran’s nuclear program is peaceful and that it cannot build a nuclear weapon.”

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Nationalize the Federal Reserve

Tax Wall Street Party

 

Alexander Hamilton, the architect of America’s First National Bank, proved that a national debt, if not excessive, is a great advantage to a modern nation. A sustained economic recovery requires a source of credit which can be neither zombie banks nor the federal budget.

We need trillions in long-term investments

According to its 2013 Report Card for America's Infrastructure, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates that America needs to invest $3.6 trillion in infrastructure by 2020.

This sum – targeted to roads, rail, bridges, power, water, schools and similar projects – is roughly equal to the entire US Federal budget for a year. We can not simply pay these costs on-budget, which would add $600 Billion per year, costing the American taxpayer more than Medicare. A pay-as-you-go approach on the scale we require is not only politically unrealistic, it would place an excessive burden on the federal budget, thus creating a vulnerability to speculative attacks on the dollar.

Why we can't borrow the money from Wall Street

In 2011, the Poway Unified School District near San Diego, CA needed $105 million to make needed upgrades to its aging public schools. Unable by law to increase property taxes, and unable to afford the cost of a short-term loan, the district used a controversial loan called a capital appreciation bond. 

With this bond, an example of the schemes becoming all too common to keep cash-strapped infrastructure functioning, the District will delay repayment for 20 years, and pay over the following 20 years at a total cost of nearly 1 billion dollars. In addition to the costs of construction, this means another $900 million in interest payments will be foisted upon local taxpayers.

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Seven Volcanoes Article: Your Questions Answered

Chris Carrington
Activist Post

My article yesterday: Seven Volcanoes In Six Different Countries All Start Erupting Within Hours Of Each Other has raised a great deal of interest. Both at The Daily Sheeple and on other sites who have kindly republished it, many readers have asked questions. So, I’m going to have a go at answering some of them.

This is bulls*%t, the volcanoes are just doing what volcanoes do.

It’s not bullshit, but you are correct that it’s what volcanoes do. Volcanoes are vents, when the pressure builds up the volcanoes release a mixture of steam and gases, and sometimes rocks and molten rock, lava, to relieve the pressure build up.

According to the Smithsonian Institute there are some 1511 active volcanoes on the planet. Active is defined as a volcano that has erupted at some point during the last 10,000 years.

The Smithsonian states that on average there are 60 eruptions a year, but that between 45 and 75 would be considered within normal parameters. Today, at this moment 34 volcanoes are actively erupting. The Smithsonian state that up to 20 volcanoes erupting on a given day would be within the normal parameters.

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Ukraine drops EU plans and looks to Russia

Al-Jazeera
November 21, 2013

Ukraine has rejected draft laws that would allow the release of a jailed opposition leader, suspended plans for a landmark agreement with the European Union and announced it will renew active dialogue with Russia.

Ukraine is highlighted in orange. Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, is about 530 miles from Moscow, the capital of Russia. Credit: David Liuzzo via Wikimedia

The Ukrainian parliament’s failure to pass the bills on Thursday to grant freedom to the former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, took away the country’s last chance to satisfy the EU’s condition for stepping towards integration with the 28-member bloc.

The decree issued by Prime Minister Mykola Azarov on the government website on Thursday said that the decision was taken in order to “ensure the national security of Ukraine” after taking into account the effects of trade with Russia if the agreement was signed on November 28-29 summit in Vilnius.

The agreement with the EU would have marked a pivotal shift westwards for the ex-Soviet republic’s 46 million people, away from historic Russian ally.

The government instead proposed creating a three-way trade commission between Ukraine, the European Union and Russia that would resolve trade issues between the three sides.

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The "Real JFK" - Not Conservative, and Not Forgotten

 Richard Eskrow
Huffington Post

Listen to the breath,
the unbroken message that creates itself from the silence,
it rushes towards you now, from those youthfully dead.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, "Duino Elegies"

HBO

Fifty years. That's how long it's been since John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Half a century can seem so brief - just a flash in time - or so terribly long, an endless walk through dusty corridors.

Presidents are the products of the times at least as much they are the shapers of them. They ride into office on great waves of half-understood historical forces, waves that can make them transformative leaders or capsize them without warning.

It's tempting to search for our own reflection in the presidencies of the past, in "what if?" exercises,in projecting more idealism and vision onto them than they actually possessed.

None of these exercises seem more misguided then the recent spate of right-wing commentary suggesting that President Kennedy was really a conservative. Kennedy was many things, but "conservative" was not one of them. That idea calls upon the person of conscience to, in Rilke's words, "gently remove the semblance of injustice that ... hinders spirits from a pure moving-on."

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Terrorism and the Bill of Rights

Jacob G. Hornberger
fff.org
November 21, 2013

infowars

In the aftermath of the Boston bombings last spring, GOP Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham and others called on Barack Obama to treat the surviving suspect in the bombings, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, as an “enemy combatant” rather than as a criminal defendant. The episode highlighted the revolutionary change in the relationship of the American people to the federal government that took place in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. For while Obama rejected the plea to treat Tsarnaev as an enemy combatant, no one can dispute the fact that the president of the United States now wields the discretionary authority to go either way — enemy combatant or criminal defendant — with respect to people who are suspected of being terrorists.
Ever since 9/11 the president of the United States, together with the Pentagon and the CIA, has been wielding extraordinary emergency powers that historically have been wielded by the most powerful dictators in history. They include the power of the government to seize people, including Americans, cart them away to a military dungeon or concentration camp, torture them, keep them incarcerated indefinitely, and even execute them, perhaps after some sort of kangaroo military tribunal — all without judicial process to determine whether the person had done anything to warrant such treatment.

Such powers also include the power to assassinate people, including Americans, again without any sort of formal charges, trial by jury, due process of law, or other procedural rights and guarantees.

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