Category Archives: Of Interest

Invest Locally for Financial Change

Posted on by

Like Shopping at Local Businesses? Now You Can Invest in Them, Too

A newly formed company based in Seattle makes it easy to put your money to work in the local economy.
posted Jul 17, 2013
Community Sourced Capital

The team at Community Sourced Capital (left to right):  Brent Cochran, Rachel Maxwell, Meryl McDonald, Casey Dilloway, and Alex Mondau. Photo by Community Sourced Capital.

Community Sourced Capital is a newly formed lender that aims to apply the crowd-sourcing model to encourage the growth of locally owned businesses. The company’s founders—Rachel Maxwell, Casey Dilloway, Brent Cochran, and Meryl McDonald—say they were inspired by the growing desire to support local businesses among their friends and neighbors.

A balance between making a profit and building local businesses is essential to CSC’s business model.

“The hardest part is often not attracting shoppers once the project is off the ground,” Dilloway said, “but securing capital to get it started.”

All four founders are graduates of Bainbridge Graduate Institute, the brainchild of entrepreneur and conservationist Gifford Pinchot III and his wife Libba, and the first business school to offer an MBA in sustainable business. It was while searching for an entrepreneurship project that they noticed a gap in the thinking about how people can best support the local economy.

In 2012, the four decided to do something about that and founded Community Sourced Capital. They worked in a shared office space in a converted furniture store in the historic district of Pioneer Square, just south of downtown Seattle. Their idea was to harness the power of the connections that tie local people together—both on social media and in the physical world—to find people willing to loan money to small local businesses.

Lenders make funds available in $50 blocks, up to a maximum of $250 per project, and are acknowledged by the receipt of a pale-blue square card bearing the CSC logo, which identifies them as “Squareholders.” The funds are then made available to borrowers at zero interest, and loans are paid back at a rate based on the company’s revenue. CSC makes loans of up to $50,000.

After repayment, Squareholders can withdraw their funds or purchase a square in another project, allowing them to keep their money at work in their community.

In a number of ways, Community Sourced Capital’s business model departs sharply from that of traditional lenders. Because the staff of CSC aims to create a model that resembles the sharing of money between friends, borrowers are not required to provide collateral. By keeping capital within the local economy and basing their lending in personal trust, they hope to strengthen ties between businesses and their communities.

“The loans are simple enough that owners won’t get weighed down in complications,” Maxwell said, “which doesn’t make sense for a $50,000 loan anyway.”

And then there’s that part about zero interest. That may seem too good to be true, but president and director Casey Dilloway explains that CSC’s loans aren’t entirely free. Borrowers pay a campaign fee and a flat monthly membership fee when using the CSC platform, a system that Dilloway believes is more equitable than traditional lending schemes, as the fees allow CSC to make a profit without burdening their borrowers with interest payments.

That balance between making a profit and assisting its clients is essential to CSC’s business model. As a “social purpose corporation”—a company with social goals written into its articles of incorporation—CSC has a mission that goes beyond just making money. As the company’s mission statement puts it, “CSC provides a simple way for community members to lend money to the local businesses where they find the most value. Our unique take on crowd funding aggregates many small loans and turns them into one big loan for a business. We call those small loans Squares and the lenders Squareholders.”

In May 2013, CSC successfully funded two projects: Bainbridge Island-based Eleven Winery’s campaign for the planned automation of its bottling process, and Harmon Brewing Company’s new restaurant location at the Tacoma Narrows Airport. Both campaigns raised $20,000 from more than 60 squareholders.

As of mid July 2013, CSC has two active campaigns. For one, they hope to raise $15,000 to enable the Adrift Hotel on Washington state’s Long Beach Peninsula to add solar hot water and rainwater catchment systems and thereby lower their environmental impact. That campaign was less than $1,000 away from full funding at the time of this writing. The second campaign is for a Seattle deli called Delicatus, which aims to raise $9,000 to purchase new refrigeration units, beverage storage, and new hardware for their sales system. That campaign has already raised more than $6,000.

David Rutherford headshotDavid Rutherford wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media project that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. David is a blogger and a graduate of Bainbridge Graduate Institute.

from:    http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/like-shopping-at-local-businesses-now-you-can-invest-in-them-community-sourced-capital

On the Process of Sainthood

Posted on by

The Science of Miracles: How the Vatican Decides

By Tia Ghose, Staff Writer
Date: 09 July 2013
pope john paul ii at his last christmas service
 The Vatican has declared that Pope John Paul II performed two miracles, clearing the way for him to be canonized.
CREDIT: Gasper Furman | Shutterstock.com

When Pope John Paul II died eight years ago, supporters chanted “Santo subito,” or “Sainthood now!”

It looks like his supporters will finally be getting their wish. The former pope’s path to sainthood is almost complete, with the Vatican recently confirming that he performed two miracles. Now all that’s left is the official canonization ceremony, which  has not been scheduled yet. The process of certifying miracles in the Catholic Church goes back centuries and involves an investigation by scientific experts.

Though it may seem strange to outsiders, verifying that miracles have occurred can strengthen people’s beliefs, said Michael O’Neill, who runs the website MiracleHunter.com.

“Even people who are believers in God have an attraction to proofs of his existence. Sometimes it seems like he’s hiding,” O’Neill said. “Miracles are a way that people see God touching the world

Long road to sainthood

In the Catholic religion, saints are people who are in heaven with God. Though many more people may be in heaven and technically saints, those deemed official saints of the church are ones that the Catholic church knows are in heaven. As such, people can pray to these saints, who sometimes intercede on their behalf with God.

But determining who is in heaven is a tricky proposition. That’s where miracles come in. According to the church, miracles, or divine events that have no natural or scientific explanation, serve as proof that the person is in heaven and can intercede with God to change the ordinary course of events.

The Catholic Church uses a formal process to determine who is a saint. First, that person’s life is thoroughly investigated. If deemed virtuous enough, the person is said to be a servant of God. If they’ve exhibited heroic levels of virtue in their life, they are considered venerable. To become saints, however, they need to have performed two miracles after death.

Miracle commission

Toward that end, a Vatican-appointed Miracle Commission sifts through hundreds or even thousands of miraculous claims. Typically, the commissions are composed of theologians and scientific experts.

Nearly all, or “99.9 percent of these are medical miracles,” O’Neill said. “They need to be spontaneous, instantaneous and complete healing. Doctors have to say, ‘We don’t have any natural explanation of what happened,'” O’Neill said.

A woman whose breast cancer was cured wouldn’t qualify, for instance, if she was given a 10 percent chance of survival — she would need to be told there was no chance of survival before any divine intervention, said the Rev. Stephan Bevans, a theology professor at the Catholic Theological Union.

In 2010, former Pope Benedict XVI confirmed that John Paul II had posthumously healed a French nun suffering from Parkinson’s disease. The church recently confirmed a second miracle, when a Costa Rican woman’s brain injury spontaneously healed after praying to John Paul II.

Miracles can be confirmed only if the healed person prayed solely to one person, such as John Paul II, during their ordeal. That way, there can be no mix-up when determining which person in heaven interceded on their behalf, O’Neill said.

Recent tradition

The process of using miracles to determine saints has a relatively short history in the Catholic Church. Prior to 1531, when a Spanish peasant reportedly saw an image of the Virgin Mary in the slopes surrounding Mexico City, miracles weren’t required and saints were agreed upon mostly through tradition or martyrdom, O’Neill told LiveScience.

The rules regarding miracles and sainthood changed as recently as John Paul II’s tenure. He reduced the required number of miracles to two, from three.

And as science has explained more and more over the years, many things that would have been considered miracles in the past are no longer seen that way, Bevans said.

Although miracles are still technically required, “I think they’ve receded in importance” as criteria for sainthood, Bevans told LiveScience. “It’s the holiness of the life of the person that counts.”

That may be the main value of saints, Bevans said.

John Paul II, for instance, has “performed the miracles, so to speak, but he’s also somebody who many people have found a great inspiration. His holiness was so evident,” Bevans said.

from:    http://www.livescience.com/38033-how-vatican-identifies-miracles.html

July 9 Color VIbe

Posted on by

Tuesday, July 9:    Light Peach

Just a note:  this morning around 3:00 AM, there was a huge surge of new energy onto the scene.  It has a clash with some of the older stuff hanging around, so you may have found your sleep disrupted or perhaps some very odd dreams.  There will be more of this happening.  It is a good time to journal your dreams.  That will assist in seeing how the pattern is merging.

This is a day for synchronicity, and if you are open to it, many things can become much clearer to you.  This will happen through the symbols and signs associated with the synchronistic event/s.  Things are happening on many, many levels now and while they can be read one way from a certain point of view, from another perspective there is a much deeper realm of meaning.  You will understand what this means as the day goes forward.  This is a day for being ready for whatever comes your way.  This is not a time to react without first grounding and centering.  It is important to have perspective today in order to see things as they are, beyond the illusion.

.

Extra-Galactic Radio Bursts

Posted on by

Mystery extra-galactic radio bursts could solve cosmic puzzle

Ultrashort radio bursts from outside the Milky Way may help locate missing baryons.

The mystery radio bursts detected by the Parkes Observatory, seem to be coming from way beyond the Milky Way.

ALEX CHERNEY, TERRASTRO.COM/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Astronomers have for the first time detected a population of ultrashort radio bursts with properties that strongly suggest that they originate from outside the Milky Way Galaxy. Lasting for a few thousandths of a second and estimated to erupt roughly every 10 seconds, the mysterious bursts are likely to be caused by a previously unknown class of radio-emitting phenomenon, researchers report in Science1.“This is one of the most important radio discoveries in the last couple of decades,” says Scott Ransom, an astronomer at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, who was not part of the study.

Although radio signals that vary over days to months have been recorded from distant galaxies for decades, ultrashort signals from beyond the Milky Way had never been definitively detected, notes study co-author Dan Thornton, an astronomer at the University of Manchester, UK. He and his colleagues embarked on a search for extragalactic radio bursts after a report in 2007 suggested that one such signal had been tentatively found2.

Using archived data from the 64-metre Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia — the same instrument that had recorded the tentative single burst — Thornton and his collaborators found four bursts that seemed to come from outside the Galaxy.

As radio waves travel through ionized material in space, they encounter a sea of electrons that slows down the lower-frequency components of the signals, but leaves higher-frequency components almost unaffected. As a result, a narrow radio signal travelling a long distance spreads out or disperses. The four radio signals found by Thornton and his team are so spread out that the distribution of electrons in the Milky Way can account for only 3–6% of their dispersion. That is a strong indication that all four signals, which come from different regions of the sky, originate outside the Galaxy. “These things look conclusively to be extragalactic,” says Ransom.

Cosmic riddle

Models of the electron content of intergalactic space suggest that the bursts crossed between 1.7 billion and 3.2 billion parsecs (between 5.5 billion and 10 billion light years) of space to reach Earth, coming from much farther away than the edge of the Milky Way.

The brevity and brightness of the bursts suggests they were emitted by some kind of small, energetic object such as a magnetar, a neutron star with an extremely powerful magnetic field. The bursts “are signalling the existence of a cataclysmic event involving large amounts of mass and or energy”, says Thornton. But their origin remains a mystery because astronomers were unable to pinpoint where the fleeting signals came from.

Researchers at Parkes are now working to find bursts in real time, so that optical telescopes can hunt for any visible light that may be given off by the same source. They could use the wavelengths of that light to calculate exactly how far away the source is.

If astronomers can pinpoint the distances, they can use the dispersion of the radio signals to measure the number of electrons in the space between galaxies. The electron abundance is representative of the amount of baryons — protons and neutrons — that resides in intergalactic space.

That number is of intense interest because it could solve a cosmic riddle: why the abundance of baryons inside galaxies falls short of the total tally that observations of the early Universe suggest should exist today. The new class of bursts could finally locate the missing baryons, notes Thornton.

Nature
doi:10.1038/nature.2013.13332
from:      http://www.nature.com/news/mystery-extra-galactic-radio-bursts-could-solve-cosmic-puzzle-1.13332

Large Sunspot Eruptions

Posted on by

BIG SUNSPOT FACES EARTH: Colossal sunspot AR1785 is now directly facing Earth. The active region has a ‘beta-gamma-delta’ magnetic field that harbors energy for X-class flares, yet so far the sunspot has been mostly quiet. Could it be the calm before the storm? NOAA forecasters estimate a 55% chance of M-flares and a 10% chance of X-flares on July 8th.

Sprawling more than 11 Earth-diameters from end to end, AR1785 is one of the biggest sunspots of the current solar cycle. In fact, it can barely fit on the screen. Click on the dark core below to see a complete hi-res picture taken by Christian Viladrich of Nattages, France:

To take the picture, Viladrich used a filtered 14-inch Celestron telescope. All those irregular blobs surrounding the primary dark core are boiling granules of plasma as small as the state of California or Texas. It’s a very sharp picture.

from: spaceweather.com

Hazards of Flood Water

Posted on by

The Underrated Power of Water
By: Tim Ballisty
Published: July 5, 2013

You vs. Flowing Water

From 2003-2012, flooding claimed an average of 76 lives per year, according to National Weather Service statistics.  Flooding makes up 40% of all natural disasters, the most common global natural disaster, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Let’s lay out some impressive facts about flood waters.

Six inches of flowing water can knock a person off their feet.

  • Water flowing at more than 8 mph has the equivalent force per unit area as air blowing at EF5 tornado wind speeds!
  • Water moving at 25 mph has the pressure equivalent of wind blowing at 790 mph, faster than the speed of sound!

Six inches of flowing water can drown a person.

  • If you slip and fall face first, you might drown before you come to.
  • Babies/small children are very vulnerable; just as they would be in a bathtub accident.
  • Water levels in flash floods can rise one foot in five minutes.  In some cases, near-instantaneous rises of 10-30 feet or more may accompany walls of water rushing downstream

from:  http://www.wunderground.com/news/power-flood-water-20130704

Graham Hancock & Lorna Byrne on Good & Evil

Posted on by

Graham Hancock and Lorna Byrne: Angels & Demons

Last updated on June 28, 2013 at 12:00 am EDT by in5d Alternative News

In this fascinating dialogue, two bestselling authors and explorers of the spiritual realm discuss the big questions at the heart of their latest books:

Is there a battle between Good and Evil?
Why are some people drawn to the dark side?
Do we only see a fraction of reality?
Do angels really walk amongst us and what would it take to see them?
How much do the daily choices we each make affect the positive future of the universe?

Also discussed is the influence of angels and demons on human affairs, the threat posed by science for limiting our spiritual experience and the power of the internet as a tool of global awakening.

Investigator of ancient mysteries, Graham Hancock’s latest supernatural adventure novel War God: Nights of the Witch tells the story of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, exploring the powerful demonic forces behind this devastating clash of civilisations. “Angel Seer” Lorna Byrne is the author of three international bestsellers including her latest Sunday Times Bestseller, A Message of Hope from the ANGELS which shows how we can be supported by angels to lead happier, more fulfilled lives.

from:    http://in5d.com/angels-demons.html

Check out the video here:  

Websites Watched by NSA

Posted on by

Which Websites Are Under NSA surveillance?

June 17, 2013 i(BeforeItsNews) – One of BIN contributor, Ye Olde False Flag, recently posted an excellent article about a Firefox plug-in that warns computer users about potential government surveillance. Ye Old False Flag explains that a 28-year-old artist and developer from Brooklyn, NY has found a fun way to alert users of potential NSA snooping by creating the “The Dark Side of The Prism’ browser extension, which plays songs from Pink Floyd’s 1973 classic “The Dark Side of The Moon” each time a questionable website is crossed.

Since I already have many plug-ins, proxies, gadgets and other goodies that keep me invisible to prying eyes online, I definitely had to give this one a try. I installed the plug-in and accessed several web pages that Ive always been a tad suspicious about. Well, the songs went off on pretty much most of the ones I suspected!

Below are some of the websites where the “alarm” went off. I’ve compiled news, social media, alternative news, government and pro-constitution websites. Now the question is if these sites are unknowingly being tracked to keep tabs on visitors or if the ones behind them are nothing but government shills feeding the masses controlled opposition. You decide. Comments are more than welcomed so we can extend the discussion.

http://www.irs.gov/

http://www.ronpaul.com/

http://sheriffmack.com/

http://constitutionclub.ning.com/ (Constitutional Sheriffs)

https://www.youtube.com/

http://petersantilli.com/

http://www.infowars.com/

http://www.davidicke.com/

https://pandaunite.org/ (People Against the NDAA)

http://divinecosmos.com/

http://www.stewwebb.com/

http://21stcenturywire.com/

http://www.orlytaitzesq.com/

http://exovaticana.com/

http://americannationalmilitia.com/

http://disinfo.com/

http://brianhaw.tv/index.php

http://in5d.com/

http://misstilaomg.com/

http://www.freedominfonetwork.org/

http://www.activistpost.com/

http://www.watchmanscry.com

https://endtimesnews.wordpress.com/

https://www.facebook.com/

https://www.microsoft.com

http://google.com/

http://apple.com/

http://www.yahoo.com/

http://rt.com/

from:    http://planet.infowars.com/technology/which-websites-are-under-nsa-surveillance

New Impressive Solar Flare 6/24

Posted on by

M-CLASS SOLAR FLARE: Sunspot AR1778 produced an impulsive M2-class solar flare on June 23rd at 20:56 UT. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the extreme ultraviolet flash:

The eruption flung material away from the blast site, but the debris does not appear to be heading toward Earth. Except for the effects of the UV flash, which created a short-lived wave of ionization in Earth’s upper atmosphere, this flare was not geo-effective.

More flares could be in the offing. In addition to AR1778, sunspots AR1775 and AR1776 have ‘beta-gamma’ magnetic fields that harbor energy for significant eruptions. NOAA forecasters estimate a 40% chance of M-flares and a 5% chance of X-flares on June 24th.

fr/spaceweather.com