Colorado Town Seizing Ski Resort’s Land To Stop It Building Employee Housing
“Following months of increasingly contentious head-butting, officials in the mountain town of Vail, Colorado, are moving to seize a property from a local ski resort to prevent it from constructing new housing for its employees.
The property in question is a 5-acre site abutting a frontage road in the eastern part of the 5,600-person ski town. After nearly five years of rezonings, planning, permitting, and litigation, ski resort operator Vail Resorts is ready to move ahead with the $17 million Booth Heights project that would create 165 beds for its work force.”
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“Standing in their way is the town of Vail itself, which filed a petition in Eagle County District Court on Friday to invoke its eminent domain powers to seize the Booth Heights site and hold it as open space”
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“Throughout the process, Vail Resorts has maintained that its project would not harm the area’s bighorn sheep. Plack tells Reason the company has committed to paying $100,000 for habitat restoration and would install barriers around its property to prevent residents and pets from interfering with the sheep.
An environmental impact report prepared for the project concluded that it would not harm the area’s sheep. Vail Resorts notes in a lawsuit challenging the emergency ordinance stopping construction of its project that the town has approved several large homes within the bighorn sheep’s range.”
The U.S. Is Losing Yet Another ‘War on Terror’
““The western Sahel has seen a quadrupling in the number of militant Islamist group events since 2019,” reads the new analysis by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, the Pentagon’s foremost research institution devoted to the continent. “The 2,800 violent events projected for 2022 represent a doubling in the past year. This violence has expanded in intensity and geographic reach.””
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“Despite substantial engagement by American commandos, terrorism trends across the continent are dismal, according to the Pentagon’s Africa Center.”
Is Crime Getting Better or Worse? We Don’t Really Know.
“despite those specific-sounding FBI numbers, we don’t really know the current crime rate. The feds recently changed the way they compile data, and reporting law-enforcement agencies have yet to catch up.
“In 2021, the FBI retired its nearly century-old national crime data collection program, the Summary Reporting System used by the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program,” Weihua Li of The Marshall Project, which specializes in journalism about criminal-justice issues, reported earlier this year. “The agency switched to a new system, the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which gathers more specific information on each incident.”
“Unfortunately, despite the advantages of the newer National Incident Based Reporting System, many state and local law enforcement agencies have yet to make the switch,” the Brennan Center’s Ames Grawert and Noah Kim commented this month. “Law enforcement agencies covering just over half of the population reported a full year’s worth of data to the FBI in 2021. By comparison, the FBI’s recent reports have been based on data from agencies covering upwards of 95 percent of the population.”
“The gap includes the nation’s two largest cities by population, New York City and Los Angeles, as well as most agencies in five of the six most populous states: California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Florida,” added Li.”
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“There are other sources of crime data aside from the FBI, point out the Brennan Center’s Grawert and Kim. But those sources, public and private, don’t entirely agree with each other. Some show increases in homicides and violent crime in 2021, though at a slower pace than in 2020; others show a decline. These sources also aren’t as well-known as the FBI data which, despite the flaws of the old methodology, gave us comparable information year after year.”
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“So, is crime getting better or worse? You can make an educated judgment about your own community. But on a larger scale, like most everything else right now, it will be a while before we sort out the mess.”
Evolution of the Indo-European Languages – Ancient Civilizations DOCUMENTARY
Bernardo Kastrup Λ John Vervaeke [Theolocution #2 on Mind Uploading, Shadow Integration, and Love]
How Federal Energy Regulations Make Dishwashers Worse
“The increase in unused dishwashers is correlated with federal energy efficiency standards that have made newer models less effective. In the last 20 years, the U.S. Department of Energy has twice tightened those standards, which limit the amount of water and electricity that dishwashers use. Manufacturers have met those standards by building machines that recirculate less water over a longer wash cycle.
Data compiled by D.C.’s Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) show that average cycle times rose from just over an hour when the first standards were adopted in 1987 to nearly two-and-a-half hours as of 2018. In complaints collected by CEI, many consumers said the longer cycle times had led them to start handwashing dishes.
The regression in dishwasher use is a great lesson in unintended consequences. As Procter & Gamble points out in its “do it” campaign, handwashing uses far more water than machine washing. Environmental standards that discourage the use of machines undermine the original goals of those rules.”
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“The Trump administration briefly liberalized dishwasher standards, but the Biden administration quickly reimposed the old rules. Millions of Americans will now spill needless gallons of water down the drain by cleaning their dishes in the sink while a machine that could have done the work for them sits sadly handicapped and idle.”
Midterm Voters Choose To Protect Reproductive Freedom
“Five states had abortion-related measures on their 2022 midterm ballots, and voters in all of these states seem to have sided with reproductive freedom.
In three states—California, Michigan, and Vermont—voters endorsed constitutional amendments protecting the right to an abortion, while Kentuckians voted against an amendment stating that there is no such right.”
Pot Prohibition Continues Collapsing, and Psychedelic Bans Could Be Next
“Voters on Tuesday approved the legalization of recreational marijuana in Maryland and Missouri while rejecting similar measures in Arkansas, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Meanwhile, voters in five Texas cities passed ballot measures that bar local police from issuing citations or making arrests for low-level marijuana possession. But the most striking election result for drug policy reformers looking beyond the ongoing collapse of marijuana prohibition happened in Colorado, where a broad psychedelic decriminalization measure is winning by two points with 80 percent of votes counted.
Prior to yesterday’s elections, 37 states had approved marijuana for medical purposes, and 19 of them also had legalized recreational use. The Maryland and Missouri results raise the latter number to 21.”
Colorado Voters Approve Decriminalization of 5 Natural Psychedelics
“Colorado voters this week passed the broadest reform of psychedelic drug policy ever approved in the United States. With 88 percent of ballots counted as of Wednesday night, 51 percent of voters had said yes to Proposition 122, which decriminalizes noncommercial activities related to the use of “natural medicine” by adults 21 or older. That term covers five psychedelics found in plants or fungi, some or all of which will eventually be available at state-licensed “healing centers.””
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“The initiative defines “natural medicine” to include psilocybin, psilocyn (another psychoactive component of “magic mushrooms”), dimethyltryptamine (DMT, the active ingredient in ayahuasca), ibogaine (a psychedelic derived from the root bark of the iboga tree), and mescaline (the active ingredient in peyote). The covered activities include “growing, cultivating, or processing plants or fungi capable of producing natural medicine for personal use.” The initiative also eliminates civil and criminal penalties for possessing, storing, using, transporting, or obtaining the listed psychedelics or distributing them to adults 21 or older “without remuneration.””
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“The initiative notes that “natural medicines have been used safely for millennia by cultures for healing.” It adds that “an extensive and growing body of research” supports “the efficacy of natural medicines combined with psychotherapy as treatment for depression, anxiety, substance use disorders, end-of-life distress, and other conditions.” But like Oregon’s initiative, Proposition 122 does not require that clients of psychedelic centers have any particular medical or psychiatric diagnosis.”