Month: January 2012

“My deer got Scrooged,” said Diana Frieling, owner of California Reindeer Rentals in central California. “I don’t have the heart to tell them.”

by Kelly Bennett / Voice of San Diego / Jan. 26, 2012

Hyped as an epic holiday tradition-to-be, A Christmas Tabernacle in Liberty Station last month turned into a yuletide nightmare. Scores of performing groups and small businesses haven’t been paid for their involvement, ranging from carolers and ballet companies to reindeer owners.

Jamie Sutton was selling Christmas. The 31-year-old businessman dreamed of fathering an epic tradition in San Diego, the Christmas-only version of popular but religion-neutral events like Balboa Park’s December Nights. Last summer, he made his way around town wooing vendors and performers, painting them into his Rockwellian vision.

Editor: Here’s some news that fell under the radar: police go on a violent rampage on another UC campus, injuring and arresting students. This was up at UC Riverside on Thursday, January 19th. Check out the video on the original site.

By Jamie Applegate / The Daily Californian / Originally published Jan. 20, 2012

Police officers arrested two protesters and struck several others with plastic pellets during a demonstration Thursday [1/19/12] surrounding the UC Board of Regents meeting at UC Riverside.

The two individuals arrested — identified as Kenneth Ehrlich, 39, and Humberto Rivera, 25 — were booked on suspicion of felony assault on a police officer, according to Riverside campus spokesperson Kris Lovekin.

Nine police officers also sustained minor injuries, and about 11 people in the crowd suffered bruises from the pellets, Lovekin said.

For UC Riverside junior Stephen Fong, the protests on his campus marked a dramatic shift in the atmosphere of the student body.

By Miriam Raftery / East County Magazine / January 26, 2012

Last week, we reported that Friends of Palomar Mountain State Park launched a pledge drive to save this beautiful place from closing forever. They asked the state to keep the park open if their group can raise $60,000 to fill the gap between revenues and operating expenses. Already, $16,625 has been raised.

Today [1/26/12], chairman Rick Barclay revealed, “We’ve received a generous matching pledge challenge from Mr. & Mrs. Robert S. Wilson of Rancho Santa Fe: If we can raise $30,000 in pledges and donations, they’ll match that amount.”

Now only $13,375 more is needed to reach the $60,000 total.

By Mark Gibb / rsn – Forbes / January 27, 2012

Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country – while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.

With those words earlier today, in a blog posting titled “Tweets still must flow” the management of Twitter’s went over to the dark side and may well have dug their own grave.

In what can only have been a fit of corporate insanity, Twitter announced that it has the ability to filter tweets to conform to the demands of various countries.

Thus, in France and Germany it is illegal to broadcast pro-Nazi sentiments and Twitter will presumably be able to block such content and inform the poster why it was blocked.

Groups Claim National Marine Fisheries Service Fail to Protect Thousands of Whales, Dolphins, Sea Lions and Other Animal Life From U.S. Navy Warfare Training Exercises Along the West Coast

By Ed Joyce / KPBS / January 26, 2012

A coalition of conservation and American Indian groups sued the National Marine Fisheries Service Thursday, Jan. 26, over the use Navy’s use of sonar and other training exercises. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Northern California.

It claims the National Marine Fisheries Service failed to protect thousands of whales, dolphins, porpoises, seals and sea lions from U.S. Navy warfare training exercises along the coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington.

Oh, Mighty Sonoran,
I fight back tears
for what they’ve
done to God’s Brown Children,
Sonorans for hundreds of years,
for how they’ve
banned their studies,
lied about their heroes,
stolen books filled with their histories
like purse snatchers
abusing passers-by
on dangerous urban streets
while they cried in their classroom seats.

Part One – A Summary.

What is the proposed Keystone XL pipeline?

It was the latest project to move DilBit, diluted Bitumen, from Canada to oil refineries in the United States.

What is Bitumen?

Bitumen is tar (think the La Brea Tar Pits) or natural asphalt (it is a key component of the asphalt we drive on). Bitumen after extensive processing and refinement can become a form of fuel oil (gasoline, diesel, jet fuel).

With the high cost (economically and environmentally) of extraction and processing of Bitumen, it has only recently became profitable due to the high price of a barrel of oil.

Who has made MAN the guardian of women’s rights? Who has sanctioned other women telling other females that they are wrong because they want to have an abortion. Did you hear a candidate for President of the United States of America say, when it involves a woman pregnant from a rape, “Make The Best Out Of A Bad Situation”. Yes, that is what candidate Rick Santorum said when he commented on his opposition to abortion.

A woman’s body is her own. It does not belong to anyone else except that woman. No one should be able to tell a woman what to do with her body. Not her family; not her husband; not her significant other; not her religion. What she decides to do with it should be between her and her doctor. No one else.

Editor: Check out the following report by former OBcean Michael Steinberg who now lives in San Francisco. Apparently, the Occupy movement in San Diego is not the only one with problems with the daily fishwrap.

On January 20 Occupy protestors took over a 600 unit vacant hotel in San Francisco. But the San Francisco Chronicle missed the point. Actually it missed a lot of them.

As the final action of January 20th’s Wall Street West San Francisco protests, activists marched to the former Cathedral Hill Hotel at Geary and Van Ness and took it over.Why? The San Francisco Chronicle’s report the next morning only informed us that, upon arriving and being greeted by riot cops, “Some activists threw bricks and bottles, injuring two officers, one in the chest and one in the arm.” Also that “40 people broke in through a back entrance and loudly cavorted in the 600-room hotel for two hours. When they threw furniture from the roof, several dozen police cleared the building.”

The Court considers the 4th Amendment implications of new surveillance technologies.

Jacob Sullum / Reason.com / January 25, 2012

“If you win this case,” Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben during oral argument in U.S. v. Jones last fall, “there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen of the United States.” That prospect, Breyer said, “sounds like 1984.”

Fortunately, the government did not win the case. But the Court’s unanimous decision, announced on Monday, may not delay Breyer’s 1984 scenario for long. Unless the Court moves more boldly to restrain government use of new surveillance technologies, the Framers’ notion of a private sphere protected from “unreasonable searches and seizures” will become increasingly quaint.

By Don Bauder / San Diego Reader / January 24, 2012

San Diego Gas & Electric has told the California Public Utilities Commission that there is no need for local public hearings now on its attempt to get customers to pick up uninsured costs of the 2007 wildfires. Recently, the Mussey Grade Road Alliance asked for such a hearing.