Author: Source

Robbie Kenner didn’t mean to make a horror film when he started working on Food, Inc.. But you can’t shine a light on our food chain without exposing some ugly truths. As Michael Pollan says in the opening of the film:

The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000, but the image that’s used to sell the food…you go into the supermarket and you see pictures of farmers. The picket fence and the silo and the 1930s farmhouse and the green grass. The reality is, it’s not a farm, it’s a factory.

Editor: We just heard that 94-year-old Pete Seeger has just passed away. When Pete hit 90, we shared the following review of his project by Richard Flacks, a retired UC Santa Barbara professor who has long written about US culture.

BY Dick Flacks

[When] Pete Seeger turned 90 on May 3, 2009, it provided the occasion for a huge Madison Square Garden celebratory concert, featuring a wide array of popular musicians singing his songs and honoring his influence. In the years prior to this event, Pete has gotten more mainstream attention than he’d received in the previous 70 years of performing. Springsteen’s recorded several CD’s called ‘The Seeger Sessions’ and simultaneously went on an international tour featuring material drawn from Seeger’s folksong repertory. There was a documentary film bio, released on public tv and theatrically, called Pete Seeger :The power of song. There’s an ongoing campaign to get him nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

by Sebastian Ruiz / SDNews.com / June 10, 2009

City Council voted on June 9 to term out the current Mission Bay Park Committee by July 1 and replace the board with members that have expertise in city finance and management. It is unclear who the new members will be – and if any of the current board members will return to their seats.

One in nine Americans are using federal food stamps to help buy groceries as the country’s deep recession forced another 591,000 people onto the federal anti-hunger program at latest count.

The unemployment rate raced to 9.4 percent, the highest since a matching rate in July 1983, from 8.9 percent in April. This reading beat the peak in the jobless rate during the 1973-1975 recession that lasted 16 months.

Some call it the “Tiananmen Square Massacre,” others say the “Tiananmen Square Crackdown,” and in China it is known merely as an “incident,” the “June 4th Incident,” or as the Chinese say, “liù-sì shìjiàn”.

No matter how you refer to the 1989 democracy protests in Beijing and the brutal response by China’s military, on Thursday, June 4th, the world marks the event’s 20th anniversary.

AHIP (America’s Health Insurance Plans) is having their annual meeting in San Diego this week. Nurses from the California Nurses Association and allies from groups like Physicians for a National Health Program and Progressive Democrats of America will be there to greet them – of course!

Emotions ran high at the monthly meeting of the Sunset Cliffs Natural Park Council last night as dozens of people — a record turnout, regulars said — filled the small meeting room at the Cabrillo Recreation Center, most of them eager to discuss replacing the park’s recently departed benches.

by Craig Gustafson / SignOnSanDiego.com

A federal court has ruled the city of San Diego is prohibited from harassing or dispersing the entrenched seal colony at Children’s Pool beach in La Jolla.

by Michael Moore

General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled. …

It is with sad irony that the company which invented “planned obsolescence” — has now made itself obsolete.

Dear Superior Court Judge Yuri Hofmann,

As a US Citizen residing here in San Diego, I would like to thank you and applaud your efforts to disperse the seals at the “Children’s Pool” beach in La Jolla. I hope to see these actions succeed, and the beach be returned to the hands of its true owners, the people of San Diego.

Often dumbfounded by the countless trespassing violations and blockages of public right-of-way by the members of the “animal kingdom,” …

More photos from photographer Jeff Stone. This time Jeff’s at the shore. “Barrel Boy” is Cody, Jeff’s youngest son – that’s the first shot. Nick, in the last shot, is Jeff’s nephew.

We invite anyone who wants to showcase their photos of Ocean Beach in our blog to simply send them to us via email. We need groups of six photos in order to fill up our gallery.

The trial of San Diego Police Officer Frank White, the officer accused of shooting an Oceanside woman and her 8-year old son, begins Thursday, May 28th.

Rachel Silva, 27, and her son were both seriously injured when they were shot by Frank White on March 15, 2008 in an Oceanside parking lot.