Category: Civil Disobedience

Editor: The following rant is an unsolicited article by Don Sevrens on the issue of “vigilante stop signs in Point Loma”. For earlier posts on the issue, go here, here, here, and here .

By Don Sevrens

Ever wonder why there seems to be a stop sign every two blocks whether needed or not?

The San Diego City Council has a curious policy that allows uninformed community planning groups to overrule the city’s traffic experts and, with the concurrence of one district council member, order stop signs installed.

There are no standards for collecting signatures or even telling the neighborhood what is going on. Just get a couple friends together, ask some community planner to schedule a vote and – presto! – you have new stop signs up.

By Marjorie Cohn / truthout

Just as Bradley Manning’s court-martial was getting underway, another brave whistleblower dropped a bombshell into the media: The Obama administration is collecting data on every telephone call we make. Nearly 64 years to the day after George Orwell published his prescient book 1984, we have learned that the “Thought Police” are indeed watching every one of us. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” Edward Snowden told the Washington Post.

A former undercover CIA employee who has worked at the National Security Agency (NSA) for four years, Snowden provided a secret order of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to the Guardian. The order requires Verizon on an “ongoing daily basis” to provide the NSA information about all phone calls in its system both in the United States and other countries.

Press Conference with Mayor Bob Filner

Ronnie Chang is a state legal medical cannabis patient, an alleged former collective operator and victim of the 9/9/09 raids on cannabis collective in San Diego County. A widespread and brutal attack on legal cannabis patients, the raids were part of a joint effort by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis to senselessly destroy the public safety collectives provide the community.

Point Loma Planners’ Recommendation That “Bogus” Signs Be Replaced and Official Signs Removed Continues to Split Local Community

CBS8 reports that the Peninsula Planning Committee’s decision last night – May 16th – to find a compromise on the “bogus” stop signs continues to divide and rile the local hilltop community in Point Loma.

The Committee voted 4 to 3 to send a recommendation to Councilmember Faulconer’s office that the controversial stop signs that appeared and installed by anonymous parties, outside of city regulations, will be replaced – there’s 2 of them – and that 3 official stop signs in the area be removed.

A Brief History of the Origins of the Modern May Day and the Movement for a 8-Hour Day

May Day Connections

By Neale Towart / Workers Online

May Day as a modern working class celebration and commemoration began from the 1886 events in Chicago where workers were demonstrating for an eight hour day. But the day already had special significance for working people before then.

Pre-Industrial May Day and Working People

As a working peoples celebration its origins go back much further, with connections to Ancient Roman rituals. In pagan Europe it was a festive holy day celebrating the first spring planting. The ancient Celts and Saxons celebrated May 1st as Beltane or the day of fire. Bel was the Celtic god of the sun.

In the 1700s the Churches banned the pagan rituals, just as bosses today want workers to forget any traditions of solidarity and celebration of workers rights, but many peasants continued the tradition.

Not Every Resident Is Happy, However

Two bogus stop signs have been discovered in the tony neighborhood of southern Point Loma, near the Point Loma campus of Nazarene University. In July, 2012, a stop sign appeared on Jennings Street. The counterfeit signs have many supporters among local residents, and even the City signed off (no pun intended) on one of them – but, not everyone is happy.

Residents along Jennings at Albion Street and Silvergate Avenue are divided on the issue. Some say the bogus signs have made their neighborhood more safer for pedestrians, children, and walkers.

And some of them have been complaining to the City about traffic speeding through their ritzy neighborhood for over a decade. In fact, residents in 2000 asked the City to do something and allow stop signs, but the City declined, and installed a “Yield” sign. Residents also asked the City again later in 2000, and also in early 2001, and city staff deemed stop signs unnecessary.

Perhaps spurred on by the latest sexual assault (and though the suspect has been caught), OBceans are organizing the next meeting of the OB OB Citizen’s Patrol.

The first meeting of 2013 will be held Tuesday, April 2 at 5 pm. The meeting will take place at the Tower 2 Cafe, in OB.

Tower 2 Cafe is located at 5083 Santa Monica Avenue, OB, CA 92107; and their phone is (619) 223-4059.

Today, March 28th, marks the 42nd anniversary of the infamous Collier Park Riot – the largest “disturbance” between the community and police in the history of Ocean Beach.

Hundreds of OBceans and students from area colleges were gathered on March 28, 1971, at a peaceful anti-Vietnam War protest that was combined with a community clean-up of a large corner lot for parkland when they were attacked by police. This unprovoked assault by police resulted in a riot that spread from Soto and Greene Streets all the way to the beach and lasted for hours into the night. Fifty people were arrested, many injured, a patrol car was burned, but over time, the wounds were healed, the war ended, and a park was created in northeast OB: Collier Park.

Here are a series of articles about the Collier Park Riot and what it meant for Ocean Beach.

Much has been made of Bob Filner crashing the City Attorney’s news conference a little while ago but we shouldn’t forget that in that flurry of feistiness he pointed out that there are people among us, fellow citizens, family, friends, you name them, who are paid tacky wages. Like hotel workers.

He made it clear that the tourist industry isn’t going to ply their trade with $30 million dollars of the city’s money unless they pay hotel workers what they deserve.

How refreshing is that, a mayor for the people, a man standing up for the folks who make visitors to “America’s Finest City” comfortable and well fed, with nice pools for a swim on well manicured hotel grounds. These people get out and about town and spend money by the ton and the people who added so much to the fineness of their stay don’t get anywhere near their fair share of this bounty.

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship / February 12, 2013

Last week, The New York Times published a chilling account of how indiscriminate killing in war remains bad policy even today. This time, it’s done not by young GIs in the field, but by anonymous puppeteers guiding drones that hover and attack by remote control against targets thousands of miles away, often killing the innocent and driving their enraged and grieving families and friends straight into the arms of the very terrorists we’re trying to eradicate.

Sierra Club – for first time – to participate in civil disobedience that includes RFK Jr

From EcoWatch / February 13, 2013

Fifty American leaders—including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (Waterkeeper Alliance), Michael Brune (Sierra Club), Bill McKibben (350.org), Reverend Lennox Yearwood Jr. (Hip Hop Caucus), civil rights legend Julian Bond, actress Daryl Hannah, and others —will risk arrest today in front of the White House to demonstrate the depth of their support for decisive action against climate change. For the first time in its 120-year history, the Sierra Club will participate in this civil disobedience action to convey the severity and urgency of action on climate.

By Steven Wishnia / Alternet

Preserving the main legal barrier to medical marijuana, a federal appeals court on Jan. 22 rejected a lawsuit intended to force the Drug Enforcement Administration to move marijuana out of Schedule I, the federal law that classifies marijuana as a dangerous drug with no valid medical use.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled 2-1 that the medical-marijuana advocates who filed the suit—Americans for Safe Access, a California-based patient-advocacy group; the Coalition to Reschedule Cannabis, Patients Out of Time, and four individual medical users, including Air Force veteran Michael Krawitz—had not proved that the DEA’s decision to keep marijuana in Schedule I was “arbitrary and capricious.” The court held that marijuana had failed to meet the five standards the DEA sets for drugs to qualify as having a valid medical use.