Category: Culture

The Voice of San Diego, an online news publication, has begun a series on the dismal nature of San Diego County’s safety net. It is too excellent to pass up. Here is an excerpt and links to the original article byKelly Bennett and Dagny Salas:

San Diego County’s safety net is riddled with gaps ….

A voiceofsandiego.org investigation has found that the county government’s historical resistance to provide social welfare programs has left a wide chasm between last-resort aid and those on the bottom rungs of economic survival.

In San Diego’s surfing turf wars, tempers heat up as the waves become more crowded. Are the skirmishes a solution or a symptom?

By Adam Elder / San Diego Magazine / January 2010

I’m not violent, but I have had some times where we’ve had to do some breath-holding exercises, me and another guy,” deadpans Nate Cintas. “That’s just part of it.” Part of waterboarding? No. Part of surfing? Yes—if you surf at Cintas’ spot at Sunset Cliffs and don’t obey the locals’ rules.

Cintas, known to many as Irate Nate, has for years been one of the heaviest enforcers at his home break—a wave surf magazines won’t run photos of, much less mention—solid, powerful, with close-cropped hair and in great shape for a man in his 40s. Born and raised less than a mile from the Cliffs, he’s a local in every sense of the word.

Editor: I received this email from a good friend this morning after he had watched President Obama’s State of the Union speech:

…. For me, an Obama supporter who contributed hundreds to his campaign – well, tonight I removed my Obama bumper sticker. Based on his speech, he’s a 20th century president in the 21st century, looking backwards into the future. Nuclear power, capital gains cuts, and a health care bill designed by the greedy for the greedy – insurance companies, he’s as much a republican as he needs to be. Just better looking with a better presentation. His approval rating is sinking not because he’s losing the right – he never had them. He’s losing everything left of center.

Here’s an analysis of the Speech:

by John Nichols

Say what you will about Barack Obama. But don’t accuse the president of veering from the course he charted at a point when his term was new, his popularity ratings were high and Americans took seriously all that talk of “hope” and “change.”

by Dave Zirin / Huffington Post / January 28, 2010

Howard Zinn, my hero, teacher, and friend died of a heart attack on Wednesday at the age of 87. With his death, we lose a man who did nothing less than rewrite the narrative of the United States. We lose a historian who also made history.

Anyone who believes that the United States is immune to radical politics never attended a lecture by Howard Zinn. The rooms would be packed to the rafters, as entire families, black, white and brown, would arrive to hear their own history made humorous as well as heroic. “What matters is not who’s sitting in the White House. What matters is who’s sitting in!” he would say with a mischievous grin. After this casual suggestion of civil disobedience, the crowd would burst into laughter and applause.

Originally published Jan. 27, 2010

We here at the OB Rag have been complaining for awhile now that even though we live in a coastal desert, there is no wide-spread effort to collect the rainwater that falls on our parched paradise. There is no government encouragement for it, our culture doesn’t support it – and we waste the opportunity every time it rains – and floods like it did last week.

Well, there’s a woman in Point Loma who is showing us how to do it. Cielo Foth has installed huge storage tanks and 44-gallon trash cans in her backyard to collect rainwater – which she uses for her garden.

SEE INSIDE FOR ARTICLES

* Pier Re-opens and Is Mobbed
* OB Historical Society Featured Steve Rowell’s Birds
* Old Rexalt Drug Sign Bites the Dust
* Ciao Bella to Open by Valentine’s Day
* Surf Shop Opens at Old Rock Paper Scissors Building
* Meanwhile, New Smoke Shop and Others to Open at the Old Surf Shop
* Rich’s VW Closes
* Skate Shop Closed
* OB Planning Board to Hold Election March 9th
* Point Loma Planning Committee Seeks Candidates for March 18th Election
* Channel 10 News Finds Sprinkler Going Outside OB Library During the Rains
* Noon Designs Is Celebrating Its First Birthday February 4th
* South Beach Bar & Grille Fish Tacos “Discovered” by Chicago Tribune

Since Thursday, January 21, 2010, the internet, newspapers and people around kitchen tables across the country have been ablaze with outrage over the Supreme Court’s action to open the floodgates to corporate money in our elections.
Over 40,000 of you have joined with us in launching a long-term campaign to amend the Constitution, and others have begun to follow your lead.

The annual election of candidates for the Ocean Beach Planning Board is coming up. The election will be held March 9th at the OB Rec Center. There are vacancies in each of the 7 Districts.

The OB Planning Board – the grandparent of all planning boards and committees – is the official advisory body to the City of San Diego and the San Diego Planning Commission. It has jurisdiction over construction projects and planning issues within Ocean Beach, and is mandated to require such projects to conform to the OB Precise Plan – the planning outline for the community.

The establishment of OB’s Board was the result of years of trials and tribulations of community residents back in the early and mid-1970s.

As a former government worker myself, I can understand the food stamp worker’s lament to not be blamed for the program regulations she/he has to deal and the stress she/he deals with having heavy caseloads and not enough workers, BUT it sure sounds like there is an attitude problem also, as many have already mentioned.

The worker blames federal regulations but doesn’t seem to be aware that California, and San Diego County in particular, goes far beyond what the federal regulations require to PROCESS the applications, and someone has already mentioned that maybe the fact that our County Board of Supervisors is made up of all Republicans has something to do with that.

by Sunshine

Women. Questing, contrary, willful, inventive, questioning women. We are women who name ourselves and announce ourselves as the oracles we are. Breaking the mirror of deceit that kept us tamed, framed, within the mirror, the cage. Unbound in this world, free to achieve our hearts desires.

I am reminded of such women by Laughing Womyn’s (Whispers of Our Knowings by Laughing Womyn Ashonosheni) words on First Woman.

“Return, return, sisters, with me to the time of our origins. Remember First Woman…she whose body was made from this Earth, molded and shaped to carry and birth the coming generations of children, of ideas, of human ways of being. Remember, sisters, when we gave birth to words, and writing, and counting. Remember our healing ways, our artwork, our ways of expressing ourselves, our strong muscles and bones, our minds that fly with our souls.”

Women like this have lived in OB for generations.

California medical marijuana patients won a court battle Thursday.

In a unanimous decision, the state Supreme Court struck down a state law that set an 8-ounce limit on the amount of medical marijuana a patient can possess at one time. The court, in a ruling issued in San Francisco, said the measure approved by the Legislature in 2003 was an illegal amendment of the medical marijuana law enacted by state voters in 1996.

The initiative, known as the Compassionate Use Act, doesn’t set a limit and allows patients to possess the amount needed for “personal medical purposes.” The court ruled in the case of a Los Angeles County patient, Patrick Kelly, who was prosecuted and sentenced to probation for possessing 12 ounces.

by John Williams

Having now been in Saudi Arabia for only thirty-eight days, I have had time to develop no more than a newcomer’s perspective on this significant Gulf Region country. This is my first experience in a kingdom other than Disney’s magic one. While I can hardly help but consider the political basis of this state to be archaic, I am able to recognize that it is but one of the many systems extant on the planet today, and I can also recognize that whether it is the best or worst system currently in existence or is the best system that possibly could be developed are issues I am neither prepared nor qualified to determine, though I could, if pressed, express an opinion thereon.

If pressed, I would have to say it is unlikely that this system is the best possible system which could be created, but then to the limit of my understanding, no system is, and, further this one seems to work for its citizens. Saudis I meet spend no time complaining about their government, culture, or society.