Category: Health

By David Helvarg / The Progressive Magazine / November 21, 2024

For those of us committed to protecting the ocean, it’s always been clear that restoring healthy seas will be the work of our lifetimes, and that of others who’ll come after us.

Unlike the majority of Americans, I believe the Biden Administration did a decent job, particularly in responding to the climate emergency we’re currently living through. During his term, Biden signed into law two major pieces of legislation: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Nonprofit groups including Blue Frontier, which I founded, created an “Ocean Climate Action Plan” which helped in adding $10 billion to the IRA law, with a focus on coastal resiliency, including $3 billion for greening ports.

By Kate Callen

You can’t blame Todd Gloria for delaying the painful announcement that Measure E is DOA.

The mayor is having a rough month. He should have been re-elected easily. That didn’t happen. He had an inside track to a White House post. That won’t happen either. It’s understandable that a politician with fresh bruises would put off more skirmishes. But while Gloria takes a breather, the rest of the city is preparing for a fierce budget battle in the not-too-distant future.

From 7SanDiego

Thousands of patient care and service workers at UC San Diego Medical Center and other University of California campuses across the state will stage a two-day strike starting Wednesday, alleging unfair bargaining tactics, allegations the UC system denies.

According to the AFSCME Local 3299 union, the strike will include roughly 37,000 UC workers “at every UC campus and medical facility across the state.” The strike began at midnight Wednesday and continues until midnight Thursday. Picketing both days will be from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The 2024 Susan G. Komen San Diego 3-Day walk kicked off at the Del Mar Fairgrounds Friday morning, November 15th, with local residents and supporters across the country coming together for a 60-mile trek throughout the San Diego area.

Participants have spent the months prior raising money, a minimum of $2,300 each, that will go toward efforts to fight breast cancer. As of current, the event has an impressive track record and has already raised more than $160 million for the cause, officials with the fundraiser confirmed.

Hey, If You Can Kill 20 Million Native Americans, Enslave 12 Million Africans, and Let Biden Fund the Slaughter of 40,000 Women, Children and Elderly…
— Of Course You Can Install a Rapist/Felon/Fascist as your President! In the Meantime, Breathe, Take Care of Yourself, Read a Good Book.

By Michael Moore / Nov 14, 2024

If you stop and think about it, we’ve come up with a lot of doozies in our history. Like the genocide of 20 million Native Americans. Or the enslavement of 12 million kidnapped Africans. Or us invading Vietnam and killing 4 million Asian people for no reason at all. We are not a good people.

We have a non-stop cavalcade, a sordid laundry list of evil deeds that led us directly to last week, to the point where we the people, by popular vote, elected a 34-time convicted felon, a fascist, and a civilly-charged and convicted sexual abuser to be our 47th president of the United States. And we did so after he clearly and quite honestly warned us that he was going to do a mass round-up and deportation of nearly 15 million people. And that he would consider executing people he referred to as “the enemy within” (i.e. his political opponents and those who were disloyal to him).

Striking mental health care workers at Kaiser Permanente were back on the picket lines this week, beginning Monday, November 11 at one site in San Diego as well as others at multiple Southern California medical centers in a continuing dispute with management.

Union officials said workers would be picketing be at the San Diego location all week – Monday through Friday at San Diego Medical Center, located at 9455 Clairemont Mesa Blvd. Picket lines will begin at 8 a.m. and run through 2 p.m.

The union’s contract with Kaiser expired Sept. 30. No bargaining sessions are scheduled for this week.

According to the union, the key issues remain “Kaiser’s unwillingness to provide its nearly 2,400 mental health professionals in Southern California the same amount of time for critical patient care duties that can’t be done during appointments as their counterparts in Northern California — as well as the same wage levels and retirement benefits as comparable workers throughout the Kaiser system.”

Editordude: This Op-Ed by NY Times columnist Michelle Goldberg reprinted in the LA Times helped me to understand that I was truly grieving — in grief — about the death of democracy — and it helped me get through the weekend. I wanted to share it.

By Michelle Goldberg / The Spokesman Review – New York Times /Sat., Nov. 9, 2024 

When Donald Trump won the first time, I spoke to a journalist friend in Turkey to commiserate. I told her about all the protests that were planned, and she gently tried to prepare me for disappointment. She and her friends had protested Recep Tayyip Erdogan when he was prime minister, she said. But in time, the protests subsided, and life within a country of diminishing freedoms ground on. This conversation stayed in my mind throughout the Trump presidency as a warning against letting down our guard. When Trump was finally ejected from the White House, I felt patriotic pride in the endurance of the anti-Trump resistance, which had never for a moment accepted his grotesquerie as our new normal.

It won’t be that way this time.

By Kate Callen

I am always delighted to get an assignment from Frank Gormlie. Writing for the OB Rag is the best reporting gig I’ve ever had. But when Frank asked us to think about the aspects of democracy we will miss if Donald Trump is elected, my brain shut down. I just could not go there.

In 2016, the prospect of Trump becoming president was unthinkable. Eight years later, it’s all we seem to think about.

It’s making us despondent. And here’s the kicker: It might not even happen. We’re obsessing about something that might not take place.

By Dana Williams /7SanDiego / October 3, 2024

A newly-approved bill signed in late September by Gov. Gavin Newsom allows cities within San Diego County, or the county itself, to ban electric bicycles for riders who are younger than 12 years old.

The bill, AB 2234, was written by Assemblymember Tasha Boerner, who is the California State Representative for the 77th District that includes much of coastal San Diego County. She shared that while she is a mother of kids who enjoy using their e-bikes to get around, there needs to be more regulations around how they are used.

What is the Paddle for Clean Water?

Originally launched in the 90s as a protest against sewage pollution, the Paddle for Clean Water has grown into an annual event uniting surfers, swimmers, and ocean enthusiasts in a powerful show of solidarity for protecting our coastline and improving ocean water quality.

Local TV station CBS8 sent a couple of reporters out to Convoy Street in Kearny Mesa to check on the new bike lanes the city just installed a couple of weeks ago.

What the station found was not pretty. The crew was there for 2 hours and witnessed a total of 5 bike riders in the bike lanes, including one on an ebike and another who jumped onto a sidewalk to ride.

They also found that the plastic barriers used were ineffectual – several already damaged — and that because the barriers prevented street sweepers able to clean the gutters, the bike lanes had trash, rubble and shopping carts clogging them.

A lot of OBceans know Matt Beatty. He was the librarian at the OB Library for years. Now Matt is in the news.

Matt is a resident of Mission Beach and goes for daily swims in the ocean off his home beach. But on Friday, September 20, he was attacked by a sea lion while swimming — and injured and had to be taken to a hospital for his wounds.

And he wasn’t the only person attacked by a sea lion. Jessica Linares was snorkeling with a friend earlier in the day, around noon on that same Friday when she too was attacked and had to go to the hospital.

Matt, 61, told ABC10News that he was halfway done with his daily ocean swim near the lifeguard station Friday night at Mision Beach when he felt more than just a tug on his leg.