Serving OB, the Peninsula and San Diego Beaches
by John Lawrence / San Diego Free Press
Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital was very good at making money for Mitt Romney.
At the same time, it loaded companies Bain bought with debt, borrowed even more money to pay dividends to Mitt Romney and destroyed or outsourced lots of jobs. It even raided pension funds. Then Romney turns around and holds himself up as a “successful businessman.”
Hey boys and girls! Here’s a bevy of progressive pundits – all pontificating:
Noam Chomsky: Shredding the Magna Carta
Down the road only a few generations, the millennium of Magna Carta, one of the great events in the establishment of civil and human rights, will arrive. Whether it will be celebrated, mourned, or ignored is not at all clear.
A couple of weeks ago the Northeast was in the grip of a severe heat wave. As I write this, however, it’s a fairly cool day in New Jersey, considering that it’s late July. Weather is like that; it fluctuates.
Something very interesting is happening. There’s been so much corruption on Wall Street in recent years, and the federal government has appeared to be so deeply complicit in many of the problems, that many people have experienced something very like despair over the question of what to do about it all.
By Conor Friedersdorf / The Atlantic / Jul 25, 2012
A collaborative investigation launched by law clinics at four top universities has assembled damning evidence of widespread misconduct.
An investigation undertaken by law clinics at NYU, Fordham, Harvard, and Stanford has concluded, after eight months of study, that the NYPD abused Occupy Wall Street protesters and violated their rights on numerous occasions during the 2011 protests that radiated out from Zuccotti Park. Their report, Suppressing Protest: Human Rights Violations in the U.S. Response to Occupy Wall Street, was released today. It focuses on transgressions against international law.
by Larry O’Brien
People have been riding wood in the surf since before historians had pens and paper. The age of hard and soft plastic surfcraft is barely sixty years old, but it’s far more common than wooden surfcraft.
Unfortunately it also means that these plastic beach toys are more common in our landfills, and litter our coves and sea caves.
The good news is that the old ways are still available to us. Riding wood in the surf has been gaining in popularity in recent years, and the internet has helped proliferate the enthusiasm around the globe.
This is Part 2 of my “brief” history of modern OB activism. Here’s Part 1. It is taken from a talk I gave at the Open House of the Green Store on July 14th.
The Eighties
The 1980s were a period of accommodation. Hippie businessmen and women emerged on the scene in OB and were accepted. The projects of the hippie radicals of the late Sixties and Seventies had all but faded away – many of the hippies remained however, buying homes in OB or Point Loma, getting married, and having careers and children. But the radical pioneers had paved the way for a new wave of hippies – it was the coming of age of the “hip-oisie”, a type of hip petite-bourgeoisie.
By Loverne Brown
I wait for a bus.
He comes up out of the shadows
to share the bench,
greets me with a broken-toothed smile.
He has the sad courtesy of the derelict
who remembers once being other than what he is,
the remote regard of one who no longer cares.
He drinks from a fragrant bottle, is himself fragrant
with all of the human smells.
His chariot arrives before mine. Two officers
relieve him of his bottle,
spill the red dreamstuff
into the gutter, rumple him into the car.
By Michael Moore / July 25, 2012
Since Cain went nuts and whacked Abel, there have always been those humans who, for one reason or another, go temporarily or permanently insane and commit unspeakable acts of violence. There was the Roman Emperor Tiberius, who during the first century A.D. enjoyed throwing victims off a cliff on the Mediterranean island of Capri. Gilles de Rais, a French knight and ally of Joan of Arc during the middle ages, went cuckoo-for-Cocoa Puffs one day and ended up murdering hundreds of children. Just a few decades later Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Dracula, was killing people in Transylvania in numberless horrifying ways.
In modern times, nearly every nation has had a psychopath or two commit a mass murder, regardless of how strict their gun laws are – the crazed white supremacist in Norway one year ago Sunday, the schoolyard butcher in Dunblane, Scotland, the École Polytechnique killer in Montreal, the mass murderer in Erfurt, Germany … the list seems endless.
And now the Aurora shooter last Friday. There have always been insane people, and there always will be.
The following is based on a talk I gave at the Green Store’s Open House on Saturday, July 14th.
This is an outline of the history – the modern history – of OB grassroots activism – which began in the late Sixties with the development and growth of the hippie sub-culture, the counter-culture.
By 1967, Ocean Beach had become the Haight-Ashbury of San Diego. OB was the San Diego equivalent of that fabled and iconic San Francisco neighborhood that had become synonymous with “hippie-ism”. If you were a hippie or a hippie-wannabe during this time somewhere in San Diego, you ended up in OB.
Of course, other factors contributed to the incubation in Ocean Beach of a community sympathetic and supportive of the new emerging counter-counter: before there were long-haired hippies in OB, there were long-haired surfers – as this community had been a center of surf-culture for years by time OB had morphed into a hippie haven.
July 1970: construction begins on the jetty at north beach in OB.Editor: We originally posted this article about the movement to stop the jetty that the City of San Diego and the Army Corps of Engineers had designed for north OB as part of our series on the early history of the original OB Rag in November 2007. We re-post it now for its historic significance.
There was definitely turmoil in OB the summer of 1970. For a number of weeks during those hot days, OB residents used a combination of direct action and legal moves to battle efforts by the Army Corps of Engineers and the City to construct a jetty parallel to the southern edge of the San Diego River channel — next to what is now Dog Beach.
Many locals viewed the jetty as a prelude to an attempt by the City and developer interests to create a marina and resort district at Ocean Beach’s waterfront.
by Dave Patterson
I think the Boy Scouts just set in place the demise of the organization. I say that because the BSA (Boy Scouts of America) just declared that gays are officially not welcome, and I know that some scout leaders and or parents will take it upon themselves to make sure that “Morally Straight” means no gays in attendance.
The official Boy Scout policy, as I understand it, states that the BSA does not proactively inquire about the sexual orientation of employees, volunteers or members.
For the remainder of this article, please go to San Diego Free Press.
by Frances O’Neill Zimmerman
At 8:30 p.m. yesterday, July 18, a lot of people milled around the illuminated American flag on the eastern side of the small federally-owned Mount Soledad Veterans Memorial in La Jolla, as City Parks and Recreation Department tested a new idea to keep Old Glory flying 24/7 up there year-round.
Members of the La Jolla Parks and Beaches advisory committee had been notified to witness this run-through. I too was invited at mid-afternoon yesterday, as I was one of several who testified at that group’s last meeting against electrification and in favor of keeping the greater Mount Soledad Natural Park a dark park for viewing the night sky and the spectacular 360-degree panorama of the city below. Parks and Beaches chairman Patrick Ahern put off voting on this matter in both May and June, though it was heatedly discussed.
For the remainder of this article, please go to San Diego Free Press.
The San Diego Unified School District is selling off seven properties in order to stay afloat – including the campuses of Barnard Elementary and Mission Beach Elementary schools.
Barnard is located at 2930 Barnard Street, a block from West Point Loma Avenue in the Midway area. The 9.37 acre parcel is in the “coastal zone” and is on the chopping block for a minimum bid of $9.14 million. Originally opened during World War II for Navy children, the elementary school was acquired by the District after the war.
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