Category: Popular

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 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.

Editor: This is a commentary sent to us by OBcean Richard Grosch who wrote it in conjunction with labor activist Peter Zschiesche and was published in the July 18th OpEd pages of the U-T San Diego. Grosch is president of the San Diego Community College District board of trustees, and Zschiesche is the executive vice president of the board.

By Richard Grosch & Peter Zschiesche / U-T San Diego / Originally published July 18, 2012

California has a higher education crisis. The University of California (UC), the California State University System (CSU) and the California Community College system have all been hit with deep reductions in state funding for students’ education in the face of unprecedented need for job training, college degree preparation and re-careering.

Regulators Cover for Edison: “No One at Fault”

The announcement on July 19th by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) stating that Southern California Edison (SCE) – the owner of the San Onofre Nuclear Power station – had complied will all regulations is yet another dangerous case of regulators looking the other way coupled with gutted unsafe regulations, according to local anti-nuke activist groups. The groups include Residents Organized for a Safe Environment (ROSE), Citizens’ Oversight, and the Peace Resource Center of San Diego.

Listen to the activists:

Carol Jahnkow of the Peace Resource Center of San Diego:

“It’s a very sad commentary when regulatory agencies will allow transgressions to occur and will not speak out about them, to avoid scrutiny themselves.”

My time here is rapidly drawing to a close. Thank God. Don’t get me wrong, the people are nice, the money’s been good, and at 65, hell, it’s just good to work at all. I hope I’ve stayed long enough, but even if I haven’t, I gotta get out of here.

Why do I need to leave?

More than any other reason it is because I’m starting to lose my patience. Things I could shrug off before are becoming too tiresome to let go by. I’m starting to tell administrators things they’re not interested in hearing. In class, I started straying further and further off the prescribed and only acceptable path. My ability to pretend I’m happy as a clam in company and school meetings is deteriorating. I’m just too tired of the bullshit.

By A feleségül

Here’s the scenario:

Horny person; No lover; Playboy or Playgirl magazines; Sex talk on line; Porn available on paid television; Libido going wild.

What’s a nice person to do? (Or…what’s a “not- so-nice” person to do?) What is acceptable in today’s society? How does one relieve the tensions building up in the body? What “aids” are available for the average person? How would you feel if you went into an adult store and saw your neighbor there? Would it matter if your neighbor was a woman or a man? Would you be embarrassed?

Wall Street got bailed out. Cities got sold out. Federal policies keeping interest rates low are resulting in extracting wealth from cities and transferring it to Wall Street.

by John Lawrence

We blogged earlier about how traders from JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs descended on European cities such as Casino, Italy and even nunneries selling them interest rate swaps. Interest rate swaps were also responsible for bankrupting Jefferson County, the county seat of Birmingham, Alabama. Now the same big banks are bankrupting California cities. Stockton, San Bernadino and Mammoth Lakes have already gone down. Oakland is fighting Goldman for its very life.

But what does this have to do with the LIBOR scandal, you say? A lot, it turns out. LIBOR stands for the London Interbank Offered Rate, a benchmark that most other interest rates are tied to including interest rate swaps, the very derivative financial instruments that are now bankrupting California cities.

By Marjorie Cohn

The issue of immigration has been tossed about like a political football for some time. Democrats argue that migrants who have spent many years in the United States should be permitted to apply for lawful status. Republicans criticize these proposals as “amnesty.” But Congress has been unable to agree on comprehensive immigration reform.

Three and one-half years into his term, President Obama announced on June 15 a policy to halt deportations for many undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children. They must be under age 30, have come to the United States when they were under age 16, have lived in the U.S. for at least five years, be either an honorably discharged veteran or a high school graduate, and have suffered no felony or “significant” misdemeanor convictions.

Ten days after Obama revealed his new program, the Supreme Court issued its long-awaited decision on Arizona’s SB 1070. Arizona had enacted a repressive law aimed at “attrition [of undocumented immigrants] through enforcement.” Five other states followed suit and waited as the high court considered the constitutionality of Arizona’s law.

Here’s a Youtube video about Ocean Beach in the surfin mid-Sixties to the rowdy late Sixties. The artist is Trouble 6.

Come on inside to let us know your fave scene or other minutia of our OB history.

From San Diego Free Press

For those of an apocalyptic bent, the beginning of the final half of 2012 was near perfect.

True, the walls didn’t all come tumbling down, though those retaining the spent nuclear fuel pool atop Fukushima Unit 4 were bulging. But the signs seemed to be everywhere, from the eastern shores of Japan to the west coast of California.

The most widely reported such event was the July 1 restart of a Japanese commercial nuclear power reactor at the Ohi nuclear plant. Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda pushed for this restart, despite a massive protest in front of his office in Tokyo only days before. Digital Journal reported that 200,000 protested there on June 29

After going to the beach during the summer in OB for fifty years, I have never seen such a dramatic display of dolphin drama as a pod demonstrated yesterday – July 10th – just beyond the breaker line in South OB.

I was sitting with two friends waiting for the wind to die down, for the waves to get less choppy, and for the conditions in general to get better. We were sitting next to a firepit just north of Tower Two when all of a sudden my friends yelled out. What?

Dolphins jumping! Right there – right beyond the breakers!

Well, kiddies, looks like the Starbucks in OB has closed and moved on. There’s a sign in one of the windows that announces that OB Kabob will be moving into the storefront at the corner of Newport Avenue and Bacon Street.

Nope. Not yet. Sorry. It’s Seth’s Chop Shop that is being remodeled and will be the site of the new OB Kabob.