Category: Popular

Report from Meeting on Monday Night – October 8th – at Tower Two

By Celeste
Around 30 or so people crowded in the Tower Two Café on Monday’s meeting on creating the OB Citizens Patrol. Tim Nolan, owner of the cafe, had recommended that people who sign up for patrols carry a flashlight. He also suggested having a siren to scare people away. He reinstated several times that the patrol is set up to PREVENT not to PROVOKE and anyone “misbehaving” would be asked to leave the patrol group.

He also suggested that the patrols take place on Friday and Saturday nights in two 3 hours shifts. The first shift would begin at 9pm-midnight, and then midnight-3 am. He would like to have 3 or more people in a patrol group, patrolling a 2 block square (depending on how many people show up). The area that would be patrolled would be Newport Ave to West Point Loma Blvd, and Cable Street to the beaches.

By Ronnie Cummins / Alternet / Oct. 4, 2012
Is it possible that Whole Foods wants to ride the GMO labeling popularity wave while it quietly works behind the scenes to prevent Prop 37, or any other GMO labeling law, from passing?

After months of pressure from the organic community, including thousands of its customers, the leadership of Whole Foods Market on September 11 endorsed Proposition 37, the California Ballot Initiative to require mandatory labels on genetically engineered foods. But the endorsement came with “reservations” and inaccuracies. It also included the false claim that company policy precludes Whole Foods and its executives from providing much-needed financial support to Prop 37, a campaign that consumers – the very people who have made WFM and its executives wildly profitable – overwhelmingly support.

During the recent meeting at the OB Woman’s Club over concerns about the sexual assaults, I was surprised by the “anti-police” attitudes by many attendees, having lived in OB for a number of years with no major complaints.

That is, until the other night.

Perhaps SDPD resents the proposed Citizens Watch or are under pressure for not publicizing the recent sex crimes, and are responding aggressively to allegations of insufficient patrol units. But, what happened to me was uncalled for . . .

I rode my bike to Apple Tree Market, was unknowingly “red lighted” for a block and detained in the parking lot by two cops. I saw the flashing lights and thought they were responding to a crime at the grocery store, until they walked in my direction.

Have you missed Judi Curry’s bloggings? We have.

Judi writes the Widder Curry column and often does restaurant reviews and other musings of life here in OB and on the Peninsula. Yet she has not been filing any columns of late.

And there is a darn good reason why she’s not writing these days – she just had surgery on her left hand and is left typing with only one hand for a while.

By Kenny Goldberg / KPBS / October 1, 2012

Medical marijuana has been legal in California since 1996. But today in San Diego County, many patients are having trouble getting their hands on the drug. That’s because all of the openly operating storefronts that sell marijuana have been shut down.

In response, activists in four local cities have placed measures to authorize medical marijuana dispensaries on the November ballot. But even if the measures win, patients might ultimately lose.

Vey Linville has severe emphysema. He needs bottled oxygen to survive. When Linville was first diagnosed, doctors told him without a double lung transplant, he’d soon be dead. Linville got his affairs in order.

There was barely a seat available at last night’s meeting called by the OB Woman’s Club to discuss the recent sexual assaults in Ocean Beach. Nearly 50 people – over a quarter of them men – crowded into the building at the corner of Muir and Bacon – just yards from a violent sexual assault that took place during the wee hours of August 25th.

Becky Sorensen, vice-president of the club, opened the meeting and welcomed everyone. The meeting had been set up out of frustrations, apparently, at the weak response women had received when they brought up their concerns about the assaults and peeping tom at the OB Town Council meeting recently. A number of individuals approached the leadership of the Woman’s Club that night out in front of the Masonic Hall after the Town Council and asked if a meeting could be held there. Becky and Celeste McClure jumped into the task and printed up a flier and began distributing them around town.

A recent poll of Southern California residents found that most of them want to keep the troubled San Onofre nuclear power plant shut down . The poll also found that the residents don’t trust its majority owner and operator, Southern California Edison, to keep safety as its first priority at the nuke plant.

” A strong majority of Edison customers want to keep San Onofre shut down and almost half don’t trust Edison to put safety before profit,” environmental group Friends of the Earth reported on October 1.

Friends of the Earth (foe.org) commissioned David Binder Research to carry out the poll. The company talked to 700 registered voters in the counties San Onofre provides electricity to.

The results: “58% of respondents said they oppose reopening the plant…Only 32% said San Onofe should reopen,” Friends of the Earth reported.

By Elizabeth Batt / Digital Journal / October 1, 2012

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), says it is planning to protest outside of SeaWorld San Diego on Wednesday, following an horrific injury to one of the marine park’s killer whales.

PETA who has already called on the U.S. Department of Agriculture (APHIS) to launch an investigation into the gruesome injury received by Nakai on Sept. 20, says it is now planning a protest Wednesday to urge the federal government to take action against the marine park.

Nakai, an 11-year-old orca at SeaWorld San Diego, had his lower jaw sheared off to the bone with an injury so severe said Washington DC-based writer Tim Zimmermann, that the detached piece “Was big enough and intact enough for SeaWorld to retrieve it from the bottom of the pool.”

Question is raised – is this our ‘Trayvon Martin’?

Nearly two hundred people attended the vigil for Valeria “Munique” Tachiquin Alvarado in Chula Vista Monday early evening. Family, friends, supporters and strangers – and the media – gathered at the intersection of Moss Street and Oaklawn Avenue – where she was shot to death by a plainclothes border patrol agent on Friday afternoon, September 28th, while in her car.

The 32 year old mother of 5 had been fatally killed during some kind of interaction with the agent. Reports of what happened differed wildly. And during the at times emotional vigil family members, including the young woman’s father, called for answers and justice.

Speaking first, Christian Ramirez of the American Friends Service Committee spoke about the evening being a sober one. He said the community vigil “was called by the family to remember her life and bear testimony to the tragedy that occurred 72 hours ago. They demand justice.”

By Suevon Lee / ProPublica / (Originally published Sept. 27, 2012)

As November 6 approaches, the efforts of True the Vote, a Texas anti-voter fraud group recently profiled by the New York Times, are gaining national attention.

Despite scant evidence of voter fraud, the group is laser-focused on weeding it out. It has pushed for voter-ID laws, voter roll purges and other controversial voting-related measures in a host of states. (Here is our guide to the voter ID controversy, where we note that evidence on both sides of the issue is lacking.)

Great white sharks back in north coast “Red Triangle”

By Peter Fimrite / SFGate / September 22, 2012

Scientists are all but running giddily into the surf with fancy new gadgetry as the annual migration of great white sharks hits full swing along the Pacific coast and reports flood in about finned beasts lurking in shallow waters.

Hope on my mind

Hope comes easy for me. It can rise from the words in a kindergarten girl’s poem where everybody lives happily forever and ever, or it could come out of the energy of thousands of San Diegans standing in the middle of Broadway singing “Give Peace a Chance.”

I didn’t realize, though, how hopeful a human being I am until I found myself one day holding out hope that the San Diego Union-Tribune, a rag that, on good days, over the years, has made me gag, could change and become a factor in helping San Diego become all it can be.

I didn’t see this hopeful moment coming. I was leaving the Union-Tribune Building one day when it dawned on me that I had a smile on my face. And that had never been the case when I look back on all the times I’ve walked away from the place.