OB Rag

By South OB Girl

It will be a challenge to come up with something more poignant than Ernie’s poem, with his great knack for words and rhyme.

I’ve lived in a few places in the world, but San Diego will always be home. It has sadly become a little harder to say “home sweet home.”  It is not so sweet here anymore.  Being ranked #1 in the United States for inflation is nothing to be proud of.

San Diego has the potential to be a really great city. For many years it has been great.

Here in OB, we have enjoyed over a hundred years of greatness! Why are so many people doing such a great job trying to wreck it? Along with many other San Diegans, I have lost positivity about many aspects of local politics.

Trump bombs Venezuelan land for first time: Is war imminent?

By Usaid Siddiqui / AlJaseera / Tue, December 30, 2025

United States President Donald Trump said the US carried out a land-based strike on Venezuela on Monday, marking a sharp escalation in Washington’s recent military activity against the South American nation.

Trump said the operation had targeted a docking facility being used to load boats carrying narcotics. Venezuelan authorities, however, have yet to confirm the incident.

Tensions between Washington and Caracas have risen sharply since September, when the Trump administration began a series of strikes on Venezuelan vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, which the US government claims are trafficking drugs.

However, despite aerial strikes on more than two dozen boats, which have killed at least 100 people, the US has presented no evidence of drug trafficking.

More recently, US forces have seized Venezuelan oil tankers, which it claims are carrying sanctioned oil and ordered a naval blockade on all sanctioned oil tankers near the coast.

Caracas has long accused Washington of using allegations of drug trafficking as a pretext for forcing regime change in Venezuela, raising renewed concerns about the legality of such actions and the risk of a broader conflict. Indeed, legal experts say the targeting of vessels in international waters likely violates US and international law and amounts to extrajudicial executions.

By Angelo Haynes

Charles Beard, a local man with deep ancestral roots to San Diego, has begun construction of a residential micro farm in southeast San Diego.

Totaling under half an acre, the farm area is nestled in the Jamacha foothills near Encanto, Skyline Hills and Lemon Grove contributing to the steep incline on the property. The farm currently has a variety of fruit trees including a pomegranate, apricot, mulberry, guava and loquat. Future plans include dividing the hill into unique terraces, each containing unique groups of crops. Construction on an irrigation system is already underway, with future plans of integrating a grey water filtration system.

Charles, or “Sibee” as his friends call him, had the idea for creating the micro farm after having a vision while standing on the top of the hill behind his childhood home.

Note: Author’s views do not necessarily reflect the views of the OB Rag.

By Lisa Mortensen

Our city and county governments are looking for any avenue available to obtain revenue to feed their over-sized staffing.  Rather than pop the staffing balloon, our elected officials would like to tap into our property taxes by placing initiatives on the ballot that would require only a 51% threshold to approve these measures into law that would threaten to uncontrollably increase our property taxes and jeopardize our Prop 13 protections.

Currently the county of San Diego wants to place a measure on the ballot that would increase the real estate sales transfer tax from 55 cents for every $500 in assessed property value to $30.55 for every $500.  This would basically burden both buyers and sellers to have to come up with this excessive additional transfer tax during a for-purchase transaction.

Let’s not forget the trash tax assessment that was placed on our property tax bill ($539 and rising in 2026-2027 tax bill) by just a 51% threshold.

By Kate Callen

The year 2025 hit San Diego with a double dose of political wreckage.

Along with the rest of the country, we watched a president take a sledgehammer to democracy. Here at home, we saw a mayor extort taxpayers to replenish a treasury he looted.

Donald Trump and Todd Gloria began their second terms with the same playbook: They would use their executive powers to do whatever they damn well pleased.

This is called “tyranny,” and it’s the subject of a book that a wise friend gave me in 2025 to raise my hopes for 2026.

Tyrants have been with us since cave people learned to conquer one another. Sooner or later, they all topple. But the wait can be agonizing. Are there steps we can take to speed things up?

By Geoff Page

2025

The Rag’s editor-in-chief challenged Rag writers to provide “thoughts on the passing of 2025 and what the future portends.” That’s a big Magilla because it was a year like none other in my three-quarters of a century.

I’m not a pessimist or an optimist, some of both. But, this year, it was nearly impossible to have any sense of optimism. However, two important, positive things happened this year in my personal world. My little girl got married and a dog bit me.

By “little girl,” I mean my 32-year-old child who is beginning her seventh year in the legal profession. I did the big walk down the aisle and it was more emotional than I had imagined. It was a great experience, seeing her so happy. I’m not a fan of the institution of marriage, as a rule, but that day was an exception.

After a long professional career as a construction claims expert, I had managed to avoid ever owning – or wearing – a suit. I wore one that day and it felt right. I have a new son-in-law now that we all like and is a perfect fit for my girl.

Much as I love my girl, I will say I don’t envy parents who have to go through weddings for multiple daughters. There is this level of stress…

The dog bite was not pleasant when it occurred.

Here’s a bunch of seemingly unrelated articles that have been sitting in my “in-basket” for a while — some for months. Yet, they deserve attention –so here they are:

It was supposed to be a California utopia. It turned into a ghost town.

By Tessa McLean, California Editor – SFGate / June 17, 2024

Just off the Pearblossom Highway, 75 miles northeast of Los Angeles, six crumbling stone columns rise from patches of dusty brown weeds. Two of the wider set pillars contain capacious brick fireplaces, the blocks deteriorating inside. The foundation of a once-grand building stretches out into the flat plain, carpeted with shards of glass and rusty beer cans. At its northern end, a short staircase leads to nowhere.

From 1914 to 1918, an actual building stood here — a bustling gathering place for California’s most important utopian commune-turned-doomed desert experiment. When wandering the site today, close your eyes and you might be able to imagine happy residents dancing or talking politics on a cool California desert evening, the snow-capped San Gabriel Mountains in the distance.

The remains of a grand hotel and social hall are the only recognizable infrastructure left of the failed town, which is visible even from the highway — if you don’t blink. The foundations of other nearby buildings sink into the ground, faded blue and purple graffiti covering the splintering stone, the lettering disappearing into low concrete walls. From the middle of the ruins, trailers and warehouse structures under the power lines jolt you back to the modern day from any dreams of early 1900s life.

Here is a screen recording of a 60 Minutes segment about the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) prison in El Salvador, which was intended to be aired December 22, 2025 but was pulled last minute for unclear reasons. Despite being pulled, it aired on Global-TV in Canada anyway.

It was pulled due to corporate censorship.

Here is an analysis by Salon – Reader Supported News

CBS News segment yanked off the air at the last minute by editor-in-chief Bari Weiss was apparently showcased in Canada, with its content quickly spreading online.

The “60 Minutes” story, “Inside CECOT,” featured testimonies from Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration from the U.S. to CECOT, a notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador. Weiss canned the segment on Sunday, just three hours before it was set to air, saying it “wasn’t ready” to be presented.

Edited From JP Theberge

Following the October 2025 approval of the Harmony Grove Village South (HGVS) project by the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, a number of groups filed a lawsuit challenging the County’s decision, citing serious wildfire safety risks and violations of state and local law. These groups include the Elfin Forest / Harmony Grove Town Council and the Endangered Habitats League.

The approved project would allow more than 450 homes to be built in a designated Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, relying on a single dead-end road as the only evacuation route. That road far exceeds current fire safety limits, and the project was approved without secondary access that is required to protect residents and first responders during a wildfire.

The Town Council represents residents of the largely rural, fire-prone Harmony Grove and Elfin Forest communities near Escondido. Endangered Habitats League is a statewide environmental organization that opposes unsafe, fire-prone sprawl development.

Wild weather caused a tree to fall on a house in Ocean Beach. No one was injured, but the person inside had to exit through a skylight due to the doors being jammed by the fallen tree. The house at 4720 Narragansett was red tagged until the tree is removed. Bad luck on a Christmas Eve.

Check out Ed Baier’s video.

by Ernie McCray

2025.
A year in which I often
watched, in disbelief and grief,
as a president who, between
cheating at golf
and decorating
the White House with gawdy appearing gold leaf,
constantly and relentlessly
stood before a mic
spewing
disgraceful overly racialized
cockeyed jive
in braggadocious tones
about the crackdowns,
featuring ridding the country of dark-skinned immigrants,
he had going on
on our borders
and in our cities and towns,

By Joni Halpern

It is often said by holiday revelers that they are exhausted by the holiday season. Too much pressure to meet expectations. At the close of the season, those who participate in the festivities are ready to seek rest and distance from others. Those who spend the holidays alone await the return of the everyday hum of relationships among colleagues, neighbors, and acquaintances who might have been away spending time with loved ones.

In either case, people seem spent emotionally and financially by the holidays. They are relieved when the Holiday Spirit retreats into its lair like the octopus off the island of Maui who I heard escaped the commotion and expense of energy from too many visitors by sliding into a Coke bottle on the ocean bottom, reaching out one last tentacle to slap sand over the bottle and align small rocks to cover the opening. Like that octopus, the Holiday Spirit can almost be heard breathing a watery sigh of relief as it settles back for another nine months until the merchandising gods dig it up and force it to overtaxed prominence.

In America, it is at least substantially true that the Holiday Spirit involves a full-court press to convince us that those to whom we desire to show love or friendship, respect or neighborliness, connection or concern can only become aware of this message by conveyance of some material object, preferably purchased, sometimes homemade, and only rarely labeled “fruitcake.”