OB Rag

By Steven Newcomb

Early this year, 2015, the Maritime Museum of San Diego is scheduled to launch a replica of the colonizing Spanish ship called “San Salvador” (“Holy Savior”). That was the ship which Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, in 1542, sailed into the Kumeyaay bay of the Kumeyaay Nation’s territory. As a result of that voyage, the society of the United States now typically calls that bay, and the city adjacent to it, by the Catholic name, “San Diego” (“Saint Diego”).

Cabrillo sailed up the Baja peninsula under a royal commission that the Spanish crown had granted to a vicious and deadly psychopath, a conquistador named Pedro Alvarado. The royal commission authorized Alvarado “to discover and conquer” places he was able to reach by sailing northward along the Baja peninsula. When Alvarado was killed in Guatemala, the Spanish viceroy charged Cabrillo with sailing north on the basis of that royal commission.

It is now clear, at least from a technical perspective, that we could eliminate fossil fuels over a period of 20 to 40 years. That’s if we went full steam ahead without being blocked by fossil fuel corporations, the politicians beholden to them and various other vested interests who stand to profit from the status quo.

In 2009 Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University and Mark Delucchi, a research scientist at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, came up with a detailed, groundbreaking road map for just how this could be accomplished.

In international news, the recent liberation of the Syrian city of Kobani from the control of Islamic State (ISIS) fighters by Syrian Kurd rebels was a little reported story which popped up briefly for its 15 minutes on the mainstream media roulette wheel of fame. Then it disappeared. But the under-reported little story – a story with a huge irony – deserves retelling.

The story – which can be pieced together from a number of media reports – involves the identity of the major fighting force that kicked ISIS out of Kobani, a city of 200,000 mainly ethnic Kurds in north Syria, a stone’s throw from the Turkish border.

It turns out it was a group of Syrian Kurd leftists who kicked ISIS’ ass, if you forgive the vernacular, after 4 months of intense house-to-house fighting, at times room-to-room, and pushed them out of the city entirely. It was the People’s Protection Units, a local leftist organization, and its affiliate, the Women’s Protection Units, that have collective command structures and believe in the equality of women, and – in fact – have numerous women commanders in the fighting units. (These are new wave Sixties leftists, not from the old school like China, Russia, North Korea.)

OB CDC Votes to End Its Involvement With OB Entryway Project

by Lois Lane

The OB Community Development Corporation (CDC) meets on the second Thursday of the month at 7:00 in the OB Rec Center, and February 12 was no different.

The Future Veterans’ Plaza

The primary focus of this meeting was the Veteran’s Plaza. This project was originally funded by the City of San Diego with $76,000 in 2014, but this money was de-allocated and the entire project must be funded with donations. No funds were included in the 2015 city budget.

After owning it for 28 years, the unidentified owner of the large apartment complex in the heart of Ocean Beach has decided to put the 22-unit complex up for sale. The apartments are prominently located at the corner of Bacon Street and Cape May Avenue, at 2051-59 Bacon Street. It’s on the market for a mere $4,199,000.

It’s an “old-school” 2-story type of apartment complex, as it’s been around for decades, and was always known as one of the inexpensive rental apartment buildings in that neck of the woods in OB.

By Kim McGinley

Friday, February 6th at 11:30 p.m. San Diego Activists, including representatives from The Ocean Beach Green Center, began gathering at the Old Town trolley station to hop on board a charter bus heading to California Governor Brown’s neighborhood in Oakland.

The goal was to encourage the Governor to be a “climate leader” …

...the insistence on what one might call “San Diego exceptionalism,” the notion that our city is somehow free of the same troubled history as the rest of the country, is at the heart of our city’s failure to truly serve the needs of all San Diegans.

By Jim Miller

Last week, the San Diego Free Press – [the online media partner of the OB Rag] posted a story about a new report released by the Equal Justice Institute (EJI) that notes how:

“Capital punishment and ongoing racial injustice in the United States are ‘direct descendants’ of lynching, charges a new study, which found that the pre-World War II practice of ‘racial terrorism’ has had a much more profound impact on race relations in America than previously acknowledged.”

This hidden history of racial terrorism in America is far more influential than many of us would prefer to acknowledge.

NEW UPDATE: Witness: Marudas out and back home by 1:30 pm

A neighbor of Jimmy Maroutes Marudas has reported that he saw Marudas out of police custody and back at his home in Ocean Beach by 1:30 pm. No more details are available, other than to say this neighbor saw Jimmy “cleaning up his garage and side walk area”.

UPDATE: See below

OCEAN BEACH – In a breaking news development, a well-known Ocean Beach local has just been arrested for the stabbing of a woman in Point Loma on Saturday.

Jimmy Marudas Maroutes, who has lived on Voltaire Street for decades, was taken away by San Diego police this morning, Sunday, Feb. 15, at approximately 10 a.m.

We spoke to Marudas’ conservator, Dan Zolezzi, by phone, and he told the OB Rag that he believed that Marudas, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, was arrested by police for the stabbing.

From CIS- OB – Sunday Sunset

Every Sunday locals meet up for a trash clean up. After most weekends, there have been extra guests in town and additional trash left behind. Sunday at 4:40pm – 5:30pm

The objectives are:

• 1) Making a consistent group effort to clean up our town
• 2) Catching an awesome sunset that you wish you got out to enjoy more often

The time of the event will be a little different each week so that we can start about 45 minutes before the sunsets.

We will meet up each week at the pier entrance at the end of Niagara Ave.

In May 1976 the OB Community Planning Group Won a Majority on the First OB Planning Board

In early May of 1976, OB’s very first election was held for the very first planning board. The forerunner of today’s Board, the OB Community Planning Group, ran a slate of candidates, hammered out an election platform and published and distributed its 8 page campaign brochure. The group won 8 of the 14 seats in the election.

We decided to republish their campaign literature, beginning here with the text of the election brochure. The platform and candidate statements of this election that occurred 39 years ago will follow.

And by the way, the current Ocean Beach Planning Board is holding their annual election on March 10th. Half of the seats are up for election. The Peninsula Community Planning Board is also having their election on March 20th.

By Luis Villanueva Rodríguez / Draft NOtices

For many, the September [kidnappings and] killings of … 43 students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in the Méxican state of Guerrero has been profoundly painful and tragic. My feelings of outrage and despair are also deep because I was educated in one of Ayotzinapa’s sister schools.

What many do not realize is that this crime was perpetrated by the Méxican government against students who had important social justice concerns and who were soon to become activist teachers. These rural teachers’ colleges are known for their progressive beliefs.

Originally posted on Feb. 12, 2015

Ye Ol’ OB Hippie Writes –

This is my almost weekly rant, man, so don’t be a square, gimme some slack, jack, grab some space and chill.

This is another rap session of “OB Time”.

Just Be-Ing

OB Time? You don’t know what that means? OB Time is more than the “hourly pause that refreshes” due to our overhead friendly skies. It means that OBceans are not bothered by any exact minute or hour. It’s why OB’s Holiday Parade begins at 5 minutes past 5pm and not 5 sharp.

Time is relative, and at times irrelevant. OB Time means we don’t get bothered by the mainstream and establishment requirements of temporal exactness. Nobody cared about the concept of “minutes” until capitalism came into being. Being anxious about minutes takes you away from just “being” – as in “be-ing” – existing for the moment.