On Sunday, Dec. 9, the San Diego Free Press held its second contributor meet-and-greet at the home of Patty Jones and Frank Gormlie in Lemon Grove. Approximately 10 contributors attended for a pleasant afternoon of introductions, brainstorming and food (because the former isn’t impossible without the latter).
Come inside for all the photos! [Read more…]
By Kit-Bacon Gressitt
Perhaps you hate President Obama
Because he won re-election
Because he’s a Democrat
Because he’s Black
Because he supports same-sex marriage
Because he organized to fight prejudice
Because he lived in Chicago
Because he initiated heathcare reform
Because he sometimes compromises
Because he sometimes doesn’t [Read more…]
The plan for the day had been to finally get the Christmas decorations up and address cards. I turned on the news to get my daily laugh from the cirque de D.C. and see how much closer we were coming the fiscal cliff. I wish I had not. The news was so just awful, again, I wept. Twenty-six souls lost, 20 of them only 6 and 7 years old. In an instant, another mad man took away so many dreams, so much joy, and so much love.
According to reports, the 20-year-old murderer took his own life, so we will never get the chance to ask him why or how he became so full of evil. Even if we were able to, it would not stop the carnage which all too often frequents the innocent, here and abroad. It will not stop, because we either do not care enough, or we must ghoulishly enjoy it enough to not do anything about.
It was in January, 1979, I recall the first school shooting, at least the one which caught everyone’s attention. And it was here in San Diego. After barricading her house across the street from Cleveland Elementary School in San Carlos, 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer opened fire with a semi-automatic .22 caliber rifle, killing the principal, the custodian and wounding eight children and police officer before she surrendered after a seven-hour standoff. Tried as an adult, she received a sentence of 25 years to life in prison. She has been denied parole four times, and it will be 2019 before she is eligible again. [Read more…]
An individual under the influence of LSD experiences mild cardiovascular stimulation and, of course, mild to severe hallucinations. Behavior exhibited by the user may fluctuate between catatonia and manic outbursts. To the inexperienced and unsuspecting, the hallucinations can range emotionally from pleasant to terrifying, consisting mainly of an altered perception of all the human senses. The individual’s environment also plays an important role in the “trip” experience as well.
As with many other legal and illegal substances, the human body tends to develop a tolerance and may require more to achieve the desired effect. And while the jury is still out on physical addiction, most professionals in the health care field agree that LSD can at least be psychologically addictive, leading to short or long term personality changes.
In other words, the effects of LSD remain unpredictable. [Read more…]
States, counties and cities are in a race to the bottom because they are giving away taxpayer dollars to provide incentives for corporations to locate withing their boundaries. There’s a fierce competition going on and corporations are playing one region off against another. Whichever one comes up with the largest package of cash grants and loans, sales tax breaks, income tax credits and exemptions, free services, and property tax abatements wins.
Corporations hire people whose job it is to get them the best package. Mayors and Governors desperate for jobs for their citizens are giving away the store with the consequence that schools, parks and police and fire services are underfunded. City employees are forced to take pay and pension cuts in order that corporations can report to shareholders that they got the best possible deal. [Read more…]
By Joshua Holland / AlterNet
The United States is not the only country to experience the horrors of mass shootings. We are, however, the only society in which a serious discussion of tighter gun controls doesn’t follow incidents like the massacres we’ve seen at a Connecticut elementary school on Friday. In fact, in most countries these kinds of tragedies result in some kind of concrete legislative action.
The reason we can’t have a sane, adult discussion of how to cut down on random gun violence is simple: the NRA has hoodwinked a lot of reasonable gun owners into believing that there’s a debate in this country over banning firearms altogether. We’ll never be able to have a serious discussion about how to cut down on gun violence until that group accepts the actual terms of the debate. And the NRA has a vested interest in making sure they remain obscure because the organization represents gun manufacturers and a small, highly ideological minority of gun-nuts, rather than (typically responsible) gun owners.
And that means that, at least in theory, there is political space for a new kind of gun control advocacy – one that isn’t about whether Americans have a right to bear arms, but instead explicitly advocates safe and responsible gun ownership, a goal the polls tell us most gun owners would embrace. [Read more…]
By Lynn Stuart Parramore / Alternet
The scene has replayed itself over and over — in Tucson, at Virginia Tech, at Columbine. On Friday in Connecticut, another unstable man has taken innocent lives in a burst of terrifying violence.
Inadequate gun control is only one half of the story. The other is the shameful job America does of treating the mentally ill. Today, 45 million American adults suffer from mental illness. Eleven million of those cases are considered serious. Most of these people are not dangerous, but if they can’t get treatment, the odds of potential violence increase. [Read more…]
If acclaimed authors Upton Sinclair (The Jungle), Jeremy Rifkin (Beyond Beef) and John Robbins (Diet for a New America) haven’t given you enough reasons over the last century to be wary of the meat industry, then a year-long investigation by the Kansas City Star may do the trick.
Mike McGraw kicks off the KC Star’s investigative series by introducing Margaret Lamkin, who has been forced to wear a colostomy bag for the rest of her life, after a medium-rare steak she ordered three years ago at Applebee’s was contaminated with a pathogen. The resulting illness destroyed her colon.
Of course we already know about E. coli and other food-borne pathogens; people have gotten sick from everything from spinach to peanut butter. But the news here is that what sickened Lamkin wasn’t just the meat, but a process the industry uses to tenderize it. [Read more…]
Growing up white in Arizona put you in touch with all kinds of guns — only your fingers and hands if you were the boss, your more vulnerable parts if you were not. Back then, white boys had the bb gun at the age of 6 or 7, a .22 rifle by the age of 11 or 12 and at 16 a 20-gauge shotgun for doves. Many of them knew something about clips and muzzle velocity and hollow point bullets before they’d even grown up.
I’m saying “white” because that, plus a bit of Mexican culture, is all I remember about Arizona at this point in my life, removed from that state and condition by at least 5 decades. In Phoenix, back then many, but not all, whites were — as Mitt Romney might put it — self-segregated. They chose to be cut off from the rest of the world, which made it possible to be white. You could have some large distortions in your thinking that were rewarded when you expressed them. And if they weren’t why, then, you had guns.
[Read more…]
By Frances O’Neill Zimmerman
Time for newly-re-elected President Obama and the lame Congress of the United States to enact an assault weapons ban and to provide safeguards against easy access to guns and ammo. The old assault weapons law was allowed to expire a couple of years ago, thanks to craven legislators succumbing to pressure from the National Rifle Association.
Here’s my personal random list of incidents of mass-murder perpetrated by
unstable people with access to our uniquely American weapons of mass destruction. [Read more…]
Open wide and swallow:
Guns don’t kill people- people (with guns) kill people
Mentally ill people (with guns) kill people
Careless stupid people (with guns) kill people
Unarmed people enable people (with guns) to kill people
There. That was easy [Read more…]
Today I’ll take a break from breathless headlines and poke my journalistic nose into the mythology bandied about by the Official Press in reference to boosting local economies. This is particularly relevant to San Diego, as we (hopefully) move away from a mode of development that sacrificed neighborhoods in favor of corporate edifices downtown. Of course, we still have stuff in the pipeline and the ‘must have’ stadium scheme being promoted in Lynchesterland…
Three articles on related topics have come to my attention this week that I’d like to share: two debunk the idea that “incentives” given by government to companies are beneficial to local economies; the other pulls back the curtain on the “sports welfare” system in this country.
Here’s the deal: your tax dollars are supporting a system of kickbacks and enticements for corporations and individuals based on empty promises of employment opportunities and economic growth. Thus the rich get richer while the rest us pay more taxes. [Read more…]
