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Eve on the Move

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The rising Feminine has something to offer our old fashioned religions

By Dr. Carol Carnes

The great American Man of Letters, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “be an opener of doors for such as come after thee and do not try to make the universe a blind alley.”

I interpret this to mean, contribute to the overall wisdom of the world. Do not perpetuate superstition and dogma. Challenge the isms that limit our experience of the greater good. Share your ideas with the young. Teach them to think critically. Show the power of Love by your own actions.

None of us lives in a private reality to the exclusion of the collective. We can go along with the tribes’ beliefs or we can be part of raising our shared version of reality. Those who speak out to challenge ideas that belonged in ancient times but do not serve us today, are making a great impression on the whole.   [Read more…]

The Old Hippie Gets a Medical Marijuana Card

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The Ol’ OB Hippie Writes / The OB Rag

I’m finally going legal after 50 years – or at least almost 50 years. I started smoking pot when I was a freshman in college. And I still smoke – but the other day, I went legal and obtained my medical marijuana card, and now I can smoke legally for the first time in a half century. And god I need it – for all my genuine ailments, from chronic back pain to insomnia to other problems whose symptoms are relieved by the inhalation of the medicinal gift from nature.

Actually my very first joint was during my first year’s Christmas break – I was going to college on the East Coast and had flown home for the 2 week break. Pot smoking literally exploded here in OB and Point Loma in 1966-67. It blew up in OB. And of course, PLHS was called “Pot Loma” after that large bust behind the church – I think – in 1968. Plus we all thought it would be legal by 1976. Seriously.   [Read more…]

Can Eve Get Elected?

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We do not need a gun-toting warrior with a vagina

By Dr. Carol Carnes 

You may know her as Hillary or Carly or Elizabeth but her real name is Eve. All women carry that label in the subjective realm of our collective unconscious.

The allegorical tale of Adam and Eve has been misinterpreted, misunderstood and accepted as an irrefutable condemnation of the Feminine, which has resulted in the subjugation of women in almost every culture on earth. The rights of women were not included in the founding documents of America because we were considered creatures, not full humans.

Eve represents the bitch, the temptress, the siren that caused the Fall of Man (men). She listens to the serpent (the devil). She makes it impossible for men to control their impulses. Therefore, at the risk of oversimplification, she is the cause of her own rape. Some cultures will stone her to death for it while in the west she is humiliated, not believed and portrayed as a whore or a careless twit.
  [Read more…]

Brown unLike Me

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By Emmanuel Ortiz

In Venezuela I watched
As the people of the nation
Stood at the plate
Swung out
In defense of their president,
Who won a democratic referendum
By a majority of the majority
(Unlike our own president that same year).
In defense of Chávez,
Millions of hands upon a single bat
Swing for the fences,
Un jonrón over the wall of the White House lawn.   [Read more…]

The San Salvador and Junípero Serra: Celebrating Spanish Catholic Domination

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By Steven Newcomb / OB Rag

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.   [Read more…]

Anti-fracking Coalition Calls for Shutdown of Toxic Injection Wells

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The permission to pollute was granted because of the capture of the state’s regulatory apparatus by Big Oil and other corporate interests

By Dan Bacher

A coalition of anti-fracking groups and the Center for Biological Diversity today urged the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to immediately shut down hundreds of injection wells that are illegally dumping toxic oil industry wastewater into scores of California aquifers during the midst of a record drought.

Oil and gas companies over decades used more than 170 waste disposal wells to inject oil and gas wastewater into dozens of aquifers containing potable water, in violation of state and federal law, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The majority of these violations are located in California’s Central Valley, while others are near San Luis Obispo and Santa Maria.

“Oil companies in drought-ravaged California have, for years, pumped wastewater from their operations into aquifers that had been clean enough for people to drink,” said David Baker, reporter. “They did it with explicit permission from state regulators, who were supposed to protect the increasingly strained ground water supplies from contamination.”   [Read more…]

Show’s Not Over at Che Cafe at UCSD – Its Fate Likely Rests on Students

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By Andrea Carter

The struggle continues to keep the historic CHE Café facility open on the University of California San Diego (UCSD) campus. This battle over a rare public, all-ages arts, food, and music venue should concern us all as it represents the canary in the coal mine for additional onslaughts of this nature to follow.

Undergraduate and graduate student government councils, respectively the Associated Students (AS) and the Graduate Student Association (GSA) are set to soon issue reports and recommendations to the University as to the CHE Café, its facility and the other cooperatives at UCSD concerning the lease issues, upgrades and dispute resolution. Recently, the councils moved in favor of adopting a joint resolution rather than two independent ones. In the coming weeks then the councils will be synthesizing their input and accepting more from students on these issues as well as from the CHE and other cooperatives.   [Read more…]

Andrea Skorepa, The Queen of San Ysidro

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The hard work of the Executive Director of Casa Familiar has helped San Ysidro residents for 35 years

By Barbara Zaragoza / South Bay Compass

Andrea Skorepa, Executive Director of the non-profit organization Casa Familiar, has been advocating for local San Ysidrans for the last thirty-five years. She manages a team of thirty-four employees who use holistic approaches to serve the predominantly hispanic community.

They’ve worked on constructing family housing for first time sale and they’ve developed low income housing for the elderly. They’ve focused on programs to get San Ysidrans civically engaged and they’ve developed ways for parents to increase their participation in school governance and their children’s education. In 2008, Casa Familiar even expanded into the arts by creating The Front.   [Read more…]

The Passing of Chicano Warrior Reies López Tijerina

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Reies Lòpez Tijerina’s spirit will not be forgotten and will live on in our hearts, minds and history

By Herman Baca 

In the late 1960’s Cesar Chavez, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, Jose Angel Gutierrez and Reies López Tijerina were known as the Four Horsemen of the Chicano Movement. With the sad news that Reies Lòpez Tijerina has passed at the age of 88 in El Paso, Texas, on January 19, 2015 only one of the Four Horsemen remains…Jose Angel Gutiérrez.

To those of us in the Chicano Movement who had the privilege of knowing and working with Tijerina, El Tigre del Norte or King Tiger (who I knew since 1970) his passing is another reminder that; “A historical era is slowly, but surely coming to an end.”

In U.S. history Tijerina will always be known for his struggle to reclaim the lands stolen from Mexicans and Native Americans after the U.S./Mexico War, and will forever be remembered for his daring armed raid in 1967 of the Tierra Amarilla courthouse in rural northern New Mexico.   [Read more…]

Readers Write: A God-Given Right to Bear Arms?

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By Brad Bianchi

I heard one of my more conservative free-thinking friends speak out in defense of an American’s right to bear arms, to amass as many weapons as he or she may choose, without the obtrusive regulations of the Socialist American Government. He was a little heated. Perhaps he believed he had a right to be. After all, here was Obama, coming to get his guns. At the end of his diatribe, I clearly smiled when he said, “After all, it’s my God- given right to bear arms.”

Needless to say, it was the end of the conversation. How can you argue with that? At least on his level.   [Read more…]

Boundary Monument #257

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By Barbara Zaragoza / South Bay Compass

The boundary monuments between San Diego and Tijuana are approximately 1 mile apart. They number from 258 to 252. They are open and free for the Mexican citizens to admire, but  military landing mat hides the monuments from American citizens. Since 2008, a second wall approximately three-hundred feet away from the original military landing mat has further obscured the monuments.

Each boundary monument has its own tale. I’ve already written about 258 and 255, the most famous of all the boundary markers. In total there are 276 markers stretching from the Pacific Ocean to El Paso, Texas. Some are numbered A & B so that the original numbering from the Barlow-Blanco Commission of the 1890’s are retained. (There were originally 52. You can read all about that here.)   [Read more…]

Where is the Infrastructure Planning for San Diego’s Vulnerable Coastline?

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By Jeffrey Meyer/San Diego 350.org

A few weeks ago, San Diego coastal cities were given a stark reminder of the threat to public safety and our $15 billion a year tourism industry by increasing tides and coastal flooding. With this problem becoming more severe, year after year, the lack of substantive coastal infrastructure planning can become a countdown to disaster.

The latest combination of high astronomical tides and elevated surf caused strong rip currents and some flooding at low-lying areas along beaches. Known as king tides, they are expected to return to our coastline on January 19-21 and February 17-19. They have become a harbinger of damage to our coastline as we confront increasing sea levels during this century.   [Read more…]

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