San Diego Free Press

Grassroots News & Progressive Views

You are here: Home / Archives for Source

Theater Review: An Iliad – Surely this was, is happening now

by

By Karen Kenyon

As we begin to leave the theatre space after seeing “An Iliad,” we leave in silence — after a standing ovation.

After all, it is finished — Hector is dead, Achilles has lost his rage, and the Poet has left the stage with his suitcase of war.
*******

On a mostly bare set (with a sink, cleaning tools, and other backstage clutter toward the back) one chair, and a table, the “poet,” performed by Henry Woronicz, tells us the story of The Trojan War, focusing on the conflict between the half-god warrior, Achilles of Achaea (Greece), and Hector, Prince of Troy and Commander of the Trojans.   [Read more…]

Sex In San Diego: Who Gets to Say Vanilla Is Boring?

by

by Catherine Scott/Bitch Magazine

If we bemoan the oversexualization of culture, should we also be concerned about the kinkification of culture? As BDSM blogger Clarisse Thorn writes, “Being a sex-positive feminist, I worry that other women will read my work and it will increase their performance anxiety … that it will lead other women to feel like, ‘gosh, is this something liberated sex-positive women do? Is this something I should be doing?”. Thanks to a prescriptive media, the competition to be having the most out-there, kinky, freaky, dirty sex keeps escalating, with “Ultimate Perv” engraved on the winner’s medal. Fantastic if you’re antsy to compete, but what if you’re just not into all that stuff? What if you think you secretly might be…[whisper it, now!]…vanilla?

One of the reasons I didn’t dare join a fetish community website, or go to a play party, ’til years after I was first curious about BDSM, was a subconscious sense that I was probably “too vanilla.” I didn’t dress head-to-toe in latex or own any seven-inch heels, and I didn’t take my partner down to the local shops on a dog leash. I’ve since realized that the scene is open to anyone who feels their sexual tastes land outside the mainstream—there’s no test you have to pass. However, by labelling every non-kinky person as effectively the same, is the BDSM community just as judgmental as those who judge us?   [Read more…]

Companies You Need to Avoid That are Giving Money to Stop Proposition 37 (GMO Labeling)

by

The next time you take a swig of Odwalla’s Organic Carrot Juice, or munch on a bowl of Orville Redenbacher’s Organic popcorn, take note: A lot of popular organic and all-natural brands are made by companies that are spending thousands of dollars to defeat Proposition 37, the California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act.

Donations are pouring into the campaign to defeat Prop 37. Among the big donors are companies like J.M. Smucker, Hormel Foods, Kellogg Co., Coca-Cola North America and PepsiCo. – companies that make a fortune marketing ‘natural’ and organic brands with slogans like “We’re good to the earth.”

All of these companies are members of the powerful Washington, DC-based Grocery Manufacturer’s Association (GMA), a multi-billion-dollar trade association which represents America’s $1.2 trillion “Big Food” industry. The GMA itself has already pitched in $375,000 to the anti-labeling campaign. And it’s still early in the game.
  [Read more…]

Looking Into Google News: A Week’s Worth

by

by Bob Dorn

Like the news industry on which it depends, Google News is a big, sprawling mess. There’s little consistency in what it chooses to emphasize hour by hour, day by day, week to week. But, lurking not far beneath Google’s aggravating, aggregated news site is the larger industry’s basic conservatism.

This year Google News intensely chased, first, the Romney/GOP nomination, and secondly the Romney vs. Obama mini‐series as slavishly as the news industry itself did ‐‐ not saying much given the fact that Google News doesn’t originate stories; it reprints them. The media’s obsessive preoccupation with Romney began to sag by mid‐summer along with his polls. But then the August 11th nomination of Paul Ryan by the Romney gave the national press corps something to believe in again, sending them hyperventilating down to Florida to cover Ryan‐‐ “the next president of the United States,” in the Romney world – where the new guy appeared with his mother at campaign stops ‐‐ a kind of Immaculate Perception that gripped the media as if something had happened.

Then the Missouri man, Todd Akin, took the top spot away from the Romney/Ryan and Obama.   [Read more…]

San Diego’s morphing water policy

by

by George J. Janczyn / Groksurf’s San Diego / August 28, 2012

The San Diego City Council has been working on a comprehensive water policy for several years. While incremental developments have been sporadically reported in the news media, it’s easy to lose the thread, so here’s a backgrounder.

In late 2010, anticipating an eventual announcement that the drought was officially over, then San Diego City Councilmember Donna Frye proposed that the city’s temporary Drought Response Level 2 restrictions on water use be made permanent, rather than be discontinued.   [Read more…]

Paul Ryan: Will Swap Unborn Babies for Vice Presidency

by

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt / Excuse Me, I’m Writing / Published Aug. 25, 2012

Less than two weeks after joining Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign as the GOP’s presumptive vice presidential candidate, U.S. Congressman Paul Ryan has publicly confirmed his erstwhile inner opportunist.

Ryan, who is “very proud of [his] pro-life record,” was faced with a choice between the dangling prize of the vice presidency and remaining true to the source of his pridefulness. Lo and behold, Ryan is surprisingly pro-choice, albeit in a 1-percent sort of way.

Ryan chose to abandon his 100-percent rating from the National Right to Life Committee (a rating based partially on his rejection of abortion ban exceptions for rape and incest), to jump on board the Romney presidential campaign, which, at least for the moment,* supports an abortion ban with exceptions for rape, incest and threat to a mother’s life.   [Read more…]

Banned by the Pros: Reuters News Succumbs to Digital Randomness

by

By Bob Dorn

Banned. That’s the word Reuters used back in March – March 20 of this year, it was ‐‐ when their pop‐up popped up just after I’d clicked the SUBMIT button. POW!! “We’re sorry, you’ve been banned from our comment posts,” they said, or words like those. Imagine seeing that word, BANNED, in a sentence bearing your name. Would a banning from a news organization show up on your credit
rating? During an investigation of your CV by a prospective employer? If you were under the age of 18 would Reuters reach out and tell your parents about the banning?   [Read more…]

Can You Hear Me Now? The Violence of Eastern Congo Is Calling

by

by L.A. Moore

Ten thousand miles away, a small woman weeps into her delicate hands whispering the horrors she faces: Her husband was killed when he tended their crops. The rebels killed her son who tried to hide their money. The soldiers raped her. She has no home and no way to feed her children.

In this video from The Guardian UK, her voice comes across the miles from somewhere in Eastern Congo, where she and others pound mineral grit that will make a cell phone ring.

The grit from gold, coltan, tin and tungsten is used in the manufacture of electronic devices. The cellphone in your pocket or the iPad in your hands connect you directly to this horrific conflict.

Remember that film Hotel Rwanda, which brought the horrors of Africa violence into the mainstream American consciousness? Eastern Congo seems like Rwanda all over again. Who could forget exiting the theatre overhearing the same blithering comments: “Someone should have done something; all those people slaughtered ….”

Similar violence is taking place in Eastern Congo, and little to nothing is being done to stop it.   [Read more…]

San Diego City Attorney Backs Out of ‘Equality Nine’ Prosecution

by

More than two years after the arrest of the “Equality Nine” ― activists who enacted a sit-in at the San Diego County Clerk’s office and demanded that marriage licenses be issued to same-sex couples ― six of the members have been vindicated.

The legal proceedings against them ended with a “motion to dismiss” by the city attorney yesterday.

The activists said they see the end of this case as a victory in the struggle against restrictions on free speech, the inequality of LGBT marriage rights, and an overzealous San Diego City Attorney.   [Read more…]

How the Presidential Candidates Use the Web and Social Media

by

by Project for Excellence in Journalism / Originally published on Aug. 15, 2012

If presidential campaigns are in part contests over which candidate masters changing communications technology, Barack Obama on the eve of the conventions holds a substantial lead over challenger Mitt Romney.

A new study of how the campaigns are using digital tools to talk directly with voters-bypassing the filter of traditional media-finds that the Obama campaign posted nearly four times as much content as the Romney campaign and was active on nearly twice as many platforms. [1] Obama’s digital content also engendered more response from the public-twice the number of shares, views and comments of his posts.

Just as John McCain’s campaign did four years ago, Romney’s campaign has taken steps over the summer to close the digital gap-and now with the announcement of the Romney-Ryan ticket made via the Romney campaign app may take more. The Obama campaign, in turn, has tried to adapt by recently redesigning its website.

These are among the findings of a detailed study of the websites of the two campaigns as well as their postings on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube-and the public reaction to that content-conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.   [Read more…]

Learning from the Cascading Power Failures that Brought Down the Power Grid in India

by

Government studies show that cascading blackouts, like the one San Diego experienced in 2011, are still possible due to fundamental flaws in the nation’s power grid.

By Deb Severson

On Tuesday, July 31, 2012, India’s interconnected power grids failed, leaving 600 million people — half the population — without electricity. Cascading failures occur in systems of interconnected parts. They usually begin when one part of the system fails. Nearby system parts must then compensate for the failed component, which can then overload or in other ways fail, triggering a vicious cycle as successive parts fail.

When Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) chairman Jon Wellinghoff was asked if power problems in the Northeast could spread all the way to California, he told ABC News, “It’s very, very unlikely that ultimately would happen.” Part of why the risk is low, the ABC story conveyed, is due to our nation’s grid being divided in the middle. Unfortunately, this division still leaves hundreds of millions at risk for cascading failures, and increased investment in transmission is in NOT the answer.
  [Read more…]

Drag Troupe Sings the Republican Economic Platform (Video): ‘Sell the Poor!’

by

AlterNet / By Lauren Kelley

A drag troupe — or rather, a “Dragapella Beauty Shop Quartet” — called the Kinsey Sicks has a new song called “The Official GOP Economic Platform.” It is about… exactly what you think it is! And it’s great.   [Read more…]

©2010-2017 SanDiegoFreePress.org

Code is Poetry