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The New Morena District Certified Farmers’ Market

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The new Morena District Certified Farmers’ Market opened Tuesday, June 19, 2012, from 3 – 7pm with 75 booths exhibiting the wares of 45 vendors to the delight of a crowd estimated by Brian Beevers, Market Manager, to be approximately 3,000 people! Among those attending were Lori Zapf, Republican, Member of San Diego City Council representing the Sixth District.

Vendors included local merchants of coffee, fruits, vegetables, baskets, nuts, berries, prepared foods, including BBQ, fresh drinks, flowers, clothing, fish, roasted corn, cupcakes, pasta, jams, object d’art, honey, plants, olives and bread. Two musicians played guitar and a percussion instrument.   [Read more…]

Helping Jazz 88.3 Cop a Plea

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The other day
I was kind of lowriding down the street,
feeling about as cool as a 74 year old
could ever hope to be,
listening to some sounds
on Radio Jazz 88.3.
Ramsey Lewis, more specifically,
running his fingers over a keyboard,
as per usual,
ever so funkily,
with a spacey
other world type vibe…   [Read more…]

Coffee, City Heights Style- A Blend of Cultures in Every Cup

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It probably should come as no surprise that the diverse community of City Heights delivers up equally diverse coffee drinking experiences. The one unifying quality to the coffee here is a certain “robustness–” this is City Heights after all. If you love the smell of coffee, the taste of coffee and the experience of drinking coffee in unpretentious cafes and restaurants, City Heights delivers on all counts.

I began my week with a hot Vietnamese coffee, pâté chaud and sharing a Vietnamese Special sandwich with my husband at Café Doré, so hot Vietnamese coffee with espresso and condensed milk it is for this week’s coffee column. The cafe is located in a strip mall off of University Avenue that includes a busy laundromat, a couple of Asian markets and a check cashing store.   [Read more…]

Lights in the Darkness of Mount Soledad

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By Frances O’Neill Zimmerman

A veterans’ group led by the owner of the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club wants to light up inky-dark Mount Soledad nights and is seeking official approval next week for this unprecedented alteration to the highest viewpoint on the west side of the city of San Diego.

At stake is encroaching light pollution within our urban area and maintaining Mount Soledad as a sacred dark space for viewing the night sky — shooting stars, unusual planetary alignments, spectacular moonrises, eclipses of the moon. Generations of San Diegans and visitors to San Diego have experienced the beauty of the nighttime sky and the 360-degree panorama of the city below from atop Mount Soledad.   [Read more…]

Young Wall Street Traitor Joins Occupy Wall Street

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Wall Street “Quant” Alexis Goldstein Joins the Opposition

Wall Street recruits young, just out of college computer science majors and mathematicians to become “quants” whose skills are used among other things to predict when pension funds are going to make huge trades so that Wall Street can jump in ahead of them and do deals effectively raising the price the pension fund must pay or lowering the profit they might make.

One such young twenty something quant was Alexis Goldstein. Goldstein devised trading software for Deutsche Bank and Merrill Lynch. She has divulged some of Wall Street’s most closely held cultural secrets such as the phrase “rip the client’s face off” which means selling some derivative “solution” to a naive client such as a convent of nuns in Europe at a huge profit to the trader and to Wall Street while convincing the client that it’s the best deal they ever made. Sometimes they refer to these clients as “muppets.”
  [Read more…]

Making a Case for Public Space in San Diego, Tuesday June 19

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When we talk about public spaces, parks and beaches are probably the first things that come to mind for many of us. It is easy to overlook our streets, alleys and sidewalks, which are in reality the most ubiquitous examples of public spaces. Because they are not destinations they become invisible to us. Are there other public spaces that we are equally oblivious to, and are they worth a second look? Can those existing spaces be made more inviting, more functional and safer?

The San Diego Architectural Foundation is hosting a Pecha Kucha which will examine those questions. Nine different presenters will show twenty slides each, but can only talk about them for twenty seconds. This is a fast tempo way to encourage a lively public discourse about serious quality of life issues.   [Read more…]

Activists to Demand San Onofre Closure at NRC Public Meeting – Monday, June 18th

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Nuclear Regulatory Commission to Release Investigation Findings on San Onofre June 18 in San Juan Capistrano

Anti-nuke, environmental activists and their supporters plan to rally at the up-coming NRC hearing and demand that the nuclear power plant at San Onofre be closed for good. They also plan on holding a press conference – all at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission public meeting on Monday, June 18th, at the San Juan Capistrano Community Center at 25925 Camino Del Avion, San Juan Capistrano, California.

The rally and press conference in opposition to continued operation of the San Onofre nuclear plant is at 5pm prior to the 6pm public meeting scheduled by the NRC.

This will be the first public hearing of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission after the emergency shut down of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station on January 31, 2012. The NRC has had months of investigation into the steam generator failures.   [Read more…]

An Open Letter to My Daughter, Carrie

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Four years ago, “my daughter Carrie,” was arrested for being in this country illegally. Along with her older brother and younger sister, Carrie had been brought here as a young child by her biological parents who entered the United States legally. The family had fled Guatemala because of civil unrest in their native land and her father with his family had been welcomed in the United States for that reason.

Over the years, the family grew by two additional children who, born in the United States, were automatically citizens.

Carrie’s mother tried repeatedly to get her three oldest children their own paperwork showing that they were legally independent of their parents. Her last effort included paying $1,500 to an immigration attorney to help her children get their documentation. Unfortunately, her attorney died before informing her of his progress or sharing his files with anyone else. Repeated attempts to find out what he accomplished, if anything, were unsuccessful.   [Read more…]

The Truth About Religion in America: The Founders Loathed Superstition and We Were Never a Christian Nation

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By Kerry Walters /Alternet

Once they begin to circulate, falsehoods—like counterfeit currency—are surprisingly tenacious. It doesn’t matter that there’s no backing for them. The only thing that counts is that people believe they have backing. Then, like bad coins, they turn up again and again.

One counterfeit idea that circulates with frustrating stubbornness is the claim that America was founded as a Christian nation. It’s one of the Christian Right’s mantras and a favorite talking point for televangelists, religious bloggers, born-again authors and lobbyists, and pulpit preachers. Take, for example, the Reverend Peter Marshall. Before his death in 2010, he strove mightily (and loudly) to “restore America to its traditional moral and spiritual foundations,” as his still-active website says, by telling the truth about “America’s Christian heritage.” Or consider Wall Builders, a “national pro-family organization” founded by David Barton, whose mission is “educating the nation concerning the Godly foundation of our country.” Called “America’s historian” by his admirers, Barton is a prolific writer of popular books that spin his Christian version of American history. And then there’s Cynthia Dunbar, an attorney and one-time professor at Liberty University School of Law. She’s another big pusher of the Christian America currency. Her 2008 polemic One Nation Under God proclaims that the Christian “foundational truths” on which the nation rests are being “eroded” by a “socialistic, secularistic, humanistic mindset” from which Christians need to take back the country.   [Read more…]

Try to smell the flowers before the Filner vs DeMaio battle begins

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By Norma Damashek / NumbersRunner

Take a break, friends and fellow voters. We could all use a brief respite from campaign-season frenzy. Soon enough San Diego’s two heavyweight contenders for mayor will be climbing back into the ring for what’s guaranteed to be a nationally publicized, brutal battle for the heart and destiny the 8th largest city in the USA. Our town.

So sniff the flowers while you can and begin preparing yourself for the Filner-DeMaio race for mayor. It’s no ordinary contest. The stakes are at an all-time high, not just for San Diego but for cities across the nation. If this sounds dramatic, you can bet it is.

That’s why we ought to use this short time-out to reflect on how our city got to this political point. To provide some context and fill in some of the blanks about San Diego’s quixotic and freighted mayorship history, here’s a quick and painless civics lesson.   [Read more…]

Field of View: Occupy Our Arts 2012

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Intended to highlight the creative side of the Occupy Movement, the city-permitted Occupy Our Arts event included performances by professional dance groups and acrobats, as well as face painting, poetry, comedy skits, street theater and more.   [Read more…]

Book Review: Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life

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By Mel Freilicher / Special to the OB Rag

Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life
By Vivian Gornick
Yale University Press, 2011; 151 pages; $25

Rather than write a political history of Emma Goldman’s very full life (which is already documented in great detail, including in her own hefty, 2 volume autobiography, Living My Life), Vivian Gornick has chosen to “concentrate on the force of her extraordinary rebelliousness and try to understand it in light of the existential drive behind radical politics.”

To illuminate what she believes to be at the heart of many dedicated radicals’ commitment, Gornick delivers a provocative portrait of Goldman’s soul, really: embodied in what’s famously paraphrased as, “If I can’t come to your dance, I’m not coming to your revolution.”   [Read more…]

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