Vol. 12, No. 19 – June 19 – July 2, 2019 – Opinion/Editorial

∙I want to thank the Ventura Port District for inserting the Harbor Views Newsletter in this issue. Nice to know that they feel the Breeze is the best way to contact Venturans.

Commenting on gun violence, Gov. Gavin Newsom stated, “From San Bernardino to Ventura to Poway, too many Californians have already died from gun violence.” Strange that we got mentioned. Normally that would be good but maybe not in this case. Makes it sound as if we have lots of gun shootings here.

∙The Ventura City Council accepted a recommendation from Ventura’s water sources General Manager Susan Rungren to remain in a Stage 3 Water Shortage Event.

This means rate payers will continue to be divided into four cost tiers.

Apparently, rates won’t increase, but rates will remain the same through fiscal year 2019-20.

The fact that the City remains in Stage 3 seems strange to me, even the State has declared that we no longer have a water shortage.

∙In 2011, Ventura, and some homeowners in the Pierpont area, came to an agreement on who would clean sand from the beach in front of their properties that was blocking their ocean views.

Per this agreement, the City would remove tons of dirt and haul it away. Of course, the sand just comes back and now the City is being sued once again by a few owners.

The City claims that this is a natural occurring condition, and even if the City is held responsible it should not be the only one to pay for the removal costs.

What really confuses the issue (and others) is that the City owns 40 feet of the beach in front of the homes and the State owns the beach to the ocean, so the question becomes just whose sand is this and who should pay?

Never have understood why the State still owns part of our beaches. Can’t they just give it to us?

Cannabis in the news:

Businesses that focus on manufacturing, testing and distributing cannabis can apply to operate in Oxnard starting next month because the Oxnard City Council has voted to relax the current ban.

With a unanimous vote, Council gave preliminary approval for cannabis distributors and manufacturers and a testing lab to open in the city. Oxnard is considering allowing up to eight manufacturers, three distributors and one testing lab.

Port Hueneme cannabis dispensaries are contributing $30,000 in order to continue presenting the City’s Fourth of July fireworks show.

When, oh when, will our City Council get it?

∙I went online to make a DMV reservation. The next available appointment is in August which isn’t too bad considering that is about how long you would sit there without a reservation.

∙How to make foreign friends – An American airstrike accidentally killed at least eight Afghan police officers in southern Afghanistan.

∙The FBI released documents on the bureau’s short-lived investigation into Bigfoot which was done in 1977.

The 22 documents show that the bureau’s Scientific and Technical Services Division examined 15 hairs sent by Peter Byrne, who was head of the now-defunct Bigfoot Information Center and Exhibition in Oregon, and determined they were from a newspaper publisher and not bigfoot.

∙I like to keep our readers informed. Researchers say they have observed parity-time symmetry breaking for the first time in an experiment. The result was obtained using a “dilation” technique on a single-spin system – a nitrogen-vacancy centre in diamond. The system could be used as a platform for studying new and exotic physics, such as new topological variants, quantum thermodynamics and quantum criticality, in non-Hermitian quantum systems.

According to current physics theories, the universe is governed by certain fundamental symmetries. One of these looks at the relation between parity (P) or “handedness” and time (T) and describes the oddness or evenness of a quantum particle and whether it is moving forwards or backwards in time. When a PT transformation is applied to a quantum system it appears the same as the original.

I hope that clarifies it for you. I’m sure no other explanation is necessary.

∙ Perhaps athlete’s salaries are getting out of hand. The LA Lakers (they play basketball) feel that they need one more star on the team, but they only have about $25M a year to offer. Unfortunately, that isn’t enough money to obtain a marquee player.

Ocean levels are rising due to climate change. Some scientists say that sea levels could rise nearly three feet by the year 2100. However, others claim that is incorrect and feel sea levels could rise more than double that amount if global temperatures increase more than expected.

If sea levels were to rise by more than 6 feet, which the study’s authors believe is possible – an event they said, “lies within the 90% uncertainty bounds,” – the devastation could be catastrophic. A rise in temperatures by 5 degrees Celsius would cause significant declines in ice levels in Greenland, as well as Antarctica.

I know that the cause of climate change is debatable, but the fact that it exists is certainly not.

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