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Take back the zoo

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EDITORIAL It may be months before we know just how Tatiana the tiger escaped and killed Carlos Sousa Jr. Since nobody seems to have the incident on video, none of the witnesses are talking, and the event is bound to be the subject of multimillion-dollar lawsuits, the exact details may never come out.

But it’s safe at this point to say one thing: the privatization of the San Francisco Zoo has been a failure.

When the city turned the management of the place over to the San Francisco Zoological Society in 1997, all of the lingering financial problems were supposed to be solved. The society could raise money: big donors would pay for what the city couldn’t. Animal welfare would be improved; facilities would be brought up to modern standards.

And indeed, there are some new habitats for the animals and some fancy amenities for the humans, including a spiffy $3 million Leaping Lemur Café and an educational center.

But when you look at what’s happened with the animals, the record is pretty shoddy. We’ve been reporting on this for almost a decade (see "The Zoo Blues," 5/19/99, and "The Zoo’s Losers," 5/7/2003). Mark Salomon has compiled a nice updated list of all of the problems in this week’s Op-Ed piece. And the moment the tiger escape happened, we saw exactly why a private agency shouldn’t be running this sort of public facility: a lid of Pentagon-style secrecy was clamped on every aspect of the disaster. Employees were forbidden to talk to the press. Key records weren’t available. The Zoo hired a private public relations firm that immediately began spinning like crazy.

As Craig McLaughlin, a former Guardian editor and tiger expert, reports on page 15, there are endless questions about the escape — and there’s plenty of evidence that the Zoo should have known long ago that the tiger grotto wasn’t secure. This wasn’t the first tiger escape; at least once previously one of the big cats was found outside the fence, and at least twice tigers have come close to jumping over the wall. It appears as if the Zoo didn’t even know how tall the walls were or whether the setup was adequate (and frankly, containing tigers isn’t that difficult or expensive).

Privatization has been good for the director, Manuel Mollinedo, whose total compensation last year came to $339,000, according to the Zoological Society’s federal tax forms. But Mollinedo’s comments about the escape haven’t been encouraging; he seemed mystified at first about how the tiger could have gotten free, then denied the facility was unsafe, then admitted he didn’t know whether it was safe or not. At no point did he say or do anything to give the public confidence that this highly paid executive was willing to take responsibility for a problem or move effectively to solve it.

And, of course, while the city has no real oversight or authority over the Zoo, San Francisco taxpayers will probably have to foot the bill for the gigantic legal settlements that will come out of this fiasco.

This is no way to run a public facility.

The Board of Supervisors ought to hold hearings on the Zoo right away, and the budget analysts should do a management audit of the Zoological Society. But in the end, the city needs to sever its contract with this private nonprofit. If there’s going to be a zoo in San Francisco, it needs to be run by and for the public.

PS Sam Singer, the Zoo’s hired gun, has made a mess of the situation, making apparently false accusations about the victims and refusing to come clean on the facts. He can sling dirt, but he wouldn’t answer the 20 key questions we posed to him. He’s an example of what’s wrong with privatization.

The Zoo Blues

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This story was first published May 19, 1999

IN EARLY 1997, the San Francisco Zoo had a serious public-relations problem. The zoo wanted San Francisco voters to approve a $48 million bond measure to overhaul the facilities. But the Asian elephant exhibit was making the zoo look bad.

Tinkerbelle the elephant had been living alone since April 1995, when her longtime companion, Pennie, was put to sleep. Animal activists had been complaining that, for an animal that herds and has complex social interactions in the wild, life alone was cruel and unacceptable. According to the minutes from a board meeting of the San Francisco Zoological Society, the private group that manages the zoo, executive director David Anderson decided it was time to find a friend for Tinkerbelle. He thought he found her in Calle.

Calle was about 30 years old and on exhibit at the Los Angeles Zoo. She had put in her time entertaining humans, working shows in Las Vegas and giving rides to kids at the San Diego Zoo. Animal advocates in Los Angeles were trying to get her to a sanctuary in Tennessee. But Anderson decided he wanted her in San Francisco.
Animal rights advocates hated the idea. Gretchen Wyler, executive director of Endocino-<\h>based Arc Trust came to San Francisco to check out the zoo’s facilities. “I was devastated when I saw how small and barren it was,” Wyler told the Bay Guardian.

S.F. Zoo curator David Robinett denies that the decision to move Calle to San Francisco had anything to do with the timing of the bond campaign. “We were anxious to move ahead and get a companion for Tinkerbelle,” he told us.
Either way, the zoo was in a hurry — and it wound up with a huge problem on its hands. Before leaving Los Angeles, Calle was tested for tuberculosis. According to Susanne Barthell, who ran the Council for Excellence in Zoo Animal Management until her death last fall, the elephant population at the L.A. Zoo was known to have problems with T.B., a claim Robinett denies. But S.F. Zoo officials did not wait for the test results to come back before they brought Calle north on March 19, 1997.

The tests came back positive. The zoo had just bought a tuberculous elephant.

As soon as she arrived, Calle had to be quarantined from her new companion. And the financially troubled zoo got hit with elephantine medical bills. Calle’s treatment would run from $60,000 to $65,000 a year, curator Robinett told the city’s Commission of Animal Control and Welfare in July.

It got worse. In separating the elephants, zoo workers put Calle in the cushier exhibit quarters, which at least had some vegetation and a watering hole. Tinkerbelle was moved to neighboring quarters, without vegetation or water. She had to poke her trunk through a hole in the wall to refresh herself. (Only this month was the electrified barrier between the two areas removed permanently. Calle is cured, and the two elephants can now interact.)

The elephant debacle is all too typical. San Francisco’s zoo has never been one of the country’s best — but six years after it was placed in private hands, it’s in worse shape than ever. Privatization was supposed to save the zoo; instead it has failed it. A Bay Guardian investigation based on interviews and documents shows:

* Dozens of animals live in squalid, substandard conditions: primates have died because of disease-<\h>ridden cages, orangutans are cooped up in tiny cement boxes, rare rainforest mammals are losing hair.

* The number of zoo employees charged with taking care of the animals has plummeted — while the number of other employees has doubled.

* The U.S. Department of Agriculture is so frustrated with the S.F. Zoo’s animal mistreatment, it is threatening to fine the zoo thousands of dollars — and one foundation that had given hundreds of thousands to the zoo has withdrawn its funding.

* Thanks to a string of expensive bond issues, the public is still paying for the zoo, but zoo executive director David Anderson has seen his own salary substantially boosted.

* Marketing expenses have skyrocketed, and the zoo is heavily dependent on amusement park–<\d>type rides and other non-educational attractions to break even.

* City officials have become so skeptical of the zoo society’s ability to manage itself that Board of Supervisors president Tom Ammiano called for an audit last spring. Stanton W. Jones, an auditor who works for budget analyst Harvey Rose, is expected to release the audit late this summer.

In fact, the zoo is a case study of everything that is wrong with privatization.

A bad place to live


The push to privatize the zoo got rolling in 1990, when David Anderson was brought in from New Orleans’s Audubon Park and Zoological Garden. The zoo’s infrastructure was crumbling, and its finances were in bad shape. Sources in the Recreation and Park Department say Anderson enthusiastically advocated privatization as a solution.
Without accepting bids from other organizations, Rec and Park handed over control of the zoo to the private San Francisco Zoological Society, which had been raising money for the zoo since 1954. In the summer of 1993 the society agreed to lease the premises and take over management of the zoo, promising to balance its budget by June 30, 1998 (see “Sold!,” 10/19/94).

Anderson has made out handsomely from the deal. In 1994 the society paid him $81,443; by 1997 his total compensation had gone up to $148,500, including a $25,000 bonus — in a year when the zoo was still losing money.

The animals have fared much worse.

Within the past two months the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which governs animal care in zoos, has issued the society a warning. According to the USDA, inspectors have repeatedly notified zoo administrators about problems. If those problems aren’t corrected, the agency is now threatening to fine the zoo.

“We made it clear that they are not doing a good job on maintenance,” Wensley Koch, supervisory animal care specialist with the USDA’s western sector office, told the Bay Guardian. “Basically there’s a management problem.”
Records of inspection reports dating back to 1990 reveal problems throughout the zoo facilities — from the big cats’ lairs to the monkeys’ quarters. Wood is rotting; fences are rusting. Rats get into food areas and leave droppings.
Many of the problems are associated with the primate center, which has been a trouble spot since it was built in 1985. The colobus monkeys’ metal climbing bars were grooved. Since keepers couldn’t clean them of feces, the monkeys got sick from contact with their own excrement. The colobus population was decimated. According to Sandra Keller of Citizens for a Better Zoo, which was watch<\h>dogging the zoo at the time, 53 of the 85 primates in the center died.

“Once they opened it, the animals started dying,” Keller told the Bay Guardian. “They didn’t quarantine the new animals sufficiently when they were brought in. They basically wiped out the whole primate collection. It was heartbreaking.”

But turning the zoo over to the private society didn’t help. If anything, conditions are worse. A September 1996 USDA inspection found feces all over outdoor structures in the primate center. And in April 1997 an inspector noted that rat feces were found in the gorillas’ indoor housing area and that weeds and bushes grew out of control in the outside exhibit.

Inspectors frequently found that problems they had repeatedly brought to the society’s attention had not been addressed. For example, rotting wooden structures in the primate center went unrepaired for years between inspections; wire mesh fences keeping the colobus monkeys from escaping the exhibit continued to rust for a year after the USDA-imposed deadline to fix them.

Indeed, records from the past three years show that the zoo was regularly blowing its USDA-imposed deadlines on fixing facilities.

“When you’ve been writing ‘rust up’ for 10 years, most people get the message,” Koch told the Bay Guardian. “We’re at the point where, if the zoo doesn’t shape up, we might be forced to take an action against them. We can fine them up to $2,500 per violation.”

“If we’re looking at a monkey enclosure and we explain that a rusty enclosure is a problem and we note they also have rust at the zebra site, then the next time we come out, we don’t want to see a rusty elephant enclosure,” she said. “What becomes obvious is that either they don’t care about complying or they have decided not to. When they’re doing that, they’re using us as a quality control agency. The impression is that they have no quality control themselves.”

A 1993 incident involving an orangutan named Chewbacca sheds light on how zoo officials have tended to respond to agency involvement. Responding to an anonymous complaint, the USDA found that zoo officials had been planning to keep the 150-pound Chewbacca confined to a four-by-six-foot converted entryway for more than a year while they used his quarters to breed chimpanzees.

“From my perspective it appears that the project with the chimpanzees has been ill conceived,” William DeHaven, a sector supervisor with the USDA, noted on Oct. 12 of that year. “If you do not have sufficient space to conduct a breeding program properly, we feel it should not be conducted at all.”

USDA veterinary medical officer Richard Spira found Robinett to be uncooperative in dealing with the situation. “Incredibly, David Robinett took exception to my observation that the temporary night quarters were cramped at best,” Spira wrote to Koch. “This … is to give you a little taste of the double<\h>speak I’m getting at the zoo.”

The zoo has been no quicker to respond to problems brought to its attention by private citizens. On January 23, 1997, Barthell complained to both the zoo and the USDA. Barthell, an outspoken critic of the zoo, reported that she had seen a herd of six blackbuck standing in a driving rainstorm with no shelter, not even a tree. She also noted that 12 kangaroo were soaked and huddling against a wall for protection, their shelters too small to protect them.
Robinett responded to her concerns in writing. “This is not atypical of antelope,” he wrote. “In fact, many species react to inclement weather by seeking open space rather than cover.” He also said the kangaroo shelters were fine.

The USDA didn’t see it that way. The agency informed the zoo in February 1997 that shelter provided for both the blackbuck and the kangaroos was inadequate.

Robinett denied that the zoo has a cavalier attitude toward facilities problems.

“A lot of it is the age of the enclosures,” Robinett told us. “It is also a problem of limited resources. When you’re patching the patch of a patch — that’s when there are problems.”

He said that the zoo had to choose carefully how to spend its funds and that it gave the highest priority to the ones that officials there felt posed the greatest hazard to animals. And Wayne Reading, the society’s chief financial officer, says the infrastructure improvements are well underway, funded by donations and bond revenues.

Private zoo, public funds

When the society assumed control of the zoo in 1993, it was on the verge of collapse. City officials had neglected at least $10 million in facility maintenance; the number of paying visitors was in decline.

According to the zoo society’s lease, the city agreed to keep paying the zoo $4 million a year (to help cover the cost of civil service employees). In exchange, the society was supposed to take over the zoo and make it financially viable.

The society was not able to pull the zoo out of the red. In the spring of 1997, after four years of losing money, zoo officials admitted to acting parks director Joel Robinson that they were paying operating expenses with a loan of roughly $2.5 million from Wells Fargo as well as with money raised before the zoo went private. And in November of that year, Reading told the Rec and Park Commission that the marketing expenses for that fiscal quarter were over budget by $47,000. The society raised admissions prices in spring 1998 to cover an immediate $250,000 shortfall.

The society had already started going after an infusion of public funds. The minutes of society meetings show that for more than a year, the group devoted almost all its energy to getting a $48 million bond issue passed. According to the lease, the city agreed to sell at least $25 million in bonds to improve crumbling facilities. The society was supposed to raise $25 million from private funders by the time the bonds were sold. (To date, the society has raised $17 million.)

In June 1997, voters passed the $48 million bond issue. The zoo expected the bonds to start selling in late fall 1998, but they were delayed by a lawsuit seeking to overturn voter approval of the 49ers stadium bonds, which passed in the same election. That litigation was thrown out of court; the zoo bonds are expected to be sold this summer. The society has also taken $26 million from bonds issued for rebuilding after the Loma Prieta earthquake.

The city’s Recreation and Park Department responded to the zoo’s financial troubles by looking the other way. Rather than conduct an audit of the zoo or monitor the operation more closely, the department announced that it would no longer scrutinize the zoo’s budgets at all (see “The Secret Zoo,” 11/26/97, and “Don’t Feed the Zoo Society,” 12/10/97).

Rec and Park’s former finance director Ernie Prindle, who had been checking the zoo’s budgets until 1997, told the Bay Guardian that Anderson seemed to want the zoo to have the advantages of being run by a private organization while still being covered by a public one. When the zoo admitted in the fall of 1997 it was further in debt than it should have been, Anderson asked why the department could not just take care of the deficit and make the numbers work as it had done in the days when it was part of the city system, Prindle said.

“We had to tell him it does not work that way anymore, now that the zoo is a private contractor,” Prindle said.

Carnival or classroom?

By the end of October 1998 the zoo was in the black for the first time since the society took it over. But with that success has come controversy. Instead of investing in the animals, the society has capitalized on theme rides, such as the merry-go-round, the Puffer Train, and the Tiger Express ride.

Amusement-park attractions and a pricey marketing campaign — costing the zoo almost $3 million from 1995 to 1998 — have brought more visitors to the zoo. That plus higher ticket prices means more money. And Anderson is certain that with this increased revenue, the zoo will ultimately be able to shed its carnival atmosphere and focus on its true mission: education to foster environmental activism among visitors.

But if environmental activism is Anderson’s goal, he has a strange way of showing it. For example, when the zoo brought in a lorikeet exhibit in April 1998, it allowed its sponsors to place a display — a shiny Ford sports utility vehicle — near the site.

“If you’re setting yourself out as an educator, then you’ve got to have a source of funds,” Anderson told the Bay Guardian.

Some of Anderson’s more straightforward forays into environmental education have had trouble. One of his pet conservation projects is the Madagascar Fauna Group, head<\h>quartered at the San Francisco Zoo. Among other things, the group supports the protection of Madasgascar’s Betampona National Reserve and hopes to re-introduce zoo-bred lemurs and other endangered primates, such as aye-ayes, to the island nation’s wilds.

Since 1994, when the society assumed control of the zoo, it has spent $785,222 on its Madagascar projects.
In August 1997 Anderson brought two aye-ayes from Duke University’s primate center to San Francisco. Merlin and Calaban are the only male-female aye-aye pair in any zoo in the United States. Zoo officials hope to breed them.
Anderson speaks proudly of the work the zoo has done to educate people in Madagascar about protecting aye-ayes. But he hasn’t done such a great job protecting the ones in his care.

In Madagascar, aye-ayes spend time more than 60 feet high in the rainforest canopy, where they pull bugs from trees with their long fingers. In San Francisco, they live in an eight-foot-tall glass case.

Male aye-aye Merlin has had an ongoing problem with hair loss on his hind legs. As a result the zoo’s vet put him on steroids periodically from 1997 to 1998. Zoo officials blame the hair loss on two factors: premature separation from his mother, which took place while Merlin was at Duke, and the stress of being introduced to a new female.
Anderson told the Bay Guardian the hair loss wasn’t a big deal; some activists feel differently.

“That’s a shame,” Shirley McGreal, director of the International Primate Protection League, located in South Carolina, told the Bay Guardian. “Those guys cover a good distance of territory in the wild.”

But the aye-ayes haven’t been a huge success with zoogoers either. Aye-ayes are nocturnal creatures and extremely timid; Merlin and his mate, Calaban, rarely leave the shelter of leafy branches. The best chance you’ll get to see an aye-aye at the zoo is in the gift shop, on a sweatshirt or a postcard.

Paying the price

Luckily for the society, hardly any of its donors know about how the zoo animals live; it’s hard to woo grants with rusty fences, feces-filled cages, and cramped cement cells. But one funder did find out.

In September 1994, the zoo announced the opening of its $2 million Feline Conservation Center. Keepers had already raised questions about the new facility; some thought it was unsafe for the keepers because the animals could reach through the fence to the service area with their paws and claws.

When zoo administrators brought in Denver Zoo curator John Wortman, he had the same concerns. In his final evaluation to the Zoo Society, written in October 1994, Wortman stated, “I hate to sound like a broken record, but the old safety issue rises again. The repairs should have been made prior to the felines moving unto the enclosures. Fortunately, enough of the lock system functioned and no person or creature was hurt during the shake-down period.”

The keeper at the time, Terry Moyles, was fired by the zoo March 1995. Barthell and other animal advocates suspected he was dismissed because he was outspoken about the inadequacy of the facility; Robinett denied the charge.

In a Jan. 30, 1995, letter to the charitable foundation that was funding the center, Wortman described the Feline Conservation Center as “a poor design and dangerous exhibit for both the animals and the zoo keepers.”
The center’s problems got its funders’ attention. In a Feb. 19, 1999, letter to city auditor Jones, executives from the Redmond, Wash.–based Leonard X. Bosack and Betty M. Kruger Charitable Foundation blasted the zoo.

After the foundation made initial grants of more than $200,000 for the center, the letter states, “the Foundation Board also pledged two payments of $162,000 to be made in 1994 and 1995 contingent on continued progress reports. The Foundation rescinded the pledge of $325,000 in 1995 after years of unsatisfactory response from the Zoo Executive Director and the Board of Directors.”

The letter goes on to lay out how the zoo hired a contracting firm with no experience in building wildlife care facilities, how it wasted funds, and how it ignored the recommendations of its consultant.

“As John Wortman noted, the `major problem was the inability of the S.F. staff to design a modern animal facility,’” the letter stated.

Robinett denies that the zoo staff is to blame. “To say this was a screwup in design — I think that is incorrect,” Robinett told the Bay Guardian. “We have had success [with the center], especially with breeding. It’s been a very good exhibit.”

It is that attitude that makes some people worry about making animals pay the costs of privatization.
Privatization “has not helped animal care,” Ron Lippert, a longtime animal health technician and former member of the city’s Commission on Animal Control and Welfare, told the Bay Guardian. “What privatization has done is allowed the society to do more things on their agenda — without the public scrutiny they had before. It seems like this is [Anderson and the society’s] kingdom and palace, and they want to see how much they can show it off.

“But the bottom line is that with the cold, windy, and wet climate at the zoo, it’s the wrong city. It’s the wrong location. Animals who aren’t used to handling ocean climate have to handle it day in and day out. Maybe we just shouldn’t have a zoo here. The zoo society was supposed to do all this great stuff. But as far as zoos go, this one still sucks.”

Bob Porterfield contributed to this story.

Edwards Reconsidered

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There have been good reasons not to support John Edwards for president. For years, his foreign-policy outlook has been a hodgepodge of insights and dangerous conventional wisdom; his health-care prescriptions have not taken the leap to single payer; and all told, from a progressive standpoint, his positions have been inferior to those of Dennis Kucinich.

But Edwards was the most improved presidential candidate of 2007. He sharpened his attacks on corporate power and honed his calls for economic justice. He laid down a clear position against nuclear power. He explicitly challenged the power of the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical giants.

And he improved his position on Iraq to the point that, in an interview with the New York Times at the start of January, he said: “The continued occupation of Iraq undermines everything America has to do to reestablish ourselves as a country that should be followed, that should be a leader.” Later in the interview, Edwards added: “I would plan to have all combat troops out of Iraq at the end of nine to ten months, certainly within the first year.”

Now, apparently, Edwards is one of three people with a chance to become the Democratic presidential nominee this year. If so, he would be the most progressive Democrat to top the national ticket in more than half a century.

The main causes of John Edwards’ biggest problems with the media establishment have been tied in with his firm stands for economic justice instead of corporate power.

Several weeks ago, when the Gannett-chain-owned Des Moines Register opted to endorse Hillary Clinton this time around, the newspaper’s editorial threw down the corporate gauntlet: “Edwards was our pick for the 2004 nomination. But this is a different race, with different candidates. We too seldom saw the positive, optimistic campaign we found appealing in 2004. His harsh anti-corporate rhetoric would make it difficult to work with the business community to forge change.”

Many in big media have soured on Edwards and his “harsh anti-corporate rhetoric.” As a result, we’re now in the midst of a classic conflict between corporate media sensibilities and grassroots left-leaning populism.

On Jan. 2, Edwards launched a TV ad in New Hampshire with him saying at a
rally: “Corporate greed has infiltrated everything that’s happening in this democracy. It’s time for us to say, ‘We’re not going to let our children’s future be stolen by these people.’ I have never taken a dime from a Washington lobbyist or a special interest PAC and I’m proud of that.”

But, when it comes to policy positions, he’s still no Dennis Kucinich. And that’s why, as 2007 neared its end, I planned to vote for Kucinich when punching my primary ballot.

Reasons for a Kucinich vote remain. The caucuses and primaries are a time to make a clear statement about what we believe in — and to signal a choice for the best available candidate. Ironically, history may show that the person who did the most to undermine such reasoning for a Dennis Kucinich vote at the start of 2008 was… Dennis Kucinich.

In a written statement released on Jan. 1, he said: “I hope Iowans will caucus for me as their first choice this Thursday, because of my singular positions on the war, on health care, and trade. This is an opportunity for people to stand up for themselves. But in those caucuses locations where my support doesn’t reach the necessary [15 percent] threshold, I strongly encourage all of my supporters to make Barack Obama their second choice. Sen. Obama and I have one thing in common: Change.”

This statement doesn’t seem to respect the intelligence of those of us who have planned to vote for Dennis Kucinich.

It’s hard to think of a single major issue — including “the war,” “health care” and “trade” — for which Obama has a more progressive position than Edwards. But there are many issues, including those three, for which Edwards has a decidedly more progressive position than Obama.

But the most disturbing part of Dennis’ statement was this: “Sen. Obama and I have one thing in common: Change.” This doesn’t seem like a reasoned argument for Obama. It seems like an exercise in smoke-blowing.

I write these words unhappily. I was a strong advocate for Kucinich during the race for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. In late December, I spoke at an event for his campaign in Northern California. I believe there is no one in Congress today with a more brilliant analysis of key problems facing humankind or a more solid progressive political program for how to overcome them.

As of the first of this year, Dennis has urged Iowa caucusers to do exactly what he spent the last year telling us not to do — skip over a candidate with more progressive politics in order to support a candidate with less progressive politics.

The best argument for voting for Dennis Kucinich in caucuses and primaries has been what he aptly describes as his “singular positions on the war, on health care, and trade.” But his support for Obama over Edwards indicates that he’s willing to allow some opaque and illogical priorities to trump maximizing the momentum of our common progressive agendas.

Presidential candidates have to be considered in the context of the current historical crossroads. No matter how much we admire or revere an individual, there’s too much at stake to pursue faith-based politics at the expense of reality-based politics. There’s no reason to support Obama over Edwards on Kucinich’s say-so. And now, I can’t think of reasons good enough to support Kucinich rather than Edwards in the weeks ahead.

_____________________________

Norman Solomon’s latest book is “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State.” For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com

Hamster dance

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I have a friend a few years younger than me. We were recently at a bar talking about his girlfriend and my wife. After a time, he confided to me that in the past few weeks he has been having trouble getting it up and was very concerned that he would have to take erectile dysfunction meds for the rest of his life or that he was losing his edge. We are both in our early 40s and in good shape and health.

My answer to him was that he should not panic. It seems to me that as the weather gets colder, the days become shorter, and we set the clocks back, our bodies, which are much more attuned to nature than we are generally aware, prepare for winter and slow down. I noticed that my sleep patterns changed at the visible onset of winter. I’ve been less interested in sex and other physical activities. I also remember that in the spring, when the days get longer and the sun shines, I get really horny all of the time — or at least I did last spring.

Are there any studies to support my thesis? Is any of this quantifiable?

Love,

Regular Reader

Dear Reg:

Pretty much, yes. What a great question to get on a gloomy winter day just a few days shy of the solstice. Let us thank all the little gods and goddesses for the end of the %#@&*%@ darkness, with extraspecial gratitude reserved for Flora, Persephone, Maia, and anyone else who is usually depicted wreathed in posies and scattering petals through the newly verdant forest while the little animals frolic … ahem. Why do I have spring fever when it isn’t even spring?

I’m not sure if there has been any serious research done on humans and libido fluctuation through the seasons, but because the slightest fluctuations in reproductive capacity can cost high-stakes meat producers serious money, plenty of hormone-titer and testicle measurements have been done on bulls and boars and other large horned or tusky beasts, and yes, those characteristics do fluctuate with the seasons, and by quite a bit too. Mostly, though, males get all maleish during their breeding season, whenever that may be, but one of the most striking differences between ourselves and most of our animal cousins is our lack of an estrus cycle and corresponding male big-balls cycle. However …

It’s nice that I happened to mention little animals frolicking, because have I got a frolicking animals story for you: "Sex Ends as Seasons Shift and Kisspeptin Levels Plummet" (at www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-12/iu-sea122806.php). It concerns a neuropeptide most excellently named kisspeptin. Oh, and it’s about Siberian hamsters. Kisspeptin triggers the release of the important reproductive hormones gonadotropin-releasing hormone and luteinizing hormone, without which we (and the hamsters) would not experience puberty, libido (in the hamsters at least), or conception. Hamsters placed in a winterlike environment with short days and low light immediately experience a drop in kisspeptin and with it the hamster equivalent of mojo workin’. Happily, though, the winterized hamsters were just as sensitive to kisspeptin as the summer hamsters were; as the article emphasizes,

"What is really striking is the disappearance of kisspeptin in animals experiencing winter-like days, yet the ability to respond to kisspeptin when we provide it," said Timothy Greives, lead author of the study. "These data show that the disappearance of kisspeptin in the brain is likely critical in turning off reproduction during winter."

So is kisspeptin supplementation the answer to your problem? Oh, I wish, but hormone feedback loops are way too serious and complicated to mess with when we don’t know what we’re doing, and in this case we truly haven’t the faintest. Plus, seen any kisspeptin on the supplement shelves recently? So no, of course it isn’t the answer, but I think it’s worth paying attention to the fact that we are, as you say, "much more attuned to nature than we are generally aware." We might try adapting to the season by either simply expecting less of ourselves and our partners in the depth of winter — a winter break, as it were — or bringing our opposable thumb–having, tool-using human best to bear on the problem. Try (or rather suggest to your friend that he try) light therapy, as prescribed for seasonal affective disorder. And why do you think the midwinter tropical vacation is so popular? Surely froofy umbrella drinks are available in the frozen north; there must be another, better reason for heading to summerier climes with your sweetie as the days get short and dark. Failing that, we could do what sensible large fauna (and many types of flora too, come to think of it) do when the weather gets nasty: hibernate.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Technology in wartime

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION War changes everything, including technology. We are roughly six years into what the George W. Bush administration calls the war on terror and what hundreds of thousands of soldiers know as the occupation of Iraq. Gizmos that a decade ago would have been viewed entirely as communications tools and toys are now potential surveillance and killing machines.

Don’t believe me? Consider how much the Web has changed. Referred to naively 10 years ago by Bill Clinton and Co. as the friendly, welcoming "information superhighway," the Web is now the National Security Agency’s surveillance playground. Last year a whistle-blower at AT&T revealed that every bit of Internet traffic routed by AT&T was also being routed through an NSA surveillance system. Millions of innocent people’s private Internet information, including online purchases and e-mail, was being watched without warrants.

Cuddly consumer robots epitomized by Sony’s Aibo robot dog have changed too. The company that makes adorable Roomba vacuum robots, iRobot, just announced a huge deal with the United States military to make reconnaissance and killing robots called PackBots for use in combat zones. Already, 50 PackBots have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are the ground versions of crewless aerial vehicles, remote-controlled spy planes that can also shoot weapons.

Tech security expert Bruce Schneier describes technology as having "dual uses": one for peacetime and one for war. The Wii video game console, for example, is great for transutf8g physical movements into movements onscreen. That makes the Wii great for party games in which you swing your arms to move dancing penguins on the screen. It also makes a great interface for remote-controlled guns in a combat robot. Just move your arm to aim.

In a time of war you can’t enjoy a party game without thinking about your game console being used to kill people. I realize that sounds melodramatic, but looked at pragmatically it’s quite simply true.

Once you realize that every form of technology has a dual use, it becomes much easier to argue for ways of limiting the uses that aren’t ethical or legal. Consider that a roboticized antiaircraft cannon (similar to the PackBot) turned on its operators during a field exercise in South Africa in October 2007, killing nine people before it ran out of ammo. The software error that led this robot to slaughter friendly soldiers is no different from errors that make your Roomba crash. What do we draw from this analogy? Perhaps robots that are perfectly legal as vacuums should be illegal on the battlefield. Perhaps no weapon should ever be completely autonomous like the Roomba.

Questions like these led me and my colleagues at Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility to put together a conference at Stanford University on the topic of technology in wartime, focusing especially on ethics and the law. Coming up on Jan. 26, the conference will be a day packed with talks and panels about everything from dual-use technology (Schneier will be a keynote speaker) to what happens when robots commit war crimes. We’ll also hear from people who are appropriating military technologies for human rights causes — the very technologies that let military spies hide online also help human rights workers and dissidents shield themselves while still getting out their subversive messages.

We’ll also have a panel on so-called cyberterrorism, or destructive hacks aimed at taking down a nation’s tech infrastructure. But should fears of cyberterror lead to total government surveillance of the Internet? Cindy Cohn, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s legal director, will talk about how the NSA used AT&T to spy on US citizens and the suit the EFF has brought against AT&T for vioutf8g its customers’ privacy rights.

If you want to find out how to change the way militaries are appropriating consumer tech or just want to learn more about how war is changing the way we use technology, come to Stanford on Jan. 26 for the conference. It’s open to the public, and you can register at www.technologyinwartime.org. The cost of admission gets a you free lunch and a T-shirt, as well as a chance to talk to some of the smartest people in the field. See you there!

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who wants smart defense to replace buggy offense.

Cindy Sheehan’s SF values

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OPINION A major difference between Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s values and my values surfaced last month.

On Friday, Dec. 14, I learned that since 2002, Pelosi has been a silent partner in the George W. Bush regime’s torture policy. As a Bay Area resident for the past 15 years, I can say with confidence that the use of torture is not a San Francisco value.

According to a Dec. 9 Washington Post article, Pelosi was one of four members of Congress to witness a "virtual tour" of secret CIA detention sites. Officials have described the briefings as "detailed and graphic." The article, by Joby Warrick and Jan Eggen, revealed that the House Intelligence Committee received 30 briefings on the CIA’s torture chambers and the "harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk."

In 2003, Congressperson Jane Harman (D-Calif.), who was also present during the briefings, filed a letter of protest over the interrogation program. After the Democrats won control of the House in 2006, Pelosi passed over Harman, who was in line for chair of the Intelligence Committee, instead naming Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas) to the position. Harman, who publicly voiced her discontent at her demotion, was punished for speaking out when Pelosi would not.

Pelosi and I both know that the use of torture is outlawed under both the US Army Field Manual and the Geneva Conventions. I have chosen to speak out against the Bush administration’s use of torture. Pelosi has chosen to remain silent.

Through her complicity and her actions, Pelosi continues to support an illegal policy that harms our soldiers in the field and is counterproductive to winning the hearts and minds of the Arab and Muslim world. Even committed warmonger Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) realizes that the use of torture as a tool to garner information is a flawed and inhumane strategy.

Pelosi has used her position as Speaker of the House to protect the criminal Bush regime, and although she has pledged to hold the president accountable for the Iraq war, she continues to give him the money, and therefore the means, to wage it.

San Franciscan values are good values. We want every person to be guaranteed the very same basic human rights that Pelosi and her wealthy cronies enjoy: peace, shelter, nutritious and plentiful food, health care, education, and the right to live free from torture. I would add the right to marry whomever one loves regardless of gender or orientation.

The neocon hatemongers have tried to make the word liberal an obscenity. Fox News jester Bill O’Reilly has publicly stated that al Qaeda can "go ahead" and "blow up" San Francisco. We cannot allow our values to be marginalized and ridiculed any longer. Our values must spread across this nation because we care about people and we care about true freedom and real representative democracy.

Pelosi abdicated her role as defender of our values and needs years ago, but especially so when she countenanced torture and refused to impeach the Bush regime when San Franciscans voted overwhelmingly in a referendum for impeachment.

The choice is simple and clear in California’s District 8. If you want San Francisco values represented in Congress, vote for me in November. If you support torture and war crimes, then vote for Pelosi. *

Cindy Sheehan

Antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan is running for Congress as an independent.

Offies!

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

It’s gotten to the point where you don’t have to make fun of the president anymore — the rest of the country has gotten so insane that George W. Bush almost looks normal. Just think about 2007:

One presidential candidate said aborted fetuses could have replaced immigrant workers. One said he wanted to be sure to shoot Osama bin Laden with American-made bullets. One said he’d seen a UFO. One said he wanted to deport 400,000 immigrants but was too busy.

A prominent conservative writer said Jewish people need to be "perfected." A bathroom stall in Minneapolis became a tourist attraction.

And Gavin Newsom screwed his secretary, Ed Jew didn’t know where he lived, people ran naked for mayor, Halloween was cancelled … It was, by any standard, a banner year for the Offies.

YES, I SLEPT WITH MY SECRETARY. YES, SHE WAS MARRIED TO MY CAMPAIGN MANAGER. YES, I AM AN ASSHOLE. THE NEWSPAPERS GOT THAT RIGHT.

Gavin Newsom, faced with news of his sordid affair with Ruby Rippey-Tourk, told reporters that "everything you’ve read is true."

SISTERHOOD IS POWERFUL

Jennifer Siebel, Newsom’s girlfriend who said "the woman is the culprit" in the mayor’s notorious affair, posted a message on SFist.com insisting she’s a "gal’s gal."

GOOD ONE, JEN — WAY TO ACCUSE YOUR BOYFRIEND OF DATE RAPE

Siebel said Newsom’s affair with Rippey-Tourk "was nothing but a few incidents when she showed up passed out outside of his door."

THE TRUTH, NEWSOM STYLE

Newsom’s press secretary, Peter Ragone, admitted to posting fake pro-Newsom comments on the SFist blog under a friend’s name.

AND NOW HE CAN CLAIM HE’S REALLY A CELEBRITY

Newsom announced he would go into rehab.

YOU’D THINK A SECRETIVE MAYOR WHOSE PRESS SECRETARY LIES COULD AT LEAST MAKE THE TRAINS RUN ON TIME

The Muni Metro T line opened for business with delays that crashed the entire underground train system.

JEEZ, CAN’T YOU TV PEOPLE FIND A REPORTER WHO WILL STOP ASKING THE MAYOR SO MANY EMBARRASSING QUESTIONS?

Newsom announced on camera that he wasn’t going to talk to ABC’s Dan Noyes anymore, saying, "You just send some other reporters. It’s going to be a lot easier now."

WAIT — ISN’T THERE SOME STATE LAW ABOUT USING YOUR CELL PHONE WHEN YOU’RE DRIVING?

State senator Carole Migden crashed her state-owned SUV into another car in Marin when she took her eyes off the road to answer a cell phone call.

COME TO THINK OF IT, HE DOES HAVE THAT HOLLYWOOD SMILE GOING ON. AND THOSE EYES …

Sup. Chris Daly set off a press furor when he said Newsom was refusing to answer questions about his alleged cocaine use.

THAT’S OK — IT’S HARD TO GET THOSE COSTUMES OFF TO PEE ANYWAY

Newsom’s press office announced that Halloween was cancelled, and the mayor refused until the last minute to allow portable toilets to be set up in the Castro.

CHARITABLE ORGANIZATIONS NEED A LITTLE BRIBERY MONEY TOO

Suspended Sup. Ed Jew, who was charged with accepting $40,000 in cash from a tapioca store chain, insisted he was going to give half the money to a neighborhood parks program.

APPARENTLY, THE MONEY WASN’T THE ONLY THING THAT SMELLED

Jew insisted he lived in a Sunset District house that had no water service and said he showered at his flower store (where reporters were never shown an actual shower).

BY SAN FRANCISCO STANDARDS, HE’S EMINENTLY QUALIFIED FOR PUBLIC OFFICE

Mayoral candidate Grasshopper Alec Kaplan stole Jew’s house numbers, was arrested for playing his guitar naked on top of his purple taxicab, and was sentenced to nine months in jail for threatening a passenger.

AND FRANKLY, IT’S JUST AS WELL THEY GOT HIM OFF THE STREET; NOBODY WANTS TO LOOK AT THAT SHIT

Yoga instructor George Davis was arrested four times while campaigning for mayor in the nude.

UNFORTUNATELY, HE CAME IN FIFTH

Chicken John Rinaldi insisted he was running for second place and considered using the slogan "The other white mayor."

YOU HAVE TO GIVE IT TO HIM: THE GUY CAN PICK HIS ICONS

Paul David Addis was arrested for setting fire to the Burning Man icon four days before it was supposed to be burned, then was later charged with attempting to burn down Grace Cathedral.

POOR JERRY — CAN’T SOMEBODY DONATE SOME MONEY TO HAVE HIM PUT IN A HOME FOR THE TERMINALLY MORONIC?

Jerry Lewis created an imaginary character for his muscular dystrophy telethon called Jesse the illiterate fag.

UNLIKE LUNATIC RIGHT-WING CHRISTIANS, WHO SEEM TO BE DOING JUST FINE

Ann Colbert said that Jews need to be "perfected."

HEY MARTHA, CHECK IT OUT! LET ME POSE FOR A PHOTO! I GOT MY WIDE STANCE ALL READY!

The bathroom stall where Larry Craig was arrested for public sex became a tourist attraction.

AND NOW, THE CELEBRITY NEWS FOR THE SEVEN OR EIGHT PEOPLE WHO STILL ACTUALLY CARE

Britney Spears shaved her head. Paris Hilton went to jail.

THE WORLD JUST GOT A TINY BIT SAFER FOR HUMANITY

Spears’s mother lost her contract for a book on parenting after her 16-year-old daughter Jamie Lynn became pregnant.

NOW IF THE SCALPERS COULD JUST DO A JOB ON THAT WIG

Tickets to the Hannah Montana concert in Oakland were sold for as much as $1,000.

OF COURSE, SHE MAY HAVE SIMPLY BEEN TRYING TO FIT IN THOSE TINY SEATS

Southwest Airlines kicked a woman off a flight for wearing too short a skirt.

WAIT, WE MISSED THE ONE ABOUT FUCKING THINE OWN GENDER. MAYBE HE LEFT IT IN THE TENT

Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee said he would oppose same-sex marriage "until Moses comes down with two stone tablets from Brokeback Mountain saying he’s changed the rules."

WHY EXPLOIT IMMIGRANTS WHEN WE CAN EXPLOIT KIDS OF OUR OWN?

Huckabee announced that if all of the nation’s aborted fetuses had gone to term, the United States wouldn’t need low-cost immigrant labor.

OF COURSE, IF HE’D BEEN GAY OR HAD AN ABORTION, HE WOULD HAVE WOUND UP IN PRISON

Huckabee told Rolling Stone he’d pardoned Keith Richards for a 1975 traffic ticket.

WE LIKE A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE WHO HAS HIS PRIORITIES STRAIGHT

Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani said he would have liked to have kicked all 400,000 undocumented immigrants out of the city, but he was too busy fighting crime.

OF MAYBE IT WAS JUST THE VULCANS, COME TO MAKE FIRST CONTACT AND CONVINCE US TO SUPPORT SINGLE-PAYER HEALTH INSURANCE

Rep. Dennis Kucinich said he’d seen a UFO.

WE’D HAPPILY PAY $999 NOT TO HAVE TO KNOW

A Los Angeles company called 23andMe offered to test your DNA for $999 and tell you if you’re related to Marie Antoinette, Jesse James, or Jimmy Buffet.

WITH THE CUBAN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM, HE’LL PROBABLY OUTLIVE US ALL

Police in south Florida were put on alert after blogger Perez Hilton falsely announced the death of Fidel Castro.

KILL THE BASTARDS — BUY AMERICAN

Sen. John McCain told workers at a small-arms factory in New Hampshire he would "follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell" and "shoot him with your products."

OF COURSE NOT — THEY’VE ALL BEEN TORTURED, BEATEN, OR STONED TO DEATH

Iran’s president said there are no homosexuals in his country.

BUT THEN, SHE TORTURED US FOR 10 YEARS AS MAYOR

Sen. Dianne Feinstein voted to confirm Michael Mukasey as attorney general even though he refused to say that waterboarding is torture.

IT’S NOT IN YOURS EITHER

President Bush said democracy might not be in the "Russian DNA."

WHEN A SIMPLE "CUNT" OR "PUSSY" JUST ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH

A Florida production of The Vagina Monologues sought to avoid controversy by changing its name to The Hoohaa Monologues.

THE 41ST PRESIDENT STARTS WORKING ON HIS PLACE IN HISTORY

President Bush predicted a "nuclear holocaust" if Iran develops weapons of mass destruction.

QUICK, GIVE ME THE BUTTON BEFORE THE BOSS GETS THAT PROBE OUT OF HIS ASS

Vice President Dick Cheney had executive power for two hours and five minutes while President Bush was under sedation for a colonoscopy.

GREAT MOMENTS IN FOREIGN CINEMA

The European Commission put a video clip on YouTube promoting European films by showing 18 couples having sex with the tagline "Let’s come together."

STANCE IS TOO WIDE … STANCE IS TOO WIDE … MALFUNCTION … DOES NOT COMPUTE …

The mayor of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., suggested the city create a robot toilet to combat gay sex in public bathrooms.

COME ON, YOUR HOLINESS — THEY JUST NEED TO BE "PERFECTED"

Pope Benedict XVI declared that Protestants don’t have real churches and their ministers are all phonies.

PERHAPS THE KID CAN’T GO TO SCHOOL ANYMORE, BUT AT LEAST HE WON’T HAVE TO BE PERFECTED BY ANN COULTER

The Supreme Court ruled that a high school student could be suspended for displaying a sign that read "Bong Hits 4 Jesus."

THE OFFIES, OF COURSE, ARE PRODUCED LOCALLY, AND YOU CAN SEE THE QUALITY CONTROL …

A news Web site in Pasadena outsourced its local reporting to India.

BOOM GOES LONDON, BOOM PAREE

Former senator Mike Gravel announced during a presidential candidates debate that the other Democrats frightened him and asked Barack Obama whom he wanted to nuke.

WELL, AT LEAST WE KNOW WHO THE REPUBLICANS ARE GOING TO NUKE

Sen. McCain changed the lyrics of the Beach Boy’s "Barbara Ann" to "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran."

APPARENTLY, MEMBERS OF THE US SENATE DON’T GET OUT MUCH

Sen. Joe Biden declared Obama is "the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."

Godzilla versus Mothra

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› sarah@sfbg.com

When retired entomologist Jerry Powell caught two tiny light brown apple moths in a blacklight trap in his Berkeley backyard last winter, he had no idea of the furor his find would unleash — especially in the communities that were subsequently sprayed with female moth pheromones, a process that could come to San Francisco this spring.

Native to Australia and now found widely in New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the LBAM (or Epiphyas postvittana, as it’s known in bug circles) is classified as a plant pest, but it had never before been reported on the United States mainland, though it was found in Hawaii in the late 1880s.

So its discovery, first in Powell’s trap in February and then throughout the Bay Area and the Central Coast in March 2007, drove the US Department of Agriculture to declare a statewide emergency and issue quarantine and extermination directives.

The USDA’s problem, as Powell explained, is that unlike many moths, which only lay eggs on oak trees or eat holes in sweaters, the LBAM can lay eggs on and eat many, many plants.

"From each batch a hundred tiny caterpillars hatch and feed on a wide variety of shrubs and trees, using silk to tie the leaves up into bundles," Powell told the Guardian.

According to the USDA’s Web site, this pest could infest up to 80 percent of the continental US and attack 2,000 types of plants, causing huge economic and environmental damage.

Officials with the California Department of Food and Agriculture estimate the LBAM could cause up to $640 million annually in crop damage and control costs in California alone.

So starting last summer the CDFA required nurseries to either destroy infested plants or treat them with chlorpyrifos, an organophosphate pesticide derived from World War II nerve gas.

The agency also made ground applications of Bacillus thuringiensis (a genetically engineered bacteria) and hand-applied female moth pheromones in other infested areas, including Napa, Vallejo, and Mare Island.

But the agency’s most controversial act was the spraying of entire communities, including Santa Cruz, with Checkmate, a synthetic female moth pheromone made by the Oregon company Suterra. Since male moths use the real pheromone to detect females, flooding an area with similar-smelling stuff is supposed to confuse them and prevent mating.

The controversy, according to four lawsuits filed in Monterey and Santa Cruz counties, in which 73 percent of the moths have been found, began when the CDFA acted with minimal notice, without fully disclosing Checkmate’s contents until after the spraying occurred, and without adequately demonstrating that the moths were enough of an emergency to exempt the spraying from the California Environmental Quality Act.

Not to mention the sentiment, expressed by numerous members of the sprayed-on communities, that they felt as if they had been airlifted into Vietnam. For three nights in a row crop dusters, flying at 500 to 800 feet, traversed the skies, coating homes and gardens, parks and playgrounds with scentless, invisible, and largely untested female moth pheromones while freaked-out citizens were advised to remain indoors to avoid unwanted exposure.

Numerous health complaints were recorded after the spraying, along with questions about the scientific efficacy of the plan and the worry that the CDFA had paved the way to do an end run around due process — and next time could use heavy-duty pesticides.

Gina Solomon, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Guardian the spray’s contents are everyday chemicals, often labeled natural or organic, that degrade pretty rapidly into nontoxic by-products.

"But we did have a concern about tricaprylyl methyl ammonium chloride, a mild respiratory irritant, which could be of concern in a high dose to sensitive asthmatics," Solomon said.

Solomon gave the CDFA credit "for not picking a pesticide off the shelf," adding, "But it’s funny to see them trying to do the right thing, then tripping up over the public process. People don’t like planes going overhead spraying stuff and feeling like this is happening without their consent. I feel that if [the CDFA] is going to be inflicting this stuff on us, they need to let people know exactly why."

And with some scientists claiming that pheromones aren’t powerful enough to attract every single moth, Solomon is concerned the CDFA could decide to spray more toxic stuff.

"They could technically spray an insecticide, but I guarantee they’ll face a major protest, and it wouldn’t make any sense," Solomon said. "For all its nastiness, the moth is not a human health threat. It’s a threat to agriculture, nurseries, and gardens. We’re not talking about malaria."

Retired entomologist Powell suspects the LBAM was well established in California when he found it, given that it was trapped in a dozen counties within the next month.

"They had probably been here a few years before they happened to bumble into my light trap," he said. "And whenever you have anything that feeds on all kinds of plants, it doesn’t become a general defoliator but gets scattered around and causes minor damage. The problem is for nurseries that were forced to shut down and fumigate, but it’s not likely to become a noticeable pest in the garden. It’s likely to attract parasites and predators of similar species in the area."

James Carey, a professor of entomology at the University of California at Davis, is not a specialist in the LBAM. But he does know about invasive biology, having worked on the Mediterranean fruit fly. And in Carey’s opinion, the moth can’t be eradicated. It’s already widespread, he said — and disruptive mating pheromones have never been able to eradicate anything.

"It’s not numbers that matters, but numbers of locations," Carey told the Guardian. "It’s like metastatic cancer, where it’s not a matter of a tumor but of tens of thousands of tumors. So any [pockets of moths] that are not 100 percent eradicated can repopulate entire areas."

He acknowledges the USDA’s valid pest-related concerns. "But their entomologists should be able to argue that eradication is feasible, or face the facts that without effective tools not only to eradicate but to detect the moth it’s not possible," he said. "Pheromones are weak tools; not all moths come or respond to them. Even in an orchard they don’t work that well."

Casey warned that the CDFA will try to say that if we can’t eradicate the moth with pheromones, we’ll have to spray more pesticides. "But what if you can’t eradicate it because it’s too far gone?" he asked.

As for the unlikely scenario in which fixed-winged aircraft fly sideways between high-rises and the Transamerica Pyramid as they spray clouds of pheromones across the Castro, Chinatown, and beyond, Carey observed, "These moths can live in little pockets, so San Francisco will become a reservoir for them."

The CDFA’s Steve Lyle told the Guardian that at this point the agency has completed treatment for 2007 and is evaluating what it will do in 2008 and where it will do it.

"It’s fair to say that the entire program is being assessed, but we have made no definitive decisions and made no announcements," Lyle said.

With the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment reassessing whether Checkmate causes harm to people, plants, and pets, Lyle added, "The moth is of serious concern to the feds. Unfortunately, this invasive pest is established in an urban area."

USDA public affairs specialist Larry Hawkins was a little less vague. "Since LBAM has been found in San Francisco proper and in the East Bay, these areas are likely to be treated in 2008," he said. "But we’re considering whether to treat them through ground applications or aerial application."

Hawkins said any control action "will be preceded by informational meetings with the public, so any actions will be fully disclosed."

David Dillworth, executive director of the nonprofit Helping Our Peninsula Environment, which is suing the CDFA over the Monterey spraying, advised San Francisco to get proactive and lean on its elected leaders.

"San Francisco still has time to get Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein, whose backyards will be sprayed, to put pressure on USDA to stop the eradication, since at this point all they can really do is control the moth," Dillworth said.

Pelosi’s press secretary, Drew Hammill, told the Guardian that Pelosi is "checking with state and city officials regarding the spread of this species.

"While the Speaker understands the consequences this moth can have on our precious ecosystem," Hammill said, "she is also concerned about the prospect of spraying any substance into the air in our city and its possible effects on public health and organic farming in our state."

Solar man

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› steve@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Two years ago Tom Price called me from the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast. We didn’t know each other, but he’d read some of my articles about Burning Man, including "Epilogue as Prologue" (10/4/2005), which culminated my seven-part series by looking at how burners were projecting their culture, skills, and ethos into the outside world.

The most obvious example I used was the group that went straight from Burning Man 2005 to Mississippi to help clean up after Hurricane Katrina, which hit during the event. "If that isn’t applying our ethos, I don’t know what is," Burning Man founder Larry Harvey said in my article. "The very skills needed to survive at Burning Man are the skills needed to respond to a disaster."

Price had been a little busy mucking out flood-damaged homes and rebuilding a Buddhist temple in Biloxi, Miss., but the he’d called home for the past five months had finally gotten an Internet connection, and he’d just found my article. "Dude, we’re still here," he told me excitedly by phone. "It’s happening just like you wrote. We’re doing it."

As I started to learn, Price was an accomplished idealist for whom "doing it" means working to save the world. In college in Utah he spent a year in a shanty he erected in the main college square urging the university to disinvest in apartheid South Africa, and his removal led to a court case that expanded free speech rights. He worked as a journalist chronicling threats to the indigenous Kalahari tribes in Botswana and as an environmental activist and lobbyist in Washington DC, where he eventually became the main contract lobbyist for Burning Man, an event he loves.

In Mississippi he turned an encampment of do-gooder burners into an organization he dubbed Burners Without Borders. Price spoke so passionately and eloquently about what they were doing that I just had to go, working with them (as both journalist and laborer) for a week and writing a Guardian cover story about the experience ("From Here to Katrina," 2/22/06).

It was a project and a moment that seemed to capture both the scale of the environmental problems facing this country and the enormous potential of motivated individuals to creatively deal with them.

From there Burners Without Borders went on to create a program that recycles the huge amount of wood used by the more than 40,000 people who now attend Burning Man every year, donating it to Habitat for Humanity for the construction of low-income homes. And the group has sent contingents to do cleanup work after floods in the Pacific Northwest and cleanup and reconstruction in Pisco, Peru, after the massive earthquake there in 2007.

Price became the first environmental director for Burning Man, reflecting its Green Man theme last year.

One of the most notable projects to grow from that endeavor finally came into full bloom Dec. 18, 2007, when a 90-kilowatt solar array — some of which was used to power the eponymous Man at last year’s event — was placed in the town of Gerlach, Nev., as a donation to the Washoe County School District.

It will give the school free, clean power for the next 25 years, saving the district about $20,000 annually — money that can surely be put to better use than paying for fossil fuels.

The project was a joint venture between venture capital firm MMA Renewable Ventures (which put up the money), Sierra Pacific Power (which offered a substantial rebate for the project), and the Price-led burners who donated their labor.

"MMA put up the money, and the rebate from the utility paid back almost all of it, with the difference made up by Burning Man and its volunteers," Price said.

Price said 10 volunteers — including Eli Lyon, Matt Deluge, and Richard Scott, who were in Pearlington, Miss., with us — worked eight hours per day for 51 days to do the work that made the project pencil out.

Matt Cheney, CEO of MMA Renewable Ventures and a resident of Potrero Hill, said he approached people he knew at Burning Man a year ago, wanting to help the event’s new green goals. "One of the simplest ways to do it was to green up the Man with solar," he said.

Price helped guide the project past the anticorporate sentiments of burners. "A lot of people were afraid that Green Man would spell the end of Burning Man because there was corporate participation," Price said.

Instead, this creative partnership has become a model for the future and a job for Price, who is now executive director of the new nonprofit Black Rock Solar, which aims to replicate the Gerlach project at schools, hospitals, and other public institutions in Nevada and other states.

"We’re taking fiscal capital and social capital and combining them in a way that’s really never been done before," Price said.

John Hargrove, who runs the rebate program for Sierra Pacific Power, agrees the burners have created an entirely new model.

"They’re able to do installations that wouldn’t get done otherwise," Hargrove told the Guardian. "Clearly, they are donating a tremendous value to the project. The Burning Man, Black Rock Solar people are very unique. They’re not in it to make money."

Yet the model they’ve created allows capitalists to make money, albeit at lower returns, by tapping into a universal sense of goodwill and a desire to save the planet.

"We call this not-for-profit work. We’re operating on metrics where we don’t have to make our typical returns," Cheney said, noting that the price points for this project were about 25 percent lower than for a typical big solar project. And he thinks the undeniable public benefits of projects like this will attract more support from powerful players in the public and private sectors.

"It was the right moment in time to do something like this," Cheney said. "It’s one of those good ideas that happened at the right time and has taken on a life of its own."

www.blackrocksolar.org

www.burnerswithoutborders.org

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

A hard line on 55 Laguna

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EDITORIAL In spring 2007, Assemblymember Mark Leno talked to Ruthy Bennett, the point person on the A.F. Evans proposal to build a major housing development on the old University of California at Berkeley Extension campus in San Francisco. Bennett was running into some problems: the site’s neighbors didn’t think the project included enough community mitigations. And Evans was looking for ways to fund a much larger community center and possibly some affordable housing.

Leno was interested in the project in part because it included plans for 80 units of housing for queer seniors. Open House, a local nonprofit, had been trying to find a site for an LGBT retirement complex for some time, and Evans had agreed to make that part of its project. The assembly member had a friendly relationship with the chancellor of the UC, which owned the land, and he told Bennett he might be able to intercede and help reduce the lease amount the UC wanted to charge the developer. Leno brought Sup. Bevan Dufty, whose district includes part of the site, to the meeting.

Leno told us he made some progress: the UC had wanted $20 million, but he talked the chancellor down to $18 million. "With that $2 million, we were able to substantially increase the size of the community center," he said.

But at the same time, UC representatives apparently walked away from the table thinking they had a final, done deal — that representatives of the city and the state had signed off on a price, which was now set in stone. "Unfortunately, UC’s position is predicated on a deal that doesn’t work well for moving this project forward," Sup. Ross Mirkarimi told us. Now that Mirkarimi is demanding greater affordability in the housing — which is largely high-end rentals — Evans is saying it needs a break from the UC, and the UC won’t budge an inch.

And somebody needs to budge, or this deal needs to be scrapped altogether — because it’s not good for the city.

Remember: this is public land that’s been used for public educational purposes for a century. Now the UC and Evans want to turn it into a private, for-profit housing complex. And only a minimal amount of that new housing will be available at a price that’s affordable to the vast majority of San Franciscans.

Of the 420 units, only 16 percent (roughly the legal minimum) will be affordable. None of the 80 LGBT units will be rented at anything but market rates unless Open House can raise the money to subsidize them. That’s not acceptable: building high-end apartments for the rich does nothing to help the city’s housing crisis, and while we agree there’s a need for supportive community housing for LGBT seniors, middle-class and poor queers need a place to retire too — and this will do nothing for them.

The project was on the fast track until state senator Carole Migden squeezed the UC and forced a delay until late January. The city has plenty of leverage here: not only does the site require rezoning, but the supervisors would also have to sign off on a plan to hand over a piece of Waller Street to the developer.

At this point city officials need to take a hard line: either Evans and the UC up the affordability level to, say, 40 or 50 percent and guarantee that some of the senior units will be subsidized, or the project dies. Period.

We agree with the neighbors of 55 Laguna who say the site has been empty for too long, is an eyesore, and attracts crime. It’s 5.8 acres of land in a central part of the city, and it shouldn’t remain a crumbling ghost of a former college. But the UC and a private developer can’t set all the terms here either — and the city can do a whole lot better than the deal on the table right now.

Amending the solar plan

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EDITORIAL San Francisco assessor Phil Ting wants to encourage more city residents and businesses to put solar panels on their roofs. It’s a noble idea, but the legislation he and Mayor Gavin Newsom have proposed needs work.

Ting told us he’s concerned that buying and installing solar panels is too expensive and that the cost is discouraging people from taking these steps toward putting the city on a path to greater reliance on renewable energy. So he’s put forward a two-pronged plan to lower the price: Using funds generated by the sale of Hetch Hetchy power, the city would offer cash payments of between $3,000 and $10,000 to residents and businesses that go solar. Then city bond money would be used to finance the remaining installation costs, and customers could pay back the city over 20 years.

The bond money Ting is eyeing comes from a measure passed more than 15 years ago, after the Loma Prieta earthquake, that makes money available for seismic upgrades to commercial property. For various reasons, including the complexity of the requirements, almost none of the $350 million in that bond fund has been spent, so with the approval of the voters it could be redirected to solar programs.

There are several problems with this approach.

We’re always a little leery of spending public money to benefit private property owners (and let’s remember that almost everyone who owns a home in San Francisco has seen its value increase dramatically in the past few years, despite the market slowdown). And while Ting and Newsom are right that the Hetch Hetchy money doesn’t come directly out of the General Fund, it’s still public money that could be spent on other programs — and the mayor is fighting against a plan to spend more city money on affordable housing.

But global warming and energy independence are important enough that we could live with the cash incentives — if the program were tailored to support community choice aggregation and public power. Instead, in its current draft, the plan would amount to a large incentive for electricity customers to snub the upcoming city program and stick with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. The language of the measure requires that applicants for the incentive program be eligible for a similar state program — but that state program is administered by PG&E and two other private utilities and is available only to their customers.

Starting sometime this year, if all goes well, San Francisco will be in the retail electricity business, competing directly with PG&E. Ting told us he’ll make sure the language is fixed to make the program available to all, but we’d go further: a city incentive program should help the city’s efforts. The first benefits should go to city customers, and they should be tailored as incentives for residents and businesses to stick with municipal CCA power and reject PG&E.

The bond money is problematic too. As it stands, landlords could pass along half of the costs of that money to tenants, many of whom don’t pay their own electric bills anyway and thus would get no benefits. That’s got to go: if the city is going to offer cheap loans to let landlords upgrade their buildings (and thus increase the value of their property), the supervisors shouldn’t pass any measure that sticks tenants with any of the costs.

The city of Berkeley is working on a similar program that seems much more simple: property owners can borrow money for solar panels and pay it back through increased property taxes. Sup. Gerardo Sandoval has suggested San Francisco pursue a similar plan, and Ting and the mayor should take that into consideration.

There’s the kernel of a good idea here — but the supervisors need to make some significant changes to what the mayor and the assessor are proposing before this plan moves forward.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

So you want the heartwarming Christmas story, and it almost happened: A 17-year-old girl in Los Angeles girl was dying of leukemia. She’d received a bone marrow transplant, and for some complicated and unexpected reason, her liver began to fail. The doctors at the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center said she’d die without a liver transplant.

As it turned out, a liver was available and the operation could have gone forward — except that the girl’s insurance company, Cigna, refused to pay. This set off a furor — the California Nurses Association organized a protest, word got out on Daily Kos (thanks to blogger Eve Gittleson), and hundreds of people jammed Cigna’s phone lines, marched in front of company headquarters, and generally made such a stink that after 10 days of delay, on Dec. 20, the insurance giant caved and approved the operation.

But there’s no happy ending here: on Dec. 21, Nataline Sarkysian died. The nurses say that if she’d had the transplant as soon as possible, the outcome might have been different. I’m not a doctor and I wasn’t there, so I’m not going to wade into that one.

Here’s what I’m going to say:

Anyone who thinks it’s possible to reform our health care system while leaving these kinds of decisions in the hands of private, profit-seeking insurance companies needs a transplant of the cerebral cortex.

There are cases like this one all the time — people who suffer because health insurance has become a big business that’s all about the bottom line. It’s not news that these big companies routinely reject valid claims and pay their employees bonuses based on how many people are denied health care.

There is no perfect way to provide health care for the entire population of the United States. Any structure that we create will by its nature be large and prone to bureaucratic snafus. There are always going to be limits on resources and hard decisions: Should an insurance pool cover liposuction for an actor who needs to lose 10 pounds for a starring role? (Probably not.) Should it pay for the same treatment for a morbidly obese person who is at risk of heart failure? (Probably so.) Should an 80-year-old person get a kidney transplant while a 23-year-old is left waiting? (I don’t know; do you?)

But I do know that if you leave those decisions in the hands of people who will make more money if they choose one path, then the path of one of the most important public policy issues in the nation will be selected on the basis of greed. That’s the fundamental flaw in our health care system.

I thought the comments of Rose Ann DeMoro, the head of the CNA, regarding the Sarkysian case were right on point. "Every politician who thinks the answer to our health care crisis is more insurance should stop and think about Nataline Sarkysian," DeMoro said. "Insurance is not care."

That’s exactly what’s wrong with the plan the governor and the State Assembly have passed.

Sure, it’s better to have people insured than uninsured. Universal insurance means fewer people getting very sick and dying for lack of primary care. It means fewer people jamming public hospital emergency rooms. But it doesn’t mean everyone’s going to get adequate or decent medical treatment — not as long as health insurance is in the hands of people who consider it first and foremost a big business.

Santa’s secret

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I’m a guy with a platonic, single, straight female friend in her mid-20s who could really use her first sex toy but doesn’t seem comfortable enough with her sexuality to buy one on her own. The holidays seem like the perfect excuse to give a gift that keeps on giving. I was going to get her a gift certificate or gift from a woman-friendly online store, since she may be uncomfortable going into an adult store and a vibrating gift under the Christmas tree might make Christmas morning a little embarrassing.

She’s the first girl I’ve ever met who doesn’t have at least one toy. I don’t think it’s occurred to her female friends to get her a toy or gift certificate, and I imagine she might be uncomfortable with my telling them she could really use a sex toy. But it’s been years since the girl’s had sex. I can see how giving a toy as a gift can be awkward, because it can become associated with the visual image of the gifter. But among friends without a great deal of cash, it could also be uncomfortable for her to receive a gift certificate for $50 or $100. Is there a way around this that results in a more sexually fulfilled and less tense friend?

Love,

Secret Santa

Dear Santa:

She might be uncomfortable with you telling her friends she needs a good buzz-off? Do you think? Please, please, put down the gift certificate and back away slowly. There is no way for this to go well and too many possible bad endings to count. I mean, let’s say you’re right and she really has been utterly abstemious all these years, as opposed to uninterested in detailing the contents of her bedside drawer for you, her straight male friend. Even so, what could be more mortifying than a gift that says she’s hard up and in danger of drying out and all her friends know it? I suppose for maximum mortification you could save the gift presentation for whatever party she and all of your mutual friends will be attending, and let her do the stammering and blushing in public, but I’m confident that the moment would suck for her whether public or alone with you, the friend who suddenly seems to know too much and be thinking too deeply about what does or doesn’t go on between her sheets. You’re mean well, and it’s nice that you care and all, but just don’t.

I see one way you could ensure that she has access to what you have determined she needs, but it’s both expensive and rather ridiculous: on the Romper Room–ish principal that you shouldn’t bring any if you don’t have enough for everyone, pass out the gift certificates to your whole circle, whoever you’d normally be buying presents for, boys and girls alike. Then you’ll just be thought of as generous, if slightly pervy, instead of creepily overinvolved in the sex life of someone with whom you are not and will not be having sex. Unless you actually do want to have sex with her, in which case I still wouldn’t recommend buying her a vibrator.

Oy. This is very complicated. It makes me glad I’m Jewish and don’t have to buy Christmas presents for anyone, let alone receive any. It’s a minefield! Who knew?

Love,

Andrea

Dear Andrea:

We are trying to have a baby. After we have sex, the semen doesn’t stay in but trickles out of the vagina. Why does it happen, and what should we do to keep it in so I can conceive?

Love,

Drippy

Dear Drip:

The only connection between your letter and the one proceeding is the way they produced an involuntary and audible "Don’t do that!" from me as I read them. Don’t have a baby!

Oh, relax. You can have a baby, but you should already know the answer to this, and I can’t help wondering what else you don’t know. The semen trickles out because it’s already done its job. Only a very small part of the ejaculate is made of sperm; the rest is what would be called "inactive ingredients" if your husband were ejacuutf8g, say, toothpaste instead of semen. The carrier fluid coagulates briefly, just so it won’t run down your leg before the sperm have made their escape. Once the sperm have gone, the leftover gunk liquefies and runs down your aforementioned leg to form the "wet spot" of lore. If it didn’t, you’d be carrying the leftover goo from a lifetime of sexual encounters around with you until you scrubbed it out with a bottle brush, and that is not a nice picture.

You’re fine. If your question really does reflect your general state of knowledge about these things, please get a book. Get several. Get a library card. This baby-having business is not simple, and while there is such a thing as too much information, too little information is worse.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea’s on vacation this week; this column ran previously (12/12/06). But she’s still checking e-mail and eagerly awaiting your questions about love and lust!

International intrigue

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION The following story is not entirely made up. But it’s fictional enough that if you think you recognize yourself or your friends, then you must be mistaken.

He had a vaguely European-sounding name and a vague job doing something with the United Nations, or perhaps one of its subcommittees or projects or councils. It sounded important because it had a lot of words in it, and one of those words was Internet. That’s why Shiva met him.

They were at some kind of after-conference party, or maybe it was midconference. Anyway, it was for some center or special interest group at Harvard that was very concerned about the Internet in Africa. Shiva had come late in the afternoon to hear the keynote presentation, which wasn’t actually related to Africa. It was delivered by someone whom she admired, a technologist with a social conscience who would have done something about Africa if he had had time after haranguing the United States government about putting its citizens under surveillance without warrants.

The keynote speaker talked rousingly about how easy it was for governments — even ones in Africa, he was careful to add — to spy on people’s activities online. He talked about all of the great activist groups at Harvard and elsewhere around the world where smart geeks were figuring out ways to hide personal data from invasive states. He invited them all to help out by contributing to several open-source software projects, and then he invited them to the reception for wine and cheese.

There Shiva met the guy with the European-sounding name, who regaled her with stories about the wine in Spain and setting up wireless networks in Africa. He was so entertaining that she forgot to ask him which country in Africa, and then she consciously decided not to ask him since she knew so little about African geography that she might come across as exactly the sort of person who didn’t belong at Harvard. At one point he mentioned Lagos, which she knew (to her relief) was in Nigeria.

One thing led to another, and they wound up at Shiva’s lab at MIT because the European guy got really excited when she told him about her project on assembling virus shells for drug delivery. He would be leaving for Lagos in the morning, he told her, and she thought, "What the hell? I’m going to take this guy back to my lab and fuck him." And she did, and it was pretty hot, especially because he seemed so interested in her work. Before he left they exchanged e-mail addresses.

Lagos is one of the biggest cities in the world, but its exact population is unknown. A 2006 census claims the state of Lagos (which includes the city) has a population of nine million, but locals say these numbers are low and should be as high as 10 or 12 million. A city like that, whose population can’t even be determined to the nearest million, is a good place to disappear.

But the European guy didn’t disappear, and he would occasionally write Shiva e-mails from Lagos, forwarding her links about local politics or commenting on how locals ate this green stuff they called simply vegetable. He was setting up wireless networks and writing reports about them for his UN group or council or whatever. To get data in and out of the country, he wrote, he had to hide it on USB devices that looked like toy models of the TARDIS spaceship. People were so suspicious of anything that looked like a computer.

Eventually, the e-mails trailed off. He was in Switzerland, then Dubai, then Africa again. Never Cambridge. Shiva was busy prepping a paper for Nature, and then she was prepping for a conference. She hooked up with a couple of other people, started exchanging other flirtatious e-mails, then forgot about the European guy entirely.

Until one day she saw a picture of him on her favorite blog, right next to a post about how to make bicycles from foam. Apparently he’d been selling bioweapons information to groups variously labeled terrorists or insurgents, using his UN gig as cover. He had been teaching guerrillas about viruses. Nobody could figure out where he’d gotten his data. They figured it was a disgruntled Islamic militant somewhere, a person with a vendetta against the US government. Shiva never knew if it was her. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who doesn’t know anything about virus shells and has never been to Lagos.

The Ron Paul phenomenon

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› news@sfbg.com

San Franciscans rarely get excited about Republican presidential candidates, and it’s rarer still to see GOP campaign signs in Mission District windows, beat-up old cars, or crowds of enthusiastic supporters flooding the city’s streets. But that’s what Ron Paul has been inspiring.

"I would give my entire net worth to see Ron Paul elected president," a man holding a "Ron Paul ’08" sign on the corner of Powell and Geary on Dec. 16 said. "I’ve never contributed to a candidate’s campaign in my life, but in the past months I’ve given about $600 or $700."

Paul’s frank assessment of the United States as an overreaching empire got his campaign rolling, and it has gathered serious momentum in the past couple of months, as evidenced by an increasing online presence and record-breaking fundraising for November and December. Paul’s essentially libertarian platform is attracting support from a surprisingly diverse range of people, from lifelong members of the National Rifle Association to medical marijuana activists to disenchanted college students.

Perhaps even more surprising, this Republican from Texas is generating significant support among Bay Area voters. "Ron Paul" signs are now visible at antiwar protests, on lawns, and in apartment windows. People who have never been politically active or have never felt excited by a candidate before are spending their free time tabling at weekend farmers markets and walking precincts after work in support of the candidate.

A recent recruit of the San Francisco Ron Paul meetup.com group, which is attracting new members daily, captured the fervor of Paul supporters with this posting: "I can’t believe my new hero is a politician. Never in my life have I encountered any political leader who actually represented me. This country needs Ron Paul desperately."

Despite their demographic diversity, one unifying theme among all Paul supporters is their absolute belief in their candidate’s integrity. He is perceived as a man who says what he thinks and takes action according to what he says; he is seen as a rare breed among politicians, especially those who, like Paul, have served several terms in Washington DC. "My gut tells me Ron Paul is different," said John Harvan, one of about 60 radiant Paul supporters gathered amid Union Square holiday shoppers Dec. 16.

Bay Area supporters — organized through online meet-up groups — were congregated on the chilly Sunday in solidarity with a national Paul fundraising push, or what the campaign dubbed "a moneybomb." Staged to coincide with the anniversary of the 1773 Boston Tea Party, the Ron Paul Tea Party was, as one Web site put it, "a symbolic dumping of these tyrannical systems that thwart our true destiny of Freedom & Liberty!"

The Dec. 16 fundraising push was an unquestionable success, raising more than $6 million in a 24-hour period. Paul’s campaign had already received national attention when it received $4.2 million in donations Nov. 5, which precipitated his much-needed boost in the polls. But $6 million broke the record for funds raised in one day, a record previously held by the John Kerry campaign for raising $5.7 million in 2004.

Most of the donations to the Paul campaign are small contributions from committed individuals. Proving the grassroots nature of Paul’s support, the average size of each donation is consistently around $100.

Yet there is no political mystery to Paul; he has been articuutf8g the same message — one of limited constitutional government, low taxes (if any), and free markets — since he was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1976 from his home state of Texas. And his dependability is starting to gain traction with libertarians, Republicans, Democrats, and independents.

"A real mix of people are brought together by Ron Paul’s message because we sense the danger in the country," Gerald Cullen of San Francisco told the Guardian. "I think the [George W.] Bush administration has just about destroyed the country. Nothing in the Constitution provides for a president to attack another country that hasn’t attacked us."

Paul is a self-proclaimed noninterventionist and has opposed the war in Iraq from the start. He is by no means liberal or progressive; he’s more a classic conservative who opposes government regulation. "A lot of people are frustrated by the different regulations and infringements on our liberty day in and day out," said Ralph Crowder, who lives in Berkeley. "Ron Paul’s not trying to sell you on himself; he’s just selling you the message of freedom."

And while there are varying definitions of freedom, Paul’s fundamental noninterventionist belief translates into a variety of positions that appeal to voters on both ends of the political spectrum. He sees the USA PATRIOT Act as a breech of civil liberties; wants to stop US involvement in the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and other free trade agreements; and supports bringing American troops home from Iraq posthaste.

Appealing to the opposite end of the spectrum, he is also staunchly antichoice, introduced legislation in 2004 to repeal bans on assault weapons, and wants to beef up the US’s borders.

Adrian Bankhead, who also lives in Berkeley, wants Paul to be the Republican nominee but disagrees with his social policies too heartily to vote for him in the general election. "His social views against immigration, abortion, affirmative action, and women make me nervous," Bankhead told the Guardian. But Bankhead respects what he sees as Paul’s fundamental honesty: "He is the only Republican nominee who would not steal the election in November."

However, Bankhead’s position is a minority one among Paul supporters. Crowder and Cullen, for instance, agree with almost everything Paul says. "There’s not much difference between where he stands and where I stand," Crowder said. And Cullen, who worked for Paul during his 1988 bid for the presidency as a Libertarian candidate, sees the candidate’s principles as "very much in line with the old Republican Party principles … before the madness took over the country."

Stephanie Burns, one of the main organizers of online Bay Area meet-up groups, says she agrees with Paul "all the time."

There are more than 80,000 Ron Paul online meet-up members around the country — 452 in the San Francisco group as of the writing of this article — and most of them find themselves in complete agreement with Paul’s perspectives.

Scott Loughmiller sees the Paul campaign as being in a prime position to steal the nomination, with his polling numbers rising, his momentum building, and plenty of money in the coffers. "We’re right where Kerry was in 2004 going into the primaries, when [Howard] Dean had already been crowned winner by the media," Loughmiller said.

A lousy casino deal

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OPINION After spending millions in campaign contributions, four of the state’s wealthiest and most powerful tribes — Pechanga, Morongo, Agua Caliente, and Sycuan — have cut themselves sweetheart deals for one of the largest expansions of casino gambling in United States history.

As a California Indian and vice-chairman of the American Indian Rights and Resources Organization, an organization working to protect the civil rights of Native Americans, I am deeply concerned that the deals on the February ballot — Propositions 94, 95, 96, and 97 — benefit four tribes at the expense of other tribes, the workers at these tribes’ casinos, and California taxpayers.

The big four tribes bring in huge profits from their existing casinos and spend heavily to influence state laws. Yet they are eager to deny California voters their right to decide this issue and have fought to keep these deals off the ballot and prevent the voters from having their say. Could it be that the big four tribes know their sweetheart deals may not hold up to voter scrutiny?

Here are a few reasons to vote no on Props. 94, 95, 96, and 97.

Labor unions oppose the measures because the deals would shower four wealthy tribes with billions in profits but fail to ensure the most basic rights for casino workers, including affordable health insurance. A study conducted by David Farris, a University of California at Riverside professor of economics, found that Agua Caliente’s health coverage is so expensive that 56 percent of the dependent children of casino workers are forced into taxpayer-funded health care programs.

In addition, the expansion of tribal gaming in California has seen an increase in the number of human and civil rights violations, especially within tribes that have gaming operations. These abuses have resulted in thousands of disenfranchised Indians being cut off from or denied health care benefits, elder benefits, education assistance, and other social services provided by their tribal governments.

Other tribes also oppose the deals. Just four of California’s 108 tribes would get control over one-third of the state’s Indian gaming pie. The deals would create dominant casinos that could economically devastate smaller tribes and local businesses. Moreover, the big four deals fail to adhere to the purpose and intent of previous gaming initiatives, which led California voters to believe there would be modest casino expansion and that Indian gaming would benefit all California Indians and taxpayers.

The big four deals would give these tribes an additional 17,000 slot machines. That’s more than all of the slots at a dozen big Las Vegas casinos. As a result, California would become home to some of the largest casinos in the world.

While the big four would make billions of dollars from these new deals, promises to taxpayers would fall short. The claims about the amount of money the state would get under these deals are wildly exaggerated, and the state’s independent, nonpartisan legislative analyst called the tribes’ figures unrealistic. In fact, under these deals the big four tribes themselves would determine how much revenue they would pay to the state.

Join labor unions, educators, public safety officials, tribes, taxpayers, senior groups, and civil rights and environmental organizations and vote no on 94, 95, 96, and 97. *

John Gomez Sr.

John Gomez Sr. is vice-chairman of the American Indian Rights and Resources Organization.

Politics as cryptography

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› news@sfbg.com

In his new book, Cracking the Code: How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America’s Original Vision (Berrett-Koehler), author and Air America radio personality Thom Hartmann offers a how-to manual for expressing political viewpoints. He says the left’s struggles are not the fault of liberalism as an ideology; the problem is that many liberal politicians simply do not know how to talk to people.

Part self-help book, part populist polemic, Code puts our country’s political discourse under the knife and dissects how master communicators like Bill Clinton, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan won elections by talking their way deep into voters’ consciousnesses. He spoke with me by phone.

SFBG The poet Muriel Rukeyser said, "The universe is made of stories, not atoms." You have a similar view of the political universe, don’t you?

THOM HARTMANN Story is the way we transmit culture. Story is the way we remember things…. The story we call politics is the story of how to best accomplish the common good.

SFBG In Cracking the Code, you trace the lineages of the modern conservative and liberal stories to two philosophers, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.

TH The conservative worldview is grounded in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. You could argue that the Adam and Eve story is an early articulation of it as well. This [story] suggests that people are intrinsically evil, and because of that we have to find the most meritorious, the few who are good, and put them in charge. And small-d democracy with a lot of people participating is not such a good idea….

The liberal story came out of John Locke, but also [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau and eventually Thomas Jefferson. It says the vast majority of people are good and therefore collective wisdom can be trusted. The more people that participate in democracy the better. That’s why the liberal founders of this country put "We the People" as the first three words of the Constitution. It wasn’t "Us the meritorious few, us the ones who are in charge." It was "We the People."

SFBG You say that after Sept. 11, George W. Bush was able to get even liberals to buy into the conservative story. Do you believe it’s still a powerful enough narrative to bring another Republican into the White House?

TH Yes, I think it’s possible. Particularly if we don’t have Democrats stand up and say, "I’m not afraid anymore." I’m still waiting for a Democrat to stand up like Franklin Roosevelt did and say, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, and we will not be frightened."

We’re wired for survival first and foremost. The reptile brain is the most primitive part of our brain. [It] is where fear is processed, and it’s all-powerful. So those people who motivate us with fear and danger are, over the short term anyway, typically going to have success. The problem is, it’s sort of like whipping a horse, these "moving away from pain" strategies. The more often you whip a horse, it’s going to go faster and faster until it hits a limit, and then it’s going to fall over dead…. At some point people say, "Wait a minute, you’re fearmongering. You’re the little boy who cried wolf."

SFBG You speak in the book about effective communication inducing a kind of trance.

TH If you want to teach somebody something, they have to be in a kind of trance state. And I refer to the techniques for bringing that on as "inducing the learning trance." Mostly these have to do with pacing and using different modalities as you speak.

The big mistake that John Kerry made against George [W.] Bush in 2004 was that he induced a boredom trance while Bush induced a feeling trance. Bush communicated feelings. They were clumsy, yes, but that made it more intense, frankly. Kerry communicated ideas and concepts. But people don’t vote on ideas and concepts. They vote based on their feelings.

SFBG Ronald Reagan was pretty much the master at appealing to emotion, wasn’t he?

TH Ronald Reagan, FDR, and Jack Kennedy were three of the greatest communicators that we’ve had in the White House…. What made them great was, first of all, their ability to be multimodal in their communication. They talked about their vision for America, they talked about their story of America, and they gave America a sense of what they thought it could be.

Number two, they all principally used "moving towards pleasure" strategies instead of "moving away from fear" or "pain avoidance" strategies. In other words, they held up an ideal of what we wanted to move towards as a country and made us proud of ourselves.

Number three, they communicated emotion and always used story and emotion to pass along information.

SFBG You point out how Reagan picked up one of Kennedy’s themes, which Kennedy himself picked up from John Winthrop: the "America as a city on a hill" theme. Except Reagan inserted a key word into its phrasing, didn’t he?

TH Yes, shining. He dramatically improved the "America as a city on the hill" metaphor by making us a shining city on a hill. He put that word in, and it gave the image even more power.

What’s interesting is … Reagan’s notion of America as the city on the hill was very different than Kennedy’s. John Kennedy’s idea of the city on a hill was that the entire world is looking at [America], and every single one of us in the country is the city. From the highest and best to the poorest economically, we are all part of that city on the hill, and we welcome people in to participate in it. Reagan, on the other hand, his version of the city on the hill was we’re the castle, we’re the fortress, we’re the place where Cinderella the lowly commoner hopes one day to get in and dance with the prince.

SFBG I noticed your Wikipedia page says you campaigned for Barry Goldwater in your youth.

TH When I was 13 years old, my dad was active in the local Republican Party, and I went door-to-door with him. I read [Goldwater’s] autobiography Conscience of a Conservative [Victor Publishing Co., 1960]…. I even went to a John Birch Society meeting. I was convinced that the communists had infiltrated the State Department and they were coming to get us. But within two years I had completely shaken myself out of that trance. There’s nothing like growing up, going off to college, and discovering that you’re of draft age and your government wants to kill you. Not to mention being exposed to ideas beyond what I had learned up to that point, [like] the core concepts of the Enlightenment.

SFBG So you heard a different story.

TH Exactly, and I lived a different story. I really saw America differently the first time one of my friends came back in a box from Vietnam.

SFBG My mother is a big fan of your radio show. But she lives in San Diego, and the Air America affiliate there is either going off the air or has already gone off the air.

TH It went off the air last week, actually.

SFBG Can you talk about the future of progressive media in light of that kind of setback?

TH The first two or three years that conservative talk radio was on the air, it struggled terribly. But then it reached the point where advertisers realized they were getting results and program directors realized that they had a core listenership, and it started to take off….

In the next year or few years I think there’s going to be a broad perception shift across radiodom that beyond the ongoing feast and famine of Air America, liberal talk radio is here to stay…. Right now the conventional wisdom [for program directors] is "nobody ever got fired for putting Rush Limbaugh on the air." When the conventional wisdom becomes "nobody ever got fired for putting Thom Hartmann on the air," then everything will change, and I think we’re very close to that.

Green City: Climate change could spark more wildfires

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› news@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Imagine a future in which hundreds of thousands of people in the more arid parts of the country flee wildfires. Imagine a future in which many of those people never return home when the winds shift and the temperature drops because the blazes have left their property a smoldering husk. Imagine this happening with ever more increasing frequency until it’s hard to tell where one fire season ends and the next begins.

Hard to imagine a future like that?

Then maybe it’s easier just to remember last summer’s fire season, when the fires in the American West and Southwest forced the evacuation of more than a half-million people and burned thousands of homes. That terrifying summer could become a more regular reality under our current climate-change trajectory.

Scientists generally don’t describe ecological changes in such apocalyptic terms. But it’s hard not to when faced with the early results of major experiments being conducted at the Nevada Desert Research Center. These experiments are designed to show the impacts on desert environments of climate change caused by soaring levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

"We need to see how natural ecosystems are responding to changes in the global climate," Desert Research Institute scientist and project director Lynn Fenstermaker said. "In particular we are interested in how well certain ecosystems are going to be able to sequester [contain in the soil] the additional carbon that’s being produced by fossil fuel burning."

Rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere are one of the main causes of global warming and could create all kinds of environmental mischief, particularly in sensitive desert ecosystems.

These changes could have devastating consequences, with effects including increased growth rates for plants, increased rain, and shifting varieties of plants and animals. These transformations may allow invasive, nonnative species to gain footholds, scientists warn. And with the additional fuel on the ground come bigger and more destructive fires.

The Nevada Desert FACE Facility is hosting one project to study these effects. FACE stands for Free-Air CO2 Enrichment. It’s a 10-year collaboration between several Nevada universities, the Desert Research Institute, the National Science Foundation, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the Department of Energy. The two-square-kilometer desert facility is located on the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles north of Las Vegas.

FACE allows scientists to raise the CO2 level of large plots of land. For this project the concentration of CO2 is raised 50 percent above the present atmospheric levels in three plots in the Mojave Desert, North America’s driest ecosystem. It’s done by essentially fumigating the area with the greenhouse gas.

"Early results have shown that when we have a wet winter, an El Niño winter, we have invasive grass species producing a lot more and a lot bigger plants [including red brome, a relative of cheat grass]. This particular species leaves a lot of dead biomass [plant matter] on the surface, and then you get lightning strikes and then these nice rangeland fires," Fenstermaker said.

The worst part is that the wildfires also contribute to the carbon load in the atmosphere.

Experiments like those at the Nevada Desert Research Center are necessary because some 40 percent of the earth’s land surface is arid or semiarid, with more land becoming desert each year. This process — the degradation of formerly productive land, often caused by humans — is called desertification. It’s already responsible for an unknown number of deaths. For example, according to US Geological Survey documents, between 1968 and 1973 the desertification-caused Sahel drought in Africa led to the deaths of up to a quarter of a million people and the collapse of the agricultural bases of five countries.

Will increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere cause devastating fires, more powerful hurricanes, decreased land productivity, and inconceivable starvation? It may be hard to imagine that sort of future — and even harder to accept that it may already be happening.

D. Brian Burghart is the editor of Reno News and Review. View the climate-change study at www.unlv.edu/Climate_Change_Research/NDFF/NDFF_index.html.

Comments, ideas, and submissions for Green City, the Guardian‘s weekly environmental column, can be sent to news@sfbg.com.

Switching sides

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Following the waves of layoffs that have occurred over the past year at several newspapers in the Bay Area, former top editors and reporters are reinventing themselves as media spokespeople, also known as "flacks," after the jackets that deflect incoming rounds of ammunition. At least a half-dozen prominent journalists have succumbed so far.

Their job now is to stamp out unsettling questions from their former colleagues or put a positive spin on bad press, like calling a slight dip in San Francisco’s homicide rate last year a huge success for Mayor Gavin Newsom or characterizing his lurid affair with a subordinate as a chance for him to heal emotionally.

They’re perhaps most famous for the phrase "no comment," but flacks the world over would likely prefer a more honorable description, like the one promoted by the Public Relations Society of America: "Public relations helps our complex, pluralistic society to reach decisions and function more effectively by contributing to mutual understanding among groups and institutions."

Spoken like a true flack.

So who better to work as a media relations executive than a former reporter? Newspaper insiders know more than anyone else how to kill a story or at least blunt its impact by instilling doubt in the mind of the reporter. It’s not uncommon for journos to hear "That’s not a story" from the new flacks.

Another tactic, used by C.J. Cregg, the fictional flack in Aaron Sorkin’s television series The West Wing, is to invite uncooperative reporters out for coffee and off-the-record chatter until they’ve been befriended. District Attorney Kamala Harris’s press office is famous for coffee invites.

Among the newspaper expatriates:

•Chris Lopez, an editor of the Contra Costa Times who was laid off by parent company MediaNews Group last year, took a job as a communications director for the Denver host committee of the Democratic Party’s 2008 convention.

•Paul Feist, formerly the Sacramento bureau chief for the San Francisco Chronicle, was appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger earlier this year to serve as a communications secretary for the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency.

•Tom Honig, who recently departed as the longtime editor of the Santa Cruz Sentinel, accepted a job with Armanasco Public Relations, an affiliate of Hill and Knowlton, which represents such illustrious clients as McDonald’s, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., and Starbucks. Hill and Knowlton helped McDonald’s diminish fallout from the 2004 documentary Super Size Me, in which filmmaker Morgan Spurlock attempted to survive exclusively on the fast-food chain’s food for 30 days, with disastrous results (his health condition plummeted).

Honig, however, promised Sentinel staffers Nov. 30 that he wasn’t betraying the values of news reporting and proclaimed himself a martyr hoping to save the Sentinel from further staff cuts enacted by MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton.

"Just because you’re in public relations does not mean you’re a liar," the paper quoted Honig as saying. "What I do now is tell people’s stories. This is just another way to tell people’s stories."

He’ll make a praiseworthy spinner indeed.

Lopez and Honig could not be reached by deadline. Nor could we get hold of a spokesperson for the spokespeople at the Public Relations Society of America. Feist wouldn’t comment when we contacted him.

There are other defectors. A former Chronicle reporter from the paper’s Sacramento bureau, Lynda Gledhill, is now a spokesperson for State Senate leader Don Perata, and a San Jose Mercury News capitol reporter, Kate Folmar, is working for the press office of Secretary of State Debra Bowen. And former Chronicle City Hall reporter Charlie Goodyear is now working for the high-powered SF flack firm Singer Associates.

Newspaper giant MediaNews set the trend this year for pushing career journalists into public relations. The company laid off scores of people after it purchased several newspapers in the Bay Area, including the Sentinel, the CoCo Times, and the Mercury News. But other Bay Area newsrooms, including the Hearst Corp.–owned Chronicle, today have literally half the staff they had just a few short years ago.

Lopez previously worked for Singleton’s flagship paper, the Denver Post, which he helped earn a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Columbine shootings. Columnist Charles Ashby of the Post‘s rival Pueblo Chieftain pointed out Dec. 10 that two more former Post staffers are now working as press secretaries for Colorado governor Bill Ritter and reporters from other large Colorado papers are today handling public relations for the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce and the University of Colorado.

Gene Rose of the National Association of Government Communicators insists citizens are better served by bureaucracies that contain former reporters.

"With the shrinking news hole and with less reporters to cover news, agencies and governments are being forced to figure out ways to communicate more directly with people one-on-one," Rose, also a former reporter, said.

The interim dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s journalism school, Neil Henry, documented the phenomenal rise of public relations in this year’s book American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media (University of California Press). In particular, he notes, TV news organizations have grown increasingly reliant on polished video news releases produced by flacks, which sometimes air verbatim, as opposed to expending their own dwindling newsroom resources. The VNRs, as they’re called, give "coverage" of a product or idea the veneer of journalistic credibility, when in fact they’ve been created by professional manipulators.

"For the concerned citizen and certainly for the dedicated American journalist, it is horrifying to see how significantly business and political advertising has compromised the mission of the news industry, at times with the industry’s full participation," Henry writes.

He adds that in 2004, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson lured more than 20 journalists, including some of the state’s best, into his administration with the promise of good pay.

So who else in the Bay Area plans to depart for the dark side? No comment.

PG&E contracts: an $80 million legacy

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EDITORIAL The San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved a modest item the other week described on the agenda as "Agreement to Implement a Term Sheet … between the City and County of San Francisco … and the Modesto Irrigation District." There wasn’t much discussion, the action received no notice in the press, and few people outside the office of the Budget Analyst realize just how significant this scrap of legislation really is.

But the vote brought to a close (for now, anyway) one of the most rotten chapters in San Francisco history, a story of corruption, waste, and raw political power that makes many of today’s scandals look like cornflakes. Since 1988, when the city attorney, the mayor, and the supervisors bowed down to Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and signed one of the worst deals in the city’s history, San Francisco has lost more than $80 million.

And with public power back on the agenda and activists discussing the potential for a ballot measure in November 2008, it’s worth reviewing a bit of the history. There are plenty of lessons.

The story goes back to 1983, when city staffers began negotiating a series of long-term contracts with PG&E and the Modesto and Turlock irrigation districts. San Francisco had an obligation under federal law to sell some of the electric power from its Hetch Hetchy dam to the two districts; PG&E would carry that power over its lines and guarantee its supply if low water kept the dam from generating at full capacity.

The negotiations were immensely complex and generated tens of thousands of pieces of paper. The city wanted to raise the bargain-basement rates it had been charging the districts; PG&E wanted to raise the rates it charged for transmitting the power.

Then a Central Valley congressional representative named Tony Coelho got involved. Coelho (who was later forced out of office in a scandal) started talking about the Raker Act — the federal law that gave San Francisco the right to build the dam but also required the city to create a public power system — and suddenly, official San Francisco freaked. If Coelho were to make too much noise about the feds enforcing the Raker Act, the city, which had been in violation of the law for 70 years, could have lost the dam.

So then-mayor Dianne Feinstein cut a backroom deal with Coelho: the city would be allowed to raise rates but had to sell almost all of its power (aside from basic municipal needs) to the districts. That, of course, would ensure that the city had little power left for a full-scale public power system. Feinstein promised that her staff would work out the final details of a 30-year contract.

The negotiations on that contract dragged on, however, as PG&E and the districts kept demanding more. The talks were conducted in secret, at PG&E headquarters. By 1987 city staffers were writing memos calling PG&E’s demands "ridiculous" and "excessive" and stating that the proposed deals would "impose many risks on the city." The negotiations stalled — until Feinstein intervened, overruled her staff, and agreed hands down to the deal PG&E wanted. That was one of the last acts of her administration; Art Agnos was elected to replace her that November and took office in January 1988.

The contracts had to be approved by the Board of Supervisors, and (after the Guardian broke the story and denounced the deals) discussions were heated. Budget analyst Harvey Rose took a hard look at the proposed contracts and, using strong and decisive language, told the board the deals were terrible for the city, would cost taxpayers a fortune, and should be rejected.

Right before the final vote we obtained public records that outlined Feinstein’s sellout — but the documents from the key negotiating period had somehow mysteriously disappeared.

Then a team of seven PG&E lobbyists descended on City Hall, and Louise Renne, a PG&E ally who was then the city attorney, privately advised the supervisors that they would be in legal trouble if they didn’t do PG&E’s bidding. The contracts were approved, with only Sups. Harry Britt and Richard Hongisto voting no. Our front-page headline of Feb. 24, 1988, told the story: "PG&E 8, SF 2." Although Agnos had run as a public power candidate, he buckled too and signed the contracts — without ever so much as searching for the missing records.

The Dec. 5, 2007, budget analyst’s report notes that the city lost between $2.5 million and $3 million per year on the deals — and during the two years of the energy crisis, when the true downside of what Feinstein, Renne, Agnos, and the Board of Supervisors did became apparent, the tab was $27 million. That’s a total of as much as $87 million of city money thrown away on sweetheart deals with PG&E and the two districts.

After the energy crisis — and after Renne left office — the current city attorney, Dennis Herrera, went to court to renegotiate the deals. The new agreements are much better and will save San Francisco millions. That’s what the board quietly approved this month.

But much of San Francisco’s power is still tied up for another 10 years, and huge damage has been done.

Meanwhile, PG&E is suing the city to keep public power out of the Ferry Building, is trying to corner the market on wave and tidal power in the bay and along the coast, is trying to undermine community choice aggregation, and remains an entrenched, illegal monopoly with far too much clout at City Hall.

The good news is that there’s real talk of a new public power push in San Francisco, and it can’t come too soon. And the lessons from the fiasco of 1988 can and should guide any future efforts.

For starters, nobody — no city attorney, no department head, no mayor — should ever again be allowed to negotiate with PG&E in secret. Any talks with the utility should be recorded and all documents and memos made public before any city agency votes on any contract or deal.

PG&E loves to argue that public power is an expensive proposition and that taxpayers will be on the hook for a lot of money to buy out or create a municipal power grid. But advocates can accurately point to the history of private power in San Francisco: dealing with PG&E has cost the city (and the taxpayers and the ratepayers) far more than the price of creating a municipal grid. The 1988 contracts are a particularly visible example. And 20 years later, the overall lesson is clear: as long as a private company is running the city’s energy policy, the public is going to get screwed.

Editor’s Notes

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› Tredmond@sfbg.com

A friend of mine used to play defensive end for one of the big football schools, one of those places that are constantly in the top 10, win a few national championships, and send a couple of people to the NFL every year. The football players had their own dorm, far away from everyone else on campus. The mirrors in the bathrooms were stainless steel instead of glass, so they wouldn’t get broken when the guys got a bit out of control.

Everybody juiced. That’s what my friend told me. If you wanted to star at the national level and you thought you had a chance at the pros, you took steroids. You just did. It was part of the deal.

So I had a hard time getting agitated about the Barry Bonds scandal, and I’m still having a hard time getting agitated about the Mitchell Report. What, nobody knew there were drugs in major-league baseball? Does anyone believe the owners weren’t encouraging it? Buffed-up players sell tickets.

And now there’s talk of asterisks — the idea that anyone who may have used steroids shouldn’t remain in the record books or in the Hall of Fame without some sort of formal indication that the milestones might be tainted — which strikes me as silly. How will we know for sure who did what when? Are we basing all of this on Mitchell Report–style hearsay? How about the people who may have juiced or may have just worked out harder and suddenly started performing better?

How about the fact that almost every professional athlete today has the advantage of better nutrition, better training, and better medical care than even the most lucky and privileged had 50 years ago?

Besides, steroids are chickenshit.

See, when I look out the window of my office near Mission Bay, I see this fancy new University of California complex that’s going to be home to a huge, brand-new industry based on genetic technology. I’m in favor of stem-cell research, and I have no problem with using embryonic cells, but I think we need to understand what we’re doing here before unregulated private and public sector researchers start doing some truly funky stuff.

Tali Woodward wrote about this in the Guardian three years ago, and plenty of others have been talking about it. It’s going to be possible pretty soon (in 10 years? 20?) to alter the genetic makeup of a fetus to select for or enhance certain characteristics. Some couples may want a boy or a girl. Some may want to avoid a family history of hemophilia or heart disease.

And some may want a kid who can run really, really fast or has exceptional vision, lightning reflexes, and the strength to hit a baseball 500 feet.

Lee Silver, a molecular biologist at Princeton, talked about this in 1997 in a book titled Remaking Eden (Avon Books). His thesis, in part, was that certain human beings — the "GenRich" — will be born with powers and abilities far beyond those of the weaker "Natural" class.

And which people do you suppose will play professional sports?

When there’s so much money at stake and the private sector is running the game, steroids are going to seem like lemonade. That’s what we should be getting agitated about.

Loose women

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› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I have a good one for you! What does being pregnant and having a baby do to your body? Is it true that birth will enlarge your vagina, or make it "loose?" Does it get worse if you have more children? Is it noticeable to men? What about if you have a C-section? Are there other postpartum changes to a woman’s body that affect how much she enjoys sex?

Love,

Trepidatious

Dear Trep:

The harsh truth is that pregnancy and childbirth usually do cause physical changes (thanks for asking!), although these are by no means always dire or even particularly notable. The change you sound most concerned about is vaginal looseness and yes, it does happen. As I am constantly repeating, the vagina is not a fixed size like a train tunnel. It is a potential space, like a sock. Even so, it’s supported by a whole complex of structures in the pelvis: not only muscles but also connective tissues of various types, all of which can get stretched out of shape, weakened, or even torn. Tone at the front of the vagina, where we feel most of the sexual sensation, can be lost due to perineal stretching, tearing, or the increasingly unfashionable but still sometimes necessary episiotomy. Nerve damage is fairly common too, and we need those nerves for more than just sensation; they also tell our muscles what to do. So while the sort of looseness that a million extremely crass jokes are built on may be rare, it’s probably not as rare as the completely pristine and unchanged postpartum vajayjay. Change happens, and yes, pregnancy itself — a.k.a. carrying a smallish medicine ball firmly lodged above your cervix for half a year — is enough to do some of the changing.

There’s an excellent if not particularly cheerful article called "Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Your Pelvic Floor: Understanding the Connections" at www.augs.org/custom/kb/answer.cfm?id=61. It’s adapted from a book called Ever Since I Had My Baby (Random House, 2003), which sounds informative if a bit dispiriting. Do we really want to know that we might lose a fair amount of the sensation we enjoy during intercourse? Do we want to know how extremely common a little bit of urinary stress incontinence — something we thought only happened to great-grandma — really is? Actually, yes, we do. Much of the potential damage can be avoided or at least mitigated by good care and careful choices, so of course we want to know about these things ahead of time.

I looked up "changes after childbirth" or some such thing on About.com yesterday and found the usual sprightly lecture on doing your Kegel exercises. Under the "Did you find this article helpful?" heading was a large, crabby "No!," which cracked me up. I’m sorry the Kegels didn’t work for Crabby Reader, but in truth they’re about all we’ve got in our looseness-mitigation and restoration of continence arsenal. There are surgeries, but surgery is expensive and risky and requires the kind of recovery time that mothers rarely have available for lolling about on the chaise longue sipping sweet tea. In truth, a lengthy course of Kegels, energetically performed, can vastly improve muscle tone and help prevent its loss in the first place. Exercising your hoo-ha can feel undignified, but being afraid to sneeze (or laugh!) for fear of leaking is damned depressing. After all the Kegels there may still be a little extra space up there, but frankly, that can be put to good — or at least entertaining — use. It’s the tonelessness toward the front that both partners can find dismaying and that inspires the jokes that end with (please forgive me, mothers everywhere): "Flashlight? Hell! Help me find my keys, and we can drive out!"

Other changes you wonder about (arousal, lubrication) are generally more of a more hormonal nature and will right themselves in time. "But what other long-term disfigurements and indignities await?" the anxious nullipara asks. Have you seen those trend pieces in the papers on the so-called mommy makeover? That’s a tummy tuck (for weakened abs and loose skin), lipo (to remove new fat deposits on hips, thighs, or belly), and breast augmentation (for deflated boobs). Not always mentioned but also available: trimming or plumping stretched or saggy labia and a little internal spiffication. Think what you like about the doctors who push such services and the women who feel they need them. Many of my own such thoughts fall on the uncharitable side, and a browse through those cosmetic surgery Web sites, which are as unappealingly (to me) slick and pink as a freshly Brazilianed mons veneris, does little to change my reaction. Still, if you need help, you need it, and we should be glad the procedures are available to those in need, even if it’s hard not to think about all of the yachts and country-club memberships some of those unwarranted labiaplasties are buying.

Love,

Andrea

PS Don’t forget my favorite girl-power Web site, Shape of a Mother (theshapeofamother.com/home.php). Consciousness raising, not boob lifting!

Andrea is home with the kids and going stir-crazy. Write her a letter! Ask her a question! Send her your tedious e-mail forwards! On second thought, don’t do that. Just ask her a question.

Humans are dogs

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION Two new studies of animal intelligence caught my attention last week because they prove that humans are no better than dogs and monkeys. This is something I’ve always felt to be true on an anecdotal level, and now cognitive science backs me up.

A researcher in Vienna, Austria, trained dogs to sort photographs into two categories: pictures of other dogs and pictures of landscapes. This is big news because it means that dogs not only recognize what’s happening in symbolic visual representations (photos) but can also figure out how to translate an abstract concept ("dog") into a category of pictures. Previously, nobody thought dogs could categorize photographs or even abstract concepts other than "food" and "enemy."

The other study is even better, partly because it’s called "Basic Math in Monkeys and College Students" (oh, those zany editors at PloS Biology). In this study, cognitive scientists gave monkeys and college students a series of very simple tests to determine how quickly and accurately they could add up the number of dots on a screen. On average, the monkeys and students answered in the same amount of time. The students were 94 percent accurate in their answers, while the monkeys were 76 percent accurate. So monkeys are nearly as good as humans at adding dots, even without the benefit of a college education.

What struck me first on contemputf8g these studies is that cognitive science has taken us in an unforeseen direction. This is a field that promises to study consciousness as if it were a machine, to look at thoughts as electrical impulses and biological structures rather than sublime metaphysics. It would seem, therefore, to run the risk of dehumanizing us, of converting all of our crazy, ambivalent feelings into mere blips on a chart. Instead, what cognitive science has done, at least in these studies, is show us how deeply connected we are to the living creatures around us.

By breaking down our thought processes into their component parts — pattern recognition, counting — we are able to see that the building blocks of thought are not unique to Homo sapiens. Dogs and monkeys are doing this shit too. In fact, there is a monkey out there who can add better than a college student (some of the humans did in fact score lower than some of the monkeys in the study).

So what do we do now that we know dogs and monkeys are capable of humanlike intelligence? Shall we test more animals and discover what we already knew about elephants and dolphins having language? I hope so.

If nothing else, this should teach humans to be a lot more damn humble about our supposed niftiness.

Of course, there are dangers in taking this scenario too far. Instead of seeing ourselves as having something in common with animals, we might use this information to make animals into better slaves. Science fiction author David Brin’s Uplift series is partly about this. He describes humans using biotech and genetic engineering to "uplift" chimps and dolphins, giving them human-equivalent intelligence. The creatures become fully intelligent, but socially they remain second-class citizens.

The two transformed species are in a constant struggle to prove themselves to the humans, and often fail; Brin portrays the dolphins as liable to slip back into incoherent animalness when threatened.

Still, we have not yet appointed ourselves uplifters. Humans are at a moment in our history when we are still in awe of animals who can think the way we do. Now we have to figure out the appropriate next steps.

Obviously, we need to test more animals for intelligence, using a variety of methods.

Probably the most oddly hopeful news to come out of all of this is the fact that both of these tests were done without any killing or brain invading. The researchers who did the dog test even invented a special paw-operated touch-screen computer for the dogs to use. I like that. Not only have we discovered that dogs are like us, but we’ve also invented the first dog-friendly user interface. What next? Wii for dogs? That would pave the way for true interspecies bonding. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd whose cat is unfortunately not among the mentally gifted creatures who can add, sort, or even recognize food.

The case for Kucinich

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OPINION At a recent Potrero Hill Democratic Club presidential forum, when the representatives of Hilary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama spoke more about how the candidates made them feel than about their positions on the issues, it first struck me as strange. Eventually, though, their approach made sense — I realized these people weren’t necessarily all that hot about their candidates’ actual policies.

In defending their health care programs, for instance, the Clinton and Obama reps tacitly acknowledged that a single-payer plan was superior to their candidates’ offerings, while the Edwards spokesperson cautioned the audience against seeking a candidate who believed everything they believed.

Maybe it’s the lack of distinct seasons in San Francisco or something, but these people seemed confused about the difference between voting in a primary and in a final election. November is the month when you vote for what you have to vote for; in February you can vote for what you believe in. In November the halfhearted health plan of one of these candidates, which would continue siphoning scarce public funds away from health services and into the coffers of the private health insurance industry, will likely be superior to whatever scheme the Republican nominee offers up. But in the February primary you can actually vote for Dennis Kucinich’s single-payer plan.

Logically, we might ask why any of these front-running candidates who won’t pledge to have all American troops out of Iraq by the end of their first term should expect much support in San Francisco, arguably the nation’s most antiwar city. Why would anyone who opposes this war not back a candidate like Kucinich, who calls for complete troop withdrawal within three months? Or why, for that matter, would voters who support gay marriage not also back Kucinich, a gay-marriage supporter himself?

Well, when I appear as a Kucinich representative at election forums, people answer those questions for me all the time in postmeeting conversations. They and their friends believe in what Kucinich says, they often tell me, but "he can’t win," so they’ll vote for someone who they think can.

Now let’s be honest here and admit that those of us who get worked up about peace and justice issues are prone to complain a lot. We are ever bemoaning the influence of money in politics and the poor job the news media do in covering the real issues. But when we get to the point where a candidate is raising the important issues and we know we agree with him and we still won’t vote for him, then the next time we start complaining, it may just be time to look in the mirror.

Casting a vote against the war in Iraq is a lot easier than marching against it or even writing a letter. But if antiwar voters won’t vote for antiwar candidates, you have to ask why those candidates should go to the trouble of running and why the big-money candidates should pay any attention to the supposed antiwar vote.

Whatever else happens in this election, one thing is certain: if you don’t vote in February for what you believe in, you won’t get to vote for it in November. And then there will be no one else to blame. *

Tom Gallagher, a former Massachusetts state representative, is a San Francisco activist.

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