The New San Francisco

It’s not just the 22 construction cranes dotting the San Francisco skyline and 5,000 pricey condos and apartments under construction, AlterNet reports.

“Nor is it the fleet of private buses ferrying 14,000 tech workers to Silicon Valley, or the explosion of restaurants and boutiques, or rents doubling, or the spike in evictions, or home sales now averaging $1 million. imgres

What’s happening to San Francisco goes beyond the accelerating gentrification in multicultural districts like the Mission or Mayor Ed Lee minimizing affordable housing woes. The city that’s been a magnet for free spirits and immigrants and working-class people for decades seems to be losing its famous heart. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that its heart is being replaced by a software update.

The best encapsulation of this sea change, which is driven by a booming tech sector that’s generated 13,000 jobs since early 2012, might be this blog from former San Francisco Bay Guardian editor Tim Redmond, who begged the techie beneficiaries to stop treating the city he loves like a “rich kid’s playground.”

“When a 1990s tech-startup guy who admits he was part of the last generation of gentrification is now so fed up with the new arrival of high-paid techies that he’s ready to leave, it’s pretty serious,” he wrote in a piece titled, “The Mission ‘douchebags.’” He ended, “I know, I’m an old fart who is not rich and never will be… But if you’re lucky enough to be rich in your 20s, show some respect.”

“All economic booms bring dislocations, but what San Francisco is undergoing seems deeper because unlike past decades, when hippies arrived in the 1960s and gays came a decade later, locals were not displaced. That distinction has also been noted by longtime San Francisco Chronicle columnist Carl Nolte and by author Rebecca Solnit, another longtime resident, who recently wrote, “The problem is that we understand Silicon Valley’s values all too well, and a lot of us don’t like them.” Continue reading “The New San Francisco”

Psychedelic academics

You don’t have to spend much time at the six-day second international Psychedelic Science conference in downtown Oakland to learn that not all its 1,900 attendees are academic scientists, and that few are strangers to the power of mind-bending drugs. So reports today’s Chronicle of Higher Education:imgres-1

On my first day, boarding the conference’s sunset cruise of San Francisco Bay, I meet Chad, a middle-aged man dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, who says his trips with magic mushrooms have “reawakened him to the beauty of existence. “I am here out of curiosity,” he explains, adding that he has a desire to understand what he has experienced. “It is just really nice to know they are breaking through some of the barriers with formal research. God knows there is a lot of informal research.”

“As the sun sets behind the Golden Gate Bridge, I meet Seabrook. Wearing rings in both ears and a flower badge pinned to his cap, he says he has never had a bad trip in more than 20 LSD experiences. “The main thing I love about this is it is a reunion—I have so many old friends here it is like a family,” he says.

At least half the attendees on the cruise disembark early in San Francisco to join a celebration of Bicycle Day, commemorating the day in April 1943 that the Swiss chemist Albert Hofman sampled the lysergic acid diethylamide compound that he’d discovered and then rode his bike home.

“But dotted among the conference’s psychedelic aficionados, who along with healers, artists, and activists make up the bulk of attendees, are members of another tribe. Researchers in psychiatry and psychology are here presenting their latest findings on the use of psychedelics to help treat anxiety disorders and addictions for which conventional treatments don’t always work.

“Distinguished by their suits and business dress, the researchers are for the most part keeping to themselves any personal experiences with the drugs. They stress the drugs’ dangers as well as potential benefits. And I see none disembark for Bicycle Day. “We are a bunch of serious, sober academics,” Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of California at Los Angeles medical school, told me on the phone before the conference. Grob is presenting the published results of his study using psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, to treat severe anxiety in advanced-stage cancer patients.

“I first get to know Grob—a personable man in a baggy suit with a beard and recently trimmed salt-and-pepper hair—the afternoon after the cruise, accompanying him to a nearby Starbucks to take a break from the conference’s colorful crowds and locate some hot water in which to dunk his echinacea tea bag. “People want to talk to you, they get really interested, and they kind of get in your space, and it’s like, ‘I gotta get my echinacea tea,'” he says.”

 

More at: http://chronicle.com/article/Psychedelic-Academe/139509/

California schools & gender non-conformity

A California lawmaker has introduced legislation aimed at guaranteeing transgender students the right to use public school restrooms and participate on the sports teams that correspond with their expressed genders, reports USA Today.imgres-1

“The bill reflects the accommodations that a number of U.S. schools are being asked to make as Americans start identifying as transgender at younger ages. Continue reading “California schools & gender non-conformity”

Lacking love, bugs choose booze

imgres-3“A male, his affections spurned by a female that he’s attracted to, is driven to excessive alcohol consumption. The story may be familiar, but in this case, the lead characters aren’t humans — they’re fruit flies.”

In a study conducted by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), it appears that  “that like their Homo sapiens counterparts, male members of the species Drosophila melanogaster tend to, for lack of a better term, “get drunk” after being rejected by females, reports RedOrbit. “Fruit flies apparently self-medicate just like humans do, drowning their sorrows or frustrations for some of the same reasons,” Carey wrote on Thursday.

“Male fruit flies that were rejected “preferred food spiked with alcohol far more than male flies that were able to mate” and drank “significantly more alcohol” than those who successfully mated, leading researchers to believe that “alcohol stimulates the flies’ brains as a ‘reward’ in a similar way to sexual conquest,” he added. Continue reading “Lacking love, bugs choose booze”

Covering up in San Francisco

It looks like public nudity is a thing of the past in San Francisco. SF Gate today reported that “Nudists will need to cover up or limit where they show their bare buns after the Board of Supervisors voted 6-5 to pass a ban on public nudity.

“Supervisors Jane Kim, John Avalos, Eric Mar, Christina Olague and David Campos voted to oppose the ban. Campos argued that police resources could better be spent fighting violent crime, instead  of tracking down naked men roaming the streets. Other supervisors argued the ban seemed to infringe on people’s right to express themselves and was merely a problem in a Castro that didn’t need a citywide ban.

“The ban still requires a second vote by the board and approval by the mayor, but if all happens as expected, the ban could go into effect Feb. 1.”