Opinion

A very prominent feature of the California gubernatorial race has been money, and not in the usual sense of campaign fundraising and expenditures. As in, who has it – lots of it.

Krystal Ball, a 28-year-old democratic congressional candidate in Virginia, has made headlines this past week because photos of her at age 22 were released on a blog (a completely unbiased and respectable one I’m sure). In these photos she is dressed as a kinky, pirate, Santa Claus leading around her then-husband on a leash with a dildo strapped to his nose. In some pictures she mimes rubbing the dildo-nose, and in others she pretends to fellate the dildo-nose. Even one of her girlfriends got some dildo-nose action in another photo (this last point is not as relevant I guess but I’m having too much fun with the phrase \

Urban Dictionary defines “spitting game” as “when a person tries to pimp someone of the female persuasion. Many times it involves one male macking on many other females.”

I had a horrible realization last Wednesday: I’m not perfect.

Am I a freak for encouraging my parents to have sex?

Old habits, that is.

According to a recent UC Davis report, our campus received $679 million to fund scientific research during the 2009-2010 fiscal year. This was a record-breaking amount and a huge increase from just $298 million in 2000-2001. At the same time that research funding grew, student fees rose dramatically. While it’s tempting to connect these two increases, and assume students are footing the scientists’ bills, there is no correlation between the two.

Proposition 215 of 1996 is perhaps the pivotal measure of national drug reform policy, catalyzing popular laws in many other states, impelling unprecedented adjustments to federal enforcement policy. Yet, due to legislative failures and various other factors, it remains largely unimplemented – despite being very widely popular.

Readers may have seen the fliers around campus last week screaming quizzically: “Can we have a revolution?” I did. I was tickled enough to attend a meeting by a group called the Socialist Organizer at Olson Hall last Thursday. Never say never, right? But this time, I don’t mind the designation of general in the naysayers’ army. A revolution, of any kind, is not going to happen in today’s America. I’ll tell you why.

Many people nowadays, myself included, are engaged in a process of soul searching – a quest to find our place in the world and to figure out the meaning of life in these modern times. For me the journey began with a trip back to my childhood hometown in Illinois, where the French-Canadian ancestors on my mother’s side of the family settled in the 1800s.

“Ho-kay. So. Here’s the Earth. Damn, that is a sweet Earth, you might say.”

One of the most important measures on the California ballot this November is Proposition 19, which would legalize and regulate the possession and sale of marijuana.