Opinion

ASUCD senate elections begin next week on Tuesday at 8 a.m. at elections.ucdavis.edu. Students can vote until Nov. 12 at 8 a.m. Results will be announced at 10 a.m. that day.

We've been told many times by UC executives, in attempting to explain the exorbitant salaries offered to its administrators, that in order to attract the top leaders to our university we need to pay them top dollar.

The animals unfortunate enough to be imprisoned, crippled, burned, cut into, poisoned and killed in UC Davis' laboratories are no different than the animals with whom many of us share our homes and think of as friends and family. We would never allow anyone to mistreat the dogs and cats in our homes in ways that are commonplace in laboratories. Outside of a laboratory it would be illegal.

The \

I started thinking about today's column on Sunday. Namely, that I wouldn't write it until Wednesday. Sure, I was hungover, but I wasn't really avoiding it out of a particular laziness or incapacity to get it done earlier. I knew that if I waited, mine could be The Aggie's first column with the privileged information of the 2010 midterm election's results.

Browsing through the Borders clearance bins, as I often do when bored and looking to waste money, I came across a book titled Porn For Women by Susan Anderson. Instantly I thought I had found a great bargain, but then I looked inside. This book wasn't porn at all. All it had was pictures of muscular men doing housework and saying things like "want to snuggle?"

It is an unusual experience to attend an election night gathering for a campaign you've managed. It is even more unusual for it to be a victory party - if you're a Republican in California.

Imagine this scenario: You're hungry and you wish you had a burger, sandwich or a hot dog to eat. To spice up your story, you're in the middle of nowhere, you're dying of starvation and you're a moron. Let me add that only a moron would be starving and unprepared in the middle of nowhere (like the moron from Into the Wild).

Imagine it's your 40th birthday. Give or take a few years, it's around 2030 and you are, like it or not, a middle-aged person of the numerically official type. The specifics of your hypothetical future are irrelevant (except that you're probably fat). The point is, you've lived about half the years of your life and you can safely say your youth, in all its flower frolicking glory, is well in the past, at least in the physical sense of the word.

Do you ever find yourself drifting off in thought when you're really supposed to be paying attention - getting lost in, say, musings of your day or what you're planning to do this weekend?

When I first lost weight, some friends who hadn't seen me in a while would compare my loss to someone else they knew who had lost weight. In this way, I learned that you could lose weight on a juice fast, carnivore diet, questionably legal pill, lima bean diet and origami diet. OK, I made that last one up (but in my defense, you probably could uncomfortably lose a lot of weight if all your calories come from paper foods.) Decades of writing on weight loss, combined with the dissemination of information through the Internet, has given unearned credence to weight loss and weight gain urban legends. I'll go through some of those myths here:.

In a matter of hours, America will be making the fundamental "Decision 2010." Whether it is change for better or worse is anybody's guess. What we cannot afford to leave to conjecture is the reality that extremism reeks all over the "tsunami win" prognosis for the Grand Old Party (GOP). If you don't vote, you'll see the reversal of all that you think is not enough 'progressiveness' under current Democratic leadership. You the people are powerful - at least till the end of today.

Two weeks ago, during National Primate Liberation Week, activists on the quad protested against the use of non-human primates at the California National Primate Research Center (CNPRC) on the UC Davis campus. This shows ignorance of the medical research process. While the CNPRC tries to minimize research on primates, the anatomy of the human body means that sometimes non-human primates are the only option.

Animal testing is often justified through utilitarianism, which states that the suffering of the few is worth the gain of the many. This is the stance taken by the California National Primate Research Center (CNPRC), and it is ethically unjustified.

In recent weeks, college students across California have been inundated with TV, radio, and Internet ads in the governor's race. Young people have come to understand how their votes on Nov. 2 will influence higher education funding and whether California will properly prepare their generation for the new global economy. But what they might not realize is the significance of one ballot proposition that may very well have a larger impact on education than the result of the governor's race: Proposition 25 is actually the most important vote for students.