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.

Apparently, it was a meeting to engage students and push the idea of a revolution, albeit socialist, as the only way forward or out of the current status quo. Before long, one of the organizers mounted his idealist pedestal and categorically spelled hopelessness: the fact that Obama and the Democrats have failed the masses on every issue, from immigration to education.

Obama has deported more illegal immigrants than any other presidential administration in history – almost 400,000. The Obama administration did not do enough, and acted only last minute on SB 1070. Obama is in league with big business and he bailed them out; now they are sitting on $800 billion or so in profits on their balance sheets, and refusing to create jobs. Two billion people go hungry around the globe, while United Nations says there is enough to go around. Three to 6 million Americans are homeless, and 18 million homes have been foreclosed on. Capitalism has proven incapable of satisfying the needs of common folk. Government is run for profit. Our politicians are beholden to corporations that only care about bottom lines. The Democrats claim to be the party of the common man and promise change; they “suck” the energy out of organizing.

“The military and prison industrial complex is…” Work with me here, guys! I am just trying to paraphrase. If you happen to read the dead-leftwing bloggers, you know exactly where this is headed.

Naturally, the question of what to do about it as students did come up: Organize! Socialism-style. The Socialist Organizer wants students to chart (no, make that dredge) the way forward. First, demystify “misconceptions” about socialism that have wide currency currently in America. Next, garner the power in numbers – one college and neighborhood at a time – until the ranks are big enough to (I am only guessing here) shut down government and replace them. What else? We don’t believe anymore in the Democrats; and the Republicans support corporate welfare as opposed to ours. The latter, the organizers claim, are riding the wave of frustration, despair and anger in the country, and making scapegoats of the poor, minorities and immigrants.

The organizers did not quite come to that meeting prepared with all the answers on the way forward. They were looking to engender dialogue on the feasibility of a revolution, looking for input and support. The participants, most of them curious Joes like me, had reservations and concerns. One of them cautioned that we don’t hate the rich, because they sometimes deride the poor out of ignorance. An organizer brought up the current protests in France and tried to elucidate the point that mass protest at the spate of a revolution can bring change; adding that the UC system got more money from the state this year, partly because of fee hike protests on campuses last year. There is no love lost between the Brits and the French, and this student from England said though he is from a country where there is socialized medicine and all, they (Europeans) don’t take the French protests seriously. “It is a common joke that if it is Thursday, the French are on strike,” he jibed. I don’t know that Americans want to go down that route.

And me? I didn’t just observe as I had planned. Let me repeat what I said at the gathering, the very reason I am a naysayer general. The baby-boomers – some of them fought in Vietnam, came back and rode the G.I. bill into the middle class and places further north on the economic ladder. Other boomers (1960s radicals) just grew long hair, tuned out, smoked weed, took “acid” and joined caravans that camped out in D.C. They are currently running everything – from Wall Street to Harvard. They are professors and C.E.O.s today who had the best youth. And they have a “gilded” retirement waiting for them. Our generation? We are screwed! Leave Berkeley today, and go camp out in D.C.; you will be so welcome to join the ranks of the jobless and homeless.

Last I checked, Obama was the socialist for passing a diluted health care bill and financial regulation. Big business has been funneling money into this election cycle incognito via such groups as Karl Rove’s American Crossroads. Capitalism is to reality, what socialism or revolution is to fantasy. Fact!

Having a revolutionary meeting? Let FAYIA SELLU know at fmsellu@ucdavis.edu.

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.

  In the midst of this brutal, over decade-long train wreck of Proposition 215 policy, Proposition 19 is spawned, a cynical and dangerous hoax upon the people of California, an imposter attempting to usurp the cause of genuine cannabis legalization – contrived by what amounts to the OPEC of Pot in Oakland.

  The real nature of Proposition 19: pseudo-legalization, and therefore also pseudo-prohibition.

Proposition 19 allows adults to carry around an ounce, currently a $100 legal infraction in California, not a felony. No big change here, but a clever charade, nudging prohibition just far enough for industrial-scale cannabis producers to purvey their wares, by the ounce, but not far enough for ordinary cannabis consumers to reliably supply themselves, thus inclining them to subscribe to this new retail market.

  Proposition 19 permits only 25 square feet of space per dwelling/parcel in which to cultivate cannabis, obviously not enough for most situations. Self-reliant, sustainable cultivation requires three distinct plant phases: propagation, vegetation and reproduction, and this latter phase must be separated from the prior two phases. A mere 25 square feet of space simply cannot regularly accommodate this diversity of essential activities.

  Proposition 19 only slightly shifts current law, largely maintaining existing prohibition with arbitrary, unreasonable suppression of the scope of activities of individual cannabis consumers of California — so that an entrenched and maximized retail market for industrial-scale producers can become established.

  This initiative authorizes local governments to approve and zone commercial cannabis production and distribution facilities. As witnessed with Proposition 215 policies, however, only a small minority of jurisdictions will likely participate by approving and regulating these enterprises, despite potential tax revenue.

  California will soon become a crazy quilt of “dry or wet” jurisdictions, similar to eastern states’ zoning of alcohol. Faced with traveling long distances and paying a lot for only an ounce of weed, other options will arise.

  Plainly, the black-market will continue to thrive and even expand within such a setting of slightly diluted prohibition.

The obvious question: Who will police this pseudo-prohibition? Permitting personal cultivation but attempting to specifically yet unreasonably restrict it to only certain physical contours, appears to be an infeasible enforcement policy, swapping the simplicity of a sheer ban for prosecuting over inches.

  Policing this vast and weird scene will likely cost much more than present prohibition, while also being inadequate for most cannabis consumers. New criminal penalties will exist regarding juveniles.

  Racially disproportionate enforcement and prosecution will persist, simply shifted from one criminal scenario to another, which is much more difficult to fairly police.

  Jurisdictions (likely the majority) which don’t sanction industrial production and/or retail distribution of cannabis will certainly experience much greater enforcement issues and challenges attempting to successfully police the size of numerous cultivations where found. Black market activity will diminish only where lawful means genuinely exist for convenient cannabis access.

  Patchwork policy of Proposition 19 effectively fragments California into provinces of pot, amidst a remaining countryside of percolating quasi/de facto criminality. Even within these pot provinces, due to infeasibility and inadequacies, criminality persists.

  Depending upon legislative amendments to fix serious problems of a fundamentally flawed format is quite unwise. Proposition 19 will become more legally complex than prohibition, installing a whole new regime of criminal litigation to clog our courts.

  California needs consistent statewide policies on such matters, not the strange landscape of unreasonable, infeasible, adversely segregated and imbalanced consequences of Proposition 19.

BOBBY HARRIS, a resident of Woodland, innovated local governmental implementation of Proposition 215 in 1997.

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.

Students should not worry about financing scientific research. Every time a UC Davis scientist announces a breakthrough, the reputation of the university improves.

While student fees do not go toward scientific research, UC Davis students do benefit from outside support of science. Scientific progress gives our degrees more prestige.

In fact, most of the 2009-2010 science funding came from the federal government. The government-run National Science Foundation gave $12 million to the UC Davis MIND Institute for research into autism. The U.S. Agency for International Development granted $75 million over five years to establish a network to detect and prevent diseases spread from wildlife to humans. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act gave Davis’ California National Primate Research Center $14.2 million to construct a center for research on respiratory diseases.

UC Davis also received funding from charities and businesses. Most of this money doesn’t go toward buying fancy new technology; it pays for the salaries of researchers and graduate students, lab supplies and lab utilities.

From recent surveys it can be seen that funding for science is an investment that pays off. In U.S. News & World Report’s 2011 edition of “America’s Best Colleges,” UC Davis ranked ninth among public research universities nationwide. UC Davis also regularly earns the most citations in scientific peer-reviewed journals in fields such as agricultural sciences, food sciences and plant and animal sciences.

While student fees are increasing, rest assured that scientific funding isn’t coming out of our wallets.

Old habits, that is.

Even if you have access to perfect information, the gap between thinking about a problem and doing something about a problem is more like a chasm. Nowhere is this truer than in health. Most people know and agree that it’s important to exercise, eat healthy, get enough sleep – common sense, right? Less common: people who act on that knowledge.

In the past couple columns I’ve been writing about exercise, something that’s pretty easy to adopt and fit into your schedule. But it’s only one side of the health equation, and the lesser side at that. What really makes the difference is what you eat. And sure enough, it’s much, much more difficult to change your diet. Unlike exercise, which is an activity that you can add to your lifestyle, manipulating your diet is tantamount to reprogramming your way of life. It’s for this reason that a healthy eating public service announcement would be ill conceived. This-is-your-brain-on-french-fries won’t change the way anyone eats. Diets are deeply ingrained habits.

Not to beat a dead KFC-chicken, but research also shows that habits are self-reinforcing. Old habits discourage change by inducing fear in the emotional side of our brain, triggering a flight-or-fight response. This is the logic to running away from our problems.

But there is a way to stop running. A Japanese philosophy called kaizen is a system for changing habits by tricking the brain. The idea is to use the thinking side of our brain to bypass the emotional brain’s fear of big change by introducing deliberate, continuous change, little-by-little. Baby steps. By the time you successfully reprogram your habit, your flight-or-fight won’t know what hit it.

It actually helps that food is so complex, because this allows you to introduce change infinitely. You can change what you eat, how much you eat, when you eat, where you eat, what you buy at the supermarket, where you buy groceries, etc. In the same way that nobody eats quite like you now, the changes you decide to introduce are endlessly customizable.

I’ll suggest three changes to introduce in as many weeks. Before I go into detail, do yourself a favor and sign up for an account on About.com’s CalorieCount (or a similar service online or a Smartphone app). The following advice is virtually impossible to follow without it.

1. Record everything you eat. You won’t enjoy this, but you have to do it. Every time you eat anything, note how much and when. Record that brownie you had this morning because your roommate’s mom baked them for your apartment. Record that CoHo bagel. Should you decide to indulge, at least attempt to record the massacre known as Davis Sushi. CalorieCount and similar programs turn this process into something as easy as a Google search. Spoiler alert: you may find that the process of recording your food is motivation enough to change what you eat. Michel Foucault would have called this knowledge-power: recording something grants you the power to manipulate it.

2. Design the perfect meal plan. With the sophisticated tools of CalorieCount, you don’t have to have a degree in nutrition to design a healthy eating guide (though it helps, a lot). Once you add foods to a hypothetical day, these websites can simulate how many calories you’re getting, what nutrients you’re lacking, and even suggest foods to make up the difference. Have fun with the customization process and make a couple perfect plans if you require variety. Once you design the perfect meal plan(s), don’t do anything for a day or two. Use those days to revisit what you ate last week. Decide what you can reasonably expect yourself to change (even if the changes are small, some small changes are unreasonable). Then, tweak the perfect meal plan to make it more perfect still.

3. Introduce change meal-by-meal. Depending on how much willpower you wish to exert, focus on changing one meal a day to move closer to the perfect plan. Maybe you’ll end up overhauling your current diet to perfection in three days of changing breakfast-lunch-dinner. But I hope you’ll focus on each meal for a week. Remember that small changes still require commitment; there’s an art to eating the same lunch seven days in a row. By week six, you’ll be a food all-star.

Who says old habits die hard? Old habits die slow.

If you need help figuring out the websites, shoot RAJIV NARAYAN an e-mail at rrnarayan@ucdavis.edu and he’ll respond one. word. at. a. time.

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

Wait. Don’t answer that just yet. Before you make your judgments, let me explain.

To me, sex is a good, natural thing. It’s healthy, fun and my only means of exercise. While the old saying may recommend an apple, I find the trick to keeping the doctor away is an orgasm a day.

So, because I’ve adopted such a laissez-faire sexual philosophy, I don’t cringe at the thought of my parents doing the nasty. Really – doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, I accept it because I know what it’s like to go without sex for a while. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. My parents included.

But I know a lot of you may not think like I do. Thank goodness, you’re probably saying to yourself, this guy’s a freak no matter how hard he tries to convince me he isn’t. And that’s okay. I understand that not everyone can talk about sex so easily, even less so with his or her parents.

Take this for example: A 15-year-old girl, claiming to be a sex addict, avoided talking to her mother at all costs and went to the only other person she felt could help her, the one and only Tyra Banks. The Associated Press reveals the teen responded to a request on Tyra’s website for sex addicts to appear on her show. Soon after, execs responded and had her “picked up from her home in Georgia in a limo and flown to New York, where she was put in a hotel, all without her mother’s knowledge.” Now the mother’s suing poor Tyra for causing “irreparable” damages and putting her daughter on a show that was “undoubtedly watched by sexual deviants, perverts and pedophiles.”

There are two things to take away from this mother-daughter squabble gone mainstream. For starters, Tyra’s efforts to better the young female generation via talk show only reach pervs and pedos, apparently. The second: Mothers take not being confided in quite personally.

There are tons of reasons why many of us may not feel too compelled to pull up a chair next to mom or dad, and gab about things like Chlamydia, the appeal of pubic hair or doing it for the first time. Maybe you don’t want your parents always butting into your life. Perhaps sex education at your school was more than enough information you needed on the subject. Or maybe you want to talk to your parents, but they shoo the topic away, more disgusted than if they were to find a rat in the kitchen. Or worse: What if they start getting into their sexual history. That’s definitely where I’d make my exit – sure, I’m open and all, but I don’t need to hear the dirty details.

The fact of the matter is: Parents are just as put off by sex talk as you are. A study at Harvard that surveyed parents and teens on their sexual conversations revealed that about 40 percent of American parents do not come around to talking about safe sex until after their child is sexually active. Teens in the study reported having faced issues before even discussing it with their parents; many had already used condoms or uttered a “no means no” before parents mustered the courage to talk about it.

Perhaps the biggest deterrent from healthy and open parent-child sex talk is the overemphasis on when to have sex and not how to have sex.

Now that we’re in college, we’re obviously a little too old for the birds and the bees. But some things we can talk about are how to handle someone who refuses to wrap it up, how to avoid sexually transmitted infections, how to resist pressure for sex, or how to get your leg to bend behind your head without pulling something. (Okay, maybe not the last one, but you get the idea.)

Your parents are a wonderful resource. They were our age once. They had their flings and got naughty, I’m willing to bet. Maybe you can take advantage of that and use some of their ripened wisdom for your sexual benefit.

But like I said, you’re in college now. You’re as much of an adult as those ‘rents of yours. You’ve learned a thing or two. And maybe your parents are the ones who could benefit from a nice long chat about safe sex. In fact, according to a recent study by Indiana University’s Center for Sexual Health Promotion, male teens were more likely to have wrapped their willies for casual sex than older, “wiser” men. Sure, older gents may be more settled down and less frightened at the thought of being a father, but STIs show no mercy. Maybe you can talk to your parents about condoms, just to make sure they’re being safe. Just a suggestion.

MARIO LUGO has actually given his mom some sex pointers and advice. And yes, she even knows about this little column of his. To talk about how well that conversation went in the Lugo household, e-mail him at mlugo@ucdavis.edu.