Three supervisors in the county of Santa Clara have decided that food choices are too important to be left up to parents. Because average, adult citizens simply cannot see the insidious link between junk food, obesity and toys, a small group of enlightened supervisors have decided to protect and educate us by mandating the removal of toys from fast food meals.

Who would have thought the small hunks of plastic included in McDonald’s Happy Meals were indeed causing the American obesity epidemic? Who would have known that the simple joy brought to children through the inclusion of Lego Batman and Chops the Lamb were actually ignominious ploys by McDonald’s to bring obesity and heart disease to all the world’s children? They would have succeeded too if it wasn’t for that meddlesome Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors.

According to the supervisors, this mandate was intended to sweep the nation. This action could thereby end childhood obesity. It’s interesting that the epidemic doesn’t seem to be nearly as big a problem in places such as Japan, where McDonald’s and Happy Meals are quite plentiful. Perhaps there should be an investigation into the persuasive powers of Batman and Barbie as opposed to Pokemon and Hello Kitty.

The language of the new law does allow McDonald’s to place toys back in the meal if those meals meet certain nutritional requirements. The restaurants have 90 days to comply. So the toy ban is meant to be a sort of ultimatum to McDonald’s and similar businesses to clean up their menus before they are literally forced to remove one of the competitive advantages that has allowed McDonald’s to dominate the fast food market.

A serious question that should be asked is that in light of the obvious connection between eating fast food and higher rates of obesity, why stop at simply severing the link between the behavior and the result? It would be more expedient to simply ban fast food altogether. They won’t do this because such an aggressive use of governmental power would cause a major pushback.

What the supervisors in Santa Clara County are attempting to do can be described as “choice engineering.” They want to nudge the population in a certain direction without outright violating their freedom of choice. They believe that a relatively small group of “experts” has a better understanding of the way the world works and can better negotiate the perils of choice than the massive number of people in society can.

I wouldn’t argue that eating fast food is okay or that the presence of toys in Happy Meals doesn’t influence a parent’s decision to buy McDonald’s food. I believe that decision, along with most child-rearing decisions, should be left up to parents. It’s a matter of where responsibility should lie.

Ultimately, the choice is over having a loving parent who is deeply interested in your well being to help guide you through childhood, or a few impersonal bureaucrats working in a government office who view you as a number or statistic. The message being sent is that parents shouldn’t have to worry about telling their children no or instilling good behaviors in them that will carry them throughout life.

The more the government restricts choices in this manner, the less capable we will be at acting independently like adults. No matter how brilliant some people may be, and no matter how deeply they look into a set of statistics, they will eventually make mistakes that a very large number of average, responsible people will correct over time.

Other countries have fewer problems with childhood obesity because of lifestyles that, outside the control of government agencies, decrease the chance of becoming overweight.

The decision to remove toys from Happy Meals is a misguided policy that will not stop childhood obesity. Without Happy Meal toys, irresponsible parents who take their children to McDonald’s five times a week might bring them to Wendy’s or Taco Bell instead, but the issue will still remain unsolved and one more slice of freedom will have been taken away.

JARRETT STEPMAN has a few fond memories of collecting Happy Meal toys as a child and he is not overweight. Thanks Mom and Dad! Jarrett can be reached at jstepman@ucdavis.edu.

I don’t really get what’s going on in Arizona.

The New York Times referred to the new law passed less than two weeks ago as the “U.S.’s Toughest Immigration Law,” which would give police broad rights to detain anyone who looks, dresses or acts like an illegal immigrant and doesn’t have the papers to show otherwise. President Obama gave us a wonderfully unjust picture of detained housewives last week when saying in reference to the law, “suddenly, if you don’t have your papers and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you’re going to be harassed.”

How conservatives like Sarah Palin and Brian Bilbray still defend that this isn’t about racial profiling, I’m not exactly sure. Apparently, according to Bilbray, supporters of the law won’t be looking at race, but “at the kind of dress you wear.” So now, not only do you have to look white to stay in America, you have to look middle class, too.

“It’s straight up fascism in the twenty-ten,” my friend Albert said last week. His parents are Mexican immigrants, and he’s the first family member to ever go to college.

Racial profiling, yes. Fascism, probably. But I’ll admit, this isn’t what weirds me out about Arizona. What I find weirder is that the sheriff in its largest county requires the inmates to wear pink underwear to make them feel less like men. What I find weirder is that residents can carry guns anywhere, but they’re not allowed to cut down cacti.

Weird, yes, but strangely comforting that there was a group as contradictory, bizarre and seemingly closed-minded out there as my Asian-Christian fellowship on campus.

This is a group that makes no more sense than Arizona. For starters, we have an unwritten no-underage-drinking policy. I’m familiar with this, because I was rejected from the leadership team two years in a row for that reason, the first time making me the only one out of 18 applicants to be rejected (this is more of a running joke by now than anything of substance). We also had a policy in a recent year that banned women from speaking at our events, because an outspoken president thought that women were inherently incapable to speak on behalf of God because Eve ate the apple.

Yes, we have a history I’m not proud of. But it’s hardly one that represents the group. Rather, it represents the most outspoken leaders who happened to be running the fellowship that year (let’s not forget that the only reason why Jan Brewer is Governor of Arizona is because the previous one, a Democrat, was chosen to be part of President Obama’s cabinet).

Contrary to how we look, a majority of our members voted for President Obama and no on Prop 8. One year, our president came from a Lutheran church with a female pastor. Two years before that, the president took off the “official” no-any-age-drinking policy, probably because he went drinking after every Friday large group during midterm season. Some members think gay people won’t go to heaven. Some members actually are gay people who are going to heaven.

In short, we don’t make any sense. We may mostly have small eyes and black hair, but that’s about the only thing consistent about us.

Arizona represents a larger national movement to try and purify America, because if we all look and dress the same, we might actually be the same. It’s no coincidence that conservative supporters of the law happen to overlap with Tea Party radicals who still don’t think President Obama was born in America. Just last Thursday, Arizona was about to sign a law that required all presidential candidates to show their birth certificates. But after the racist spotlight was moved onto their lovely border state, they pulled the bill.

The same thing happens more subtly on campus, and I’m not just talking about conservatives. I just heard an honors thesis from a graduating Co-Op resident last Saturday about how the Co-Op culture on campus tends to attract people who are white, affluent and guilty. You’ll have a hard time living in the Co-Ops if you have to work for your own tuition and you don’t have enough time to garden.

Or take the protest movement against the UC fee hikes. You’ll have a hard time fitting into the dominant protest movement on campus if you prefer planning and organizing over anarchy. Or even the LGBT community that still has people who don’t think bisexuality exists, despite the giant “B” in the name. Or even my design team for Vent Magazine, which happens to only include designers who specifically like typography and white space.

It’s the most inconsistent group that has the harshest rules, and it’s the most lenient group that has the most homogeneity. And I think part of the horror we feel when we look at Arizona is that we see a bit of ourselves.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a senseless, inconsistent hypocrite, and the moment I try to make sense of that is when I go wrong. It shouldn’t be any wonder that America – contradictory and bizarre – is made up of contradictory and bizarre individuals.

Arizona’s problem is not just about Arizona. It’s about America, and everyone in it.

GEOFF MAK wonders if anyone wasn’t actually offended by this column. E-mail him at gemak@ucdavis.edu if you think that is a good thing.

Life is the dancer, and you are the dance. You make it up as you go along. Every step, every jump and every chassé is of your doing. But you cannot define yourself by any one movement. To do so would box you into an existence that is limited by the parameters of your own self-definition.

There are plenty of people who say things like this: I’m a feminist, I’m an American, I’m disabled, I’m Latino, I’m Christian, I’m This, I’m That. But what does that all mean? In the endless search for self-identity, humans cling to things that mean little -things that are transient and oftentimes divisive. Once you identify yourself as “Christian,” you may lose sight for what it is to be “Human.” I’m not saying that all Christians lose sight; what I am saying is that your identity is wholly separate from the things that you say you are. And when Christians do lose sight, you get horrible atrocities like the Crusades, the Inquisition and this whole priest pedophilia Freudian nightmare. Their egos get in the way of treating humans kindly.

One’s identity is transcendental to those useless descriptors. I can call myself a “columnist” but that’s not who I am deep down. In America, people love to define themselves by what they do, because utility is essential in a capitalist society. “You don’t do anything? But this factory needs to run! You’re a goddamn waste of space.”

I’m not really interested in these self-definitions. I enjoy the nuances of the dance movements much more – or the little things, if you will (like leaving someone hanging during a handshake-to-pound). It would take me too long to mention them all here, so I will instead outline the best of them in a handy-dandy list I like to call “Quirky Human Behaviours Exhibited by Students at UC Davis.”

(For the record, I routinely find myself adding the letter “u” in random places. I’m not sure if it’s because I was a rowdy Brit in my past life, but I think it’s just totally wholesome to add a “u” in words like humor, honor or behavior. It’s like they’re incomplete without the “u.”)

Crocodile tears

“Sorry” no longer carries the same weight it once did. It’s now a word that serves as a catchall for any uncomfortable social faux pas.

“Sorry for being late” is one great example. Or when people ask fake questions. Case in point: the Wells Fargo downtown. “HI, HOW ARE YOU?! I’M SO EXCITED TO SEE YOU! AND BY THAT I MEAN I GET A FAT CUT FOR EVERY CHECKING ACCOUNT I OPEN UP!”

Do I know you?

Maybe it’s just a byproduct of being a senior, but I routinely find myself stupefied by certain people on campus who say hi to me. It’s not that I’m socially awkward or anything – it’s just that I can’t for the life of me figure out how the fuck I know that person.

Any other seniors having this problem? I’m like, “that girl looks hella familiar! I’m just going to smile like I know her.” What really bothers me is when people say “Do I know you?” when they actually know where they know you from. They just dance around the issue so they won’t be perceived as creepy. This brings me to my next point.

Smiling = creepy

Why does smiling confuse people? These days you can’t smile at people without it being considered A) sexual, and B) therefore, creepy.

Smiling is a tool that can be wielded effectively by those who are attractive, but if you’re ugly, then you’re shit out of luck. I’m not even going to use anecdotal evidence here (because Lord knows I definitely could) so let me blow your mind right now: Dion, Berscheid and Walster (1972) in their piercing, bold study entitled “What is Beautiful is Good” basically PWNED everyone who retorts with the pithy line, “you can’t judge a book by its cover.” That admonition is no more than a reaction-formation that covers up the fact that we irrationally imbue “good” qualities to physically attractive people. To quote Schiller (1882) “Physical beauty is the sign of interior beauty, a spiritual and moral beauty.”

How can something so irrational, so primordial, so unfair still exist in our society? I’ve heard the phrase “check your privilege” thrown around many a time at this campus. Could beauty be one such privilege? Study after study shows that our society gives physically attractive people the upper hand – and we’re not even aware of it. But the Cross Cultural Center would never admit that – they’re too busy unpacking other privileges. They carefully gloss over this problem because it’s taboo; they are afraid to rock the boat just like every other bureaucratic institution at UC Davis.

But beauty is fleeting and character is timeless. And it’s no secret that attractive people who take advantage of unattractive people actually suffer from poor self-esteem and are in a perpetual search for validation. Or – to quote my friend Dan Maroon – “they’re just hammered.” Either way, my life would be fundamentally different if I were orders of magnitude more attractive than I am now – even more so, I believe, if I were white. It would be bomb if I was an underwear model or something. Free Calvin Klein tighty-whities for life.

DAVE KARIMI is listening to deadmau5 right now. It’s great paper-writing music. If you’re from the CCC and have a U.P.R. (Ugly Person Retreat), sign him up at dkarimi@ucdavis.edu.

To the UC Davis Community:

It has been a little over two weeks since our campus announced what has truly been one of the most difficult and painful decisions of my short tenure at UC Davis – discontinuing four of UC Davis’ 27 intercollegiate sports as the campus continues to struggle through an unprecedented financial crisis.

Since that announcement on April 16, my office and others on campus have received hundreds of phone calls, e-mails and letters from students, parents, alumni and other friends of Aggie athletics urging me to reconsider my decision. Many have suggested alternative solutions and recommendations, including not discontinuing any sports, or discontinuing different sports, or substantially reducing the administrative budget of Intercollegiate Athletics, or launching a major fundraising effort to partially or fully cover the sports on a year-to-year basis. Others suggested that I was given faulty data, or that we followed a flawed process, or that I have misunderstood one or more of the admittedly complex factors that were key to this multidimensional decision.

Those of you who have shared your views have been thoughtful and heartfelt with all your comments, recommendations and concerns, and I know you have the best interests of the university and its intercollegiate athletics program in mind.

But it is important for all of you to understand that in reaching my decision, I too did so with what I believed to be the best interests of the university and our intercollegiate athletics program in mind. I considered all of the suggested options listed above, as well as others. I made my final decision – to discontinue women’s rowing, men’s wrestling, men’s swimming and diving and men’s indoor track and field – only after considering all those possibilities, and after consulting with senior leadership. It is also important for you to know that I have full faith in those who participated in the review process, and I am confident that their evaluation and review was comprehensive, fair and deliberative.

As I wrote to Vice Chancellor Fred Wood on April 16, in accepting his recommendation to discontinue those four sports, I believe that going forward, our new Intercollegiate Athletics budget model offers the least impact to student-athlete participation and provides the most realistic approach to supporting continued academic and athletic excellence in the program. (For more information on the decision, please go to: news.ucdavis.edu/special_reports/sports_dropped/).

It is important to understand the pressures on our Intercollegiate Athletics budget in the context of our broader financial crisis here at UC Davis. For the past two years, the campus has been working to resolve unprecedented shortfalls totaling more than $150 million, or 25 percent, of its general fund budget of $590 million as of July 1, 2008. For 2010-2011, the campus faces an additional shortfall of $38 million to $78 million, depending on the outcome of the governor’s budget proposal.

In response to budget cuts over the past two years, Intercollegiate Athletics has already made significant cuts in its administration and operations while preserving all sports. The significant new cut to the program’s budget ($2.4 million, with associated benefit costs) cannot feasibly be accomplished with past solutions. As part of my decision to discontinue only four sports, Intercollegiate Athletics still must absorb another $400,000 in annual operational cuts as our campus continues to struggle through this financial crisis. Still, we are confident that this new budget will reduce costs by more than $5 million over the next five years, and will eliminate a $1.4 million deficit and return Intercollegiate Athletics to fiscal solvency by 2013-14.

I appreciate the offers of financial support we have received and the request for additional time to fundraise. Successful continuance of a sport requires reliable and sustainable funding. Leaving the viability of these programs subject to the year-to-year success of various fundraising efforts is not, in my view, a responsible approach. Programmatically, the uncertain nature of such funding would make it difficult to recruit competitive student-athletes and coaches.

If donors were allowed to contribute to a specific sport in the short term, this support would have to be considered within the context of gender equity and Title IX. The best external funding mechanism would be an endowment that is not specific to any sport and that is of enough size to produce annual returns sufficient to support teams in compliance with the requirements of Title IX, the NCAA and relevant athletic conference affiliations. Currently, it is not reasonable to foresee such a funding mechanism.

There were other factors to consider too, in addition to finances. Our final decision had to not only be fiscally sound, but also comply with the multidimensional requirements of federal Title IX regulations, the NCAA, the Big West Conference and other member conferences, as well as relevant student-approved referenda, all in order to minimize the impact on a large number of sports and support services.

In all, the campus reviewed 13 men’s and women’s sports for continued viability based on a set of criteria and considerations that included: current conference and NCAA financial aid and membership requirements; compliance with what is called Prong One of Title IX’s three-prong compliance test; and the need to cut additional operating expenses in order to offset the significant reduction in funding for Intercollegiate Athletics.

Director of Athletics Greg Warzecka and his staff evaluated more than 20 models for their potential to reach fiscal solvency. He and his team met with coaches as well as many other groups and constituents.

The welfare of student-athletes at UC Davis has been front and center in the discussions and decision-making about the budget cuts. We will continue our annual grants-in-aid, or scholarships, for student-athletes of discontinued sports who choose to continue their studies at UC Davis, as they make “normal” progress toward their degrees. At UC Davis, full grants-in-aid in 2009-10 are worth $21,513.

For those who were concerned that we moved too quickly in our review, evaluation and decision, I want to point out that we made our April 16 announcement as close as possible to April 14 so that current and prospective student-athletes could make their choices about where to study and compete in the future. The National Letter of Intent signing period for some sports – including men’s swimming and diving and men’s wrestling – began April 14.

The varsity programs that will be discontinued, especially men’s wrestling and women’s rowing, all have the opportunity to be supported and thrive through the Sport Club program at UC Davis. Indeed, UC Davis has one of the largest and most active Sport Club programs in the UC system.

We recognize that UC Davis’ coaches and student-athletes are proud, talented and dedicated. We all appreciate that the student-athletes and their coaches and Aggie fans are in mourning for the loss of the teams, and what those losses mean to them as individuals. I share that sense of loss.

Now it is time for us to come back together, to embrace the Aggie pride that makes our program unique, and to begin focusing on how – together – we can move forward to ensure long-term success for our student-athletes on and off the field of play.

In the next few weeks, UC Davis students may have the chance to vote on two referendums declaring no confidence in both UC President Mark Yudof’s leadership and the management of the UC Regents. This vote will more accurately reflect student sentiment on the issues, and will effectively utilize ASUCD’s decision-making ability.

The votes of no confidence are significant attempts to protest the UC leadership. If passed, these votes would convey a powerful and weighty statement. The referendum and the student-wide vote itself will likely resonate throughout other UC campuses.

Moreover, the referendum draws in a large potential voter base, all while remaining consistent with the campus’ growing sentiments of unity and solidarity. Those who may disagree with the methods of our campus’ more vocal protestors and those who might have been turned off by the March 4 protests are more likely to participate. After all, casting a vote takes less time and requires less risk.

A student referendum might also draw more student voters than typical ASUCD Senate elections, which see a low voter turnout largely because of voter apathy and disconnect from ASUCD itself.

In this way, a student-wide vote would provide a much more accurate depiction of student views, as opposed to an ASUCD Senate resolution on the same issue. Even a low voter turnout of 2,000 to 3,000 respondents would more wholly reflect the student body than a vote of 12 ASUCD senators.

The intent of this vote would not be to minimize ASUCD’s representative power. Rather, the referendum would add more voices to a strong statement, and would offer students a direct voice in the decision-making process.

These votes of no confidence utilize the ASUCD referendum process in a peaceful, democratic way. If passed, the decisions would carry more weight than an ASUCD Senate resolution, since it would represent the views of the entire voting student body.