If Bilbo Baggins attended UC Davis, he’d no doubt live at Baggins End, also known as The Domes. Bilbo could have been my neighbor, too, because Baggins End is where I call home.

Baggins End? What the hell is that? Oh! Are those the freaky white igloos between the Activities and Recreation Center (ARC) and West Village that dirty hippies live in? I heard the people living there aren’t allowed to eat anything they haven’t grown in their garden, don’t shower and poop in buckets. The igloo things — Domes, I guess they call them — don’t have kitchens or bathrooms, either.

Yep. All true. I poop in buckets and haven’t showered since I moved in. I also enjoy eating babies.

Alright, alright. Either you are overwhelmingly gullible, chuckling to yourself, or are blatantly confused. Let me dispel those myths (all of which I have been asked about before).

Those wacky igloos are called Domes. They are made of fiberglass and insulated with polyurethane foam and were built by students as an experiment in alternative living back in the 1970s. There are 14 domes total, and 13 are occupied by two students each.

Domes residents — called Domies — do regularly eat food from their gardens, but still frequent Trader Joe’s and the Davis Food Co-op. There are indeed some Domies who shower less than the compulsively-American once a day, but I doubt you have to look far to realize that this is hardly a Domes-exclusive trait. And as far as pooping in buckets goes — we don’t currently, but you should Google the Humanure Handbook. It’s pretty cool.

So, maybe some people living at the Domes, including myself, are a little weird, but this is not the unifying trait amongst us. After all, weirdness is subjective to our own norms. Watching television is weird to me, but it may not be for you.

What unifies those at Baggins End is the desire, or willingness, to live cooperatively. Cooperation permeates our daily lives. Living at the Domes has taught me that as quickly as I can get hot and bothered, I can cool down and resolve conflicts. Communication is the most important skill I’ve learned in my life thus far, and I learned it the best way — by actually doing it — here at the Domes.

Domies also agree to cook dinner for each other four nights a week, lend our hands at twice-a-month work parties, take responsibility for a community chore and attend twice-monthly meetings.

At these meetings, we use the esoteric hand gestures popularized by Occupy and only pass decisions with 100 percent approval. We decide on issues ranging from whether or not to host a bumpin’ party, to building an entirely new structure on the property.

The end result of consensus work is for everyone to feel they have been heard and considered. Hopefully, going through such a process will accomplish a task while also building trust in the community.

Trust? Sounds like some hippy-dippy bullshit to me …

If trust is hippy-dippy bullshit, then I consider myself beshitted. I’ve found no place else I can argue with someone until I am in tears one night and vigorously bump and grind with them to R. Kelly’s “Ignition Remix” the next. When your life is this intertwined with other folks, it gets real, fast.

Keepin’ it real is based in trust. How can I be real with you about my opinions and feelings if I don’t trust that you will respect and honor them?

Building trust can be done with cooperation. But cooperation is not an answer, it’s a process. Not a what, but a how. It takes the form of whatever is shaping it.

While meetings and work parties offer Domies a scheduled time to cooperate with one another, the real work of cooperative living is day to day. It is communicating about the minor annoyances to avoid snowballing frustration. It is listening instead of speaking. It is learning that you still need to learn more and rejoicing in that humility.

Living in the Domes is wondrously silly, reliably loving and entirely frustrating at times, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything else. If you’ve ever been in love with a place, then you’ll understand the feeling I had when I returned after being away all winter break. My chest began to swell, my lips grinned and I exclaimed to myself, “I’m dome!!”

If you have any other questions about round living, feel free to contact ELLI PEARSON at erpearson@ucdavis.edu.

So there has been no point in all of the time I’ve spent working on my film studies major that I have not seriously grappled with the question of whether or not Joss Whedon’s sci-fi TV show, “Firefly,” is the greatest thing to have ever occurred in front of a camera.
The very first tattoo I had done was of the Chinese characters for “Serenity,” the name of the space-faring vessel of focus in “Firefly,” because there will never come a time in my life when that show will not speak to some very profound, innate part of who I am as both an aesthetic and moral being … ain’t no power in the ‘verse.

In the “Firefly” universe, the Milky Way galaxy has become a new frontier for humanity. Something of a space-age Wild West is born. While there is an expansive, blinky terminal-ed, omni-government stomping around with giant gray space cruisers, the galaxy is predominantly made up of settlers, families, cattle-hands, sultry harlots and outlaws — everyday people all just trying to get by.

The events of the show are set following a galaxy-wide war that ripped humanity in two. The central planets’ Alliance sought to bring the recently-settled planets’ Independents under a single rule, a hard-fought dream that was eventually achieved.

The captain of the Firefly-class vessel that we follow around throughout the show is named Malcolm Reynolds, a man who, following fighting in the war as a sergeant for the Independents, turned freelance spacecraft captain, i.e. outlaw, smuggler, scavenger and oddjobber. As Malcolm drifts through space, “right” and “wrong” as he had come to know them have become very dim lights in the endless black of the newly unified galaxy.

Like any passionate love affair, my relationship with “Firefly” has been a tempestuous one. I watched a single episode of the show while it was on air in 2002 and could not at all buy into its outward appearance of space cowboys, complete with brown dusters and snappy retorts.
I think that in order to really get into “Firefly,” it takes having the DVD box set or Netflix on-hand. I have always sort of imagined that that’s why Fox cancelled the show so early in its run — it’s a strange concept for a show coming out of a genre as nichey as science-fiction and really can only be appreciated as you get to know the characters and see how they change as people over the span of several episodes.
While several people on the crew of Serenity — Mal, Shepherd, Inara, Simon — all do grow throughout the show, I became engrossed with “Firefly” when I personally connected with some of the mythic figures that these characters are drawing upon.

Malcolm is an antihero — pulled perfectly out of a fable, fairy tale or Western — and is a magnificent bastard. Though he is emotionally distant, often makes biting and rude jokes, and is an outlaw in the eyes of proper society, it is obvious that there is a both soft-spoken and yet tremendous resolve expressed in his choices.

Simon is an incredibly intelligent, educated doctor from the heart of the Alliance’s planets who has a prodigally brilliant sister, River. When he hears that she is being experimented upon after having been taken hostage by a super secret Alliance training facility, in order to rescue her, he sacrifices every chance he has at being a successful doctor, vilifies his name in many circles and condemns the rest of his days to life on the run as a fugitive. And he does all of this without even considering the alternative of abandoning his sister.

Simon’s love for River is of superhuman proportions — it unwaveringly and unquestioningly transcends everything about his life, his future, his society — and is made briefly tangible to us, mere mortals, in the form of an awkward, diminutive rich boy from the core who knows nothing of hard life on the edge worlds.

Malcolm does what he can for this poor, naive man — he brings him into his merry flock of brigands — because, as Malcolm says, he needs Simon’s passenger fare and a doctor onboard his ship. But between them it is clear that there is an unspoken, mutual understanding of one another’s resolve in the face of adversity.

Despite circumstance, several of Serenity’s crew have all found each other in the infinite black out of some common recognition of something … more. Though Joss Whedon’s dialogue is marked as chirpy and lighthearted, it’s the way in which “Firefly” taps into something so much deeper that gives me goose pimples of excitement.

If at any point in your life you have felt as though your moral compass was at odds with the circumstance that is reality, I could not recommend a piece of fiction to you more highly than I can recommend to you “Firefly.”

“Burn the land and boil the sea, you can’t take the sky from me.”

MICHAEL FIGLOCK in his brown coat can be reached via wave over the Cortex at mpfiglock@cudavis.edu.

A single term can be used in so many incompatible ways. This leads to the problem of words and meanings becoming detached. Talk becomes a way of confusing and clouding rather than informing and illuminating. Speech loses its grip on meaning. Words and ideas become malleable.

This may seem to be a mere academic problem, but it is, in fact, a central human problem, a problem whose effects, if they could be counted in human deaths, would number in the millions. This is my introductory article as a political columnist, and the two points which follow provide the central framework for all of my coming columns.

The first point is very simple. Only by decoding the system of imposed language can we even begin to really question power. Only by paying close attention to the relation between words and meanings can we stop the imposition of “Newspeak.” It is via controls over our discourse that our language is destroyed, that our thoughts are kept within safe, non-challenging bounds.

Second, anarchism is the natural, sensible view towards systems of power, which is at the root of all of our conceptions of fairness. Also, the only reason that people reject anarchism — clinging to the idea that the term means “no government” — is because of the manipulation of language which is possible via powerful groups’ control over discourse. “Anarchism” did not originally mean “no government,” and most of its adherents would not have made eliminating government a goal.

Then why do people define the term so? What changed the meaning? Well, some groups have much more influence over what information is prevalent, and there is no better way to defeat the detractors of your power than create a campaign against them in which you convince the population that what they believe is something other than what it is –– something crazy and disagreeable.

Powerful groups successfully utilize this tactic against anarchism.

One important note here is that I’m not advocating any sort of conspiratorial view. There is no conspiracy in which the elite class met under a volcano and decided to corrupt the use of the term “anarchism” or language in general.

It is crucial to my argument that the elite groups in the society somehow do this, though, and it is argued very thoroughly for in literature on the subject, most famously in “Manufacturing Consent” from Chomsky/Herman. Basically, groups naturally do what is in their power interests.

In highly complex industrial economies, institutions evolve extremely sophisticated mechanisms for upholding their power. Branches of corporations work on tasks independently, and the firm becomes an organism, operating as a whole in ways that none of the members themselves intend to or realize. If certain information causes a firm to lose power, the firm has an interest in suppressing it, and firms do just that.

Since nearly all of the information that we get is filtered through this system, the effect that centers of power have over our thought is immense. Our thoughts are deeply poisoned by systems of power. The best we can ever hope to do is decode our language enough to think clearly about how to restructure these systems so that their ideological poisoning can be eliminated.

Finally, what is anarchism, and why was that idea so dangerous to systems of power that they had to effectively delete it from the political discourse? Anarchism is a simple, common-sense view of power. When people have power over other people, they misuse it. When we create systems of human organization in which there are hierarchies, the system will represent the interests at the top of the hierarchy.

Since human beings care about fairness and equal representation, we do not favor hierarchies. Hierarchies are antithetical to the political virtues inherent in human beings. Hence the prefix “an” attached to the suffix “archy.” An (as in “no”) archy (as in “power”).

No power: that is anarchy.

It is general skepticism toward all authority, toward any hierarchy, toward any information that is the product of power or systems of power. That is a dangerous idea to powerful institutions. That is why systems of power naturally propagated straw man versions of anarchism –– in order to neutralize it.

Anarchism is where all political analysis starts. What do we mean, and how might this meaning have been affected by power groups? This question must arise at every step of inquiry if we are to ever be liberated.

BRIAN MOEN is so anarchist, he pronounces it “an-are-chee.” He can be reached at bkmoen@ucdavis.edu.

As we near the one-month anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, it seems to be an appropriate time to reflect on the national dialogue surrounding gun control and the prevention of mass shootings.

In a country as large and diverse as the United States, it is no wonder there is not a consensus on how to best prevent tragedy; this editorial is not about to offer up such a solution.

Instead, we will reflect on a point that is both more obvious and more complex: The culture in America is scary and concerning, and without a major change, things are only going to get worse.

The best any of us students can do is commit to being critical thinkers about policy and legislation. And not just when it comes to news items, or politics. Because nothing happens in a vacuum, and ultimately we are all responsible for the way our world plays out.

So what does this mean? This is not change as declared in the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) Dec. 21 press release, which attributes the problem to violent media, and also warns that “our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters — people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them.”

This is also not the change presented on nearly every news channel in December, demanding more gun laws, with desperate pleas that we protect the children. While the opinions of the various editorial board members range from pro-legislation to skeptical, we all agreed that the greatest problem is a society with poisoned economics, politics and psychology that all require consideration.

This poisoned mentality is clear in the rhetoric alone. Tragic news items are followed by two-sided policy debates that reduce the intrinsic web of history to a binary of political babble. The public discourse is often overly simplistic and ignorant. Our national identity is a series of superficial reactions to violent events.

It doesn’t matter if you are for gun laws or against them –– culture is too complex to be reduced to yeses or noes, zeros or ones. As the educated class and the generation that will soon be responsible for improving society, we can’t keep letting the same old bullshit pass as acceptable critique.