audendi

Tell me who would win in a battle of wits, my friends (and my enemies, numerous as they may be on these internets). Leo Strauss or Ron Paul?

I’m not so concerned with the Straussians or Leo himself, but the totally crazed disciples of his that made one man’s philosophy a religion of death and destruction.

Essentially, I dare you to comment coherently in this blog. I’m sure you know I’m biased one way, and you know whom I would pick in this grudge match. Win, lose or draw, say your piece.

Your Internet Pal,

Daniel Greene

They deftly maneuver, and muscle for rank
fuel burning fast on an empty tank

Erik Prince, co-founder and owner of Blackwater USA, and a graduate of Hillsdale College, is in a lot of trouble right now. Blackwater is, in essence, the U.S. government’s biggest provider of non-uniformed soldiers (mercenaries) inside Iraq. Is he George W. Bush’s Remirro de Orca? His sacrificial lamb, if you will? What will happen if (more likely when) a Democrat becomes the next President?

Ron Paul ‘Boston’ Tea Party in Columbus, Ohio on December 16, 2007

We raised over 4 million dollars for Ron Paul’s campaign in one record-breaking day. Truly incredible. I was privileged enough to be there today Sunday to see a group of 60 plus patriots brave the weather to throw our own tea party. The boxes of ‘tea’ were thrown into the river, representing all the things Ron Paul would help us get rid of were he President. We did not litter, however, the boxes were firmly connected to strings, so don’t worry. We had a great time supporting the revolution! Here’s a write-up about this event and the relevance of Ohio, from lewrockwell.com. Viva la revolucion!

Have you ever heard of the phrase “Ballots not Bullets” - a phrase used in the 19th century? If not, it was the idea that paper ballots, not use of violent arms, was the appropriate way to settle political disputes large and small. If you look at the evolution of the political process in America, you see the overriding importance of the use of the ballot box. Concomitant with this is the importance of free access to the ballot box, the right to free association, the right to a free news media, the right to life, and so on. It seems that anymore these days, our public officials abuse their positions of power without but a peep from the people. It seems that things are falling apart and that the operators of our public institutions are asleep at the switch. Some people feel that this process is inevitable, the sign of some sort of end times, some apocalypse that will, nay must, befall our dear republic. Well, to hell with that notion. There is hope. There is a way out. But the answer must come from within ourselves. We have to lay aside our apathy, our avarice, our sheer laziness and greed. We must come together and defend this country not with violent revolution but with loving, peaceful persuasion, hard work, and consistent voting. But what does this have to do with Dr. Ron Paul, Texas Congressman running for the Republican nomination, and for President of These United States?

Well, I’m just some guy you probably have never met from Dayton, Ohio. I wasn’t born here, but I was raised here, and I love where I’m from - ok, technically I live in Beavercreek but I went to school in Downtown Dayton, so there. I don’t have a college degree, yet, but I know enough to tell you that the vast majority of the people running for president in both parties have a lot of trouble saying what they mean, and even worse, meaning what they say. You know this to be true, just watch the television for five minutes, look at their faces, watch their expressions. Most of them don’t mean a word of it, and you know it.

Ron Paul is different. Now, I don’t agree with him on everything, but he is clearly a hardworking, honest man. He has put his time in serving this country, and now that he feels the time is right, he has decided to run for President. Almost eleven months ago he announced, and people everywhere didn’t even hear about him, because he was not taken seriously by the ‘mainstream’ media. Well, that doesn’t matter as much anymore, because the media is being democratized before our very eyes, the power of information is being handed down to the regular people. People like you and me.

I am a registered independent and I really want someone that I can support in the March 4 primaries here in Ohio. Ron Paul doesn’t just stand for a lot of the things I stand for, he stands for them with great courage and conviction. He is the only candidate this election cycle that should, no, that deserves, to be Chief Executive of the United States of America.

- D. Greene
Friday, December 14, 2007

According to The Myelin Project:

“Myelin is the insulating sheath surrounding nerve cells…the white matter coating our nerves, enabling them to conduct impulses between the brain and other parts of the body. It consists of a layer of proteins packed between two layers of lipids.

Myelin is produced by specialized cells: oligodendrocytes in the central nervous system, and Schwann cells in the peripheral nervous system. Myelin sheaths wrap themselves around axons, the threadlike extensions of neurons that make up nerve fibers. Each oligodendrocyte can myelinate several axons.

Myelin can be destroyed by hereditary neurodegenerative disorders such as the eukodystrophies, and by acquired diseases such as multiple sclerosis.

Demyelinating diseases affect more than two million people worldwide.”

Imagine your brain as a big ball of interconnected wiring suspended in moist mushy meatspace. It is a signal processing unit, a

Each wire ends in a node, where it connects to another wire. The nodes are where the chunks of important things are kept, usually. The routes across wires, from one node to another, are known as pathways. Think of it like a hiking trail - a frequently used trail is smooth and worn in, you travel efficiently along it. Except sometimes the trail is off the beaten path a ways, it doesn’t see more than a few hundred people a year walk it - the pathway can be followed but it just takes a while to get back to your goal, and you might have to meander and beat around the bush to reach your important thing. Well worn memories are trails

Perhaps the most infamous form of myelin degeneration is Multiple Sclerosis, a debilitating and often fatal condition. More than two million people have some form of myelin problem - that’s roughly 1/3550th of the world’s population. There are treatments available to help defend the existing myelin and thwart the degenerative process, but much more can be done. Of course, the FDA is no friend to people willing to take risks on experimental, untested procedures, and their colossally slow drug approval process takes so much time that it should not be quantified in seconds or minutes, but in lives lost. The approval period is like a bad drum solo with no end in sight. The intervals can be measured in the space between the gravestones. Of course, the FDA doesn’t care, they’re coked up and flush with cash.

What myelin neurodegeneration needs is a sexy mascot. Perhaps we can convince some vapid Hollywood ‘hottie’ that the shakes she’s going through aren’t cuz she is single again and not on the ya-yo every day, but because she has demyelination congenitally. Perhaps indeed. The campaign would be a cash cow. It could be the next Darfur, except that it would also get results.

(previously posted at Ideas From Free Minds)
One of the privileges of being a student at Hillsdale College was that we were introduced to the full array of prominent neo-conservative intellectuals. Speakers at my former school have included Bill Kristol, Midge Decter, Richard Brookhiser, Kenneth Starr, Harvey Mansfield, Victor Davis Hanson, Mark Helprin, and many, many more. Of course, to the average political junkie these names may be familiar, but to the vast majority of the population, nobody knows who any of these people are save for the Sexual Inquisitor.

In any event, this little story has to do with Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist, author, farmer, and sometimes professor at Hillsdale College, visiting to teach month-long courses in 2004 and 2006 on Greek history and war. In his own words:

“I am teaching at Hillsdale College for a month in rural Michigan, and feel, in the positive sense, transported back to the 1950s. The students are well-dressed and polite — gone are the lunatic screaming and free-speech antics of the California campus where I taught for 20 years.Arguments are conducted politely; there is no controversy any more about the value of the therapeutic curriculum of ethnic studies, women’s studies, black studies, or the leisured courses dealing with cartoons, pornography, sit-coms, Star-Trek, etc. There simply are no classes here like that: Politics, History, hard science, Classics, literatures, English, Math, and economics, are felt to encompass about all one needs to know.”

A brief aside: it should be noted that I did indeed take a summer seminar class at Hillsdale College on the Philosophy of Star Trek, where we studied various ethical and metaphysical issues and their treatment in the famous television series. It was quite enjoyable and quite educational. Hanson is demonstrably a hypocritical asshat, because the Greek culture he gets off on so much was in its own time the ‘pop’ or vulgar culture of the era. Fortunately, in his view, Hillsdale did not engage in free-speech or culturally relevant activities.

Back to my main point. Hanson is one of those close advisers that has the ear of President Bush, making frequent trips to the Oval Office during the Bush II era. At one point during his class in 2006, Hanson related a story where he was in the Oval Office in December of 2005, discussing the matter of Iran and how the problem should be dealt with. Hanson closed his story by saying that Bush vowed to do something about Iran before his term expired. Now, in the Bush lexicon, ‘doing something’ usually involves bombing something, and with the recent aggressive campaign by Dick Cheney to bomb Iran back into the stone age, and with the presence of carrier groups in the Persian Gulf, I personally predict that it is only a matter of time before the United States Government initiates some form of direct hostilities with Iran.

While I was a student at Hillsdale College in Michigan, the issue of mandatory meal plans at the school cafeteria was an issue of great contention, although most people just suffered through it, because there were no alternatives. Off-campus students still were obligated to subscribe to a ridiculous 10 meal a week plan (ridiculously overpriced, I might add - the whole point of a cafeteria is to use economies of scale to reduce the price of food, something lost on Saga, Incorporated). The only way to get completely off the meal plan, it seemed, was for a precious few exceptions, including being married. One wonders what they would do if the couples that were married were of the same gender.

In any event, a good friend of mine who is still enrolled at Hillsdale College has a medical condition that requires a special diet as ordered by this person’s physician. This diet requires, among other things, no commercial meat, no soy products, no sugar, and no chemicals, additives, or artificial preservatives of any kind. Very specific foods must be procured to satisfy these stringent dietary requirements. However, when this person requested to be released from the meal plan so that they could purchase food that meets these specific standards, they were informed by the Hillsdale College administration that this was not an option. Instead, this person is going to be forced to meet with a nutritionist to ‘find’ food to eat that meets the diet. Ridiculous, because the only health food/organic food shop in Hillsdale is a specialty place that isn’t open all the time. Even people that were simply vegetarians were underserved and constantly disappointed by Saga, Incorporated. Indeed, this person will most likely have to drive to Ann Arbor, where there is a Whole Foods store, in order to purchase the food necessary to make this diet work. In reality, this person will be paying double for food - to Saga for food that will be essentially inedible, and to a store that actually sells the right food. But the school is apparently intransigent on this matter. No exceptions, it would seem. They just aren’t interested in taking very good care of the customer, and why should they be when the administration and their cronies at Saga are making money hand over fist regardless?

This is a situation that deserves attention from alumni, parents, and students alike. This is an injustice, and it should not stand.

Looks like Hillsdale College, after some seven years roughly, has finally redesigned their website. It looks good! If it had been designed seven years ago, that is.

Yep, it looks great! All the content has been reorganized with a new interface and what looks like a new(er) backend - at closer inspection it looks like they are running the same ASP based content management system. In any event, that’s fine. I mean, if they want to use IIS, that’s their problem. The website does at least look a little better than the old iteration. Unfortunately, the change will probably jar a lot of longtime users who are accustomed to the old design. Perhaps it could have been a little more evolutionary, but it’s too late for that.

Of course, the real clusterfuck about this whole situation is that since they reconfigured all the content and changed all the pages URLs, Google searches of Hillsdale’s website are essentially worthless. To access any content you have to use the Google Cache. For example, a search of hillsdale.edu for the term ‘Shakespeare’ yields plenty of results. Try clicking any of the top three results. That’s right, 404 error, page not found. They even moved some parts of the old website entirely to a new URL, for example, the Collegian Newspaper’s website is now at hillsdalesites.org. People, like say, alumni who donate money and read the newspaper to keep up with things at the college, and who have bookmarked a simple url, hillsdale.edu/collegian, will now be met with an entirely unhelpful 404 error. I cannot emphasize enough how bad this is. It is bad design practice. Linkrot should really be unacceptable for such an organization, especially if their content management backend has not actually changed.

Many people rely on search as their primary means of navigating the web, and now a 404 page is the result of clicking just about any google result for the time being. This will probably settle out as google reindexes the website, but it will take a while, and there will still be lots of dead links. They could have provided a custom 404 error without too much work to help ameliorate this transition period. Perhaps this redesign was necessary, and the scorched earth policy of redesign just had to be done, but I’m skeptical.

Oh well, maybe they moved the Collegian to a different URL so that nobody can find any antiwar sentiments on hillsdale.edu.

UPDATE: As Joe has noted in the comments, some URLs now redirect to their proper location. For example, hillsdale.edu/collegian redirects to the new Collegian website. Of course, any URL that is hillsdale.edu/collegian/article/example just redirects to the Collegian main page. An improvement, at least.

Also, they have issued a Custom 404 error page! This is definitely an improvement from an information and usability standpoint. I wrote this post on July 3. Now, 5 days later, it appears someone has fixed a few of the things I griped about. Maybe someone from Hillsdale College is reading this blog.

Inspired by David Frank’s recent editorial (which naturally went unpublished by the Hillsdale Collegian) about the provincial nature of Hillsdale College’s Student Pledge, I too have been inspired to post an unpublished editorial I wrote that was, naturally, rejected by the Hillsdale Collegian. Throughout his career, Dave has been one of the great, most consistent satirical writers to attend Hillsdale College. He has always been an outspoken and principled critic of the school’s policies, with sarcastic yes well-reasoned arguments in opposition. That said, my editorial is about something, as indicated by the title of this post, that the Collegian and school administration, let alone my own fraternity, has refused to talk about. Read on.
Continued »

In the race for Mayor of Hillsdale, Michigan, where I attend college, 18-year-old Michael Sessions has upset the incumbent mayor Douglas Ingles by a vote of 732 to 668 (who says your vote doesn’t matter? It sure does locally). This election is interesting because of his age, and also because Michael announced his candidacy late in the game, got together a petition, and ran as a write-in candidate. I saw blue yard signs around town supporting him, I saw not a single sign for Ingles, because he didn’t make any. I can’t say that I predicted this outcome, but I am not at all surprised by it. Here’s some context:

1. Personality

Ingles is regarded by many citizens as incompetent and arrogant, and there are lots of anecdotal stories within the community and among students to back this up. For example, he nevertipped a friend of mine who used to deliver pizzas to his house. The college hockey club looked into practicing on rollerblades at the skating rink he owns, and we ultimately nixed the idea because the price he offered for us to rent the facility was unreasonable. Most recently, my fraternity tried to schedule a philanthropy at this business establishment and the rate he offered was again highly unreasonable (considering the size of the rollerskating market in this town) and forced us to completely change our plans. Now I know you urbane, worldly cityfolk might scoff at such anecdotes, but over the years they add up and create a negative impression, especially in a small, close-knit community like Hillsdale. For example, people will forget what Oliver North was indicted for, let alone that he was even indicted, but they’ll remember things that happen to them and theirs.

2. Economy and College Politics

Much worse is that Hillsdale has been hemorrhaging jobs for years, and nothing has really improved - the business climate is more favorable in neighboring Jonesville, for example. Unemployment is high and people are unhappy. Additionally, the college has pushed the city around in acquiescing to its various projects (completely closing College Street during construction of new classrooms and attempting to get the city council to close it permanently) while using its non-profit status to deny the city more tax revenue. This has a lot of citizens upset, especially since the college is asking the city to extend its water and power services into Hillsdale Township to support the college’s new retirement home, which will be run presumably as part of its overall non-profit strucure. While Ingles may not have been responsible for these things, he catches the blame by failing to take any sort of even symbolic action or speech in opposition. One commenter on the Hillsdale Daily News Forums put Ingles’ problems best:

“Furthermore…. I think if you spin a monkey in circles then have him throw a dart at a wall full of “decision” balloons you could achieve the same results that the incumbent mayor is producing.” (more on this is in the politics section of the forums)

Ingles failed to realize that perception is reality: he should have tried to get a sense of what people in the community were thinking, realized he was at risk, and attempted to counter these opinions. He didn’t, and now he will be forever known as the guy who lost to an 18-year-old high school student. The national media is going to have a field-day with this story. I predict Michael Sessions will be getting at least one high profile interview and maybe an appearance on a late night show. It will be interesting to see what he does as mayor. I’m looking forward more to the possibility that as a future student of Hillsdale College, Sessions will be able to do something to bridge the gap between the town and the college. Here’s hoping.

Pat Sajak
Originally uploaded by djgreene.

How many people get to meet Pat Sajak at a bonfire? He liked my hat too.

Meanwhile, in The Philosophy of Star Trek, students are reading about:

• How Hobbes would have loved the Ferengi.
• James T. Kirk critiques Nietzschean ethics.
• The existential anguish of Picard’s responsibility as starship captain.

Yes, this is what I am doing every day during the week. I wake up around 10:30 am, and then read, at my leisure, one or two chapters from The Ethics of Star Trek or The Metaphysics of Star Trek. After lunch, we drive to campus and attend class at 1 pm. Class commences with a viewing of a Star Trek epsisode relevant to whatever ethical or philosophical issue we are talking about that day. For example, on Friday, we watched “Conundrum,” an episode from The Next Generation where the crew suffers amnesia. This provided a basis for talking about Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Sartre. The class discussion is fairly focused, although different tangents have led to references to The Simpsons, D&D, Monty Python, and so on. Perhaps the funniest moment thus far was when Dr. Turner burst into song, singing a few lines from The Meaning of Life…. “Every sperm is sacred, every sperm is pure…” He couldn’t continue much farther due to the laughter. So far, it is the good times, and it is totally rad.

Yes, my car is fixed (turns out it was the ignition module). Instead of seeing Ep III last night I saw Kingdom of Heaven, which isn’t even worth my criticism, because that would mean the film warranted further thought.

Summer school is going well thus far. On a happier note, I have a $25 gift certificate to amazon.com.

What should I buy?

(I took this photo in October of 2004, as I recall. Its the back of a run-down camper with a sticker of the American flag on it)

Outkast, War:

When will we all, awake up out this dream
Come here and smell the Folgers, the soldiers are human beings
Man actin as if he was the supreme bein
Clockin the souls of men out like he was G-O-D and
W-A-Rrah, there’ll be no tomorrow but sorrow
and horror will follow the hollow hearts battle for dollars
Politicians, modern day magicians
Physicians of death, more health care for poor health
Who makin us ill, they makin us kill
That’s makin me spill my guts (chill Big, lay in the cut)
For what? I refuse to sit in the backseat and get handled
Like I do nuttin all day but sit around watch the Cartoon Channel
I rap about, the Presidential election and the scandal
that followed, and we all watched the nation, as it swallowed
and chalked it up, basically America you got FUCKED
The media shucked and jived now we stuck - damn!

In academic news related to myself [wait, why you you you, all of the time? Cuz I'm an arrogant bastard, thats why]. Presently, I am:

• Taking a class for 2 weeks with novelist Mark Helprin called “The Art of Strategic Assessment.” It meets on MWF from 7-9 pm. Yes, Fridays. It is work intensive, I’ve already done more homework per credit hour for this class than I have all semester, but perhaps it will be interesting. We are supposedly going to learn the art of predicting who will win a war. I didn’t know thats what it was about when I signed up, but whatever, apparently most of the grade is based on, as Helprin said, our ability to improvise and make bold decisions with very limited information. Well, at least when it comes to academics, that is all I do (translation: procrastinate). Expect Dave Frank to riff on the Helprin issue as well, as DF is taking the creative writing seminar with MH.
• Writing a paper on the politics of Graham Greene as revealed by his novels, esp. Power and the Glory, The Quiet American, and to a lesser extent The Human Factor, The Honorary Consul, Our Man In Havana, etc.
• Going to take a class this summer, from May 14 to June 3, on “The Philosophy of Star Trek” with philosophy professor Dr. Turner. That means I’ll be all up here in Michigan a bit longer so you should come visit me, even if you have to drive from Dallas.
• Not failing any classes this semester, yet.

Expect more from this space when I have less important things to do! Also, I am doing the new viral marketing fad related to the new Xbox launch, and if you like to waste time with that whole nonsense, go here for a little context. Don’t ask for any fucking explanations though, I’ve had enough with you baby-stepping newbies.