audendi

My friend Chris Brown and I made a video to the song “Mush Room” done by my friends in Grizzzzy Bear (myspace profile, artist page), a local Dayton band on the Squid’s Eye Record Label. The song is released on their self titled album. Check it out!

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

I shot this September 7, 2007 at the Night Owl on a Canon GL-1. This one is raw and unedited, but the sound was better, so here you go. From the same show the Grizzzzy Bear video came from:

For your viewing pleasure, Grizzzzy Bear playing September 7, 2007 at the Nite Owl! I shot this on an old Canon GL-1 with the built in mic, hence the relatively poor sound quality. Next time I’ll try to just jack right into the sound board with an XLR cable. This video was edited by my good friend and filmmaker Chris Brown. I’ll be posting more Squids Eye Records goodness as it gets edited. For now, let me know what you think of this:

Enjoy this video a colleague of mine made - I consulted on the production:

Hint: it’s a parody of this.

That video was from 1994. He accurately described what would happen if Saddam Hussein’s regime was toppled by an invading American force. In 1998, the Project for a New American Century called for regime change in Iraq. Allow me to explain:

On January 26, 9 days after Drudge first broke the Lewinsky scandal, President William Jefferson Clinton appeared on television, visibly emotional, to assure the nation that he did not have sex with that woman.

On the same day, The Project For A New American Century, a think tank of intellectuals concerned with foreign policy, sensing weakness, wrote an open letter to President Clinton, urging him to take action against the Baathist regime. Just take a look at who signed the letter. Perle, Fukuyama, Armitage, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Kristol the younger, Bennett, Bolton, Kagan, and so on and so forth.

It took them a few years and a lot of whinging about Iraq to get their guy installed and their policies implemented, but five years later, they finally got their wish. An interesting exercise would be to plot the respective net worths of the signers of that letter to Clinton to a graph, showing their trajectory from 2003-2007, especially.

This debate is always framed, and Cheney argues the same way, that ‘everything changed after 9/11.’ Sorry, but I am going to have to pre-emptively nuke that argument from the comments section of this blog. The real question is, what changed between 1994 and 1998 to get Dick Cheney’s cohorts to push for the precise thing he warned against, and the thing he defended George H.W. Bush for not doing?

Hat tip to ChenZhen for blogging about it first.