The history of thought on free will and the human mind has tended toward supernatural explanations. It's been suggested, for example, that humans are mystically endowed with an intangible and incorporeal soul, immune to physical laws. Compared with animals, some believe that humans are a fundamentally different type of being.
Oh, ASMSU. You've captivated us with your latest bill. MSU's undergraduate student government has passed a bill in support of two extra days off during fall semester — a fall break.
I was browsing through the pages of The State News when I came across the column, "Local radio needs diversity" (SN 1/12), about diversifying local radio in Lansing. I read through the column and noticed that much of it was devoted to bashing MSU's very own Impact 88.9-FM — which has been the Michigan Association of Broadcasters and Broadcast Music Inc. college radio station of the year for the last five of the past six years.
Timing is everything. But ASMSU seems to be a bit behind. Months after the independent commission reviewing the April 2-3 disturbances released its report, MSU's undergraduate student government is demanding that MSU police be held responsible for its actions regarding events surrounding the disturbances. ASMSU is currently working on a bill that would ask the Executive Committee of Academic Governance to create a special investigative committee to decide if MSU police "shirked" its duty by not cooperating with the independent commission. It's a great idea for ASMSU to take students' needs into account and try to do something about it. But it took ASMSU, what, three months after the commission released its report to discover this? If this was a pressing problem, ASMSU should have gotten involved and demanded that the MSU police be more cooperative when the commission was still meeting. Because the bill — a potentially positive step for students — is late, it looks like ASMSU is just beating a dead horse. A horse that collapsed and died in October, when students decided they didn't want their voices heard and failed to show up to the independent commission's public hearing. Or maybe it died when members of ASMSU, who were assigned to the commission, failed to show up for several meetings. Even if students do still care about that night, it's questionable what the actual effect of having another investigation would be. The independent commission was created to investigate that night and it met for months on end to eventually release a report with recommendations to prevent the disturbances from happening again.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a plagiarist, an adulterer, socialist and power-hungry blasphemer, which I only mention because he claimed to be a reverend. Some deny the charges, others say that it doesn't matter whether they are true or not because the movement he led was so great that we should ignore his personal failings.
The MSU Board of Trustees makes a lot of huge decisions. And it seems to make a lot of these important decisions behind closed doors. The board, of course, always announces its decisions in public, sitting down to a lengthy meeting in which it praises and thanks each member and President Lou Anna K.
As an MSU senior that listens to WDBM (88.9-FM), or the Impact, quite often, I would like to voice my opinion in response to Ryan McCormick's column "Local radio needs diversity" (SN 1/12) about the music on the radio in Lansing.
What is the point of giving MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon an $85,000 raise if she is going to give it back to MSU?
It's funny how moods and overall levels of life enjoyment can change in a matter of mere hours.
During the recent warm spell, I decided to take a stroll through the Sanford Woodlot on campus, as I have frequently done in the past.
The MSU Board of Trustees makes some of the most important decisions for this university. It decides how much students pay for tuition, where fans can tailgate and whether they can drink on campus. At their public monthly meetings, trustees spend only a few minutes discussing crucial issues affecting thousands of students before voting unanimously on almost all of them. How eerily efficient. But the public meeting isn't where the real discussions are taking place.
Say you're walking down Grand River Avenue listening to your iPod with those little white earbuds burrowed inside of your delicate ears. Sure, there are warnings of permanent ear damage, but people couldn't possibly use regular earphones, even though they might be more comfortable or convenient. Without the trendy white earphones, how would anyone know you had an iPod? A recent study concluded that prolonged use of small earbud headphones can cause hearing damage. Just like the "coolness" of traipsing around with a bronze tan, taking a long puff of a cigarette or clutching that venti-sized Starbucks coffee, people don't care about ear damage, skin or lung cancer and stunted growth — as long as they look amazingly stylish in the process of acquiring these health complications. When the effects aren't readily apparent and are too far off to think about, people convince themselves it's all OK, for now.
Kristi Jourdan's opinion on hunting and sex, "Scholarly article connecting sex, hunting disgusting; uninformed opinions false" (SN 01/11), was at best uninformed and at worst deliberately misleading.
In response to Kristi Jourdan's column, "Scholarly article connecting sex, hunting disgusting; uninformed opinions false" (SN 1/11), I would like to thank her for bringing to light such a ridiculous article. I had a great laugh when I read it — I had never dreamed I would see Ted "Truck Dog" Nugent mentioned in a scholarly article. If I had turned in a paper such as the one Jourdan criticized, I would have failed the assignment, and although I admire the novelty of the claims made within it, I can't say they are anything more than specious and contrived and are easily reasoned against, as was shown. Sigmund Freud, who I am sure Kalof, Fitzgerald and Baralt have all studied, probably wouldn't mind this adaptation of the famous quote attributed to him: Sometimes a bow is just a bow. Alex Nezich chemical engineering junior
I was just browsing through the online State News this morning and saw an article written by Josh Jarman titled, "Simon backs bioeconomy" (SN 01/11). I think it is wonderful that such conferences are being held in Michigan and that MSU's leaders are taking part in the discussion about the future of Michigan's agriculture industry and the economy.
Sometimes, good ol' President George W. Bush really cracks me up. When he makes up a new word on live television or tries to walk out through a closed door while at a press conference in a foreign nation, it's a hoot.
I also attended the joint ASMSU and Residence Halls Association meeting in December. However, I disagree with the previous letters about both ASMSU and RHA's stance on the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, a very critical piece of legislation that will affect many here at MSU by getting rid of affirmative action and the programs it supports. Also, in response to the opinion of those who think this bill was brought about in some kind of underhanded fashion, they should realize we did nothing illegal and did not twist anyone's arm to get the bill on the agenda. The bill was properly debated for quite a substantial amount of time when anyone could have gotten up and spoken to the group.
Recently, a great deal of criticism has been leveled against both ASMSU, MSU's undergraduate student government, and the Residence Halls Association, or RHA, for their support of a resolution opposing a ballot proposal titled the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, or MCRI.
If you support a king-like presidency, if you don't believe that due process is important for everybody, if you don't recognize a right to privacy, if you think freedom of religion means freedom to use public money to support the most popular religion, if you don't think it matters that our leaders lied to us about reasons for going to war, if it doesn't bother you that we torture prisoners, what exactly is it that you think makes this country great? We have been a beacon of hope for more than two centuries because there was always the idea that these things are not acceptable in our government. There have been stumbling blocks of course, but there were guiding ideals and the potential for what we could be generally outweighed the sins that were committed. I get the sense now that those guiding principles are being thrown away.
Why the U.S. military decided to let this happen is mind-boggling. In an attempt to kill one al-Qaida member, 18 Pakistani civilians are dead.