At last: some war-mongering that I can get on board with. A battle-cry that libertarians, anarchists, feminists, and all who value decent and rational conversation can join in, full-throatedly.

Carthago Delenda Est, in English, means, Carthage must be destroyed.

Have a nice day. Peace be with you. Good luck. Best wishes. Good bye. God bless. Good night. Thank you very much. All might be ways to end a talk. But in the days of the Roman Republic, Cato the Elder is said to have uttered that phrase of curse to Carthage, or one similar to it, at the close of every one of his speeches on the floor of the Senate, regardless of the subject matter.

That phrase became the rallying cry of the Punic Wars (like, Remember the Alamo), and Carthage was, utterly destroyed. As Wikipedia reports, Carthage was, ploughed (sic) over and surviving inhabitants sold into slavery.

Well, I'm going to strive to follow in Cato's footsteps.

I'm going to try, as often as I remember, until it's a habit, to close all my blog posts with the phrase, Hardball delenda est.

But my ambitions are more modest than genocide. I merely want to see MSNBC's Hardball booted off the air, with no hope of anything like it in replacement, and Chris Matthews himself standing behind a counter somewhere, wearing a paper hat, and asking those who still line up to see him, Would you like fries with that?

Hardball delenda est.

— Jim Babka @ Positive Liberty (2008-01-19): Delenda Est

I spent yesterday afternoon sorting through the mail that had been held for us while we were out of town. Among several belatedly delivered direct-mail pitches for year-end donations, I found one from Jay Gogue, the lately installed CEO of my dear old Alma Mater. Here’s how it began (emphasis added):

Auburn University Office of the President

December 17, 2007.

Dear Alumni and Friends,

As 2007 draws to a close, so does my first six months as President of this great university. My wife Susie and I are delighted to be back home on the Plains and excited about the opportunities of Auburn University.

It is important to listen to the full spectrum of Auburn constituencies both on and off campus. My very first meeting as President was with Auburn students and my second was with faculty leaders. These meetings have been followed by many others involving alumni, the deans, staff representatives, extension …

Based on past experience with Auburn University senior administration, I am sure that Dr. Gogue has been doing a lot of listening to University stakeholders. But I must confess that I am a bit surprised to see him writing out the scare quotes himself. Usually administrators leave that syntactic detail to be tacitly understood.

Three good recent articles on learning and unschooling in the home:

• David Friedman (2007-12-04): Home Unschooling: Theory

  Our approach starts with the fact that I went to a good private school, my wife to a good suburban public school, and both of us remember being bored most of the time; while we learned some things in school, large parts of our education occurred elsewhere, from books, parents, friends, projects. It continues with some observations about the standard model of K-12 schooling, public and private:

  1. That model implicitly assumes that, out of the enormous body of human knowledge, there is some subset that everyone should study and that is large enough to fill most of thirteen years of schooling. That assumption is clearly false. Being able to read and do arithmetic is important for almost everyone. Beyond that, it is hard to think of any particular subject which there is a good reason for everyone to study, easy to think of many subjects outside the standard curriculum which there are good reasons for some people to study.

  2. It implicitly assumes that the main way in which one should learn is by having someone else tell you what you are going to study this week, what you should learn about it, and your then doing so.

     ….

  3. A related assumption is that you learn about a subject by having someone else decide what is true and then feed it to you. That is a very dangerous policy in the real world and not entirely safe even in school–many of us remember examples of false information presented to us by teachers or textbooks as true. A better policy is to go out looking for information and assembling it yourself.

• David Friedman (2007-12-04): Home Unschooling: Practice

  When our daughter was about ten there was a class, lasting somewhat over a year, in math. It started assuming the students knew nothing, ended with the early stages of algebra. That is pretty much all of the formal instruction either of them had. In addition, we required them to learn the multiplication tables, which are useful to know but boring to learn. That, I think, was the closest thing to compulsory learning in their education.

  How did they get educated? They both read a lot, and although some of the books they read were children’s books, pretty early they were also reading books intended for adults. … But the largest part of their education, after reading, is probably conversation. We talk at meals. We talk when putting one or the other of them to bed. …

  What is the result? Our daughter will enter college knowing much more about economics, evolutionary biology, music, renaissance dance, and how to write than most of her fellow students, probably less about physics, biology, world history, except where it intersects historical novels she has read or subjects that interest her. She will know much more than most of them about how to educate herself. And why.

• Heart @ Women’s Space/The Margins (2007-12-05): Raised in the Revolution: Radical Women Homeschooling Boys

  There are quite a number of youngsters being homeschooled in progressive families, including by radical feminists and lesbian feminists. I have been homeschooling for 24 years now; my two youngest, Sol, 12, and Maggie, 9, are still being homeschooled and have never gone to a regular school. It's an interesting thing, raising children away from the sexism, racism, classism, lesbophobia, and other destructively socializing influences of school kids and school hierarchies of all kinds, with a commitment to seeing to it that your children spend time with with others who are being raised as they are. V's son, shown in the video, goes to Brother Sun camp at the Festival every year, a camp for boys ages 5-10 years. My daughter, Maggie, goes to Gaia girls each August. In settings like this, children raised in the revolution find encouragement and support.

  V has graciously given her permission for the posting of this video. I will allow comments but want to remind everyone that V is a real person to me, a member of a women's community I value. I'd ask you to keep that in mind in commenting. V's son, Parker, is giving a report about his friend, Alix Olson, also a member of the Michfest community. Watch it all the way through the different "takes" — I think you'll enjoy it!

  None of us involved really knows what the results of this quiet revolution we have undertaken will be. But, that is the way with all revolutions– they take on lives of their own which are outside of any individual's immediate control. I do find reason to feel hopeful about the potential for change in the world which resides in this particular revolution, for so many reasons. I am about to blog its dark side, as I have before, but before I do, I wanted to post this.

Roderick has a good post up called A Question for Critics of Ron Paul’s Critics, which does an excellent job of deflating one of the common rejoinders that Ron Paul boosters make to Ron Paul’s libertarian critics–specifically to those, like me, who consider Paul’s anti-libertarian position on abortion or immigration to be a poison pill. It’s well worth reading the whole thing.

There’s a lot of interesting exchange going on in the comments. Here are excerpts from five different comments that oppose treating Ron Paul’s support for forced pregnancy as a poison pill:

David Miller:

Given the complexities of NAFTA (and the same is true of immigration and abortion), it does seem to me rather silly to use this as a litmus test, ….

Max Raskin:

Immigration, free trade, abortion, and cosmopolitanism don't really mean anything if any of the other candidates get elected and throw us into World War Five.

Rich Paul:

If I have to tolerate Kansas outlawing abortion in order for Kansas to tolerate New Hampshire legalizing drugs, then I think it a good trade.

Otto Kerner:

To me, personally, it seems clear that federalism and opposing the war are much more important libertarian issues than immigration and abortion.

Stephen W. Carson:

To those who support Paul but voice their criticisms of his positions on immigration, abortion, whatever... Hurrah! To those who don't support Paul, for whatever reason, I have only one question: What is your plan for stopping the killing?

Perhaps it is rude to point this out; perhaps it is even dirty pool. Certainly it is not a demonstration that their reasoning is flawed. Nevertheless, can you guess what all five of these commenters have in common when it comes to abortion?

If you’re baffled, try reading the first block quotation in Roe v. Wade Day #34.

Here’s an interesting passage I noticed in an article in the New York Times Magazine, which was mostly about companies trying to sell fancy new mattresses.

The story of our ruined sleep, in virtually every telling I've heard, begins with Thomas Edison: electric light destroyed the sanctity of night. Given more to do and more opportunity to do it, we gave sleep shorter and shorter shrift. But the sleep that we're now trying to reclaim may never have been ours to begin with. It's a myth, A. Roger Ekirch, a professor of history at Virginia Tech, told me. And it's a myth that even some sleep experts today have bought into.

… More surprising still, Ekirch reports that for many centuries, and perhaps back to Homer, Western society slept in two shifts. People went to sleep, got up in the middle of the night for an hour or so, and then went to sleep again. Thus night — divided into a first sleep and second sleep — also included a curious intermission. There was an extraordinary level of activity, Ekirch told me. People got up and tended to their animals or did housekeeping. Others had sex or just lay in bed thinking, smoking a pipe, or gossiping with bedfellows. Benjamin Franklin took cold-air baths, reading naked in a chair.

Our conception of sleep as an unbroken block is so innate that it can seem inconceivable that people only two centuries ago should have experienced it so differently. Yet in an experiment at the National Institutes of Health a decade ago, men kept on a schedule of 10 hours of light and 14 hours of darkness — mimicking the duration of day and night during winter — fell into the same, segmented pattern. They began sleeping in two distinct, roughly four-hour stretches, with one to three hours of somnolence — just calmly lying there — in between. Some sleep disorders, namely waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall asleep again, may simply be this traditional pattern, this normal pattern, reasserting itself, Ekirch told me. It's the seamless sleep that we aspire to that's the anomaly, the creation of the modern world.

… Our peculiar preference for one well-organized hunk of sleep likely evolved as a corollary to our expectation of uninterrupted wakefulness during the day — as our lives came to be governed by a single, stringent clock. Eluned Summers-Bremner, author of the forthcoming Insomnia: A Cultural History, explains that in the 18th century, we start overvaluing our waking time, and come to see our sleeping time only as a way to support our waking time. Consequently, we begin trying to streamline sleep, to get it done more economically: We should lie down and go out right away so we can get up and get to the day right away. She describes insomniacs as having a ruthless ambition to do just this, wanting to administer sleep as an efficiency expert normalizes the action in a factory. Certainly all of us, after a protracted failure to fall asleep for whatever reason, have turned solemnly to our alarm clocks and performed that desperate arithmetic: If I fall asleep right now, I can still get four hours.

Nevertheless, while it may be at odds with our history and even our biology, lie-down-and-die is the only practical model for our lifestyle. Unless we overhaul society to tolerate all schedules and degrees of sleepiness and attentiveness, we are stuck with that ideal.

— Jon Mooallem, New York Times Magazine (2007-11-18): The Sleep-Industrial Complex

Besides grousing about one of my linguistic pet peeves — the sloppy misuse of the idiom ____________-industrial complex, the only other thing that I’d like to add is that filing the institutions that currently structure most Americans’ sleep patterns under the vague label of our lifestyle tends to obscure the issue. Depending on your age, the two main institutions that regiment your sleeping schedule are either (1) school, or (2) your job. The first has little to do with lifestyle choices; it’s something that’s forced on children by both their parents and by the government for a good 10-12 years of their lives. After a decade or more of forced training, the job you take is nevertheless a matter of adult choices. But the economic and political environment that structures and constrains those choices — and tends to favor centralized, regimented, official forms of employment not only through cultural prejudice but also through government-enforced subsidy and monopoly — deserves much more critical scrutiny than the term lifestyle conveys. In both cases, the daily schedules that we keep are no better described as an adopted style than is a straightjacket.