Was thinking about Cicero the other day, too...

Hail Cicero, a Death and Afterlife He couldn't save the Roman republic, but his writing crossed centuries to help inspire ours. By E.J. Hutchinson

Dr. Fleming, Cicero, De Officiis, A ON THE HOUSE

Dr. Fleming, Preface to Cicero

Beginning a new series.

Related: Dog Latin

To be a Citizen

On Cities and Community by Tim Dunkin

Items of Interest, 8 December 2011

Jack Donovan, Violence is Golden

Pearl Harbor:
Thomas Fleming, Pearl Harbor: Someone Had Blundered

Wilfred Owen was quite wrong. Though it is a hard thing for young men to die, it can be dulce et decorum pro patria mori, so long as the war is just and the leaders something better than the cynical butchers that lead their countries unnecessarily into war.

It is natural for a man to value the polity above himself. But what if the polity itself is an illusion and just an aggregate of individuals and their families, nothing more?

Mere Comments: Pearl Harbor, the Dust of Time
FDR, Pearl Harbor and the U.N. by John V. Denson

Empire:
Reading Cicero's "On Old Age" At Any and Every Age by Robert M. Woods
Iran War Already Begun
Justin Raimondo, The Untouchables

Washington’s Secret Wars by Philip Giraldi (The Changing Face of War)

The Remoteness of 1% Wars by William J. Astore
Why our wars of choice may prove fatal

Freedom Means War by Leon Hadar
Why libertarians can’t do foreign policy.

Fast and Furious:
Confirmed: ATF Plotted to Use Fast and Furious to Demonize Second Amendment
CBS

Paul Gottfried:
Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement
Cambridge University Press
How the GOP Swallowed the Conservative Movement
His review of The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes The Moral Life by Kenneth Minogue.
Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy

States' Rights:
One sheriff stands up for the people he serves

Economics:
ECONOMY: Ecological Economics (EB)
Gene Logsdon, Old Tractors Never Die
A Course to Keep You From Crashing (Chris Martenson)

John Michael Greer, What Peak Oil Looks Like
A review of his The Wealth of Nature.

John Robb, Technology Shifts and Economic Depression and US Economy Breaks Bad

System, not consumers, are the big green problem by Simon Butler (EB)
Old Tractors Never Die by Gene Logsdon (EB)

Relocalization:
Durban Dollars: Tck Tck Tck Money by Albert Bates (EB)
The Beautiful, the Local, the Slow by Marta Madigan
How Transition initiatives shone in the Energyshare vote: a podcast

OWS:
Farmers Come to Wall Street
Shannon Hayes, From the Farm to the Occupation (EB)
Ralph Nader, Not made in America (same article posted at Counterpunch last week)

Energy:
‘Net Energy’ ignorance reigns on Capitol Hill by Megan Quinn Bachman (EB)

Diet and Health:
Karen De Coster, The Industrial Food Machine Addiction


Food Matters from LuMeL on Vimeo.
official site

Whole30 Paleo: How I Failed But Succeeded
The 100 Most Influential People in Health and Fitness 2011

Education:
When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids

Alte, Sir, will you please take my vote? (See this old thread at VFR: Thoughts on gyneocracy and liberalism.)

Cicero, The Republic and The Laws

The Ciceronian Society

Peter Haworth, Become a member of the Ciceronian Society and present papers via its future panels at the APSA (h/t to Lewis McCrary)

Telegraph: Men do not grow grumpy with age, research finds (via FTW)

Does grumpiness have anything to do with the actual results of the study?

Despite the curmudgeonly stereotype cultivated by Victor Meldrew in the BBC sitcom One Foot in the Grave, scientists found that older people view the world through rose-tinted spectacles, remembering the good times rather than the bad.

Researchers asked groups of 19 to 31-year-olds and 61 to 80-year-olds to view a series of photographs while analysing their brains’ activity.

and

They found that in older people, there were stronger connections between regions of the brain that process emotions and those known to be important for forming memories. The trend was particularly strong for processing positive information.

and

The results suggest that older people are much more likely to remember happy moments than their younger counterparts, the journal Cortex reports.

The reasoning is rather weak.

Do men get cranky as they get older because of their inborn temperament? Or because of their acquired character? Cicero gives one answer. Having had more experience than young people, old men are better acquainted with disappointment and failure, especially the flaws of others. Do people become more stubborn and set in their ways, especially how they react to life?

De Senectute

In response to a comment on this post, I looked up a relevant passage from the Nicomachean Ethics. This is from Book VIII (Ross's translation):

As in regard to the virtues some men are called good in respect of a state of character, others in respect of an activity, so too in the case of friendship; for those who live together delight in each other and confer benefits on each other, but those who are asleep or locally separated are not performing, but are disposed to perform, the activities of friendship; distance does not break off the friendship absolutely, but only the activity of it. But if the absence is lasting, it seems actually to make men forget their friendship; hence the saying 'out of sight, out of mind'. Neither old people nor sour people seem to make friends easily; for there is little that is pleasant in them, and no one can spend his days with one whose company is painful, or not pleasant, since nature seems above all to avoid the painful and to aim at the pleasant. Those, however, who approve of each other but do not live together seem to be well-disposed rather than actual friends. For there is nothing so characteristic of friends as living together (since while it people who are in need that desire benefits, even those who are supremely happy desire to spend their days together; for solitude suits such people least of all); but people cannot live together if they are not pleasant and do not enjoy the same things, as friends who are companions seem to do.

The truest friendship, then, is that of the good, as we have frequently said; for that which is without qualification good or pleasant seems to be lovable and desirable, and for each person that which is good or pleasant to him; and the good man is lovable and desirable to the good man for both these reasons. Now it looks as if love were a feeling, friendship a state of character; for love may be felt just as much towards lifeless things, but mutual love involves choice and choice springs from a state of character; and men wish well to those whom they love, for their sake, not as a result of feeling but as a result of a state of character. And in loving a friend men love what is good for themselves; for the good man in becoming a friend becomes a good to his friend. Each, then, both loves what is good for himself, and makes an equal return in goodwill and in pleasantness; for friendship is said to be equality, and both of these are found most in the friendship of the good.

Between sour and elderly people friendship arises less readily, inasmuch as they are less good-tempered and enjoy companionship less; for these are thou to be the greatest marks of friendship productive of it. This is why, while men become friends quickly, old men do not; it is because men do not become friends with those in whom they do not delight; and similarly sour people do not quickly make friends either. But such men may bear goodwill to each other; for they wish one another well and aid one another in need; but they are hardly friends because they do not spend their days together nor delight in each other, and these are thought the greatest marks of friendship.

One cannot be a friend to many people in the sense of having friendship of the perfect type with them, just as one cannot be in love with many people at once (for love is a sort of excess of feeling, and it is the nature of such only to be felt towards one person); and it is not easy for many people at the same time to please the same person very greatly, or perhaps even to be good in his eyes. One must, too, acquire some experience of the other person and become familiar with him, and that is very hard. But with a view to utility or pleasure it is possible that many people should please one; for many people are useful or pleasant, and these services take little time.

See also Cicero's De Amicitia.

First Things: Cicero Superstar by Mary Ann Glendon