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Via Boing Boing: an interview with President Bush's speechalist.

Via :

http://www.dallasobserver.com/Issues/2005-10-27/news/feature_print.html

From dallasobserver.com
Originally published by Dallas Observer 2005-10-27
Copyright 2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.

Wild Child
For Quinn Eaker, a son of the radical “unschooling” movement, school's out forever
By Glenna Whitley

When Quinn Eaker dropped out of a Colleyville high school in the second month of his senior year, his mother was so happy she threw him a huge party. A hundred guests descended on their home to celebrate Quinn's return to the freedom in which he'd been raised: days on end without classes, tests or grades, days free of any schedule, days for Quinn to learn what he wanted, when he wanted and how he wanted.

He returned to being unschooled.

Now 22, Quinn draws stares as he walks into a pizza parlor in Plano. Stubble sprinkles his square jaw, and his streaked hair looks like it's been styled with a blender. One braid wrapped in copper wire droops between his blue eyes, other braids sproing out in all directions and the rest is untamed.

About 6-foot-3 and lean, Quinn has a hairless but muscular chest revealed by a laced-up white linen shirt. (Which he made.) Around his neck is a leather strap with a long silver pendant. (His design.) His feet are wrapped in shoes sewn of scraps of black leather with a bit of bone to hold them on. (Made two pairs of these, one black and one brown.)

The effect is of a handsome young man who has been raised by nice, middle-class wolves.

Animated, articulate and charming, with a vocabulary bent toward the metaphysical, Quinn describes his idyllic childhood spent at a rambling ranch house at the end of a dirt road. He and his two younger siblings had a pool and two wooded acres where they could frolic, build forts, romp with dogs and other pets, doing whatever they liked all day while the rest of their friends suffered in school.

“My mother taught us everything without teaching us anything,” Quinn says. “Everything I know I've experienced myself, I've taught myself, I've learned myself. The whole childhood was magical.”

Mark Graham

Quinn Eaker, with his mother Barb Lundgren in their Colleyville backyard, where he says he spent an idyllic childhood.

Holly Kuper

An unschooling family: clockwise from bottom left, Steve Eaker, Brenna, Barb Lundgren, Ike and Quinn

Mark Graham

Quinn Eaker had his own spiritual awakening in Los Angeles, where he was pursuing a modeling career.

Few people lived in Colleyville 20 years ago when his parents, Barb Lundgren and Steve Eaker, moved here from St. Louis. Since then, the surrounding farmland has filled in with acres of gargantuan custom homes of high-achieving parents. Lots of them probably moved here for the schools.

Lundgren wanted to get away from them.

Quinn tells the story of his mom's epiphany as if he were recounting a family legend. It started with his birth, an event that took place at their home in St. Louis in 1983. Lundgren was the college-educated director of financial aid at Washington University. Her husband was an advertising executive with an MBA in marketing and a big advertising agency job. Though neither ever wanted kids, Lundgren says that at age 27, her biological clock started ticking so loudly it was all she could hear.

She started reading Sante Fe-based Mothering magazine and soaked up its philosophy of natural childbirth, the wisdom of mothers and the instincts of babies. Lundgren's friends warned her that home birthing was not only painful but dangerous. But the experience was so amazing, so profound, that Lundgren began to wonder what other received wisdom was wrong.

As she delved deep into alternative parenting literature, Lundgren came to believe that sending her children to school–public or private–was a bad idea. In the early '80s, the homeschooling movement was small but gathering steam, especially in Texas. Parents, mostly conservative Christians, were quietly taking their children out of schools to educate them at home.

Lundgren had rejected her Lutheran upbringing but discovered the ideas of John Holt, who began in the '60s to advocate what has come to be called “unschooling.” The child directs his education, deciding when and if he wants to learn reading, math, science, anything or nothing.

So when Quinn was 5, Lundgren didn't send him to kindergarten. At age 6, he didn't go to first grade. Neither did his sister Brenna or brother Ike. When Quinn decided in the eighth grade to try school, Lundgren was unhappy but bit her lip. Neither of his siblings has ever attended school.

It's an approach to child-rearing that would–and did–shock their families and neighbors. What about SAT scores? What about college? What about law school and medical school and getting a good job and marrying the right sort of person and then sending their grandkids to good schools?

Lundgren has heard it all, but, with a few detours, has remained a radical unschooler. It hasn't always been easy. A lover of books, Lundgren admits it bothered her when one child wasn't interested in learning to read until he was a teenager. An avid traveler, Quinn once came home with a tale of living on the streets in Hawaii with a homeless schizophrenic who taught him how to dumpster-dive–a practice he sometimes continues during pit stops at home.

“What I have learned to do is withdraw from the societal expectations that exist for my child and ask some basic questions,” Lundgren says. “Does he seem happy with himself? Is he making inquiries into things he's interested in?”

Homeschooling's stepchild, the unschooling movement has quietly spread, especially in Texas, where there are virtually no legal restrictions against it. It produces either–as proponents contend–creative thinkers who are self-motivated to learn or, as critics maintain, illiterate young adults who can't read a menu or make correct change.

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

According to a recent story in Mothering magazine, the U.S. Census Bureau in 2001 reported that more than 2 million children were being homeschooled in the United States. More astonishing: That number was rising at a rate of 15 to 20 percent a year.

Tim Lambert, president of the Texas Home School Coalition and an unschooler since 1984, estimates that perhaps only 5 percent of those parents are radical unschoolers. One measure of interest is that Holt's books are more popular than ever.

Many parents who start homeschooling in a structured way often move toward unschooling as their kids get older, Lambert says. Often teens will become “apprentices,” volunteering or working with someone to learn a trade or master a craft.

Tracy Wallace, a Lakewood mother who unschools her 10-year-old son Galen, takes an academic approach. “In some unschooling circles, it's almost negative to say the word 'curriculum,'” Wallace says. “If it works for us, we're going to use it.”

Gail Paquette, a homeschooler and founder of the Web site Hometaught.com, is a critic of unschooling. “A child-led approach may develop the child's strengths but does nothing to develop his weaknesses and broaden his horizons,” she recently told Salon.com. “I [mostly] disagree with the premise that children can teach themselves what they want to learn, when [and if] they want to learn it. Certainly children do learn some things on their own, but their often roundabout way of going at learning is not necessarily the best way.”

Linda Dobson, author of a number of homeschooling books, offers another view. “What I would counter that criticism with is that the child is learning how to learn,” she says. “If kids are allowed to learn how to research, to learn critical thinking, to question things, they can take those skills and apply them in the future to whatever they need to learn. They can conquer math in two months or six months or a year, instead of 12 years. They retain it. The difference is night and day.”

For Lundgren, unschooling meant relinquishing her expectations for her children's lives. A collector of adages and aphorisms, Lundgren has clung to a quote from John Holt. During one of his lectures, a parent posed a question: “What are the things you think every kid should know?”

“Nothing,” Holt replied. “There is absolutely nothing every kid should know.”
It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mostly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.
–Albert Einstein

In the state of Texas, thanks to several decades of litigation, there are virtually no requirements of homeschooled kids. Parents don't have to be certified teachers. They don't have to devote a certain number of hours each day to instruction. Their children don't have to use certain books or pass any tests. As far as the state is concerned, homeschoolers can study one day a week and watch TV and play videogames the rest of the time.

Some do, but the expectation usually is high achievement. Many unschoolers point to the success stories like Jedediah Purdy, unschooled until high school and author of the best-seller For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today, and Christopher Paolini, author of the best-selling fantasy books Eragon and Eldest. Another best-seller is Homeschooling for Excellence, by David and Micki Colfax, who unschooled their three sons into Harvard.

Few have been in the trenches as much as Lundgren, who, for the last nine years, has been one of the producers of “Rethinking Education,” a national conference on unschooling. This year's conference, held in September at the Sheraton Grand Hotel in Irving, attracted about 450 people from around the country.

Along the corridors of the Sheraton, Lundgren posted favorite sayings about life and education. Some of the sessions would have been popular with hippie parents in the '60s: Learning as a Subversive Activity, Nonviolent Communication, Simple Living, Animal Communication & Muscle Testing. Teens can attend discussions on dating violence or participate in “late night earth drums.” Quinn did a class on applying body art with henna, a ceremonial form of decoration from India.

While many attendees have been unschooling for years, others are homeschoolers investigating the more radical approach. The discussions tend to meander but always center around how to guide children without stifling their natural curiosity and inner spirits.

Many unschoolers now call Lundgren for advice and guidance, something Lundgren resists. The whole point, she says, is for parents to follow their own path in uncovering their children's passions.

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
–Henry David Thoreau

This intensive parenting method required Lundgren to give up her own career. It was isolating. At first, the few homeschooling support groups she found were doing it “because Jesus told them to,” Lundgren says. She'd rejected all dogma and felt little in common with them. So she started putting up flyers to find like-minded unschoolers. “Gradually, over a few years, we had many families,” Lundgren says. “Now there are hundreds.”

In fact, unschooling is the opposite of the approach taken by many homeschoolers, usually conservative Christians dismayed by the erosion of educational standards and pernicious cultural influences in public and private schools. Most homeschoolers attempt to offer a structured, back-to-basics curriculum in a disciplined environment. They are certainly not child-led (ever hear of Original Sin?), and their educational guru is not John Holt but James Dobson, the evangelical leader of Focus on the Family.

While the groups overlap, generally unschoolers are more liberal and less motivated by religion. Some only unschool in early childhood. Others keep their children out of school until they are grown but seek out community college classes or other enrichment opportunities the child seems interested in. They say the benefits are close-knit families, children who are unafraid to say what they think and young adults who have confidence in their ability to learn anything.

“From a learning and education point of view, people gravitate to the things that make them feel good and the things they enjoy doing,” Lundgren says. “That approach is radically different from what most people are taught.”

But Holt's admonition to “trust the child” wasn't always easy to follow. Lundgren remembers one of her most challenging moments as an unschooling mom came when Quinn, barely a year old, pulled a butter knife out of the dishwasher, pointed it at his mother and went “bang-bang!”

Guns. Her baby was play-acting guns. If Lundgren believed in the child following his curiosity, should she buy him a toy weapon?

Lundgren had gone from a professional woman determined to make a lot of money to a whole-wheat, granola kind of mom who believed in the things espoused by Mothering magazine. No immunizations. Everyone slept in the family bed. Breastfeeding until the children weaned themselves.

“We weren't going to have TV or guns or sugar,” Lundgren says with a laugh.

With her short-cropped hair and glasses, Lundgren could be a librarian or a drill sergeant. She's sitting at the kitchen table of her Colleyville home, which looks out on a pool surrounded by sculptures and a wooded backyard. She brews a cup of lavender tea and remembers, in a voice that is both calm and commanding, what it was like to step out in faith that the path she'd chosen would result in happy children with a lifelong enthusiasm for literature, learning and life.

Well, two out of three ain't bad.

Literacy has been vastly overrated as a measure of competence and success in the marketplace.
–John Taylor Gatto, author of The Underground History of American Education

Lundgren had been a straight-A student, though she never liked school. A voracious reader, after Quinn's birth she'd devoured books by Holt, such as his classics How Children Fail and How Children Learn, published in the '60s.

Holt, a fifth-grade teacher, described the dynamics in most classrooms that inhibit learning, like kids terrified to answer questions for fear they'll get something wrong and be humiliated. He pointed out that little children learn an enormous amount by age 5, sometimes teaching themselves to read. At traditional schools, that enthusiasm for learning is stomped into the ground by mediocre teachers, peer pressure and curricula centered on boring stuff they couldn't care less about learning. What they needed: parents who could guide their interests without imposing expectations. In such freedom, they'd learn what they needed to learn when they needed to learn it.

Holt's ideas coincided with the rise of America's counter-culture. “The Russians had beaten us to space,” says Pat Farenga, president of Holt Associates. “There was a big push to reform the schools. The answers are always higher expectations, more testing.” The current motto: “No child left behind.”

After a rave review of his first book in The New York Times and an appearance on The Donahue Show, the soft-spoken Holt vaulted into celebrity. A reluctant guru, Holt in 1977 started Growing Without Schooling, a magazine for the new movement. He died 20 years ago, but 10 of his books are still in print, selling more now than when he was alive.

Holt's ideas inspired the back-to-the-earth crowd as well as conservative Christians, who started pulling their kids out of school. But in many states, including Texas, school district officials began telling parents to present their curriculum for approval or be prosecuted for violating compulsory attendance laws.

In 1986, not long after Lundgren and Eaker moved to Colleyville, Texas homeschoolers filed a class action lawsuit for the right to teach their kids at home. A year later, says Tim Lambert, president of the Texas Home School Coalition, state District Judge Charles Jay Murray in Harris County issued a ruling that remains the guideline today. As long as parents rely on a curriculum from any source that covers the basic educational goals of reading, spelling, grammar, math and good citizenship, and they pursue that in a bona fide manner, the home is considered a private school and thus exempt from the compulsory attendance statute. What is taught and when it is taught are completely up to the parents.

Upheld by the Texas Supreme Court in 1994, Murray's opinion gave virtual carte blanche to homeschooling parents. Since the Texas Legislature has never defined private schools by statute, homeschoolers are protected from government interference.

After Murray's 1987 ruling, the number of kids learning at home exploded. Lambert estimates that today there are about 300,000 homeschooled students in Texas–about the same number as in traditional private schools. Nobody knows for sure, because they don't have to register or be tested.

Critics have tried to link homeschooling with child neglect and abuse. “We point out that the vast, vast majority of kids abused or killed by their parents are in the public schools,” Lambert says, but concedes “there are probably some folks who homeschool who are just as unqualified as some teachers out there.”

Lundgren sees no downside to unschooling. “I think there are unschoolers out there where the kids aren't benefiting too much, but it's a mysterious process,” she says. “I do believe the intelligence and drive unique to the human species is powerful, and the unschooled child will always gravitate to the things he's interested in. Even a dysfunctional family is able to see that.”

Stand firm in your refusal to remain conscious during algebra. In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.
–Fran Lebowitz

Lundgren believed her children came out of the womb with the intelligence and ability to express themselves, and her role was to listen to them.

“It's all about following the child's lead and not treating him like something that needs to be molded and shaped in my image,” she says. “I think that from a learning and education point of view, you always gravitate toward the things that make you feel good and the things you enjoy doing.”

So when Quinn persisted in “bang-bang,” Lundgren bought him a squirt gun. He and his siblings, Brenna, now 20, and Ike, 16, spent their early years in the backyard waging battles with fake guns and swinging homemade swords. They had pets and gardens. They watched the weather and cooked meals, learning math by measuring out ingredients. They peered under rocks and caught turtles.

“There's a huge amount of natural science that comes in the life of a normal person,” Lundgren says.

When Quinn turned 5, Lundgren bought some workbooks and sat him down for home “kindergarten.” Quinn looked at his mom in bewilderment. “Up until that point, his life had been an organic diverse exploration of all things that were of interest to him and us,” Lundgren says. They went to the library and took frequent field trips. She thought, “Why am I sitting him down with books matching shapes and checking boxes while he's out in the real world building forts?”

She chucked the workbooks, but when Lundgren noticed her children becoming intrigued with something–bugs, dinosaurs, mummies–books on those subjects would appear. They'd be off to the natural history museum or Fossil Rim Wildlife Center with a butterfly net. It required attentive listening.

Early on, Lundgren assumed her children would love the same things she did, especially books. But Quinn and Brenna didn't learn to read until they were 9. Though he could understand instructions for computer games, Ike was 14 before he got serious about learning to read. (Ike declined to be interviewed.)

Lundgren admits that provoked concern. “Just because your kids are home with you, it doesn't mean there isn't a lot of anxiety,” she says. “I never tried to put any pressure on them to read. I think they learned how to read many times before their brains were able to keep up with it.”

For Lundgren, it was an article of faith that–properly facilitated–each of her children would learn what he or she needed to learn. The gate in their brains would swing open. But as much as Lundgren loves the canon, those Great Books that form the basis of most classical education in the Western world, her three children simply weren't interested. “It's tough to get a kid to gravitate naturally to that,” she admits.

Who wants to read Dante when he can play Doom?

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.
–Oscar Wilde

Quinn gets a dreamy look in his eyes when he talks about the early days–the closeness he shared with his siblings and his best friend down the street, the day-long games of make-believe uninterrupted by “musts” or “shoulds” or “have-tos.”

And always the gentle influence of his mom.

“She would expose us to a lot of things and make opportunities available without making it seem as if she wanted us to do it,” Quinn says. “Her philosophy was if you didn't want to learn it, it's not worth learning.”

But that philosophy provoked some anxiety. Lundgren kept waiting for Quinn to express interest in reading on his own, but it never came. He remembers learning to read at age 9 only because it was “coaxed.”

“My mother bought us a reading program and nudged us,” Quinn says. He didn't start picking up books on his own until age 12, when he read his way through Lord of the Rings. “My life was so full,” Quinn says. “All we did all day was play.” He and his brother would often stay up until 5 a.m. playing videogames.

At about 11, Quinn decided he wanted a curriculum. Lundgren says friends who went to school were teasing him, saying he'd have to start in kindergarten if he ever went to school. “I think he wanted to prove to himself that 'I can do this,'” Lundgren says.

Lundgren agreed, telling Quinn if he wanted help, she'd sit down with him 10 hours a day, but she wasn't going to force him to study or do homework. It was all up to him.

She bought a curriculum package with lots of hands-on projects. But most of the books he'd already read. Quinn complained the science book was boring and didn't teach anything he didn't already know. Skeptical, Lundgren read him the experiments and asked him to describe the outcome. “He did,” Lundgren says. “We tossed that book aside.”

Quinn's initial excitement waned, but when another homeschool mom offered to buy the curriculum, he refused to give it up. Lundgren made her son a deal: For each week that he didn't keep up with the work, he paid her $4 from his allowance. He ended up paying for the whole thing. One night, Quinn cuddled up with his mom and said, “It makes more sense for me to do the things I'm interested in instead of what other people think.”

But at age 14, Quinn announced he wanted to attend school.

Shocked, Lundgren thought the main reason was that his friends were all in school. Eaker says his oldest son was bored. “Quinn, of the three of our kids, is the more sensitive and had more of a need to be accepted,” Eaker says. I think he felt more acutely the difference in which he was raised.”

Quinn says the main reason was his love-hate relationship with his sister Brenna. Like most little sisters, she was driving him nuts. And Quinn admits he was rebelling. “I knew my mother didn't like school,” Quinn says. His dad? “I think he was quite happy I was going.”

Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality.
–Henry Fielding

Steve Eaker's biggest conflict with his wife over unschooling was simple: How would his children find good jobs? What if all Ike wanted to do was play videogames and Frisbee golf, as it now seems?

But Eaker's own life took a weird twist that proved a top-flight college degree doesn't provide lifelong happiness, or even employment.

A soft blanket depicting a tiger drapes a table in the room at St. Paul Medical Center. Diagrams of “trigger pressure points” adorn the walls. After several years, Eaker's massage therapy practice has built up a client base, but it's still a struggle.

Tall, his graying brown hair in an upswept brush-cut, Eaker wears a purple scrub shirt and large glasses. Low-key and thoughtful, he has found a niche in the massage business providing relief to people with long-standing pain, but 30 years ago, if anyone had told Eaker he'd be rubbing backs for a living…well, it wasn't even a “remote possibility.” In fact, Quinn was the one who was interested in massage school. But in 2001, Eaker got laid off. Nearing 50, in a business–advertising–slammed by the collapse of the stock market, Eaker had few prospects.

Eaker now looks back with some regrets. “I wouldn't say I wasted 25 or 30 years of my life, but I do think a lot of my choices I thought I made weren't really choices,” Eaker says. “They were fulfilling expectations I integrated into my personality.” If he'd had more freedom to explore other interests, he says, maybe he would have found not just a job but a passion.

His father insisted on Eaker getting a master's degree. “It was important to him what schools I applied to,” Eaker says. “He was seeing who was being hired and promoted. He would have loved it if I'd gotten into Harvard, but I didn't.”

He admits today that he's had anxiety over his children's educations. He'd repeat to himself, “I believe they will learn to read when they are ready.” Ike's late start spooked him, but he was comforted by the fact that soon after his children got serious about reading, they quickly progressed to reading at their grade level.

“For most people, it's the lunatic fringe,” he says. “What I've seen is that our kids are better-adjusted than most other kids.”

Like Quinn, Brenna wanted to go to school in the eighth grade, so Lundgren took her on a tour of the public middle school. “It seemed so scary,” Brenna says. “There were so many people. The way they went from one class to the next class. It sort of seemed like prison.” She said no thanks.

Brenna's experience mirrors Quinn's, except that from an early age she kept a journal and wrote to pen pals. At Brenna's request, Lundgren started teaching her math. Brenna lost interest after two weeks but has kept track of her babysitting money since she was 12. “I think my dad may have been a little scared that we wouldn't know the things that we should,” Brenna says. “But he didn't pressure us.”

At 18, Brenna took a couple of classes in science and math at a community college to see if she'd like to pursue a degree. She did well but hated the boring material. Brenna still hasn't found her passion, but she feels “happy, capable and smart” as a result of her upbringing. She's been financially independent for several years. An avid climber, she moved a month ago to Boulder, Colorado, with her boyfriend. If there was any downside to unschooling, it was that she was never around people who didn't like her. “I don't have as much experience with people being negative toward me,” Brenna says. “People who have been to school can take that with more of a grain of salt.”

I remember that I was never able to get along at school. I was always at the foot of the class. I used to feel that my teachers did not sympathise with me, and that my father thought I was stupid.
–Thomas Edison

When Quinn announced one month into his senior year at Colleyville Heritage High School that he was dropping out, his dad couldn't believe it. “To me it was a very illogical decision,” Eaker says. “I was like, 'You've played the game so long and you're one semester away from graduating.' Barb wouldn't support me in that.”

Quinn had attended eighth grade at a private, half-day Christian school that taught Latin. Though normally outgoing and effervescent, he was shy and didn't make any friends he brought home.

He went to high school for sports, but didn't make the baseball team. To fit in, Quinn became one of the preppy kids, wearing Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger. But he was better with teachers (who didn't know his background) than other teenagers. He excelled at art and English, even though he couldn't spell and was terrible at punctuation. “I can communicate,” he says. But Quinn never made good grades in his other subjects. Who cared?

His unschooler's ability to think out of the box at times came to his rescue. In physics, Quinn got the best grade in his class on the egg drop problem (a project popular with homeschoolers) even though he'd forgotten to do the assignment. In 10 minutes, Quinn says, he borrowed paper, tissue and tape from the teacher and fashioned a container and “parachute.” His egg not only survived the 50-foot drop, he got extra points because his contraption was the lightest.

Quinn played some football, but after years of never going to a doctor, he got sick and lost so much weight that, by age 17, he was down to 100 pounds. No illness was diagnosed; was it depression?

“Part of me wanted to be popular and have friends,” Quinn says. “But it wasn't me. It was like I lost my strength and confidence. I almost wasn't alive.”

By his senior year, Quinn had had enough, or maybe–as the material got harder and more boring–he choked.

“My whole life had been just being, just playing,” Quinn says. “A month into my senior year, I was like, 'Why am I here?' The only reason I was there was social reasons. My dad was like, 'Why now? Get the diploma.' I wasn't quitting for logical reasons. It was for the sake of being happy.” (He later got his GED, “because my dad wanted me to.”)

After dropping out, Quinn devoted himself to getting healthy, working out and taking dance lessons. He did some metal-working and jewelry-making. Then his ambitions took several turns that Lundgren could never have predicted.

He loved paint ball, and after a period of testing himself physically–like fighting someone bare-knuckled to see if he could hold his own–Quinn decided to join the Army.

A soldier? That wasn't how Lundgren expected her oldest son to turn out. “I was definitely sweating it,” she says. Quinn didn't follow through.

At Grapevine Mall, Quinn went through a modeling program and was recruited by an agent. At 18, he rode his motorcycle to Los Angeles, determined to become a model and actor, his goal “to be as rich, as famous, as good-looking as I could.”

In L.A., Quinn was working in retail, going on auditions and reading metaphysics when he experienced his own “awakening” as a female friend recounted an emotional experience. “She was really re-living it, and I was so aware of what she had been through, it was like I was tripping,” Quinn says. “I experienced everything and nothing. I fell to my knees. I was crying. It was like a complete connection.” All that mattered was being alive, because he felt so good.

Soon after, Quinn attended a 10-day program for teens in Oregon put on by the Conversations with God Foundation, created by New Age guru Neale Donald Walsch, author of Conversations With God and numerous other books and tapes. Walsch claims to have spoken directly to the Supreme Being and advocates a “new spirituality,” encouraging people to chuck all religion-induced guilt by realising they are just fine as they are. Quinn resonated with Walsch's message about choosing his own path, living in the moment, following one's “bliss.”

Abandoning modeling, Quinn went on a pilgrimage, seeing members of his family he hadn't seen in years. Since then, Quinn has traveled around the United States and a handful of foreign countries, never staying anywhere longer than three months. Quinn has had 20 different jobs: painting, construction, yard work, selling art, teaching yoga or didgeridoo, an Australian musical instrument. But all jobs are on his terms: no diploma necessary, and no commitment.

There have been hair-raising moments in this self-directed tutorial. After reading a book on wilderness survival, he and a male cousin spent a month on Prince Charlotte Island in Canada with only the clothes on their backs and two knives. They planned to stay three months, but everything–building a shelter, finding food, making rope–took so much effort that they left exhausted after a month. But how many suburban kids could have lasted that long?

In Hawai'i, Quinn became intrigued with a schizophrenic who was living on the streets. “He bordered on clairvoyant,” Quinn says.

When Quinn called home to say he planned to live homeless with the man, Lundgren had a gut-check moment. “We had a long conversation about it,” she says. “Ike came to me and said you have to talk him out of it. I said, 'Ike, you know I don't do that. We don't understand it, but this is what Quinn wants to do.'”

Quinn got an education in what it was like to be poor and crazy. He paid close attention to his new friend's ramblings, hoping to glean some wisdom, but after a week they parted ways.

“It affected me powerfully in positive ways but also in negative ways,” Quinn says. “He would have anger fits and unload on me.” But the man also taught Quinn how to dumpster-dive.

Quinn lived homeless alone for another week. One night he was sleeping in a doorway when he was approached by a woman wearing makeup and heels. She showed him a place to sleep out of the rain where cops wouldn't bother him. Quinn refused her offer of crystal meth and a blow job. “I've never had sex, so no,” Quinn told her. Though he felt some pinpricks of fear, the woman left him alone. Quinn later realized she was probably a he.

Being homeless taught him a resourcefulness no reading ever could. “I lived two weeks without spending a penny,” Quinn says. Every meal was scrounged. He has confidence today that he will never go hungry. Even now, when Quinn is home, he often brings his mother bananas or melons or rotisserie chickens he's found in trash bins outside grocery stores. Lundren tosses the overripe fruit, but Quinn says she sometimes uses the chickens for salad and burritos.

Quinn doesn't see college in his future. He's after something bigger than a bachelor's degree. “I just go and let the universe open up to me,” Quinn says. He's shopping for a bicycle so he can travel without relying on oil or other methods of transport. “I always have some new profound experience. That's what my life is about now, a moment-to-moment, day-to-day existence.”

It's not that Quinn doesn't have dreams. But in a world full of options, they change every day.

I've often wondered, given all the zombie movies out there, why few of them have explored what would happen if the zombies retained their intelligence and humanity. Therefore I was pleased to find Xombie, a cool little flash series about Dirge, an intelligent zombie, who rescues a little living girl named Zoe, and tries to return her to her family.

Check out his cover of Baby Got Back by Sir-Mix-A-Lot. More here.

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Nina Gordon's Straight Outta Compton.
Max Raabe's Oops, I Did It Again

Randall Parker, in his futurepundit persona, finds an enormous number of fascinating science articles. As parapundit, he's virulently anti-immigration. Most of the time I resist the temptation to respond to his parapundit posts, but this time I couldn't resist:

http://www.parapundit.com/archives/003053.html

Randall,

I've been reading your blog (via the Livejournal RSS feed) for over a year, so I'm familiar with many of your arguments. (And I have great admiration for the breadth of your reading — futurepundit is quite fascinating.)

That said, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to respond to a suggestion to read a book-length archive of blog posts. So instead I'll respond to the specific points you raised.

1) Whether or not poor Mexicans can pay for the bonds depends on a) the amount of the bond b) the expected earnings of the Mexican in the U.S. Assuming for the moment that the purchase of such bonds could be enforced, how much of a bond would you require before allowing the average Mexican into the U.S.?

2) You claim that a barrier could be erected for between $2 – $8 billion. Leaving aside whether such a barrier would be effective, proponents of government initiatives are not known for their accuracy in estimating the costs. For example, In September 2002, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Iraq war would cost $1.5 billion to $4 billion per month. In fact, it costs between $5 billion and $8 billion per month. Moreover,

“Prior to the war, White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsay estimated the war would be about 1 to 2 percent of the gross national product, or about $200 billion on the high end. Lindsey left the White House post several months later. Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels called Lindsay's estimate “very, very high” and told news organizations the cost would likely be between $50 billion and $60 billion.” (5)

The U.S. has already spent $312 billion on the war, and current CBO estimates put the final tally at $700 billion. (2) The costs of all earlier wars have been similarly underestimated. (2)

And it's not just war — the costs of Medicare, Social Security, and other great society programs have been similarly vastly underestimated. For example:

“At its start, in 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion,” wrote Steven Hayward and Erik Peterson in a 1993 Reason article. “The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that Medicare would cost only about $12 billion by 1990 (a figure that included an allowance for inflation). This was supposedly a 'conservative' estimate. But in 1990 Medicare actually cost $107 billion.” (4)

Why should I believe that your projected costs are not similarly underestimated?

3) Even if such a wall were built at your projected costs, I have no confidence that it will work. The U.S. has spent $40 billion so far this year alone in the “War on Drugs” (3) (up from $1 billion/year in 1980), yet the street cost and purity of drugs has remained the about the same as it was 20 years ago (in inflation-adjusted terms).

Why should I believe that a “War on Illegal Immigrants” will be any more effective?

You write:

“Nearly half of all illegals came in through legals ports of entry. So the construction of a barrier on the border with Mexico would probably cut illegal immigration by about half.”

This assumes that immigrant behavior is static. Do you think that immigrants will just throw up their hands? Illegals already pay large bribes to coyotes to take them across the desert. How much more would it cost to bribe a border guard? And what about the thousands of commercial vehicles that cross into the U.S. every day? The tourists and businessmen?

In my opinion, so long as there is a large differential between median U.S. and Mexican wages, there will be an inexorable pressure for immigrants to come to the U.S.

Ironically, I think that immigration restrictions make it more likely that immigrants will stay in the U.S. than they would otherwise. Since crossing the border is so risky, once an immigrant makes it into the U.S., they stay and build new lives here. If it were easier to cross the border, I think a lot of immigrants would come here to build up a nest egg, then move back to Mexico to start their own businesses, secure in the knowledge that they could come back to the U.S. if their venture doesn't work out. This would a) provide venture capital, thus allowing Mexicans to build up their own economy b) create demand in Mexicans for a U.S. style legal environment (instead of the current cronyism and corruption that characterizes Mexican law now) c) raise living standards so that Mexicans have enough time, money, and energy to lobby for political reform d) reduce pressure on Mexicans to move to the U.S. in the first place.

3) Just as the War on Drugs has caused enormous damage to our civil liberties, I expect a War on Illegals would have similar consequences. You write:

“The solution to our immigration problem is to build a wall and then start deporting all the illegals.”

So first you want to build a Berlin Wall around the United States. Assuming you agree with Krikorian's proposals, you also support stepped up “document audits”, asset forfeiture, and a national id card system required to own a car, start a business, go to school, or do pretty much anything. Doesn't this ring any alarm bells for you? Are you so confident in the benevolence of government officials that you would give them the power to track your every move?

4) You complain about the costs of uninsured llegals. But how exactly is an illegal immigrant supposed to get a good paying job with insurance without documentation? Most high paying jobs don't pay cash under the table. And what value is a good education if you can't get a job doing anything other than menial labor?

Yes, Mexicans use social services (healthcare, education). Why shouldn't they? We allow them to use them. We should stop subsidizing them. Of course, you could argue that there is now a voting constituency for tax-subsidized healthcare and government schools, and it would therefore be quite difficult to eliminate the subsidies. And I would agree. But I see them as problems regardless of whether immigrants come to the U.S. or not.

5) You wrote:

“Take away the Mexicans and rebuilding would stll get done. But it would get done by American citizens at higher wages.”

If a Mexican and a U.S. citizen of equal skill applied for the same job, and assuming that each imposed the same level of externality, would it matter to you who got the job?

1) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/07/17/MNG5GDPEK31.DTL&type=printable
2) http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0321/p02s02-woiq.html
3) http://www.drugsense.org/wodclock.htm
4) http://www.reason.com/sullum/112803.shtml
5) http://zfacts.com/p/447.html

The Manolo he has not yet seen the movie Serenity, however he is very much enjoying the Firefly series.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-legalize16oct16,0,4914395.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

Let those dopers be
A former police chief wants to end a losing war by legalizing pot, coke, meth and other drugs

By Norm Stamper, Norm Stamper is the former chief of the Seattle Police Department. He is the author of “Breaking Rank: A Top Cop's Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing” (Nation Books, 2005).

SOMETIMES PEOPLE in law enforcement will hear it whispered that I'm a former cop who favors decriminalization of marijuana laws, and they'll approach me the way they might a traitor or snitch. So let me set the record straight.

Yes, I was a cop for 34 years, the last six of which I spent as chief of Seattle's police department.

But no, I don't favor decriminalization. I favor legalization, and not just of pot but of all drugs, including heroin, cocaine, meth, psychotropics, mushrooms and LSD.

Decriminalization, as my colleagues in the drug reform movement hasten to inform me, takes the crime out of using drugs but continues to classify possession and use as a public offense, punishable by fines.

I've never understood why adults shouldn't enjoy the same right to use verboten drugs as they have to suck on a Marlboro or knock back a scotch and water.

Prohibition of alcohol fell flat on its face. The prohibition of other drugs rests on an equally wobbly foundation. Not until we choose to frame responsible drug use — not an oxymoron in my dictionary — as a civil liberty will we be able to recognize the abuse of drugs, including alcohol, for what it is: a medical, not a criminal, matter.

As a cop, I bore witness to the multiple lunacies of the “war on drugs.” Lasting far longer than any other of our national conflicts, the drug war has been prosecuted with equal vigor by Republican and Democratic administrations, with one president after another — Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush — delivering sanctimonious sermons, squandering vast sums of taxpayer money and cheerleading law enforcers from the safety of the sidelines.

It's not a stretch to conclude that our draconian approach to drug use is the most injurious domestic policy since slavery. Want to cut back on prison overcrowding and save a bundle on the construction of new facilities? Open the doors, let the nonviolent drug offenders go. The huge increases in federal and state prison populations during the 1980s and '90s (from 139 per 100,000 residents in 1980 to 482 per 100,000 in 2003) were mainly for drug convictions. In 1980, 580,900 Americans were arrested on drug charges. By 2003, that figure had ballooned to 1,678,200. We're making more arrests for drug offenses than for murder, manslaughter, forcible rape and aggravated assault combined. Feel safer?

I've witnessed the devastating effects of open-air drug markets in residential neighborhoods: children recruited as runners, mules and lookouts; drug dealers and innocent citizens shot dead in firefights between rival traffickers bent on protecting or expanding their markets; dedicated narcotics officers tortured and killed in the line of duty; prisons filled with nonviolent drug offenders; and drug-related foreign policies that foster political instability, wreak health and environmental disasters, and make life even tougher for indigenous subsistence farmers in places such as Latin America and Afghanistan. All because we like our drugs — and can't have them without breaking the law.

As an illicit commodity, drugs cost and generate extravagant sums of (laundered, untaxed) money, a powerful magnet for character-challenged police officers.

Although small in numbers of offenders, there isn't a major police force — the Los Angeles Police Department included — that has escaped the problem: cops, sworn to uphold the law, seizing and converting drugs to their own use, planting dope on suspects, robbing and extorting pushers, taking up dealing themselves, intimidating or murdering witnesses.

In declaring a war on drugs, we've declared war on our fellow citizens. War requires “hostiles” — enemies we can demonize, fear and loathe. This unfortunate categorization of millions of our citizens justifies treating them as dope fiends, evil-doers, less than human. That grants political license to ban the exchange or purchase of clean needles or to withhold methadone from heroin addicts motivated to kick the addiction.

President Bush has even said no to medical marijuana. Why would he want to “coddle” the enemy? Even if the enemy is a suffering AIDS or cancer patient for whom marijuana promises palliative, if not therapeutic, powers.

As a nation, we're long overdue for a soul-searching, coldly analytical look at both the “drug scene” and the drug war. Such candor would reveal the futility of our current policies, exposing the embarrassingly meager return on our massive enforcement investment (about $69 billion a year, according to Jack Cole, founder and executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition).

How would “regulated legalization” work? It would: 1) Permit private companies to compete for licenses to cultivate, harvest, manufacture, package and peddle drugs.

2) Create a new federal regulatory agency (with no apologies to libertarians or paleo-conservatives).

3) Set and enforce standards of sanitation, potency and purity.

4) Ban advertising.

5) Impose (with congressional approval) taxes, fees and fines to be used for drug-abuse prevention and treatment and to cover the costs of administering the new regulatory agency.

6) Police the industry much as alcoholic beverage control agencies keep a watch on bars and liquor stores at the state level. Such reforms would in no way excuse drug users who commit crimes: driving while impaired, providing drugs to minors, stealing an iPod or a Lexus, assaulting one's spouse, abusing one's child. The message is simple. Get loaded, commit a crime, do the time.

These reforms would yield major reductions in a host of predatory street crimes, a disproportionate number of which are committed by users who resort to stealing in order to support their habit or addiction.

Regulated legalization would soon dry up most stockpiles of currently illicit drugs — substances of uneven, often questionable quality (including “bunk,” i.e., fakes such as oregano, gypsum, baking powder or even poisons passed off as the genuine article). It would extract from today's drug dealing the obscene profits that attract the needy and the greedy and fuel armed violence. And it would put most of those certifiably frightening crystal meth labs out of business once and for all.

Combined with treatment, education and other public health programs for drug abusers, regulated legalization would make your city or town an infinitely healthier place to live and raise a family.

It would make being a cop a much safer occupation, and it would lead to greater police accountability and improved morale and job satisfaction.

But wouldn't regulated legalization lead to more users and, more to the point, drug abusers? Probably, though no one knows for sure — our leaders are too timid even to broach the subject in polite circles, much less to experiment with new policy models. My own prediction? We'd see modest increases in use, negligible increases in abuse.

The demand for illicit drugs is as strong as the nation's thirst for bootleg booze during Prohibition. It's a demand that simply will not dwindle or dry up. Whether to find God, heighten sexual arousal, relieve physical pain, drown one's sorrows or simply feel good, people throughout the millenniums have turned to mood- and mind-altering substances.

They're not about to stop, no matter what their government says or does. It's time to accept drug use as a right of adult Americans, treat drug abuse as a public health problem and end the madness of an unwinnable war.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/08/AR2005100801405_pf.html

washingtonpost.com
Scientists Finding Out What Losing Sleep Does to a Body
By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 9, 2005; A01

With a good night's rest increasingly losing out to the Internet, e-mail, late-night cable and other distractions of modern life, a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that too little or erratic sleep may be taking an unappreciated toll on Americans' health.

Beyond leaving people bleary-eyed, clutching a Starbucks cup and dozing off at afternoon meetings, failing to get enough sleep or sleeping at odd hours heightens the risk for a variety of major illnesses, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity, recent studies indicate.

“We're shifting to a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week society, and as a result we're increasingly not sleeping like we used to,” said Najib T. Ayas of the University of British Columbia. “We're really only now starting to understand how that is affecting health, and it appears to be significant.”

A large, new study, for example, provides the latest in a flurry of evidence suggesting that the nation's obesity epidemic is being driven, at least in part, by a corresponding decrease in the average number of hours that Americans are sleeping, possibly by disrupting hormones that regulate appetite. The analysis of a nationally representative sample of nearly 10,000 adults found that those between the ages of 32 and 49 who sleep less than seven hours a night are significantly more likely to be obese.

The study follows a series of others that have found similar associations with other illnesses, including several reports from the Harvard-run Nurses' Health Study that has linked insufficient or irregular sleep to increased risk for colon cancer, breast cancer, heart disease and diabetes. Other research groups scattered around the country have subsequently found clues that might explain the associations, indications that sleep disruption affects crucial hormones and proteins that play roles in these diseases.

“There has been an avalanche of studies in this area. It's moving very rapidly,” said Emmanuel Mignot of Stanford University, who wrote an editorial accompanying the new obesity study in the October issue of the journal Sleep. “People are starting to believe that there is an important relationship between short sleep and all sorts of health problems.”

Not everyone agrees, with some experts arguing that any link between sleep patterns and health problems appears weak at best and could easily be explained by other factors.

“There are Chicken Little people running around saying that the sky is falling because people are not sleeping enough,” said Daniel F. Kripke of the University of California at San Diego. “But everyone knows that people are getting healthier. Life expectancy has been increasing, and people are healthier today than they were generations ago.”

Other researchers acknowledge that much more research is needed to prove that the apparent associations are real, and to fully understand how sleep disturbances may affect health. But they argue that the case is rapidly getting stronger that sleep is an important factor in many of the biggest killers.

“We have in our society this idea that you can just get by without sleep or manipulate when you sleep without any consequences,” said Lawrence Epstein, president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. “What we're finding is that's just not true.”

While many aspects of sleep remain a mystery — including exactly why we sleep — the picture that appears to be emerging is that not sleeping enough or being awake in the wee hours runs counter to the body's internal clock, throwing a host of basic bodily functions out of sync.

“Lack of sleep disrupts every physiologic function in the body,” said Eve Van Cauter of the University of Chicago. “We have nothing in our biology that allows us to adapt to this behavior.”

The amount of necessary sleep varies from person to person, with some breezing through their days on just a few hours' slumber and others barely functioning without a full 10 hours, experts say. But most people apparently need between about seven and nine hours, with studies indicating that an increased risk for disease starts to kick in when people get less than six or seven, experts say.

Scientists have long known that sleep disorders, such as sleep apnea, narcolepsy and chronic insomnia, can lead to serious health problems, and that difficulty sleeping may be a red flag for a serious illness. But the first clues that otherwise healthy people who do not get enough sleep or who shift their sleep schedules because of work, family or lifestyle may be endangering their health emerged from large epidemiological studies that found people who slept the least appeared to be significantly more likely to die.

“The strongest evidence out there right now is for the risk of overall mortality, but we also see the association for a number of specific causes,” said Sanjay R. Patel of Harvard Medical School, who led one of the studies, involving more than 82,000 nurses, that found an increased risk of death among those who slept less than six hours a night. “Now we're starting to get insights into what's happening in the body when you don't get enough sleep.”

Physiologic studies suggest that a sleep deficit may put the body into a state of high alert, increasing the production of stress hormones and driving up blood pressure, a major risk factor for heart attacks and strokes. Moreover, people who are sleep-deprived have elevated levels of substances in the blood that indicate a heightened state of inflammation in the body, which has also recently emerged as a major risk factor for heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes.

“Based on our findings, we believe that if you lose sleep that your body needs, then you produce these inflammatory markers that on a chronic basis can create low-grade inflammation and predispose you to cardiovascular events and a shorter life span,” said Alexandros N. Vgontzas of Pennsylvania State University, who recently presented data at a scientific meeting indicating that naps can help counter harmful effects of sleep loss.

Other studies have found that sleep influences the functioning of the lining inside blood vessels, which could explain why people are most prone to heart attacks and strokes during early morning hours.

“We've really only scratched the surface when it comes to understanding what's going on regarding sleep and heart disease,” said Virend Somers of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “I suspect as we understand more about this relationship, we'll realize how important it really is.”

After several studies found that people who work at night appear unusually prone to breast and colon cancer, researchers investigating the possible explanation for this association found exposure to light at night reduces levels of the hormone melatonin. Melatonin is believed to protect against cancer by affecting levels of other hormones, such as estrogen.

“Melatonin can prevent tumor cells from growing — it's cancer-protective,” said Eva S. Schernhammer of Harvard Medical School, who has conducted a series of studies on volunteers in sleep laboratories. “The theory is, if you are exposed to light at night, on average you will produce less melatonin, increasing your cancer risk.”

Other researchers are exploring a possible link to other malignancies, including prostate cancer.

“There's absolutely no reason it should be limited to breast cancer, and it wouldn't necessarily be restricted to people who work night shifts. People with disrupted sleep or people who are up late at night or get up frequently in the night could potentially have the same sort of effect,” said Scott Davis of the University of Washington.

The newest study on obesity, from Columbia University, is just the latest to find that adults who sleep the least appear to be the most likely to gain weight and to become obese.

Other researchers have found that even mild sleep deprivation quickly disrupts normal levels of the recently discovered hormones ghrelin and leptin, which regulate appetite. That fits with the theory that humans may be genetically wired to be awake at night only when they need to be searching for food or fending off danger — circumstances when they would need to eat to have enough energy.

“The modern equivalence to that situation today may unfortunately be often just a few steps to the refrigerator next door,” Mignot wrote in his editorial.

In addition, studies show sleep-deprived people tend to develop problems regulating their blood sugar, which may put them at increased risk for diabetes.

“The research in this area is really just in its infancy,” Van Cauter said. “This is really just the tip of the iceberg that has just begun to emerge.”

I want to live in a world filled with smart, interesting people. Therefore, I have an interest in seeing that more smart, interesting kids are raised to adulthood. Unfortunately,a dismaying number of smart, interesting couples on my friend's list have no plans to have children.

Of course, I agree with the logic of their position–the direct and opportunity costs of having children are huge. It's easy for me to be wistful for the kids that will never be — I'm not the one paying the cost. But it's disheartening to think that their genes will disappear from the gene pool.

On the other hand, in a few hundred years or so, it will likely be a moot point anyway — I expect that to the extent most people reproduce at all, it will be via robotic children. And in the relatively near-term, I expect that children will be heavily tweaked to optimize their genetics before birth. So, as long as we know how to reproduce the 'good genes' at will, nothing has truly been lost. And if anti-aging research pans out, most of the child-free couples themselves will still be around.

Serenity in 2000 words. (SPOILERS!) Via .