News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
One of the interesting local places we've discovered this summer is Bicycle Heaven, the world's largest bicycle museum with nearly 6,000 bikes. It's a fascinating place to spend a few hours wandering in. Despite its many hills, Pittsburgh apparently has an active cycling culture. Every fall, cyclists participate in the Dirty Dozen, a race up and down 13 of the city's steepest hills.
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In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays on rare earths, canning, and exhaustion.
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Douglas Fox thinks through the implications of the analogy of being for how we understand freedom and health: "If we can foster a freedom to flourish rather than our modern freedom of choice, and if we can recognize versions of a common good appropriate to different real entities of social order from the family to the town to the nation, integrated with the rest of nature at scales from the local and regional to the biosphere, then the need to impose order through laws and regulations is minimized, replaced by deliberative, cooperative action towards a common good."
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The Bar Jester expresses deep gratitude for the kindness of the experts looking out for his best interests: "The problem is that we fly-over folk can’t get our small provincial minds around what the Planners have done for us from behind their thick black curtain of transparency. We haven’t properly understood what a smart, valiant, and courageous thing it was for the government to print money."
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Paul Krause recommends Livy's understanding of the conditions for liberty: "His assertion that Roman liberty and equality were destroyed by the decadence of the civil wars and buried with the emergence of the Augustan regime had far reaching influence."
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Alan Cornett talks with Michael Possanner about the value of bespoke tailoring, his non-traditional journey to learning the ancient trade, his love of American football, and his passion of mixology and collecting vintage cocktail books.
I enjoyed reading Brian O'Neill's The Paris of Appalachia: Pittsburgh in the Twenty-first Century, and it's a fine introduction to the culture and character of Pittsburgh and its region. He's a committed new urbanist, and he sings the praises of front porches and walkable neighborhoods. Take, for instance, the answer he gives when asked why he enjoys living in the city rather than a suburb:
If I'm in a hurry I answer by saying our family gets by with one station wagon that averages about seven thousand miles a year, including vacation trips. In an age of expensive gas, this alone wins converts. Not that seven thousand miles should sound paltry, as it could get you to California and back by way of Florida, but it might be one-fourth of what a suburban two-vehicle family logs in a year. As a cheap, lazy man, that suits me. It also means less pollution and less oil imported from those people on the other side of the world who want to kill us. Plus all our walks generally give us the requisite hour of moderate daily exercise to keep the lard off. But truth be told, it isn't exercise, thrift, environmentalism or patriotism that keeps us where we are. The best way to explain what holds us, if I haven't already, is the parable of the garage door opener.
His account of this parable is a good one, but suffice it to say that those without garage door openers (or garages) are far more likely to bump into their neighbors.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro