News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We received several generous year-end gifts--thanks to all who have supported FPR financially and otherwise! We have some exciting developments on tap for the new year--stay tuned for more on those in the coming weeks.
- I review Wendell Berry's new collection of Sabbath poems: "One might think that after forty-four years of writing these Sabbath poems, Berry would run out of things to say. But it seems that as long as the trees continue their silent conversion of light to soil, as long as the sun and the moon endure, as long as he has life and breath, Berry will continue his acts of Sabbath praise."
- Garth Brown responds to a recent Senate hearing on the FDA and America's food system: "There’s little appetite for a response that begins with taking up our axes to clear the land for something better."
- Eugene Callahan offers some guidance for identifying the encroachment of ideological thinking: "Whenever we see such an avoidance of questions like these, we are witnessing someone protecting an ideological dream world."
- Austin Hoffman makes a Swiftian case for classical schools to adopt AI: "It’s possible that we could feed AI enough content and parameters that we wouldn’t need to have any staff except for janitors. We could have students learn from their classical AI at home, except they need to be socialized. It builds community when students use their devices in the same room. If students still need some semblance of personal connection to their teacher, we might construct an artificial head to lead them in instruction. I propose we name this model Alcasan."
I recently read David McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt. McCullough is always a delight to read, and I enjoyed learning more about Roosevelt’s early years. I also learned some methods of treating asthma:
The common methods then used to confront an attack varied greatly and to the present-day reader seem excessively harsh. Emetics and purges were standard. The common way to avert an attack was the make the patient violently ill, to dose him with ipecac or with incredibly nauseating potions made of garlic and mustard seed and “vinegar of squills,” a dried plant also used for rat poison. Children were given enemas, plunged into cold baths. Whiskey and gin were used, laudanum (opium mixed with wine) and Indian hemp (marijuana). The patient was made to inhale chloroform or the fumes of burning nitrate paper or the smoke from dried jimson weed (Datura stramonium), another poisonous plant, coarse and vile smelling, that had been used in treating asthma in India for centuries. Many children were made to smoke a ghastly medicinal cigarette concocted of jimson weed and chopped camphor.
Black coffee may have been the Roosevelts’ “trump card,” as Mittie said, but Teedie was also made to swallow ipecac and smoke cigars. The purpose of the cigar was to subject the child to what, in essence, was a dose of nicotine poisoning. “In those who have not established a tolerance to tobacco,” explained Henry Hyde Salter, “its use is soon followed by a well-known condition of collapse, much resembling seasickness—vertigo, loss of power in the limbs, a sense of deadly faintness, cold sweat, inability to speak or think, nausea, vomiting.”
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro