President Donald Trump's inauguration has been relocated to the cozy confines of the Capitol rotunda, all thanks to a frigid Arctic blast sweeping across the nation. This is a rare occurrence, marking the first indoor swearing-in ceremony in four decades! With temperatures plummeting to a brisk 20°F, the decision was made to prioritize the comfort and safety of all attendees.

Now, let’s take a moment to reflect on the infamous "Buchanan Grip." This peculiar ailment plagued President James Buchanan and several guests during his inauguration back in 1857. Also dubbed the National Hotel disease, it unleashed a torrent of symptoms including severe diarrhea, vomiting, and fever. While some whispered of a sinister assassination plot, modern-day experts lean towards a more mundane explanation: the hotel’s shoddy sewage system was likely the culprit behind this unfortunate outbreak.

The Owner of Non-Man and Other Tales… Second edition, revised and expanded…

Help us make a dream come true…

From a young age we listen to the instructions of the elderly in the sense that we must be able to choose our path in life. It's a nice metaphor.

There are those who, complying with this, prepare themselves to travel the highways of life, provide themselves with fast engines and soft seats.   Others, simpler, choose secondary roads where the speed does not produce so much vertigo and the tolls are cheaper. Many have to join forces and travel the kilometers in collective buses that force the touches and strident music. And there are too many who have no other option than to walk along the humble paths crossing puddles or boulders and threatened by wild beasts or insects. This is the vineyard of the Lord, and everyone can make use of their free will. Say.

Reading the stories of Germán Toro Ghio one discovers that there are also those who chose all paths. And they also added the alternatives of lifts, elevators (and descenders), cliffs, flying devices and perhaps how many more.

With its eight stories, The Owners of No Man's Land takes us to a world so real that, unfortunately, we tend to forget it.  From the first story, he (Germán) rides the maelstrom of a roller coaster in which he mixes the discomforts of a Moscow hotel with the adventures in the Nicaraguan jungle.  He is a de facto witness to the invasion of the USA army in Panama and his cousin of millenary stubbornness at the same time, without us being able to deduce which of the two experiences was more dangerous.  He celebrates supposed birthdays in the company of an aphonic Fidel Castro (what a contradiction!) in a city of Havana corroded by sea salt or political blunders.  He walks through one of the most unusual borders in the world, the one that divides the island of Hispaniola.   He witnesses the sun sheltering us with unusual loves, in this case, his friend "Pepe" who, on a streak of good fortune, attracts them to a stale gypsy princess and a one-eyed gypsy king in the nights of Madrid and prologues his luck in the world of love to an island called Grinda in the Stockholm archipelago where Alexander's honey captivates.

Germán also takes us to a café in Paris where Ernest Hemingway is in existential conversations about life, accompanied by the sweet notes of a Santa Teresa rum, which invades the soul with harmony and helps the journalist and writer try to persuade some young gang members to change the course of their lives, in this world of violence, organ trafficking, and arms.  He evokes the spirit of the Nicaraguan poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal, particularly in his mesmerising "Ode to Marilyn Monroe".  This remarkable work invites him to explore the labyrinth of the mind's afflictions, guided by the brushstrokes of legendary artists such as Sorolla, Munch, Botero, and Modigliani.  Alongside this artistic journey, we encounter the candid whispers of Truman Capote in his poignant "Unanswered Prayers", which lays bare the frailties of our contemporary society, political systems, and monarchies.  Ultimately, Germán leads us to a heartwarming conclusion with the charming figure of "il Nono", a grandfatherly character we all wish we could have known.

The book is magnified by experiences that have taken place outside the battlefields, far from palaces and ambitions.  In other words, the principle of freedom of expression is paramount, even when individuals may endure defamation's repercussions.  With these stories, Germán Toro Ghio allows us to taste something of everything he keeps in his cupboard, and I hope he will continue to cook and deliver in successive books.

*Juan Forch, Puerto Octay, Chile

*Film director, writer, and political scientist is renowned for the 1990 "NO" campaign. / https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/movies/oscar-nominated-no-stirring-debate-in-chile.html

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O gods, women, and men with the souls of gods and goodwill, we request your solidarity and support for launching the second revised and extended edition of "The Owner of Non-Man Lan and Other Tales" in November 2025. We have already contacted a senior editor at Penguin Random House in London to help us create a remarkable and distinctive book handcrafted to serve as an exceptional corporate gift.

Thanks in advance...

Today…

The mysterious illness that plagued a presidential inauguration

America became obsessed: Was a fatal sickness called the “Buchanan Grip” an assassination attempt? Or just the result of a disease-ridden hotel?

The Washington Post By Petula Dvorak, today

Save the Inflation Reduction Act (in Part)…

Solar and wind account for the bulk of the subsidies, which are a waste of money. But promising new technologies deserve support…

WSJ by Ted Nordhaus and Alex Trembath, January, 15, 2025.

Gratitude is a vital aspect of our existence...

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The mysterious illness that plagued a presidential inauguration

America became obsessed: Was a fatal sickness called the “Buchanan Grip” an assassination attempt? Or just the result of a disease-ridden hotel?

The Washington Post By Petula Dvorak, today

The inaugural parade of 1857, on a March day that was surprisingly warm, celebrated President-elect James Buchanan with something new to Washington parades: floats.

There was the “Goddess of Liberty Car” drawn by six horses, complete with a woman dressed as a goddess, and a 50-foot flagpole.

Then a massive replica of the frigate USS Constitution, built at the Washington Navy Yard, rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue with sailors dangling from the ship’s faux rigging.

The 1857 inaugural parade for President James Buchanan included floats for the first time, including a replica of a ship. (Library of Congress and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper/Library of Congress)

But Buchanan, smiling tightly amid all the pomp, was hiding a roiling sickness.

He was staying at Washington’s posh National Hotel. And he and most of his entourage that slept there the night before were in various stages of gastrointestinal distress, shaking and pallid. Within days, hundreds of people gathered for the inauguration of the 15th president would have the same symptoms. At least 30 of them would die of it.

“We were somewhat fearful that Mr. Buchanan might be seriously embarrassed during the inaugural ceremonies from the effects of what was then known as the National Hotel disease,” his nephew James Buchanan Henry wrote years later.

The president-elect was so unsure that he would be able to make it through his inaugural address that day that he asked for a naval surgeon to stay by his side.

He had no idea what was happening to his body. But political Washington had its suspicions.

“The opinion is becoming very general that the sickness at the National Hotel in Washington, which commenced about the date of the inauguration of President Buchanan, was the result of a deliberate and fiendish attempt to poison the President and his nearest friends!” the Pittsfield Sun concluded in a May 7 article.

We were a divided nation on the brink of Civil War. Buchanan had eked out a victory after a rancorous election. Not widely beloved, a Northerner who was deeply sympathetic to the South and to slavery, Buchanan was an enigma who confounded and frustrated abolitionists.

It wasn’t preposterous to surmise the crippling illness that felled him and his inner circle was an assassination attempt.

“Some people were absolutely convinced that Buchanan had been poisoned,” said Kerry Walters, a retired Gettysburg College philosophy professor who wrote a compelling account of the illness and the months of speculation it generated: “Outbreak in Washington, D.C.: The 1857 Mystery of the National Hotel Disease.

Everything pointed to the National Hotel, a grand building at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 6th Street NW, designed by a British architect and known for terrapin dinners, rare wines and a prestigious clientele.

Buchanan and his entourage had it booked for the inauguration, and it was to host one of the preinaugural balls.

He had stayed at the hotel in January 1857 and become sick then, too. The D.C. Board of Health was invited to visit.

“The members of the Board of Health from the Fourth Ward, and the Commissioner of Health, visited the National Hotel, and examined thoroughly all parts of the building, and they are happy to state that they can discover at present no cause that can produce disease, and that there is no need of apprehension among the guests or strangers,” the commissioner told the Evening Star in February.

The March 4, 1857, inauguration procession for James Buchanan stopped at the National Hotel on the way to the White House. (Library of Congress and Frank Leslie's illustrated newspaper/Library of Congress)

Buchanan decided to return to the hotel for his inauguration. The general manager was an old acquaintance from back home in Pennsylvania, and Buchanan wanted to give him a vote of confidence — even though he suspected it was the hotel’s soup that made him sick. He was careful to eat nothing but crackers this time, Walters wrote.

Still, the president-elect’s symptoms returned — with a vengeance. His entourage also got sick again. Within days, members of Congress, journalists and VIPs in town for the inauguration were consumed by the same mysterious illness.

It became a hot story that newspapers chased. They called it “The Buchanan Grip.”

Buchanan’s nephew and personal secretary, Elliot Eskridge Lane, was also “seized by the demon,” the National Era wrote.

He was also one of the first who died, and he “had been suffering slightly with the symptoms which have marked all the cases of disease contracted at the National,” his obituary said.

The next day, the Baltimore Sun reported that a “gentleman who died in Pennsylvania from disease contracted at the National Hotel shows a deposit of arsenic in the stomach.”

Walters said he couldn’t find any evidence substantiating the arsenic claim, that it was “most likely purple speculation.” But that fired up the conspiracy theorists.

Walters said he was struck by the parallels today.

“I’m amazed at the prevalence, not only in 1857, but really throughout all of American history of conspiracy-thinking, conspiracy-mongering,” he said.

There were inquiries and investigations. The victims were almost all male. Was it in the wine? The ladies weren’t drinking wine.

Many guests reported an odious stench of sewage in the hotel’s lower floors. That wasn’t an unusual smell in 1857 Washington.

National Hotel was on the corner of Pennsylvania Ave. and 6th Street NW. (Library of Congress and John Rubens Smith/Library of Congress)

“When James Buchanan took the oath of office, there was no sewage network, no centralized garbage collection and only the initial stages of a public system of running water,” Walters wrote in his book. “The privies of homes, hotels and government buildings discharged their contents into open fields or stagnant ponds, many of which were immediately adjacent to the structures themselves.”

Slaughterhouses dumped offal in the open, residents threw slop into alleys, pigs and cattle roamed the streets. Horses — and their manure — were everywhere.

But other hotels and buildings had raw sewage problems, so that couldn’t be the cause of the illness felling the guests at the National.

The hotel hired Thomas Antisell, a Smithsonian Institution chemist, to investigate. He analyzed the soup, the milk and the water, according to the Alexandria Gazette.

An editor from the New York Day Book whose entire family was sickened speculated that poisoned rats got into the hotel’s water tanks. He thought they were eating food “cooked in water impregnated with poisoned rats,” according to a March 17 story in the Detroit Free Press.

A Washington City subcommittee investigated and concluded that there was no way that rats could have squeezed into the water tanks.

By March, investigators came to another conclusion — it was “miasma,” a contagion that was transferred through the air via gas or vapors coming from the sewage. The hotel began throwing out some of its luxe furnishings, worried they had absorbed the nasty vapors.

None of the theories panned out.

What they didn’t know before the groundbreaking research later that century of Louis Pasteur and others was that the source of the illness was microscopic particles — germs, Walters wrote.

The Scientific American was probably the closest in guessing what plagued Washington that year: cholera, delivered through the sewage.

“It is impossible to prove the sewage hypothesis beyond any shadow of doubt,” Walters wrote. “The die-hard conspiracy buff might still object that it’s impossible to prove that the National Hotel disease was caused by backed-up sewage instead of a plot to murder Buchanan.”

Buchanan recovered but was dogged by health issues for years. Walters said he was intrigued by the story because he believed the illness altered Buchanan, who was “temperamentally timid and kind of a backbencher,” pushing him to a calamitous leadership that made him one of America’s worst presidents.

The National Hotel remodeled and recovered from the illness, with ads in late December 1857 welcoming visitors back.

One of the visitors who checked in eight years after that ill-fated inauguration season put the hotel back in the news. His name was John Wilkes Booth.

Save the Inflation Reduction Act (in Part)…

Solar and wind account for the bulk of the subsidies, which are a waste of money. But promising new technologies deserve support…

WSJ by Ted Nordhaus and Alex Trembath, January, 15, 2025.

The second coming of Donald Trump will bring another head-spinning shift to U.S. energy and climate policy. Climate catastrophism and green industrial policy are out. Energy dominance is in. Mr. Trump campaigned on killing the Inflation Reduction Act and expanding America’s hydrocarbon production. But transforming the nation into a global energy superpower will require more than simply expanding oil and gas production.

The shale gas revolution has revolutionized U.S. energy, but our oil and gas reserves aren’t limitless. Domestic production has increased dramatically over the past 15 years, and by some estimates it is already past its peak.

This, combined with Mr. Trump’s focus on increasing our energy-export capacity, could soon apply upward pressure on domestic energy prices. Over the past decade, the U.S. has lifted its prohibition on crude-oil exports and reversed the direction of many natural-gas terminals intended for import. Natural-gas exports totaled around 10% of domestic production in 2024, with enough new export capacity under construction or already approved to quadruple that figure. Add to this the predicted near-doubling of electricity demand over the next decade for artificial-intelligence data centers, and you’ve got a recipe for sustained price spikes. If we want to increase our export capacity and keep prices low at home, we’ll need new solutions.

Fortunately, the U.S. has the potential to be more than a hydrocarbon superpower. We are on the cusp of breakthroughs in nuclear fission and geothermal energy, and we have world-class wind and solar resources in many parts of the country. Exploiting these opportunities can secure low domestic energy prices and reduce dependence on Chinese supply chains.

Many of these advances, however, depend on incentives and subsidies included in the Inflation Reduction Act. Republicans have their sights set on killing the law—but there is opportunity to reform it without forgoing its benefits to U.S. energy and innovation. Republicans eager for federal savings will still have much to cut. Somewhere between half and three-quarters of projected Inflation Reduction Act spending over the next decade will be for wind, solar and electric-vehicle subsidies. These are all mature, cost-competitive technologies that don’t need further subsidization. Cutting their subsidies could amount to somewhere between $300 billion and $650 billion in savings.

But Congress should maintain federal incentives for promising less-mature technologies, such as nuclear and geothermal energy and natural-gas plants with carbon capture. Doing so would rebuild the bipartisan consensus for energy innovation that prevailed in congressional politics for decades.

Both parties have supported investments in energy innovation since the energy crisis of the 1970s. It proved critical to the development of drilling technology that created the shale revolution. Federal tax credits in the 1980s for unconventional oil and gas exploration were essential for the advancement of fracking technology. Modern solar and wind technology was initially developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and national labs. And federal loan guarantees during the Obama years were critical to getting Tesla rolling. Mr. Trump even approved the Section 45Q credit, a subsidy for carbon-capture and storage technology.

With the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, President Biden and congressional Democrats destroyed this consensus by shifting the government’s focus to hyperpartisan climate policy. Democrats and renewable-energy advocates once promised that clean-energy subsidies would be temporary. They now propose to use them as a kind of reverse carbon tax to subsidize clean technology in perpetuity and kill the hydrocarbon industry.

Nixing these subsidies will save taxpayers money and end incentives that often end up undermining energy reliability. But doing so won’t be enough to unleash our full energy potential. Mr. Trump and Congress must also pursue far-reaching regulatory reform to the National Environmental Protection Act, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and interstate-transmission and grid-connection rules. Each is antiquated and restricts energy development.

Republicans in Congress could tie interstate-transmission and grid-connection reform to an overhaul of NEPA’s judicial review process and a streamlining of NRC’s advanced-reactor licensing. Federal tax credits for battery and electric-vehicle manufacturing and charging infrastructure should also be maintained—they will cost less and do more to bolster energy security than subsidies for wind and solar generation and EV buyers.

Many Democrats will oppose these efforts, as the climate movement still has a powerful grip over the progressive wing of the party. But more-moderate Democrats should keep in mind that, one way or another, Republicans are likely to cut many of these subsidies. In their absence, regulatory reforms will be essential for continued growth of clean energy technologies.

Mr. Trump and Congress have the opportunity to restore bipartisanship to energy policy. Their efforts would ensure the U.S. continues its ascendancy as a global superpower. They would do well to remember that no energy policy can stand the test of time without buy-in from the other side of the aisle.

Mr. Nordhaus is founder and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute. Mr. Trembath is deputy director of the Breakthrough Institute.