One Less Beer to Cry Into

Anchor Brewing Company is a regional craft brewery on Potrero Hill in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1896, the brewery has undergone several changes in location and ownership throughout its history. It’s one of the last remaining producers of steam beer made by fermenting lager yeast at a warmer than normal temperature.

After 127 years, the company has given up. Brewing has stopped, and the finished beer on hand will packaged and sold. The company’s employees have been given 60 days notice and the company will be liquidated (an ironic term to use for closing a brewery).

Anchor was one of, if not the, original craft breweries, but it seems that too many of the kind of people who buy such beers have left San Francisco.

Crazy People Are Dangerous™

My podcasting partner Stacy McCain has piece over at The American Spectator about staying sane during Pride Month. (When will greed, envy, lust, wrath, gluttony, and sloth get their months?)

Words have meanings, however, and “phobia” denotes an irrational fear. The person who accuses you of harboring a “phobia” — in regard to gay or transgender people, or anything else — is claiming the authority to make a psychiatric diagnosis. The obvious question is, what are their credentials to make such a diagnosis? As a critic or opponent of the LGBTQIA2S+ political agenda, do you really fear or hate people based on their sexual preferences? And whatever your beliefs or opinions may be, are they really irrational?

Read the whole thing.

Maybe the real problem is that too many people are suffering from kanonikophobia, the irrational fear of normal things.

Team Kimberlin Post of the Day

This episode of the Blogsmoke first ran six years ago today.

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SOUND: MODEM CONNECTING FADES UP TO FULL MIKE—SINGLE SHOT—RICOCHET

MUSIC: UP AND UNDER—RECORDED—CUT 1

ANNOUNCER: (VOICE OVER MUSIC) Around Twitter Town and in the territory of the net—there’s just one way to handle the harassers and the stalkers—and that’s with an Internet Sheriff and the smell of “BLOGSMOKE”!

MUSIC: THEME HITS: FULL BROAD SWEEP AND UNDER—RECORDED—CUT 2

ANNOUNCER: “BLOGSMOKE” starring W. J. J. Hoge. The story of the trolling that moved into the young Internet—and the story of a man who moved against it. (MUSIC: OUT)

JOHN: I’m that man, John Hoge, Internet Sheriff—the first man they look for and the last they want to meet. It’s a chancy job—and it makes a man watchful … and a little lonely.

MUSIC: MAIN TITLE—RECORDED—CUT 3 Continue reading

Hate Speech

Consider those words: hate speech.

When the Left uses them, they act as if the first word hate is an adjective categorizing speech they deem improper. In reality, they mean the first word to be a verb. The phrase becomes a command. They want us to hate speech, especially speech that challenges them.

Robust, free speech challenges all of us, and comedy forces us to laugh at our own silliness. Consider this famous scene about four humorless activists from Life of Brian

Watch Eric Idle toward the end. He’s obviously trying not to burst out laughing at the absurdity of the material.

John Cleese is putting together a stage version of Life of Brian. Some actors reading the script urged that the I Want to Have Babies scene be cut, but Cleese has refused to drop it. Bravo! He can still do so here, but in other countries making a joke can now be punished as a hate crime.

I intend to continue to laugh. If that makes me a hate criminal, so be it.

Schools, Guns, and Nashville

The school shooting today would have been unimaginable when I was in elementary school in Nashville in the ’50s. Here’s part of a post about Teachers and Guns that I posted five years ago this month.

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That got me to thinking about my teachers and which ones I would trust with a gun.

Mr. Brown, the 8th grade teacher, and Coach Warfield were WWII veterans. I suspect they would have handled the responsibility. The principal Mrs. Mathis and my 4th grade teacher Mrs. Thomson probably would have also done well.

My high school was part of a college, so we had an armed campus cop assigned to our building and grounds. Additionally, several members of the faculty were veterans, including one of my French teachers who had come to America as a war bride after serving in the Resistance. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that the American History teacher Dr. Holden was armed.

It was a different time and place.

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A very different place and time—one where the idea of a school shooting was so crazy that no one would be insane enough to try it.

First, Willie Wonka. Now, James Bond.

The Sunday Telegraph reports that the James Bond books are being scrubbed of “racists references.”

Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, the company that owns the literary rights to the author’s work, commissioned a review by sensitivity readers of the classic texts under its control.

It’s almost as if this is part of a larger plan …

It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. … Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

Titanium, Oxygen, and Raaaaacism

Maureen Mullarkey has a post over at The Federalist about research into the racism associated with white paint. Norway, which for the moment is covered with vast swaths of white ice and snow, has granted about $1.2 million to the University of Bergen for an investigation into “How Norway Made the World Whiter (NorWhite).” The most common safe white dye is titanium dioxide which was developed in 1910 by a pair of Norwegian chemists.

There’s another grant of around $228,000 going the the Oslo National Academy of the Arts for a sister project “The Materiality of White (MoW).” This study is designed to “highlight TiO2’s materiality and ubiquity, and to contribute to critical thinking on the color white and its mineral origin”—all of that in search of an answer to the question, “Do we need our world to be more white?”

I remember enough high school physics and biology to know that the origin of the color white has nothing to do with minerals per se. Our sensation of the color white occurs when a broad spectrum of light excites all three types of receptors in our eyes. We see other colors when part or parts of the spectrum are missing. A white pigment such as TiO2 reflects a balanced spectrum of the light striking it.

I also remember enough high school chemistry to answer the question about the ubiquity of TiO2 in dyes. It’s vastly safer than the white lead dye it has replaced, especially in paints. Poisonings related to white paint dropped significantly during the first half of the last century as titanium white replaced lead white. BTW, white dye in a component of almost all colors other than black. It is added to moderate the strength of other pigments. The world would be much more boring without white dye.

As to whether melanin-deficient Norwegians need their world to be more white, I suggest they wait until after the spring thaw before making any rash judgments.

Happy 90th Birthday, John Reid!

A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust, and a hearty, “Heigh-ho, Silver!” The Lone Ranger!

The program was first broadcast 90 years ago today on WXYZ in Detroit.

With his faithful Indian companion Tonto, the daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains led the fight for law and order in the early western United States! Nowhere in the pages of History can one find a greater champion of justice! Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear! From out of the past come the thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver! The Lone Ranger rides again!

BTW, former Texas Ranger John Reid’s greatnewphew Britt Reid wound up fighting crime on WXYZ as well.

He hunts the biggest of all game! Public enemies that even the G-Men cannot reach—The Green Hornet!