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.

First Virginia, Now This

Shortly after Joe Xiden took office, I suggested that we were in for a couple of years of overreach by the Left—and that they would wind up going a bridge too far. It looks as if schools have been the flash point for a rebellion by normal people.

The rest of 2022 will be … um … interesting.

For The Times They Are A-Changin’

San Francisco Democrat Mayor London Breed announced a crackdown on crime on Tuesday. The city has been overwhelmed with pervasive lawlessness encouraged by progressive politicians.

It’s time that the reign of criminals who are destroying our city, it is time for it to come to an end. And it comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement … and less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city.

Harry Callahan was unavailable for comment.

I’m Not Making This Up, You Know

Blazing Cat Fur reports that a San Francisco school named for Abraham Lincoln will be renamed “because the former president did not demonstrate that ‘black lives mattered to him’.” The district plans to remove other names from schools including George Washington, Herbert Hoover, and Dianne Feinstein. Senator Feinstein’s name will be stricken because she allowed the Confederate flag to fly outside City Hall back in 1984 when she was mayor.

Bad Science and Even Worse Theology

The Federalist reports that Nancy Pelosi wants to keep churches closed. When asked to comment on her archbishop’s statement that the state and local governments’ restrictions on worship violate the First Amendment, the Speaker said,

With all due respect to my Archbishop, I think we should follow science on this. And again with faith and science, sometimes they’re countered to each other.

Mrs. Pelosi is wrong in multiple ways in her statement. First, there is less science involved the medical response to the Wuhan virus pandemic than many people imagine. Good medicine, like good engineering, uses scientific knowledge and principles to the extent they are available and applicable to the case at hand, but sometimes a new problem must be dealt with without existing good scientific knowledge available. Guesswork based on experience may or may not give an optimal solution, and some guesses will be wrong. Today’s news about Nashville’s wrongheaded response in closing certain business is just one example of how fallible public health officials, mayors, and governors have been. Continuing to act as if a failed hypothesis is correct in bad science.

Second, while her invocation of science is bad science, her theology is even worse. Without exception, apparent contradictions between what we think we understand from science and theology wind up being caused by a lack of clear understanding of what one or both of them are trying to tell us—or from asking one of them to answer questions about which it has no answers. Science tells us how. Religion tells us why. (See the posts under the Science and the Bible tab in the menu above for more on this point.)

Third, her due respect for the pastoral authority of her Archbishop requires that she submit to his spiritual leadership. If she can not or will not, she has a limited range of options. She can go full Karen and speak with his manager. The Pope would probably take her phone call. (Come to think of it, she might even get support from Pope Francis.) Her other honest choice is to leave the Catholic Church. I expect she will do neither.

The voters of San Francisco are getting what they voted for. Good and hard.

A Retro Form of Progressivism

Monica Showalter has a post over at American Thinker taking note of San Francisco’s attempt to get its … let me rephrase this … achieve better fecal cohesion—literally—by assigning five public works employees to a poop patrol. Armed with steam cleaners, these brave public servants will attempt to bring the city’s level of street sanitation up to the standard enjoyed a hundred years ago.

At the beginning of the 20th century, several trainloads of dung had to be removed from the streets of New York every day. By 1918, the number of horse-drawn vehicles in American cities had dropped to the point that dung in the streets had been greatly reduced. Indoor plumbing had eliminated chamberpot residue from the sidewalks, and our cities were becoming much healthier places. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the streets in many cities have become more filthy.

It’s not surprising, given that San Francisco just lost $40 million in convention revenue, after a major medical association, repelled by the unsanitary condition of the city’s excrement-covered streets, decided to hold its annual convention someplace else. The medical association had held annual convention in San Francisco for years up until then.

I suppose we can give them credit for not denying there is a problem, given the global exposure this gross problem has gotten. Most socialists deny there are ever any problems, other than Republicans, but money seems to have gotten their attention.

But the solution proposed is pretty much a Band-aid on a butt problem. It’s unlikely that five employees, armed with steam cleaners, is really going to be able to make a long-term difference given the reasons it’s happening.

Throwing money and public employment jobs at San Francisco’s problem will probably only make it worse. The root cause is the city’s huge homeless population that has swollen as a result of its Progressive government throwing money and public employment jobs at the city’s problems caused by its huge homeless population. Their problems won’t go away until the homeless population goes away, and that won’t occur until the city spends less money and effort on incentivizing homelessness.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen, but you may need to hold your breath walking through parts of town.

San Francisco: City of Refuge NOT

The Daily Caller reports that Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district has not taken in a single Syrian refugee.

San Francisco, California, which includes Pelosi’s district (CA-12), has taken in zero refugees since the fiscal year began. San Francisco also didn’t take in any Syrian Refugees in either 2014 or 2013.

While Pelosi’s district hasn’t actually taken in any Syrian refugees, Pelosi herself has been a vocal proponent of bringing Syrian refugees into the U.S.

Read the whole thing.

TANSTAAFL

One of the amenities that attracts well-to-do folks to San Francisco are the small businesses such as Comix Experience, a well-regarded comic book and graphic novel store. Unless it can quickly develop a new revenue stream, the store is headed out of business because it can’t afford to pay its employees San Francisco’s new minimum wage of $12.25 an hour. (It will rise to 15 bucks an hour by 2018.) Ian Tuttle writes about the store owner’s efforts to save his business at NRO.

Hibbs is not inclined to circumvent the market: “Despite being a progressive living in San Francisco, I do believe in capitalism. I’d like to have the market solve this problem.” That applies not just to his plight, but to the question of the minimum wage: “We’re for a living wage, for a minimum wage, in principle. . . . But I think any law that doesn’t look at whether people can pay may not be the best way to go.”

Read the whole thing.

Even in San Francisco, the Laws of Thermodynamics wind up superseding Blue State policy.

But It Was “For the Children”

The health Nazis in San Francisco decided to legislate healthy food into Happy Meals. The market-based response from McDonalds turns the regulation on its head so that parents are actually given an incentive to feed burger-and-fires meals to their kids.

Read more about it here.

I particularly like how the price increase will go to a children’s charity.