Interesting Tidbit

While I was in northern California last week, I stopped into the Anheuser-Busch brewery at Fairfield for the free tour and samples. The guide was a friendly sort and the tour was quite a bit more interesting than I was expecting. For example, half their factory floor was vacant due to space savings from their new fully automated bottling and canning lines (most employees actually do QA – yes, that means drinking the beer) They really do age the beer over beechwood chips – it seems to me any wood would work – and I calculate that the aging tanks on the premise contain enough beer to intoxicate every adult in California.

What wasn’t quite as amusing was finding out that the primary cause of the rise in beer prices over the last several months is federal subsidies for corn ethanol. Farms that formerly grew barley now grow corn in order to produce the most energy-negative motor fuel known to man. There may be an alternative, though — Redbridge, AB’s beer brewed from sorghum, is quite tasty!

Finally, a Post That Deserves the Blog Title

Not news: US housing prices still falling. News: by 5.3% just in the past month Triple Forehead Slap: The director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency suggests fixing this by …loosening standards so anyone can qualify for a loan!

The housing agency’s director, James Lockhart, suggested Tuesday that mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could loosen lending standards to help more homebuyers qualify for a loan and stabilize the market.

Brilliant!

Parking Sites

Websites, that is. Here’s a list of links to find available parking spaces at your destination! (via Planetizen)

ParkAtMyHouse.com reminds me of when Vicky’s family used to rent out their yard for parking during Occoquan’s annual craft fair.

A Plug-in Hybrid Use Case?

Credit where it’s due:

Senator Lamar Alexander has put his money where his energy policy mouth is and shelled out the $10,000 it costs to have a Prius converted by A123 Systems to a plug-in type hybrid. The senator says he gets 30 miles out of the lithium ion battery before the engine is called upon to do some work. Having only a 5 or 6 mile daily commute, Alexander has burned about half a tank a gas since sometime last July

So in some sense, this is a case where the plug-in part of a plug-in hybrid has value – as long as you don’t exceed your car’s battery range, you’re ‘burning’ only electricity at a fraction of the unit cost of gas. But by definition, that means you’re driving very few miles (for example, 10-12 a day) which is precisely the wrong regime for recouping the extra cost of the hybrid.

In Alexander’s case, he’s going to be making that 5-mile commute for many years to make up the $12,000+ difference between his plug-in Prius and an equivalent gas-only car. So it looks like even a plug-in hybrid makes sense, if it does, mostly as a hedge against future price spikes and/or oil shortages.

Left Begins Preparing Race Excuse

Editor and Publisher talks about an Associated Press poll purporting to show that the percentage of voters who may vote against Barack Obama because he’s black could exceed the probable margin in a close election. Besides supporting my theory that this will be uglier the closer it is, it also confirms the blindingly obvious – that “liberals” will loudly, publicly and mindlessly blame racism if Obama should happen to lose. The interesting part is that the poll picks on Democrats:

an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks—many calling them ‘lazy,’ “violent’ or responsible for their own troubles.

Cynic that I am, I just don’t believe there’s any chance that the focus on Dems indicates that someone noticed the allegedly racist and sexist GOP has serially supported Alan Keyes, JC Watts, Elizabeth Dole and now Sarah Palin for national offices, while the jackass party lamely proclaimed Bill Clinton “the first black President”, apparently because he had some of those pesky personal troubles.

Impressively, Barack Obama continues to be the only person in and around his campaign who doesn’t lean on the race crutch hard enough to compress a titanium I-beam.

Angry Cookies

These are great! They remind me of the angry face of the Starbucks Oracle…

Angry Cookies

Stoplight Coordination?

Here’s a cool idea that will never be allowed in the US:

top light gantries fitted with communications modules can let the car know when the light will turn green. The car then lets the driver know what speed he should maintain in order to pass through the intersection without having to brake for the light and then accelerate again.

Wouldn’t that be nice …but no, I think we all know the prevailing attitude here is that it’s more important to punish people for breaking the rules than to encourage them to find a win-win solution like the above.

I’m Back

Was in California last week, enjoying a mini-vacation to Sacramento, Lake Tahoe and San Francisco. Quick observations – Tahoe is gorgeous, like Lake Winnipesaukee with the Rockies as a background. Sacramento is dull, even according to the people who live there. UC Davis has all the architectural distinctiveness of a 7-Eleven, but great coffee. And San Francisco is still unbelievably expensive.

No More Palin

Ok, so I’ve written several posts here about how weird the chattering classes’ reaction to Sarah Palin has been. I’m done with that, though. Not because I’ve said my piece or because the issue is resolved (it obviously isn’t) but because it’s clearly gone past the point of rational discussion. For no reason I can see, this woman has become a love-or-hate lightning rod for half the people on the right and almost everyone on the left (to his credit, as I’ve said before, that 99% of the left doesn’t include Barack Obama, which is encouraging since he’ll probably be our next President)

So, my new plan is to “vet” both presidential candidates based on their stated positions and whatever reliable third-party information I can find. I do have a life, so we’ll see if I get that done. What I am done with, though, is talking about, reading about or thinking about Sarah Palin. A whole lot of people need to take a chill pill.

The Second Civil War?

I enjoyed the satirical movie by that name back in 1997, and the idea of fighting over politics seems just as silly now as it was then. Still, this piece by Phyllis Chesler brings up some interesting issues.

“I have lived in both [the urban liberal and rural conservative] worlds. I still do. There are good people on both sides of the great divide.”

So do I. So do a lot of people — this line calls the rest of the essay into question right away.

“The entire convention, especially the last night when Obama spoke, was the equivalent of a rock concert. To many people, especially younger people, this is what moves them, what is real. Only celebrity, “spectacle,” performance, and popular music have authority, are familiar, and command their respect.”

“rockstar” is a popular Obama meme. I didn’t watch the conventions, just the candidate speeches, so I can’t speak to that. I can, though, say that I’ve always thought a lot of younger people have an unhealthy focus on pop culture. If you find that a political party is calling your allegiance because it knows Simpsons references, you might want to take a step back (not that there’s anything wrong with Simpsons references per se… My kid already says d’oh!”)

“In 2000, when President Bush won (others say “when Bush stole”) the election, the Democrats became enraged, some say “deranged.” That rage has grown. If McCain wins–I predict that the cultural wars will not only intensify but will turn into the beginnings of the next Civil War in America.

What do you think will happen after one side wins and the other side loses? Will blue or red states want to secede from the union? Will there be more violent and ugly confrontations upon encountering ideas and practices with which one disagrees?”

There are already violent and angry confrontations, friends disassociating from one another over politics, and as we’ve seen the last couple weeks, even the media who once held themselves above the fray have stripped to their undies and jumped in the mud. I’m not sure this is going to lead to another Fort Sumter, if only because I can’t think of many people with enough motivation to go that route, but the slide into intramural bitterness and hate does seem to be accelerating lately. One thing’s for sure and certain – another squeaker in November won’t be a good thing.

Commenter “Polly” says it well:

“I feel I’m caught between the two Americas, and if there were a Civil War, I wouldn’t know which side to take.

The democrats seem to be moving ever farther to the left and republicans to the right. I don’t understand why democrats cannot see that we can be fair and tolerant of other cultures, but look at the reality of a culture of violence that is right now being promoted throughout most of the Islamic world. I heard only yesterday on NPR a female Islamic doctor speaking about her Muslim friends. They all studied and interned in NY, but were “satisfied” that 9/11 was the right and justified action against the US. Why must democrats always support the underdog in every case. When Israel was a struggling nation of Holocaust survivors, they were all for them. Now that Israel has, in only 60 years, been able to transform their nation into a strong, stabel democracy, the democrats run to the side that vilifies every action Israel takes.

Why must the republicans try to insert their personal religions into government policy? I am religious myself, but see no reason to impose my beliefs on others. I agree that we must remain diligent in our fight against ratical Islam (which today is most of Islam), but we must also acknowledge when we have been dead wrong in the invasion of a sovereign nation.

Now I don’t know who I should support: a misogynistic party with the smooth-talking politican that has literally done nothing of consequence politically in his life–or: the well-tested politican who was willing to give a nod to the women of the US, but whose party supports laws opposed to women’s rights.”

I wouldn’t know which side to take either. The suburban/rural right contains people who are truly good and decent to other people whom they know personally, but don’t think very hard about how they live their lives or the consequences of turning their social mores into public policy. The urban left contains people who are truly thoughtful and intelligent in the way they live their lives, but provincial and insular in regard to the wider world outside their neighborhoods, and grossly intolerant of those who disagree with them. I’ve always enjoyed having a balance of both worlds, and would really not like to live in either one exclusively.