Published on 10 May 2017
“I’ve lived my life as a pro free enterprise person,” explains Flying Dog Brewery CEO Jim Caruso. “Not pro business. Pro free enterprise, pro consumer choice, artisanal manufacturing.”
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A central player in America’s craft beer revolution, Caruso is dedicated to creating something special both inside and outside the bottle. Famed artist Ralph Steadman, best known for his iconic illustrations for work by Hunter S. Thompson, creates all of Flying Dog’s labels. It was Steadman who spontaneously wrote on his first commissioned label “good beer, no shit.” And it was this label that kicked of Flying Dog’s first — but not last — fight with government censors.Caruso sat down with Reason’s Nick Gillespie to talk about his run-ins with the state, why he is a libertarian, and the how his values keep him happy.
“I’m a happy person. And I attribute that to living as an individual, taking self responsibility, self reliance, but connected to society. It’s not a lone ranger sort of thing.”
Cameras by Meredith Bragg, Todd Krainin, and Mark McDaniel. Edited by Bragg.
May 10, 2017
Raging Bitch, Good Shit, and Flying Dog Beer’s Fight for Free Speech
BC Greens the biggest winners in provincial election
Jay Currie explains why, even though they didn’t “win” the election, the BC Green Party is the biggest winner from yesterday’s general election in the province:
There are two losers tonight: the Liberals and the NDP. And there is one winner: the Greens. They managed to split the NDP vote and likely cost the NDP a majority government.
However, where the NDP and the Liberals have no obvious room to grow their electorate, the Greens have a very good shot at expanding theirs. The fact is that the people who shop at Whole Foods, send their kids to “French Immersion” if they can’t afford private (not for racist reasons of course) and think recycling is an act of benediction are legion. They used to vote NDP, now they have an alternative.
Andrew Weaver may be a lousy climate scientist but he is not an unintelligent man. He can count (so long as it does not involve climate change time series) and there are six ridings where the Greens came second. A rational, non-coalition, support of the Liberals would let him pass legislation of greater consequence than a ban on mandatory high heels for women in serving jobs. The Liberals, who will likely be reduced to a rural rump despite having likely won the most seats, are basically being elected by BC’s version of “deplorables”. Nice people think they are a bit, well, common.
Dr. Weaver, well educated, Oak Bay resident and articulate guy that he is should be able to target those nice, white, very liberal people and peel them away from both the Liberals and the NDP. Plus, Weaver has the children who have grown up on Green ideology masquerading as education.
One winner tonight: the Greens.
And another blogiversary rolls past
Blogs aren’t as relevant today as they were a decade ago, but I’m still recording over 1.7 million hits every year (1,701,503 according to my WordPress stats page, which translates into 1,287,505 unique visitors). Those numbers are down a bit from 2014, which is still my peak year for overall traffic, when 1,766,068 visits were logged (2015 was down to 1,741,859, but it was the first decline in traffic year-over-year since I started blogging in May 2004).
While I’ve (almost) always had a daily quote of the day post, in the last few months, I’ve been adding a video of the day as well — I know a lot of people are more visually oriented than I am, so I’m trying to avoid the “wall of text” look that the blog sometimes gets when there’s a lot of written material unrelieved by graphics, photographs, or videos. Am I striking the right balance for you, the readers? Should I be scraping the Wikimedia archives for more graphics to spice up the postings visually?
Earlier anniversary postings:
- Twelfth anniversary
- Eleventh anniversary
- Tenth anniversary
- Ninth anniversary
- Eighth anniversary
- Seventh anniversary
- Sixth anniversary
- (Very belated) Fifth anniversary
- (Premature) Fourth anniversary (a few days later, I welcomed my 150,000th visitor)
- Third anniversary
- (Belated) Second anniversary
- First anniversary
What Kind of Wood Should You Build With? | WOODWORKING BASICS
Published on 22 Jul 2016
Confused by all the wood choices for woodworking? Here is all the basic info you need to get started buying lumber. Woodworking for Mere Mortals BASICS series. Read the full article here ►► http://bit.ly/WoodBasics
QotD: “Reality” TV
“Reality”-based game shows, by no means a U.S.-driven or U.S.-invented phenomenon, may recruit individuals who appear truly random. In practice, the contestants are selected for extreme personality features that the format elicits quickly. The future annals of reality TV will tell how little time it took for shows like Survivor to abandon their original regular-folks pretense — it was a matter of weeks in the case of the U.S. Survivor. Within months the more typical reality-competition show was something like Real World/Road Rules Challenge, i.e., a cauldron of freewheeling pathology spiced with sex and violence.
At any rate, everyone who appears on an actual television program has passed an implicit “can be on television” test for looks. The test is not strict: I was a semi-regular on a deep-cable panel show, and look at me. But try walking in the downtown of any major city and counting the number of people who have tics or wens or facial asymmetries that would disqualify them outright from TV. Needless to say, you don’t hear quite the same range of accents you do at a food-court MacDonald’s, either. It is probably to the good that we are disconnecting from television as a total environment, a multidimensional image of society plunged into at birth: those of us who were reared under those conditions must have weird, unfixable blind spots.
Colby Cosh, “On the ignominious downfall of Jared from Subway”, National Post, 2015-08-20.
