a month of beer – day two (Baron Black Lager)

Lagers generally taste alike to me, and this one was striking only in its similarity to many other lagers I have known. It was a bit harsh, with that usual bitter aftertaste of many lagers, though it was not as sharp as it could have been. I don’t like such lagers to start with, but they do grow on you around the halfway mark. The bitterness fades near that point as your taste buds acclimate and the beer starts tasting all right, kind of. My companion compared it to Xingo but declared it inferior. After several sips it seemed to me more like a Shiner Bock, but darker. And alas, though I am a recently transplanted Texian, the Shiner Bock is a ‘one and done’ sort of beer for me the last few years.Curiously, the Baron Black is considered exotic in Seattle, which is Ale-ville; but it would be totally par in Texas, which is Lagerland.

I feel I should invoke a rating system, so this one gets six monks out of ten, as it is a tolerable winter lager, but nothing to go to lengths procuring.

i am a puritan.

i love sex and mutual pleasure between husband and wife within marriage.  marriage isn’t a confine, but an embrace. 

in the face of so much readily available evidence that Puritans really had a pretty nuanced and healthy view of what modern folk term ’sexuality’, i do wonder why the myths keep getting trotted out as a way to stifle dissent with the modern social norm of solipsism. 

hmmm. 

more later….

charles murray is love

now i never thought i’d say those words. but i listened to his excerpted speech on the roots of poverty a bit ago and this led to my spousal unit and i discoursing on some of the roots of poverty, including support for illegal immigration, progressive-ism (a very nasty ism when it comes down to it), and the horror of the sexual revolution, and why illegal immigration is bad for everyone except white people who want to live like mexican politicians.

i will just tackle these point by point as this is primarily a rant, whee!

supporting illegal immigration is pretty much (and i very grudgingly must concede it) extremely bad for blackfolk and still not great for anyone making less than 100k a year in america. in the eyes of whitefolk with money, black people are obsolete and they were so cranky anyhow about working for free or very little. but mexicans, el salvadorans, guatemalans are so much more pliant! and sooo cheap…and when their families come over, they have lots of babies out of wedlock and consume huge amounts of social services, providing jobs for all the children of whitefolks with money. you know, the kids with the MSWs and such, who are a different sort of welfare class, but at least as leechlike as any other presumed welfare class.which leads me to my loathing of progressive-ism. i sometimes want to grab POCs i see who call themselves progressives and just PULL THEM AWAY. because it’s like they are running headlong into the traffic and someone needs to save them from being run over. progressive agendas mostly boil down to things like ‘why can’t we be more like sweden?!@!?@!@?!@?!’ and i’m like ‘you mean we should all spend 100s of years nearly starving in the snow so that we develop a culture of communalism based on ethnic heritage and need to survive?’ sweden is having a lot of trouble being less than 99% swedish, and it’s only going to get worse. because that whole aggressive socialist safety net is an ethnic thing, not something people would do if they had any other choice. in the frozen wilds of scandinavia, there wasn’t much choice if you wanted to live other than sharing with everyone else. that’s not true in most of the rest of the world, in those sheer numbers. so, unsurprisingly, the phenomenon doesn’t scale.progressives hate to adopt anything that will scale. it’s like they think they are of a different and better class than other humans, or something, and don’t want the masses adopting things they consider suitable….

as for poverty and the sexual revolution, let’s be quite honest. kids need two parents, preferably one male and one female. there are a host of secular and non-secular reasons why this is the case, but i will save all that for another day. but the same people who complain about ‘certain’ women having ‘too many’ kids or having kids at all (oh why can’t THOSE PEOPLE “choose” abortion?!@!?@!) tend to be the same ones trumpeting the glorious ‘freedom’ the sexual revolution has brought.

oh, you mean the ‘freedom’ to suck off strange guys i just met an hour ago? you mean the freedom to get knocked up and left alone to raise the kid, while getting insulted from all sides for that choice? you mean the ‘freedom’ for men to never choose to stay with the women they knocked up? because if the girl isn’t bound to the guy (and this is the feminist promise of the sexual revolution), then he is damnsure not bound to her.

and let’s not forget the ‘freedom’ to sell love itself for ever-smaller sums of money… ah, sexwork, the original beautiful and cruel mistress.

“if you penalise male virtue, all you have left is male vice”

and yet, and yet, i constantly am told men are the sole ones at fault for female mistreatment. it’s all ‘i should be able to walk around naked and rub myself against guys and they should change to accomodate ME’

but i am digressing though not undressing. i am not so free as all that.

one last little kick in the nuts regarding illegal immigration. the reason both (rich) conservatives and liberals like illegal immigration is because mexican politicians are richer than american politicians. they also have more power. mexicans expect to be ignored, so their politicians aren’t accountable.

needless to say, this is a compelling argument for supporting amnesty for mexicans flooding america illegally. loads of people who are already used to living under tin-hat dictatorship? who wouldn’t want to be one of those dictators in this country? plenty of rich white people are lining up to fill those slots as soon as they can create them in america.

so here we are, and there i was, being belligerent.

a month of beer– intro and first day

A while back, I started a blog about beer. I live in the land of microbrews and beer is just damned tasty. The plan was to drink one kind of beer a day for a year.

Then I got some news that I had fibroids, and beer specifically is worse for them than any other kind of alcohol, contributing expressly to growth. So that was abandoned after about a month’s entries. A decent enough proportion were not typed up that I might as well post the entire set of entries as chronologically (edited slightly for content) as I can when I feel like it.

So here is the very first one:

I am a fan of beer. It tastes yummy and is very relaxing and fun to drink.Yesterday I drank a Delirium Tremens, a Belgian dubbel-strength IPA (India Pale Ale). It is listed on other beer sites as a ’strong pale ale’, but whatever. That means it is a mild IPA. It was kind of buttery, with lemon flavors. I sound so wine-critic, but then beer is grain wine, so there you have it. Alas, the hoppiness was faint (I do like a hoppy ale).

It is a very summer beer, all carefree and lighthearted. I was eating a piece of fried chicken while I drank it, but it held its flavor and wasn’t overwhelmed and also didn’t overwhelm the poor chicken.

It was quite a nice adventure and beverage. I’d recommend it, particularly around july.

confusion the rapist…

One of my many many beefs with feminism is that it does a poor job of bringing bread to the masses. That is to say, no, the views of well-off white and Jewish women do not in fact represent the views of the rest of us women. In fact, some of those views outright disturb us. The situation regarding the ‘all mens are potential rapisisists’ meme being a prime case in point. There are a lot of directions I want to go here, because the issue is more complex than an overly generous definition of rape, but I will keep it narrow-ish for now.

First thing out of the way: Many many many many white and white-identifying feminists are highly neurotic. They see shadows of rape and attack when there is only the sunlight dappling tree branches near the sidewalk. When it comes to rape, they are strongly inclined to insist that their highly strung sensibilities should be society’s default view of rape. But when one is neurotic and narcissistic, all kinds of casual behaviors turn into dangerous patterns and possible attacks. I suspect the heart of the problem is that the neurotic tendencies are exacerbated by the consequences of feminism. When you denigrate what honorable masculine expressions there are in this culture, one is left with the vice. Between the pressure to have sex– and not just sex, but FREAKY KINKY sex– to ‘prove’ how ‘liberated’ one is from icky old constraints and morality and the concurrent entitlement/instant-indulgement consumer culture that’s erupted in the last half century, it would be quite amazing if a whitegirl didn’t start seeing shadows round every corner. When there’s no social morality (or what’s there is wildly corrupted), neurotic impulses are all one has to work from.

The downside of course is that they are, after all, neurotic impulses. You have an idea that ‘bad’ behaviors by males ’somehow’ lead to rape (this is of course never made clear– neurosis doesn’t need to be explained, only indulged, you see), and thus you start campaigning for the definition of rape to be as broad as possible. But you know, guilt is no good. It is a different kind of trap and often just breeds the very resentment feminists claim to want to be rid of. When anything starts looking like it could maybe theoretically be a ‘form’ of rape, you have an extraordinarily antagonistic male-female situation in the offing.

To tie this glorious ramblage back to titty bars as an example, by implicitly judging behavior your neurosis declares unappealing ‘rape-like’, ordinary men who don’t desire unwilling flesh are tagged as ‘potential rapists’. Which is just…crazy. Heh.

This is quite the incoherence, but I think it is a fair starting point to return to another day.

more notes about stripclubs and sin taxes

After I finished throwing out a few details about the mandatory sin tax on stripclubs in Texas coming concurrent with an attempt to shut down all the ones in Houston, I thought of some other interesting secondary effects.

It is worth noting that something many strippers complain about– the cheapness of the customers– has curious economic side effects. That is to say, many guys in Houston clubs eat lunch at stripclubs precisely because they are cheaper than Hooters. And Hooters is the primary competition. Nudity loses its value for the subset of customers who are unhappy if they can’t feel they are putting one over somehow on the club and to a lesser extent the girls. So a mandatory cover charge would drive some guys to spend extra at Hooters because their cheap thrill was now about the same price and it was ‘mandatory’.

Regarding the situation with Houston trying to shut down its stripclubs– bikini bars are not under the sexually-oriented-business laws’ jurisdiction. This means that if the clubs in Houston all go bikini, they are now competing directly with Hooters. Additionally, because they wouldn’t technically be titty bars, they wouldn’t have to levy the sin-tax cover charge. And other cities would see 1/3 of the potential tax revenue not being paid while those clubs still did business as usual and they would be irate. Possibly someone would suggest applying the tax to any place where women dressed skimpily while serving drinks, which would kill the entire thing.

Houston is trying to shut down its stripclubs out of an urge to both punish girls for doing the work, punish men for visiting the establishments, and ‘help’ girls by removing that option for making money in a ‘degrading’ fashion. But the bikini-bar endrun around it all would leave all the extras and sex in place in clubs without incurring any penalty for the clubowners or the customers who evolved the situation in the first place.

As for the mandatory club charge, that is looking more and more like a way of stating that visiting a stripclub makes a guy a de facto rapist, so of course he oughta fund a rape crisis center with his dirty money. This last bit actually ties into my next post, conveniently enough. Yeigh.

The true costs of sin taxing.

So anyhow, Texas, my lovely home state has passed a bill levying a statewide mandatory cover charge at strip clubs. The money will go to pay for rape crisis centers. The Onion couldn’t top that one.

However, there are several problems with the idea from an economic viewpoint. The first problem is that it creates a mandatory cover charge where there formerly was often not one. Topless clubs typically use free entry during the day and/or on slow nights to get customers in for the drink sales. Nude clubs (which are byob in all of Texas) don’t necessarily go the same route, but they are also fond of low entry fees during slow times of day to get guys in and spending. As nude clubs generally charge a fee to get dances (in the form of a wristband), a low/no cover charge early in the day or evening still benefits their bottom line.

But now the state legislature comes along and forces a fee that directly affects customers and which the club sees zero dollars from. Going from no cover to a mandatory minimum cover will drive customers away. The club cannot pass this cost onto girls in the form of higher housefees because the drink sale losses alone will be more than 5-10$ in extra house fees per dancer could make up. For nude clubs, who cannot sell alcohol and thus have an even harder time getting in foot traffic, the losses are even harder to offset (they already make up for drink sale losses in the form of house fees that are nearly double those of topless clubs).

Some key details worth noting:

In Austin, the clubs all have active dayshift attendence. There are decent numbers of customers buying drinks and dances, and generally no cover charges. In Houston, which contains about a third of all Texas clubs, guys still turn up during dayshifts for drinks, lunch buffets, and (a few) dances. So during what is a slow period of time (dayshift), in the two cities with about half of all clubs affected by this thing there is a lot of dayshift business that expects no cover charge.

Five bucks seems like nothing, but when you were coming to the stripclub with free cover for the five dollar buffet, it’s now an expensive indulgence ‘just for lunch’. If you were coming for lunch and dances, it seems like the club is trying to rip you off somehow and now you’re irritated. Irritation has subtle economic costs in excess of dollar amounts levied.

This is the most crazily feminist thing ever. ‘Visit a stripclub to stop rape!’ Yeah, that’s not problematic in any way….

None of this money goes to the girls, but clubs have a strong incentive to pass whatever cost of it onto them that they can. This will of course not exactly increase sympathy for the supposed rape victims the money is going to ‘help’.

Finally, Houston is attempting to close down nearly all its clubs. Considering that Houston stripclub revenue would be, you know, 33% of the presumed revenue, it is very interesting timing there.

This is mainly another instance of people thinking that sexwork should be taxed randomly, as if the people consuming it will just fork over more money for no particular reason and as if the people running it will just smile, nod and cut a check. Sexwork is damned lucrative, even occasionally for the product (the girls). But consumers and producers in the industry are not unaware of their expenditures, stereotypes aside. They will see this as quite silly (and already do) and it honestly has the air of clusterf*** about it.

It also doesn’t resolve the issues of actual rape in any way. It is a grand gesture, quite furious and loud, but ultimately signifying nothing. The exceptionally unhealthy dynamic that exists between sexworkers and their clientele in Texas (especially though not exclusively Houston) is a bit more pressing of an issue. But it’s complicated and it is so much easier to levy a tax that nobody will actually get around to paying to look like you care about women of all sorts.

Texian

I wrote a variation of this some while ago when I still lived full-time in Texas.  It is enough to start with, tonight. 

“Think of what you love so much, hold so deeply that you are willing to defend and possibly even die for it.  We will call that Texas.”

That is misquoted slightly from the movie rendition of The Alamo, and it’s what I needed to hear.  That movie summed up all the things I awkwardly or ineffectually try to explain to people about why I love Texas.  I was born in California, raised in Hawaii for some years, and came to Texas to stay not long before my teen years.  I have been here a lifetime already, and I would have to say it is only in fleeting moments that I ever felt this place could be a home. 

Until I saw that movie, which brought to the surface thoughts and idle fancies that had just sort of percolated in my subconscious.  I’ve ever been sure I’d have a home in Texas, among half a dozen others scattered round the world.  Now I know I could be content with just the one, so long as it was here. 

I used to think Hawaii was my home because it was so damned beautiful, paradise on earth, beauty in every sweep of a wave against shoreline.  I thought it was really home.  It’s become a dream over the years, though, a misty longing for a time when I wasn’t innocent, but when I felt that it wasn’t a mark against me.  I still miss it, but it’s only memory now, not prophecy.  I do not know if I will return– I swore years ago I wouldn’t return except to live, no visits allowed.  It is likely I may not see Hawaii ever again, given the strange way I love to think of it, but can’t bear the thought of actually seeing it again, older and unveiled.  I don’t know if I want to see that pretty lady in the bright sunlight at this point.

As for California, I was seduced some years ago into reclaiming it as home, and I may yet come to live there in some future time.  But it’s more like a vacation home to me– somewhere you can safely put your feet up and relax, but not where you build your permanent havens. 

Texas, though, she is always with me.  Even when I felt most at home in California, in the back of my mind I dreamt of the day I could have that feeling in Texas, in a home of my own to change or keep as I would.  There’s still room here, room to spread and grow and be who I wish to be, with whomever wishes to share this land with me.  I love this place so damned much, and it took a movie to remind me of what I really already knew deep down.  I’m a Texan and I’m simply not ashamed to say that, and live it. 

NB: I looked it up on the intarweb and the phrase I’d sought is ‘whatever it is you value so highly’. 

my frist post.

so anyway, this is my intro post to this thing.  i recently acquired it and will post various whatnots, probably daily.