Grove Street Summer Wheat, Big IPA

I’m late posting about this, but waaaay back on June 28th, I brewed Grove Street Summer Wheat.  I finally got around to bottling it last Sunday, July 26th.  Oops.  It was my first foray into stovetop partial-mash brewing, which went surprisingly well.

This past Monday, 7/27, I tried it again, making Grove Street Big IPA, which I expect to be bottling in about another week and a half.

Both recipes used a mash of 4lbs grain, and I calculated the volume and temperature for the strike and sparge water with the very handy SpargePal app on my iPod.  The whole procedure required the use of all four pots in my 2/3/4/5-gallon stockpot set, and I’m sure that with a better sparging method I could get much clearer wort, but overall I’m very happy with the results so far (but ask me again once I’ve tried one of the beers!).

Hops!

I started trying to grow hops in my backyard last year.  Between being busy developing their root systems, and occasional run-ins with a weedwhacker, they never got very far, and only the Cascade (I had also planted Mt. Hood and Sunbeam) made it through the winter.  This year, though, I put up a proper wooden trellis and a little fence around the base of the bine to make sure it was clear that this is a thing that is supposed to be here.

(What Does It Take For CNN To) Fire Lou Dobbs

As folks like the indispensable Dave Neiwert have amply chronicled, CNN’s primetime star Lou Dobbs has long provided a mainstream loudspeaker for radical racist/xenophobic nativism, and contributed to the atmosphere of paranoia about “illegals” that leads to the murder of 9-year-old-girls.  His vicious, fact-free anti-immigrant ravings alone should have prevented him from ever being allowed a spot on a major news network.

But now he’s picked an additional target, and a new set of paranoid fantasies: President Obama and the Birther cause.  It’s hard to imagine how he could get any farther beyond the pale at this point.

Media Matters’ press release covers the essentials and links to a number of their other posts on the subject.  Ta-Nehisi and tristero are all over it too, and make very good points, as usual.

CNN needs to either fire Dobbs, or drop the “News” from their name and give similar amounts of coverage to every equally plausible conspiracy theory: the moon-landing-hoax theory, for example, and the Roswell coverup, and of course the 9/11 Truthers while we’re at it.  Maybe throw in a special on how no one really knows for sure whether the Freemasons secretly control all the governments of the world.  Rehire Glenn Beck, why not?  He’s no crazier than the Birthers.

Dobbs is an embarrassment, CNN.  Dump him: your credibility’s on the line.

H2otown Hate Crime Update

Following up on the other day’s post, I want to strongly endorse the TAB’s editorial on the matter.  I haven’t got a flagpole at my apartment, but could perhaps put a flag up in a window.  Displays of solidarity like the TAB suggests are an excellent way to combat bigotry.

H2otown Hate Crime

I was going to start this post with something like “there’s nothing worse…” or “there aren’t many things worse…” but every time I started writing something like that, I thought to myself, “well, no, you know that’s not right: many things are worse, you’ve just experienced almost none of them because you’re the beneficiary of so many of society’s structural biases.”  And that’s true.

But without making fatuous comparisons, I feel confident in saying that it is in fact a rather terrible feeling to discover hatefulness in your own backyard: someone burned the rainbow flag that hangs outside the UU First Parish of Watertown.

The TAB now has a more detailed article up.  Apparently this is not the first time their flag has been targeted.

A Dark Day for the Internet

Hilzoy, one of the greatest in the game, is stepping out.

Go well, Ms. H.: we’ll all be poorer for lacking your voice, which was always among the sharpest, clearest and brightest on every topic you chose to tackle.  I can think of few bloggers who can approach the quality of writing which seems to simply be your natural element.

Quick Hit: Dr. Regina Benjamin

President Obama has nominated Dr. Regina Benjamin to be Surgeon General.  I haven’t been able to find out much yet about her beyond the bullet-point summary: first woman of color, and youngest person, to be elected to the AMA’s board of trustees, her clinic was destroyed in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina and, right before reopening, in 2006 by fire.  It sounds like she’s particularly focused on addressing the health-care needs of the poor and underprivileged, which is good.  There doesn’t appear to be much information available about her views on reproductive health or on “alternative” “medicine,” but I expect more will come out on those topics soon.

Quick Hit: The Dumb Rolls On

I am shocked — shocked! — to see that Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum have failed to take my sage advice, and are going ahead with an ill-fated attempt to rebut PZ Myers’s criticisms (which he’s, of course, continuing to make) of them and their book.  They give a list of reasons why they’re responding (and indicate that the series of response posts is already drafted, so I guess it’s too late for a final plea from my tiny little blog to stop them), but none of them are good reasons.  And no one old enough to no longer be getting into fights on the grade school playground should need it explained to them why those aren’t good reasons.

As Mooney and Kirshenbaum have already noted several times, there are lots of positive reviews out there.  If the book itself, plus all the positive reviews, aren’t sufficient to counter one negative review, maybe the book really isn’t all that good — now, I haven’t read it, so I don’t have any opinion on whether it’s actually good or not, but this dogged insistence on countering every point Myers makes makes Mooney and Kirshenbaum (I implicate both here because the latest was posted under both their names, although it has mostly seemed that Mooney has been leading the charge on this dumb-ass blogfight) look thin-skinned, petty, and severely lacking confidence in the quality of their own work.

Seriously, Chris and Sheril.  I like your blog, and I think you mostly do good work.  If PZ’s attacks are wrong, then anyone who reads your book and/or other reviews will know so — and anyone who only reads PZ’s review was never going to accept your arguments anyway.  Let it go!  “New Atheists” are not your enemy.

And PZ, I like your blog too, and I think you mostly do good work too.  “Accomodationists” are not your enemy.

Theocrats are the enemy.  Fight them, not each other.  Disband the circular firing squad.  I don’t know which one of you is the Judean People’s Front and which the People’s Front of Judea, but quit yelling “splitter!” at each other and fight the Romans.  It’s OK if you don’t both fight them the same way.

Could This Get Any Stupider?

I’ll save you the suspense: the answer is no.

Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum wrote this book called Unscientific America.  One of the things they argue is that public understanding of, and willingness to understand, science is impeded by the perception that scientists are intolerant of religion.  In particular, they criticize PZ Myers and other “New Atheists” (a ridiculous term, in my opinion) for their aggressive approach and their insistence that religion and science are incompatible.  Mooney is himself an atheist, but is the sort Myers and others deride as an “accommodationist,” and has been having an ongoing argument with Jerry Coyne on whether or not science and religion are necessarily incompatible (Coyne agrees with Myers and others that they are).

When review copies of the book went out, Myers didn’t receive his immediately, and some other people had already put up their own reviews, from which he learned that he came in for criticism.  He assumed this was why he hadn’t received a copy — which would be a breach of good etiquette if true, though one might equally consider his assumption of bad faith on Mooney’s and Kirshenbaum’s part to be such a breach — and Mooney and Kirshenbaum responded that the process of sending out review copies had just been disorganized, and that he had always been on the recipient list.

Myers then received his copy, and posted an extremely negative review.  Then Mooney responded, citing other, positive reviews, and promising to have “much more” to say about Myers’s review.  Up to this point, it was a pretty dumb blogfight, but far from the stupidest ever.