Bends Toward Justice

 Here's a 2019 post from the old blog when we were trying to get a gig writing about beer and breweries.  The craft beer industry has gotten more commercial, but the points are still valid. Art vs. Commerce Discussed in this post: Beer names and label information, with examples from Rising TIde Mast Landing Goodfire Bissell Brothers Rowley Farmhouse Ales A couple friends (who will go nameless since they spoke casually, not for publication) have a financial stake in one of the local breweries.  In discussion they complained about the owner-brewer neglecting commerce in favor of art.  “He thinks if he brews good original beer people will just find it, drink it, and like it,” said one.  The other called the investment “a silly way to waste a quarter-million dollars.” Since the brewery is still operating after about a decade, I’m guessing that everyone is making their investment back, just that they’re sweating it all the time.   But that, as far as I can ...

 Hi Spirits, I used to write with my students, then I had a blog hosted on the Portland Maine Walking Tours website, and cowrote some magazine articles. A lot of that material is in my Google Drive taking up storage space. Putting it here so I can delete it there might just be an egotistical exercise; however, there have been occasions when I searched for information and found that my own writing was linked. So there may be a benefit to someone else. Here’s one written in 2018. These days it seems overly optimistic: Is War Inevitable? Perhaps humankind is doomed to always live with war.  Certainly when one reads Cicero’s claim that settling a dispute by discussion is civilized, while using physical force is characteristic of “the brute,” then ruminates on the slaughter of the crusades, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the atrocities in Darfur, etc., etc. ad nauseum, one cannot help but fear that war is an inevitable element of the human condition. However,...