The Crowhill Journal

Pigweed and Crowhill review Georgia Avenue Sour, a tart peach ale from Dennizen’s Brewery, then discuss labor, Labor Day and unions.

Labor day started with a one-day strike in New York in 1882, and became an official day to celebrate workers under Grover Cleveland. P&C evaluate the development and idea of labor unions.

Unions often take credit for weekends and the 5-day work week, but that might have come from Henry Ford and the competition for scarce labor.

P&C are generally on the politically conservative side of things, but still like the idea of labor unions, which fit well with P&Cs standard political principles — especially the idea that when one party has power, somebody else has to have a countervailing power. P&C like unions for several reasons: (1) as a counter-balance to management, (2) to set standards for the profession, (3) to train the next generation of skilled workers.

P&C drink and review a Spring IPA from Peak brewery in Portland Maine.

Pigweed mentions a few things he likes about Spanish, like the fact that respect and decorum is built into the structure of the language.

P&C would both prefer that language and cultural expectations would resolve some of the tensions in personal relations, like how to address elders, or your father-in-law.

P&C discuss the idea that if a language has or doesn’t have a particular tense, does that say something about the way the native speakers think? Does the structure of a language limit the way people think about the world?

The culture produces the language, but the language then becomes a vehicle for continuing the culture.

You can download the file by right-clicking on this link.

This is kinda funny — Snopes Rates Biden’s Claim That 2+2=5 As ‘Mostly True’ — but as my brother reminded me recently, 2+2 does equal five for large values of 2.

Not really, of course. 2.4, which rounds down to 2, plus 2.4 = 4.8, which rounds up to 5. But that’s just playing with numbers.

2+2=3 would also be true. 1.6 rounds up to 2, and 1.6 + 1.6 = 3.2, which rounds down to 3. But — again — that’s just playing around, and I suppose it highlights the difference between engineering and mathematics. 2+2=4 in mathematics, but in engineering you would say that 2+2=4 +/- 1.

We hear about flareups. We hear about testing. We hear which countries seem to be doing well and which countries seem to be doing poorly. We hear lots of blame game stuff, and we hear endless stuff about masks.

What I haven’t heard much about lately is the origin of the virus.

From what I’ve read, Chinese food markets have been pegged as virus incubators and threats to the planet for years now. Years. But nothing has been done about them.

And now we have this new virus that’s been … oh, let’s say a pretty serious bummer for most of humanity … and still there doesn’t seem to be much pressure to get China to close down these markets.

Why?

Roughly 100 years ago (Aug. 18), women got the right to vote in the U.S.

I’m glad women can vote, but I question how we got here.

Why did women get the right to vote when they were not required to fight in our wars?

That might sound like a strange question, but there are Supreme Court decisions that clearly tie the two together. I.e., men could vote because men fought in the wars.

But women got the right to vote without having to fight. Why?

Don’t get me wrong. I want women to vote, and I don’t want them fighting in our wars. But there is a clear contradiction here. How is it reconciled?