Just 10 years ago, the proposed merger of SABMiller and Molson Coors into MillerCoors would have worried craft brewers. Back then, "American beer" was thought of as a cheap product with very little beer flavor.

Today the United States has by far the most exciting beer culture in the world, and America's 1,500 craft brewers are undaunted by the prospect of a juggernaut that would have more than 30 percent of the domestic market. The age of American industrial brewing is over.
...
Now Americans are moving away from spongy industrial bread, watery coffee, plasticized "cheese" and other wonders of modern food science. The top maker of white supermarket bread went bankrupt a few years ago.

just as France turns more American
let's celebrate something French
quality of life

Don't fear Big Beer - International Herald Tribune

“Blaming white people,” they write, “can be a way for some black people to feel better about themselves, but it doesn’t pay the electric bills. There are more doors of opportunity open for black people today than ever before in the history of America.”

I couldn’t agree more. Racism disgusts me, and I think it should be fought with much greater ferocity than we see today. But that’s no reason to drop out of school, or take drugs, or refuse to care for one’s children, or shoot somebody.

The most important step toward ending the tragic cycles of violence and poverty among African-Americans also happens to be the heaviest lift — reconnecting black fathers to their children.

Tough, Sad and Smart - New York Times

For their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change:

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr.

funny
Bush "wins" the Presidency but dubiously, starts a pointless war and everybody hates him
Gore wins a Nobel Peace Prize

no writer could ever get away with it -- the shear chutzpah of reality

Al Gore Wins Nobel Peace Prize 2007

Modern conservatism begins with Edmund Burke. What Burke articulated was not an ideology or a creed, but a disposition, a reverence for tradition, a suspicion of radical change.

nice
although i'm an odd beast a center-left democratic socialist/liberal who exhibits a certain dispositional conservatism

The Republican Collapse - New York Times

It’s that month again, and when the New York skies are clear, as they have been and were then, you gaze at the proud prow of Manhattan and still feel the absence, and perhaps you see once more those papers from the crumpled towers fluttering out across the East River to strange landings in Brooklyn.
...
That was a breaking point, dividing our lives into before and after, and the world into pre- and post-, and we’ve all had to succumb to the awful 9/11 shorthand that compresses the loss of almost 3,000 lives into a couple of digits, and the wider loss of America-as-sanctuary into a date.
...
The United States was not previously a homeland, it was just our land, and that unhappy neologism with its Orwellian echoes, its sense of exclusion rather than inclusion, its faint fatherland-like echoes, seems to capture the closing and the menace and the terror-terror refrain with which we have all learned to live.

That refrain, for Americans, but not only them, has a pursed-lipped face called Bush-Cheney, and the braggadocio-smirk of the bring-it-on duo has come to form yet another shorthand for a certain grimness, one as relentless as the U.S. national debt clock.

a nice essay
you can feel the humanity

The Breaking Point - New York Times

Pro-anorexia websites offering tips on extreme dieting are nothing new, but their growth on social networking sites is a disturbing new twist and brings them within reach of a wider audience.

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Seeking 'thinspiration'

Representatives of Israel's 250,000 Holocaust survivors are to demand more state support in a protest outside Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's house.

maybe the survivors should get pensions from the UN. They were victims of crimes against humanity so maybe humanity should stand up and support the survivors.

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Israel faces Holocaust protests

For tens of thousands of members of the National Guard and reserves who are called up to serve in Iraq, returning home safely may be the beginning -- not the end -- of their worst nightmare. Reservists lucky enough to make it home often find their civilian jobs gone and face unsympathetic employers and a government that has restricted access to civilian job-loss reports rather than prosecuting offending employers.

The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) protects members of the guard and reserves from job loss, demotion, loss of seniority and loss of benefits when they are called to active duty.

The act is supposed to protect reservists' civilian jobs for up to five years of military service. But the government has made it difficult for veterans to enforce their legal rights. Service members who return to find their civilian jobs gone also find that the burden is on them to prove that their jobs were taken away as a result of their military service and that there is no other reason that they could have been fired.

This onerous burden of proof discourages many from filing formal complaints.

Amy R. Gershkoff - Saving Soldiers' Jobs - washingtonpost.com

After a hearing lasting more than 40 days, Pakistan's Supreme Court on July 20th overturned the government's suspension of the court's chief justice, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry.

The court's ruling means that Mr Chaudhry is to be reinstated.

The decision is a major blow to General Pervez Musharraf, the president, and a tactical victory for the secular political parties, who have rallied behind the judiciary in protest at what they regard as an attempt to undermine judicial independence.

The ruling is also momentous because the Pakistani judiciary in the past has always been reluctant to rule against the military or a military-led government.

However, while the decision removes one source of political tension, it will do little to stop the terrorist violence now engulfing the country.

Justice wins

In a drug case from San Diego County, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco likened computer surveillance to the "pen register" devices that officers use to pinpoint the phone numbers a suspect dials, without listening to the phone calls themselves.

We lose yet another privacy right... they're falling like flies...

SAN FRANCISCO / Judges OK warrantless monitoring of Web use / Privacy rules don't apply to Internet messages, court says