Author: Pigweed and Crowhill

The boys drink and review Kostritzer Schwarzbier, then discuss homelessness.

When we talk about “the homeless,” we have to make some distinctions. Some people with no home have a job, a car, and are making do … they just don’t have a place to live. They live in their car and shower at the gym.

Others are drug addicts or have mental illnesses. It’s a mistake to lump them all into the “homeless” category.

Homelessness is closely associated with drug abuse, mental health issues, street camping, open drug use, and property crime.

There are different philosophies on how to address this. One is called “housing first.” Another is “treatment first.” Many policies are based on permissiveness and perpetuation of the drug-addled life on the street.

Good policies require people to have skin in the game and demonstrate responsibility. Accommodating drug addiction and facilitating a vagrant lifestyle is sold as compassion, but it’s not the solution.

The boys drink and review Erdinger’s Weissbier Dunkel, then discuss developments in artificial intelligence.

Our first experiences with artificial intelligence were things like “playing the computer” on the Atari, or spellchecker. Checking grammar involved an extra layer of computation that had to take context into account.

Another level of computer-assisted information is what you see on Amazon — “customers who bought this also bought…” — or on Spotify — “people who likes this song also liked ….”

How will AI affect sports? Do we want computers calling balls and strikes? Do we want first downs and fumbles determined by artificial intelligence?

Just recently the tech geniuses have developed AI engines that can write books and provide the illustrations.

How long before AI is writing screenplays and creating computer-generated characters to act out the script? When will we have AI judges in the courts?

The boys drink and review Pigweed’s latest robust porter, then welcome John Wayne Jew to the show to help review “this month in woke.”

The plague of wokeness is out of control.

We’re seeing university struggle sessions where if any of the students disagree with a teacher’s liberal agenda, the student has to issue a written apology and submit himself to lectures from the teacher and other students.

Teachers can be jailed for failing to use a student’s preferred pronouns.

In Virginia, the schools slow-walked informing students they were national merit scholars because it wouldn’t be “equitable” to give the smart kids a leg up.

With control of the government, the schools, scientific establishments, the media, Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, the left is often pushing the boundaries of crazy, and mostly getting away with it — with ridiculous results.

Every day there’s another story about lunacies on the left. If you’re not getting enough sleep, you may be a victim of racism.

The woke Biden administration is going to drop millions of dollars on AI to find “microaggressions,” but they won’t pay any attention to the straightforwardly racist aggression from Joy Behar.

The word “field” has been designated too racist and triggering.

The boys end the show with a simple summary of what “woke” means.

With special guest Longinus (a vegetarian), the boys drink and review a small beer, following a recipe from George Washington, then discuss vegetarianism.

Sometimes vegetarianism is inspired by religious beliefs, and sometimes by secular ethics and questions of health. There are also issues about environmental issues and sustainability.

There are different types or levels of vegetarianism, including veganism, lacto and ovo vegetarianism, pescetarianism, raw vegans, etc.

Some claim that vegetarianism is more healthy and better for the planet.

Pigweed asks how vegetarianism squares with the history of our species. Cooking and eating meat was a huge step in our evolution and facilitated the development of our large brains.

And what about eating bugs? The geniuses at Davos seem to want us to do that.

Crowhill believes the future of meat eating is lab-grown meat, and that once we perfect that, vegetarianism will be irrelevant.

Along with special guest Longinus, the boys drink and review Beam Me up, Stouty (a coconut stout) from Saugatuck Brewing, then discuss “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”

The story is not about an escape, or an unusual day, or how something dramatic happened on this day. It’s just a typical day in a Soviet labor camp.

Solzhenitsyn’s account of this one day so captured the experience of the Soviet prisoner camps that he received letters from former prisoners expressing how perfectly he had captured the experience.

The characters themselves are not particularly wicked. You don’t come away hating the characters in the story, but the system. It’s all about ordinary, decent people caught up in a wicked system.

It’s a cold story. You might want to bundle up as you read it.