the hill we climb

 

One of the books that is currently banned in Florida is “The Hill we Climb”. Naturally, I put it on reserve at the local library, and picked it up a few days ago. Since it is only 32 pages long, it is a very quick secret.

Here’s a news flash for you:

There is NOTHING in the book that is remotely controversial.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/books/review/amanda-gorman-the-hill-we-climb-best-seller.html

Since book bans usually lead to unintended consequences, Amanda Gorman’s book was the #1 fiction best seller in early April.

Most people are award of the fact that she read her poetry at Joe Biden’s inauguration AND at the Super Bowl. In January, Penguin Random House announced that because of the "overwhelming demand" and presales, "The Hill We Climb," with a foreword from Oprah Winfrey, would give the book a first printing of one million copies, which quickly turned into 1.5 million. 

The Harvard graduate and National Youth Poet Laureate, 23, was the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, the first poet to write and perform an original poem for the Super Bowl, and now her book, "The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country," is the first book of poetry to debut at No. 1 on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list. And not just debut, but the first book of poetry to even claim the top spot on the list since its inception in October 1993.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2021/04/07/amanda-gorman-the-hill-we-climb-tops-usa-today-bestseller-list/7122126002/

So why is her book, (and numerous others) banned in Florida?

You can blame Florida’s Fuhrer, Ron DeSantis, who is determined to stamp out “woke” (whatever the hell that is), but he is also supported by a group named Moms for Liberty.

 Moms for Liberty is an American political organization that advocates against school curriculums that mention LGBT rights, race and ethnicity, critical race theory, and discrimination, while multiple chapters have also campaigned to ban from school libraries books that address gender and sexuality. The group began by promoting disinformation and conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic by protesting COVID-19 protections in schools, including mask and vaccine mandates.

The group is influential within the Republican Party. Many of the group's chapters across the U.S. have forged close ties to right-wing extremist groups, including the Proud Boys and Three Percenters, as well as sovereign citizen, QAnon, and Christian nationalist organizations. In 2023, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that tracks extremists, termed Moms for Liberty a far-right extremist organization.

Moms for Liberty has been criticized for harassment, for deepening divisions among parents, for making students' education more difficult, and for having close ties to the Republican Party rather than being a genuine grassroots effort. The group was labeled an "anti-government extremist" organization in 2023 by the Southern Poverty Law Center

Moms for Liberty was co-founded in Florida on January 1, 2021, by former school board members Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice, and by then-current school board member Bridget Ziegler. By late 2021, Ziegler had left the organization. Republican activist and campaign consultant Marie Rogerson is the third-leading member of Moms for Liberty. Descovich receives a stipend as Moms for Liberty's executive director.

Descovich conceived of the organization in the fall of 2020, after losing a seat she had held on the Brevard County school board in a primary to former district employee Jennifer Jenkins, who campaigned against Descovich's opposition to mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic and teacher raises  Voter turnout was higher among Republicans than Democrats county-wide.

As of their first national gathering in Tampa, Florida, on July 14–17, 2022, Moms for Liberty claimed to have 195 chapters in 37 states and nearly 100,000 members

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moms_for_Liberty

What books has Florida banned?

 According to the article below, more than 350 books have been banned in Florida, and the article below lists the specific books that have been banned. I’ve read 5 of them, and one of them is “To Kill a Mockingbird”. A year after its publication, To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/more-than-350-books-banned-in-florida-schools-since-last-july-16817328

Florida, of course, is not the only state to ban books.

More than a 1,000 books have been banned in 86 school districts in 26 states across the United States, a new PEN America analysis shows.

PEN America, a literary and free expression advocacy organization, released a detailed analysis on Thursday of challenges to and bans on school library books and class curriculums. The group said it documented media reports, consulted school district websites, and spoke with librarians, authors and teachers from July 31, 2021, to March 31, 2022.

According to PEN America, in that period, there were 1,586 books banned. Texas led the country with the most book bans – 713 – affecting 16 school districts, followed by Pennsylvania and Florida with 456 and 204 bans, respectively. PEN America describes a book ban as “any action taken against a book based on its content” that leads to the removal or restriction of a previously accessible book. The analysis includes book removals or restrictions that lasted at least a day, the group says.

Politicians and school board members have played a significant role in book banning, PEN America says. At least 41% of book bans were linked to directives from state officials or elected lawmakers.

In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has pressured school boards to remove what he calls “pornography” from school libraries. Meanwhile in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill late last month that requires school libraries to post more information about their collections and seek community input on materials they acquire.

The book bans “have become a favorite tool for state-wide and national political mobilization” with groups such as Moms for Liberty, a conservative group whose “mission is to organize, educate and empower parents,” curating lists of books to be challenged and urging parents to mobilize, the analysis says.

The group also found that at least 96% of the bans were initiated by school administrators or board members and that for the most part, school officials did not follow existing guidelines, raising “serious concerns,” it said.

The report also states that school officials were not transparent or made “opaque or ad hoc decisions” before removing book titles.

Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, said the wave of book bans represents a troubling retreat from America’s historic commitment to First Amendment rights.

“By short-circuiting rights-protective review processes, these bans raise serious concerns in terms of constitutionality, and represent an affront to the role of our public schools as vital training grounds for democratic citizenship that instill a commitment to freedom of speech and thought,” Nossel said.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/07/us/book-bans-pen-america-analysis/index.html

 As you know by know, I am opposed to book bans, and my reasons for that opinion can be found in the article below:

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2022/01/

In March of 2023, a teacher’s union in Florida sued the Florida Department of Education over a new law that made book bans easier to achieve. Since teachers and librarians can be fined, or charged with a crime over this issue, it’s an important step to take.

If you don’t live in a state that has book bans, you can’t vote out the politicians involved, but you can read as many banned books as possible.

Ron DeSantis is one of the leading GOP candidates for the 2024 presidential race. Although I’m usually careful about expressing my political views, one thing is clear. 

It’s obvious that you would have to be crazy to vote for the guy.

*******************************************

 Here’s few closing thoughts about poetry:

 

15 or 20 years ago, I could make up poems at the drop of the hat, and I have managed to save copies of a few of them. However, you don’t need to be a literary genius to write poetry.

All you need is a computer.

 

BING just added a feature where you can use artificial intelligence to write poetry.

 

Inspired by a picture of a lighthouse in Majorca, I asked BING to write a poem about a lighthouse keeper, and this is what I got:

 

***********************************************

 

The lighthouse keeper stands alone, A beacon in the night, He keeps the ships from danger, And guides them to the light.

He spends his days in solitude, With only gulls for friends, But when the night comes creeping in, His vigil never ends.

He watches o’er the stormy seas, And through the darkest night, He keeps the light burning bright, A symbol of his might.

For though he may be all alone, He knows that he is strong, And when the ships come safely home, He knows he’s done no wrong.

 

I am woman

 

In 1971, Heled Reddy released a song titled “I am woman”. The first line of the song is, “I am woman, hear me roar.

Let’s travel back in time more than 50 years, and listen to it again:

Helen Reddy - I Am Woman (1971) - YouTube

There’s an old saying that describes the place of women in our society:

“When mama’s not happy, nobody’s happy.” That phrase, and Helen Reddy’s song, are reminders that there is a price to be for misogyny.

Men as diverse as Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, Bill Cosby, Bill O’Reilly and Donald Trump have discovered that there is a steep price to pay for not respecting the female members of our society.

Weinstein was sentence to 23 years in prison in 2020 after losing a case in New York, and three years later¸ he was sentenced to an ADDITIONAL 16 years in prison in Los Angeles for additional sexual improprieties.

Bill Cosby served time in prison, and was forced to pay damages to numerous victims of sexual assault.

At one point, “The O’Reilly Factor” was the highest rated show on cable television for 16 years. Ultimately, the sexual allegations against him force FOX to pay $13 million to five women who he had sexually abused. That same year (2017) his contract with FOX was terminated.

Although the “Access Hollywood” tape did not prevent Donald Trump from become president, his sexual misconduct has become costly for him. He was recently indicted by a New York jury for his connection with Storm Daniels, and he recently was charged $5 million for a defamation suit tiled by E. Jean Carroll.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_Access_Hollywood_tape

In 2022, 70% of the women in America were registered to vote, compared to 68.2% of the women. If you were a member of a political party, you’d be wise to keep all those women happy, but the GOP has done exactly the opposite.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/999930/share-people-registered-vote-gender/

The overturning of Roe v. Wade, long a goal of the Republican party, has had unintended consequences. Like the dog who finally caught the car, they aren’t sure what to do next.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/

Majorities of both men and women express support for legal abortion, though women are somewhat more likely than men to hold this view (63% vs. 58%). Since the Dobbs decision, half of the 50 states have either banned abortions or rightened restrictions on the procedure. As a result, the 2022 midterms were a disaster for the Republican Party – and the 2024 elections won’t be pretty either.

 https://www.politifact.com/article/2023/jun/21/the-abortion-laws-passed-by-states-since-the-dobbs/

It’s time that we move past politics into other aspects of American life.

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has lost over a million members in the past three years, with back-to-back years of the COVID-19 pandemic following a decade-plus of decline.

https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2022/may/southern-baptist-membership-decline-covid-pandemic-baptisms.html

Pastor Rick Warren published a few thoughts on this topic in The Washington Post this morning:

“Amid an unprecedented decline within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the nation’s largest Protestant denomination has elected to expel several churches for their interpretations of Scripture. That action has fueled a larger conversation about the future of the denomination to which I have belonged my entire life.

 I was not surprised by the vote of the SBC to expel Saddleback Church, the congregation my wife, Kay, and I founded 43 years ago, for giving three longtime female staff members “pastor of” titles. There are now perhaps nearly 2,000 other SBC churches around the United States worried they will be next.

The SBC executive committee’s unprecedented decision has opened a Pandora’s box of unintended consequences that will fundamentally destroy several tenets of the Baptist faith upon which the Convention was founded.

 The SBC has been in decline since the Baptist Faith and Message confession was revised in 2000 to add a prohibition against female pastors. Then in 2015, just eight years ago, an amendment to the SBC constitution weaponized that confession, turning it into an enforceable creed.

 For 400 years, Baptists have been anti-creed — but not anymore. Sadly, I think the decline in the SBC’s size and influence will continue as the Convention suffers one self-inflicted wound after another. These problems have weakened the identity, structure, mission and strategies for cooperation that once made the SBC a powerful force for the kingdom of God and for good in our society.”

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/22/rick-warren-southern-baptists-female-pastors/

Membership in Catholic churches has also declined.

While fewer than half of American adults responding to a recent poll said they are members of a church, synagogue or mosque, the findings do not necessarily mean that people have lost faith in God, a pair of church observers said.

Church membership in 2020 dropped to 47% of the more than 6,100 respondents to a Gallup Poll. It is the first time since the polling firm started measuring church membership in 1937 that a minority of adults said they belonged to a formal religious institution.

Back then, in the midst of the Great Depression, 73% of adults said they belonged to a church. Over the next six decades, membership levels remained steady at about 70% before a measured decline began

The poll's findings show that the number of Catholics belonging to a parish dropped from 76% in 2000 to 58% in 2020. Among Protestants, the membership decline in the same period was smaller — from 73% to 64%.

Membership in the Catholic church has declined because of three factors:

1)    Our society as a while has become less religious, and fully 15% of our population have no church affiliation

2)   Sexual abuse claims against current and former members of the priesthood have cost the Catholic church more than $4 billion in America.

3)   The majority of the Catholics in this country to not agree with the church’s positions on abortion and birth control.

 https://www.ncronline.org/culture/poll-church-membership-continues-decline-21st-century

Over 80 million people today identify themselves as Catholics in the United States, an increase of over 30 million since 1965.

With more Catholics, there could be an assumption that the United States is overflowing with men trying to become priests.

But that is far from the truth. Instead, the number of Catholic priests in the United States has seen a drastic decline since 1965, from nearly 60,000 to 37,500 in 2015.

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-priest-shortage.html

The solution is obvious – but it won’t happen.

Up until about the 4^th century, women served as priests in the Catholic Church, but after that, only men could be priests (unless you count Pope Joan in the 9^th century).

Believe it or not, there ARE female priests today, and the link below goes into more details. One of our friends from A.C.C., Connie Walsh, started to prepare to be a priest. However, the administrative duties of the priesthood did not appeal to her, so she became a deacon instead.

The link below provides more information about female priests:

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2021/02/pink-smoke-over-vatican.html

As a society, we need to be more mindful of the role that women have in our society. If you are in a relationship with a special woman in your life, treat her right – and don’t be afraid to send flowers.

 

 

the prodigal son

 

 

The story of the prodigal son is found in Luke 15:11-32.

The story begins with a man who has two sons. The younger son asks his father for his portion of the family estate as an early inheritance. Once received, the son promptly sets off on a long journey to a distant land and begins to waste his fortune on wild living.

When the money runs out, a severe famine hits the country and the son finds himself in dire circumstances. He takes a job feeding pigs. Eventually, he grows so destitute that he even longs to eat the food assigned to the pigs.

The young man finally comes to his senses, remembering his father. In humility, he recognizes his foolishness and decides to return to his father and ask for forgiveness and mercy. The father who has been watching and waiting, receives his son back with open arms of compassion. He is overjoyed by the return of his lost son.

Immediately the father turns to his servants and asks them to prepare an enormous feast in celebration of his son's return.

Meanwhile, the older son boils in anger when he comes in from working the fields to discover a party with music and dancing to celebrate his younger brother's return.

The father tries to dissuade the older brother from his jealous rage explaining, "Look, dear son, you have always stayed by me, and everything I have is yours.  We had to celebrate this happy day. For your brother was dead and has come back to life! He was lost, but now he is found!” (Luke 15:31-32, NLT).

https://www.learnreligions.com/prodigal-son-luke-1511-32-700213

The Bible has numerous references to forgiveness.

 The beauty of Christianity is that its core message is one of forgiveness.

God loves people, but we have rebelled against Him and need to be forgiven. We cannot earn or deserve that forgiveness, so God came to earth Himself in the person of Jesus to live a perfect life and earn forgiveness for us by sacrificing Himself for everything we’ve done wrong. Now, He offers forgiveness to each of us, but we must confess our wrongdoings and accept Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf.

Forgiveness is the way your relationship with God begins and it’s the way you should live with others as well.

Forgiveness is great conceptually, but actually putting it into practice can be challenging. Both asking for forgiveness and granting forgiveness are some of the hardest interpersonal interactions, but they are both essential for the Christian life.

https://www.cru.org/us/en/train-and-grow/spiritual-growth/forgiveness-scriptures.html

The reason this topic came to mind today is that a well-known prodigal son finally received reckoning for some of his deeds.

President Biden’s son Hunter has reached a tentative agreement with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to two minor tax crimes and admit to the facts of a gun charge under terms that would likely keep him out of jail, according to court papers filed Tuesday.

 

Any proposed plea deal would have to be approved by a federal judge. Both the prosecutors and the defense counsel have requested a court hearing at which Hunter Biden, 53, can enter his plea.

 

The agreement caps an investigation that was opened in 2018 during the Trump administration, and has generated intense interest and criticism since 2020 from Republican politicians who accused the Biden administration of reluctance to pursue the case. The terms of the proposed deal — negotiated with Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a holdover from President Donald Trump’s administration — are likely to face similar scrutiny.

The story of the Biden family, naturally, is complicated.

 

In 1972, shortly after his first successful run for office, Joe Biden’s first wife and infant daughter were killed in an auto accident just before Christmas. Although his sons Hunter and Biden were in the car, they were not killed, but both spent some time in the hospital after the accident.

 

Both of them eventually had successful careers.

 

Joseph Robinette "Beau" Biden III (February 3, 1969 – May 30, 2015) was an American politician, lawyer, and officer in the Army Judge Advocate General's Corps from Wilmington, Delaware. The oldest child of current U.S. president Joe Biden and Neilia Hunter Biden, he served as the 44th attorney general of Delaware from 2007 to 2015 and was a major in the Delaware Army National Guard in the Iraq War. He died of glioblastoma in 2015 at the age of 46.

 

His son’s illness was the primary reason that Joe Biden did not run for president in 2016.

 

Hunter Biden did not seek election to a third term as attorney general in 2014. In the spring of that year, he announced his intention to run for governor of Delaware in the 2016 election to succeed term-limited Democratic Governor Jack Markell. At the time of this announcement, the cancer that would kill Biden in 2015 had been diagnosed (in 2013), but was in remission

 

Robert Hunter Biden (born February 4, 1970) is an American attorney, businessman and artist who is the second son of U.S. President Joe Biden and his first wife Neilia Hunter Biden. He is also a hedge fund, venture capital, and private-equity fund investor who formerly worked as a lobbyist, banker, public administration official, and registered lobbyist-firm attorney. Biden was a founding board member of BHR Partners,  a Chinese investment company. In 2020, he began exhibiting his paintings.

 

Although he was a successful businessman, his personal life was a mess.

  

He eventually became addicted to drugs, which cost him his first marriage, and a small fortune. His 2021 memoir (titled “Beautiful Things”) describes his life as an addict, and it’s a frightening story. Although he went through countless rehab sessions, what finally cured him was his second wife (Melissa Cohen) who he met in 2019.

 

The Biden family has been targeted with numerous investigations over the years by Jo Biden’s political opponents. The details on those investigations can be found at the link below:

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/05/30/gop-investigation-hunter-biden-fbi/

 

To quote William Shakespeare, all of the investigations were “much ado about nothing”

 

In an effort to distract voters from Donald Trump’s phone call to Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25, 2019 (for which he was impeached) Trump’s allies (including Rudy Guiliani) tried to find a scandal involving Hunter Biden and Burisma, where he served on the board. Ultimately, no wrong going was ever discovered.

 

The “perfect phone call” to Zelensky turned out to be anything but that, and Trump was impeached (for the first time) in December of 2019.

 

Joe Biden’s first run for the presidency (in 1987) did not end well, and was short-lived.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/us/politics/biden-1988-presidential-campaign.html

 

By the spring of 2019, though, he felt that it was time to try again.  

 

In his campaign announcement video, Biden rebuked the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 and President Donald Trump’s handling of the aftermath. “He said there were quote some very fine people on both sides,” Biden said. “With those words, the President of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.”

Biden framed the 2020 race as a “battle for the soul of this nation.”

“The core values of this nation, our standing in the world, our very democracy, everything that has made America, America, is at stake,” Biden said in the video. “That’s why today I’m announcing my candidacy for President of the United States.”

Biden, 76, entered the crowded Democratic primary field of 20 candidates as the presumptive front-runner sitting atop the most recent polls. But his more than four-decades-long career is set to undergo an unprecedented level of scrutiny as he seeks to win the Democratic nomination to take on Trump in a general election.

Biden, a centrist Democrat who often touts his relationships with those across the aisle, also will grapple with a Democratic Party that is increasingly feeling a pull from the left with a number of progressive candidates, like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, in the 2020 race.

 

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/25/politics/joe-biden-2020-president/index.html

 

Biden’s Republican opponents tried to hobble his campaign by reminding us of his son’s business dealings, but their efforts were not successful.

 

Hunter Biden is certainly a flawed character, but he is on the road to redemption

 The court papers indicate the younger Biden has tentatively agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges of failure to pay in 2017 and 2018. The combined tax liability is roughly $1.2 million over those years, according to people familiar with the plea deal, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe details of the agreement that are not yet public. Prosecutors plan to recommend a sentence of probation for those counts, these people said. Biden’s representatives have said he previously paid back the IRS what he owed.

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/20/hunter-biden-plea-deal/

Hunter Biden has had a life-long struggle with drug and alcohol abuse and detailed his struggles in his memoir Beautiful Things. He believes his addiction can be linked back to trauma from the 1972 motor vehicle accident that killed his mother and sister. Over the past two decades, Biden has been in and out of rehabilitation, with long periods of sobriety followed by relapses. Following the death of his brother Beau, his addiction escalated, and he claims to have been "smoking crack every 15 minutes." A detailed analysis of Hunter Biden's hard drive by NBC News showed that Biden and his firm were paid $11 million from 2013 to 2018, and the funds fueled his addiction. In his autobiography Beautiful Things, he said that the money from Burisma "turned into a major enabler during my steepest skid into addiction" and "hounded me to spend recklessly, dangerously, destructively. Humiliatingly so I did”.

Hunter Biden’s convictions aren’t going to stop continued assaults on his character, but if there is anything that all of us can learn from the Bible, there ARE times when we are compelled to show some compassion.

 

Even to prodigal sons.

 

Women confuse me. Beer, I understand – part 2

 

When I was a kid, beer was pretty simple. My dad usually drank Hamm’s beer, and my uncle Norbie favored a shot and beer, a favorite drink of people who had German roots. If you wanted to drink a really good beer, you bought Schlitz.

After Schlitz tampered with the recipe to increase profits, while simultaneously producing a series of really dumb commercials, their sales plummeted, and they never recovered.

At a few select places in Tucson, you can still buy an original recipe Schlitz, and it REALLY IS a good beer.

If you wanted to buy an AUTHENTIC American beer, you bought Yuengling, which is the oldest brewing company in America. However, sales have always been limited to 14 northeastern states and the District of Columbia.

http://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-good-old-american-beer.html

About a dozen years ago, I wrote an article explaining why beer had become more confusing.

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2011/06/women-confuse-me_23.html

Since that time, beer has become even MORE confusing.

Up until very recently, Bud Light was the most popular beer sold in America. In order to appeal to an even larger audience, Budweiser recently produced cans of Bud Light with an image of Dylan Mulvany on the label. (If you don’t follow the culture wards very closely, Dylan Mulvaney is known for detailing her gender transition in daily videos on TikTok since early 2022. In October 2022, Mulvaney spoke with U.S. President Joe Biden at the White House about transgender rights.

As of April 2023, Mulvaney has more than 10 million followers on TikTok, while her video series, Days of Girlhood, has received over one billion views.)

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_Mulvaney

 

If you’re looking for a really good beer, Bud Light isn’t it. According to the Wall Street Journal, it is one of the worst tasting beers in America. It ranks #6 of the worst 25 beers. The majority of the beers on the list have some connection to Anheuser-Busch.

 https://247wallst.com/special-report/2017/03/11/25-worst-tasting-beers-in-america/5/

Bud Light became popular because it’s cheap. You can buy a 12 pack for as little as $12.99, about $6 less than a 12 pack of better-quality beers, like Samuel Adams of Four Peaks.

The people who bought it tend to be conservative, and a fair number of them might be characterized as “the MAGA” crowd, which is not a group that welcome diversity.

Almost immediately, Bud Light sales started to slip, and the Dylann Mulvaney cans were quickly pulled off the shelves. A few of the A-B executives were either demoted or fired. Ironically, Bud Light also saw a decline in sales to the gay community, who felt that Anheuser-Busch was not doing ENOUGH to support them

Almost overnight, the most popular beer in America became Modelo.

Until this morning, I had never purchased any Modelo, but I bought a 12 pack this morning in order to try it. Taste wise, it reminds me a lot of Budweiser. It’s not horrible, but it’s a not a brand that a true beer lover would buy on a regular basis. A 12-pack cost me $15.99, slightly less than what I would call “the good stuff”.

What distinguishes a great beer from the also-rans is “the head”.

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2016/04/it-takes-good-head-to-make-great-beer.html

I saw a post this morning on Facebook stating that the less educated among us were shunning an AMERICAN beer in favor of a MEXICAN beer.  Although that illustrates the silliness of the MAGA crowd, it fails to mention a couple of critical facts:

1)    Bud Light is not an American beer

2)   Modelo is not a Mexican beer. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grupo_Modelo)

 Bud Light, of course, IS brewed in America, and Modelo IS brewed in Mexico. Both brands, however, are owned by In-Bev, which is a BELGIAN company.

https://www.ab-inbev.com/our-brands/

In-Bev makes 500 different beers. Among them is Budweiser, Beck’s, and Modelo. Although Anheuser-Busch may be disappointed by the slump in Bud Light sales, and Modelo executives might feel happy about the rise in sales for Modelo, the parent company of both brands (In-Bev) could care less which one is popular, and which one is not, since the bottom line is all that matters.

After I finish the Modelo that I bought this morning, I probably will not buy it again, and will (once again) buy beers that actually have a satisfying flavor. I may even buy some non-alcoholic beer on occasion, since most of the ones that I have tried are actually very good beers.