Let me preface by saying I’m not a bleeding-heart liberal. Like President Jimmy Carter says, “War is evil, but sometimes a necessary evil.”
I live in the real world, and in the real world, at this stage of human evolution, some things have to get resolved through war. Preferably a judicious application of war based on absolute necessity in order to create more benefit than harm based on the needs of humanity and not the desires of a particular side’s greed or ideology.
War itself is evil in that it is the legalized murder of countless humans, usually for a political reason. Sometimes it’s for a greater good such as stopping a growing murderous tyranny such as in World War II. But that too was a “just war” capable of bringing out the worst in humanity en masse and as individuals.

I come to writing this post after watching “Band of Brothers.” An incredibly well-made, emotional, informative mini-series about a year in the life of the 101st Airborne Ranger’s Easy Company at the end of World War II. Produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks after “Saving Pvt. Ryan” with the same incredible production quality that just explodes with realism. In fact, the story of “Band of Brothers” was painstakingly researched and then given approval from the surviving members of Easy Company before being filmed.

Anyway, (SPOILER WARNING! The following contains a couple of spoilers for the episode “The Replacements”!) one particular episode really hit me hard. It was during their mission in Market Garden, in Holland, trying to push into Germany. The Company enters a Dutch town and are welcomed with celebration and love as liberators. There Dutch citizens are partying and warmly welcoming the American soldiers. Men are huging and shaking hands with them, girls are hugging and kissing them. We see one soldier taking advantage (in a polite way, not a bad way) of the well-wishing by kind of making out with one Dutch woman until he’s called away by the sergeant. When he leaves, we see a couple of Dutch men hanging by, grab the woman forcefully and drag her away, struggling. They take her to a group of people in the middle of all the celebrating. As they arrive a couple of men are dragging away a woman with her head grotesquely shaved, blood from cuts running down her face, and a swastika drawn on her forehead, her blouse ripped off, the woman screaming in terror and pain. The new woman is forced on her knees and has her dress blouse ripped open and a woman starts cutting her hair off as she’s being held still, the small crowd yelling and jeering, and the victimized woman crying in fear and anguish.

A couple of the soldiers from Easy Company see this, and express “What the hell…” and a Dutch man explains to them, “They have slept with the Germans.”

This happened. These were normal, “modern” (for the 1940’s) Western Dutch people who as a mob brutalized fellow humans in such public, terrible ways.

Later in the episode a sergeant from Easy Company finds himself cut off and forced to fight hand-to-hand with a German soldier, and is forced to bayonet the man quite horribly to survive. And the display of that struck me so hard, realizing throughout wars ordinary people have had to commit terrible acts just to survive. Soldiers are given guns and made to kill people, given bayonets and made to slay people, given grenades and made to blow people into pieces. Would that sergeant who grew up on a farm have to ever kill another human being if not for war? Probably not. And so that man, like most soldiers in war, go home at the end of it, after having done things that would cause people to receive capital punishment in a court of law, and try to live a normal life. And it’s both horrific and terribly heart breaking. The idea that ordinary people are made to become killers for at best stopping tyranny, at worst, furthering a political goal.

And I think of my grandfather, who was a Marine lieutenant in the Pacific theater during World War II. He never talked (to me) about his experiences, and he was the kind of man that wouldn’t want to. And I can imagine what horrors he may have seen, may have committed, and came home to be an ordinary hard working and moral man that I knew him as. It’s heart breaking.

I look around today, and I see news article about U.S. Marines intentionally killing civilians in Iraq. About Abu Garab. About rape as a war tactic in the Congo. About atrocities against civilians U.S. soldiers committed in Viet Nam. Whether soldiers are commiting “war crimes” or just the “regular” job of killing that is the job of waging war, it goes to show all humans are capable of doing terrible things given the circumstances.

I think back again to World War II, and the Nazi’s. The Germans. The ordinary German citizens that were so horribly affected by inflation and poverty that they were willing to listen to and believe the lies of a charismatic sociopath into looking the other way when their government was commiting terrible crimes against humanity. Were they evil? The people who look the other way? No more than your average American 20-year-old who is handed a rifle and told to kill as many faceless enemy soldiers he can. Were the Nazi’s “evil” in some supernatural sense of the word? It is dangerous to believe so. Hitler wasn’t a demon, wasn’t some rare monster, he was a human being. Criminally insane, but a human. Himmler? Eichman? Goering? Humans, some psychopathic, some homicidal, some delusional, but humans all. The SS, humans. All the soldiers and agents of “evil” regimes, all humans.

And we can not forget that any and every human, with the right motivation and in the right circumstance, is capable of terrible acts and can rationalize them. We must remember when we look at world leaders, charismatic people, politicians and military officials, that any of them is capable of being a Hitler or Stalin or Rasputin or Papa Doc or Jim Jones or Charles Manson. And anyone who does not stand up for what is right, who does not use critical thinking, who can be controlled by their fears or prejudices or religious dogma or jingoism or twisted ideas of patriotism, can be lead and controlled and made to do terrible things. And believe they are in the right.

Belief is a powerful force. Belief in one’s rightness, one’s certitude, can lead to terrible things. Maybe a life of false and “harmless” mis-reality, maybe the commission or the complicity of others’ terrible acts. But unquestioned belief, unexamined dogma, unchallenged certitude, absolutism, is the basis for all human created ills. All violations of human rights. All war, “good” or “bad”. When we fail to remember that belief can be like steel and utterly in conflict with rationality and reason, belief can lead to destruction. Remembering that all humanity is valuable regardless of creed, religion, ethnicity, politics, or “sins” against one’s gods, then the fear, hatred, predjudice, moral certitude that is the basis for war have a harder time justifying mass slaughter and rationalizing turning ordinary people into killers.

I want to, without permission, copy here a recent entry in the “Bad Astronomer” blog, titled “The Cost of Uncritical Thinking“. I hope you have suffered through my diatribe and got this far, because Phill Plait makes a better point than I ever could:

In America, we have this dichotomy in that we lead the world in ground-breaking scientific research, yet we have creationists and other anti-scientists who hold sway over the government.

It’s cold comfort, I suppose, that we’re not alone. A few months ago, in Assam, a state in India, 5 people were publicly beheaded by a mob for practicing witchcraft. Amir Munda was a traditional healer at a tea plantation. He and his family were “guilty of causing a mysterious disease that claimed two plantation workers and affected many more during the past two weeks.” 200 workers assembled, held a trial, and used machetes to decapitate Munda, two of his sons and two of his daughters. If you are not sufficiently outraged yet, I’ll note that his wife – his pregnant wife—managed to escape with three of their sons.

It’s incredible that something like this can still happen, more than a century after germs were discovered to cause disease. It might be easy for some listeners to want to laugh at news like this, I mean, really, beheading people for witchcraft?

But remember, India, like America, has an excellent scientific community, but also, like America, it’s brimming with people who have no clue about how science works. In this country, we have homeopathy, “natural” cures, creationism, and people who think AIDS is a government conspiracy. So don’t mock those plantation workers so quickly. How far are we from such atrocious acts?

Then I remember race riots, Matthew Shepherd, and so, so many other atrocities based on superstition, credulity, and uncritical notions — take your pick which ones — and I realize:
We’re already there.

Back in March I wrote a blog entry: Absolutely Relative (the theme continues) and recently it’s gotten some discussion in the comments.

Discussion regarding naturalism, humanism, and their approaches to subjectivism.

On a related note, Mark over at NewSojourn has written an article condemning naturalism as absurd because it does not address the “bigger issues” of morality and the meaning of life. “How Big Is Your Frying Pan?”
In this article he repeats an analogy by Ravi Zacharias that goes like this:

A visitor stopped by and observed the man who was fishing and noticed he was catching several fish.
There was something strange though. The visitor noticed that the fisherman would only keep the smaller fish. Any fish that were larger were tossed back into the water.
Confused, the vistitor approached the fisherman and asked him: “Sir, why do you not keep the big fish?”
“Ahh, well it is really quite simple. I only have an 8-inch frying pan.”

The problem with this sophistry is that it is a “straw man fallacy“. It completely misrepresents the view and meaning of naturalism in order to ridicule it.

To learn about what naturalism is, I recommend these two links:

Wikipedia on Naturalism

Naturalism is an Essential Part of Science and Critical Inquiry

An edit to that parable above that would make it closer to the reality of what naturalism is would be like this: The fisherman, seeing that he is catching a lot of big fish, realizes that throwing them back is a waste, and so considers what he would need to do in order to keep them. He ponders various hypotheses such as buying a larger frying pan, or perhaps a smoker.

Another edit that would illustrate the nature of the arguement against naturalism would be if the observer came by and saw the fisherman catching fish, but ignoring all the beautiful 18-point deer buck behind him, and asks “Why aren’t you going after those deer?” And the fisherman replies, holding his fishing rod out, “Uhm, because I’m fishing.”

See, here’s the problem with the attacks on naturalism, and I deal with it some in the recent comments of my earlier blog, Absolutely Relative (the theme continues). Blaming and criticizing naturalism for not addressing issues of morality and the meaning of life is like criticizing your fridge for not doing a good job washing your dishes. Naturalism doesn’t address those issues because it’s not its realm, its jurisdiction, its purpose. Naturalism as a philosophy has no need to address those things.

But here’s the follow-up point: It doesn’t preclude those issues being addressed another way, any more than your owning a fridge precludes you from having a dishwasher.

America’s founding fathers were naturalists. It was the Age of Reason and men like Franklin and Jefferson believed in the power of science and objective analysis to uncover truths about the natural world. However, they were also Deists and Unitarians and believed in a Creator God and of God-contrived events and developments defined as Providence. Because they depended on the philosophy of objective reasoning and emperical evidence to explain and discover the truths about the world we live in, doesn’t mean those “bigger questions” of morality and meaning of life should be ignored.

Now attackers of naturalism, like Mark over there on How Big Is Your Frying Pan? continue to criticize naturalism’s “flaw” of not dealing with issues that are not related to the natural world, by saying it then relies on “relativism” to address those bigger questions. This is a false relation. Naturalism does not require that a person use relativism to address the bigger issues. Sure, the connection is easy to relate since naturalism presupposes that there is no such thing as the supernatural, thus morality and purpose cannot come from a supernatural means. However, naturalism does not prevent the notion that anything that seems supernatural may have logical and natural properties and that if there is objective moral truths and “meaning” to life, it may come from a source that appears supernatural but can still be defined and explored using consistant naturalistic approaches.

I admit to being slightly disingenuous here, in that I personally believe in “relativism” of sorts, but there are schools of belief, such as Deism and Pantheism and Transcendentalism which do believe in God that also believe in relativism and subjective truths. So the idea that naturalism MUST be tied to relativism in the sense that there is no God or Providence is an incorrect and misleading arguement.

That really should address the erroneous and misleading attacks on naturalism. But to promote the validity of naturalism, I offer the following arguements.

What is the alternative? The supernatural. Is there such a thing? Is there phenominae that is not of this orderly and natural existance we live in? I don’t know, but the evidence doesn’t look good. Using the tools of naturalism, reason, critical thought and inquiry, we have moved our existance from that of agrarians with short life spans who feared the dark, believed in witches who soured milk and demons who created diseases, to a world where we have space exploration, cures for countless ailments and conditions, and the ability to feed millions with technology that would have led to mass starvation and famine 100 years ago.

Now, acknowledging that morality and meaning is outside the purvue of naturalism, has naturalism failed us so badly in this way? No other philosophical construct has been used to develop modern medicine and food production and computer science and transportation safety measures. Has naturalism, being the philosophy of scientific discovery and development, failed us so badly?

If you continue to say it fails because it does not address morality and meaning, then I suggest you give up all modern medicine, all modern conveniences, turn in your computer and antibiotics, go live in a cave or log cabin. Because that’s where you’d be if not for the philosophy of looking at the world using objectivity, testible data, and critical inquiry. There are a great many natural scientists out there who depend on and follow the tenants of naturalism every day to discover better medicine and better crop production and safer cars who use other philosophies, and yes, religion, to answer those “bigger questions” of meaning and morality. There are a great many Christians and Jews and Muslems and Hindus and Buddhists who are scientists and natural explorers. But 99% of them, like Franklin and Jefferson 200 years ago during the Age of Reason, believe the supernatural elements of religion simply do not apply to the natural world. Never happened, or have natural explanations.

Anyway, for more on relativism and the failures of personal experience to determine “reality”, I suggest reading the recent comments to Absolutely Relative (the theme continues).

The Pledge of Allegiance: America’s Little Hypocrisy

I absolutely love the pledge the author of the above article has come up with:

“I pledge allegiance to the Constitution of the United States of America, and to the Republic by which it stands; one Nation, indivisible, with the promise of liberty and justice for all.”

The Challenge of the Fossil Record

Holy-moly what a site! It’s refutation of the challenge against evolution by using corrupted, flawed, and even intentionally twisted fossil records and aspects of Darwinism by anti-evolutionists.

I think any time I encounter someone who tries to bring up pseudoscience of fossil record challenges to disprove the factuality of evolution, I’ll point them here and drop it.

It’s a tough read, though. It took me quite a few tries in some places to understand what we being said. But then, I’m not a biologist or palentologist. But it’s an excellent refutation, incredibly detailed and complete, of anti-evolutionist claims.

CNN.com – Pelosi asks Democrat to quit key committee – May 24, 2006

And when Tom Delay is indicted for even greater crimes of corporate bribery and campaign finance illegalities, not only do the Republicans put him on an ethics committe but change the law so that a person indicted can still be Majority Leader.

God I hate the neo-cons and modern day Republicans. They are evil, immoral, arrogant, self-righteous, criminals who revel in their sistemic criminality.

Ten Amendments Day was May 7th, but I didn’t know about it until last week. Shame.

Ten Amendments Day is an answer to the politically motivated Ten Commandments Day.

I learned about both on the podcast Point of Inquiry. On this particular episode of Point of Inquiry which addressed the real meaning of separation of church and state, the contributor that discussed these two days begins by saying there’s nothing wrong with using a day to celebrate a tenant of your faith. Which is what Ten Comandments Day appears to be.

But take a close look at their Web site: Ten Commandments Day. You’ll notice such rhetoric as:

The Ten Commandments Commission was founded to counter the secular agenda and help restore the Ten Commandments and Judeo-Christian values to their rightful place in our society.

And

Join with us in supporting two new bills that that have been introduced to Congress to protect your religious freedom to acknowledging God in America. S520 in the Senate and HR1070 in the House of Representives.

Throughout the site the political agendas are glaring. There’s very little there about actual celebrating a tenant of faith, and more about forcing a government to acknowledge one religion over all and force the citizens of this nation to observe one official, national religion. Basically, eradicate the basic freedoms and liberty of America.

But what’s interesting, (beyond their blatant desire to have a government rule this nation doing exactly what the European governments of the 16th and 17th centuries were doing that caused people to flee to the New World ironically to escape forced governmental religion,) is how ignorant of their own Ten Comandments they are. It’s something I’d addressed before in my blog: 10, no 12, no 20 Commandments…What are they?

And the Ten Amendments site does a great job in its “10 Commandments FAQ” and “Are the 10 Commandments Relavent Today” of exposing how absurd the secular recognition of the 10 Commandments is.
Some small, brief reasons: There are no 10 Commandments as found in the Hebrew scriptures. There’s actually two different sets of commandments from God to Moses that differ from each other, and bear little resemblance to what Protestants count as the 10 Commandments today.

The only Commandment that actually has any significant presence in the Constitution is “false witness” in the sense of purjury. Our legal system pretty much only recognizes three of the Commandments: lying, murder, and stealing. But then, so do ALL religious, cultural, legal codes. The Ten Commandments and the US legal system are not even close to unique in this respect. The first Commandments regarding worshiping God alone, not other Gods, no idols, not using God’s name in vain, these aren’t and never have been a part of the US Constitution or legal system, so the claim that America’s government ever used the Commandments as a basis for its formation is a bold faced lie.

Expecially when you consider the fact that since the 1780’s there have been attempts after attempts to put religion in the Constitution has always failed. Even simply putting the words “Lord” or “Jesus” in the Constitution have always failed since the original draft was being debated. So any statement that the government was founded on a Judeo-Christian foundation is utterly false.

Another interesting submission on the topic of the 10 Commandments in the public areana, and the absurdity of using them in the secular arena, is this article: Protect My Children from the Ten Commandments. The author uses the thesis “pushing the Ten Commandments as a moral code is bad ethics, bad religion, and bad psychology.”
Check it out.

Old Slug Porter

(Beer Advocate review)

overall: 3.3
appearance: 4 | smell: 3 | taste: 3 | mouthfeel: 3.5 | drinkability: 3.5

Interesting bottle art. Cute. =)
It pours with a nice, thick, nutty cream colored head. Very thick if you’re not careful, but reasonably thick with a careful pour. Almost edible.
It’s a deep, cola color with a slight red hue to the extremely dark brown/black.

The scent is nearly undetectable. A very slight citrusy smell and a slight nuttiness.

The taste is bitter, with a bitter aftertaste that hangs around in the back of the throat for a while. However, oddly, only when it’s cold. As it warms up that aftertaste doesn’t exist.
(And no, it’s not because I drank too much of it. After noticing this as I nursed the first glass, I waited quite some time before I poured the second glass from this large bottle, and there was virtually no extended bitter aftertaste.)

It has a slight cloa, coffee taste with a hint of burnt nut. Very rich, nice mouthfeel.

[ serving type: bottle ]

An article on a lawsuit filed to stop the government from collecting phone records.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/05/22/studs.wiretap.ap/index.html

One interesting point is how author Studs Turkel who was blacklisted in the 50’s states that when the goveernment uses corporations to collect information on its citizens, it’s gone too far. But here’s the part that’s really interesting:

The Bush administration has urged a judge to dismiss a similar case, saying it threatens to divulge state secrets and jeopardize national security. The government argued in briefs that the courts cannot decide the constitutionality of the president’s asserted wartime powers to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants.

That dear readers, is a dictatorship. President Shrub has done a great many things the last few years to remove civil liberties and break the law, and has hid behind the justification of war powers. It’s real convenient that the war we’re in is over not a country that can surrender, not an army that can be defeated, but the concept of “terrorism.”

It’s an unwinnable war, an eternal war like the “war against drugs,” and the “war on poverty.” This administration, like the dictatorship in “1984″ is using a war that won’t end to do what it wants in flagrant violation of the Constitution they were sworn to protect and defend. They stomp and tread and spit on the Constitution in their mad grab for power and control at the sake of the citizens that put them in power.

I’m disgusted and angry beyond control, and sadly, not surprised.

Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier Weizen

(Beer Advocate review)

overall: 1.9
appearance: 4 | smell: 1 | taste: 1 | mouthfeel: 3.5 | drinkability: 1.5

Wow, this was a shocker of a beer!
I shouldn’t have been surprised, it says “Schlenkerla Smokebeer” right on the bottle. But I’d never had a smoke-beer before, so hey.

Nice pour; nice dark amber. The proper shade of amber in my opinion.
A tan/beige head, pretty tall, but goes down to a nice lacing reasonably quick.

But then the smell. A highly pungent smell of smoked bacon. Orange smoked bacon.

The taste was no better. A sour taste of smoked apricot. I can see why some people would like this, but I sure couldn’t hack it.

[ serving type: bottle ]

I finally got to see “Chronicles of Narnia” this weekend. (We don’t get out much.)

I have to say that I would have loved the movie if I wasn’t quite familiar with the Bible and somewhat familiar with C.S. Lewis’ writings.

With the exception of some special effects it was quite well produced. (The effects ran the gamut from simply incredible to rubber-doll syndrome.) The acting was quite good, especially from the kids. The script was well written… to a point. And that’s the point where my enjoyment of the movie was ruined by obtuse beat-you-over-the-head allegory. “Allegory” may imply more subtlety than the movie actually incorporated.

In the movie’s defense, it was true to the letter and spirit of the book. Good for it. But even when I read the book as a kid years ago, I was struck by how heavy the Christian allusions and metaphors were. (Of course at that time I loved it, now I find it tedious.)

Actually, if the Christian allegory was the only problem, I think I’d be OK with it. There’s nothing wrong with allegory, and skillfully done, allegory is a wonderful and entertaining literary technique. (Although I wonder if this was the book that made Lewis’ friend, Tolkien, state publicly and emphatically that he hated allegory.) It does make me wonder how some people who have watched the movie have come away curious why people say it was filled with Christian allegory. It’s obvious that those people, if they’ve had any at all, have only experienced Christianity at most through childhood Sunday School.

There’s the very obvious references to “sons of Adam” and “daughter’s of Eve,” and of course Asland’s sacrifice and resurrection. But during the last third of the movie just about every scene had religious allusion. Like the evil White Witch proclaiming that the life of a traitor belongs to her, and she requires blood as is put down in the “old law” and “as is tradition.” Oh my God, if that’s not heavy-handed reference to Hebrew Law. And then Asland’s post-resurrection reveal that if she truely understood the meaning of the old law she’d have realized the true meaning of sacrifice. And who can forget Asland’s line “It is finished”? It was hard for me not to roll my eyes. And then more subtleties like having “Peter” as the human (son of Adam) leader of Asland’s kingdom. (The first Pope, anyone?)
But like I said, allegory alone would have been OK. I would actually have probably been more annoyed if Lewis (and the film makers) had tried to sneak Christian allegory into the story. That would have felt like some kind of subversive attempt. Being so blatant and obvious, it feels more entertaining. And like, oh my! like what Dan Brown has done with “The Da Vinci Code.” Take a story, a setting, a plot, a theme, and then work it into a new narrative fiction story. Of course, Lewis does it with more skill and entertainment than Brown did with his potboiler.

My main problem comes as a personal issue I have with Lewis, and not the movie itself, which makes it quite unfair of me to blame the movie for whatever lack of enjoyment I had of it due to something not its fault. It’s my annoyance at Lewis’ non-fiction writings, mainly “Mere Christianity.” Early in the film when the older two kids are discussing with their host, the Professor, their youngest sibling’s stories of having been to this Narnia place inside the wardrobe, the professor poses to them, “Well, if she’s not mad, she must be either lying or… the alternative.” Or something like that. And I groaned greatly on the inside when I heard that and couldn’t pay attention to the movie for like the next minute or two.

That was basically Lewis’ “trilemma” poser regarding the validity of Jesus’ divinity. He states in “mere Christianity”, to paraphrase, if the the prophesies are true, than what Jesus said about his fulfilling them makes him insane, lying, or telling the truth. And it’s best for the concept of absolute morality that he’s telling the truth because if he’s not it negates everything Jesus says about morality. The problem is, the trilemma, as I discuss in earlier blog: Trilemma Delimma, that reasoning fails on two counts. a) Just because one thing someone says may be wrong, does not make everything that person says is wrong. For example, the Pope believes he’s the divinely ordained voice of God on Earth. Non-Catholics don’t believe this. So, even if the Pope is completely wrong about that, does that mean EVERYTHING else he says about morality and behavior and righteousness is wrong?! And b) It assumes that the Bible is 100% accurate, when that can’t be proven. We don’t have any 1st-hand accounts of what Jesus said. We don’t even have original copies of the Gospel writings. What we have are copies of copies of stories written by people who weren’t there. Well, there’s some debate whether, I think it was Matthew and Luke, were there or not at the events. Even so, we don’t have their original writings, and even so, we can’t be certain that they themselves got down exactly what was said. So any statement of absoluteness based on what Jesus said is suspect because the source of the “recording” is suspect.

Anyway, after things like that, it made it hard to enjoy the movie. And again when Asland tells Peter that there is an absolute power greater than even him which governs right and wrong, it’s a statement right out of “Mere Christianity.” (Oh yeah, back to allegory, Asland states that he was present at the writing of the “old law,” harking back to the Christian belief that Jesus is Logos and was around at the creation of/is “The Word.”) And so Lewis’ infusion of his philosophy made the movie annoying.

Again, I can’t fault the movie for these, they’re being honest with the book, and that’s great. The movie did what it set out to do well and entertainingly, and I applaud it. I in fact mainly enjoyed it. I’m just annoyed with Lewis and his horrendously flawed logic and circuitous reasoning. If I’d never read “Mere Christianity” I probably would have fully enjoyed “Narnia.”

Hobgoblin

(Beer Advocate review)

overall: 3.75
appearance: 4 | smell: 3 | taste: 4 | mouthfeel: 4 | drinkability: 3.5

Unfortunately this is an example of “I may not know if it’s art, but I know what I like.”
A nice color, a nice, creamy head, and a creamy feel without that oily feel that a lot of dark ales tend to have.
But I couldn’t quite pinpoint exact flavor or aroma notes. Some have said “caramel coffee,” and I could see that. There’s a sweetness to it that balances the bitterness. The aftertaste is mainly what has the coffee-like flavor, but it doesn’t last too long.
I found it more pleasant at a cool temperature. Not frigerator temperature, but definitely above room temp. Warm enough to bring out the creaminess but cool enough to temper the bitterness and “open” hoppiness. If that makes sense.

[ serving type: bottle ]

Samuel Smith’s Oatmeal Stout

(Beer Advocate review)

overall: 3.4
appearance: 4 | smell: 2.5 | taste: 3.5 | mouthfeel: 3.5 | drinkability: 3.5

A beautiful pour, dark and opaque brown/black with a nutty brown head that’s reasonably thick and lasts a reasonable amount of time that leaves a nice lacing. It’s my second favorite looking beer.
I really couldn’t get much of a scent from it. I don’t think I’m experienced enough to really catch the notes yet. A deep deep inhale I can smell something, faint, and it’s nice, but I can’t place the spice or floral or what it is. It’s like a richness that’s right on the edge of perception.
The taste is not as sweet as I would have expected, but this was my first oatmeal stout. Didn’t know what to expect, but I like my Apple and Cinnimon Oatmeal breakfast, so I think I expected something sweet subconciously. *grin*
There’s a sharp bitterness, almost a burnt taste. Like what I would expect burnt oats to taste like. But it’s only slightly annoying. More interesting, actually.
I found I had to drink it a little colder than I normally like dark beers. Just under or at refridgerator temp. (What, about 50F I think?)

[ serving type: bottle ]

Bohemia

(Beer Advocate review)

overall: 2.45
appearance: 3 | smell: 2.5 | taste: 2 | mouthfeel: 2.5 | drinkability: 3

Golden pour, pretty yellow actually; golden is kind of kind.
(I’m not a fan of golden beers. No real reason…biased against gold, yellow beers mainly because of its resemblance to something…else.)

No real “head” per se, just some carbonation bubbles that accumlated at the top VERY briefly.

I caught a faint scent of, seriously, pork chop. Yes, pork chop. (And no, no one was cooking.) But seemed to fade pretty fast.
There was a slight vanilla scent that remained, and that was nice.

Its bitterness kind of sticks for a while at the top, back of the mouth. There’s a slight creaminess to the feel, which is nice, but does a lot to point up the lingering aftertaste. Not a good end result.

Between this and a diet Pepsi, I’d take the Pepsi. Between this and a Bud light, it’s be a real tough call and I’d hem and haw a little, but I guess I’d settle for this.

[ serving type: bottle ]