Jack Daniels Whiskey Note

This photograph, captured at the turn of the 20th century, depicts Jack Daniel, recognizable in the white hat, seated alongside George Green, son of Nathan "Nearest" Green, the pioneering African American master distiller in the United States. For a long time, it was believed that Daniel had been taught the art of whiskey-making by a prosperous landowner and Lutheran preacher named Dan Call. However, it was actually Nathan Green who served as his true mentor, having been rented out by his owners to assist Call. Green took Daniel under his wing and continued working for his whiskey enterprise after the conclusion of the Civil War.

The significance of Green's role was an open secret, passed down through generations. After over 150 years, Brown-Forman, the company that owns Jack Daniel's, officially acknowledged Green as the first master distiller, with Jack himself being recognized as the second. While the history of American whiskey has predominantly revolved around Scottish-Irish and other European distilling traditions, it's crucial to acknowledge the substantial involvement of enslaved individuals in the distillation process. They not only provided physical labor but also possessed extensive knowledge of alcohol production techniques originating from West Africa.

Nathan Green's contribution is now formally acknowledged on the official Jack Daniel's website and highlighted during distillery tours in Lynchburg, Tennessee. Interestingly, the distillery itself is situated in a dry county where the sale of liquor is prohibited. To circumvent this restriction, they legally sell commemorative Jack Daniel's bottles that coincidentally contain whiskey.

Twitter link

Immigration Note

I'm blogging this Facebook post for future reference. 

As Title 42 comes to an end the big news is that big numbers of hopeful migrants will very likely be added to the already great multitude of undocumented immigrants in America, many of whom have been here entire lifetimes. 

The numbers are impossible to know, of course, since they do not officially exist. But those of us who have depended on hourly workers know perfectly well that our economy would not be the same if these people were not here, working, paying taxes, spending their money, making investments and quietly making significant contributions to the American Dream.

Wikipedia cites a number of estimates but the one that turned up in my post was this:

➡ A 2018 paper by three Yale School of Management professors estimated that the undocumented immigrant population was in the range of 16 million to 29 million, however the methodology presented in this study has been criticized as leading to vastly overstated results.

The USA population is something over three-hundred million, so even fifteen-million would be about five percent of the country. 

Five out of every hundred people is still a bunch of people. 

(Who knows what would happen if Congress once again took a stab at comprehensive immigration reform? Now that's another interesting article. Take a look at "Immigration reform in the US" and see what a mess it is.) 

In any case, as I see screaming headlines about immigrants, I'm confident that the numbers are trivial compared with the number of undocumented Americans already here which is a much larger number.

And yes, I consider them Americans - with or without documents. They have been a vital part of my working life, enabling me to enjoy a comfortable retirement.

Social media platforms are a mess

Twitter is a case in point - a messy, clumsy, opaque platform - hard to read and even harder to follow. Despite that I often find interesting and intelligent conversations but they soon vanish in the quagmire. Noah Smith's exchange here is a good example.

Greg Ip is a Canadian-American journalist, currently the chief economics commentator for The Wall Street Journal.
His WSJ link opens an exchange.

He posts: As western multinationals pursue a "China plus one" manufacturing strategy, India is aggressively seeking to be the "plus one." One company official said, “We don’t want all our eggs in one basket in China.” @PhilipWen11, @agarwalvibhuti and I report.
(WSJ link here. Subscription wall.)
In Tamil Nadu, companies like Vestas, Salcomp, and Foxconn are ramping up production on wind turbines, iPhones and other accessories. Indian electronics exports are soaring. India is trying to improve its notoriously slow, burdensome and capricious regulatory environment.

“We have now taken… integrating ourselves with other countries far more seriously," says commerce and industry minister @PiyushGoyal.
"In fact, manufacturing's share of Indian GDP has gone down since PM Modi introduced "Make in India" in 2014. Never mind China, India has work to do to convince MNCs it's a better place to manufacture than Vietnam or Mexico."

Noah Smith replies...
"If India can become a new "workshop of the world", it will be one of the greatest victories for human progress in the history of the planet, comparable only to China itself. 🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳"

To which someone responds "We already made that mistake once with China, why should we make the same mistake again with India?"

Smith: "It wasn't a mistake; Chinese people deserve not to be poor. Yes, we have to deal with negative side effects of China's rise, but the same was true of Germany, Japan, Britain, etc...and the U.S. itself.
"This is a nuance I wish more people understood. Keeping 1.4 billion Chinese people in poverty would NOT have been worth it just to prevent the rise of the Xi Jinping regime. China's leadership is bad, but the fact that China developed is overwhelmingly good.
"The same is true of India. Cheering and promoting India's economic development does not equal an endorsement of Modi. Trying to keep India poor just to try to weaken Modi and the BJP would be a monstrous crime, so hopefully no one wants to do that.

This is not a big deal, but I come across stuff like this all the time, fresh  ideas - nothing combative or argumentative - just conversational exchanges, which is how civil discussions unfold. Makes me crazy.
Something about the current sound-bite prone social media platforms tends to evoke confrontational challenge instead of thoughtful reflection.

Harlan Crow Sure Isn’t Paying for Your Kid’s School

Harlan Crow Sure Isn’t Paying for Your Kid’s School

BY DAHLIA LITHWICK

MAY 08, 2023

In 1969, Justice Abe Fortas resigned his seat at the Supreme Court for accepting $15,000 in exchange for a series of paid lectures at American University. Part of the Fortas scandal also involved news of him accepting a stipend for doing legal work for a very rich friend (money he had actually returned when the benefactor was indicted and before the outcry).

None of Fortas’ colleagues defended him for this. No one blamed the press or even the Nixon administration (which very much orchestrated the ouster). It was widely understood that Fortas had done something that undermined the public legitimacy and independence of the court and that he had to go.

Over the past few weeks we have learned that Justice Clarence Thomas took multiple luxury vacations, valued in millions of dollars , over many years, paid for by Harlan Crow, a billionaire GOP donor who has business before the court. We know Crow had also contributed the $500,000 seed money that became Ginni Thomas’ Liberty Central, which paid her salary. We also know that Harlan Crow purchased the home in which Justice Thomas’ mother currently resides, rent free. And late last week, we learned that Crow paid years’ worth of private school tuition for Thomas’ grandnephew, Mark Martin, of whom Thomas had legal custody and whom Thomas was, as he put it, “raising as a son.” Justice Thomas knew such gifts needed to be disclosed because he did so with another tuition payment gifted to Martin in 2002. But he did not report the tuition Crow paid.

Last Thursday, we also learned that in January in 2012, Leonard Leo arranged to have Ginni Thomas paid $25,000 for consulting work through Kellyanne Conway’s polling company. The funds came from the Judicial Education Project, a dark money group that listed its address as a UPS Store in Georgetown. Leo’s instruction to Conway asked her to funnel the cash to Ginni, and took care to note that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.” A few short months later, the Judicial Education Project filed an amicus brief in Shelby County v. Holder, arguing for the dismantlement of the Voting Rights Act. Shelby County was a 5-4 decision, with Justice Thomas in the majority.

The insult-comic response to all these revelations has been some sighing version of “I sure wish I had friends like Harlan Crow,” and “I sure wish I had friends like Leonard Leo.” The problem is: Most of the justices, and certainly most politicians and judges and people of generalized fanciness already do have friends like Harlan Crow. American governance is so inextricably bound up with capitalism and cronyism that the shocker would in fact be if justices didn’t have a few friends who were the sort of wealthy political operatives who could buy them a pony or two on demand.

Which means the difference is not that there aren’t other Harlan Crows out there—surely there are. The difference is that most politicians and judges don’t take millions of dollars of gifts and air travel and luxury vacations and rent-free housing and tuition payments from those friends. To the extent that they do, they disclose them. The problem with Justice Thomas is not that wealthy donors to institutions and organizations with interests at the court all want to be his friend. The problem with Justice Thomas is that he thinks that every single aspect of his life is private and that any scrutiny of these “private” affairs is an intrusion. Indeed Leonard Leo swiftly defended his “No mention of Ginni, of course” comment with a statement saying: “Knowing how disrespectful, malicious and gossipy people can be, I have always tried to protect the privacy of Justice Thomas and Ginni.”

So that—right there—is the problem. It’s not that Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo aren’t free to pick who their friends are. It’s that they happened to be in charge of spending a ton of money to use the courts to restructure democracy, and they deliberately picked the friends who would help them do it. The problem is that everyone seems to have acceded to an arrangement in which those millionaire donors get to give stuff to their “friends,” and that this ought to be a secret, because otherwise it would compromise their privacy. If you are a Justice, you have to disclose this kind of stuff. If that bothers you—if you are so committed to living a private life beyond the reach of disclosure—you can go be a urologist or something.

Which is why the real answer to why you don’t get to have rich friends like Harlan Crow is not that Harlan Crow wouldn’t like you if he knew you. He probably would. It’s just that Harlan Crow doesn’t want or need to know you. His claim that he met Justice Thomas and found himself “sympatico” has less to do with the nature of private friendship than with the nature of public power. And the way power currently works in this country is that you get to buy it. If you don’t see the straight line between Citizens United, Leonard Leo, Shelby County, and the concerted effort to take power from regular you and give it to Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo, you are not seeing the plan clearly.

There’s also something specifically infuriating about the way defenders of the deep spiritual kinship between Harlan Crow and Clarence and Ginni Thomas root their argument in the fact that paying for an at-risk youth’s private school tuition is a noble act—“charity” even. The problem with that is: This is a conservative legal movement that is racing to subvert voting, public education, the administrative state, and (at present) the possibility of student loan forgiveness. So Harlan Crow’s replacement of an entire New Deal safety net with an ad hoc charitable benefits system administered by himself and directed only at the offspring of personal friends is specifically infuriating. Because the kids who receive the generosity of the Crow’s private charity are not yours, and the kids who receive the protections of EPA regulation are not yours, and the kids who receive the benefits of going to schools where nobody will shoot them are not yours. The beauty of Leonard Leo and Harlan Crow is that they always get to determine who benefits, and guess what, until and unless you are related to a sitting Supreme Court Justice: It will be not you.

The lesson we are learning from the new scandals at the high court go way beyond “ethics” reform. This is no longer an ethics problem. This is a democracy reform problem and it signals first and foremost an effort to deform democracy to serve the Harlan Crows and the Leonard Leos of the world. It also signals a view of democracy in which they will determine whose private life is private and who are the “gossips” (you may still know them as “journalists”).

Indeed, that’s the latest defense that Thomas’ allies have cooked up: His wealthy pals had to funnel the cash and lavish gifts to him and his wife in secret, because if they had done it publicly, or disclosed it, regular people would cruelly intrude upon their cherished privacy with the unspeakable horror of public criticism. (Leo raised this exact argument to explain why he concealed the payment to Ginni, which is akin to a crooked lobbyist saying he had to bribe a congressman in secret because if people found out they might tarnish his reputation.) And if there is one thing we know about Thomas, it’s that he views public criticism (at least of himself) as a profound evil to be avoided at all costs. Bending disclosure rules is, to his mind, perpetually justified by the desire to shield his good name from any scoundrels who would dare speak ill of him. Whether or not he’s adhering to the law is, at most, an afterthought.

It would be painful in the extreme to have to confront the fact that your closest, dearest friendships are sometimes in fact almost wholly transactional. But that is not the issue that is up for debate just now. What is up for debate is whether justices exist in a sphere of privacy so impenetrable, that neither disclosure rules, nor corruption concerns, nor journalism, nor accountability of any kind, may intrude.  That is the world Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow and Leonard Leo have been building for themselves. Let me assure you, it is not a world that will admit you. They don’t actually need friends like you. You and your kids are on your own.

When Heather Cox Richardson says something
is important, you can be certain it's important.

Memo to Blogger

In retirement I have had great fun with Blogger since 2004. It's a great platform, easy to use once you figure out how to use the sandbox. I write, edit and publish posts, and the experience continues to make me happy, even as other platforms (Social media, Ticktock, Substack and endless other spin-offs) seem to be getting more traffic. But this experience is not without challenges, most of which seem to be the result of what happens when details and tasks that only living humans can resolve are delegated to algorithms and technology. I will explain.

Five years after I launched Hootsbuddy's Place in 2004 I ran into a problem. I was the target of a phishing email at that time related to a technical mix-up unrelated to Blogger (long story) which resulted in my losing control, even though the blog itself was not affected and continues to be accessible via web searches even now -- thanks to my good fortune. Google acquired the platform soon after I started and didn't want to let all that content get into other hands or disappear altogether. (I have a folder of emails called "Google mess" trying to keep track.) But I digress...

I gave up personal blogging for a while, writing as a guest contributor to a couple other blogs (both of which have since gone). But I still had the itch so I launched another blog, Hootsbuddy's New Place, where this post appears. That all happened before Facebook and other social networks came along, acquiring more traffic than blogging, making information aggregators and fun sites like TTLB obsolete. But I digress...

My Facebook account has been and continues to be great fun but I noticed when I tried to link my old blog something in the system did not allow the url to connect. I decided since it was out there on the Web like a ship without a captain it might be a covert way to spread malware, a kind of software IED or land mine that might explode if it got into someone's platform. (Think wearing a mask to protect against Covid.) Who knows? It might have been. I didn't do that but I have no way to know what happened after I left. But I digress...

Time passed and a day came when I ran into some technical challenges using the web. I went through a stressful period of moving to a new Chromebook because the "two-factor ID" system, for reasons I don't understand, stopped using the land line to transmit the ID verification numbers which had been operable before. When I later used my wife's cell phone to receive the numbers the system put her Facebook page on my Chromebook, which for reasons unknown was finally corrected after a week of waiting. 

Incidentally, one unexpected result of the mix-up, which I call Password Hell, was that after that I discovered to my surprise that the Hootsbuddy's Place urls could then be used at Facebook. But I digress...

The reason for this blog post is to make yet another attempt to recover control of my original blog, Hootsbuddy's Place, which I lost as described in the second paragraph above. 

I sent a number of messages to Google attempting to recover my blog, which also involved returning to Facebook and other sites where I had been linking. Here is one of several notes I sent at the time along the way. As I said, I kept a folder of this stuff for future reference.

This is what I sent to Facebook Security after my account was disabled.

According to what I just read I must have in some manner violated the Facebook Terms of Use.

It is true that I have used the screen name "Hootsbuddy" and various derivations of the same all over the internet for the last ten or more years. But my Facebook page is the first time in my very cautious life that I have used my real name, John Ballard, as well as a photo of myself with Jake, a family pug.

My trouble began about two weeks ago when the PC that I had been using for five years went bad and had to be taken in for replacement. At this point I have lost access to all that the hard drive and Outlook Express had accumulated over five years, including the various password records in the Outlook file.

About the same time I fell for a spam letter that got through the gmail filter. It looked very real and I did a stupid thing, replying with my ID and password to the account. As a result the account and my blog were both frozen and I have had no further access to either. The blog, Hootsbuddy's Place, represents five years of blogging in over three thousand posts. It was a bitter loss. I can still see the Sitemeter traffic count and am pleased to see it still gets about a hundred hits a day without any attention from me, mostly from Google searches!

In the meantime I got past my grief and opened another gmail account as "hootsbuddyjr" and started another blog named "Hootsbuddy's New Place." I was able to put up three posts, telling my story and getting started at a new place, when that account was lost as well. I got mixed up with passwords and when I sent for a reminder it was sent to... you guessed it, the previous disabled gmail address.

I'm having trouble now with Typepad as well and my fear is that evderything in my internet life is about to get wrecked.

If my IP address is the problem, I would like tlo know and be advised how best to repair what appears to be the internet equivalent of a flesh-eating bacterial infection.

My wife and I are now scared that our long-standing personal email account, from which this email is being sent, may be the next to get infected.

I am not a cyber-criminal, as the notice said. I am only a 65 year old guy who has been blogging for five years and recently watched my Internet world come tumbling down.

Tell me please, what to do next.

I sincerely hope a living person with a heart and the time to address the problem can read what I have written and have mercy on me.

Now that ChatGPT and a new permutation of AI have come along, it is my hope that when this blog post is read and digested by some AI program it will decide to bring it to the attention of one or more of the human operators or technical experts who might then find a way to give me control over the original Hootsbuddy's Place, my lost blog.  

In the recovery process, it would also be good if Ron Beasley's old blog would vanish from my sight and go wherever abandoned blogs go when their creators die. 

For other humans who have read this far, thanks for your attention. 
And to whatever Blogger AI application who stumbles across it, give it your best shot and let's see what happens.