Sales of Jack Daniels whiskey to Canada are down 62% according to CBC. I wonder how other major US brands are doing worldwide, and if they will recover if / when things stabilize.

Company behind Jack Daniel’s says Canadian boycott is ‘significant’ as sales drop 62%

It was 20 years ago that Katrina made landfall on the gulf coast. I haven’t made many personal statements about it over the years but I’ll say it was a low point in American leadership.

The media was even lower, providing very little useful information and lots of false narratives. During and immediately after the storm a fellow named Michael Barrett kept a liveblog from a data center downtown that was really my only trusted source of information. Thanks Mr Barrett.

Over the years I have sent people links to Michael Lewis NYT article about his return to New Orleans immediately after the storm. Perhaps the best thing written about Katrina and maybe about New Orleans. Today it is paywalled but if you haven’t read it I encourage you to get access and read a first hand account from someone who knows the city and is also an excellent writer.

Wading Toward Home

China has stopped buying American soybeans and is turning to Brazil. In fact, China is investing in Brazilian infrastructure so they can continue buying their soybeans. Farmers want the US government to “do something”. They already did something, that is the problem. Things these days can change on the whims of one man, but this one looks like a door closing.  From Talk Business and Politics (Arkansas) and Iowa Soybean Association.

As U.S. soybean crop matures, anxiety grows over lagging Chinese demand

Arkansas on the verge of agricultural disaster

I think I figured out what this Vibe Coding stuff is. It’s when you are too lazy to Google SubStack and let AI do it for you.😀

I retired my old Android tablet and was going to give it away. Decided it might make a nice Digital Photo Frame for Mom. I have almost 10,000 family photos I scanned in (Dad was a professional photographer) so there would be plenty of content.

I search around and found discussion of apps, using Google Photos, but I wanted to keep it simple, without using WiFi if possible. Turns out the solution was pretty simple. I won’t give exact cookbook instructions, but it’s pretty easy to figure out.

• Do a factory reset, mostly for security purposes. Restart and keep everything turned off (WiFi, Google login, etc.)
• Copy photos to the device. My 10,000 or so photos only took about 20 GB. I used an old 32 GB SD flash card I had. Took a while to get the formatting right. Used FAT32 finally.
• Point the screen saver to the directory with all the photos. That’s it.
• Additionally, since this is for my 92 year old Mom, I got rid of pretty much all desktop icons, turned off everything I could (Bluetooth, updates, alerts, etc)

The default is that the screen saver only works when the pad is plugged in. Great.

Dr John has been gone a while. I heard at the end of his life he spent a lot of time “collaborating” with Doc Pomus. A Google turned up this nice Paris Review article. Meanwhile on PBS Beck is playing Willie Nelsons “Hands on a Wheel” from Willie’s 90th Birthday Celebration.

Farewell to Dr. John, Wherever You Is Now

Wow. Over a third of the renewable energy produced by Scotland’s wind turbines is “curtailed”. This means ignored, dumped, not used. Not that there isn’t demand for this power, just not enough power lines to move the electricity from where it is to where it’s needed. Or storage to hold it for when it is needed.  I realize the criticism of renewables is that it can be unreliable. But we are talking about wind in northern Scotland. It seems pretty reliable.

Scotland’s Wind Turbines Are Being Paid to Stand Still 37% of the Time

I have always been fascinated by the end of the Cold War and the transition of the former Soviet Union to a capitalist economy. Perhaps just because it was the big historic news story of my youth.

The short story is a group of US economists led the Soviet economy into capitalism via “Shock Treatment”. In retrospect it appears to have been an abject failure. But little has been said about this in the mainstream. Just googling around today out of curiosity I ran across the article from 1990 in something called the Monthly Review. It discusses how the former USSR and later China made their largely unsuccessful transitions to a modern Western democratic capitalist societies.

As the same group of free market capitalists continues to exert influence in the US, despite their repeated failures overseas, one has to ask if these “failures” weren’t failures at all but part of a plan. As the corruption mounts in the US and our Billionaires begin to resemble the Russian Oligarchs, you have to wonder where the US is headed.

The Necessity of Gangster Capitalism

From The Guardian (UK)

Trump Burger owner in Texas faces deportation after Ice arrest