Christian Miller

Proprietor of Full Glass Research, specializing in food and beverage. Research Director for the Wine Market Council & UC Davis instructor. Tweets are my own.

[ProPublica @propublica]

The DOJ has dropped 23,000 criminal cases — including hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime and drugs — while prosecuting 32,000 new immigration cases in just the first six months of Trump’s second term.
https://t.co/F92hGp0SSO

[Christian Miller @CMMwine]

Pulte was last in the news for rummaging through Federal data for dirt on political opponents and Reserve Bank officials who wouldn't toe the line. Which he bungled.

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

"Late Kakistocracy" is that phase of democratic decline where the regime starts running out of ppl who will work for it, and so the folks who aren't qualified for their current positions are promoted to even larger positions for which they are even more unqualified

[Tara Blume @tcblume]

Science gasps for breath. They are removing all the ocean monitors to understand changes in currents and climate, and the excuse is a master class in obfuscation & double speak . (1/2) https://t.co/vs782YbcI3

[Christian Miller @CMMwine]

@nytimes There are actually words to describe being anti-diversity without regard for merit. Hint: they begin with "r" and "m".

[Christian Miller @CMMwine]

@wblakegray Unfortunately no. There has been a rise in "fewer wine occasions" as a negative factor, but that could be interpreted multiple ways. A tricky thing to quantify, would probably require brief surveys over long periods of time. Civic Science might have some such data.

[Christian Miller @CMMwine]

This video makes one very glad these creatures are just a few inches in size.

[Interesting World @_fluxfeeds]

A bombardier beetle triggering its chemical defense mechanism, firing a boiling, high-pressure spray directly at a massive longhorn beetle trying to crush it.

By internally mixing hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide, the beetle produces a near-100°C (212°F) chemical burst powerful enough to force predators to recoil.

📹Tropical insects

[Christian Miller @CMMwine]

@wblakegray I will never get over the absurdity of assuming a 100 point wine will be a better experience than a 96 point wine.

[Christian Miller @CMMwine]

@wblakegray Interesting article & project. But she's wrong about there being no quant data on ultra high end consumers. https://t.co/5NrNpCGJ8P has a significant number of them in their consumer panel. These consumers need careful screening: hard to find, many fakes/wannabes.

[Christian Miller @CMMwine]

@SicilianMonke @MedievalScholar Talented warrior, but actually a crappy king, also slaughtered prisoners of war.

[Christian Miller @CMMwine]

@MedievalScholar Bernard du Guesclin

[David Axelrod @davidaxelrod]

"After Trump, the urgent task for the American republic will be to turn norms into statutes, curtail the ethical immunities of the presidency and find legal ways to ensure that the highest public office in the world can never again become a platform for family business."

[Christian Miller @CMMwine]

"Drain the swamp"? This administration is the Everglades of corruption.

[Jason Kint @jason_kint]

NYT out with a jaw dropping investigative report on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. 60 Minutes reported last Sunday on some of this, too. The NYT report is a must-read, the 60 Minutes report should then be watched. 1/3

[Christian Miller @CMMwine]

A great story and I remain a fan. Original Tabasco seems like the old fuddy-duddy on today's crowded hot sauce shelves, but the balance and complexity of acid-heat-flavor keeps it among my favorites.

[Archaeo - Histories @archeohistories]

In 1868, a bankrupt Louisiana banker with a ruined plantation and no income took some pepper seeds of unknown origin, mixed the mash with salt mined from underneath his own property, aged it in barrels, and bottled it in cologne bottles because manufacturing specialty glass after the Civil War was impossible.

That bottle shape has not changed in 156 years...

Edmund McIlhenny had lost almost everything in the Civil War. His banking career was gone. The Avery Island plantation he had married into was destroyed. When his family returned in 1865 they found the fields in ruin and allegedly a few volunteer chile plants still surviving in the wreckage. Nobody knows exactly how McIlhenny obtained the Capsicum frutescens pepper seeds that became the foundation of his sauce.

What is documented is that he crushed the ripened peppers into a mash with rock salt mined from the natural salt dome underneath Avery Island, aged the mash in barrels, blended it with French white wine vinegar, strained it through cloth and bottled it in small cologne-type bottles with sprinkler fitments, sealed in green wax. Workers on the plantation used small red sticks called le petit bâton rouge to identify peppers at exactly the right stage of ripeness. In 1869 he sent exactly 658 bottles to grocers along the Gulf Coast at one dollar apiece. He secured a patent in 1870, and the sauce sold out immediately.

Manufacturing specialised glass was essentially impossible in the post-Civil War South so McIlhenny used what was available. The sprinkler fitment on a cologne bottle turned out to be the perfect delivery mechanism for a concentrated pepper sauce best applied in dashes rather than poured. That practical wartime improvisation became one of the most recognisable pieces of packaging in the world. The original recipe, Tabasco peppers, Avery Island salt and vinegar, has not changed in 156 years. The salt still comes from underneath the same island. Every pepper seed used in production worldwide still originates from Avery Island.

A bankrupt banker's post-Civil War improvisation, bottled in repurposed cologne bottles, became one of the most globally distributed food products in history.

© Eats History

[Christian Miller @CMMwine]

Reminder for anyone with cases or regulatory disputes involving DOJ: the current version of the department continues to lie, even in court under oath.

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

The DOJ's attorney told the court at oral argument: "this whole notion that somehow there's going to be a national database created from" the voter registration data "is not true."

Judge Walker quoted it. Then noted that an executive order directing DHS to compile a "State Citizenship List" from exactly that voter registration data was issued almost immediately after those assurances were given.

That is not editorializing. That is a Trump-appointed federal judge documenting, in a footnote, the distance between what the government said under oath and what the government then did in public.

The DOJ is 0-8. Four of those eight losses came from Trump's own appointees. The Civil Rights Act of 1960 argument has not persuaded a single judge across 31 cases. The footnote will outlast all of them.

[Christian Miller @CMMwine]

@RandallGrahm Check out this version of AC/DC's Thunderstruck. Who knew the Guzheng came with a detachable whammy bar? https://t.co/mR7Q9CPnGu

[Christian Miller @CMMwine]

@emilejoubert Not a bad notion - US consumer research shows that simple flavor descriptors, especially sweetness, could significantly reduce purchase barriers for non and marginal wine consumers. But narrow front label requirement, especially if binary dry/sweet, is clumsy and heavy-handed.

[Christian Miller @CMMwine]

@GermanSimply_ One more, just based on visiting - the trains do not actually run on time. But they are rarely very late, and they do a great job of keeping you informed of the actual time.

[Christian Miller @CMMwine]

Some sound advice for number crunchers these days, where everyone is in a frantic, sometimes self-defeating rush.

[Manu Chevalier @ChevalierManu]

1/
One thing that took me years to accept:

Good data analysis is often surprisingly slow at the beginning.

Not because strong analysts are inefficient.
But because they spend time understanding the dataset before deciding what to do with it.

[scary lawyerguy @scarylawyerguy]

It would be helpful if the press pointed out that a mechanism already exists for people to sue the federal government for wrongful (or malicious) prosecution but one key requirement for doing so is not having been found guilty.