Christian Miller

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

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

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.

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.

They all have it in common: contraposto.