ETA lot of links, correct grammar, spell and stuff:
And native religions too. Some people say that these religions aren’t africans, but Afro Brazilian or even brazilian religions with african influences such as the Umbanda. These religions were also influenced by the French Spiritism, a kind of catholic syncretic spiritualist movement from the XIX Century.
I wish I could write more, but I am an ignorant in these matters. My brother, who is an adept of this religion, could explain it better than me.
The nefarious institution of slavery mixed people from different regions of the African continent who, under normal conditions, would hardly have contact with each other. One way to understand this would be as if the European peoples were uprooted from their lands and ended up in the Americas. We would have people from the Mediterranean, living with Scandinavians and Greeks, having to overcome their differences to survive in a strange land under a brutal and inhumane regime of forced labor.
(excerpt) According to an alarming — though yet-to-be-peer-reviewed — astronauts who underwent a crewed mission to the Red Planet would likely face devastating levels of radiation — even when wearing protective metal shields.
I don’t think Musk was worrying about it anyway, though strangely, he didn’t seem to be worrying about things like hospitals to keep people alive either.
What people do to each other, the cruelties (performative or otherwise), the dogmatic deliberate violence, makes me fear for the future of our species and our planet.
It makes me appreciate (and celebrate) good choices, human kindnesses wherever they can be found, and compassion great and small. Each seems all the more miraculous given that humans can also choose to act in a negative way.
When my grandfather went to enlist during WW2 they asked him what he wanted to do. He said “Kill Germans. I hate Germans.” So they very sensibly put him in an anti-submarine balloon over the Gulf of Mexico where he saw exactly zero action. Because people who want to kill and who hate like that should not be given the tools of war. Soldiers should be reluctant.
[I have no idea what his beef was, and he was otherwise a very nice old man when I knew him.]
Sitting on a memorial bench near what is now Heath Middle School, Hadley Ellegood, 40, who still lives in Paducah and works in real estate, takes solace in knowing that her sister and the other victims are remembered in a place so calming and peaceful.
“This feels like a safe place,” she said.
What world may be in store for us when students might seek refuge from an active shooter in the memorial or monument erected to honor those who died at a a school shooting?
Ok ok I think I better get on with the chores today, working outside, sweating copiously in the crazy Texas heat.
ETA:
Tell me I am not simply projecting… this is the John F. Kennedy Memorial in Dealey Plaza, in Dallas, Texas:
I had one of the shooting victims interviewed in that article when they became a college student. It was incredible to me how normal the kid was, considering. But they went on to dedicate their life to trying to stop that stuff from happening again.
I don’t know why they seem surprised. They nail it right in the article:
Since the fall of 2020, Jack Daniel’s, Old Forester, Maker’s Mark, Kentucky Owl, Bulleit, and more have lost some of their top talent.
Another way to phrase that:
Since the fall of 2020, massive corporations Brown-Forman, Brown-Forman, Beam Suntory, Stoli Group, Diageo, and more have lost some of their top talent.
Jeff Arnett, formerly of Jack Daniel’s spells it out:
at the end of the day you were an employee of Brown-Forman and that came with certain limitations and frustrations, corporate politics and things,” Arnett says.
Yep, working for big corporations sucks. Opening your own distillery is a dream, in many ways.
This one is a bit interesting, though:
The recent trend of resignations was preceded, seven years ago, by the departure of Woodford Reserve rising star Marianne Eaves (then Marianne Barnes) to join craft startup Castle & Key, which she subsequently left four years later.
Barnes/Eaves was a rock star in the distilling world when she left Woodford, and Kentucky was practically breathless, following her every move and utterance. Newspapers, not just trade papers, wrote lengthy pieces about her, touting her as “Kentucky Bourbon’s First Female Master Distiller.” (Originally it was “First Female Master Distiller,” but then it turned out that there were a few, pre-Prohibition, and one or two in recent years outside of Kentucky, so it was trimmed back to “Kentucky Bourbon’s First.”). That she was young, blonde-haired, and pretty helped out. There wasn’t a similar level of hype around Victoria Eady Butler, the first Black woman Master Blender, and we don’t hear much about Nathan “Nearest” Green, the slave who taught Jack Daniel to make whiskey
Barnes, though, could do nothing but “disappoint.” She was placed on such a high pedestal, with such unachievable expectations, that it wouldn’t have mattered if her first few batches were the Elixir of the Gods, it would never be as good as the hype suggested. She made very good bourbon. But in the atmosphere created around the opening of Castle & Key (a specialized garden to produce aromatics on-site, a beautiful restoration of the Old Taylor Distillery for Castle & Key, etc) it became cool to disparage Castle & Key, early on. “Yeah, it’s fine, but it’s not as good as it could be” was a common comment at tastings. She eventually left, and joined a circus. Well, helps run one, with her husband. This makes a funny kind of progression, though: she left Brown-Forman, a known hellhole, to renovate the abandoned Old Taylor Distillery, which was a literal snakepit before they began renovations, and then ran off to join the circus.
Anyway, the Great Resignation stuff in distilling is interesting to me, if unsurprising. Barnes is a great distiller, and I’m sorry she’s out of the production side of bourbon. I’m glad she’s still doing education stuff.
These are great stories, and I’m really glad to see them. There are simialr networks for brewing. For example:
The absolute insanity surrounding Marianne Eaves’ (then Barnes) departure from Woodford and the beginnings of Castle & Key was a full 11. It was good in some ways, but it was a lot of unrealistic pressure. And, came at a time when there were other women trailblazers in the industry.
The industry is hard on women, and hard on people of color. Hollis Bulleit, scioness of the Bullet whiskey family, was fired from Diago-Bulleit, and says it was because she was on out lesbian. I don’t doubt it for a second, despite Diageo being a supposedly LGBTQ-friendly place to work (for the 14th year in a row, it received a perfect score from the Corporate Equality Index).
