Bali’s Mad Hater? But is it really funny?

Bali’s Mad Hater? But is it really funny?
By Bali BS News
Oct 12, 2005, 06:59

We have featured the very nasty acts of John M. AKA Jack Daniels of Bali Discovery Tours in previous articles and believe we have to ask the question; “Is Jack Daniels so nasty because he is mentally ill?" We understand that mental illness renders a person unable to legally function as a company director under Indonesian law, so we ask whether Mr. Daniels needs to take a mentally competency test in order to continue running PT Bali Discovery Tours given the facts we believe exist to suggest he has such a problem.

Why are we running this article? Well Mr. Daniels and some others hold him up to be the pious pillar of Bali’s travel industry, while he has in fact been conducting some particularly nasty acts against people in the industry. The normal procedure in any well managed society would be to quietly report him to the health authorities for his own sake and for others. Unfortunately Bali’s corrupt police officers, whom Jack Daniels is well recorded as colluding with, simply does not make this possible. It is also important that we publish what we do to mitigate the damage Mr. Daniels does to others. Finally, it is important to make the facts known, so people can draw a balanced conclusion on the possible merits or risks in being associated with Mr. Daniels. Our articles about Bali Discovery Tours’ chief executive are therefore in the public’s best interests.

Some people on the island and in the travel industry may be amazed or even outraged at the suggestion Jack Daniels is perhaps a lunatic. But you have to remember that schizophrenics for example show sudden dramatic personality changes, so a person’s recollection of someone suffering from this disease may be at odds with that person’s current state of mind. Anyway, we have looked at some of Mr. Daniels’ recent acts and compared them with known symptoms of mental illness such as Paranoid Schizophrenia, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, etc. and will compare them here.

The first indication most people might get that Jack Daniels has mental health problems is that it appears he writes about himself in the third person in his Bali Updates email. That in itself many will agree is not necessarily a sign of illness, just writers’ license to add importance to themselves, but Mr. Daniels seemingly goes beyond this “license” in certain articles and it becomes clear he is actually interviewing himself, which is a different matter altogether. If true, this apparently satisfies two substantial criteria for diagnosing mental illness, having hallucinations and two separate personalities which talk to each other.

The next indication comes from reports on the Internet, clearly with Mr. Daniels’s knowledge and approval that his Bali Update consumes all of Jack’s time at weekends. It is well documented that Schizophrenia is also characterized by withdrawal from the outside world. Other characteristics include delusions, the inability to manage emotions, make decisions, and relate to others. Further characteristics of Schizophrenics are being obsessed with a particular subject and being unable to trust others to do as good a job as themselves. Mr. Daniels clearly has the resources to have others do much if not all of his clearly personally important Bali newsletters for him; if only to do the research. So why does he do it himself during the time we are all meant to relax? It is not just that Mr. Daniels apparently locks himself away in his own world at weekends to produce the Bali Update, he also spends a lot of his prowling the Internet seemingly looking for trouble, which includes posting some very questionable messages on forums while everyone else in the “real” world is probably sleeping, e.g. Search Google for “Moderator - Do you Job”. A posting which indicates Mr. Daniels is a very pious, self-opinionated bully whose English skills are not as polished as he presents in his “ezine”; which also therefore indicates Mr. Daniels must spend a lot of time refining the grammar, spelling and punctuation of his Bali Update articles. Mr. Daniels clearly seems to be obsessed with what he does over and above the “call of duty”. From what we have been told, Mr. Daniels has very little if no life outside “work”, working weekends on his emails and drinking with his travel industry buddies in his favorite bar in Sanur.

This brings us onto indications Mr. Daniels is clearly deluded. Apart from, we believe, over-stating his past (he previously was in fact a morticians’ assistant and apparently worked illegally in Indonesia for many years on a dinner cruise boat), which some might think natural enough. Mr. Daniels also commits some very nasty acts, publishes the facts of these, and yet it seems he believes what he did is normal, even something a respectable businessman would be expected to do. In one example he showed he colluded with corrupt Balinese police officers into trying to unlawfully entrap and investigate a competitor who had recently caught his company Bali Discovery Tours offering unauthorized hotel rates on their web site, balidiscovery dot com. Mr. Daniels “predicted” the police would take a sealed complaint from him and not open it until they could get their hands on his competitor (entrapment). It is not just that Mr. Daniels actually published what he was doing, which is perhaps a clear sign of madness in itself, but he did it in such a way as to try and present what he was doing as a responsible balanced act. As well as spelling a likely prison sentence for himself at his own hands, or rather keyboard, in the future for collusion. This single act clearly shows Mr. Daniels is deluded into believing what he did was proper and ethical. Perhaps insanity will be his best plea when he is one day called to account for these actions.

Other examples of Mr. Daniels’ apparent obsession for doing nasty things which he clearly believes and presents as normal, even professional behavior include bizarre defamations, for example; driving to the other side of Bali to take a clearly misleading picture of an open air restaurant belonging to a small villa resort. Which he then masqueraded as an illegal or legally questionable beachfront villa, just because he had a grudge against the villa owners. A seven + hour round trip in order to falsely defame this villa resort in an article about illegal villas being built in Jimbaran, the other side of Bali from where he took the picture. It is not just that his acts are nasty it is the extent to which Mr. Daniels will apparently go which we believe show he is clearly deranged to beyond the point of mental illness.

Other deranged and deluded acts we believe Mr. Daniels can be proven to have committed include building hate web sites and then reporting others for building them to the police / his lawyer. We have also seen a mass circular email which was clearly sent by Mr. Daniels, as it absolutely came from Bali Discovery’s own email servers; so the sender would had to have both Mr. Daniels ISP and email passwords. The nasty email masquerading as performing some proper public duty called upon people to report others who might be doing anything potentially illegal to Mr. Daniels himself so he could in turn report these people to his police contacts. Mr. Daniels later denied sending the email and clearly tried to implicate someone else. However Mr. Daniels has since failed to respond at all to multiple challenges that it was him who sent this very strange and nasty message which can be proven by the electronic data contained within the emails themselves.

We have also received quite a bit of personal information about Mr. Daniels we do not think it right or proper to disclose here. But we do believe it all adds up to show Mr. Daniels is in need of help; you should, of course, draw your own conclusions.