Detective Gregory: Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?
Sherlock Holmes: To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.
Detective Gregory: The dog did nothing in the night-time.
Sherlock Holmes:That was the curious incident.
Arthur Conan Doyle: The Adventure of Silverblaze 1896
At Instapundit there is a link to a pair of stories about the Nellie Bowles book about how the New York times decided to ignore reality in their reporting. This part really jumped out at me:
First, it was blunting my reporting. It was saying you can’t report on the most interesting stories of the day, which was really frustrating and crazy-making a little bit because it was like, “What do you mean we’re not supposed to cover the riots? What do you mean we’re not supposed to talk about” … you name it, hot-button issue of the day. And basically there was a media blackout for a while.
I call it now time wandering, which is all of the most interesting issues. You’re allowed to talk about it in the world of all the Substacks, the conservative media covers it, and the liberal media waits about two or three years and then they’re allowed to touch it.
Cracker Barrel’s stock has taken a beating since the restaurant chain held an investor call in which its new CEO admitted the Southern country restaurant chain isn’t as “relevant” as it once was.
Julie Felss Masino, who became Cracker Barrel’s CEO nine months ago, told investors during the May 16 call that the 54-year-old eatery “was not delivering the financial results that shareholders deserve.”
“Cracker Barrel is a great concept and a great company,” Masino said. “… But to ignite growth, we must revitalize the brand.”
Before Masino and Cracker Barrel’s leadership held the meeting, the company’s stock hovered around $60 per share, but a day after the call, it dropped almost 20%, to about $48 per share, according to NASDAQ.
The stock closed Thursday at $45.75 per share.
Now why would a CEO saying the chain isn’t “relevant” cause the stock to drop 20%?
Well, maybe it’s because it means the CEO is not addressing the reason why the stock had dropped TO $60 a share from the $102 it was at a year ago. To find the answer to that question you have to ignore the USA story and search instead at Ace of Spades HQ:
In June of 2023 Cracker Barrel went woke, deciding that it could bring in new customers and investors by sexualizing the front porch with rainbow-striped rocking chairs. As it turned out, that was not a good marketing strategy, and it had the effect of repulsing existing customers who don’t want country cooking to be sexualized, be it gay, straight, or otherwise.
Image via Ace of Spades HQ
The fallout was immediate, with consumers announcing boycotts and the stock price taking an initial hit. Despite a lack of headlines or buzz since then, the boycott has continued and has been devastating to Cracker Barrel. The restaurant chain permanently ran off a great many loyal customers, and the persistently “unexpected” decline in traffic is taking a serious financial toll on the company.
It was just announced this week that Cracker barrel is slashing its dividend by 81%. Cracker Barrel stock has fallen from $102 per share at the start of “Pride Month” 2023 to $49 per share now, a 52% decline.
Now one might think that this would be an important part of the story of the drop in Cracker Barrel’s share price. Particularly when there were stories as far back as September that this was a “marketing” issue:
In a rare downbeat financial accounting, Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores acknowledged that its marketing and media efforts likely worsened a traffic drop-off during the quarter ended July 28.
We had expected the traffic would improve in June and July with the onset of the summer travel season,” said [CEO] Cochran. “Unfortunately, this didn’t materialize, and our restaurants and retail sales performance came in below our expectations.
Note that a “downbeat financial accounting” was “rare” for Cracker Barrel until they went woke, but even in that story they pointed to “marketing” rather then going all in on the gay agenda. Of course Don Surber didn’t shy from the actual cause of the Cracker Barrel crack-up
On Friday, USA Today reported, “Cracker Barrel stock plummets after CEO says chain isn’t as relevant, must revitalize.”
It turns out, the rainbow people don’t like rocking chairs. Maybe Cracker Barrel can become relative by offering Bud Light and holding Drag Queen Sleepovers for children.
Of course the rainbow folks don’t like Cracker Barrel, in fact back in the days when Pintastic NE was in Sturbridge my son and I would go for breakfast at Cracker Barrel at least once during the event we would play a game which I called the “woke offense game” where pretended to be woke leftists and took turns pointed to items on the wall and explained why we were offended by them. The last person who couldn’t find something to be offended by lost. Usually we could not reach that point by the time breakfast was over.
This is all a question of people not knowing who their customer base is. Buck Throckmorton has a solution:
the first thing Cracker Barrel needs to do is apologize for insulting its loyal customers by sexualizing the restaurant and for effectively smearing its loyal customers as being “unwelcoming” people.
If it doesn’t, Cracker Barrel might as well go full woke. Perhaps it could hire Dylan Mulvaney away from Bud Light and have him cross-dress in Daisy Dukes while drinking an old-time pop from a rainbow-colored rocking chair. Alissa Heinersheid has experience using for Mr. Mulvaney for such promotions, and I believe she is available. Or maybe Cracker Barrel could run a Gillette-style ad accusing its legacy customers of being loathsome bigots and sexual predators.
June is only a week away and we will find out if Cracker Barrel’s new CEO is interested in serving the shareholders or serving the agenda. She can
Take Buck’s advice, apologize for last year and promise customers their only agenda will be good food served in a country motif. (Plan A)
Say nothing but make it a point not to go near the June “pride” agenda and hope the offended customers notice they decided to give it a miss this year (Plan B)
Decide to go all in on the rainbow agenda let the gay flag & rockers fly and damn the stock price! (Plan C)
Whatever the choice and result is we can be sure that the MSM in general and USA Today in particular will not report on the actually cause of the initial fall of Cracker Barrel, after all, it might discourage others from falling into line.
King Richard: Well, sir rascal, tell me, who are you?
Robin Hood:I’m called Robin Hood.
King Richard: It seems I’ve heard of you.
Robin Hood:Nothing good, I hope.
King Richard: Oh, now I remember. How does your loyalty to Richard set on a killer of knights, a poacher of the king’s deer and an outlaw?
Robin Hood:Those I’ve killed died from misusing the trust that Richard left them. And the worst rogue of these is the king’s own brother.
King Richard:Oh, then you blame Prince John.
Robin Hood:No, I blame Richard. His task was defending his people instead of deserting them to fight in foreign lands.
King Richard: What? You’d condemn the Holy Crusades?
Robin Hood:I’ll condemn anything that leaves the task of holding England to outlaws like me.
The Adventures of Robin Hood 1938
Yesterday I talked about the pampered college radicals who never had to deal with responsibility in their lives and contrasted them to my father. Today I want to talk about the some of the folks responsible for them.
For many years a group of us decided the culture wars were worth fighting. We bemoaned the idea that children were no longer disciplined. We scoffed at the idea that everybody got a participation trophy, we bemoaned the culture of death and the removal of God from the public square.
And when we warned that being American was not enough to guarantee our freedoms, that people had to be taught and encouraged and educated about how and why we were the richest and most powerful country that ever existed, that if we did not do so our society would fail that the laws of cause and effect had not been repealed. What happened? We told to shut up.
We were trying to turn back the clock, we were out of step with the times, we were on the wrong side of history. I remember years ago at a Tea Party event there was a “mainline” conservative who came down on us who fought the culture war hard. We were told those fight cost votes that the GOP needed and if we just kept our mouths shut about the culture we would win. They didn’t believe that it would come to this, that the fight wasn’t worth having. They wanted us to keep still. They didn’t realize what Andrew Breitbart always noted, that politics was downstream from culture.
These folks share a good chunk of the blame for what’s happening today but that’s not the biggest irony of the situation.
The biggest irony of all of this is that the primary targets of these attacks. The Jewish students on campus, come primarily from families who embraced the culture wars, who had to problem with restricting conservatives speakers and demonizing conservatives. Who treated Tea Party rallies and the people who attended, people who left their venues cleaner than they found them as the epitome of evil. They are among the folks who enabled the left wing ideologues, who supported the redefinition of marriage, man and woman and who though both the campus, media, both news and entertainment and via large corporations gave into to the radicals in order to be considered part of the proper crowd.
And when conservatives were banned on campus or shouted down for years they at best said nothing or at worst agreed. The worst of their wrath were saved for people like, Pam Geller and Robert Spencer and Bridgette Gabriel and David Horwitz who saw what was coming and warned them of the anti-Semitism of the left. They were labeled as purveyors of “hate speech” to be shunned and banned.
Pam, Robert, Bridgette and David would have likely given anything to be wrong about what was coming but they were rejected like the Prophet Jeremiah and treated as such.
Now the whirlwind is upon those who rejected them and all that remains is to decide what they consider a worse fate:
To be hounded, threatened and attacked by anti-Semites who want them dead OR
Or to admit they were wrong about us and Join the side of folks they hated & vilified for years.
I honestly don’t know which choice they will take.
Lieutenant Harold Kaminsky: [to Captain John Earle, who demanded confirmation before alerting anyone when informed of a sub sighting in the restricted zone] You wanted confirmation, Captain? [Pointing to the Pearl Harbor fleet aflame] Take a look! There’s your confirmation!
Tora Tora Tora 1970
I found myself thinking of my father yesterday and realizing that the people who are currently occupying colleges and screaming for the destruction of Israel and the death of Jews would have defined him as having “White Privilege”.
Well he certainly was white (although many in society didn’t consider the children of Sicilian immigrants white and he certainly was loaded with privilege his entire life.
He had the privilege of being born to a family of 9 from Parents who came from Sicily with nothing
He had the privilege of leaving school at 13 to work full time in the paper mills to help support a family that while having a little bit of land was dead poor.
He had the privilege of working through the shutdowns of the plant to clean out the vats for extra money in an age when there was no such thing as “welfare”.
He had the privilege to spend years in the Pacific on an Ammunition ship knowing it would take but a single hit for his life to end it his 20’s.
He had the privilege after the war of running a bar and restaurant in a town that didn’t like Italians.
He had the privilege of enduring gunshots fired at his house and business for being an Italian businessman in the wrong town, of being jumped and in one instance run over for daring to carry on and not pay protection.
He had the privilege of seeing his wife and mother of his four children at the time caught in an explosion at his place, being badly burned but somehow surviving to eventually give birth to a fifth child.
He had the privilege of using his skills as a carpenter to build the house where he moved his family to and eventually build next door to his mother-in-law after her husband died to take care of her.
He had the privilege of having her move in with her and devoting himself full time to her welfare when she was too sick to live in her house next door.
And he had the privilege of after a lifetime of labor to die just after retirement at 65 before he ever received his first social security check.
But the biggest privilege he had was being brought up in a faithful Catholic house, marrying a faithful Catholic wife and during all that time of unremitting labor and danger thanking God for all the blessings he had. Always sharing what he had with strangers in need and never complaining about his lot, at least not in the 23 years that I shared a house with him.
Yet in contrast we see people attending elite universities, people who have rarely if ever had to struggle, who would be considered part of the 1% not just of this nation but of all human history abusing that advantage to gain an elite education, flouting the law and terrorizing their fellow students whose primary crime is to belong to a race that has survived thousands years of various attempts to exterminate them.
I’ll wager these pampered fools never had “no” said to them in their lives. They wouldn’t have lasted 15 minutes in the great depression let alone on the battlefields of World War 2 in the world where my dad and millions like him bore the “privilege” of responsibility. They’ve not builders they’re destroyers.
Even worse the “adults” in the room are encouraging them to continue such behavior and at the highest levels of Government people holding power do little or nothing out of fear that enforcing the law might cost them votes come November.
In my fathers day they would have been quickly arrested and subject to the full penalties of the law and in states like Florida where sanity still rules they are, which is why you aren’t seeing Campus takeovers and bridges blocked, because people protest within the boundaries of the laws and the adults in charge make sure that if they cross the line between exercising their rights and abusing the rights of others, they suffer the consequences.
These kids never faced the consequences of their actions. Now all of us get have the “privilege” of doing so.
Hacom:Reger, these are young men. They are not old enough to be excused. Reger:They’re visitors. Hacom:Well, have they no Lawgivers in the Valley? Why be they not at the Festival? Captain Kirk [in local dress]: We heard that you might have rooms for us. Reger:There. You see, Hacom? They’ve merely come looking for a place to rest afterwards. Hacom:The Red Hour has already struck. Tamar:Hacom, these be strangers. The Valley has different ways. Hacom:Do you say that Landru is not everywhere? Tamar:No, of course not. It’s simply they may have different ways.
Star Trek The Return of the Archons 1967
We all have pet peeves in our life, my wife hates when I leave lights on (I like to see) and I hate pans left inside of pans on stoves while DaWife is all for it. But this article title hit a serious Pet Peeve of mine concerning war:
I Am Furious About the Relentless Anti-Israel Propaganda
Now the article itself by David Strom is better than the title. It talks about the relentless propaganda by the left, and by universities and by Hamas attacking Israel and he expresses his disgust thus:
But the truth is that very little of the criticism aimed at Israel is even remotely rational or motivated by anything but anti-Western or antisemitic hate, and I am sick and tired of it. And I am just as disturbed by the media’s spreading of that propaganda with far too little skepticism.
Words have meaning. Actions have context. Hamas is objectively evil.
While I share Mr. Strom’s support of Israel and his analysis of Hamas I’ve got to say none of this infuriates me.
Why? Two basic reasons.
First Hamas and the Arab World have been spreading propaganda about Israel from almost the moment of its creation, in fact there is a rather famous intercept from the 1967 War with Nasser pretty much blackmailing Jordan into joining the war and discussing how to spin the destruction of the Arab air forces. Falsehoods and lies are a basic tactic in Muslim Arab culture even to their own people (There are generations of Egyptians who have been taught since their birth that the 1973 war with Israel was a resounding victory).
Second and most importantly: This is war.
Right now Hamas is fighting for it’s very survival, they had no idea that Israel would respond in the way that they did and the people who cheered on Hamas on October 7th and rushed into Israel to steal what they could had no idea that they would be reduced to living in tents because of these actions.
The Qataris and the Iranians who are financing Hamas didn’t see this coming either. They’re happy to fund proxy efforts (Iran with the help of Obama’s pallets of Cash and Biden’s moves to push up oil prices) but don’t dare let the war touch themselves. If Israel decided to strike Qatar they would last about 30 seconds and Iran understands that a direct assault on Israel could give them the casus belli for a counterstrike that could contain a nuclear component to end the Mullahs once and for all.
So naturally they use the best cards they have in their hand which are playable.
For Iran and Qatar it’s money and that money is wisely spent on buying academics and media who are easily bought and pushing a narrative. There are plenty of Muslims in Europe and the US who don’t like Jews and would be happy to see them dead but without the ability or strength to legally slaughter the Jews in their midst they’ll settle for intimidation and vandalism and the spreading of propaganda across regular and social media until such a time in the future when their numbers grow to the point when they can can openly slaughter them.
For the far left which has been aborting and neutering their own children and encouraging other to do the same, they’ll welcome the additional number sure in the idea that it will be a generation or more before they are strong enough to take action against the gays, transgenders and libertines which the Arabs despise. (And if it means some Jewish leftists are demoted from Useful idiots to simply idiots to be discarded so be it).
For Hamas it’s the hostages. As long as Hamas holds them or can be thought of as holding them they have a card they can use to delay and disrupt Israel both in the field and on the home front, so no matter how much understandable outrage one might hold over the barbarity of holding hostages, especially women & children I’m not phased or shocked over their doing so because for them that’s the best card they have.
This is war, a game of life and death that is played to win, I’m not outraged about the Arabs playing the game in the way they see fit nor am I outraged over them saying one thing in Arabic to their own people and another to people in the west with different customs and standards. That’s what drives me nuts. This is not our culture, it’s not our standards. This is what the Arab/Muslim world is, it’s what it’s always been, it’s what they’ve been doing for decades and what people like Pam Geller and Robert Spencer and Brigitte Gabriel have warned the west repeatedly about. It’s not a secret and we should not be shocked and outraged that they act as they do.
If you want to be outraged, be outraged about the people who either through ignorance or expedience fall for or pretend to fall for it for cash, or fame or acceptance or even fear.
That’s something to be outraged about.
Instead think of how to counter it and act accordingly.
