Category: Update

On Wednesday, Paul Jacob discussed the cultural erasure involved in the Cracker Barrel re-branding effort. One of the curious elements to the story is that previous icon branding erasures all focused on what might be called “icons of color,” Paul mentioning Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Mia the Land O’Lakes maiden. All gone now. They were “stereotypical” and thus somehow “racist.”

It is pretty obvious, however, that icons must be stereotypical — that is how they succeed as icons!

But this time a white — not to say “cracker” — icon was slated for erasure.

First they came for the icons of color (IoCs) and then for white icons. Why?

Paul suggested that cultural erasure may be the real point. A people without history or shared culture are easier to rule. Orwell was not alone to teach us that.

Thankfully, the issue was explored humorously by The Babylon Bee:

And even more thankfully, Uncle Herschel was spared, remaining on the logo.

“Define woke as erasure in the name of non-erasure,” Paul suggested. The Cracker Barrel erasure attempt wasn’t woke, obviously. It was a misguided erasure for the sake of modernization, of trying to … what? 

The general trend in corporate (and perhaps the general) culture is to dispense with the past and its associations. As if that is the way to make money.

The announcement of the new logo on August 19, 2025, led to a significant drop in Cracker Barrel’s stock, shares falling over 12 percent in two days, and an additional 7 points by the 26th. After the reversal, the stock recovered quickly — the title at The Street was “Cracker Barrel Hasn’t Gone Woke Nor Has It Gone Broke.”

Branding experts were generally negative on the whole fiasco.

Cultural critics were all over the map. The Atlantic’s critique argued that Cracker Barrel’s brand has always been a “simulacrum of rural life” rather than authentic Americana — obvious enough. The backlash was misguided, the piece went on, because the corporate chain was founded to sell gas along highways, contributing to the erosion of genuine local culture by replacing it with a homogenized, nostalgic aesthetic; the new logo’s blandness was not “woke” but a continuation of this corporate sanding-down of regional identity. That doesn’t seem quite right, though. The earlier corporate branding served to entice rural Americans away from authenticity, sure, but with an appeal to traditional Americana style. The rebranding betrayed that, and if Americans objected, in a culture war way, they had a point.

But it wasn’t woke, true. It was too cynical and stupid for that. 

Most of the critiques from the intelligentsia, including Paul’s foil David French, regarded the “political” reactions as “overdone” and “exaggerated.” But that is hardly up for them to decide. If consumers feel betrayed, their outrage is surely more sincere than the critics’ sniping.

Meanwhile, it might surprise most readers to learn that “Uncle Herschel” was an actual person with an actual connection to the company: Herschel Cawthon McCartney, uncle of Cracker Barrel’s founder, Dan Evins.

Our solar system’s third identified interstellar intruder, 3I/ATLAS, continues its course past the planets more-or-less within the plane of the ecliptic, and continues to surprise.

The least surprising thing is that it has finally developed a tail pointing away from the Sun:

On August 27, 2025, deep imaging of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS by the Gemini South 8.2-meter telescope — aided by the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS), revealed a weak tail with a teardrop shape in the anti-Sun direction (reported here). At that time, 3I/ATLAS was at a distance from Earth of 2.59 times the Earth-Sun separation. The Gemini South Observatory is located on a mountain called Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes.

Avi Loeb, “Detection of an Anti-Solar Tail for 3I/ATLAS,” Medium (August 30, 2025).

Earlier observations had not seen the usual tail forming away from the point of origination of the solar winds, like a normal comet. Instead, the “coma” of dust or ice or gas or whatnot surrounding the object extended in advance of its trajectory — as if it were throwing out flak to take out dangerous objects ahead of it!

Yes, from the beginning the oddities of this intruder were being considered as possible indications of an artificial object.

While this is heartening for those who itch to relegate 3I/ATLAS to “mere” comet status (it’s already proved to be one weird comet, it comet it truly be), Abraham Loeb notes the accumulating oddities, too, which don’t fit the standard “nothing [challenging] to see here, folks” debunkers’ designations: “Recent spectroscopic data from the Very Large Telescope in Chile (accessible here), reported the surprising detection of cyanide and nickel without iron in the plume of gas around 3I/ATLAS with steeply increasing rates as the object approaches the Sun. Nickel without iron is a signature of industrial production of nickel alloys. Natural comets generically show iron and nickel simultaneously, as both elements are produced simultaneously in supernova explosions.”

And as Loeb just noted, measuring the nucleus of the object remains extremely difficult and uncertain.

Further, though detection of CO2 in the object’s coma (surrounding matter) is indeed what one would expect of a comet, the absence of water and carbon monoxide is . . . peculiar.

Everyone should fear a lawless president. But complaining about President Trump’s allegedly illegal actions while not having complained about Biden’s and Obama’s smacks of partisanship.

But the one magazine in America that should not be open to this criticism has to be Reason, right? This magazine of “free minds and free markets” has been critical of every president. Hasn’t it?

So when it reports on Trumpian oversteps, missteps, and outright tyrannical acts of “the imperial presidency,” we should certainly not dismiss the cases out of hand.

“President Donald Trump overstepped the limits of executive authority when he used emergency powers to levy tariffs,” wrote Eric Boehm, “a federal appeals court ruled on Friday.

Trump administration used IEEPA in February to slap tariffs on imports from Canada, China, and Mexico. The Trump administration again invoked IEEPA to impose its so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs in early April, which included a universal 10 percent tariff on all imports and higher, country-specific tariffs, some of which went into effect in August after being delayed several times.

As seemed evident during oral arguments, the court’s majority was deeply skeptical of the government’s claim to broad powers that are not spelled out in the IEEPA law, which notably does not contain the word “tariff.”

If the government’s interpretation of the IEEPA statute is correct, the court ruled, that would create “a functionally limitless delegation of Congressional taxation authority.” Elsewhere in the ruling, the court said that such a delegation of taxation power would be unconstitutional, even if that were what Congress intended to do.

In short, the Trump administration’s argument for using emergency powers to impose tariffs fails on multiple fronts.

Eric Boehm, “Why Is Trump’s Border Patrol Arresting Firefighters During a Wildfire?” Reason (August 29, 2025).

But the court lifted all injunctions on the tariffs, throwing the whole issue into chaos. Boehm not unreasonably calls upon Congress to settle the matter. Setting tax rates is the constitutional duty of Congress, after all.

On the same day, however, Joe Lancaster tells us of another ICE arrest, in “Why Is Trump’s Border Patrol Arresting Firefighters During a Wildfire?” Fighting summer fires in the Olympic National Forest were two illegal aliens, it seems. So they were nabbed. We are supposed to be incensed by this. “The arrest was a reversal of federal policy under two presidents. ‘Absent exigent circumstances, immigration enforcement will not be conducted at locations where disaster and emergency response and relief is being provided,’ the Department of Homeland Security announced in 2021, during Joe Biden’s presidency.”

This is mildly interesting. But resting a case against Truman border enforcement on Biden era border control policy seems too tendentious by half, for the Biden let open the borders. And going against past protocols is hardly a case of an Imperial President Threatening All. While we know that Reason folks lean heavily to the radical open borders position, anyone who is at all alarmed at the millions of illegal aliens wandering out in America will hardly be impressed with this particular coverage.

“Arresting firefighters during a wildfire simply over their immigration status undercuts the president’s rhetoric on both immigration and public safety,” Mr. Lancaster argues — not very convincingly. It would be very easy to argue, on the contrary, that the one place that one should not expect to find illegal alien workers is in government employment. And that finding them there uncovers something of an emergency in and of itself.

The current stretch of history dominated by Trump, war, a reverse in fortunes in the culture war, and AI, have the Greta Thunberg brigades champing at the bit to bring back “climate change” as the main driver of conversation and policy.

So gird up your loins and remember the real big picture in climate change: the regularity of the cycle of glaciation/deglaciation in our current era, the current interglacial of the Ice Age.

And of course there is always John Stossel to throw some cold water on global warming:

South America’s 21st century boom in socialist politics is going bust all over the continent. The latest case? Bolivia. See the terrific article in Reason:

Argentina’s libertarian president, Javier Milei, has turned fiscal shock therapy into a political calling card, and the payoff is visible as inflation cools, poverty falls, and growth returns. In Ecuador, Daniel Noboa secured a second term by blending tough security policies at home with pragmatic economic partnerships abroad, striking new deals with China while maintaining close ties to the U.S. Colombia is poised to move sharply to the right in next year’s election, with one leading contender, the conservative journalist Vicky Dávila, sounding a lot like Milei.

The most recent reversal is happening in Bolivia, where voters just rejected democratic socialism by a lopsided margin. The results mark a sharp turn away from the policies of former President Evo Morales, which have brought immense suffering to the country. In last week’s election, the once-dominant Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) barely cleared 3 percent of the vote.

César Báez, “Socialism Just Imploded in Bolivia,” Reason (August 21, 2025).

Socialism is inherently unstable, contra all the leftists in first world countries who apologize for it. Why is it unstable? Well, the key argument was developed by Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek: complex systems like large societies gain much by distributing responsibility widely, so that diverse knowledge from all sources can be leveraged with minimum of coercion and maximum of efficiency; the industrial society that tries to provide a wide array of consumer goods must fail, because the central planners cannot calculate value without markets in production goods.

Socialism as a universal mode of production is impracticable because it is impossible to make economic calculations within a socialist system. The choice for mankind is not between two economic systems. It is between capitalism and chaos.

Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and the Total War (1944).

There are many other arguments as well. Ayn Rand famously said that though one can vote oneself into socialism, one must shoot one’s way out. That appears to be the case in Venezuela, but not, thankfully, Bolivia. “The socialist project ‘imploded by itself,’ Bolivian policy analyst Rolando Schrupp” explained, according to the Reason article, “citing public exhaustion after nearly two decades of rule.”

This is the problem with democratic socialism, as Irving Kristol noted: “Every social-democratic party, once in power, soon finds itself choosing, at one point after another, between the socialist society it aspires to and the liberal society that lathered it.”

Thankfully, Bolivians are choosing democracy by voting out the socialists.

The tale is repeated every day. A skeptic of the federal government questions a purported fact and is told he is an awful person for believing “alternative facts” or “denying reality.” But how much of our social reality is curated for us? How much is fake? How much of official, government-stamped and -indexed reality is false?

Take crime. President Trump has federal forces taking over the Dysfunction of Columbia — that is, placed the National Guard on the streets, to cut down on crime. Crime in the imperial city is an embarrassment, Trump says — and many agree: visitor and resident and neighbor alike. But the newspapers and news readers on TV say that “Akshually, crime has been down for two years!”

But has it? Really? And if it is down, isn’t it too high? Can we trust the stats?

For example, one way to get lower crime stats is to disengage the police from actual crime, or even effectively de-criminalize crimes against property, as in many cities around the country.

The question of reliability of statistics came up in a recent Trump firing:

Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, after she reported weaker-than-expected job growth figures, which he claimed were “rigged” for political purposes. This action raised concerns about the integrity and credibility of U.S. economic data.

Duck.ai ”Search Assist,” August 16, 2025.

We saw a similar response from newspaper headline writers, saying that it is Trump himself who is engendering bad statistics: “Trump firing of statistics chief puts US data credibility at risk, experts warn,” as an early August article in The Guardian put it.

When two sides call each other the same bad thing, it makes it hard to judge. But sometimes we can make good guesses.

There is no small amount of evidence, after all, that much of our social reality has been faked to some degree. Tim Pool suggests that the hit USAID took from DOGE did in progressive media; reputations fell as bots were liquidated and dark money sources evaporated:

As has been discussed by Paul Jacob in these pages, USAID played a vast shell game, distributing fortunes to NGOs and other “non-government” institutions without requiring any accounting. And all that money could indeed have been used to support a dying cause — and radicalizing a minority of moonbats in the process.

Note to comedians: there’s a rich vein here.

As Paul Jacob discussed on August 5th, Texas’s bold redistricting plan is causing a furor among Democrats. The latest is especially funny, but we’ll let you supply the jokes:

On Aug. 14, California Gov. Gavin Newsom called for his state to hold a referendum to redraw the state’s congressional maps, marking an escalation in the ongoing, nationwide districting battles between Republicans and Democrats.

“We’re putting the maps on the ballot, and we’re giving the power to the people,” Newsom announced at an event in Los Angeles, saying that the vote would be held on Nov. 4.

The referendum would be a vote to approve a map to more heavily favor Democrats in California. Given Democrats’ political dominance in the Golden State, it’s likely to pass.

Joseph Lord, “Newsom Calls Special Election to Redistrict California Congress Seats—What to Know,” The Epoch Times (August 15, 2025).

For a historical perspective, consult Brion McClanahan:

This historian understands the comic element here.

As Donald Trump tries to negotiate a peace in Ukraine — with the beleaguered country’s president balking at the current favored option of Putin and Trump (ceding thr Donbas to Russia) — an older Russia story is receiving updates. Russia Collusion!

Paul Jacob last covered the story late last month, in “One Dares Call It Collusion,” with Tulsi Gabbard releasing the intel data on “Russiagate” to the public. Now we are seeing a lot more of the evidence, with testimony of key figures.

Not Clapper or Brennan or Comey, mind you — they confess to nothing.

But the evidence against these past directors of the NSA, CIA, and FBI (respectively) appears to be mounting, and one bit of testimony, at least, is worth considering: “Two days after the election in 2016, I was called up on the NSA phone. The person said I had to be on the intelligence community assessment that was assembling to finalize the Russia narrative, because we were going to prove that Trump was a Russian asset, and we were going to delay or block the inauguration of Donald J. Trump for the first term.”

Also worth considering? This very same Col. John Mills’ perspective on Chinese (well, CCP) influence: “How the CCP and Its Proxies Created a ‘World on Fire’.”

Fallout from the pandemic response of 2020-2023 continues to . . . fall out.

New Zealand’s “Royal Commission has been tasked with investigating the nation’s COVID-19 response,” wrote Frank Bergman a few weeks ago. “However, the body is facing intense criticism for ignoring key scientific data and creating a narrative that unquestioningly supports government policies and the ‘safety’ of mRNA ‘vaccines.’”

The southern hemisphere nation-state, when headed by quasi-repudiated former Prime Minister Jacinda Adern (pictured above), proved to be an enthusiastic enforcer of lockdowns and vaccination-by-novel-therapeutics. And has experienced an ominous post-pandemic rise in excess deaths (higher rates of mortality than is statistically expected). Still, the government does not seem eager to question public health practices.

The Commission received extensive briefings from groups like Voices for Freedom and New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out on Science (NZDSOS).

The briefings included peer-reviewed studies and official data.

Yet, the Commission has been accused of selectively referencing discredited claims to further its agenda.

In addition, the Commission was found to have ignored studies and data that highlighted the dangers associated with the mRNA shots.

Frank Bergman, “New Zealand Government Caught Covering Up Data Exposing Covid ‘Vaccine’ Deaths,” Slay News (July 28, 2025).

Officials stubbornly refuse to entertain alternative views or even data from other countries:

One of the most alarming aspects of the Commission’s handling of evidence is its refusal to consider the significant findings of international studies.

Most notably, the panel ignored a bombshell Japanese analysis of 21 million health records.

This study showed a disturbing rise in unexpected all-cause deaths following Covid mRNA injections.

The data shows that deaths spiked significantly after mRNA “booster” doses, with many occurring 90 to 120 days post-vaccination.

This timeline directly challenges the Commission’s stance that deaths need to occur shortly after vaccination to be linked causally.

Yet, this critical data was brushed aside during public hearings, further fueling the perception that the Commission is more interested in defending the status quo than genuinely investigating public health concerns.

Ibid.

The article goes on to mention the New Zealand government’s hostility to whistleblowers, Barry Young in particular. His story has been circulating again on social media this past week, so if you aren’t familiar with this controversy, brace yourself. He claims that his work as the sole healthcare database manager in New Zealand allowed him to notice (and expose) “a staggering 10 million deaths around the world” because of “vaccines”:

• Barry Young’s story, briefly (the “jibby-jabby”)
• “Falsified data” and Internet censorship
• “Sean Plunket Explains Why Whistleblower Barry Young Needs to Go to Trial Fast” — a negative portrayal

New Zealand’s case against Mr. Young — a database designer for a corporation under government contract, Te Whatu Ora — is dubious. He says he saw a pattern of results contrary to what the government was telling citizens and patients, and thus disclosed that information. The case against him is this: he is alleged also to have disclosed private information, too. That is what Sean Plunket, above, is so much exercised about.

While Te Whatu Ora claims that 12,000 individuals’ data was exposed, their statements are cautious, noting that the data “appears anonymised” but that there is a “small chance” some individuals could be identified.

The story is well-covered, if a tad one-sided in the media . . . in New Zealand. Happy Googling. (We recommend DuckDuckGo or Freespoke.)

Did you know that “the federal debt is expected to grow from 124 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2025 to 135 percent in 2035”?  Yes or no, from this fact you probably can guess what the consequence of this sad fact of rising government debt is: “the federal government will absorb an increasingly larger share of the economy and capital markets.”

The quotations are from an article in Reason magazine by Mariana Trujillo, “The National Debt Is Becoming Your Local Problem.” It is well worth reading, for this discussion of an ever-growing problem is distinct from most others, in that it focuses on the effects of said problem on the governments closest to you. 

The $29 trillion federal debt held by the public is becoming an increasingly local problem. Washington’s fiscal challenges have led to increased borrowing costs as well as reduced federal aid to states, cities, and other local governments — who may soon have to reconsider their budgets as they face a difficult choice: cut services, raise taxes, dip into reserves, or incur further debt.

Curiously for a “libertarian” magazine, the general tenor of the challenge local governments now face — increasingly — is not depicted as an opportunity. Less government, libertarians are wont to say, is better. Being forced to economize should be a welcomed thing. Look on the bright side.

Well, OK — Ms. Trujillo does conclude with a hint of that perspective:

As federal support dries up from many ends, and its return becomes not only politically but economically less feasible, state and local governments should resist the temptation to push costs to an indefinite future and drive down precious savings to fund permanent programs — precisely the approach that has led to the status quo — and opt instead for a serious, responsible reorganization of their finances.

It just doesn’t seem very upbeat. None of that old-fashioned, Robert Poole-style “Cutting Back City Hall” enthusiasm.

Still, the article is well worth reading. Though not long, it contains some interesting facts.