End of an Era !!
BU basketball was a major highlight of my BU experience. To this day, one of the biggest honors of my life was being Knights Nation President, surrounded by an amazing executive board + student body, during the 2011 National Championship run. Thank you, Coach!
Thank you again for all the outpouring of love for our Ben. I can’t tell you how much it means to me and my family.
He wasn’t just my best friend – he was America’s best friend ❤️
People need to stop overreacting about Kamala’s plan to reduce food inflation, as if it would lead to communism, mass starvation, and the end of America.
I worked in M&A in the food industry. Here’s a step-by-step summary of what would actually happen:
1. The government announces that grocery retailers aren’t allowed to raise prices.
2. Grocery stores, which operate on 1-2% net margins, can’t survive if their suppliers raise prices. So the government announces that food producers (Kraft Heinz, ConAgra, Tyson, Hormel, et. al.) also aren’t allowed to raise prices.
3. Not all grocery stores are created equal. Stores in lower-income areas make less money than those in higher-income areas, as the former disproportionately sell lower-margin prepackaged foods (“center of the store”) instead of higher-margin fresh products like meat (“perimeter of the store”). Because stores in lower-income areas aren’t able to cover overhead (remember, even if their wholesale costs are fixed, their labor, utilities, insurance, and other operating expenses aren’t fixed… yet), grocery chains start to shut them down. Food deserts in rural areas and in low-income urban areas alike become worse.
4. Meanwhile, margins for food producers are also quickly eroding. Their primary costs (ingredients, energy, and labor) aren’t fixed, and their shrinking gross profits leave less cash flow available to cover overhead, maintain facilities, and reinvest in additional production capacity.
5. Grocery chains, which have finite shelf space, start to repurpose their stores (those they didn’t have to shut down, I should say) to sell more non-price-controlled items—everything from nutrition supplements to kitchenware to apparel—and less price-controlled food products. Your local Kroger or Safeway starts to look and feel more like a Walmart.
6. Food producers stop making products with lower margins. Grocery chain start competing with each other to secure inventory. Since they can’t compete by offering stronger prices (remember, producers aren’t allowed to raise prices here, and, even if they could, grocery chains no longer have the gross profit to bear price increases), they compete on things like payment terms.
7. Small grocery chains start to shut down entirely, or get sold to larger chains like Kroger. In addition to not being able to cover fixed costs, a major reason for this is because they can no longer reliably secure delivery of products, due to producers prioritizing sales to larger customers, which are able to leverage their stronger balance sheets to offer superior payment terms.
8. Smaller food producers—which typically sell via distributors, rather than directly to grocery chains—start to go out of business. Because these producers have an additional step their value chains, and because they have lower volumes over which to spread their fixed costs, their cost structure is inherently disadvantaged compared to major food producers. When grocery stores aren’t able to raise prices, cutting product costs becomes all the more important, and deprioritizing purchases from smaller producers is an easy way to do so.
9. As supply chains break down, lines start to form outside grocery stores every morning. Cities assign police officers to patrol store parking lots, and food producers draft contingency plans to assign armed escorts to delivery trucks.
10. The federal government announces a program to issue block grants for states to purchase and operate shuttered grocery stores. The USDA also seizes closed-down production facilities.
11. The government announces that prices for all key food costs—corn, wheat, cattle, energy, etc.—are also now fixed, to stop “profiteers” from gouging the now-government-operated food industry.
12. Shockingly, the government struggles to operate one of the most complex industries on the planet. The entire food supply chain starts imploding.
13. Communism, mass starvation, and the end of America quickly ensue.
Hey wait a second
It’s with a heavy heart today that we announce the deaths of two SEALs, Chris Chambers and Nathan Ingram. They were killed in action in the Gulf of Aden during a ship boarding operation on January 11th.
The vessel was carrying Iranian weapons to the Houthis in Yemen (same Houthis that have been shooting those missiles at US ships lately, disrupting global trade). The seas were rough, and one SEAL went into the water during the boarding. It appears the second went in to rescue his teammate.
These ops are dangerous. We have to hook a caving ladder to a hard point high up on the deck, and climb up from the smaller combat craft alongside the ship, while both are moving. All at night. With rough seas, a lot can go wrong. Everyone carries flotation with them and emergency “water wings”, but we don’t have the details of what happened exactly or whether the flotation worked.
The water is warm, about 80 degrees, so the search went on for a long time in the hopes these guys could be found.
Unfortunately that search was called off today. Pray for the families of these heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice.
I wish more Americans understood the dangerous world we live in. I wish more understood how fragile the system is that gives you all of life’s comforts and freedoms. Chaos spreads easily and quickly, as history shows over and over. Leaving evil alone doesn’t make it go away. Thank God there are brave men willing to raise their right hand and take on these dangers and protect our way of life.
I often hear people complain that “we are at war” in one way or another - whether it was Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, or maritime operations like this one. But let’s be clear, there has never been a “we.” The vast majority of Americans have been completely insulated from any of the costs of war. There is no we. There is a small number of us, and some, like these two men, make the ultimate sacrifice. Their families make an even greater sacrifice than you can imagine. Pray with them today. Never forget.
JUST IN: Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers trolls Keith Olbermann by telling him to get another booster after Olbermann mocked Rodgers for his injury.
“Hold on. There's another guy. What's it? Keith Olbermann said that it’s because you're not vaxxed. That's why [your injury] happened.”
Rodgers: “Yeah. Get your fifth booster, Keith”
Amazing.