Loose Ends (112) [With Update by John]

 Readers know that I keep ordering up more popcorn and worrying about a potential popcorn shortage. Well guess what? A reader in the southeast sends along this very worrying news:

You mentioned in one of your recent articles that it is amazing that there isn’t an acute popcorn shortage with all the lunacy going on. I am an Independent Distributor for a national company that delivers into retail grocery accounts in the Atlanta area each workday. I have in fact noticed that there is indeed a popcorn shortage! I was in 4 major grocery retail accounts this morning and all 4 were half full at best. These shelves have been bare for several months now. Not surprising given the behavior from some of our elected officials.

And the photos to prove it from two different stores (though our correspondent has similar pics from several others:

I say take no chances: buy popcorn like it’s toilet paper in March.

Chaser: We’re still investigating whether Orville Redenbacher has a nefarious past that will require his eponymous popcorn brand to be canceled, but at least we can report that, contrary to what you may have heard, Cap’n Crunch was not a slave-trader, and so his breakfast cereal will not be canceled. How do we know? It was created by Quaker Oats. And Quakers were early abolitionists. So the good Cap’n Crunch is in the clear.

Who had UFOs on their 2020 Bingo card? From the New York Times today:

Despite Pentagon statements that it disbanded a once-covert program to investigate unidentified flying objects, the effort remains underway — renamed and tucked inside the Office of Naval Intelligence, where officials continue to study mystifying encounters between military pilots and unidentified aerial vehicles. . .

Mr. Davis, who now works for Aerospace Corporation, a defense contractor, said he gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency as recently as March about retrievals from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”

Say wut?

Related, from The Express:

UFO hunters have shared NASA photos they believe show an enormous cubed alien craft exiting from the Sun. After analysis of images shot by US-based space agency Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite, life enthusiasts believe they have spotted a huge UFO near the Sun. What appears to be a solar anomaly close to the Sun’s surface is claimed by alien life conspiracy theorists to be a of an almost incomprehensible scale.

Well, given the gullibility of the New York Times these days in going in for conspiracy theories like the 1619 Project, it is no wonder that the Times reads like a British tabloid. On the other hand, maybe the late night “comics” should stop chuckling about Trump’s Space Force. Maybe it was a prescient move after all.

• Well whaddyaknow: The Washington Post, following CNN’s lead, has reached a settlement with Nick Sandmann, the Kentucky high school student that the Post defamed with its appalling coverage of the incident at the Lincoln memorial a couple years ago. The terms are confidential of course, but reading between the lines (and given that CNN is said to have paid Sandmann millions) it seems likely that the Post shelled out a considerable sum.

Sandmann’s camp is jubilant, while this is what you hear about the Post: ‘A spokesperson for The Washington Post told Fox News, “We are pleased that we have been able to reach a mutually agreeable resolution of the remaining claims in this lawsuit.”‘ If the Post had been confident in their legal position, I think they’d put out a more muscular statement than this.

JOHN adds: If the Post had been confident in its legal position, it wouldn’t have paid Sandmann off and bargained for a confidentiality agreement.

The Babylon Bee is already on top of this latest development:

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