Addison

This woman fascinates me.

On Instagram.

Saturday Evening Movie Thread

At AoSHQ, "In the absolute most basic sense, the producer's job is to supply money to a movie production. This is why independent productions tend to have so many producers because the money comes from so many sources. So, some banker supplies $15,000, and he's a producer in the credits now. However, with money comes the ability to control a lot if one so chooses. A producer, even up to a studio executive, could supply the cash and walk away, waiting for the opportunity to use his tuxedo at the film's premiere..."

'The unsettling reality is that America in the not-too-distant future is going to have a lot in common with partial-collapse societies of Eastern Europe and Latin America where gangs have more power and influence than the government; where politicians pass the laws but gangs enforce the rules...'

At Gray Zone Activity, "The disturbing reality of America's future: This is the Gray Zone America you should be preparing for — not quite collapsed, but not quite standing."

Bed Bath & Beyond Files for Bankruptcy

My wife briefly worked there. Briefly. It wasn't her most memorable or rewarding job. 

The company made a bad bet on its own-store brand lines, alienating longtime customers who shopped there for deals on major brand names. 

At the Wall Street Journal, "Bed Bath & Beyond Files for Bankruptcy":

Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. BBBY -2.17%decrease; red down pointing triangle filed for bankruptcy protection to wind down its business after years of losses and failed turnaround plans left the once-powerful retailer short of cash.

The company had warned of a potential bankruptcy for months. It needed a $375 million loan to get through the holidays. It struck an unusual $1 billion financing deal with a hedge fund in February to put off a bankruptcy filing, then scrapped the deal and tried this month to raise $300 million from other investors.

None of the moves were enough. Nor were efforts to stem losses by closing hundreds of stores. Sales evaporated and its stock price tumbled well below $1 in recent weeks, as the rescue efforts dimmed.

The retailer filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy Sunday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Newark, N.J., and said it expects to close all of its 360 Bed Bath & Beyond and 120 Buybuy Baby retail locations eventually. Top lender Sixth Street Partners has put up $240 million in financing to keep Bed Bath & Beyond operating through the liquidation process, the company said.

Bankruptcy gives Bed Bath & Beyond the breathing room to conduct going-out-of-business sales at its physical stores and solicit interest from potential buyers for its remaining assets, such as its branding. Individual investors who continued to back Bed Bath & Beyond during its final months, when it was flooding the market with shares, will likely be wiped out in chapter 11, which prioritizes the repayment of debt over shareholder recoveries.

As Bed Bath & Beyond’s situation worsened, suppliers stopped shipping goods to the retailer. Photo: Johnny Milano/Bloomberg News If a bidder emerges for the business in bankruptcy, Bed Bath & Beyond said it would pivot away from its liquidation plans to pursue a sale.

Once a pop-cultural phenomenon, Bed Bath & Beyond has long been losing shoppers to rivals and struggling to stock its stores. Replacing KitchenAid mixers and other name brands with private label goods further alienated vendors and customers.

Bed Bath & Beyond joins a growing list of once-ubiquitous retail chains seeking court protection. Some like J.C. Penney Co. continue to operate hundreds of stores; others like Sears and Toys ‘R’ Us closed most of their locations; while Circuit City and Linens ‘n Things disappeared altogether.

The country’s largest wedding dress retailer, David’s Bridal LLC, recently filed for bankruptcy and said it would shut all of its stores if it doesn’t quickly find a buyer. It was the chain’s second bankruptcy filing in less than five years....

Bed Bath & Beyond didn’t have an unprofitable year as a public company until 2019—when it reported its first annual sales decline. By then, the rise of Amazon.com Inc. and other online retailers had started to eat into the business. “We missed the boat on the internet,” Mr. Eisenberg said.

A group of activist investors forced the co-founders, who had relinquished their executive duties in 2003 but remained co-chairmen, off the board in 2019. The reconstituted board hired former Target Corp. executive Mark Tritton as chief executive.

Mr. Tritton moved quickly to put his stamp on the company. He sold many of the company’s noncore businesses, including Christmas Tree Shops. Then, in January 2020, he signed a deal to sell roughly half the company’s real estate to a private-equity firm and lease back the space.

With the world in lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Mr. Tritton pushed through what the company called the biggest change to its assortment in a generation. It replaced name brands such as KitchenAid mixers, All-Clad cookware and OXO spatulas with private-label goods manufactured just for Bed Bath & Beyond.

The rationale was sound: Private-label merchandise carries higher margins and helps retailers differentiate their offerings from competitors. The playbook has worked for countless chains from Target to Macy’s Inc. But it failed at Bed Bath & Beyond for several reasons, according to former employees and analysts.

Mr. Tritton made the switch at a time when supply chains had been upended by the pandemic. Factories had temporarily closed and shipping delays were proliferating, along with rising costs, making it difficult for retailers to keep goods flowing to their stores in a timely manner.

The company also rolled out too many private brands too quickly, before it had the infrastructure to support them, the former employees said. It planned to launch eight new brands in 2021 alone. At first, the results of Mr. Tritton’s strategy looked promising. Bed Bath & Beyond’s sales rose 49% in the spring quarter of 2021, compared with a year earlier when stores were closed for Covid lockdowns. Mr. Tritton presented results to the board showing that some of the early private-label launches—such as the Simply Essential line of bed, bath, kitchen, dining and storage items—were well-received by shoppers, according to people with knowledge of the company.

Some of that buying was due to consumers stocking up while sheltering from the pandemic. As that demand ebbed, the gains quickly evaporated. By August 2021, sales were falling, and they continued to drop, as losses piled up.

“You know if you buy Cuisinart what you are getting,” said Sheryl Bilus, a 68-year-old retired bank manager who lives in Canton, Ga. “But with their own brands, you don’t know what the quality is like.”

Mr. Tritton had planned a similar overhaul of the Buybuy Baby chain by replacing Gerber and other children’s brands with private-label goods. But he was pushed out in June 2022, before he could make many of those changes. Sue Gove, a veteran retailing executive and Bed Bath & Beyond director, was named interim CEO.

Meanwhile, Bed Bath & Beyond’s stock went on a wild ride after Ryan Cohen, the billionaire founder of pet retailer Chewy Inc., took a big stake in the company and agitated for changes, including the sale of Buybuy Baby. The board considered strategic alternatives for the baby chain, but decided against selling because separating it would have been time-consuming and costly, and they needed to nail down a new strategy before marketing it to potential bidders, people familiar with the situation said...

GENIANI Portable Small Cool Mist USB Humidifier

At Amazon, GENIANI Portable Small Cool Mist Humidifiers 250ML - USB Desktop Humidifier for Plants, Office, Car, Baby Room with Auto Shut Off & Night Light - Quiet Mini Humidifier (White).

Decoding the Bud Light Disaster

At Instapundit, "THOMAS LIFSON: Decoding the Bud Light disaster as marketing VP Alissa Heinerscheid ‘takes leave of absence’.

Book Bans Are Soaring

They are, but blame for the outrage also goes to authors and publishers. You publish garbage. Now one has to read your shit, and the push-back is appropriate. 

At the Los Angeles Times, "Book bans are soaring in U.S. schools, fueled largely by new laws in Republican-led states."

Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart

Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.

Coleman 70-Quart Xtreme Hard Ice Chest Cooler

At Amazon, Coleman Xtreme Portable Cooler - Hard Cooler Keeps Ice Up to 5 Days.

BONUS: Carhartt Men's Loose Fit Washed Duck Insulated Active Jacket.

Classic Buck Knives 110 Folding Hunter Lock-Back Knife

At Amazon, Buck Knives 110 Folding Hunter Lock-back Knife, Brass Bolsters, Ebony Handles, 3-3/4" 420HC Blade with Leather Sheath.

In Test Flight, SpaceX’s Starship Explodes Shortly After Launch

 At the Wall Street Journal, "SpaceX’s Starship Explodes Shortly After Launching Uncrewed Test Flight."

Luke Harding, Invasion

At Amazon, Luke Harding, Invasion: The Inside Story of Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival.

Solene

On Instagram.

Margaret Lawrence, The Stone Angel

At Amazon, Margaret Lawrence, The Stone Angel.

One Dead After Driver Intentionally Plows Car Through Group of Teenagers at Westlake High School (VIDEO)

There's too much death. 

Day after day we're subsumed by "senseless" acts of violence. Damn. What next? Car control?

At the Los Angeles Times, "Driver intentionally hit Westlake High students, killing 1, after Walmart stabbing, authorities say."

The poor kid.

West Coast Cities Are Letting Drug Addicts Kill Themselves

At the Washington Examiner, "Liberals in the biggest cities on the West Coast have made it easier for drug addicts to die from overdoses based on the fallacy that letting drug addicts destroy their own lives is some form of compassion."

Liz

On Twitter.

Alleged Pedophile Throws Himself Under Wheels of Utility Van

Be sure to check the comments.

Paedophile hunters chasing a man who was allegedly attempting to meet underage children throws himself under an oncoming van! pic.twitter.com/MS3qqC9sdA

— Danny Tommo 🇬🇧 (@RealDannyTommo) April 18, 2023

Fox News Defamation Settlement

Is this the big decimation denouement that the left's is jonesin' for? 

There's a lot of churn at Memeorandum, with what looks like is absolute glee at this defeat for Rupert Murdoch.

At the New York Times, "A $787.5 Million Settlement and Embarrassing Disclosures: The Costs of Airing a Lie":

Fox News’s late-stage agreement with Dominion Voting Systems came with a rare acknowledgment of broadcasting false claims by the conservative media powerhouse.

In settling with Dominion Voting Systems, Fox News has avoided an excruciating, drawn-out trial in which its founding chief, Rupert Murdoch, its top managers and its biggest stars would have had to face hostile grilling on an embarrassing question: Why did they allow a virulent and defamatory conspiracy theory about the 2020 election to spread across the network when so many of them knew it to be false?

But the $787.5 million settlement agreement — among the largest defamation settlements in history — and Fox’s courthouse statement recognizing that the court had found “certain claims about Dominion” aired on its programming “to be false” at the very least amount to a rare, high-profile acknowledgment of informational wrongdoing by a powerhouse in conservative media and America’s most popular cable network.

“Money is accountability,” Stephen Shackelford, a Dominion lawyer, said outside the courthouse, “and we got that today from Fox.”

The terms of the agreement, which was abruptly announced just before lawyers were expected to make opening statements, did not require Fox to apologize for any wrongdoing in its own programming — a point that Dominion was said to have been pressing for.

Shortly after the agreement was reached, Fox said it was “hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues.”

The settlement carries an implicit plea of “no contest” to several pretrial findings from the presiding judge in the case, Eric M. Davis, that cast Fox’s programming in exceptionally harsh light.

In one of those findings, the judge sided with Dominion in its assertion that Fox could not claim that its airing of the conspiracy theory — generally relating to the false claim that its machines “switched” Trump votes into Biden votes — fell under a legally protected status of “news gathering” that can shield news organizations when facts are disputed. The judge wrote, “the evidence does not support that FNN conducted good-faith, disinterested reporting.”

In another finding, the judge wrote that the “evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.”

Through those findings, the judge seriously limited Fox’s ability to argue that it was acting as a news network pursuing the claims of a newsmaker, in this case, the president of the United States, who was the lead clarion for the false Dominion narrative.

In those heady days before the first day of trial, Fox had been indicating that if it were to lose at trial, it would work up an appeal that would, at least partly, argue with those judicial rulings. Now they stand undisputed.

By the end of the day on Tuesday, it was clear that Fox’s lawyers were engaged in an urgent calculus to take the financial hit rather than risk losing at trial.

As so many legal experts before the trial had argued, Dominion had managed to collect an unusual amount of internal documentation from Fox showing that many inside the company knew the Dominion election conspiracy theory was pure fantasy. That extended to the network’s highest ranks — right up to Mr. Murdoch himself.

That evidence appeared to bring Dominion close to the legal threshold in defamation cases known as “actual malice” — established when defamatory statements are “made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or not.” (That bar, however, is not always easy to meet, and there are no guarantees in front of a jury.)

“Dominion Voting had elicited much critical evidence that Fox had acted with actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth, which it could have proved to a jury, so the only question remaining would have been damages,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond. “Trial of the case also might have undermined the reputation of Fox when the evidence was presented in open court.”

It was less surprising that Fox settled than that it did so at such a late stage on Tuesday...

Keep reading. 

Hisense U8H Quantum 4K ULED Mini-LED 65-Inch Class Google Smart TV

At Amazon, Hisense U8H QLED Series Quantum 4K ULED Mini-LED 65-Inch Class Google Smart TV with Alexa Compatibility, Quantum Dot, 1500-nit HDR10+, and Dolby Vision (65U8H, 2022 Model), Black.

BONUS: Edward H. Bonekemper III, The Myth of the Lost Cause: Why the South Fought the Civil War and Why the North Won.