Category: Business

[Wisconsin] Republicans pass bill making it harder to sue gun makers, sellers

MADISON (WKOW) — Republicans in the state Assembly passed a bill Wednesday making it more difficult to file lawsuits against gun manufacturers and dealers.

The bill prohibits lawsuits that claim the makers and sellers of firearms and accessories are liable for injuries or deaths inflicted by gun crimes. It also bans lawsuits claiming a gun’s design was responsible for a nuisance.

The bill had already been approved in the Senate so it now advances to the desk of Gov. Tony Evers [yep there’s your standard operational demoncrap] who is all but certain to veto it.

Rep. Nick Milroy (D-South Range) was the lone Democrat to join Republicans in voting for the bill. Republicans argued lawsuits that targeted gun companies because of what people did with the guns was a threat to gun owners’ rights.

“Some believe that they should be able to simply sue American manufacturers out of business if somebody commits a crime with a firearm,” Rep. Gae Magnafici (R-Dresser) said. “I just feel that when a crime is committed, we should blame the criminal and not the gun.”

Democrats said the measure was yet another step further away from mainstream support for stronger gun laws.

“There are bipartisan, popular, and common proposals that the people of Wisconsin want to see move forward including a background check on every gun sale,” Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer (D-Racine) said. “These are the policies we should be taking up today.”

According to polls conducted by the Marquette Law School, between 70 and 80 percent of Wisconsin voters have consistently shown support for requiring background checks on all gun sales. [until the fact that to work, it would require total gun registration, or the proposed law includes registration, then such ‘support’ evaporates]

The Giffords Law Center, which advocates for gun control, currently lists 34 states with laws giving legal immunity to gun makers.

Ammunition shortage still impacting local gun stores, hunters 2 years later

BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) – A new report from the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearm industry trade association, shows around 5.4 million people purchased a gun for the first time in 2021.

But, getting your hands on ammunition has been an ongoing issue since the pandemic began.

“In the economy, you have fridges that are hard to get, you have sofas that are hard to get, you have cars, computer chips, there are a lot of things that are hard to get, firearms and ammunition are no different,” said Joshua Davis, the owner of Louisiana Firearms in Baton Rouge.

He believes this ammo shortage is linked to supply chain issues and more.

“It’s hard to get raw materials. It’s hard to get raw materials to a factory. It’s hard to forage those materials to make whatever you’re trying to make,” Davis said.

He says another reason there is such an ammunition shortage is due to the fact that the gun manufacturer Remington went bankrupt.

“And whenever they went bankrupt, a lot of other companies were afraid to expand,” he said.

Davis believes demand for ammunition and guns can either increase or decrease, depending on whichever political party is in power. And, he’s seen that firsthand in his stores.

“Regardless of which way you lean, left or right. If you have a Republican in the in the White House, people think, ‘hey, gun rights are safe’, so the demand goes down. If you have a Democrat in the White House, everybody thinks well they are out to get our guns. So, demand goes up. The cycle goes back and forth, and it’s been like that for the past 30 to 40 years,” said Davis.

Guns shops are dealing with ammo shortages.
Guns shops are dealing with ammo shortages.(WAFB)

In his business, specialty firearms are the hardest to find ammo for right now.

“It’s been going on for two years now. I think March will make the anniversary of two years. It’s funny whenever it first started, everyone else was like, in a few months it will get better. Six months it will get better. Next year it will get better. Well, here we are two years later, and things haven’t gotten better,” said Davis.

With deer season officially over in Louisiana, gun store owners are just hopeful to have their shelves stocked with ammunition soon.

No word yet on response from Greta

CHINA WANTS TO BUY 100 MILLION METRIC TONS OF COAL FROM RUSSIA.

The governments of China and Russia are developing an agreement that would see Beijing purchase 100 million metric tons of coal from Moscow, the Kremlin announced on Friday.

“[A]n intergovernmental agreement with the People’s Republic of China is being developed, and the figure is 100 mln tonnes [of coal],” Sergey Mochalnikov — the Head of Department of Foreign Economic Cooperation and Fuel Markets Development at the Russian Energy Ministry — told reporters on February 18.

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I had to look at that twice, because it sure looked like something else at first glance

NRA Board Member, Wayne LaPierre Ally, Resigns After 23 Years

A longtime ally of National Rifle Association (NRA) CEO Wayne LaPierre has resigned after serving on the organization’s board of directors for 23 years.

NRA board member Todd Rathner did not explain why he was leaving while announcing that he was stepping down in a statement posted to social media on Thursday. Rathner’s departure comes as the NRA faces multiple challenges including dwindling membership and a lawsuit from New York Attorney General Letitia James that seeks to dissolve the organization over alleged financial misconduct.

“My personal commitment to the Second Amendment has never been stronger, and I will continue my work to defend it as long as I live,” he continued. “I am still in the fight, I am still working EVERY SINGLE DAY to fight against those who would leave us defenseless. My advocacy will continue. Thank you again for your years of support and encouragement, I am fully at peace with this decision.”

The NRA said in a statement to Newsweek that Rathner was “pursuing an opportunity with another Second Amendment organization,” while adding that the organization wishes him well and thanks him “for his service.”

Although it was not clear if Rathner was joining another organization after leaving the NRA, he was also listed as the chairman and executive director of gun-rights lobbying group NFA Freedom Alliance while serving on the NRA board.

Earlier this month, financial records obtained by The Reload showed that NRA membership numbers in 2021 were at their lowest point since 2017. The records also showed the organization’s revenue had declined significantly in recent years, with revenue last year being roughly half of what it was in 2018.

NRA Media Relations Director Amy Hunter told The Reload that the records were “an outdated, unaudited financial report.” Hunter blamed the NRA’s dwindling membership on the COVID-19 pandemic and insisted that the organization was in a “stronger” and “better” position to “fight for its members and their freedoms.”

James filed a civil lawsuit against the NRA, LaPierre and several other high-ranking members of the organization over alleged fraud and misuse of charitable funds in 2020.

LaPierre is accused of using millions of dollars on personal expenses like private air travel and expensive clothing. NRA President Carolyn Meadows has described the lawsuit as a “baseless, premeditated attack.”

While multiple NRA board members left the organization after the financial misconduct allegations and a dispute between LaPierre and former NRA President Oliver North emerged in 2019, Rathner remained loyal to LaPierre, telling The New York Times that LaPierre was “leading and proving that he has the political juice to get the job done” at the time.

American Truckers Plan Convoy to DC in Protest of COVID-19 Mandates

Taking a cue from truckers bordering America’s north, a political action committee will partner with truck convoys to protest what it deems as overreaching government COVID-19 restrictions and mandates.

The Great American Patriot Project on Wednesday asked volunteers to contribute, join or support a convoy of truckers slated to travel to Washington D.C. next month.

Routes for the convoys will start in Cleveland, Columbus, Ohio and Fresno, California and will end on March 6 in Washington. They will be met by a congressional welcome committee to discuss policy changes, organizers said.

“I don’t think that anybody wants to be told what to do,” Erica Knight, spokeswoman for the PAC, told Fox News. “They don’t want to deal with these mandates and it’s kind of a way to stand up for all the American people against it.”

In an email blast, the PAC said the truckers represent “peaceful, non-violent Americans who are dissatisfied with the unscientific, unconstitutional government overreach in regards to mandates.”

The convoy comes amid ongoing protests by Canadian truckers calling for an end to COVID-19 mandates in their country. The resistance began several weeks ago when truckers decided to stand and oppose a rule requiring them to be fully vaccinated.

Not being vaccinated could impact their livelihoods as well as the country’s supply chain.

On Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked that country’s Emergencies Act, a rare move that gives the country’s government temporary powers to deal with the border blockades, including using tough legal and financial measures against participating truckers.

Trudeau’s actions against Canadian truckers are ‘absolutely outrageous’ and ‘overkill’: David KraydenVideo

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

“I’m sure that having a bunch of protesting and standing up for their rights are definitely part of the inspiration here,” Knight said.

Burger King pulls Whopper off discount menu; parent RBI to hike prices

Feb 15 (Reuters) – Burger King parent Restaurant Brands International Inc (QSR.TO) said on Tuesday that it stripped its most famous sandwich, the Whopper, from discount menus and will raise menu prices again this year as to offset higher costs.

U.S.-listed shares of the company rose more than 3% after it topped results estimates for the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, led by soaring online sales and better-than-expected same-store sales growth at Burger King in the United States and Tim Hortons in Canada.

Restaurant chains are raising prices because they are paying higher costs for shipping, labor, and commodities including chicken, coffee and cooking oils amid COVID-19 related disruptions.

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NSSF says insurance companies, not firearms industry, agreed to Remington settlement

The National Shooting Sports Foundation is the trade association for the firearms industry, and while it wasn’t a party to the lawsuit filed against Remington by several families who lost loved ones in the attack at Sandy Hook elementary in 2012, the organization and its members throughout the industry have been paying close attention to the lawsuit since it was first filed in 2013.

After today’s announcement that the lawsuit had been settled, the NSSF released the following statement, which contains some pretty important details that are likely to be glossed over by most media outlets. Here’s the statement in its entirety, with some comments to follow.

The decision to settle in the Soto v. Bushmaster case was not made by a member of the firearms industry.  The settlement was reached between the plaintiffs and the various insurance carriers that held policies with Remington Outdoor Company (ROC), which effectively no longer exists.

As part of bankruptcy court proceedings, the assets of ROC were sold at auction in September of 2020.  Remington Outdoor Company, which owned the Bushmaster brand, effectively ceased to exist as a going concern.   The lawsuit, however, continued against the estate of the Remington Outdoor Company, essentially ROC’s insurers and their insurance policies in effect at the time.

The settlement also does not alter the fundamental facts of the case. The plaintiffs never produced any evidence that Bushmaster advertising had any bearing or influence over Nancy Lanza’s decision to legally purchase a Bushmaster rifle, nor on the decision of murderer Adam Lanza to steal that rifle, kill his mother in her sleep, and go on to commit the rest of his horrendous crimes. We renew our sincere sympathy for the victims of this unspeakable tragedy and all victims of  violence committed through the misusing of any firearm. But the fact remains that modern sporting rifles are the most popular rifle in America with over 20 million sold to law abiding Americans and rifles, of any kind, are exceedingly rarely used in crime.

The Connecticut Supreme Court wrote in its Soto v. Bushmaster (4-3) opinion, “[T]he plaintiffs allege that the defendants’ wrongful advertising magnified the lethality of the Sandy Hook massacre by inspiring Lanza or causing him to select a more efficiently deadly weapon for his attack. Proving such a causal link at trial may prove to be a Herculean task.”  NSSF believes the Court incorrectly allowed this one claim to go forward to discovery. We remain confident ROC would have prevailed if this case proceeded to trial.

Finally, this settlement orchestrated by insurance companies has no impact on the strength and efficacy of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), which remains the law of the land. PLCAA will continue to block baseless lawsuits that attempt to blame lawful industry companies for the criminal acts of third parties.

Vista Outdoors, which is the current owner of the Remington brand, wasn’t a party to the lawsuit or involved in the decision to settle. In fact, it sounds like the decision to settle was made solely by the insurers of the former Remington Outdoor Company, since the company itself is no longer around.

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GiveSendGo: Ontario Court Order Won’t Stop Us Processing Freedom Convoy Donations
“Canada has absolutely ZERO jurisdiction over how we manage our funds here at GiveSendGo. All funds for EVERY campaign on GiveSendGo flow directly to the recipients of those campaigns, not least of which is The Freedom Convoy campaign.”

The crowdfunding platform “GoFundMe” has sparked outrage in recent weeks after twice pausing donations to the Canadian Freedom Convoy before deciding they would shut the group’s donation page down altogether at the $10 million mark due to alleged “terms of service” violations.

Further angering supporters of the convoy, which is protesting oppressive Wuhan virus vaccine mandates, was GoFundMe’s initial decision to seize the donations and “work with organizers to send all remaining funds to credible and established charities chosen by the Freedom Convoy 2022 organizers and verified by GoFundMe.”

After a massive backlash, GoFundme backed down and said they’d be refunding donations directly to the donors.

Stepping in to fill the void has been the Christian-based crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo, located in Massachusetts. Earlier this month, they announced they would be hosting a page for Freedom Convoy donations. Since that time, they’ve faced cyber attacks and increased scrutiny by the Usual Suspects on the left and in the media, both of which apparently have had an abrupt – and very convenient – change of heart when it comes to supporting peaceful protests.

Because dictators will be dictators, government officials in Ontario pleaded with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice last week to issue an order effectively freezing donations to the convoy from GiveSendGo. The court granted their wish:

The Ontario government says it has successfully petitioned a court to freeze access to millions of dollars donated through online fundraising platform GiveSendGo to the convoy protesting COVID-19 restrictions in Ottawa and at several border crossings.

The province obtained an order from the Superior Court of Justice that prohibits anyone from distributing donations made through the website’s “Freedom Convoy 2022″ and “Adopt-a-Trucker” campaign pages, said a spokeswoman for Premier Doug Ford.

Ivana Yelich said the order binding “any and all parties with possession or control over these donations” was issued Thursday afternoon. She cited a section of the Criminal Code that allows the attorney general to apply for a restraint order against any “offence-related property.”

In response, GiveSendGo tweeted that the Canadian government has “absolutely ZERO jurisdiction” over how they process donations and noted that they would continue to proceed as normal:

Know this! Canada has absolutely ZERO jurisdiction over how we manage our funds here at GiveSendGo. All funds for EVERY campaign on GiveSendGo flow directly to the recipients of those campaigns, not least of which is The Freedom Convoy campaign.

Based on GiveSendGo’s actions in response to the court order, as well as co-founder/CEO Jacob Wells’ statements regarding high-level attempts to shut down the fundraising page for the Freedom Convoy, this company gets it:

“Big Tech really has taken it upon themselves to be the arbiters of truth. And it’s a place that they were never intended to be, and it’s caused more damage than good,” Wells told Fox News Digital in a phone interview Monday. “We are now stepping into that place because there is a natural pushback from many people because America was founded on these ideas of freedom.”

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Oligarchy’s Response to the Freedom Convoy Bodes Ill for Them.

Roger Kinball

As I write, Canadian police, many dressed in military garb and supported by armored vehicles and snipers(!), are moving in to enforce several court orders and demands of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, and others that the “Freedom Convoy” of Canadian truckers stop blocking the Ambassador Bridge, the major artery between the United States and Canada, and disperse. Some of the protestors are leaving while many others are standing their ground.

Will the heavy hand of the state succeed in crushing the protest? In the short term, perhaps.

On Friday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson presented a montage of Canadian and American officials berating the truckers and threatening all sorts of dire retribution should they fail to obey their masters. Carlson was right: the hysterical squeaking of Justin Trudeau, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and the other political mannequins was pathetic—a sign of impotence, not strength.

But impotence comes in long-term and short-term varieties. Long-term, I think Carlson is right. Officialdom’s response to the Freedom Convey is a desperate effort to put the genie of liberty back in the bottle. Ultimately, it will not work. But on the way to that failure there will be plenty of opportunities for the coercive power of the state to manifest itself.

As General Mark “White Rage” Milley, the anti-Trump chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put it when commenting on the January 6, 2021 protest in Washington, D.C., “We’re the guys with the guns.” Well, some of them, anyway. Joe Biden was trespassing on the same territory when he said that if you want to take on the government, you’ll need “some nukes and F15s.”

I do not think that is true. In fact, I would say we are rapidly approaching a situation that the columnist Matt Taibbi evoked when he suggested that Justin Trudeau’s response to the Freedom Convey might be his “Ceaușescu moment.” After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the oxygen of legitimacy rapidly went out of Communist dictatorships throughout Eastern Europe. Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu was one of the unlucky tyrants. He went from delivering a speech to an angry populace to facing, along with his wife Elena, a firing squad four days later on Christmas Day.

According to the media, the Canadian truckers, and their imitators around the globe, are protesting COVID vaccine mandates. That’s only part of their complaint. They don’t like the government ordering them to inject substances into their bodies that have not been shown to be safe (or effective), made by drug companies that are protected from liability for years.

But the standoff is more basic. It is like the standoff between the American colonists and the British authorities in the late 1760s and early 1770s. That standoff turned on the question “Who rules?” So, ultimately, does the conflict between the established regimes and the truckers and other protestors. Legitimacy does not proceed from the barrel of a gun, although Western “democracies” everywhere seem to have ignored the lessons of history.

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Short and not so sweet

What’s Good For Generac Is Bad For America.

“The reason why K. and so many other people in Texas and across the country are buying generators is obvious: the reliability of the electric grid is declining. According to data from the Department of Energy, between 2000 and 2020, the number of what the agency calls “major electric disturbances and unusual occurrences” (read: blackouts) on the U.S. electric grid jumped about 13-fold.”

‘You can’t stop the signal…”

ATF Tries To Ban Forced Reset Triggers As People Begin To 3D Print At Home

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) has been coming after the Orlando-based Rare Breed Triggers (RBT), the manufacturer of a drop-in AR-15 forced reset trigger since last summer.

Everyone in the gun-rights world has been following the ATF’s attack on RBT. The Feds say RBT’s FRT-15 (forced reset trigger for an AR-15 platform) is classified as a “machine gun,” but the company claims otherwise.

Less than two weeks ago, Gun Owners of America, one of the most prominent pro-gun organizations, published an alleged leaked internal ATF email documenting plans to start seizing lawfully-owned FRT-15s from manufacturers and resellers. RBT’s president Lawrence Demonico responded to the leaked memo and said while he couldn’t confirm it, “I can tell you we’ve received word from one dealer in Illinois late yesterday afternoon stating that the ATF visited him and handed him a cease and desist order and seized FRT-15 triggers.”

The ATF under the Biden administration is getting bolder and could rule by executive fiat on new guidelines for gun braces, serialized uppers, and 80% lowers as early as spring. The Feds are also pursuing the ban of forced reset triggers. Many in the gun community have a bad feeling about an overreaching ATF ahead of midterms as President Biden must appease his anti-gun base.

With that aside, we enter the world of 3D printing and how the gun community has embraced this technology over recent years to stay one step ahead of the ATF. This brings us to one YouTuber named “Hoffman Tactical,” who released a video days ago explaining how he 3D-printed a forced reset trigger.

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Arabica Closes At A 10-1/4 Year High As Global Coffee Supplies Plunge.

March arabica coffee (KCH2) on Wednesday closed up +9.40 (+3.78%), and Mar ICE Robusta coffee (RMH22) closed up +24 (+1.07%).

Coffee prices on Wednesday closed sharply higher, with arabica posting a 10-1/4 year nearest-futures high and robusta posting a 3-1/2 week high.  Dwindling global coffee supplies fueled fund buying of coffee futures Wednesday after ICE-monitored arabica coffee inventories fell to a 22-year low of 1.036 mln bags.   Also, ICE-monitored robusta coffee inventories fell to a 3-1/4 year low of 9,061 lots Wednesday.

Global coffee supplies are tightening after the International Coffee Organization  (ICO) Tuesday cut its 2020/21 global coffee surplus estimate to 1.20 mln bags from a Jan estimate of 2.41 mln bags.  The ICO also reported 2021/22 global coffee exports from Oct 1-Dec 31 fell -1.6% y/y to 31.289 mln bags

Strength in the Brazilian real is also supportive for coffee prices after the real (^USDBRL) rallied to a 4-3/4 month high Wednesday against the dollar.   A stronger real discourages export selling from Brazil’s coffee producers.

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Much of that concentration is the result of goobermint policy.

Joel Kotkin: The Zaibatsu-ization of America.

Our tech overlords have forsaken innovation for consolidation.

Enthusiasts of “the new economy” long cherished the notion that it would be different from the unenlightened, sluggish, and piggish older one. Yet our economy seems increasingly to resemble not some hippy capitalist utopia, but the deeply concentrated economy of pre-war Japan.

At the time, Japan had developed an economic model around a handful of large corporate conglomerates called zaibatsu. Organized as a “financial clique,” with a bank at the center, these firms extended their interests into virtually all economic activity. They included Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Yasuda. Mitsubishi led the way in shipbuilding, steel, and of course aircraft, being the creator of the famous Zero fighter.

Until bested by their onetime allies in the military, the zaibatsu dominated Japan. The war initially benefited them, but ultimately ruined their businesses as Japan was devastated. Yet they were so essential to the function of the economy that they were gradually rehabilitated during the U.S. occupation, recreating their historic pattern of using smaller firms as convenient subordinates.

Today we see the rise of a few companies, who have moved into virtually every aspect of our economy. The nerds of Silicon Valley are no longer just interested in gadgets to make life better but are seizing control of both the production and dissemination of information. Arguably the greatest beneficiaries of a pandemic that hooked people ever more on their products, the tech giants now have the capital to lead the drive into space and the forced march to electrical vehicles, while also looking into dominating more prosaic fields like healthcare and finance.

The zaibatu-ization of America’s economy presents an enormous problem of governance. Our constitutional structure is based on the notion of many competing players. When concentration became too evident, and politically potent, as during the early decades of the last century, measures were taken to slow, and even reverse, over-concentration. Yet in the past few decades, the largest emerging corporate interests—Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon—and a handful of large financial institutions gained unprecedented control over the economy. By last summer six tech firms, including Tesla, accounted for half the value of the NASQAQ 100.  By 2020, the five largest tech companies had total revenue amounting to half of those of all state governments combined.

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When the story is Wayne, instead of RKBA & safety, Wayne needs to go.

Why It Is Time For LaPierre To Leave the NRA

Wayne LaPierre has devoted a long time to the defense of the Second Amendment. While loyal Ammoland readers can disagree with his tactics, one cannot dispute the fact that the Second Amendment is on much firmer footing than it was 35 years ago. That said, while LaPierre’s overall track record is good, some mistakes warrant him stepping down.

Missing Clear Warning Signs Of Abuse

The Cuomo-James jihad that turned the power of New York against the country’s oldest pro-Second Amendment organization and which threatens EVERY pro-Second Amendment group or media outlet (including Ammoland) came with a lot of warning signs that were not heeded. Two big ones were the IRS scandal involving the Tea Party and Andrew Cuomo’s listing of Second Amendment supporters among those who had “no place in New York.”

The NRA should have acted then to prevent abuses and to shield themselves. They didn’t, and that is on LaPierre as Executive Vice President of the NRA. It could and should have been a straight fight over Cuomo’s infamous letter about “gun promotion organizations.”

Cultural Engagement

The fact of the matter is that for decades, anti-Second Amendment extremists have been far more active when it comes to engaging with pop culture. I’m not saying that the NRA faced an easy path when it came to engaging with Hollywood, but LaPierre apparently didn’t even bother with much effort at all. Even CMT, which should be our home turf, signed on to bull from Bloomberg.

The NRA should have been working decades ago to connect those who had been established in Hollywood with younger Second Amendment supporters who had talents, goals, and aspirations in pop culture and creative fields. They can still do that, but it will be much harder than it should have been. That LaPierre and NRA leadership didn’t do so is a stunning failure.

Failures In Outreach

This is a bit more nuanced. On some fronts, LaPierre was successful in growing the NRA, but a fair bit of that was preaching to the choir. Where LaPierre’s outreach failed was where Glenn Youngkin succeeded in the 2021 election. Translating the NRA-ILA’s fact sheets and legislative alerts isn’t the only failure, LaPierre should have pushed to translate the NRA’s safety materials and firearms training literature.

On a similar front, the NRA was also derelict in preventing the suburbs from becoming bastions for Bloomberg’s stooges. We are getting lucky with some serious dereliction on the part of left-wing officials, but it never should have come down to luck.

These failures are why Wayne LaPierre’s time with the NRA needs to come to an end. As much as he provided valuable service to the cause of the Second Amendment, the times have changed, and they call for new strategies and tactics that LaPierre has not shown he can implement. In order to defeat anti-Second Amendment extremists at the federal, state, and local levels via the ballot box, it’s time for some new blood at the NRA.

Ford says chip shortage will force it to halt or cut production at 8 plants
The announcement by the major U.S. automaker continued a series of supply-chain setbacks that have affected the nation’s economy in recent months.

Difficulties in obtaining semiconductor chips will prompt Ford Motor to temporarily halt or scale back auto production at eight plants in North America, the company said Friday, according to reports.

The announcement by the major U.S. automaker – set to take effect next week — continued a series of supply-chain setbacks that have affected the nation’s economy in recent months.

Ford had warned Thursday that a lack of chip availability would likely hurt production in the company’s current financial quarter, Reuters reported.

Plants expected to see work suspended by Ford’s decision include those in Michigan, Chicago and Cuautitlan, Mexico, according to Reuters.

Also affected will be plants in Kentucky and Oakville, Ontario, Canada, Reuters added.

In Kansas City, production of Ford’s popular F-150 pickup trucks will be scaled back as one shift produces Transit vans, the news outlet reported.

Other models of Ford vehicles affected by the move include Bronco and Explorer SUVs, Ranger pickups, the Ford Mustang Mach-E electric crossover vehicle and the Lincoln Aviator, CNBC reported.

The 2021 Ford F-150 King Ranch Truck is seen at the Ford Built for America event at Ford’s Dearborn, Michigan, plant, Sept. 17, 2020. (Getty Images)
On Thursday, Ford missed Wall Street’s earnings expectations, causing shares to drop nearly 10% on Friday, the CNBC report said.

Earlier Friday, Ford Chief Financial Officer John Lawler appeared on Fox News’ “Mornings with Maria,” where he said the company expected the semiconductor shortage to ease later in 2022.

“That’s why we’re confident in our volumes in 2022 being up about 10 to 15%,” Lawler said.

A rebound in production could help bring down auto prices that have been affected by inflation, he added.

He said the chip shortage, combined with the impact of the omicron variant of the coronavirus, were a difficult 1-2 punch for the automaker in its fourth quarter.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Disaster Is Taking Silicon Valley With It.

With a single earnings report and a disastrous conference call, Mark Zuckerberg wiped out $240 billion in value from his company. Meta’s was the largest one-day loss by a U.S. company ever, and the ripple effects were closer to tsunamis throughout Silicon Valley. The list of tech losers reeling from the Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) reckoning is long and full of familiar names: Spotify was 16 percent lower; Twitter was down about 6 percent; and even companies that were relatively safe, such as Apple and Microsoft, saw hundreds of billions of dollars erased from their market value. Every percentage point here is a huge sum of money gone, at least for shareholders. Why did this happen? Who is responsible? Has the bell tolled for Big Tech?

To answer that last question first, yes and no. Many of Facebook’s problems are of Zuckerberg’s own making. It wasn’t even six months ago that the billionaire tech developer decided not only to change the company’s name but to go even further — to hijack its reason for existing and create a whole new digital reality, the metaverse, amid one of the most damaging, long-lasting scandals of the company’s existence right here on planet Earth. (More on that later.) Meta spent more than $9 billion to build this metaverse last year, it was revealed in securities filings. This is an astronomical sum, especially since Zuckerberg has tried to warn investors that it could be as late as 2031 before he really gets it right. It’s the kind of leap of faith that, ironically, tends to get a more sympathetic hearing from smaller, scrappier companies, such as Magic Leap, that have far less money and resources at their disposal — except that the money comes from venture capitalists who can handle companies going bust, not the public stock markets that fuel people’s retirements.

But there are other, structural reasons for Meta’s rout, and the weight of those changes has suddenly registered with the rest of the world. The first is Tim Cook, the head of Apple, the largest company in the world. Last year, Apple allowed its users to opt out of getting followed around the internet by advertisers, kneecapping Facebook’s whole business model. Facebook is one of the avatars of surveillance capitalism, an economy that diminishes privacy in order to make a company more money. By last summer, consumers had decided they didn’t want to be tracked, with only 25 percent saying, Yeah, sure, follow me around. Now not only does Facebook get almost all of its money from advertising, but people who have iPhones — and Apple products more generally — are a much more appealing audience for advertisers since they tend to have more money than Android users. During the last three months of 2021, when inflation picked up and advertisers started to pull back on spending, Apple’s move hit Facebook hard and signaled to the rest of the world that online advertising will be going through a hard time.

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Palmetto State Armory announces they are going to produce M1 Garands…

Skip to time (12:10) They said that with their purchase of H&R they now have a full technical data package for the M1 and they have already begun the modeling process

US trucker convoy coming: Joe Biden will ignore protests at his peril.

As hard as it is to imagine, President ’s political fortunes are about to get worse. The massive trucker convoy that crossed Canada to protest against that country’s new vaccine mandates will almost certainly be replicated in the U.S. and will bring with it huge headaches for the Biden White House.

Biden pretends to be the champion of the “little guy”; he claims to support blue-collar workers. Truckers are exactly the kind of folks Biden is meant to embrace, but he will not do that.

The drivers protesting the vaccine mandates have already been portrayed by the liberal media as right-wing zealots and science deniers, which is only one notch above climate deniers. A Facebook group organizing the U.S. convoy that had amassed 130,000 members has been tossed off the social media platform amid allegations that the movement was being promoted by right-wing extremists, which the organizers deny.

Biden will not dare stand up for the truckers. And yet, if he dismisses them as a “small fringe minority,” as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently did with the “Freedom Convoy” drivers up north, they could get mad.

They could, if pushed, call for a sick-out of America’s vital truckers. Whatever supply chain problems we have had would pale before the catastrophe that could unfold if tens of thousands of drivers simply walked off the job for a day or two. Imagine what would happen to transportation costs, and inflation.

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Get woke, go broke

Facebook suffers biggest one-day value drop of any US company in history.

Facebook parent company Meta shed more than $220 billion in market capitalization on Thursday, the largest such single-day decline for a U.S. company in history.

Meta’s stock closed down more than 26% on Thursday, an 85-point decline. The drop was largely driven by a quarterly earnings report that found the company was hemorrhaging daily users for the first time in its history. CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally lost about $24 billion.

Meta’s crash drove declines across the stock market, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite dropping by 3.74%.

The much-anticipated report said that daily Facebook users declined by about a half-million in the last three months of 2021, which many investors saw as a sign that the global reach of the social media company might be peaking or has already peaked.

Meta’s record-breaking crash smashed the previous single-day loss record set by Apple, which lost $180 billion of its market cap in September 2020. Microsoft, Tesla, and Amazon have all experienced single-day losses of more than $100 billion, all of which happened in the last three years.

Late last year, Zuckerberg announced that the company would rebrand itself as Meta in a nod to the “metaverse,” which is a term for a theoretical digital world. The company has recently focused more of its resources on furthering the metaverse and augmented reality.

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