Category: Business

Der GretchenFuhrer is a pain in the posterior for Michiganians

Michigan militia members say they won’t allow police to arrest 77-year-old barber defying Democratic Gov. Whitmer’s shutdown order

Members of the Michigan militia said they won’t allow police to arrest 77-year-old Karl Manke who opened his Owosso barbershop last week in defiance of Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s coronavirus shutdown order, WEYI-TV reported.

“We are here to make sure he doesn’t get arrested,” Daniel Brewer told the station Saturday. “We’re willing to stand in front of that door and block the entrance so the police will have no entry there today.”

The barbershop has been open since last Monday against state order and received a packed lobby of customers his first morning — as well as two citations before Friday, WEYI said in a previous story.

Still dozens of supporters gathered outside Manke’s barbershop Saturday, and 15 customers were waiting in line outside the door for haircuts.

‘Not Asking for Permission’: Hundreds of California Churches Plan to Open May 31

Nearly 500 California pastors are preparing to open their doors on Sunday, May 31st – whether or not they have guidance from the state.

“The churches are not asking for permission,” said Bob Tyler, a religious freedom attorney advising the pastors. “The governor is sitting here as a dictator, trumping the Constitution and is kind of hanging on to this state of emergency for as long as he can hold it.”

Tyler says the pastors, including Jack Hibbs of Calvary Chapel in Chino Hills, Matt Brown of Sandals Church in Riverside, and Danny Carroll of Water of Life Community Church in Fontana, have signed a petition and plan to advise Gov. Gavin Newsom of their plans which include social distancing.

Ruger First Quarter Earnings Jump 17.5% on a 37% Increase in Sales From Distributors


Sturm, Ruger & Company, Inc. Reports First Quarter Diluted Earnings of 87¢ Per Share and Declares Dividend of 35¢ Per Share

Sturm, Ruger & Company, Inc. (NYSE-RGR) announced today that for the first quarter of 2020 the Company reported net sales of $123.6 million and diluted earnings of 87¢ per share, compared with net sales of $114.0 million and diluted earnings of 74¢ per share in the first quarter of 2019.

The Company also announced today that its Board of Directors declared a dividend of 35¢ per share for the first quarter, for shareholders of record as of May 18, 2020, payable on June 1, 2020. This dividend varies every quarter because the Company pays a percentage of earnings rather than a fixed amount per share. This dividend is approximately 40% of net income.

Chief Executive Officer Christopher J. Killoy commented on the financial results for the first quarter of 2020, “Strong consumer demand, exciting new products, and reduced reliance on promotions led to improved earnings and cash flows, which strengthened our already robust debt-free balance sheet as we ended the quarter with $188 million of cash and short-term investments. In addition, inventories were reduced at both Ruger and at our distributors as retail demand outstripped available inventories, particularly in the latter weeks of the quarter.”

US weekly jobless claims total 3.169 million, bringing seven-week tally to 33.5 million

Unemployment rolls continued to swell in the U.S. last week, though jobless claims hit their lowest level since the economy went into lockdown made to battle the coronavirus pandemic.

First-time filings for unemployment insurance hit 3.17 million last week, bringing the total to 33.5 million over the past seven weeks, the Labor Department reported Thursday. The total was slightly higher than the 3.05 million expected by economists surveyed by Dow Jones and below the previous week’s 3.846 million, which was revised up by 7,000.

Chart of weekly initial unemployment claims from 2007 through the week ending March 2, 2020.

Stock market futures reacted little to the data and continued to indicate about a 300-point gain at the open for the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Reynolds, Trump predict meatpackers ‘fully back up’ in 10 days or less

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and President Donald Trump predicted Wednesday, during a meeting at the White House, that meatpacking plants would be “fully back up” within a week to 10 days.

“Maybe sooner,” Trump said.

Reynolds said South Dakota plants are coming back on board “and we’ll have most of our facilities up and going and … we’re going to hopefully prevent what could have been, you know, a really sorry situation where we were euthanizing some of our protein supply and really impacting the food supply not only across the country but throughout the world.”

Reynolds said the response from the industry and government “I think has really maybe prevented what could have been really a serious situation.”

Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue agreed, although he noted that meatpackers that have experienced outbreaks will take time to be operating at full capacity.

“But we think the stores will see more variety and more meat cases fully supplied,” he said.

Reynolds added, “We’re still monitoring it. We’ve turned a corner.”

Trump said Reynolds had “a great talk with the owners of the plants. The top people. Big people, these are big companies actually, you wouldn’t believe how many plants they have. And I think it was a very strong talk and I think they got the message.”

The remarks come a day after Iowa’s largest grocery store chain announced it would limit customer purchases of meat due to supply interruptions and customers stockpiling food during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Iowa public health officials reported Tuesday that more than 1,650 workers in four meatpacking plants had tested positive for COVID-19, including 58% percent of workers tested at the Tyson Fresh Meats plant in Perry.

Reynolds noted that the Perry plant “came back up at 60 percent capacity, which is really, that’s a strong startup.”

Vice President Mike Pence praised the president’s Defense Production Act executive order that “made it clear that our objective was to keep meat processing plants open.”

Asked whether workers were really being protected, Pence cited the deploying of Centers for Disease Control personnel to plant sites and federal assistance in supplying workers with personal protective equipment such as face masks.  “In most of these meat processing plants, we end up testing everyone in the facility and the people that are healthy are able to return with new countermeasures and new protection” such as masks and gloves.

Pence referred to Reynolds as a “great heartland governor” and said, “One of the great stories of the coronavirus outbreak has been how our food supply has continued to work every day from the field to the fork, from the grocers to the meat processors and thanks to the president’s decision to use the Defense Production Act, we now have uniformity and the objective is to work every day to keep those meat processing plants open and the ones that are coming down are going back online.”

Asked by a reporter about the soaring price of beef, Trump said he’d asked the Justice Department to investigate. Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller on Tuesday joined attorneys general in 10 other states seeking an investigation into what they called possible price manipulation by meatpackers.

“I’ve asked them to take a very serious look into it because it shouldn’t be happening that way and we want to protect our farmers. But they’re looking into that very strongly.” Trump said. “They looking into the disparity, what’s going on. Are they working with each other? What’s going on.”

The Great Reset

My county out here in Krazifornia ostentatiously banned single-use plastic bags back in 2012, to “save the planet” naturally. So I whooped a whoop of joy through my mask when the local grocery store bagged my haul in plastic bags over the weekend. My guess is plastic bags will be back for good.

The aftermath of the virus crisis is going to change a lot of things—a process I’m calling “The Great Reset.” A lot of bad things are going to happen. A number of businesses have closed down for good already. Many others are going to shrink. Several department stores, like Macy’s, were already in trouble before the virus crisis, and J. Crew has filed for bankruptcy. General Electric has just announced that it expects to cut 25 percent of its workforce in its jet engine division permanently.

But not every business change will for the worse. The Wall Street Journal reports that another casualty of the COVID-Crash is corporate “sustainability” and other virtue-signaling luxuries of “corporate social responsibility.” The article opens with the confession of a green entrepreneur who specializes in selling products with minimal packaging and living a “zero-waste” lifestyle:

Ms. Singer, who prided herself on producing no trash that needed to be landfilled, stocked her kitchen with packaged food that would last for weeks. “I sacrificed my values and bought items in plastic. Lots of it.” She also learned a lesson: “I have many values and sometimes, as circumstances change, one of those values may take priority above another.”

Funny how that happens when things get real.

Today, every occupant of every C-suite is trying to figure out what they’re willing to throw overboard as the economic storm spawned by the pandemic is swamping their ships. Businesses that were planning to help save the world are now simply saving themselves. . .

Others are making their own cuts in response to the downturn. Unilever PLC suspended a number of its “change initiatives” that tackle complex social and environmental problems. (The company’s initiatives include water conservation and sustainable farming.) General Motors Co. killed its car-sharing program. Ford Motor Co. canceled an electric-car projectand postponed autonomous vehicles. Starbucks has paused the practice of filling reusable cups.

The end of nonsense is even spreading, like a contagion, to decadent Europe. Behold this report from the Financial Times:

Investors Blast EU’s Omission of Oil from ESG Disclosures

Investors, politicians and campaigners have hit out at EU regulators’ “ludicrous” exclusion of oil and gas from a definition of fossil fuels, arguing it will lead asset managers to understate their environmental risks. Under draft proposals for the EU’s sustainable disclosure regime, the European authorities responsible for banking, insurance and securities markets define fossil fuels as only applying to “solid” energy sources such as coal and lignite. This means asset managers and other financial groups would have to follow tougher disclosure requirements for holdings in coal producers than for oil and gas company exposure. . .

The latest EU proposals represent a significant watering down of its ambitious sustainable disclosure rules, which aim to give end investors clear information on the environmental, social and governance risks of their funds. . .

Wolfgang Kuhn, director of financial sector strategies at responsible investment group ShareAction, said that the EU regulators’ proposal was “like disclosing the amount of fat in a chocolate bar, but conveniently failing to mention the sugar content”.

According to Mr Kuhn, the exclusion of oil and gas “could, at best, result in an underestimation of the true investment risk, and at worst, contribute to further support for energy sources incompatible with Paris goals”.

Yes, I think ignoring the Paris goals is precisely the point of this bowing to reality. The EU apparently (or conveniently) “forgot” that while coal takes the most heat for its pollution, the main target of environmental campaigning for 50 years now is the oil industry.

Meanwhile, in Britain, demand for electricity is expected to be so low this weekend that utilities want to reduce the load on the grid, lest an overloaded grid suffers blackouts. So how do they propose to accomplish this load-shedding? You’d think this would be the time for renewable sources to shine, so to speak. But no. The intermittency of renewables destabilize the grid in these circumstances. Heh:

Blackout risk as low demand for power brings plea to switch off wind farms

Britain could be at risk of blackouts as extremely low energy demand threatens to leave the electricity grid overwhelmed by surplus power.

National Grid asked the regulator yesterday for emergency powers to switch off solar and wind farms to prevent the grid from being swamped on the May 8 bank holiday, when demand is expected to be especially low.

In its urgent request to Ofgem, it warned of “a significant risk of disruption to security of supply” if the “last resort” powers to order plant disconnections were not granted.

National Grid has to keep supply and demand balanced to ensure stable voltage and frequency on the network. When there is an imbalance the network can become unstable, leading to blackouts.

In other words, corporate America and corporatist Europe are relearning Milton Friedman’s understanding of “corporate social responsibility”: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business— to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.” Because if you don’t have profits, you can’t hire back a lot of the 30 million Americans who have lost their jobs. Think of it as the economic equivalent of Dr. Johnson’s famous quip about how the prospect of hanging concentrates the mind.

Triumph is a pork processor. Other processing companies up that way have shut down because of infected employees, but my real question is, whether or not, what with the current way pork is processed today, if that is a better solution than making sure the employees on the lines wear proper gear, continued testing is done, and those found infected are sent home on sick leave. I mean, if this was a significant vector, would not we see more cases out in the public?

Initial COVID-19 results in from asymptomatic testing from Buchanan County food plant

JEFFERSON CITY, MO – The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS) partnered with the City of St. Joseph Health Department, Northwest Health Services and Mosaic Life Care to offer COVID-19 testing to all employees at Triumph Foods in St. Joseph.

707 employees, who presented asymptomatically, had samples collected for testing at work on Monday [27 April] .
Results were received today [30 April], and 92 of those are positive for the virus that causes COVID-19.
Additionally, 34 of the plant’s employees had received positive results after being tested prior to this week………….

Approximately 1,500 employees had samples collected for testing on Tuesday and Wednesday, and those results are pending. Employees with positive results are being notified by the City of St. Joseph Health Department. Those with positive results will be told to isolate, and public health professionals will assist these patients with notifications of those determined to be close contacts. Triumph Foods is making notifications to those who have tested negative. All who were tested will be notified with their results by Saturday……….

Nearly 20 Percent Of The U.S. Labor Force Has Filed For Unemployment Since Mid-March

Now in its seventh week, the U.S. unemployment crisis continues to deepen. According to Thursday’s data release from the Department of Labor, 3.8 million more Americans filed for unemployment insurance during the week ending April 25. Although that represents the fourth consecutive week of decline in seasonally adjusted initial claims, the number remains historic. (Remember, no single week prior to March 21 had ever seen even 1 million initial claims since 1967, the earliest year that data is available from the Federal Reserve.) If we add up all of the initial claims filed since the coronavirus recession began,1 more than 30 million people — or nearly 19 percent of the total U.S. labor force — have filed for unemployment claims over the past month and a half.

Experts have all had their eyes trained on initial unemployment claims, both because they tell us about the ongoing scale of the crisis and because they’re one of the rare weekly indicators of the economy at large. Some economists think this weekly trend of massive unemployment numbers includes industries that weren’t hit hard at first but are now beginning to feel the ripple effects of the recession as it spreads through the economy. “Job separations will likely remain high for a while, as softer demand spills over into industries not initially directly affected by shutdowns,” Citigroup economist Andrew Hollenhorst told Reuters. (This is corroborated by sources such as the hiring site Indeed, which has consistently seen 30 to 40 percent fewer jobs posted than the norm since late March.)

Gun sales spike on stimulus check day

NASHVILLE, TN (WSMV) – The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation reported a huge increase in people seeking firearm background check requests on the day the stimulus check arrived.

Last Wednesday, the TBI received 3,917 requests for a firearm background check on the day most people received their stimulus check from the federal government. In comparison, On Wednesday, April 17, 2019, the TBI received just 972 requests.

“We did see a large amount of sales that were not typical for our store this time of the year,” said Art Cason, the general manager of Royal Range USA in Bellevue.

He said they saw a 25% to 30% increase in guns and ammunition sales when the quarantine first started and then another spike when the stimulus check hit people’s accounts.

“The ammunition was a lot like the toilet paper situation at the grocery stores,” said Cason.

Many were clearly first time buyers.

“Some of them had never even shot a gun,” said Cason.

Sen. Kevin Cramer Leads Effort to Protect Firearm Businesses from Loan Discrimination During COVID-19

GOP Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND) is spearheading an effort to ensure that firearm related small businesses do not receive discriminatory treatment from banks, after the Senate passed additional funding to the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Sen. Cramer penned a letter to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and Small Business Administrator Jovita Carranza asking the trio of administration officials, all of whom play a role in the execution of PPP loans, how this type of discrimination would be prevented. A group of GOP senators joined Sen. Cramer in defending the Second Amendment during COVID-19:

Tucker: Trump’s Immigration “Ban” Still Allows Corporations to Import Cheap Foreign Labor

Tucker Carlson warned on his show last night that President Trump’s supposed immigration “ban” is nothing of the kind because it still allows corporations to import cheap foreign labor, failing to protect more than 22 million Americans who have just filed for unemployment.

As we highlighted yesterday, the draft executive order contains broad exemptions for “refugees,” “essential workers” and a number of other categories of people.

That’s a far cry from temporarily suspending all immigration to the United States, as Trump’s initial tweet suggested.

In other words, these crap-for-brains econutz want the world economy to continue going backwards as much as it has so far this year, each year, for at least the next ten years.

The Coronavirus Economy Is a Preview of the Green New Deal Economy

Eric Holthaus, a popular online climate-change activist, points out that the allegedly positive environmental effects of the coronavirus crisis are on “roughly the same pace that the IPCC says we need to sustain every year until 2030 to be on pace to limit global warming to 1.5C and hit the Paris climate goals.”

“We’re doing it. It’s possible!” he adds.

It’s nice to see an environmentalist finally acknowledging the inherent economic tradeoff of their vision. Holthaus is absolutely correct that implementing a plan like the Green New Deal would hold approximately the same gruesome economic consequences as the coronavirus crisis — except, of course, forever. The point of modern environmentalism, as Greta Thunberg has hinted, is the destruction of wealth. This process is what Holthaus, and others, euphemistically call “degrowth.”

Holthaus, who doesn’t celebrate coronavirus, reminds us that merely to keep pace with the IPCC recommendations on carbon emissions, Americans would be compelled to shut down virtually the entire economy. They would need to restrict air travel, place most Americans under virtual house arrest (or raze all the suburbs), halt international and interstate trade, destroy millions of jobs, shut down large swaths of manufacturing, and stop people from using their cars — or buying gas.

How would it work? The only “Green New Deal” that we’ve ever actually seen was authored by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her plan, one supported by the Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden, calls for the banning of all fossil fuels, 99 percent of cars and planes, and meat-eating, among many other nonsensical regulations, within the next decade.

Also, you’d have to compel people to participate. I feel confident that Americans won’t voluntarily relive the 19th century because, whether intuitively or not, they comprehend that by nearly every quantifiable measure their lives are better because of the affordability and reliability of fossil fuels. One day that reality might change. Today is not that day.

It took a deadly worldwide pandemic to get Americans to suspend modernity, so you can assume it would take authoritarian measures to shut down the free movement of people. But Holthaus reminds us that the fight to stop climate change is often about more than separating your plastics and papers or installing some state-subsidized solar panels, it’s about a fundamental, societal economic upheaval that would throw millions into poverty.

Moreover, the Green New Deal would necessitate that capitalistic society be displaced by a technocratic regime that dictates what you consume, sell, drive, eat, and where you work. This, says Holthaus, “is what ‘rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’ looks like.”

Indeed.

Four Southern California Counties Start Declaring Independence From Wuhan Virus and the Governor.

California Governor Gavin Newsom announced Wednesday that his state will be reopened to business activity slowly but that now is not the time.

Still, businesses in four southern California counties have begun declaring independence from the Wuhan virus and from Newsom.

Golf courses in Riverside, Ventura County, will begin allowing golfers to head back out to the course this weekend. Orange County will open golf courses soon. Golfers will play in foursomes and adhere to social distancing. No food will be served on the premises. Ventura County, home to Simi Valley, Oxnard, and Camarillo, has pronounced that gatherings of four or more in one place are illegal. Exercising will be allowed outside, however. Riverside County has ordered golfers to wear face masks. No caddies are allowed and only one person is allowed to be in a golf cart.

Hikers, bikers, horseback riders, and tennis players in Ventura County can resume their activities as long as masks are worn.

Operators of the Mt. Baldy ski resort in San Bernardino County have chosen to reopen, offering probably the last chance to ski before summer sun turns the snow to mush. The resort announced that social distancing measures would be enforced:

Similar to how a golf course operates Mt Baldy will check-in a maximum of 4 individuals at 10 minute intervals. … In stark contrast to a golf course (150 acres), Mt Baldy Resort (800 acres) has more than 4x the area and will be operating at less than 10% of occupancy under this plan.

The ski resort requires face masks to be worn at all times.

Car dealers will be able to sell a car to a single live person in Ventura County as well.

People 75 years old and older are still ordered to stay home in Ventura and “non-essential” travel is forbidden.

We’re still waiting for them to reopen the vast expanse of ocean to surfers and swimmers.

The taste these bureacraps got of nearly unlimited power overrode their mental ethical limitations -if they had any in the first place- and has let the inner dictator hiding just under the surface of their personality come out in all its glory. We should be thankful that this has occurred at at time when we have a president in office more business minded and attuned to the economy (the cure can not be worse then the disease) than political.

CDC Director Lays the Groundwork for Perpetual Lockdowns and Social Distancing and Economic Depression

CDC Director Robert Redfield gave an interview to the Washington Post on the Wuhan virus panic and he made it clear, as have other so-called public health authorities that these people really have no intention of letting us getting back to our lives and they have willing allies in the national media.

Even as states move ahead with plans to reopen their economies, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Tuesday that a second wave of the novel coronavirus will be far more dire because it is likely to coincide with the start of flu season.

“There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through,” CDC Director Robert Redfield said in an interview with The Washington Post. “And when I’ve said this to others, they kind of put their head back, they don’t understand what I mean.”

“We’re going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time,” he said.

Having two simultaneous respiratory outbreaks would put unimaginable strain on the health-care system, he said. The first wave of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has already killed more than 42,000 people across the country. It has overwhelmed hospitals and revealed gaping shortages in test kits, ventilators and protective equipment for health-care workers.

Seasonality, explained: What warm weather could mean for the novel coronavirus
President Trump has said warm weather could slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, but experts explain it’s too early to know if the virus is seasonal. (John Farrell, Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post)
In a wide-ranging interview, Redfield said federal and state officials need to use the coming months to prepare for what lies ahead. As stay-at-home orders are lifted, officials need to stress the continued importance of social distancing, he said. They also need to massively scale up their ability to identify the infected through testing and find everyone they interact with through contact tracing. Doing so prevents new cases from becoming larger outbreaks.

Asked about protests against stay-at-home orders and calls on states to be “liberated” from restrictions, Redfield said: “It’s not helpful.” The president himself has tweeted encouragements of such protests, urging followers to “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” and “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”

First, let’s strip away some of the bullsh** the Washington Post is trying to peddle. Even the worst hit state (at least according to its own numbers which are highly suspect), New York, was never short of hospital beds, respirators, ICU beds, or staff. In fact, the major overflow facilities represented by the hospital ship, USNS Comfort, and the Javits Center have seen only a handful of patients. Across the country, the number of deaths is at record lows. Below is a data table from my post If Wuhan Virus Is So Bad, Why Are Deaths So Low?

CDC Director Lays the Groundwork for Perpetual Lockdowns and Social Distancing and Economic Depression

This is the same data graphed

CDC Director Lays the Groundwork for Perpetual Lockdowns and Social Distancing and Economic Depression

NOTE: the last week’s data from this year drops precipitously because the data were only 58% complete when I downloaded the dataset. The x axis is not labeled because I’m too lazy to manually insert the labels, they are available on the table.

By itself, this is no big deal. There is no human intervention that is going to eradicate the Wuhan virus, it is part of the North American ecosystem forever. Of course, there is going to be a ‘second wave’ and a ‘third wave’ and a ‘fourth wave’ and an ‘nth wave.’ But this statement does not exist in a vacuum. Let’ go back a couple of days to an interview given by Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Center for Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the key architects of the national response to the Wuhan virus (read Dr. Fauci Decides He Is Galactic Commander and Warns That Protests Will Delay Reopening the Country). In that post, I cover his statements to the effect than an early opening would create a larger ‘second wave.’ But there are two other equally important points. First, the tests being bought from all sources, like the 500,000 my own RINO governor purchased from South Korea, aren’t terribly reliable. As the entire strategy for opening the country is predicated on widespread testing, this seems important. The other point was that there is no evidence that having had and survived Wuhan (which is probably something that 99+% of the people with it do) gives you any immunity. That is entirely consistent with the finding of more than 30 mutations of Wuhan virus, the corollary to that being that there will be no vaccine for this virus.

So, no immunity and no vaccine. What does that mean? It means the people who foisted this disaster upon us are going to try to make us go through lockdown and ‘social distancing’ and all that other crap again in November and again in March. Forever. They have to push for that because if there is a ‘second wave,’ which there will be, and we don’t shutdown again, then they are going to have to answer some very tough questions as to why we did it this time. And they don’t have any answer to that……..

More and more people are getting the cluebat upside the head informing them about globalism and the fragility of the international supply chain.

Donald Trump: Coronavirus Exposed Dangers of Supply Chains Dependent on China

President Donald Trump said Saturday the biggest lesson of the coronavirus crisis was that the United States should not rely on China for their supply chains.

“We’ve learned a lot about supply chains,” Trump said. “We’ve learned that it’s nice to make things in the U.S., I’ve been saying that for a long time.”……

 

 

North Dakota Governor Issues Guidelines to Reopen State May 1: Statement

NEW YORK (Reuters) — North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum issued guidelines for reopening the state as soon as May 1 in a statement issued late Wednesday, according to a statement from his office.

Ohio Governor Announces Economic Reopening Starting May 1

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine was one of the first governors to start closing down his state when the coronavirus hit, but now he’s offering one of the first economic reopenings in the nation.

 

Neumeyer: “This is the Perfect Storm! Governments Have Put Themselves Into a Corner”

Keith Neumeyer recently sat down for an interview with Crush the Street and made it clear that mints are being overwhelmed by the demand for silver. Neumeyer also opined on the government’s response to the pandemic saying “governments can’t keep businesses closed.”

And we’d agree with him. At some point, even if restrictions are never lifted, people will leave their homes to look for work. Humans cannot be locked up house arrest for much longer, and have already been asked to endure too much. Neumeyer said “already they [the government] are destroying small businesses…” and “governments can’t prevent everyone from going bankrupt.”

Unfortunately, the big corporations will be fine and come out even bigger as the small businesses go under and are no longer able to stay in business. This is crony corporatism at it’s finest. Neumeyer says the government has overreacted and caused massive damage that cannot be undone.

Albuquerque gun shop plans to defy governor’s order and reopen

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.- A gun shop in Albuquerque plans to reopen despite a Public Health Order from the governor that says non-essential businesses must close through April 30.

Louie Sanchez, owner of Calibers, said the order is an over-reach by the governor.

“So, we at Calibers have decided that we are going to open up with social distancing on our range,” Sanchez said. “And you know what, we’re going to take this fight back to her. We feel that unless, somehow, she got a magical power to take the Second Amendment out of our constitution, that we have the right to open up.”

Several groups, including the NRA, are suing the state over the Public Health Order-– claiming it’s a violation of the Second Amendment.

The lawsuit states, “Uncertain times are precisely when fundamental rights — like the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense — must be protected.”

Sanchez claims his business helps keep the community safe.

“We are indeed doing education courses, just one person, one trainer at six feet social distancing,” he said. “And we’re allowing for military and law enforcement to utilize our ranges.”

A spokesperson for the governor said Calibers’ gun range is only allowed to stay open for law enforcement– and by appointment only.

The governor’s office released the following statement in response to Calibers: [emphasis mine]

The state has taken and will continue to take an extremely broad view of what is considered non-essential to public health amid this pandemic. Gun stores are hardly the only entity having to adapt as we work to stem illnesses and prevent deaths. No one is happy about closing in-person business in our state – no one, including the governor. But it is inarguable that the only way we get through this pandemic with the fewest number of deaths that we can manage is to limit travel outside of the home to the greatest extent possible – and while we as an administration unequivocally support the constitutional right to purchase a firearm, we recognize that right does not correspond to a right to congregate in a store and infect neighbors and workers and public safety officers amid an unprecedented global pandemic.?“ Nora Meyers Sackett, spokesperson for Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham