Canadian farmer forced to Dump 30,000 Liters of Milk—as Dairy Prices Surge
Milk at $7 a litre! It's $2 a litre in Australia. In Canada's punishing climate, dairy farming is difficult and costly so the price has to be kept up to give Canadian farmers a return commensurate with their costs. Canada must produce its own milk, apparently
The alternative, getting most of their milk from those two big countries to their South, is apparently not on. That would be free trade, which is un-Canadian. You could probably even ship milk up from Australia's contented cows for less than $7 a litre
In a video shared on TikTok by Travis Huigen, Ontario dairy farmer Jerry Huigen says he’s heartbroken to dump 30,000 liters of milk amid surging dairy prices.
“Right now we are over our quotum, um, it’s regulated by the government and by the DFO (Dairy Farmers of Ontario),” says Huigen, as he stands beside a machine spewing fresh milk into a drain. “Look at this milk running away. Cause it’s the end of the month. I dump thirty thousand liters of milk, and it breaks my heart.”
Huigen says people ask him why milk prices are so high.
“This here Canadian milk is seven dollars a liter. When I go for my haircut people say, ‘Wow, seven dollars Jerry, for a little bit of milk,” he says, as he fills a glass of the milk being dumped and drinks. “I say well, you have to go higher up. Cause we have no say anymore, as a dairy farmer on our own farm. They make us dump it.”
The (Old) Folly of Destroying Food
Before you chalk the milk dumping up to those crazy Canadians, it should be pointed out that milk dumping is also quite common in the United States (though for different reasons).
During the early stages of the pandemic, FEE wrote about farmers dumping millions of gallons of milk even as prices for dairy products were increasing. Nor was this some kind of pandemic quirk. It’s been going on for years.
“More than 43 million gallons’ worth of milk were dumped in fields, manure lagoons or animal feed, or have been lost on truck routes or discarded at plants in the first eight months of [the year], according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture,” the Wall Street Journal reported in 2016.
The reasons are different in Canada than the United States, but they both stem from the highly-regulated nature of the marketplace.
In the United States, the primary regulations are high-level price-fixing, bans on selling unpasteurized milk (which means farmers have to dump their product if dairy processors don’t buy it), and “price gouging” laws that prevent retailers from increasing prices when demand is low, which incentivizes hoarding.
In Canada, the regulations are even worse.
While the price-fixing scheme for milk in the US is incredibly complicated and leaves much to be desired—there’s an old industry adage that says “only five people in the world know how milk is priced in the US and four of them are dead”—in Canada the price is determined by a single bureaucracy: the Canadian Dairy Commission.
The Ottawa-based commission (technically a “Government of Canada Crown Corporation”), which oversees Canada’s entire dairy system (known as Supply Management), raised prices three times in 2022, citing “the rising cost of production.”
Food price inflation remains a serious issue in Canada, but the problem is particularly acute in regards to dairy products, which has seen their annual inflation rate triple over the past year, to almost 12 percent.
One needn’t have a PhD in economics to see why prices in Canada are surging. Ordering farmers to destroy tens of thousands of liters of perfectly good milk is hardly a solution to rising prices. The same goes for production quotas.
Canada’s milk dumping spectacle calls to mind FDR’s New Deal debacles, including the “1933 Emergency Hog Slaughter,” which saw American farmers ordered to destroy their own pigs in an attempt to raise the price of hogs.
Under the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), the federal government levied new taxes on the agricultural sector and used the funds to oversee the wholesale destruction of cattle and crops.
“Federal agents oversaw the ugly spectacle of perfectly good fields of cotton, wheat, and corn being plowed under. Healthy cattle, sheep, and pigs by the millions were slaughtered and buried in mass graves,” explained FEE President Emeritus Lawrence Reed.
This destruction took place, mind you, during the worst food crisis in American history.
‘This Time I’m Going Public’
This might seem like economic madness—and it is. So why does it persist?
One reason is old-fashioned protectionism. High tariffs protect producers from competition, and the quotas that cap production also are designed to keep out new dairy producers. This keeps prices high, which is supposed to make farmers happy; it also pleases the government, which makes revenue from the tariffs.
It’s lousy for consumers, of course, and as Huigen’s milk dumping episode shows, even the farmers who benefit by the protection have grown angry with quotas that prevent them from producing more milk (which would have the dual benefit of earning farmers more profit and lowering milk prices for consumers).
Another reason is that very few people—Canadians or Americans— realize the milk dumping is happening and the production quotas exist. It’s a very opaque process, but Jerry Huigen is trying to change that.
“This time I’m going public,” Huigen says in his video. “I want the people to see the pain that us growers have…our little bit of profit goes down the drain.”
Hopefully people take notice and begin to realize that functioning markets are the real solution to rising prices, not government production quotas and price-fixing.
That would ease not just Jerry Huigen’s pain, but the pain of consumers as well.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2023/02/07/farmer-dump-milk-canadian/
**************************************************************A Midsummer Night's Dream goes woke: Globe puts 'misogyny and racism' warning on Shakepeare classic
For the past 400 years, it has been performed countless times, particularly at the Globe. But now the historic theatre has given Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream a ‘misogyny and racism’ warning.
The comedy, telling the tale of four rebellious lovers who get lost in a magical forest, is set to run from April as part of the venue’s summer programme.
But when theatregoers buy a ticket on the Globe’s website they are now confronted with a trigger warning for potentially sensitive themes in the 1590s play.
The website’s warning reads: ‘Content guidance: The play contains language of violence, sexual references, misogyny and racism.’ The online guidance ends with a plea to those concerned about its themes to contact the ticketing team for further details on the play’s content.
The venue is a replica of the original Globe theatre, where Shakespeare’s plays were first seen, so is closely associated with the Bard.
A spokesman for the Globe told the Daily Telegraph: ‘Content guidance is written in advance of the creation of each production and based on what is present in the play. These will be updated as the production comes to life.’
The website’s warning comes after education experts at the theatre, which has links to Shakespeare, who intend to ‘decolonise’ Shakespeare’s work, also attacked the play for its misogyny.
A major comic plot line is King Oberon giving a love potion to Queen Titania so she falls for the ass-headed character Bottom.
But academics have claimed this is troubling because Titania is drugged, so she cannot consent.
Hailey Bachrach, the founder of the education project Shakespeare and Consent, said that this kind of plotline can ‘make Shakespeare problematic’.
Another ‘problematic’ plot line is Hermia fleeing Athens because she must choose between marrying against her will, or being executed or placed in a convent. Some academics say Shakespeare creates a ‘dark/light binary’ which casts dark or black as negative and white or fair as positive.
The Globe has sought to address the more troubling aspects of Shakespeare’s work with its Anti-Racist Shakespeare seminars.
In these seminars education experts have said the Bard’s language was ‘racialising’. For example, the first line of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is said to set out the racial divide clearly straight away: ‘Now, fair Hippolyta.’
Unlike Othello, which features a key non-white character, the play is not typically viewed as a ‘race play’ but experts believe racial slurs lie in the insults used by the play’s characters.
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Dying to Escape Socialism
“At least five people have been confirmed dead and five others are missing after a makeshift raft smuggling migrants from Cuba sank off the Florida coast,” reported the Daily Mail last week. “The U.S. Coast rescued nine migrants and recovered one body after the boat capsized Saturday about 50 miles off the shores of Little Torch Key, an island in the Florida Keys. The U.S. Coast Guard's 7th District said that at least 19 people were in the vessel and four drowned immediately after the boat capsized.”
Any cursory review of recent news will turn up numerous headlines like the one above. And yet:
“People enjoy life in Cuba like in few other places. They’re safe, literate and healthy!” Time magazine crowed in their World’s Greatest Places Issue, from March, 2015.
And back in 2011 Newsweek magazine hailed Cuba among “The Best Countries in the World,” in terms of quality of life. “Cuba outdoes its fellow middle-income countries in quality of life,” explained the 1993 “National Magazine Award for General Excellence” winner.
“Fidel Castro first and foremost is and always has been a committed egalitarian. He wanted a system that provided the basic needs to all… Cuba has superb systems of health care and universal education…We greeted each other as old friends.” (Former President of the United States and official "Elder Statesman” of the Democrat Party.)
"A simple way to take measure of a country is to look at how many want in... And how many want out," famously quipped Tony Blair. Well, prior to the Castro brothers’ and Che Guevara’s Stalinist coup in 1959, Cuba took in more immigrants (primarily from Europe) as a percentage of population than did the U.S., including the Ellis Island years. In the 1950s, when Cubans were perfectly free to emigrate with all their property and U.S. visas were issued to them for the asking, fewer Cubans lived in the U.S. than Americans lived in Cuba.
You’d never guess this from the Fake News media, Hollywood, or your professors, but in 1953 more Cubans vacationed in the U.S. (and voluntarily returned to Cuba) than Americans in Cuba. Yes, for pre-Castro Cubans the U.S. was a “tourist playground.”
“What?” you say. But you’ve always heard that it was the other way around? That Cuba was a tourist playground for Americans? Indeed it was—but the tourist traffic went both ways, as befit a nation described by a 1957 UNESCO report thusly: "One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class.” So check it out here—and please click links for thorough documentation.
Given their record, a few such statements are probably out there, but I never heard a liberal crowing about the superb quality of life in East Germany, with “its free healthcare, education…blah, blah.” And yet over 10 times as many people (and counting) have died attempting to flee Communist Cuba (which liberals routinely praise) than died trying to flee Communist East Germany.
In fact, when liberals hail the Castros and Che Guevara’s communism as somehow “different” from typical Iron Curtain communism they have a point:
It’s WORSE!
Between two and three hundred people died trying to breach the Berlin Wall. Between twenty five and forty thousand people (men, women, and children, entire families at a time) have died trying to escape Castro and Che Guevara’s Cuba.
In 1992, former East German dictator Erich Honecker was tried (to no avail) for the deaths of 192 Germans killed while attempting to cross the Berlin wall. Some human rights groups estimate that actually three hundred people (out of an average East German population over the decades of 18 million) died trying to breach the Berlin Wall or otherwise escape East Germany.
After the thousands of many machine-gun blasts from their Frontier “Guards,” (the Berlin Wall itself was officially titled the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart") kept disturbing Castro and Che’s coastal subjects, the Castro brothers hit upon the scheme of having the Soviet helicopters flown by their “Guards” to hover over the escaping freedom-seekers, often consisting of entire families—but to hold-off on shooting.
Instead of machine-gunning the families to death as years of tradition called for, they switched to dropping sandbags onto the rickety rafts and tiny boats to demolish and sink them. Then the Tiger Sharks and Hammerheads could do the Castroites' deputy-work. Screams, groans and gurgles, after all, don’t carry nearly as far as machine-gun blasts.
"The best revolutionary German man I've ever known was Erich Honecker,” said Fidel Castro on June 1th 2012 commemorating the 18th anniversary of the East German Stalinist’s death. “I maintain feelings of profound solidarity with Honecker."
“What a chump!” Castro was probably thinking. “A measly 192?”
“In one week during 1962 we counted over 400 firing squad blasts from the execution yard below our cells," recalled former Cuban political prisoner and freedom-fighter Roberto Martin Perez to this writer.
"This is the most savage kind of behavior I've ever heard of," said Robert Gelbard, deputy assistant secretary of state for Latin America during the Clinton administration. "This is even worse than what happened at the Berlin Wall!" Gelbard had watched desperate Cubans trying to swim to our Guantanamo Base when machine-guns opened up and the water around them frothed in white, then red.
The corpses were retrieved by gallant Cuban Frontier “Guards” in a boat using the same type of gaffing hooks the lucky contestants in the Castro-regime-sponsored “Hemingway Fishing Festival” were using in nearby waters to yank thrashing Tuna and Marlin aboard their Cuba-registered yachts.
In September 2011, Spanish medical examiners found that an airline stowaway from Cuba named Adonis G.B. had his throat crushed. He probably died upon takeoff, meaning he probably died more quickly and painlessly than the many others who perished escaping Cuba’s free and fabulous healthcare.
It was a different story for the tens of thousands of dead Cuban rafters. Most of these desperate rafters probably died like captives of the Apaches, staked in the sun and dying slowly of sunburn and thirst. Others perished gasping and choking after their arms and legs finally gave out and they gulped that last lungful of seawater, much like the crew in The Perfect Storm. Still others were eaten alive—drawn and quartered by the serrated teeth of Hammerheads and Tiger sharks much like Captain Quint in Jaws. Perhaps these last perished the most mercifully. As we've all seen on the Discovery Channel, sharks don't dally at a meal.
"In space no one can hear you scream," says the ad for the original Alien. Same for the middle of the Florida straits—except, of course, for your raft-mates. While clinging to the disintegrating raft, while watching the fins rushing in and water turn red—they hear the screams all too clearly.
All during the decades coinciding with Castroite Cuban rule, the Coast Guard has documented hundreds of such stories. Were the cause of these horrors more politically-correct we'd have no end of books, movies, documentaries, TV interviews, Survival-Story specials, etc.. We'd never hear the end of it. Alas, the agents of this Caribbean holocaust consist of the Left's premier pin-up boys.
https://townhall.com/columnists/humbertofontova/2023/02/04/dying-to-escape-socialism-n2619119
*********************************************************Must not praise Cardinal Pell
A great Australian and a true man of God
An associate professor of criminal justice says he was subjected to “abuse and vitriol” and cast aside from a victim support service after a personal social media post was viewed as being supportive of Cardinal George Pell.
Terry Goldsworthy, a Bond University academic whose fields of expertise include miscarriages of justice, has hit out at the stifling of freedom of speech and the “shutting down of public debate on contentious issues”.
He says it’s just the latest instance in which he has been targeted for voicing an opinion, and warns future generations are at risk of being denied fearless, independent views that run counter to those of “the baying mob”.
Dr Goldsworthy’s post on LinkedIn stated that anyone who studied miscarriages of justice should examine Pell’s case “to see how we can improve the criminal justice system”.
The former Queensland Police Service detective inspector included in the post a link to the High Court’s unanimous judgment quashing Pell’s child sexual abuse convictions.
“Vale Cardinal George Pell,” Dr Goldsworthy wrote in his post.
“His pursuit by the Victorian police on historical child abuse charges highlighted how poorly our justice system performs in certain cases where emotions run high. To quote the High Court of Australia, who overturned his convictions 7-0, there was, consistently … ‘a significant possibility that an innocent person has been convicted because the evidence did not establish guilt to the requisite standard of proof’.”
The post ended with a series of hashtags including #crime #justice #miscarriageofjustice and #wrongfulconviction. Dr Goldsworthy said a high-profile person, whom he declined to name, attacked him online in response.
He was also told his post did not align with the values of the victim support service he has helped for the past decade. The issue was due to be raised by the support service at a meeting in his absence, so he resigned as a committee member out of principle.
Pell, who died in Rome in January at the age of 81 after complications from hip surgery, spent 404 days in custody on charges of assaulting two teenage choirboys in the late 1990s when he was archbishop of Melbourne. He constantly maintained his innocence and was acquitted by the nation’s highest court in 2020.
At his funeral last week, he was described by former prime minister Tony Abbott as “the greatest man I’ve ever known” and a scapegoat for the Catholic Church, while protesters clashed with worshippers outside.
Dr Goldsworthy said he commented on Pell “as an aside” as someone who taught in the area of criminal justice. “I thought it was pertinent. It just struck me that there was a real intolerance around dealing with factual debates.
“The High Court ruled 7-0 in this case, and identified that it had been problematic. Yet there seem to be topics now where you can’t point to those facts, or if you do, you’re shouted down. In my field of criminal justice, there’s a number of contentious issues now where if you try to argue one point of the argument there’s almost this demand that you cease.
“People engage in personal attacks, rather than engaging in critical inquiry looking at the scholarly or scientific evidence you’re putting forward, and allowing some kind of public discourse to take place without fear or favour.”
Writing in The Australian, Dr Goldsworthy says that as a Catholic he is reminded in the Pell debate of the denial of Jesus by his disciple Peter.
“The message here is that you must stand by your convictions and beliefs, to fail to do so is a betrayal of the contest of ideas and a surrender to the absolutism of populist narratives where only one viewpoint is acceptable.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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