The futures were down hard today, which is totally meaningless of course.  Up, down, meaningless distraction.  Let's do some comparative arithmetic, shall we?

Ericson, Saturday last:

SELL 1250# fat heifers out of the yard @ $83.50

BUY 1046# top-quality heifers at Ericson @ $81.00

Return on the gain = $0.96 per pound

Profit per head with an $0.85 cost of gain = $22.44

So, there are solidly profitable top-quality cattle trading at Ericson.  How about that?

BUT, there are also solidly UNprofitable cattle for unskilled feedlots to purchase:

SELL 1250# fat heifers out of the yard at $83.50

BUY 683# top-quality heifers at Ericson @ $97.00

Return on the Gain = $0.67 per pound

LOSS per head with a $0.78 cost of gain = ($62.37)

Okay, kids, we're looking at an $85 per head P&L swing here, and I dropped the six-weight's cost of gain to $0.78.  We either CHOOSE to make money, or we CHOOSE to lose money.  It's all about personal responsibility.  If a young person in the inner-city drops out of school, never learns to read or write and spends all of his time watching MTV and listening to rap music, no one is shocked when he spends his life living in poverty and squalor - because that is the life that he chose.  Believe it or not, the mainstream cattle industry is exactly the same as that illiterate kid watching MTV and listening to rap music.  We are functionally incompetent, and instead of doing something about it, we just wallow in the highly disordered "culture" - 'cause you gotta fit in with your homies.

Whatever.

By the way, Al Gore's global warming "hockey stick" chart has been exposed as a complete fraud.  It turns out that Gore and his lackeys cherry-picked tree ring data only from years where there was an increase in temperature - and discarded most of the data set.  Scientists in Britain have found the complete data set, and it actually extrapolates a downward trend in temperatures.  Click the link below to read the full story.  And remember one of the points of my little creed:  Global warming is a complete fraud designed to advance the cause of socialism and enslave humanity.  Socialism reduces human beings to units of economic value and enslaves them to a ruling elite.  In case you're still fuzzy on this, the members of the aspiring "ruling elite" are:  Barack Obama, Al Gore, George Soros, David Axelrod, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Rahm Emanuel, Ezekiel Emanuel, Valerie Jarret, Bill Ayres, Bernadine Dohrn, Cass Sunstein, John Holdren, Jeremiah Wright, Barney Frank . . . .

Now sleep tight, my fellow meaningless and disposable unit of economic value.  You're infinitely precious in God's eyes, and that's all that matters. 

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100011716/how-the-global-warming-industry-is-based-on-one-massive-lie/comment-page-3/#comment-100046900

Forecasters are killing the North American Cattle Industry.
"Global warming" is a complete fraud designed to advance the cause of socialism and enslave humanity.
Abortion is the murder of an innocent human being and is never justified under any circumstance whatsoever.
Every human being is a question, to which the ONLY answer is Jesus Christ.