All news is bad news for Class III milk futures.  The loss for August was $1.08 per cwt this week, though blocks gained eight cents and barrels gained five cents per lb.  August Class III was $22.42 on Friday, off of a $25.05 high on June 9 and equal to where it was on March 1. 

Butter landed at $3.01 per lb., a level last seen dang near seven years ago and a gain of 10 cents for the week’s trade in Chicago.  Class IV futures, however, gained only 14 cents this week, and ended Friday at $24.85 per cwt.  For reference, August Class IV was $26.11 on June 6 and Friday’s price was equal to the March 6 Class IV August price.  August Class IV futures were under $24 for two weeks during May.  Markets are funny that way.

I wear a ring that was created from a soup spoon used in the Court of King George III of England.  He spent most of his 60 years on the throne at war, acquiring colonies and kingdoms, including parts of the Americas subsequently lost in the American War for Independence, which went on for eight years beginning in 1775.  France helped us out in that conflict as revenge against the United Kingdom for earlier battles and losses.   We reciprocated by rescuing the French from the Germans not once, but twice 150 years later. 

We’re celebrating Independence Day, where the Second Continental Congress declared that the Thirteen Colonies were no longer subject (and subordinate) to the monarch of Britain, King George III, and were now united, free and independent states.  

Note this was a just a declaration, and warfare eventually won our actual independence 37 years later in 1812.  The significant act here is in the audacity of a bunch of men declaring independence from the Crown in 1776, when two-thirds of their fellow country men and women were either indifferent to independence or preferred ongoing rule by a King, or even a Queen. 

A fair number of those loyalists took up residence in Quebec, and both the Colonies and King recruited native Indians to wage battle alongside either the British redcoats or the Colonial odds and ends.  This was a Davey and Goliath conflict by any measure, and a strange one, much like every revolution in history, particularly when war and independence had an ecclesiastical or theological component, real or imagined.

A fair number – most, actually - in the Americas had left their native land either wanting intellectual and spiritual freedom, or they just had no economic hope and no financial prospects in their homeland.  As such, many of us descend from the economic and social trash of other nations and from citizens defiant of authority in their church or kingdom.  This mangled mess of culture declared their independence from the Crown and eventually won it, though we had help along the way. 

The United States then, less than a century later fought north against south for control of river transportation, then joined forces twice to defeat German aggression during the last century, later ending the old Soviet Union in 1991. 

That’s a substantial, historically unparalleled, moral and ethical record for a relatively short 250 years as one nation.  While our history is littered with both iniquity and inequity, it was much less than by but a few, if any, other states or nations in history. 

All of this was descended from and by some free thinkers, poor, non-conformist immigrants - including a host of criminals, thieves and whores - landed from an old country on to a new world of danger and opportunity.