Jordan Peterson seeks 'emergency' drug detox treatment in Russia
Controversial U of T psychologist and author stable after four weeks in
intensive care, says daughter

Jordan Peterson's family says he has sought "emergency" drug detox
treatment in Russia, after several failed attempts to overcome his
dependence on a potent anti-anxiety medication.

The controversial University of Toronto psychology professor and
internationally famous self-help guru is said to have been in a Moscow
hospital for the past month, recovering from both the "incredibly
gruelling" treatment and a severe case of pneumonia.

"He's had to spend four weeks in the ICU in terrible shape, but, with the
help of some extremely competent and courageous doctors, he survived," his
daughter Mikhaila Peterson said in an online video, posted Friday evening.
"The uncertainty around his recovery has been one of the most difficult and
scary experiences we've ever had."

The 57-year-old professor has been out of the public eye since September,
when it was first disclosed by his daughter that he was seeking treatment
for his dependence on clonazepam, a benzodiazepine tranquilizer that is
often prescribed to patients with panic issues.

His family says he had been taking the drug for years to mitigate lingering
anxiety following a severe autoimmune reaction to food. His dependence
reportedly started last spring after doctors increased his dosage to help
him cope with stress as his wife Tammy battled kidney cancer.

Minnesota conservatives have been issuing warnings about fallout from the DFL trifecta’s unabashedly progressive policy agenda in St. Paul this session.

One argument that’s come up repeatedly: DFL-favored policies, specifically ones involving taxation, are going to drive people away from the state.

“Is the DFL trying to chase people out of Minnesota?” asked economist John Phelan of the Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank, in an op-ed earlier this year.

Farmington Rep. Pat Garofalo struck a similar note recently, focusing on the flow of wealth rather than people: “Democrats are driving Minnesota into the same economic cesspool as Illinois and New York,” he said on Twitter. “In just 12 months, over $1.5 billion in adjusted gross income fled Minnesota to other states.”

This is a central argument of the legislative session: Democrats are betting that their support of education, child care and a stronger safety net, transit, housing, parks, legal marijuana and protection of LGBTQ people and abortion rights will entice people to move to the North Star State while keeping Minnesotans here.

Republicans say these policies — paid for with higher taxes and increased regulatory compliance costs — will drive people away and scare businesses into moving or declining to come here.

Phelan, Garofalo and others making similar arguments are correct about the numbers: Minnesota has been losing both people and dollars to other states in recent years, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service.

But the net change in any given year is small, representing just a fraction of a percent of the total population. Moreover, the factors driving those migration decisions tend to be a lot more complicated than political soundbites can capture.

Let’s start with the raw numbers: Between 2021 and 2022, according to Census data, Minnesota lost about 19,400 people to other states. That’s not necessarily unusual, as Minnesota has consistently lost thousands of people to other states nearly every year since the turn of the millennium. But the 2022 figure stands out for being the biggest single-year loss in at least three decades.

Back in the 90s, on the other hand, Minnesota was actually gaining population from other places in the U.S.

Still, there’s no denying the trend is downward over the past few years, enough so that Gov. Tim Walz has been publicly fretting over how to draw in workers from other states. “I’m going to run ads in Florida for teachers,” he recently told the Star-Tribune. “Come here! Yeah, it’s a little colder, but we’ll let you teach.”

On the other hand, Minnesota is hardly alone in experiencing a net loss to other states. The Census data show that most Midwestern states have lost population due to domestic migration since 2020. Of the four states bordering Minnesota – Wisconsin, Iowa and the Dakotas – only South Dakota has brought in more people from other states than it lost since 2020.

Looking at 2022 data and adjusting for total population, Minnesota is in the lower middle of the pack of U.S. states when it comes to migration gains and losses. Those percentages hint at something that’s often overlooked in these discussions: a loss of 19,400 people amounts to just 0.4% of the state’s total population of 5.7 million. Some other states, like New York, Illinois, and Louisiana, are losing a full percentage point of population or more to other locales each year.

We’re lower than where economic boosters would like us to be, perhaps, but not necessarily on the precipice of demographic disaster.

https://minnesotareformer.com/2023/05/15/are-minnesotans-really-fleeing-to-low-tax-states/

That's just what the USDA has reimbursed the state's poultry and egg producers so far.

By Brooks Johnson and

Christopher Vondracek

January 9, 2024 at 10:03AM

Minnesota poultry and egg producers have received more than $135 million in federal payments to offset bird flu losses since 2022. (Dreamstime, TNS - TNS/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

The federal government has paid Minnesota egg and poultry producers more than $135 million to offset losses caused by the worst avian influenza outbreak in U.S. history.

The indemnity payments are meant to compensate for the birds that had to be culled after the virus was detected in flocks. Since 2022, Minnesota has lost 6.3 million birds, mostly commercial turkeys, to bird flu.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, created to protect the food supply and rural livelihoods, uses the indemnity program to essentially insure against calamity. USDA also pays for depopulation, disposal, contaminated materials and some other costs incurred as a result of outbreaks.

Nationwide, the agency has paid poultry farmers and companies at least $660 million in bird flu indemnity payments since the outbreak began in 2022, according to a federal contracts database. More than 79 million birds have died.

A full accounting of the economic impact from the ongoing bird flu outbreak is not yet available. The federal government spent nearly $1 billion nationally responding to the last large-scale outbreak in 2015, according to the USDA, which reported an additional $1.3 billion in lost export revenue.

The virus, officially known as highly pathogenic avian influenza, or HPAI, does not pose a threat to food safety, health officials say.

Ashley Kohls, executive director of the Minnesota Turkey Growers Association, said farmers would much rather raise healthy birds than receive government checks. But current USDA policy dictates their approach to disease mitigation.

"Minnesota's turkey farmers do everything they can to protect their birds," Kohls said in an email. "As with any other instance in which the government takes or orders the destruction of an individual's property, the government reimburses the owner for the losses."

Federal regulations require poultry operations to cull their flocks when avian influenza is detected. The indemnity payments are meant "to encourage prompt reporting of certain high-consequence livestock and poultry diseases and to incentivize private biosecurity investment, not to secure or protect producers from all consequences of disease," according to the USDA.

More than 350 Minnesota farmers have relied on the indemnity program as they've faced catastrophic losses in their flocks. A majority of the relief — $79 million — was paid to Jennie-O Turkey Store producers across 19 Minnesota counties. Jennie-O, a subsidiary of Hormel Foods, is the second-largest turkey company in the country.

Other Minnesota companies to receive more than $1 million in payments include turkey breeder Select Genetics; Howard Lake-based egg operation Forsman Farms; Sparboe, a Litchfield-based egg producer; and Michael Foods, a Hopkins-based egg processor and subsidiary of Post Holdings.

The payments don't include anticipated lost income or losses due to business interruptions and are based on the market value of the birds that had to be killed, according to the USDA. Michael Foods said it used payments to repopulate affected farms.

"Indemnity payments do not make farmers whole, rather it prevents them from going out of business during a foreign animal disease event," Kohls said.

In May 2022, as bird deaths mounted, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the second-highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate agriculture committee, sent a letter with Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley calling on Congress to make funding the USDA avian health program a "high priority."

"The outbreak of avian influenza was devastating to Minnesota's poultry growers," Klobuchar said in a statement Monday.

Bird flu is typically spread by migratory waterfowl like geese and ducks that visit or leave droppings on poultry farms. Minnesota, the nation's leading turkey producer, is in a major migratory corridor.

Iowa, a major egg producer, has also been hit hard by the outbreak and leads the nation in bird flu deaths with 18.8 million. Producers in the state have received at least $79 million in indemnity payments, according to federal data.

Rembrandt Enterprises received more than $27 million in federal indemnity payments for bird flu losses at its egg facilities in Iowa. The company is owned by Minnesota billionaire and Star Tribune owner Glen Taylor.

https://www.startribune.com/bird-flu-135-million-in-minnesota-turkeys-chickens-cullings-government-payments/600333529

Minnesota has 146 fewer dairy farmer permits this Christmas than at the beginning of the year, according to the state Department of Agriculture. (David Joles, Star Tribune file/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Minnesota lost 58 dairy farm permits in November, a devastating blow to a farm sector already drained by contraction.

"We have some seasonality to this. In October, November and December, you'll always see some herds go," Lucas Sjostrom, executive director of the Minnesota Milk Producers Association, said. "But I have not seen [a monthly declines in permits] over 50 for a long time."

The end of the year is typically a time to see more farmers opt out of milking cows, either permanently or temporarily, as producers put up silage or feed for the coming year.

But Sjostrom says last month's numbers underscore the razor-thin financial margins for dairy farmers under a crush of economic pressures, such as high input costs and low commodity values, just a year after dairy enjoyed higher prices for milk, cheese and butter in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Sjostrom said at least farmers aren't going bankrupt. He credited safety-net programs such as Minnesota's Dairy Assistance, Investment and Relief Initiative for aiding producers during crashes in milk prices.

"I would guess Minnesota has, due to that program, the least amount of unplanned exits," Sjostrom said.

In sum, Minnesota has 146 fewer dairy farmer permits this Christmas than the state did at the beginning of the year, according to the Minnesota Department of Agriculture.

Overall, the state had a total of 1,825 permits as of Dec. 1, according to MDA. A decade ago, the state counted over 4,000 dairy farms.

The largest losses this year were in central Minnesota's dairy heartland. Stearns and Morrison counties saw 27 and 21 fewer permits in December than in January, respectively.

Counties in southeastern Minnesota's dairy belt — Fillmore (nine), Goodhue (six) and Houston (five) — also saw significant losses. A few counties in Minnesota saw small increases in the number of dairy permits, including Becker (two) and Aitkin, Winona and Swift (one).

The bitter news follows a year of bottoming-out commodity prices on milk and cheese. The U.S. also lost, on appeal, a challenge to Canada's dairy program before an international arbitration board that would've opened up a new market for Minnesota dairy manufacturers and farmers.

Farmers left wondering why they were denied federal conservation grants
Last month, a dispute settlement panel under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the replacement to NAFTA, ruled 2 to 1 in favor of Canada's milk program, which curtails imports through a tariff quota system and is largely viewed as protectionist.

"It's a market that should be there, but it isn't," said Alan Bjerga, a spokesman for the National Milk Producers Federation, which represents many of the nation's dairy cooperatives. "It's safe to say U.S. dairy producers did not get the quota that they thought they were promised under USMCA."

The news wasn't all dour for dairy. The downward trend in fluid milk consumption over the last year was outpaced by faster declines in dairy alternatives such as oat milk. Meanwhile, before leaving for the holidays, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to return whole milk to American schools.

Kathy wrote:

> Jordan Peterson

First post, in here, "Kathy"?

You're pretty stupid if you think that anyone is going to believe
anything posted by some anonymous nym-shifting coward like yourself.

--
"Oh, look: a claim from chrisv that there's only 500 supercomputers
in the world." - lying asshole "-hh", lying shamelessly