Oh so it was Biden who axed the programs that monitor the spread of the screw worm fly got it got it got it
The vast majority of cattle ranchers voted for the MAGA shitheads. I have sympathy for the cattle suffering from the screwworm and wish they could stampede the shit out of the ranchers.
Pretty sure its just family and local ranchers getting fucked. Isnt this just the same as Walmart taking advantage of every economic downturn to kill competition or buy them out?
The Republicans are selling everything that’s not nailed down and crashing the US Economy. They could care less about worms and land or whatever.
even getting screwed over they stll believed he will bail them out.
“I wonder who put that dick up my ass” -Conservatives/republicans after getting fucked by their own administration
If you’re in the states and you’re worth less than 50 million, we will all be living in third world poverty, too soon.
I think Trump will create the worlds best third world country. They’ll all be talking about how good a job he did. It’ll be the thirdliest third world country ever.
“And trust me, I know third world countries! I have a cousin who’s an expert in third world countries and let me tell you, he says no one knows third world countries better than me.”
Well it might reach unprecedented levels of income equality, I can totally see it
You know all those feral hogs Cody at Some More News has been freaking out over for like a decade now?
They’re the vector.
That… they’re almost certainly how the worm is popping up in multiple places that are too far away for direct connections to previous specific locations to make sense.
… I feel bad for Cody’s blood pressure and hairline.
Anyway, beef ain’t gonna be on the menu much longer, boys.
also feral pigs are vicious animals, very hard to take down if you dont kill them outright. besides screworms, they spread other disease through thier poop, they are pretty aggressive invasive animals. this is not to confused with the wild boar, which is a different species of pig that is native to eurasia.
I mean… I feel like a somewhat sane policy at this point would be to put the US’s massive collective armory of privately owned firearms to use:
Declare feral hogs to be something approximating a national emergency, adjust hunting laws so that outside of major urban and suburban areas, and far enough away from roadways, you get a small stipend from the government for every feral hog you down and bring in to a local butcher.
Everybody has already been upgunning themselves into like 6.5 creedmoor and 300 blackout and shit for the ‘zombie apocalypse’ or ‘the boogaloo’… aim them at hogs instead of fantasies of being some kind ‘me and buddies’ militia.
Like, we already have states that adjust the number of other species you can take down per season, per how much the estimated population in the area is or is not overshooting ecological carrying capacity.
Just … every area with hogs? Dramatically reduce the legal ability to shoot anything other than a hog.
Require that a hog has to be literally placed into a body bag before you haul it away, require a picture from a phone with exif data including timestamp and geolocation be taken before and after you bagging it on site.
Maybe a farmer or rancher or someone with more hunting experience than myself could chime in with a critique of this general concept.
Just… spin it, market it as doing your patriotic duty to take out a hog instead of buck, or something.
The government could just set up to buy tails or something and the rest would sort itself out.
I think there’s already people shooting these things with night vision and automatic weapons from helicopters though.
Well, I actually like the way the beyond burger patties taste. Maybe now they’ll actually have a shot when they don’t cost more than the actual meat.
When grilled and smothered with bacon and cheese they’re not bad at all.
I mean, a burger made mostly out of beans and flavoring, with bacon and cheese, that does at least have less meat in it than the same with a full chuck patty.
And probably most people that have cooked with fatty meat before can tell you that if you fry up some meat in a pan first, and then cook various other foods in the same pan, small amounts of that oil/grease cooked into various other kinds of food can enhance their flavor.
And its almost certainly much better to use basically bean burger… than using ground up newspaper or flour or breadcrumbs as extra mass for the burger… that was not uncommon during the Great Depression.
Call it the ‘hybrid’ between a standard burger and a fully vegan one, sorta like the hybrid as the intermediary between ICE and EV cars.
It is not gonna be easy to fully snap transition the burger consumption capital of the planet into not using any meat… baby steps, baby steps.
I mean, I think I tried one once, thought it was ok, definitely didn’t hate it… but yeah, yep. Going to be an interesting shock to the American diet.
I’ve been saying unironically need to figure out how to do the bug pizzas from CyberPunk 77 for a while now… because … meat just is going to get more and more expensive…
I’ll stop short of eating ze bugs, haha. Despite how min-maxed grubs are nutritionally, I’m too squeamish for that.
It feels like it’s been the last decade or so that alternative products like the plant patty and things like hard seltzers have been formulated to taste significantly less awful than they used to. Or my tastebuds are changing, both can be true to some degree.
eating ze bugs
You better be a wonk or I’m coming at you with my slappin’ hand.
The way I see it, a bunch of crickets or ants or something, ground up into a paste and then sifted to get the crunchier parts of the carapace out…
How is that really different from the pink slime chicken nuggets?
Other than it probably requires less chemical treatment?
Just press those into the shape of a pepperoni slice, figure out how to cook em.
Funny how none of this was a problem until he started blaming Biden.
It’s totally Bidens fault, yes. Since he didn’t put Trump behind prison bars.
The year is 2367 and the economy collapses.
It is Obama and Joe Bidens fault.
It’s more likely than you’d think. I’m old enough to remember when John McCain and Mitch McConnell blamed the 2008 collapse on Jimmy Carter’s FHA reforms. Also remember getting an earful about how FDR turned a minor recession into a Great Depression by abandoning the good governance principles of Calvin Coolidge, and that we were still paying the economic price to this day.
mitch is the one that spearheaded the gop direction for the last 20 years.
This is all Trump and Elon and doge. Good job fuck nuts for axing USAID you dumb pedophiles.
“Why did Joe Biden shit in my pants?”
Wakes up long enough to holler “SLEEPY JOE!” and goes back to snoozing.
doubles down to blame Biden.
Ok, sure. Maybe. But Biden isn’t president now. Don’t point fingers. Do something productive. Don’t cut the parts of government that are supposed to help with this kind of stuff.
If it wasn’t for Biden, they’d still be blaming Obama, mate.
thats the only thing conservatives do, blame everyone else but yourself.
It’ll still be Biden’s fault in 2029, they have no shame and they’ll never stop.
Don’t point fingers
Trouble is, that’s the only thing republicans know how to do
No, this is a direct result of Musk cutting USAID. It’s not even a first term consequence, this is fully on this current Trump administration, within this electoral cycle.
Ok, sure. Maybe.
No. Wrong. Not at all. Trump did this 100%
You expect rationality and sanity where there’s none. But, one begs the question, didn’t you pay attention at all previous year and half? Nothing has changed, nothing will change, it’s the Biden’s fault for literally anything bad… And ofc “crazy far left lunatics”. Zero accountability, zero responsibility. President is not well, even if we forget about him being a pedophile and a criminal and a crook, he has a dementia and can barely keep eyes open… Sleepy Donny… It’s hard to fucking watch.
Brooke Rollins doubled down on claims that an “open border policy” under the Biden administration was to blame.
Nevermind, that Trump’s ICE is not checking the flies documentation any more than Biden’s ICE was, Trump also lifted a ban on cattle imports from Mexico, and so they’re the ones with the open border to fly larva policy.
The obvious solution is we need to build an enormous mosquito net around the entire country.
crowd chanting BUILD. THE. NET. BUILD. THE. NET.
Ketamine Musk and his merry band of DOGE misfits eliminated the department tasked with tracking and stopping screwworm flies. And now we have screwworm flies. Yet it’s Biden’s fault?
they’re the ones with the open border to fly larva
The thing about those damned larval flies is that they keep crossing the border regardless of what laws you put in place.
Ultimately, you need a regulatory regime that actually polices for them. And you need an agricultural, medical, and research system capable of detecting and culling the flies as they’re found.
The idea that you can just throw up a Big Beautiful Wall and end the risk of cross-border disease spread is - aside from being nakedly fascist bordering on genocidal - totally bullshit pseudoscience.
You have to take care of screwworms far from the US border. This was all part of the gutting of USAID. DOGE saw it was a foreign aid program operating through the UN, didn’t bother understanding it, and just cut it along with the rest of USAID. But hey, something happening in Central America could never affect the US, right?
This outcome was predicted for at least the past year, since the program was cut. Will ranchers who lose cattle finally punish Trump and Republicans at the ballot box for doing something monumentally stupid? Or is Elon just going to be used as a convenient (if somewhat deserving) scapegoat?
Here’s my take as a military person.
Okay, fine, it’s Biden’s fault you have screw worm in the States.
He’s not in power anymore. How will YOU solve it?
they will use mental gymanstics, by saying “biden shouldve had measures in place to stop TRUMP” or whatever bs they come up with.
AI will fix plz invest all ur moneys in AI. Its not a scam.
The administration is just repeating the party line: “The buck stops somewhere else”
He’s not in power anymore. How will YOU solve it?
That’s the thing, they won’t solve it. All they know how to do is blame blame blame blame blame
This has been the republican strategy my whole life. Its wild to think this is as consistent as the rise and fall of the tides, the sunrise and sunset, etc. And it still works on people.
Lol reminded me of
“All I hear is criticize criticize criticize”
I can’t see, you can’t see, all that matter is, can the fuckin horse see!
thats the problem. they dont know how to fix it so they blame others who are powerless to fix it and that gets them off the hook in their view
He’s not in power anymore. How will YOU solve it?
Gotta vote Republican harder this time. There’s still too many Democrats in government. Once we’ve gotten rid of all the Democrats, then we can implement the magical policies that will solve all our problems.
That is, of course, assuming there aren’t any fifth columnist liberal voters who try to obstruct us. We might need to get rid of them, too.
Hungarian here, Fidesz blamed previous prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsány for all of its incompetence, up until the Russo-Ukrainian war started.
He’s not in power anymore. How will YOU solve it?
Simple. He’ll wish it away the same way he did Covid. When that fails he’ll have RFK start telling the world that Ivermectin kills them.
I mean, as a military person, aren’t you currently involved in a war with Iran that’s Obama’s fault? Conservatism is fueled by personal greed at every level, from the most powerful to the poorest voter empowering the people they think they share a tribe with in the expectation prosperity will trickle down. They all lack personal accountability and share a consensus that any negative outcome from an action that was clearly their’s, it will be blamed on whoever is currently a convenient target for their disappointment. Run out of real people to blame? Oh, it was the devil.
You’ll get no solutions because they don’t care about the hubris as long as it’s not directly affecting them. Flesh eating maggots have no impact on Trump’s day to day life, he doesn’t give a fuck if they infect his constituents or destroy their herd, he knows they’ll still vote for him next time he runs.
I’m not in the American military. They don’t want my kind there.
Well when the US attacks whichever nation you’re serving, remember, it was Biden, or Obama, or maybe your leader’s fault for forcing Trump to have to do that. /s
Are you saying, are you implying Stalin’s glorious and perfect leadership caused this, failed to forsee this?
I’ll be reporting you to the company political officer.
… uh that’d be approximately the MAGA ‘military’ response.
Fortunately I am not in a MAGA military.
Fortunately indeed… I keep trying to tell people that you really do not want to fuck with the Canadian military, they consistently punch above their weight, and have a bit of a historical track record of that to boot.
Any time the Dow ticks up, regardless of the reason - that’s the result of Pumpkinhead’s financial genius, ability to make great “deals”, and probably because of his 16 inch girthy schlong.
Anything bad - that’s Biden. Also probably Obama. And Bill. And Hillary. Maybe even Carter.
Nothing can ever fail because a Republican was in charge or because conservative ideology was in play. If things fail under Republicans, it’s because they were RINOs and/or they didn’t go hard enough on the conservatism.
It works just like Communism that way.
“If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will abandon democracy.”
-Ben Franklin
George Orwell’s work might be overrated, but his depiction in 1984 of how The Inner Party blames everything bad on either the military enemy of the week or Emanuel Goldstein is a prime example of pop-cult leadership.
George Orwell’s work might be overrated
Is it?
I’m sorry but can you please explain to me how exactly an RBMK reactor can explode? No? I didn’t think so!
Hold up. “Communism doesn’t work because republicans do things” is an overlappping belief between communists and republicans, also. Which I would argue is somewhat of an admission of something.
But yeah its definitely “Republicans can’t fail, they can only be failed.” Which is a great accountability system.
I mention the Communism thing because that’s almost exactly the same way the Communists tend to talk about Communism. Or tended to.
What’s the definition of communism?
My overlap between the two has always been “the reason authoritarianism isn’t working is because its not authoritarian enough”.
This is also something capitalism does with ‘privatized/corporate authoritarianism’. “The reason the economy isn’t working is because the plutocrats are not given enough free reign over society”
Like at the end of the day there’s two groups of thought: “the public is good at decision making” or “the public is bad at decision making” and pretty much everything falls out of that core asumption.
As a farmer, dairyman, and rancher with way too many cattle in Texas. I have this to say:
I was on the front lines of the bird flu cross species fiasco. Literally ground zero. Me and my cohorts were the boots on the ground and knew what was going on weeks before the state and fed acknowledged it. The acknowledgement of the problem was purely political and self serving. The government as a whole (state and fed) were refusing to test and confirm what we already knew. I have evidence and correspondence with officials and veterinarians to back it up.
My take away: it’s a god damn miracle we survived Covid as well as we did. That should have been so much worse.
When it comes to the screwfly situation: I had little faith under previous administrations this would be handled properly. In Texas, sid miller was talking about woke agendas and playing partisan hack instead of prioritizing resources. We’ve had almost two god damn years! They all figured the people they were firing and defunding would handle it properly. With what resources?. Systematically dismantling our safety nets caused this.
This problem is one hundred percent political incompetence. Any IT professional that has been laid off because " your department doesn’t do anything" will tell you that a successful job done is literally twiddling your thumbs because you did it right. Y2k was a victory lap that the general public and politicians laugh at because it wasn’t a problem. It wasn’t a problem because we fixed it before the world ended. This screw fly trainwreck is what happens when you don’t listen to IT and fire them all for being lazy.
Detection in mexico was non existent. The screw fly hits the states and what is left of our protection finds it. Great job. Too late.
Tldr, your hamburger and steak prices will continue to be more expensive, but not from this. But the suffering of both domestic animals and wildlife will be greatly increased because these dipshits wanted to play politics instead of giving a shit about the bigger picture.
This problem is one hundred percent political incompetence.
well yes, but politicians are elected for “solving” problems, even ones they create, it’s literary what we idiots do. No one votes for a politician who preempts a problem, your y2k pefectly on illustrates this.
someones electing these people, i mean Paxton ffs ? Ted Cruz ? fuckin’ hell. Just vote fir anyone else to reset the clock, no ? okay then, keep doing the same. thing and expecting different results
Y2k was a victory lap that the general public and politicians laugh at because it wasn’t a problem. It wasn’t a problem because we fixed it before the world ended.
This is something people should well remember about IT for certain and while I don’t have much authority outside of that field, I bet it extrapolates.
In IT, though, the people that get rewarded and noticed the most are often the people that metaphorically set their own fires and then play the superhero in putting them out. All because they tend not to listen to others or take the initiative themselves to prepare. People that are not running around like their hair on fire are seen as “lazy”.
You’ll get noticed as well if you come into a shit show and can properly address it over time.
In IT, though, the people that get rewarded and noticed the most are often the people that metaphorically set their own fires and then play the superhero in putting them out.
You know, this is so true that I’m a bit ashamed to admit that my best moments at my current job have been when I correct mistakes I made. Example: I gave someone the wrong laptop when they started. I handled the comms like an expert. I made sure the exchange was smooth. The masterful handling of the mistake came from years of experience smoothing over things that weren’t my fault. It was a real opportunity to shine and it wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t fail to set a calendar reminder.
When I do everything right, there’s no need for customer service skills.
I remember reading a book years ago that was probably self-published, or maybe needed an editor? Anyway, I seem to recall him making some rather good points about how IT needs to do a better job of self-marketing what they do, because when they do it well, they are often punished for not being noticed, and boy did that ring true.
He was also taking aim at M$ use at the time but was definitely swimming upstream at the time. IT definitely has hivemind/groupthink problems and at the time it was “no one gets fired for buying Microsoft”.
It was the The Unix Guide to Defenestration
And yeah, on a personal level, I’ve noticed the same and have to admit that I’ve often was noticed for something that was probably something I could have planned for/spotted earlier.
pfff nah, overpaid leadership needs to actually do it’s job
COVID likely killed over 1,000,000 Americans.
Not sure I’d say we did well.
But… it could have been worse. Losing only 0.25% of a population during a world wide pandemic is, by all accounts in the scientific/medical field, considered a success.
Well, we were lucky in that the virus had a relatively low fatality rate for a vast majority of Americans.
The US had the highest deaths per capita from Covid. It was bad because so many people angry at covid would listen to anyone who made them angrier, by first denying it actually existed, then later, that vaccines were an attempt to murder them.
In top 50 worst things Trump has ever done, make covid worse in blue states/cities to claim that democrats are incompetent.
The US had the highest deaths per capita from Covid.
No it didn’t. 15 other countries had higher deaths per capita.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_by_country
Over 1/6th of global deaths from Covid were in US. You’re technically right on the list.
I realized by the covid response and his tone deaf re-election crap that Trump didn’t care about anyone that wasn’t Donald Trump.
At this point, pretty much anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that.
But there was a time when I thought he was just a misogynistic shitty racist old man.
Biden wasn’t the one who defunded efforts to prevent the spread of the screwworm.
Fucker.
I mean. It crossed the gap during Biden iirc
The gap has been crossed many times in the 50+ years that the barrier has been in place. These crossings aren’t failures, but inevitable when trying to wage war on a flying insect with an average lifespan of 21 days. Keeping the screwworm at bay requires constant effort and monitoring. Here’s an excerpt from the 2020 article"America’s Never-ending Battle Against Flesh-eating Worms"
“To get the screwworms out, the USDA to this day maintains an international screwworm barrier along the Panama-Colombia border. The barrier is an invisible one, and it is kept in place by constant human effort. Every week, planes drop 14.7 million sterilized screwworms over the rainforest that divides the two countries. A screwworm-rearing plant operates 24/7 in Panama. Inspectors cover thousands of square miles by motorcycle, boat, and horseback, searching for stray screwworm infections north of the border. The slightest oversight could undo all the work that came before.”
“The slightest oversight could undo all the work that came before”, huh? Shame DOGE didn’t give a fuck when they slashed screwworm monitoring programs.
The failure we’re seeing isn’t a failure to keep the screwworms out of the US (which any administration would inevitably fail to maintain perfectly), but a failure in monitoring and proactive preventative efforts to maintain the barrier. Fuck knows how long it’s been spreading before it was noticed, given that it’s already affecting multiple states.
The blame for what happens now lies solely with Trump and his cronies.
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An article not mentioning another relevant fact in 15k words means nothing about that other relevant fact.
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And what is being done about it now besides blaming it on someone else?
Nothing?
Uh-huh.
I heard it crossed the gap traveling in RFKs brain. Not sure how that’s Bidens fault.
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That’s pretty much the same response I get from my maga family when I show them evidence that contradicts clearly their claims.
Was the “rfk brain crossing” evidence lol
Pretty much on par with any evidence brought forth by anyone claiming election fraud in 2020. Except this time it’s funny.
Is it funny
You are getting downvoted, but containment was breached in 2022. Personally, I’m unsure how much orangeboi’s first stint harmed matters - did they kneecap funding for that? I’d believe it, to be clear, but I do think it’s important to bring receipts in matters like this.
And that said, while I’m sure the US had some sort of role in supporting the quarantine zone at the Darien Gap, I’m not familiar enough with the nuance of their operations to say whether or not it was the US, Panama, or someone else dropping the ball, or simply a combination of bad luck and natural adaptation. We are talking about a species of parasitic insect here - the lifecycle is so quick that 22 years very well may have been enough time for evolution to throw a wrench into containment efforts.
Edit: yes, by all means, continue downvoting because I and other users are pointing out that (CW: images of active infestation in animals) there is a lot of context and detail to this situation and it’s not actually as simple as “orangeboi cut funding”.
While it is true that orangeboi surely did not help, and him gutting programs to track things like this at the start of his second term (note: in 2024, which is after the original containment breach in Panama in 2022) was absolutely fucking stupid, the breach did not actually occur on his watch. The outbreak made it from Panama to the Mexican state of Chiapas between 2022 and 2024, all under Biden’s purview.
By no means am I defending orangeboi here. I’m simply saying that to my eye, this is looking a lot like one of the many areas in which Biden dropped the ball, and orangeboi exacerbated the matter, and then tried to fully blame it on Biden. But both are culpable: Biden and his admin for not treating a horrifying parasitic outbreak with the “oh fuck all hands on deck” attitude that it deserves, and orangeboi and his regime for being simplistic imbecilic fucks with far more concern about getting rich and casting blame than doing literally anything else to help anyone else.
There have been many times where the gap has been breached in the 50+ years it’s been in place — it’s inevitable when dealing with a flying insect with such a short lifespan.
You’re right to highlight that multiple decades is a heckton of time when it comes to the evolutionary lifecycle of this fly, but keeping track of these kinds of changes is part of the intensive preventative work done by programs under USDA.
DOGE explicitly slashed the USDA, including the screwworm program. Some funding was restored at a later date, but I believe a lot of that was put towards the construction of a new plant that would breed sterile flies (which needed to be released weekly) — a plant that is a long way from being completed. Previously, the bulk of the flies being released were produced at a plant in Panama, which no doubt spurred the decision to build a new one in the US.
However, even if the new plant had already been online before Trump ordered USDA to pull back from intergovernmental cooperation with other countries, this outbreak might not have been averted. Progress in keeping the screwworm at bay has only been possible through constant cooperation between countries. Especially because monitoring fly populations and cases of screwworm (on both sides of the barrier line) is probably the most significant facet of the program. Inspectors have to patrol thousands of square miles of land by motorcycle, boat and horseback, and the amount of manpower that takes is insane. The US was previously contributing a heckton of that manpower, but I can’t imagine that monitoring has been anywhere close to how it used to be when the USDA has been bled dry of personnel
TL;DR: I was going to say that it was definitely the US who dropped the ball, but it would be more accurate to say that they threw it, with force, at the people who were most essential for keeping the screwworm at bay
Why would they have a plant in the US?/ THE reason they chose where they did is because it is small. I don’t think they could control the entire US boarder orbit would be more expensive.
I can’t say for certain why they’d want a plant in the US, but I do know that they are already midway through building one in Texas, which is scheduled to be completed in November 2027. If I had to guess, I would say that it’s for much the same reason why Trump pushed through an executive order ordering USDA to pull back from programs that involved cooperating with other countries.
I don’t know this for certain though — it’s possible that the building of this plant was something that was approved during the Biden era, and that it was just intended to increase the amount of sterile flies available (the Panama plant was already working 24/7), or to make the system more resilient. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was another facet of MAGA hostile foreign policy
Edit: apparently the plant began being built in April, so it seems it was indeed something that started recently.
Even if the facility had been already operative, it would’ve still been dumb as shit to pull back from cooperation with other countries, but the fact that this decision was made before there was a viable alternative boggles the mind. (To be clear, the pulling back from international cooperation didn’t mean that the US would no longer be relying on the Panama plant at all — I imagine they still were. However, because the dropping of flies was reliant on so many faces of cooperation, it appears that there has been less active work to maintain the barrier, possibly because it would involve relying on Panama)
My understanding is that the barrier weakened during covid, which would have caused multiple complications for containment efforts. Believe it or not, Trump can pretty fairly be blamed for covid getting as bad as it did, and thus can pretty fairly be blamed for this screwworm stuff.
I mean yeah, that is multiple fair points. All I’m saying is that it would behoove the strength of that argument to be able to establish a causal chain that makes that unavoidably clear.
So uh to be clear, I am 0% defending orangeboi. What I AM saying is that understanding what went wrong in the context of the Biden administration’s response to the situation is far more worthy of consideration. Scapegoating orangeboi for process failures that arose specifically from the Biden admin would be refusing to learn from a poor outcome, and a rejection of agency over the part of the dynamic that wasn’t outright malicious, and simply could have been done more effectively, or without error in the future.
I’m talking about a 5Ys, basically. And if you are ever in one of those, you’re not trying hard enough if you’re scapegoating. A malicious actor is one answer; you have four more good ones to come up with, and usually the best answers have to do with process - or, at least, strategic learnings.
like cutting funding?
My understanding is that there’s one factory producing the sterile flies. And it could have been expanded a long time ago.
I’m not saying Trump isn’t to blame but like everything else Biden didn’t do shit either.
rather odd people are getting downvoted for stating the actual science behind it. i think it was raging in south america for a long time, and it was never controlled in that continent.
Political instability and size are reasons for not eradicating it in south america.
