Re: More cats infected with H5N1 by infected cat food

On 3/14/25 7:23 PM, Kestrel Clayton wrote:

On 13-Mar-25 23:01, RonO wrote:

On 3/13/2025 11:06 AM, Kestrel Clayton wrote:

On 13-Mar-25 11:17, RonO wrote:

On 3/11/2025 12:03 AM, JTEM wrote:

On 3/7/25 10:21 PM, RonO wrote:
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I don't

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Canada's new PM is assuming emergency powers just to deal with
a trade war that they created.
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What do you think Trump is going to do, if you succeed in
whipping up hysteria?
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What a nut job.  Trump is already responsible for the politics responsible for the CDC and USDA not doing their jobs.  He and his Republican cronies had already burned the CDC and USDA as they attempted to deal with Covid.  The USDA was warned repeatedly that they were limited on messing with the food system, and they wanted to prosecute employees of the CDC just for doing their jobs and making the Trumpies look bad.  When the Dairy epidemic started they were already gun shy about doing the right thing.

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And the USDA has been badly understaffed for ages. I don't know about the CDC specifically, but I suspect they are facing the same problem. Many regulatory agencies are so severely understaffed that they're forced to rely on the "Trust Me Bro" approach to compliance verification. I don't know about you, but I'd prefer not to go back to the bad old days of needing to cross my fingers and hope the meat in my frankfurter is actually from pigs or cows.
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The truth is the federal civilian workforce is too small, and has been for decades. The size of the federal workforce has shrunk since 1990, despite the total labor force growing by more than a third. All the bafflegab about "bloated government" is coming from plutocrats who don't want us peons receiving any government services at all.
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Shorter staffed now.  What Trump and DOGE have done is pretty moronic. They aren't cutting waste by mass firings and closing down departments. They are wasting billions of dollars that have already been spent.  Just what he has tried to do with science will likely disrupt science in this country for decades.  All the new researchers that have lost funding or aren't getting it could be lost to science in the future.  Shutting down the programs the way that he has is wasting billions of dollars that have already been spent to get those programs working, and what they currently have in production is being lost.  Projects will never be completed that would have done the country good, and had already cost a lot to get going.
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 From my perspective Trump could be the worst national security breech in the history of the United States.  Putin's influence over Trump was apparent in his first administration.  How could an enemy nation ever get the president of the United States into a private conference with Putin with only a Russian interpreter present?  It is no secret that Russia interfered with all three of Trump's presidential election bids in order to get Trump elected.  Trumps policies seem to have always been Russia first.  Trump spent most of his first term alienating our long time allies and disrupting NATO.  His activities this term have been more overt in favoring Russia. His policies have not been America first, but to weaken our world position, stop humanitarian aid, alienate our long term Allies, disrupt NATO and attempt to disrupt the US by weakening our economy and trashing our scientific future that has made our country what it is today.  US citizens pay for the Tariffs that he is imposing, and what is that going to do for inflation?  All the major science journals are published in English, Trump's policies are designed to reverse that.  China is building a science juggernaut, and has started creating Chinese science journals.  Some of the last few papers that I reviewed had started citing papers in those Chinese journals.  It might not be long before our graduate schools will have to reinstitute the foreign language requirement.
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We likely should try to figure out why Russia interfered with all the elections trying to get Trump elected.  Trump needs to have a good explanation for why a leader of a Western free nation would be suckered into a private conference with a leader of an enemy nation with no US interpreter present.  Why would Trump be claiming that the Covid epidemic wasn't so bad and that testing wasn't needed, and at the same time he was sending covid equipment to his friend Putin.  Trump is even said to be working up a military plan for Panama.  What will that do to the US status among the free world?  Trump has even claimed that he admires Putin.  Would dictator worship have been tolerated by the Republican party 20 years ago?  It would certainly not have been tolerated in the Reagan era.  This is just my political observation, but something stinks.

 Why Russia would interfere with the elections is obvious: They figured out how to wage war in the social media battlespace earlier and better than the US did. The Russian Federation aims to be an empire again, and bring all of its former territories back under its wise and benevolent tank-treads. It's hard to do that if the United States has a robust economy, has enormous soft power on the world stage, and leads a strong and coherent NATO. So they get a biddable fool into office to turn Americans against each other, demonstrate to our allies that we're no longer reliable, sabotage our economy, withdraw us from NATO, and generally act like a prancing dipshit.
 Note that the election-meddling is effective even when it doesn't install Moscow's guy in office: If nothing else, it still saps political capital and de-legitimizes the victor. And as long as the United States becomes more fractious and impotent, the Russian Federation's goals are advanced.
 Why does Trump go along with it? I don't know. It's possible Putin has some good old-fashioned kompromat on him — although it's hard to imagine what secret could possibly be vile enough to turn the chuds on Dear Leader at this point. [...]

I suspect simple flattery. It's easy to con a conman.
[snip more stuff I agree with.

 And yeah, racism this open wouldn't have been tolerated in the Reagan era (though the queerphobia sure was!) but this is the direction the GOP has been moving for decades. [...]

One small correction: The GOP no longer exists.  The Republican Party still exists in name, but it bears almost no resemblance to what the GOP was.  It would be better labels the American Fascist Party.
I wish Nyikos were still alive so I could ask him how Trump is substantially different from Hitler, now that Trump has said he wants to kill hundreds of thousands of people by cutting USAID.
--
Mark Isaak
"Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between 'That
doesn't make sense' and 'I don't understand.'" - Mary Doria Russell