Re: More cats infected with H5N1 by infected cat food

On Tue, 25 Mar 2025 09:45:56 +0000, Ernest Major
<{$to$}@meden.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 25/03/2025 06:43, jillery wrote:

On Mon, 24 Mar 2025 22:50:03 +0000, Ernest Major
<{$to$}@meden.demon.co.uk> wrote:
 

On 24/03/2025 16:02, Mark Isaak wrote:

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:
>

I don't

>
Canada's new PM is assuming emergency powers just to deal with
a trade war that they created.
>
What do you think Trump is going to do, if you succeed in
whipping up hysteria?
>
>
>

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.

>
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.
>
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.
>

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.
>
  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.
>
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.

 
 
The GOP has a history of radical policy shifts.  Nixon took advantage
of that in 1968.  Hayes took advantage of that in 1876.  Teddy
Roosevelt almost succeeded in 1912.
 
 

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.
>

>
Peter did claim to be a never-Trumper, and repeated that claim long
after Trump's first inauguration, even after Trump's installation of a
unelected black-robed Integralist dictatorship.

 
 
IIRC Nyikos claimed to have roots in Eastern Europe.  I suspect anyone
like that in the U.S. would have trouble with Trump sucking up to
Putin.
 

>
My understanding is that he was of Hungarian extraction.

My understanding is "Hungarian" qualifies as Eastern Europe.

According to Wikipedia Trump won 58% of the Polish-American vote (I
assume that this is the largest Eastern European bloc, and also the most
anti-Russian) in 2016, and even in 2020, after 4 years of sucking up to
Putin, he won 42.4%. (Wikipedia doesn't have numbers for 2024.) East
European ancestry is not sufficient to cause opposition to Trump.

I accept their 2016 vote due to Trump's artful dodges.  As for their
2020 vote, if the rest of the country had voted that way, Trump would
not have won the election.

Nevertheless, I don't suggest they are single-issue voters, merely
that His Suckiness would give them pause.  Perhaps it did.

--
To know less than we don't know is the nature of most knowledge