Yeah, bird flu is really bad.
Why does this mostly affect the US? I've been abroad most of the year and eggs don't seem overly expensive.
This is why we must freeze USDA funding, halt all public health communications from our federal government, and urgently (TOP PRIORITY!!!) scrub all mentions of the word "women" from every public-facing piece of scientific content we can find.
The below links are not all inclusive, but each touch on your inquiry in various capacities (as the problem is complex and multifaceted). Georgia halted all poultry sales due to infection detections, for example.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/h5n1-much-more-than-you-wan...
https://agr.georgia.gov/pr/highly-pathogenic-avian-influenza...
https://www.wusf.org/health-news-florida/2025-02-02/deadly-h...
https://investigatemidwest.org/2025/01/21/134m-poultry-and-c...
It's spreading abroad, but the US seems to be ground zero. The US's agricultural methods also make it extremely vulnerable to infectious disease (if one breaks through the continuous deluge of antibiotics we pump into our animals).
What is the executive branch of the government doing about H5N1 currently? I have not seen any press releases or statements about it.
edit: I'm not being facetious, and don't welcome flippant replies. I'm genuinely interested, since I haven't seen any updates and have well-founded reasons to be skeptical this is getting the necessary attention.
Odd it affects only the USA but not Mexico.
They're preventing public health agencies from talking about it (or anything else), so if you haven't heard anything: mission accomplished!
The bird flu is mostly contained to North America. Birds fly north/south, not east/west, so so far there has been no reports of it moving across either ocean. This is why Europeans and Asians are terrified of bird flu transmitting between humans, because then an infected human could get on a plane and spread it there. So far, however, that threat remains unrealised.
I don't find it funny at all.
Mexico vaccinates its chickens, the US does not (https://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/transmission/2023/02/17/...)
Didn't the UK just cull millions of birds for H5N1?
To cite a close-to-home example, chicken farms in Canada typically have about 25,000 chickens, whereas ones in the U.S. often have millions. So an infection that requires the entire flock to be slaughtered has a much bigger effect on the supply of eggs south of the border.
(After getting elected on promises to lower prices on day one)
Nothing, same guy who said Covid would be over by Easter a month after the first lockdowns.
Luckily the federal government doesn't get to talk about all that scary stuff right now[0], and maybe never again! /s
[0] https://www.salon.com/2025/02/02/administrations-communicati...
Eggs are usually produced and sold regionally. The current bird flu epidemic impacting US chicken farms will be less impactful elsewhere. I believe there were reported cases of bird flu in Europe at the end of last year, but I don't think they spread to the widespread devastation we're seeing in the US.
The internal incoherence is a feature of a cult, not a bug!
The more deliberately twisted shit they can make you believe, the more dependent your entire cognitive architecture is on them.
I found it exactly in line with everything I know about right-wing politics.
He was elected to explicitly not do anything about H5N1 and all other would-be government priorities.
That makes a lot of sense, because I lookup up how we handle it in Denmark and it's the same, destroy the entire flock if a farm is infected. It's just it's not millions, it's 6000, 40.000, 20.000 chickens per farm, not a million.
Weird that the size of the farms aren't being regulated if you know from other countries that it makes containment easier.
They seem to be joined at the hip now, what with Elon being granted carte blanche. If it helps, I prefer "fat man and little boy".
One smart thing would be: don't actively disrupt -- and perhaps even accelerate -- clinical trials for H5N1 vaccines.
But uh... I don't see that happening.
Here are several specific proposals to do just that: https://nlihc.org/resource/harris-campaign-releases-plans-lo...
Not a fan of credits to buyers (just inflates prices further) but I'm a big fan of credits to developers, streamlining permitting, and making some federal land available for development.
Regardless of whether you think these are good policies or an effective platform, it is patently false to say no one would run on such a promise.
Are eggs regularly transported long distances in the USA? I don't think I've seen eggs from outside Denmark for sale in Denmark, though many other things (cheese, meat) are.
If people in Minnesota (same population) aren't regularly buying eggs from out of state, then the comparison with Denmark holds.
Because why would you say that?
You would say "we're going to build more housing."
A minor difference being that one is a bunch of bluehairs Twitterati and social science professors using a goofy word and the other is a systematic purge of scientific literature and government data... Minor difference though!
Consider for a moment: what if it did include those terms? What do you think it'd indicate if some hypothetical government decided to hunt down those words across the scientific literature and subject them to review? Would that indicate something meaningful to you?
Now keep that thought in mind... and now acknowledge that that hypothetical government is actually the current one.
Pay close attention to what your mind is doing and let us know if you notice any interesting contortions that somehow draw a line between the obviously fucking insane hypothetical government you were imagining a second ago and the current real one. Report back!
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2025/02/05/n...
Trump said it directly in a news conference. https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-canada-mexico-china...
"We may have short-term, a little pain, and people understand that,"
Thing is, that would be difficult, whereas randomly breaking government agencies is quite easy. If you happen to be Donald Trump, and you're looking for ways to please your supporters, culture war nonsense is the easy approach, provided you don't care at all about the consequences.
Poor ol' JD Vance is presumably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_Man_(nuclear_bomb)
(The _third_ WW2-era bomb design, an impractically long plutonium gun-type. Much like Vance, it was rather pointless and impractical, and was never really heard from again.)
There is no real source, it is a lie.
https://chcoc.gov/content/initial-guidance-regarding-preside...
The order is to remove gender ideology, i.e. trans. Switch gender back to sex (binary).
Trans women are real women.
> I don't think I've seen eggs from outside Denmark for sale in Denmark,
That is because of the strict rules regarding salmonella. Danish chicken farmers will test for salmonella and kill any population of chicken found to have salmonella, leaving our eggs "guaranteed" free of salmonella. Any other country that wish to sell eggs in Denmark will need to be able to make the same guarantee. This is one of the few exceptions for the free movements of goods within the EU.
Rule #1 of feminine-ism.
Well no, one person (a moron and a liar) said that about eggs
Unless you segment up your chickens and spread them out, so one farmer may have a million chickens, but spread out on 40 locations. The problem is that you need to kill ALL of your chickens in just a few is sick and having a million chickens in a single location will pretty ensure that you have to constantly kill of all your chickens and replace them.
But there's probably more going on that just sick chickens being killed of.
Well cult this, cult that. What i care about is the wellbeing of the citizens. Who is being helped by erasing "trans gender idealogy nonsense"? Give me specifics about how certain people are being tangibly helped. Otherwise it's just more idealogy. It reminds me about how removing abortion rights was about "freedom of religion", who's freedom and what religion? I need examples of actual tangible assistance that has been gained by this. As of current it just sounds like certain people are mad that other people exist.
We can talk about the sports issue, the bathroom issue etc. But how many of us have had said issues? How often do these issues occur? Is the resolution in favor of the status quo actually better on the whole if it costs the personal expression of say 10,000 people? 100,000? How many people should be told what to wear and which doctor to see before you are satisfied to have squashed the "idealogy"?
Eggs are not treated as the most important investment of your life, the value of which you hedge the entire rest of your life against, and which is expected to increase in value to support an growing rather than shrinking lifestyle. Eggs are nothing like houses economically
Actually I'd argue that left-wing language engineering contributed to right-wing lunatics getting in control. This poll says 56% of Hispanics in the US are uncomfortable with 'LatinX'
https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ipoll/study/31120958/questio...
These are a swingy group that could go either way. This podcast
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/will-tariffs-end-trump...
describes polls that make it clear that Americans think that Republicans care about the issues that matter to them and that Democrats don't. "Woke" talk contributes a lot to the latter.
The good news for them though is that now that they see Republicans in power talking crazy like this, Democrats will look more normal to people. But if people on the left muzzled their own fanatics years ago we'd have woken up in a different America.
It’s funny because the terms diverged as a matter of empirical necessity of describing certain types of people who clearly didn’t fit into binary categories.
Biology is hard ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Can you explain specifically what you think this memo disproves?
No disagreement there, it certainly helped lose the election. That still doesn’t mean the two positions are equal but opposite. For example, when Biden was elected there wasn’t a Cmd + F across the federal government for “Latino”.
Thanks for sharing your contortions! Honestly impressed with your candor, I appreciate it.
I don't want to endorse the right wing version but my own perception of the young people I know is that if you're young and neurodivergent, different or just don't fit in, you will (at least at Ithaca High School) get jumped on by "egg-hatchers" who have an easy but wrong answer to your problems. You still have all your old problems, but now you have new problems.
Back in the 1960s parents got worried that their kids turned into hippies, but hippies managed to supply their own drugs and didn't need to get an Rx from a doc.
You can look it up. They’re not directly removing the word, they’re using it to trigger “reviews”, and then purging stuff they found to violate their ideology.
I can tell you there’s already been critical guidance from the FDA on clinical trials that have been removed because they have the word “diversity,” as in “a clinical trial’s population should aim to reflect the diversity of the population to which the drug will ultimately be marketed.”
A serious treatment of that requires considering what the Democratic party actually is.
Wintrobe's book [1] has an analysis of a tinpot dictator who wants to steal everything a country has but has to spend some resources on buying people off and some on repression so that he can get away with it. Bill Clinton made a similar maneuver around 'triangulation' that amounts to trying to share as little of the spoils to mass supporters as possible so that he can really give as much as the spoils as he can to donors.
In the case of Bill Clinton he got the full court press from [2] so he could say he was under so much pressure from the right that he didn't have to do anything for the left.
Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, made a clear show of disdain for the activist faction of the party but they were supposed to vote for her because, hey, she's a woman. She also hoped to win by default against Trump.
Harris didn't show the activist fringe much love, but she didn't show disdain for it either. She was also hoping to win by default, which didn't happen. Because she didn't define herself, she was defined by Fox News. She would have had to have broken visibly with the activist fringe, however, which seems like it could have been a risky move although the dirty secret is that the activist fringe may not actually vote and if it does vote it is concentrated in places where their vote doesn't count.
For now, Trumps's salvos in the culture war are 'cheap talk' that pleases certain people but doesn't consume resources that are coveted by donors. I suspect it will be unpopular too, since people are going to blame you for things once you get in power.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Political-Economy-Dictatorship-Wintro...
I’m not sure what all this is about.
You have one party’s “extremism” which takes the form of bluehaired Twitterati saying stupid shit and, I guess, not getting sufficiently disowned by actual political leaders?
On the other hand you have an ongoing ACTUAL ideological purge of our government’s personnel, records, budget, and data, complete with watchwords (like “women”) and loyalty tests.
I replied to someone who thought the words had been banned and scientists would have to use phrases like “ovulating person”.
It seemed to be based on taking your post (“scrub all mentions of the word "women"”) at face value.
You understand now that that isn’t true? That the word “women” is not being scrubbed, and nobody has asked for it to be scrubbed?
Sure.
I spoke to my uncle about this when he was convalescing in a nursing home. We live in New York, neither of our votes counted. I voted for Harris, he voted for Trump.
He did not see it as a black or white thing, he saw it as a comparison. He didn't see Harris as giving any reason why he should vote for her other than, maybe, she is a woman. The message that you shouldn't vote for Trump didn't resonate. Personally I saw Jan 6 as worse than Sept 11 but actually most people don't. Probably the best explanation I see for this is talked about in this podcast
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/will-tariffs-end-trump...
where Americans were asked "What issues matter to you?" and "What issues matter to X party?" and found that the lists mostly lined up when X=Republican but that people didn't see Democrats talking about the issues that mattered to them.
This is connected to my argument above because the reason why Democrats fall into that trap is the same thing that has ruined center-left parties everywhere in the world: that they make a lot of cheap talk to impress their base while reserving the spoils for their donors.
The good news is that people will be pretty sick of the Republicans in 2 years and if the Democrats were a normal party they would take over the house of representatives pretty definitively then. They've got an amazing way to pull defeat out of the jaws of victory though.
You're still talking about the election. I am not. I am talking about actual political actions being taken.
Sweden, Finland and Norway seem to have the same checks as Denmark [1] but we don't see their eggs for sale here either.
But from a quick search, it looks like I've happened only to live in egg-exporting countries within the EU, which explains why I've never seen it. Even so, whole eggs don't seem to be transported great distances — most imports and exports are liquid or dried egg.
[1] https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/biological-safety/food...
It's always an absurd double standard.
A bunch of people said stupid shit on Tumbler, so I guess the republicans just had to go tear down all our institutions and grift every dime they can?
It's pathetic, but par for the course for the party that insists on "personal responsibility", yet blames Democrats for the deficit despite being empirically responsible for most of it.
"You had extremists" nope, none of those people screaming on tumbler were invited into the Party's cabinet.
What are you going to do about it?
Winning the next election is the most realistic plan. Maybe not that hard in 2026 for Congress, we might win earlier than that since there are 3 special elections in the queue already and 6 per year on average. Flip 3 seats and the Republicans no longer control the House. The thinner the margin it is the more some lunatic who is offended by the idea of having a budget can throw sand in the gears.
Winning all the elections from 2025-2028 is the thing to be thinking about, and thinking about the loss in 2024 is key to that.