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[–] 215 points 5 months ago (23 children)

Biden wasn't the one who defunded efforts to prevent the spread of the screwworm.

Fucker.

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  • [+] -135 points 5 months ago (22 children)

    I mean. It crossed the gap during Biden iirc

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  • [–] 152 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    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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  • [+] -13 points 5 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    An article not mentioning another relevant fact in 15k words means nothing about that other relevant fact.

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  • [–] 55 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    I heard it crossed the gap traveling in RFKs brain. Not sure how that's Bidens fault.

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  • [+] -108 points 5 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 39 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    That’s pretty much the same response I get from my maga family when I show them evidence that contradicts clearly their claims.

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  • [+] -41 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Was the "rfk brain crossing" evidence lol

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  • [+] -28 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (10 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 49 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

    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)

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  • [–] 24 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Thanks for the article. It was an interesting read

    I disagree with your assertion that Biden had much tondo with it though. Seems he maintained the status quo, and never made any direct decisions that affected screwworms

    Trump has some blame because he authorized wonton cuts that ended up affecting screwworm monitoring, even if it was already out of containment

    His admin also re-authorized cattle imports for 2 days even though it was obviously spreading in Mexico

    Article talked about how it may have been a screwworm adaptation that allowed it to breach containment. I think that's a compelling argument. If true, it would mean stopping at the Darien Gap was always a time bomb waiting to happen

    We should have worked to completely eradicate the screwworm, rather than containing

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  • [+] -18 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 81 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    The year is 2367 and the economy collapses.

    It is Obama and Joe Bidens fault.

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  • [–] 27 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 79 points 5 months ago* (4 children)

    The screwworm coverage so far is terrible.

    First off, everyone is acting like this is a problem for beef prices (end of list). No, this is a problem for any mammal living in the southern US. FFS, some of the cases already are dogs- how are people not putting this together?

    Second, Biden did whiff on the screwworm response in Central America. They should have pulled a Gandalf as screwworms spread north, but instead were modern Democrats and assumed the situation would fix itself until it was really bad.

    Third, the real blame lies with whoever was POTUS before Biden (I can't recall) for ignoring that the Panama facility holding the Darien Gap needed updates, more funding. We're talking tens of millions of dollars to fix in 2018 what will now be a billions and billions problem. Trump- oh right it was Trump. Yeah, then when Covid hit they lost the Gap. To come back in 2025 and cut funding to to the program and re-open the border to animal disease vectors is insanity. Are we sure these people aren't literal demons feeding on human misery?

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  • [–] 57 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    "Why did Joe Biden shit in my pants?"

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  • [–] 53 points 5 months ago (11 children)

    Hey how about you stop blaming people and actually try and fix the problem jackass.

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  • [–] 38 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    I was just thinking in a sane world, that headline would have ended "and the governmental organizations are working with local groups and leading experts on preventing the spread"

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Yeah he’ll put RFK right on that

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Yeah but that's not engagement maxxing. He's gonna stretch this out for the ratings. One article isn't enough gotta slap the citizens with a cliff hanger, and the next article would say "the republicans offer humanitarian efforts to thwart sleepy Joe fumble when screworm with this one simple concept" Few months later the last article comes out about the screworm it was then screwing the citizens in some way and suddenly believes in socialism to bail out the Epstein class with our tax dollars or some useless but smart sounding to their supporters with something they will just eat up:

    "THE VERY AWAKE, NOST VENERABLE, GREATEST EVER, AND BIGGEST INTELLIGENCE PRESIDENT SINGLE-HANDEDLY ACHIEVES WORLD SAVING BREAKTHROUGH WHILE PERFORMING ADVANCED MENTAL COMPUTATIONS WITH HIS EYES CLOSED LIKE RUSSEL CROWE IN 'A BEAUTIFUL MIND' HE WAS NOT SLEEPING: BURSTING BOTANICAL FEROMONE BARRIERS USING IVERMECTIN BOOSTED SOUND WAVES BY FLICKING IVERMECTIN DUST OFF THE STRINGS OF KID ROCK'S GUITAR STRINGS ON AN AIRPLANE RIDE TO ALL MY GOLF COURSES CRITICAL LOCATIONS ACROSS THE INFECTED AREAS TO HALT SCREWWORM SPREAD IN SOUTHERN PASTURES. ​Eco-Group RedHats deploys 'Acoustic-Mimicry Moss' to disrupt larvae migratory patterns naturally using distasteful washed up bigot rock artist's guitar strings atomizing the ivermectin so when the worms breathe they breathe in this nano ivermectin powder harnesses the power of our prayers to destroy the illegal invader worms that sleepy Joe Biden and Barrack Hussain Obama didn't stop the worms between the years of 2017-2021..."

    • dozy diaper don
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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (3 children)

    But if they fix the problem then what will they have left to blame on Biden?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    Oh don't worry about that, they'll always think of something.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Oh yeah, you're right. I mean it's not like it's one of their favorite talking points, like border control, to the point where republicans would deliberately torpedo bipartisan legislation that they had helped to draft, during Biden's presidency, specifically because trump told them to block it, because he didn't want Biden to have a border win...

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  • [–] 50 points 5 months ago

    This is all Trump and Elon and doge. Good job fuck nuts for axing USAID you dumb pedophiles.

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  • [–] 46 points 4 months ago (8 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Those family and local ranchers shouldn’t have voted for trump if they didn’t want leopards to eat their face.

    They voted for this and are reaping what they sow, a principle they understand well.

    Zero sympathy.

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  • [–] -4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    They voted for the only party that reached out to them. What did you expect? Another huge failure for the democrat party.

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  • [–] 35 points 5 months ago* (13 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (6 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago* (3 children)

    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...

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    When grilled and smothered with bacon and cheese they're not bad at all.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Dramatically reduce the legal ability to shoot anything other than a hog.

    Chronic wasting disease in deer is bad enough as it is. We did in their natural predators.

    market it as doing your patriotic duty to take out a hog instead of buck, or something.

    Already been done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsn9BrNsVPo It's a scale problem.

    https://wildlife.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wsb.787 tl;dr: there were more, healthier hogs when a bounty was paid out for them.

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  • [–] 33 points 5 months ago (17 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 20 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    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

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 14 points 5 months ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 32 points 5 months ago*

    Biden blame is a stupidity test.

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  • [–] 26 points 5 months ago

    "Blaming Biden" .... Is the worm still there?? ... Fuck! "Blaming Biden HARDER!!!"

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  • [–] 26 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 13 points 5 months ago

    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?

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