>>On Monday, however, the FDA said that the "false-positive lab sample DOES NOT change the basis for [the] FDA's ongoing outbreak investigation or the overwhelming epidemiological data supporting the current voluntary recall by Taylor Farms." The agency added that its "traceback investigation and outbreak data continue to converge on shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms locations in central Mexico."
The false positive "doesn't call into question the conclusion of the outbreak investigation," McEntire said. Had the positive test been confirmed, "it could've resulted in a substantially expanded recall."
<<
I like the part where they say “No Taylor Farms branded products are involved in this recall.” As in there are other brands they do not mention which were but do not list them which they could own and distribute under.
Only slightly unrelated, but I've been thinking a lot lately about prion disease and whether or not you can still trust the meat you eat. Easily a food safety concern that is ten times worse than getting a little diarrhea from your salad, and the same institutional rot can contribute to it. And it would take 5-10 years to really see the damage done from it.
A guy gets a worm in his brain, somehow becomes secretary of health, loosens all the rules so the rest of us have a higher chance of getting a brain worm. This is comic book villain kind of stuff. Can we start a serious discussion about whether we might be living in a simulation with a troll teenager at the controls?
> Can we start a serious discussion about whether we might be living in a simulation with a troll teenager at the controls?
Nah. Power centers consolidate and seek slavery, whatever other differences they may have there is consensus there, which we can tell by their practices.
The "mission" of most people we recall by name is really just "knock out any pillars you can find, and cause chaos", they're given free hand and in that sense it's not planned or predictable, but overall it's no more random or silly than dead cows hurled via catapults. The cow has no name, no history, no meaning, it isn't hurled at a precise location in the exact right instant, but at a general location during the siege. And one thing is sure, it controls nothing.
toxoplasmosis doesn't actually do that to mice. It makes them less scared, but iirc, not even so much that they don't flee.
it's one of those studies that got blown up into a worldwide news story sensation even though the actual paper didn't say what headlines claimed it did. I don't know if it was ever proven replicable or not, either.
Making prey less scared of the predator makes them significantly more likely to be eaten by that predator.
The reality is even worse than “seeking out cats” because it means if it does this in humans, (which it appears to do) those among us who get infected will engage in all manner of risky, dangerous and destructive behaviors.
He's the opposite of Fauci, who Trump hates for contradicting him. And MAGA hates because during the pandemic they saw mask mandates as government overreach.
And he's the poster boy for conspiracy-loving anti-science halfwits like Trump and MAGA.
And he got approved because GOP senators get primaried and death threats if they go against Dear Leader.
> And he's the poster boy for conspiracy-loving anti-science halfwits like Trump and MAGA.
I mean this is the guy who as head of HHS has funded research in his government department to "figure out which other government department is doing chemtrails" (He named DARPA as his prime suspect on an episode of Dr Phil, ye gods). You can't make this shit up. If it wasn't for his family name and connections he'd be living somewhere in a trailer as a sovcit with a Don't Tread On Me Decal adorning the back of his pickup truck on blocks in the front yard while he barbecues armadillo roadkill.
The Americans have what’s basically a cultural trait at this point of deflecting ownership of their government’s actions with “not my president so not my failure” abdication of responsibility.
I wish we could open trade talks with these people instead. But, alas, that’s not how it works.
Fine, it’s all my fault. Neither me nor my state voted that way, I’ve protested like hell, but nonetheless at your insistence I accept personal responsibility for the policy choices of the federal government.
What do you propose I do?
Or did you just want my permission to be personally angry at me? Not sure you needed it, but you’ve now got it.
They asked to stop deflecting. Take that literally. Imagine this page without the comment and the comments hanging off it.
"Don't do this thing". "What should I do instead?" Your choice. Maybe nothing. When there is nothing serious to say, maybe sit with the silence, that space where a little joke or some cynicism would relieve the pressure without doing any productive work, and let it work on you. At least until you can't take it anymore, and maybe tomorrow you'll last longer, and maybe next week you'll have a breakthrough.
At any rate, others can't tell us how to fix a situation we're not part of causing. In a society of millions, while each can say "I'm just one of many", nobody else can say more, so we always have "full" responsibility, that is, the maximum possible. Put differently, it is not possible for a single person to be solely responsible for what two people do, but that doesn't change the responsibility they do have.
This isn't about spilled milk, but rather about the question on who it is to fix this. It is on you. If you cannot do it alone, you have to organise with others. But there is nobody, as long as you're an adult and a citizen, that you can point to that should be expected to "do it" instead.
Though I don't mean this in a finger-pointy way either because we all sit in glass houses. There may be differences in degree and all that, but when it comes to what should or could be, and how it is, we're all so far from the mark that bickering about who is the worst and who should get "the" blame for the situation, rather than how to change it, seems pointless.
> Or did you just want my permission to be personally angry at me? Not sure you needed it, but you’ve now got it.
I personally wish you a really awesome weekend, stranger. You insisted on making this personal, now deal with it >:[
> The Americans have what’s basically a cultural trait at this point of deflecting ownership of their government’s actions with “not my president so not my failure” abdication of responsibility.
That's merely a symptom of the underlying problem, which is that capital interests run the show, and have for many decades.
What we refer to as a democracy is illusory. We basically have a uniparty, but most people are fooled by the sports team arrangement of good cop / bad cop. Those who aren't fooled feel powerless, and they are right to.
Anyone who balks at this need only consider which things receive bi-partisan support.
Yeah, the guy who declared "No Kings" demonstrators extremists and terrorists, and threatens to invoke the Insurrection Act against ICE protestors has in effect said he's not my president for me.
Filter for dates around his presidential run: "he's not really anti Vax", "he's the only candidate talking about health"... With Dorsey and other SV actors boosting him.
That appears to be a general news article that doesn't reference HN. Can you clarify why you think it's relevant, because a general news article does not represent HN general opinion in any way.
"Darling candidate" is overselling it but there's a solid chunk of anti-vax, covid-truthing, lab-leak is-proven-fact, JFK just wants better food nutballs on HN.
They overlap with the climate deniers, the nukecels, libertarians and Trump fans.
And it clearly goes to the top, since his vice-president and primary funded was a Google CEO ex-wife, and he had high level support even before he went back on his stated opinions and joined the Trump campaign.
"Trump isn't Hitler, Hitler had policies" being one memorable zinger of his.
> In 2016, Kennedy said of Trump, according to newly uncovered recordings: “He’s not like Hitler. Hitler had like a plan, you know, Hitler was interested in policy."
On Dr Phil, an audience member raised concerns about "stratospheric aerosol injections." Kennedy responded, "That is not happening in my agency. We don't do that. It's done, we think, by DARPA," referring to the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. "And a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel. You know, those materials are put in jet fuel. I'm going to do everything in my power to stop it."
You might benefit from looking up the Goomba Fallacy. As a former anti-anti-RFK guy, I absolutely have to take responsibility, I severely misunderstood the wellness movement and didn't realize that inflicting disease on people was their goal. But I don't know why you think the person you're responding to supported RFK.
> didn't realize that inflicting disease on people was their goal
I think the lesson here is just because someone is anti-something doesn't exactly mean they stand for something. Just because someone is anti-corruption it doesn't mean they are pro corruption etc. Because people always find it easy to run their mouths and be arm chair experts.
I had a chance to see the full 10 year cycle of an anti corruption candidate. He got elected into power and did nothing. Nada. Because all he knew was to fight and find someone to blame. He was just a weasel. 10 years later the place was worse off and corruption was even higher. When I pointed this out to some MAGA folks - they were like but how do you know until we try. Its like Americans want to tempt fate and want to see for themselves how institutions which took multi decades to get destroyed in few years.
RFK is similar case. He has a stance - whether right or wrong. But under pressure he just abandons them to save his own skin. He has never owned up to the issues his anti vax crusade causing the Samoa measles epidemic. And just like that Americans wanted to tempt fate with - "he is making good points about food". He is not. He demand accountability from others but owns up to nothing. He will weasel out of every issue is causing.
He's definitely got the broken clock syndrome. And back in the day he was a strong defender of the environment.
I've got a family member and ex friend (both trained in science) and they drank the koolaid hard. A funny story about them -- both had stayed at my home (different times) and I had taken to heating the water for my coffee in the microwave.
Both of them were horrified by that and refused to use that water. Neither could give reason why, and artfully deflected when I pressed the matter. I think antivaxers caught a virus that melted their brains.
I think the worldwide disruption of the pandemic melted people's brains, and the recent surge in the anti-vax movement is a symptom. Along the lines of: if all this bad stuff happened and my life was significantly harmed, it must be someone's fault; all those doctors and scientists kept advising everyone on what they thought was happening and what to do, so they're probably the ones who caused the problem.
I say this as a committed fan of RNA vaccines and masking, who believed we could have contained covid with more serious lockdowns very early in the pandemic: In point of fact, it was someone's fault, and the someones whose fault it was - the ones doing gain of function research - were the same people who took control of lockdown policy in the US. That would be enough to melt a lot of people's brains, even if it weren't for the psychological effects of lockdowns, remote schooling, and the consequent arrested development of an entire generation. At a bare minimum, the concealment by the CCP of what they knew of covid was an act of war. The cover-up itself killed millions of people and caused untold economic damage to their adversaries, with the collusion of health officials in the US government who had offshored illegal research there.
Even if you accept the lab leak (highly questionable) and buy into the conspiracy that Fauci was controlling the operation of GoF research that created covid this is wrong. Lockdowns were managed by local authorities and state leadership.
Yes, some states, like mine, had virtually zero lockdown. And we also have some of the highest population of anti-vaxxers and covid deniers, somehow. I still hear people talking about the effects of the lockdown. The lockdown that never happened. And the covid vaccine mandates. Which also never happened.
From what I've read about GOF research, it's essentially explored in defensive posture, because viruses mutate and they're looking at how to get ahead of the curve (not a researcher, just my take).
But what is never discussed in the Lab Leak pursuit is: so what? I mean, yes, poor biosecurity and containment should be called out and not covered up, but the real value is in being the foundation of a conspiracy. "The government conspired to make you sick!".
Think about this: covid has mutated consistently since it's been tracked. Were those mutations coming from a lab or was it viruses doing virus things. Was Ebola made in a lab or did it come from a place we know viruses come from.
Was the Spanish Flu a Chinese plot? Was AIDS?
The handling of the outbreak was clearly bungled, but let's remember who was in charge in the US when it happened. The guy who shut down research and tracking teams because Obama had funded them (So had Bush -- until then, this kind of stuff was non-political and taken seriously as a non-partisan issue).
The failure for masking was again, on the then POTUS, and it's been conjectured by many (including myself) that he was against masks because it would mess up his makeup.
Yes, it could have been handled so much better, and sadly, could have been an incredibly valuable teachable moment that made us all safer in the future. But instead it was used to further divide us and foster the literal fucking insanity of antivaxxers. I have nothing but contempt for those people because they are a danger to humanity.
I don't think it was a conspiracy to make people sick. I also don't think the lab leak theory should be a partisan issue. I was in the camp at the time shouting that we needed to enforce masking and stay-at-home orders, and to say that the Trump admin bungled the response is too kind.
What was a conspiracy was the cover-up by health officials who knew that it had escaped a lab. And by the Chinese government, which knew even earlier, and which I believe saw an economic and strategic advantage in keeping the information and the genome of the virus to itself for a few months while it was already circulating in Wuhan.
One does not have to believe that the lab leak was intentional to believe that once it happened, the responsible parties conspired to cover it up.
As for the gain of function research itself, though defensive in nature and benign in intent, it was something that was deemed too risky to be performed in the US, and outsourcing it to a country with a much poorer safety record was wildly irresponsible. When it backfired, a cover-up naturally ensued.
I'm not a MAGA person (I've always voted Democrat, actually). This is just my take as to the most likely scenario given what's publicly known. And of course the virus has mutated in the wild, as viruses do. The question is whether the initial strain was given genetic advantages that were evolved under human guidance - defensively or not.
It's still conjecture. I'm well aware of confirmation bias (that we're all susceptible to), but a recent query of the Goog says it's unclear and leans towards a natural mutation.
But this also returns to the "so what" path. The conspiracy paints GOF as "evil government doing bad things" (which is not unreasonable conjecture in many contexts), but the work is primarily intended for defensive measures:
Search Google for this: "did the us outsource GOF research into sars to wuhan labs in china"
I found the answer to be reasonable and credible. Again, governments lie but so do conspiracy theories.
To make this more HN aligned I'll share a story:
I was introduced to Chuck Peddle at a wedding not long after the turn of the century. I first learned assembly language on the 6502 so I knew who he was and was thrilled to meet him and hear his stories. At that point in time he was working on some hardware startup in Malaysia (IIRC), and was a seasoned world traveller.
The last part of our conversation was his observation through his travels that due to the nature of overcrowded cities in third world countries and the advent of air travel where people could disperse rapidly to anywhere else in the world, he shared a fear that a deadly outbreak would eventually happen and would travel the world in days, with horrifying consequences.
That came to mind when Covid happened.
Lastly, I'm not at all fond of these types of conspiracies because they spread like a virus and their value is primarily in giving people the feeling that they know what's going on and they know better than everyone else -- and it becomes such a part of their identity that trying to debunk that conspiracy is only perceived as a personal attack -- there's no room for reason.
All of this "the truth is out there" while we have real conspiracies happening in broad daylight and people just shrug like "oh, that just happens, whatever". I'm referring to the current US presidential administration.
Once again, I'm not an identitarian, nor was I trying to personally attack anyone, nor is my take on what happened an attempt to gain a sense of control over my environment (anymore than anyone's attempt to understand anything is an attempt to prepare oneself for future events). I find that your need to skew the conversation toward my personal psychology actually is a form of ad hominem, and your own anectdotes or what you found on Google have no relevance other than speciously attempting to increase your credibility in this conversation.
I think my point stands that once a gain of function-mediated virus escaped a lab, the incentives aligned in such a way that the people and the government responsible for that fuckup took steps to cover it up, and that is a perfectly logical and reasonable conclusion.
I'm sorry if it came across that way, I was addressing the issue and my frustrations with the community that pursue it -- I did not have you in mind personally at all, just the topic.
I absolutely agree that government coverups are absolutely unacceptable.
I state my conclusion as "it seems to be this way" whereas I read you as saying "no, it was this, case closed".
Intent matters. In the courtroom and out of it. My frustration is that (from my perspective) the intent behind the lab leak theory is to turn it into a government plot against the people (and yes, those can happen), and that the whole affair of dealing with Covid was a nefarious plot to harm the population and importantly to force vaccines upon the masses.
As the purported incident happened in China, there will likely never be any admission or redress. And the torches and pitchforks will continue coming for vaccine research. And I have every right to be less than happy about that.
The backlash against vaccines was/is idiotic, and tying vaccine fast tracking and (some) forced vaccination to some grand conspiracy notion of a virus being released in order to force nefarious vaccines on people, is completly unserious and falls into loony-bin conspiracy territory. I wouldn't even engage with anyone holding that theory. I actually think that, short-term pitchfork weilding reactionaries aside, covid was the best thing t happen since the mid-20th Century to advance both vaccine science and general uptake in the long run. In any case, I get my covid shot every year, and I own a lot of Moderna stock and feel fairly good about their platform curing other diseases.
I would say this about the purported incident happening in China: From the perspective of the Chinese government, it really didn't matter whether it was a lab leak or not, as their concealment of the problem for 2-3 critical months would likely have happened even if saving face was not an issue. It was a simple projection to say that an authoritarian regime with a top-down economy and an unlimited ability to lock down outbreaks would gain an edge in relative GDP growth over a disorganized, democratic adversary, which would compound for every day they withheld information even though they were attempting to contain the spread within their own borders. That's the economic calculation I called an act of war.
Broken clock syndrome is very easy to "pull off" in medicine because medicine is incredibly complex and it's all risk calculus. For even the most benign or life-saving drugs, you can conjure up examples of how they've killed people. That includes vaccines, unfortunately.
So these people have a leg to stand on. It's a wooden leg (arrrg) but they have a leg. Of course they, and their supporters, are never doing any kind of statistical analysis or risk calculus. The the "risk" part is the thing that really, really matters. I mean, we have chemotherapies which have a very high chance of fucking your shit up or even killing you. But untreated cancers are fatal, and sometimes very quickly. It's all nuanced.
the republicans spent the last 50 years gerrymandering and disenfranchising.
the "who you elect" is a specious argument. Everyone in California could elect democrarts forever, and 2 senators in Wyoming still have a larger sway per capita.
Don't get me started on the words being all used incorrectly or misunderstood! Liberal, conservative, democracy, socialism, communism, free market. These are core concepts to a lot of current political debate and yet the words are effectively meaningless the way people use them. It wouldn't matter except the gap in understanding is exploited to paper over a bunch of dishonesty and corruption.
Tangential but nonetheless, I always think of this quote from Lord of War:
> Yuri Orlov: [Narrating] Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors Than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters.
>I mean, it is not as if RFK was the darling candidate of HN at one time?
Wasn't my darling candidate. Mostly because I can read research papers and understand that drinking raw milk and avoiding vaccines doesn't make me healthier.
Indeed. There is no reason to consume raw milk. Pasteurization is not actually the problem.
On the other hand, there is no reason to homogenize milk at all. It is safe and legal to procure "cream top" or non-homogenized milk at many grocery outlets. Cream-top milk is not processed, and in fact there have been detrimental effects linked to the consumption of homogenized milk, which you can avoid by drinking cream-top milk instead.
Homogenization does not make milk safer or healthier to drink. On the contrary, it permits the processors to remove healthful elements and sell them in a more profitable vehicle. Why not simply keep your entire product intact, as it was found in nature?
The "raw milk" craze is a bonkers red herring for everyone. Don't drink raw milk. Don't buy the hype. But you don't need homogenization, either!
Non homogenized, lightly flash pasteurized milk has been my favorite for years. Just tastier, luckily I grew up in a little strange town where it was norm, and I don't have the weird modern health movement baggage to go with it.
If you can sit down and compare a glass of skim milk to full-fat milk, you’re getting somewhere.
Cream-top milk is not merely full-fat: the cream is unmixed and free floating. You can immediately tell it is different by texture.
Some people separate the cream and reserve it for coffee or something. Or you can agitate it for “manual homogenization”. The difference is texture, really. It may have bothered housewives trying to cook or to pour it. But I love the experience.
Raw milk _can_ be kind of okay under very specific circumstances. (But knowing the state american farms tend to be in regarding hygiene and controls, it's a ridiculous gamble.)
1) extremely closely controlled cow health
2) minimal storage time
3) minimized chances of cross contamination/reasonably clean cows <- that's the big one
4) healthy immune system to minimize infection chances
If even one of those isn't there, it's basically sickness in a cup. Why take a risk if there's no benefit?
In germany, there's the concept of "Vorzugsmilch", which is raw milk from specifically controlled farms with super tight regulations with regular and intense controls and testing of milk, e.g. monthly testing of every individual cow's milk.
But even then, it's an - albeit small - risk without benefit, with the exception of raw-milk cheese, which can't be made in any other way. I just don't get it, practically none of the claims of the raw-milk-gurus could be proven under controlled circumstances. Why needlessly take risks?
I tend to think the risk is the point. It's an in-group marker, getting very sick every so often for no good reason shows commitment. Which of course makes it doubly pointless as a suggestion to the general public, but the fact that it's a bad idea doesn't mean that for the in-group it's a bad idea. (I mean, it _is_ a bad idea, you understand though.)
In all truthness, it was in a village and I was under 6 or 7. It was the way things worked. And no one monitored the cows specifically: they would graze all day and then returned in the evening and be milked by hand.
"The objective of this review is to provide an integrated historical account of the complex, often convoluted events impacting milk hygiene and its resultant effect on infant mortality from 1875 to 1925. Heat pasteurization of cow's milk is necessary for rendering this important nutrient source safe for humans-particularly infants. Developed by Louis Pasteur in 1864, pasteurization evolved from the commercially important parboiling of wine and beer when the Industrial Revolution was effecting rapid societal change in Western societies. In European and American societies of the early and mid-19th century, infant mortality rates were 30- to 60-fold higher than the current rates of five or six deaths per 1,000 live births per year."
Not every pre-pasteurization child died, but far more died than post-pasteurization.
Raw milk is just a bad idea at anything beyond incredibly tiny tightly controlled scale. Sure, you got lucky. It's still not a good way to feed a society.
> Can we start a serious discussion about whether we might be living in a simulation with a troll teenager at the controls?
Why? To skirt the fact that this is reality and needs to be changed? There is no simulation. There is no super-natural teenager interested in making your life a tiny bit worse (I mean: a human teenager would just let N.Korea send nukes, and it's not as if you're living in Sudan either). Your question seems to be either trolling itself or delusional, or the feeblest attempt at humor. Neither is helpful.
My comment is partially in jest. Off the top of my head, I'm not aware of any particular policies that make brain worms more prevalent, although the person I was replying to mentioned prions and I believe that's a real concern. In general, this administration has favored a looser regulatory environment. Specifically, there have been policy changes directly linked to cyclosporiasis.
Last year CDC scaled back the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network from eight monitored pathogens to two. Cyclospora was one of the six dropped. The remaining two are Salmonella and E. coli. For what it's worth, there has also been an uptick in salmonella cases. Food policy experts have pushed back on the assertion that the policy change caused the outbreak, but concede that outbreak response programs are underfunded and the fact that cyclospora no longer being monitored makes it difficult to understand how it fits in with longer trends.
What the food policy experts say really points to the broader issue - an overall decrease in response and monitoring capability - and that's a bigger concern than playing the blame game on one particular outbreak.
It's reasonable to question how government agencies are making these decisions and one just yesterday on the peptide industry may be one of the best examples yet of how flawed the decision-making process is. The FDA's Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee (PCAC) met and voted in favor of adding several peptides to the list of substances compounding pharmacies are allowed to produce. Eight members of the panel had been recently appointed under RFK, including six who run clinics that offer peptides, increasing the size of the panel from 6 to 14. The votes on the peptides were 8-6.
So... back to my comic book villain theory. This is exactly how a comic book villain would do it and fool everyone with a veneer of legitimacy.
Read https://www.docdroid.net/MfW3sAr/parasite-pill-version-20-pd... and be enlightened. I believe it was originally made by a 4chan user so obviously there are a lot of insane ramblings there but if the theory is true, the implications would be hilarious
That was a long time ago. Seems like if you were going to get it, you would have gotten it already. Besides, even in the UK the numbers aren't that high.
There's really nothing we can do about prion diseases, can we? What does the FDA (or any other regulatory or research institution) even have in the way of prion detection?
There's a U. Minnesota spinoff company Priogen testing for chronic wasting disease. I saw them advertising on Reddit for hunters to test their deer meat. Here's a recent news story about the Pennsylvania Game Commission offering kits: https://www.fox43.com/article/news/local/pilot-project-chron...
Most foreigners I know are incredibly skeptical or opposed to the idea of consuming meat while in America, as it has a pretty bad global reputation for not being good quality and/or safe.
I’m sure fans of BBQ will argue this, but I’d say the average person who is travelling just for BBQ is not really a standard foreigner.
I’ve even had co-workers visit from Ireland and Germany who only trust McDonald’s while they visit, or a local pub.
Just a general note on quality and herd practices really.
US beef has only just reached Australian health & safety standards* after being banned for import into Australia for two decades.
* perhaps it's more the case that Australia has only just bowed to US tariff pressure to accept US meat that isn't up to Australian standards for herd health tracking.
I've had both and American beef is mediocre compared to Australian or NZ beef (which is usually grass fed).
If you want BBQ, go to the US. Else for just a normal steak, just source good ANZ beef and pay for it. Cheaper Indian beef (mostly buffalo - you can get cow meat but that's mostly tougher) can also be mostly grass-fed but it's harder to source.
Grass-fed beef isn't necessarily better. It tends to be comparatively leaner than grain-fed, and a richly marbled rib eye is for a lot of people (myself included) just about as good as it gets.
Australian wagyu is, for my money, the best beef in the world (yes, better than Japanese wagyu, which really is too richly marbled), but American Prime is no slouch either.
Yes, my bad. I think the correct term I should've used isn't grass-fed (a flimsy marketing term) but free range. ANZ cattle isn't generally cooped up in feedlots and factory farmed, although this is now changing rapidly for the worse.
Australian wagyu is actually the worst offender in this regard, since it means that cattle spend 1-2 years in a factory farm feedlot.
Western cooking tends to prefer having rich fat marbling on the beef and let it cook in its own fats, but in Asia, we tend to prefer leaner cuts for our cooking, mostly because beef isn't usually eaten on its own as a steak.
My hot take on the American steak allure is more about the “cowboy” big portion fantasy that’s fairly engrained into pop culture globally. Otherwise, I wouldn’t say American cattle are superior in really any other way, and are not the best cuts globally either.
Switzerland I cannot speak to, but having had meats from Australia, Britain, Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Japan - a lot of places around the world have great and superior quality meats.
Poultry isn’t even in the conversation here, American poultry is off putting by nearly any person you ask who didn’t grow up with it.
> My hot take on the American steak allure is more about the “cowboy” big portion fantasy that’s fairly engrained into pop culture globally.
I remember a conversation in a Dallas hotel bar with an increasingly crestfallen cowboy as we talked about how the King Ranch "wasn't a particularly large ranch, all things considered". Initially, confusion. "What do you mean, it's the largest ranch in the world?" No, the US.
And then we talked about Australian cattle ranches, where Anna Station is over seven times bigger than King Ranch, bigger than Israel, and that if King Ranch was in Australia it'd be only be, at best, the 70th largest ranch in the country (and more likely only just scraping into the top 100).
Everything is not always bigger in Texas.
I despise American poultry - factory farming, copious saline injection, bleh.
Every single person I know here in europe that is a meat lover is always including either some Texas BBQ or some large tomahawk steaks in their visit and the size and quality of US meat is perceived highly. And it's not like people will go to the US to have a steak or BBQ but definitely nobody who isn't a vegan is "opposed to the idea of consuming meat while in america", that's ridiculous.
That's interesting, every single person I know in Europe that is a meat lover is opposed to some Texas BBQ and against large portion American-style steaks in general, where the quality of US meat is perceived quite poorly.
And yet Americans are the victim of food-borne illnesses at no greater rate than Europeans. I wonder how much of that is farm lobbies trying to keep out imports. US growers do the same thing when the don't want to compete with South American imports.
Animal welfare is a big thing in some Euro countries. Which let's face it nobody in the US or Argentina cares about.
And then there are concerns about human rights, rain forests, genociding Amazonian tribes, corruption and dictators. Now I will admit it is all hypocritical everyone of us happily buys stuff from AliExpress but that is the condition of man.
Been thinking about this one for decades. There is a lot not being discussed too. We have things neatly compartmentalized to avoid cohesive dialog, eg scrapie for sheep, chronic wasting for deer, CJD for humans, and BSE for cattle -- all similar enough to be in the same discussion, but somehow neatly isolated.
We know with certainty that CWD is transmitted/passed through fecal (esp ingestion) in the wild, where animals eat droppings for the stored nutrients, and 20 years ago field biologists discovered prions were transmissible through intestinal routes. At this point it's in the soil, and has been. Though good luck finding all the old, previously available official literature on this.
Remember the New Zealand farm where the sheep kept getting scrapie, so they slaughtered em all, then brought in new flocks, then watched them get re-infected, then finally said fuck it, and left the field alone, then essentially had to admit the land itself was infectious? There are many hard core highly demanding folks here who will scream for "the data" but won't mention that it's difficult to retain all this in memory over decades while the original sources become increasingly more obscure every year. In other words, no, I am not citing anything. If folks want to sneeze and giggle at prions and call me bad-man anti-data boy, go ahead.
Research has been self contradicting on this subject for many years. One day it's solvable with a bit of bleach, and the next even an acetylene torch won't do. It's transmissible through intestinal routes, no it's not, yes it is. Somewhere in between, though, a real problem persists, and my advice is to keep thinking about it, because thinking about it is bad, and looking at what most now call good, it might be a safe-enough inversion to assume bad is good, on this one.
Edit: I would also urge the question of where CWD originated. You will get speculation, but no certain answers. Wherever it came from originally, denying the intestinal route must have helped facilitate the spread.
The US Federal Government has been meaningfully degraded by the brazen corruption of the people in power. Already there was a crisis of faith in authority; this is just going to make it much much worse.
I wonder if its time to rethink some of these institutions. It seems like Food Safety is especially important to the welp being of society; it might make sense to have food testing labs in every major population center/distribution hub. Funded by a tax on the food companies or perhaps even locally. Its just unbelievable that the entire US population is so vulnerable… what if a bad actor did something nasty deliberately?
Seems because of Supreme Court ruling practically every federal agency likely needs to be re-chartered to have the same structure as the Federal Reserve.
As you say, the current profoundly corrupt Supreme Court majority will make up whatever justification they need to get the outcome they want, case by case, and don't believe in the concept of precedent, even their own.
The only thing that can be done is "re-chartering" the court – immediate significant expansion/packing followed later by drastic structural reforms.
Depending how far the Supreme Council takes the unitary executive theory, we might need a straight up Constitutional amendment. And while we're at it, those department heads should be directly elected by the People - imagine being able to split your choices for which parties control the FCC vs the ATF.
(Ideally we'd move towards Ranked Pairs voting too, diminishing the two-party stranglehold as well)
Technocrats shouldn't be popularly elected. Someone like RFK Jr. would be more likely to end up in a top position under popular election, not less likely. The American public does not generally respect expertise, but politicians mostly did until quite recently (with a few exceptions like climate change).
Except that rejection of expertise has been building, right? To the point that people were decrying the bureaucrats as unelected, wanting to tear it all down, and here we are.
I don't think department heads were particularly technocratic, either. That was more supported by the laws/customs protecting the actual workers who didn't lose their jobs every administration. The heads were political - just political with an eye towards getting appointed/confirmed, rather than popularly elected.
Yes but it was largely built on trust, under the assumption the American president would have the best interest of Americans as heart, even if he and his constituency may disagree from time to time. It was a fair assumption, which is now permanently broken.
We now must consider the possibility that our president is a malicious or foreign actor, intent on destroying the US. Granted, we DID consider this in the beginning after the revolutionary war. But we slowly forgot, and did not build in nearly enough protections. Modern America is nothing like post-revolutionary America. Everything is more complex, and our government bigger and power powerful than ever.
Generally the industry DOES lobby for regulation. In a deregulated industry, there's a rush towards the bottom - which means trust in the industry implodes. They don't want that. I don't believe the current administration is actually in line with the industry as a whole.
Even the UK (very belatedly, let's be clear) effectively disowned one of the Royal Family. Andrew lost the styles of His Royal Highness, the title Prince (along with all military rankings, including Vice Admiral), all government funding, his police protection, all public duties, is no longer entitled to rooms at any royal palace.
Meanwhile, the faintest whiff that Trump was anything more than occasionally in the vicinity of Epstein leads a significant part of the American population to scream conspiracy.
FYI, companies are typically getting alerts/reports of mentions on the web on various subjects of interest to them.
While they may just be focusing on trends/aggregate info, they often sample messages too.
This has been going on for at least 20 years (probably more, I just wasn't aware until then). It's not mainly interns, it's the web crawlers that are constantly indexing the internet.
Taylor Farms management has gotta learn the outcome of the Chicago Tylenol Murders like they should’ve learned in high school or college. Same for all TF competitors. Business ethics ain’t easy, they’re important.
The next time you hear people claiming that Canada's dairy tariff's are unjust, unfair, etc.* ... Bear in mind that they only kick in after a quota that's never been reached because Canadians generally perceive U.S. dairy as being of lower quality. This sort of thing probably won't change that.
_______
* Trump does this regularly when justifying his latest tariffs.
"Taylor Farms donated more than $2 million to conservative political groups in 2025, according to Federal Election Commission filings. That includes a $1 million donation to MAGA Inc., the Trump-centric super PAC, and $1.1 million to other super PACs dedicated to electing Republicans."
So arguably... yes. They leveraged their 'professional courtesy' with the government.
"No shit?" jokes aside, it seems like a bad corporate strategy. Rather than owning up and doing what they can to protect their customers, they kept trying to hide, and now Taylor Farms is going to forever be associated in customers minds with explosive diarrhea.
From a purely greedy/capitalistic standpoint, this strategy made sense.
If Presdient Camacho can call a sport’s federation and have a penalty canceled and the administration is as rotten and corrupt as its demonstrated every day, it’s worth a shot for that company to try and avoid a recall.
A recall costs money, people they don’t know getting sick costs them nothing.
Don’t drag Presdient Camacho’s name through the dirt like that. He was a loving father. And as a president he identified a real issue the country was facing and when presented with evidence he changed his mind and allowed the smartest person available to implement a solution.
I’m sure they’ll just come up with some other branding, they’ll “go bankrupt” and reorganize, and call it good in the public eye, and everyone will have forgotten about it in a year or two.
They tried to hide it before the news got out in the first place; the reason executives in general are so excited about Trump is that they think he's going to let them bribe their way out of anything. I'm a bit surprised to hear no bribe was accepted here, although I suppose an uncontrolled explosive diarrhea outbreak would be hard for regime officials to keep a lid on.
> You irrigate those with water that's fit to drink
To be able to irrigate even a fraction of the US’s crops with potable water, we’d have to build some massive infrastructure to purify, store, and deliver that water. Existing nonpotable infrastructure would be difficult to reuse for this purpose. Doing that would take years and cost billions.
Industrial agriculture is not like a backyard garden; the water infrastructure for irrigation is very different from the infrastructure for drinking water.
(Less so if others are exculpatory. Which is not the case here. A known false positive is not conclusive proof, but neither does it explicitly clear a source.)
They already told you clearly, so it sounds like you're trying to browbeat them with a fallacy of equivocation over the scope of "it".
These things are not equivalent:
1. A biological test for a parasite in a sample of equipment/material from the factory. (Claimed as false-positive.)
2. The analysis of the supply-chain for the food that sickened people which led to that facility as a common factor. (Presumably still accurate.)
___________
To use a criminal-investigation metaphor: Suppose a dead woman is found covered in knife wounds, and the circumstantial evidence leads to one Knifey McStabberson, since he (A) previously dated the woman and (B) sent a death-threat once via text-message, and (C) has a collection of hundreds of suitably-sized knives. Investigators notice one that looks bloody, and test it... It's her blood! Wait, oops, no, false-positive, it was something else.
What is your takeaway from the story so far? Is it that Knifey McStabberson himself is "a false-positive" and obviously totally innocent... or is it that it would be a good idea to check more of the knives scattered around his house and in his car?
Meh, I don't see how I could make anything worse, with how they were featured in Leave it to Cleaver, and recently dissed in that song by the Full-Tang Clan.
"That $1 million donation came six days after the FDA announced plans to delay the enforcement of a "food traceability rule" that would affect fresh fruits and vegetables, among other products, until 2028. The rule is unrelated to the inspection of fresh produce — it requires companies to track products at seven different key points in the supply chain to better prevent foodborne illness outbreaks."
This is the most upsetting thing about everything that is happening. Like, sure I have plenty of criticisms about the FDA, but by and large, I thought the body was slowly working in the direction of the public good.
Once you destroy that trust, every single announcement becomes suspect. You no longer have anything you can believe.
And if you don't think the Republican's will use this distrust to their advantage, well, I have a bridge to sell you. It's a very common tactic by them: create a problem that never existed, then wine about said problem.
It’s so unbelievably destructive. We had a kid recently and I was looking up vaccine research. Do we have to prod the kid with the Hepatitis B vaccine at birth? I looked it up and promptly said, “well, CDC actually just came out with a thing that says it’s optional.” Wife turned to me and said, uh yeah, and who is the new director of the HHS now? Looked it up, and I come to find that many scientists were opposed to the decision to make it optional.
Yep, now I’ll be second guessing everything I read from the CDC. Good news though, I can ask a fucking AI Chatbot what to do. As a normal person with basic civic values this shit makes me so mad. It’s beyond disgusting. The gates of Hell are wide open for these people.
Yeah guess in hindsight that didn’t read as clear as it should have.
The chat bot is only even correct because of obvious, authoritative, trustworthy sources like the CDC. Makes it even more enraging to see bot tech makers meeting with the destroyers of truth.
It’s not worth much because the take away from this is you can call and pay to have heinous crimes pushed under the rug. It’s simple corruption, and devastating.
This admin has lied repeatedly. Why would any of us believe a statement solely because the admin said it? Do we need to give them the benefit of the doubt despite how many times they lie?
> This admin has lied repeatedly. Why would any of us believe a statement solely because the admin said it?
At this point they've lied enough that the assumption should just always be "They're probably lying again. I need more evidence / facts / details if this is a thing I care about at all." Honestly though, I'm at a point where I simply won't trust much anything anymore without seeing / hearing more (provably true) facts first. Lying / deceit has just become far too common / accepted / normalized these days.
During the COVID pandemic situations we’re evolving quickly and the admin admitted they were wrong previously or had updated their views based on new information.
If you ask this admin about their obviously incorrect or fallacious statements their response is to call you a nasty person or piggy and then double down on the lies.
It was very possible at the beginning of COVID that it was an airborne virus. However the CDC proclaimed that there was no evidence, therefore no one should wear masks.
>In March 2020, as the pandemic began, Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to the president of the United States, explained in a 60 Minutes interview that he felt community use of masks was unnecessary. A few months later, he argued that his statements were not meant to imply that he felt the data to justify the use of cloth masks was insufficient. Rather, he said, had he endorsed mask wearing (of any kind), mass panic would ensue and lead to a surgical and N95 mask shortage among health care workers, who needed the masks more.
There was also the messaging that the vaccine did not cause myocarditis.
>This obvious error was compounded weeks later during a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The committee met to discuss what we knew and did not know about heart inflammation, or myocarditis, that had been linked to mRNA vaccination, and most notable in young men who received the vaccine.
I agree that the current administration is bad but I can't call it worse because the prior administration worked to illegally censor it's critics.
The administrative agencies response to the pandemic was very telling, there were multiple large conversations here with lots of comments about how we were being lied to.
>> FDA says...
>This admin has lied repeatedly. Why would any of us believe a statement solely because the admin said it? Do we need to give them the benefit of the doubt despite how many times they lie?
The fact of the matter is that both sets of officials lied.
Fauci only admitted to lying when he was brought in front of congress and there was a chance they were going to prosecute him if he lied to them.
We will see what this admin does if they ever get brought up to task.
Fauci thought his intentions were noble.
RFK Jr. believes the same I am sure.
Doesn't make either of them right, understanding why the other side is/was upset is the first step to fixing the problem.
If you can't see the equivalence between saying don't trust the government because it's lying and don't trust the government because it's lying there is nothing that will convince you.
> This is the same argument that the anti-vaxers had about the COVID vaccine.
It’s not the same argument because one group is a true believer who will never admit fault. The other isnt. There is no equivalence to people who believe in anti vaxx ideology and people who don’t believe in RFK jr.
Yes it is because the argument is that you can't trust the government because they lied.
>Comments on YouTube videos during the COVID-19 pandemic clustered similarly around "concerns about side-effects, effectiveness, and lack of trust in corporations and government".
I don't share the same believes as anti-vaxers but I do believe that their cause was bolster by the government deliberately lying.
In the very early days of COVID, there were numerous studies that backed up the government position that COVID was not spread via airborne route.
>Airborne transmission, either by droplets (route 3) or by aerosol (route 4), contributes less than 1% of the total viruses needed to cause an infection....This finding is consistent with studies that sampled the air where symptomatic COVID-19 patients reside and found that all collected samples were negative for SARS-CoV-2
But earlier it even states:
>Due to the fact that most of these estimates were made in countries that lead a public health policy of immediate isolation of cases upon symptoms’ onset, these estimates represent the effect of pre-symptomatic carrier transmission. In fact, pre-symptomatic transmission was recently referred to as the Achilles’ heel of COVID-19 pandemic control, as symptom-based detection of infection is less effective in comparison to the control of the SARS epidemic in 2003
So we know that pre-symptomatic transmission is the primary driver but claim it's not airborne because we sampled air of symptomatic patients.
This was the quality of the "Science" that we were supposed to believe.
When you have the scientific establishment publishing what amounts to bullshit to back up the lies of government how can you trust it in the future?
Andrew Wakefield study is discredited, I am not aware of any others but there may be.
I doubt that I am going to change your mind that the argument you presented is the same as anti-vaxers. But my advice remains the same, become a domain expert or be close friends with one you can trust.
I have several family member in the medical field, when the push for adolescent vaccine began some of them quietly cautioned me about the risks that were being downplayed. I read through the studies and made my own decision. Just as I made my own decision about wearing a mask when the government was telling me it increased my risk of infection.
http://archive.today/2026.07.25-012850/https://www.wsj.com/h...
>>On Monday, however, the FDA said that the "false-positive lab sample DOES NOT change the basis for [the] FDA's ongoing outbreak investigation or the overwhelming epidemiological data supporting the current voluntary recall by Taylor Farms." The agency added that its "traceback investigation and outbreak data continue to converge on shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms locations in central Mexico."
The false positive "doesn't call into question the conclusion of the outbreak investigation," McEntire said. Had the positive test been confirmed, "it could've resulted in a substantially expanded recall." <<
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/taylor-farms-cyclospora-outbrea...
I like the part where they say “No Taylor Farms branded products are involved in this recall.” As in there are other brands they do not mention which were but do not list them which they could own and distribute under.
https://www.taylorfarms.com/newsroom/taylor-fresh-foods-stat...
Only slightly unrelated, but I've been thinking a lot lately about prion disease and whether or not you can still trust the meat you eat. Easily a food safety concern that is ten times worse than getting a little diarrhea from your salad, and the same institutional rot can contribute to it. And it would take 5-10 years to really see the damage done from it.
A guy gets a worm in his brain, somehow becomes secretary of health, loosens all the rules so the rest of us have a higher chance of getting a brain worm. This is comic book villain kind of stuff. Can we start a serious discussion about whether we might be living in a simulation with a troll teenager at the controls?
> Can we start a serious discussion about whether we might be living in a simulation with a troll teenager at the controls?
Nah. Power centers consolidate and seek slavery, whatever other differences they may have there is consensus there, which we can tell by their practices.
The "mission" of most people we recall by name is really just "knock out any pillars you can find, and cause chaos", they're given free hand and in that sense it's not planned or predictable, but overall it's no more random or silly than dead cows hurled via catapults. The cow has no name, no history, no meaning, it isn't hurled at a precise location in the exact right instant, but at a general location during the siege. And one thing is sure, it controls nothing.
Reminiscent of the toxoplasmosis life cycle.
Instead of making mice seek out cats, this one encourages poor public health policies in people.
toxoplasmosis doesn't actually do that to mice. It makes them less scared, but iirc, not even so much that they don't flee.
it's one of those studies that got blown up into a worldwide news story sensation even though the actual paper didn't say what headlines claimed it did. I don't know if it was ever proven replicable or not, either.
Making prey less scared of the predator makes them significantly more likely to be eaten by that predator.
The reality is even worse than “seeking out cats” because it means if it does this in humans, (which it appears to do) those among us who get infected will engage in all manner of risky, dangerous and destructive behaviors.
If it results in more and fitter offspring it will be selected for.
Sounds like a nice topic for a PhD for someone 100 or 1000 generations down the line...
I don't have a parasite in my brain so take everything I say with a grain of salt but at this pace I'm skeptical there will be 100 more generations.
Maybe it's the worm doing it?
Two things that got RFK nominated.
He's the opposite of Fauci, who Trump hates for contradicting him. And MAGA hates because during the pandemic they saw mask mandates as government overreach.
And he's the poster boy for conspiracy-loving anti-science halfwits like Trump and MAGA.
And he got approved because GOP senators get primaried and death threats if they go against Dear Leader.
That's a large value of two.
> And he's the poster boy for conspiracy-loving anti-science halfwits like Trump and MAGA.
I mean this is the guy who as head of HHS has funded research in his government department to "figure out which other government department is doing chemtrails" (He named DARPA as his prime suspect on an episode of Dr Phil, ye gods). You can't make this shit up. If it wasn't for his family name and connections he'd be living somewhere in a trailer as a sovcit with a Don't Tread On Me Decal adorning the back of his pickup truck on blocks in the front yard while he barbecues armadillo roadkill.
Can we start a serious discussion about whether you might start taking responsibility of who you elect instead of wasting your time fantasizing?
I mean, it is not as if RFK was the darling candidate of HN at one time?
The Americans have what’s basically a cultural trait at this point of deflecting ownership of their government’s actions with “not my president so not my failure” abdication of responsibility.
I wish we could open trade talks with these people instead. But, alas, that’s not how it works.
Fine, it’s all my fault. Neither me nor my state voted that way, I’ve protested like hell, but nonetheless at your insistence I accept personal responsibility for the policy choices of the federal government.
What do you propose I do?
Or did you just want my permission to be personally angry at me? Not sure you needed it, but you’ve now got it.
> What do you propose I do?
They asked to stop deflecting. Take that literally. Imagine this page without the comment and the comments hanging off it.
"Don't do this thing". "What should I do instead?" Your choice. Maybe nothing. When there is nothing serious to say, maybe sit with the silence, that space where a little joke or some cynicism would relieve the pressure without doing any productive work, and let it work on you. At least until you can't take it anymore, and maybe tomorrow you'll last longer, and maybe next week you'll have a breakthrough.
At any rate, others can't tell us how to fix a situation we're not part of causing. In a society of millions, while each can say "I'm just one of many", nobody else can say more, so we always have "full" responsibility, that is, the maximum possible. Put differently, it is not possible for a single person to be solely responsible for what two people do, but that doesn't change the responsibility they do have.
This isn't about spilled milk, but rather about the question on who it is to fix this. It is on you. If you cannot do it alone, you have to organise with others. But there is nobody, as long as you're an adult and a citizen, that you can point to that should be expected to "do it" instead.
Though I don't mean this in a finger-pointy way either because we all sit in glass houses. There may be differences in degree and all that, but when it comes to what should or could be, and how it is, we're all so far from the mark that bickering about who is the worst and who should get "the" blame for the situation, rather than how to change it, seems pointless.
> Or did you just want my permission to be personally angry at me? Not sure you needed it, but you’ve now got it.
I personally wish you a really awesome weekend, stranger. You insisted on making this personal, now deal with it >:[
> The Americans have what’s basically a cultural trait at this point of deflecting ownership of their government’s actions with “not my president so not my failure” abdication of responsibility.
That's merely a symptom of the underlying problem, which is that capital interests run the show, and have for many decades.
What we refer to as a democracy is illusory. We basically have a uniparty, but most people are fooled by the sports team arrangement of good cop / bad cop. Those who aren't fooled feel powerless, and they are right to.
Anyone who balks at this need only consider which things receive bi-partisan support.
Well, a two-party system is bound to be compromised as voters don't have reasonable choices.
Euro countries with >2 parties have the similar capture problems.
Yeah, the guy who declared "No Kings" demonstrators extremists and terrorists, and threatens to invoke the Insurrection Act against ICE protestors has in effect said he's not my president for me.
No, it's those who say "He's my President! (also yours)" who deny and deflect all responsibility.
I've been a long time foe of RFK Jr., spend way too much time here, and have never been under the impression that RFK Jr. was a darling here at all.
Filter for dates around his presidential run: "he's not really anti Vax", "he's the only candidate talking about health"... With Dorsey and other SV actors boosting him.
https://archive.is/kce6f
"he's not really anti Vax"
Ha ha, what a glowing endorsement.
That appears to be a general news article that doesn't reference HN. Can you clarify why you think it's relevant, because a general news article does not represent HN general opinion in any way.
This was never a majority opinion here
There are plenty of topics here where you’ll find that statement untrue.
"Darling candidate" is overselling it but there's a solid chunk of anti-vax, covid-truthing, lab-leak is-proven-fact, JFK just wants better food nutballs on HN.
They overlap with the climate deniers, the nukecels, libertarians and Trump fans.
And it clearly goes to the top, since his vice-president and primary funded was a Google CEO ex-wife, and he had high level support even before he went back on his stated opinions and joined the Trump campaign.
"Trump isn't Hitler, Hitler had policies" being one memorable zinger of his.
Is there a place that I can find this zinger of a quote? I assume the actual wording is slightly different.
> In 2016, Kennedy said of Trump, according to newly uncovered recordings: “He’s not like Hitler. Hitler had like a plan, you know, Hitler was interested in policy."
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/rfk-jr-compared-trump-...
You forgot the chemtrail'ers.
On Dr Phil, an audience member raised concerns about "stratospheric aerosol injections." Kennedy responded, "That is not happening in my agency. We don't do that. It's done, we think, by DARPA," referring to the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. "And a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel. You know, those materials are put in jet fuel. I'm going to do everything in my power to stop it."
Wait, so techbros angling for influence represent the HN population?
Sadly, there's enough MAGA here to share their downvotes but your "evidence" is pointing in a different direction.
Yes because everyone else on HN is one hivemind, other than you of course.
Goomba fallacy
You might benefit from looking up the Goomba Fallacy. As a former anti-anti-RFK guy, I absolutely have to take responsibility, I severely misunderstood the wellness movement and didn't realize that inflicting disease on people was their goal. But I don't know why you think the person you're responding to supported RFK.
> didn't realize that inflicting disease on people was their goal
I think the lesson here is just because someone is anti-something doesn't exactly mean they stand for something. Just because someone is anti-corruption it doesn't mean they are pro corruption etc. Because people always find it easy to run their mouths and be arm chair experts.
I had a chance to see the full 10 year cycle of an anti corruption candidate. He got elected into power and did nothing. Nada. Because all he knew was to fight and find someone to blame. He was just a weasel. 10 years later the place was worse off and corruption was even higher. When I pointed this out to some MAGA folks - they were like but how do you know until we try. Its like Americans want to tempt fate and want to see for themselves how institutions which took multi decades to get destroyed in few years.
RFK is similar case. He has a stance - whether right or wrong. But under pressure he just abandons them to save his own skin. He has never owned up to the issues his anti vax crusade causing the Samoa measles epidemic. And just like that Americans wanted to tempt fate with - "he is making good points about food". He is not. He demand accountability from others but owns up to nothing. He will weasel out of every issue is causing.
He's definitely got the broken clock syndrome. And back in the day he was a strong defender of the environment.
I've got a family member and ex friend (both trained in science) and they drank the koolaid hard. A funny story about them -- both had stayed at my home (different times) and I had taken to heating the water for my coffee in the microwave.
Both of them were horrified by that and refused to use that water. Neither could give reason why, and artfully deflected when I pressed the matter. I think antivaxers caught a virus that melted their brains.
I think the worldwide disruption of the pandemic melted people's brains, and the recent surge in the anti-vax movement is a symptom. Along the lines of: if all this bad stuff happened and my life was significantly harmed, it must be someone's fault; all those doctors and scientists kept advising everyone on what they thought was happening and what to do, so they're probably the ones who caused the problem.
> I think the worldwide disruption of the pandemic melted people's brains, and the recent surge in the anti-vax movement is a symptom.
Anti-vax thinking was around pre-pandemic. An article from 2018:
* https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6122668/
and 2015:
* https://www.bbc.com/news/health-33774181
2020+ was mostly about anti-vax 'contrarian' thinking merging with anti(-Democrat)-government thinking.
Before vaccines were created, Democrat and GOD death rates from COVID were about the same, but after they became available GOP rates became higher:
* https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37486680/
* https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/study-finds-large-gap-in-...
I say this as a committed fan of RNA vaccines and masking, who believed we could have contained covid with more serious lockdowns very early in the pandemic: In point of fact, it was someone's fault, and the someones whose fault it was - the ones doing gain of function research - were the same people who took control of lockdown policy in the US. That would be enough to melt a lot of people's brains, even if it weren't for the psychological effects of lockdowns, remote schooling, and the consequent arrested development of an entire generation. At a bare minimum, the concealment by the CCP of what they knew of covid was an act of war. The cover-up itself killed millions of people and caused untold economic damage to their adversaries, with the collusion of health officials in the US government who had offshored illegal research there.
Even if you accept the lab leak (highly questionable) and buy into the conspiracy that Fauci was controlling the operation of GoF research that created covid this is wrong. Lockdowns were managed by local authorities and state leadership.
Yes, some states, like mine, had virtually zero lockdown. And we also have some of the highest population of anti-vaxxers and covid deniers, somehow. I still hear people talking about the effects of the lockdown. The lockdown that never happened. And the covid vaccine mandates. Which also never happened.
From what I've read about GOF research, it's essentially explored in defensive posture, because viruses mutate and they're looking at how to get ahead of the curve (not a researcher, just my take).
But what is never discussed in the Lab Leak pursuit is: so what? I mean, yes, poor biosecurity and containment should be called out and not covered up, but the real value is in being the foundation of a conspiracy. "The government conspired to make you sick!".
Think about this: covid has mutated consistently since it's been tracked. Were those mutations coming from a lab or was it viruses doing virus things. Was Ebola made in a lab or did it come from a place we know viruses come from.
Was the Spanish Flu a Chinese plot? Was AIDS?
The handling of the outbreak was clearly bungled, but let's remember who was in charge in the US when it happened. The guy who shut down research and tracking teams because Obama had funded them (So had Bush -- until then, this kind of stuff was non-political and taken seriously as a non-partisan issue).
The failure for masking was again, on the then POTUS, and it's been conjectured by many (including myself) that he was against masks because it would mess up his makeup.
Yes, it could have been handled so much better, and sadly, could have been an incredibly valuable teachable moment that made us all safer in the future. But instead it was used to further divide us and foster the literal fucking insanity of antivaxxers. I have nothing but contempt for those people because they are a danger to humanity.
I don't think it was a conspiracy to make people sick. I also don't think the lab leak theory should be a partisan issue. I was in the camp at the time shouting that we needed to enforce masking and stay-at-home orders, and to say that the Trump admin bungled the response is too kind.
What was a conspiracy was the cover-up by health officials who knew that it had escaped a lab. And by the Chinese government, which knew even earlier, and which I believe saw an economic and strategic advantage in keeping the information and the genome of the virus to itself for a few months while it was already circulating in Wuhan.
One does not have to believe that the lab leak was intentional to believe that once it happened, the responsible parties conspired to cover it up.
As for the gain of function research itself, though defensive in nature and benign in intent, it was something that was deemed too risky to be performed in the US, and outsourcing it to a country with a much poorer safety record was wildly irresponsible. When it backfired, a cover-up naturally ensued.
I'm not a MAGA person (I've always voted Democrat, actually). This is just my take as to the most likely scenario given what's publicly known. And of course the virus has mutated in the wild, as viruses do. The question is whether the initial strain was given genetic advantages that were evolved under human guidance - defensively or not.
It's still conjecture. I'm well aware of confirmation bias (that we're all susceptible to), but a recent query of the Goog says it's unclear and leans towards a natural mutation.
This does a good job of painting that picture: https://skeptoid.com/episodes/933
But this also returns to the "so what" path. The conspiracy paints GOF as "evil government doing bad things" (which is not unreasonable conjecture in many contexts), but the work is primarily intended for defensive measures:
https://asm.org/getmedia/ef3e09db-a3c3-4eff-8e73-5d7edbcabb4...
Search Google for this: "did the us outsource GOF research into sars to wuhan labs in china"
I found the answer to be reasonable and credible. Again, governments lie but so do conspiracy theories.
To make this more HN aligned I'll share a story:
I was introduced to Chuck Peddle at a wedding not long after the turn of the century. I first learned assembly language on the 6502 so I knew who he was and was thrilled to meet him and hear his stories. At that point in time he was working on some hardware startup in Malaysia (IIRC), and was a seasoned world traveller.
The last part of our conversation was his observation through his travels that due to the nature of overcrowded cities in third world countries and the advent of air travel where people could disperse rapidly to anywhere else in the world, he shared a fear that a deadly outbreak would eventually happen and would travel the world in days, with horrifying consequences.
That came to mind when Covid happened.
Lastly, I'm not at all fond of these types of conspiracies because they spread like a virus and their value is primarily in giving people the feeling that they know what's going on and they know better than everyone else -- and it becomes such a part of their identity that trying to debunk that conspiracy is only perceived as a personal attack -- there's no room for reason.
All of this "the truth is out there" while we have real conspiracies happening in broad daylight and people just shrug like "oh, that just happens, whatever". I'm referring to the current US presidential administration.
Once again, I'm not an identitarian, nor was I trying to personally attack anyone, nor is my take on what happened an attempt to gain a sense of control over my environment (anymore than anyone's attempt to understand anything is an attempt to prepare oneself for future events). I find that your need to skew the conversation toward my personal psychology actually is a form of ad hominem, and your own anectdotes or what you found on Google have no relevance other than speciously attempting to increase your credibility in this conversation.
I think my point stands that once a gain of function-mediated virus escaped a lab, the incentives aligned in such a way that the people and the government responsible for that fuckup took steps to cover it up, and that is a perfectly logical and reasonable conclusion.
I'm sorry if it came across that way, I was addressing the issue and my frustrations with the community that pursue it -- I did not have you in mind personally at all, just the topic.
I absolutely agree that government coverups are absolutely unacceptable.
I state my conclusion as "it seems to be this way" whereas I read you as saying "no, it was this, case closed".
Intent matters. In the courtroom and out of it. My frustration is that (from my perspective) the intent behind the lab leak theory is to turn it into a government plot against the people (and yes, those can happen), and that the whole affair of dealing with Covid was a nefarious plot to harm the population and importantly to force vaccines upon the masses.
As the purported incident happened in China, there will likely never be any admission or redress. And the torches and pitchforks will continue coming for vaccine research. And I have every right to be less than happy about that.
The backlash against vaccines was/is idiotic, and tying vaccine fast tracking and (some) forced vaccination to some grand conspiracy notion of a virus being released in order to force nefarious vaccines on people, is completly unserious and falls into loony-bin conspiracy territory. I wouldn't even engage with anyone holding that theory. I actually think that, short-term pitchfork weilding reactionaries aside, covid was the best thing t happen since the mid-20th Century to advance both vaccine science and general uptake in the long run. In any case, I get my covid shot every year, and I own a lot of Moderna stock and feel fairly good about their platform curing other diseases.
I would say this about the purported incident happening in China: From the perspective of the Chinese government, it really didn't matter whether it was a lab leak or not, as their concealment of the problem for 2-3 critical months would likely have happened even if saving face was not an issue. It was a simple projection to say that an authoritarian regime with a top-down economy and an unlimited ability to lock down outbreaks would gain an edge in relative GDP growth over a disorganized, democratic adversary, which would compound for every day they withheld information even though they were attempting to contain the spread within their own borders. That's the economic calculation I called an act of war.
Ahem, let me try; the atoms are too excited they will bounce through my stomach lining straight into cancer.
They also tend to contaminate the raw milk bacteria you aren't using.
Close enough?
Broken clock syndrome is very easy to "pull off" in medicine because medicine is incredibly complex and it's all risk calculus. For even the most benign or life-saving drugs, you can conjure up examples of how they've killed people. That includes vaccines, unfortunately.
So these people have a leg to stand on. It's a wooden leg (arrrg) but they have a leg. Of course they, and their supporters, are never doing any kind of statistical analysis or risk calculus. The the "risk" part is the thing that really, really matters. I mean, we have chemotherapies which have a very high chance of fucking your shit up or even killing you. But untreated cancers are fatal, and sometimes very quickly. It's all nuanced.
the republicans spent the last 50 years gerrymandering and disenfranchising.
the "who you elect" is a specious argument. Everyone in California could elect democrarts forever, and 2 senators in Wyoming still have a larger sway per capita.
They should stop calling themselves republicans, since they don't represent a republic.
Don't get me started on the words being all used incorrectly or misunderstood! Liberal, conservative, democracy, socialism, communism, free market. These are core concepts to a lot of current political debate and yet the words are effectively meaningless the way people use them. It wouldn't matter except the gap in understanding is exploited to paper over a bunch of dishonesty and corruption.
Tangential but nonetheless, I always think of this quote from Lord of War:
> Yuri Orlov: [Narrating] Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors Than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters.
>I mean, it is not as if RFK was the darling candidate of HN at one time?
Wasn't my darling candidate. Mostly because I can read research papers and understand that drinking raw milk and avoiding vaccines doesn't make me healthier.
> risk without benefit
Indeed. There is no reason to consume raw milk. Pasteurization is not actually the problem.
On the other hand, there is no reason to homogenize milk at all. It is safe and legal to procure "cream top" or non-homogenized milk at many grocery outlets. Cream-top milk is not processed, and in fact there have been detrimental effects linked to the consumption of homogenized milk, which you can avoid by drinking cream-top milk instead.
Homogenization does not make milk safer or healthier to drink. On the contrary, it permits the processors to remove healthful elements and sell them in a more profitable vehicle. Why not simply keep your entire product intact, as it was found in nature?
The "raw milk" craze is a bonkers red herring for everyone. Don't drink raw milk. Don't buy the hype. But you don't need homogenization, either!
Non homogenized, lightly flash pasteurized milk has been my favorite for years. Just tastier, luckily I grew up in a little strange town where it was norm, and I don't have the weird modern health movement baggage to go with it.
Would someone who had never had it consider it tastier, or is it memories of growing up that make it tastier to you?
If you can sit down and compare a glass of skim milk to full-fat milk, you’re getting somewhere.
Cream-top milk is not merely full-fat: the cream is unmixed and free floating. You can immediately tell it is different by texture.
Some people separate the cream and reserve it for coffee or something. Or you can agitate it for “manual homogenization”. The difference is texture, really. It may have bothered housewives trying to cook or to pour it. But I love the experience.
FWIW raw milk is actually OK. Drank it “directly” from the cows, never got sick from it.
*directly = cow milked into a cup.
Raw milk _can_ be kind of okay under very specific circumstances. (But knowing the state american farms tend to be in regarding hygiene and controls, it's a ridiculous gamble.)
1) extremely closely controlled cow health
2) minimal storage time
3) minimized chances of cross contamination/reasonably clean cows <- that's the big one
4) healthy immune system to minimize infection chances
If even one of those isn't there, it's basically sickness in a cup. Why take a risk if there's no benefit?
In germany, there's the concept of "Vorzugsmilch", which is raw milk from specifically controlled farms with super tight regulations with regular and intense controls and testing of milk, e.g. monthly testing of every individual cow's milk.
But even then, it's an - albeit small - risk without benefit, with the exception of raw-milk cheese, which can't be made in any other way. I just don't get it, practically none of the claims of the raw-milk-gurus could be proven under controlled circumstances. Why needlessly take risks?
I tend to think the risk is the point. It's an in-group marker, getting very sick every so often for no good reason shows commitment. Which of course makes it doubly pointless as a suggestion to the general public, but the fact that it's a bad idea doesn't mean that for the in-group it's a bad idea. (I mean, it _is_ a bad idea, you understand though.)
In all truthness, it was in a village and I was under 6 or 7. It was the way things worked. And no one monitored the cows specifically: they would graze all day and then returned in the evening and be milked by hand.
This is exactly how the RFK shit gets support: one person says "hey, I did it and I'm fine!" somehow get extrapolated to "it's good for _Everyone_"
There were a few times when I didn’t look as I crossed the road. It was fine.
the plural of anecdote is not data.
Yes, it is, actually. Especially in social sciences.
I played Russian Roulette a couple of times and I'm fine
"The objective of this review is to provide an integrated historical account of the complex, often convoluted events impacting milk hygiene and its resultant effect on infant mortality from 1875 to 1925. Heat pasteurization of cow's milk is necessary for rendering this important nutrient source safe for humans-particularly infants. Developed by Louis Pasteur in 1864, pasteurization evolved from the commercially important parboiling of wine and beer when the Industrial Revolution was effecting rapid societal change in Western societies. In European and American societies of the early and mid-19th century, infant mortality rates were 30- to 60-fold higher than the current rates of five or six deaths per 1,000 live births per year."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30234385/
Not every pre-pasteurization child died, but far more died than post-pasteurization.
Raw milk is just a bad idea at anything beyond incredibly tiny tightly controlled scale. Sure, you got lucky. It's still not a good way to feed a society.
Cows are covered in their own shit, including their udders.
"I drank raw milk and didn't get sick" is not actually the same as "drinking raw milk is safe."
> Can we start a serious discussion about whether we might be living in a simulation with a troll teenager at the controls?
Why? To skirt the fact that this is reality and needs to be changed? There is no simulation. There is no super-natural teenager interested in making your life a tiny bit worse (I mean: a human teenager would just let N.Korea send nukes, and it's not as if you're living in Sudan either). Your question seems to be either trolling itself or delusional, or the feeblest attempt at humor. Neither is helpful.
At some point, humor is all that's left when we have this level of incompetence running the show.
There's another thing that's left that's historically pretty common.
Civilizational collapse?
What rules are you referring to that he loosened?
My comment is partially in jest. Off the top of my head, I'm not aware of any particular policies that make brain worms more prevalent, although the person I was replying to mentioned prions and I believe that's a real concern. In general, this administration has favored a looser regulatory environment. Specifically, there have been policy changes directly linked to cyclosporiasis.
Last year CDC scaled back the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network from eight monitored pathogens to two. Cyclospora was one of the six dropped. The remaining two are Salmonella and E. coli. For what it's worth, there has also been an uptick in salmonella cases. Food policy experts have pushed back on the assertion that the policy change caused the outbreak, but concede that outbreak response programs are underfunded and the fact that cyclospora no longer being monitored makes it difficult to understand how it fits in with longer trends.
What the food policy experts say really points to the broader issue - an overall decrease in response and monitoring capability - and that's a bigger concern than playing the blame game on one particular outbreak.
It's reasonable to question how government agencies are making these decisions and one just yesterday on the peptide industry may be one of the best examples yet of how flawed the decision-making process is. The FDA's Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee (PCAC) met and voted in favor of adding several peptides to the list of substances compounding pharmacies are allowed to produce. Eight members of the panel had been recently appointed under RFK, including six who run clinics that offer peptides, increasing the size of the panel from 6 to 14. The votes on the peptides were 8-6.
So... back to my comic book villain theory. This is exactly how a comic book villain would do it and fool everyone with a veneer of legitimacy.
If were living in a simulation then all of this is meaningless :)
as opposed to the meaning of absolute reality? oh boy you’ve got so much reading and movie watching ahead that you’ll enjoy very much.
Read https://www.docdroid.net/MfW3sAr/parasite-pill-version-20-pd... and be enlightened. I believe it was originally made by a 4chan user so obviously there are a lot of insane ramblings there but if the theory is true, the implications would be hilarious
I'm still considered at-risk to BSE b/c I spent 10 months in the UK during the 1991-92 school year.
That was a long time ago. Seems like if you were going to get it, you would have gotten it already. Besides, even in the UK the numbers aren't that high.
There's really nothing we can do about prion diseases, can we? What does the FDA (or any other regulatory or research institution) even have in the way of prion detection?
Just because something can't be easily detected in a timely manner doesn't mean there's nothing to be done.
Banning offal consumption. Banning blood donations from people who could have been exposed. Detecting the disease in postmortem examinations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_BSE_outbreak
Why would offal be more dangerous to consume? The wiki seems to point to feeding offal to cows, which makes sense and I think has been widely banned.
The prion accumulates in certain tissues: mainly brain and spinal column, but also (to a lesser extent) intestinal tissue and lymphatic system.
There's a U. Minnesota spinoff company Priogen testing for chronic wasting disease. I saw them advertising on Reddit for hunters to test their deer meat. Here's a recent news story about the Pennsylvania Game Commission offering kits: https://www.fox43.com/article/news/local/pilot-project-chron...
You basically can't trust anything in capitalism. You have to verify. Almost every market is now a market for lemons.
What system allows you to blindly trust things?
Systems with extensive consumer regulations.
Until regulatory capture kicks in. Bad actors will always exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
And then it's no longer a system with extensive consumer protection regulations.
And real consequences for breaking the law
Most foreigners I know are incredibly skeptical or opposed to the idea of consuming meat while in America, as it has a pretty bad global reputation for not being good quality and/or safe.
I’m sure fans of BBQ will argue this, but I’d say the average person who is travelling just for BBQ is not really a standard foreigner.
I’ve even had co-workers visit from Ireland and Germany who only trust McDonald’s while they visit, or a local pub.
I don't know who are these foreigners you speak of. I'm looking forward to eating some of the best steaks in the US.
The beef in Switzerland is mediocre at best.
> I'm looking forward to eating some of the best steaks in the US.
Some of the ~150,000 metric tonnes of beef recently imported from Australia?
After tariffing all the meat exporting nations, the US steak will be the greatest steak in American.
Except that "America" is a continent, so you'd have to compare U.S. steak with all South American and North American steaks.
Yeah, all 2% of it. What is your message supposed to mean as a reply?
Is it some kind of gotcha if I eat Japanese A5 in the USA, but still say that USDA Prime is amazing?
Just a general note on quality and herd practices really.
US beef has only just reached Australian health & safety standards* after being banned for import into Australia for two decades.
* perhaps it's more the case that Australia has only just bowed to US tariff pressure to accept US meat that isn't up to Australian standards for herd health tracking.
* https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-25/what-lifting-trade-re...
* https://aftinet.org.au/australia-lifts-ban-us-beef-imports
I'm one of these foreigners spoken of. Congratulations, now you know.
(Honestly, what's the point of your post? You don't happen to know someone in a group, so the group doesn't exist? Weird.)
I've had both and American beef is mediocre compared to Australian or NZ beef (which is usually grass fed).
If you want BBQ, go to the US. Else for just a normal steak, just source good ANZ beef and pay for it. Cheaper Indian beef (mostly buffalo - you can get cow meat but that's mostly tougher) can also be mostly grass-fed but it's harder to source.
Grass-fed beef isn't necessarily better. It tends to be comparatively leaner than grain-fed, and a richly marbled rib eye is for a lot of people (myself included) just about as good as it gets.
Australian wagyu is, for my money, the best beef in the world (yes, better than Japanese wagyu, which really is too richly marbled), but American Prime is no slouch either.
Yes, my bad. I think the correct term I should've used isn't grass-fed (a flimsy marketing term) but free range. ANZ cattle isn't generally cooped up in feedlots and factory farmed, although this is now changing rapidly for the worse.
Australian wagyu is actually the worst offender in this regard, since it means that cattle spend 1-2 years in a factory farm feedlot.
Western cooking tends to prefer having rich fat marbling on the beef and let it cook in its own fats, but in Asia, we tend to prefer leaner cuts for our cooking, mostly because beef isn't usually eaten on its own as a steak.
You can get US grass fed beef at literally any grocery store or butcher shop in the US. So your statement still doesn’t make any sense.
GP is in Switzerland, where I live, not in the US.
My hot take on the American steak allure is more about the “cowboy” big portion fantasy that’s fairly engrained into pop culture globally. Otherwise, I wouldn’t say American cattle are superior in really any other way, and are not the best cuts globally either.
Switzerland I cannot speak to, but having had meats from Australia, Britain, Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Japan - a lot of places around the world have great and superior quality meats.
Poultry isn’t even in the conversation here, American poultry is off putting by nearly any person you ask who didn’t grow up with it.
Japanese and Australian beef are on a different level than anything else I have ever eaten in terms of beef steaks.
> My hot take on the American steak allure is more about the “cowboy” big portion fantasy that’s fairly engrained into pop culture globally.
I remember a conversation in a Dallas hotel bar with an increasingly crestfallen cowboy as we talked about how the King Ranch "wasn't a particularly large ranch, all things considered". Initially, confusion. "What do you mean, it's the largest ranch in the world?" No, the US.
And then we talked about Australian cattle ranches, where Anna Station is over seven times bigger than King Ranch, bigger than Israel, and that if King Ranch was in Australia it'd be only be, at best, the 70th largest ranch in the country (and more likely only just scraping into the top 100).
Everything is not always bigger in Texas.
I despise American poultry - factory farming, copious saline injection, bleh.
> Most foreigners I know are incredibly skeptical or opposed to the idea of consuming meat while in America
Odd. I live in the EU at the moment and all my friends here talk excitedly about all the meat options in the US.
I'm sorry but you live in a bubble that is beyond imagination. I don't think even 0.5% of tourists to the USA think this.
Every single person I know here in europe that is a meat lover is always including either some Texas BBQ or some large tomahawk steaks in their visit and the size and quality of US meat is perceived highly. And it's not like people will go to the US to have a steak or BBQ but definitely nobody who isn't a vegan is "opposed to the idea of consuming meat while in america", that's ridiculous.
That's interesting, every single person I know in Europe that is a meat lover is opposed to some Texas BBQ and against large portion American-style steaks in general, where the quality of US meat is perceived quite poorly.
And yet Americans are the victim of food-borne illnesses at no greater rate than Europeans. I wonder how much of that is farm lobbies trying to keep out imports. US growers do the same thing when the don't want to compete with South American imports.
Animal welfare is a big thing in some Euro countries. Which let's face it nobody in the US or Argentina cares about.
And then there are concerns about human rights, rain forests, genociding Amazonian tribes, corruption and dictators. Now I will admit it is all hypocritical everyone of us happily buys stuff from AliExpress but that is the condition of man.
Been thinking about this one for decades. There is a lot not being discussed too. We have things neatly compartmentalized to avoid cohesive dialog, eg scrapie for sheep, chronic wasting for deer, CJD for humans, and BSE for cattle -- all similar enough to be in the same discussion, but somehow neatly isolated.
We know with certainty that CWD is transmitted/passed through fecal (esp ingestion) in the wild, where animals eat droppings for the stored nutrients, and 20 years ago field biologists discovered prions were transmissible through intestinal routes. At this point it's in the soil, and has been. Though good luck finding all the old, previously available official literature on this.
Remember the New Zealand farm where the sheep kept getting scrapie, so they slaughtered em all, then brought in new flocks, then watched them get re-infected, then finally said fuck it, and left the field alone, then essentially had to admit the land itself was infectious? There are many hard core highly demanding folks here who will scream for "the data" but won't mention that it's difficult to retain all this in memory over decades while the original sources become increasingly more obscure every year. In other words, no, I am not citing anything. If folks want to sneeze and giggle at prions and call me bad-man anti-data boy, go ahead.
Research has been self contradicting on this subject for many years. One day it's solvable with a bit of bleach, and the next even an acetylene torch won't do. It's transmissible through intestinal routes, no it's not, yes it is. Somewhere in between, though, a real problem persists, and my advice is to keep thinking about it, because thinking about it is bad, and looking at what most now call good, it might be a safe-enough inversion to assume bad is good, on this one.
Edit: I would also urge the question of where CWD originated. You will get speculation, but no certain answers. Wherever it came from originally, denying the intestinal route must have helped facilitate the spread.
Of course they did. Look at the disaster around the messaging.
You don’t think the two are related in the least bit?
The US Federal Government has been meaningfully degraded by the brazen corruption of the people in power. Already there was a crisis of faith in authority; this is just going to make it much much worse.
I wonder if its time to rethink some of these institutions. It seems like Food Safety is especially important to the welp being of society; it might make sense to have food testing labs in every major population center/distribution hub. Funded by a tax on the food companies or perhaps even locally. Its just unbelievable that the entire US population is so vulnerable… what if a bad actor did something nasty deliberately?
Seems because of Supreme Court ruling practically every federal agency likely needs to be re-chartered to have the same structure as the Federal Reserve.
They need to be restructured such that their success or failure has a direct impact on the justices' retirement accounts.
Is this a pro-bribery comment?
It's a statement of fact. Bribery is happening.
Pro-gratuity
There is no real distinction between the Fed and the FTC. The different outcomes were the reason for the decision.
As you say, the current profoundly corrupt Supreme Court majority will make up whatever justification they need to get the outcome they want, case by case, and don't believe in the concept of precedent, even their own.
The only thing that can be done is "re-chartering" the court – immediate significant expansion/packing followed later by drastic structural reforms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministerial_rule
Depending how far the Supreme Council takes the unitary executive theory, we might need a straight up Constitutional amendment. And while we're at it, those department heads should be directly elected by the People - imagine being able to split your choices for which parties control the FCC vs the ATF.
(Ideally we'd move towards Ranked Pairs voting too, diminishing the two-party stranglehold as well)
Technocrats shouldn't be popularly elected. Someone like RFK Jr. would be more likely to end up in a top position under popular election, not less likely. The American public does not generally respect expertise, but politicians mostly did until quite recently (with a few exceptions like climate change).
Except that rejection of expertise has been building, right? To the point that people were decrying the bureaucrats as unelected, wanting to tear it all down, and here we are.
I don't think department heads were particularly technocratic, either. That was more supported by the laws/customs protecting the actual workers who didn't lose their jobs every administration. The heads were political - just political with an eye towards getting appointed/confirmed, rather than popularly elected.
Well… the system mostly worked for a pretty long time. As I used to tell my kids, if you try hard enough to break something, you’ll probably succeed.
Yes but it was largely built on trust, under the assumption the American president would have the best interest of Americans as heart, even if he and his constituency may disagree from time to time. It was a fair assumption, which is now permanently broken.
We now must consider the possibility that our president is a malicious or foreign actor, intent on destroying the US. Granted, we DID consider this in the beginning after the revolutionary war. But we slowly forgot, and did not build in nearly enough protections. Modern America is nothing like post-revolutionary America. Everything is more complex, and our government bigger and power powerful than ever.
Breaking things is also a lot easier than building complex things.
Which, funnily enough, is _also_ something you can teach your children.
Generally the industry DOES lobby for regulation. In a deregulated industry, there's a rush towards the bottom - which means trust in the industry implodes. They don't want that. I don't believe the current administration is actually in line with the industry as a whole.
The coverup is always worse than the crime.
What a way to abuse your customers!!!
They knowingly tried to sell tainted lettuce?
A good reminder that the current administration is covering up the largest CSA ring in human history.
Does HN have a filter preventing you from calling it a child rape ring?
And they're doing a bad job of it considering that almost the whole world knows that the USA elects and protects child rapists.
Even the UK (very belatedly, let's be clear) effectively disowned one of the Royal Family. Andrew lost the styles of His Royal Highness, the title Prince (along with all military rankings, including Vice Admiral), all government funding, his police protection, all public duties, is no longer entitled to rooms at any royal palace.
Meanwhile, the faintest whiff that Trump was anything more than occasionally in the vicinity of Epstein leads a significant part of the American population to scream conspiracy.
I reckon there a few bodies in the Mar-a-Lago grounds.
Alternative to archive.today
No Javascript, text-only
Dear Taylor Farms’ social media management tools,
Pick up this comment and tell the bosses they stink. Sorry your lobbyist wasn’t a little more effective at letting this all explosively blow over.
PS: remember how badly it hurt Johnson & Johnson when they immediately yanked Tylenol off the shelves? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tylenol_murders#Johnso... Yeah you wouldn’t wanna be in that boat, good moves!
Why this performative outrage? Taylor Farm's social media interns are not reading hacker news.
FYI, companies are typically getting alerts/reports of mentions on the web on various subjects of interest to them.
While they may just be focusing on trends/aggregate info, they often sample messages too.
This has been going on for at least 20 years (probably more, I just wasn't aware until then). It's not mainly interns, it's the web crawlers that are constantly indexing the internet.
Thanks jmull, this was my belief!
Taylor Farms management has gotta learn the outcome of the Chicago Tylenol Murders like they should’ve learned in high school or college. Same for all TF competitors. Business ethics ain’t easy, they’re important.
Their codexes might be
Performative? (Sometimes meat feels.)
Brandwatch and Sprinklr or whatever social media listening platforms have a blind spot or Taylor Farms doesn’t use them or what?
Got needs? Call 1800-CORRUPT right now.
How can anyone trust them to provide food safely if they can give Trump money and suddenly the recall disappears?
The next time you hear people claiming that Canada's dairy tariff's are unjust, unfair, etc.* ... Bear in mind that they only kick in after a quota that's never been reached because Canadians generally perceive U.S. dairy as being of lower quality. This sort of thing probably won't change that.
_______
* Trump does this regularly when justifying his latest tariffs.
Is that what happened, though?
The administration's corruption is so blatant in everything else, it's the default assumption now.
https://www.wired.com/story/diarrhea-outbreak-taylor-farms-m...
"Taylor Farms donated more than $2 million to conservative political groups in 2025, according to Federal Election Commission filings. That includes a $1 million donation to MAGA Inc., the Trump-centric super PAC, and $1.1 million to other super PACs dedicated to electing Republicans."
So arguably... yes. They leveraged their 'professional courtesy' with the government.
But also arguably... no. They called the White House, but as I read the story they didn't get anything they wanted.
Every large company donates to both parties, are you new here?
"No shit?" jokes aside, it seems like a bad corporate strategy. Rather than owning up and doing what they can to protect their customers, they kept trying to hide, and now Taylor Farms is going to forever be associated in customers minds with explosive diarrhea.
From a purely greedy/capitalistic standpoint, this strategy made sense.
If Presdient Camacho can call a sport’s federation and have a penalty canceled and the administration is as rotten and corrupt as its demonstrated every day, it’s worth a shot for that company to try and avoid a recall.
A recall costs money, people they don’t know getting sick costs them nothing.
Don’t drag Presdient Camacho’s name through the dirt like that. He was a loving father. And as a president he identified a real issue the country was facing and when presented with evidence he changed his mind and allowed the smartest person available to implement a solution.
Sad but true. Even Camacho was more reasonable.
I’m sure they’ll just come up with some other branding, they’ll “go bankrupt” and reorganize, and call it good in the public eye, and everyone will have forgotten about it in a year or two.
They tried to hide it before the news got out in the first place; the reason executives in general are so excited about Trump is that they think he's going to let them bribe their way out of anything. I'm a bit surprised to hear no bribe was accepted here, although I suppose an uncontrolled explosive diarrhea outbreak would be hard for regime officials to keep a lid on.
The regime officials could just pivot the blame: woke caused this, Biden's economy caused this, immigrants caused this
"Everyone gets laid at the white house, EVERYONE"
Salad. Tomatoes. Cucumber. You irrigate those with water that's fit to drink. It ain't rocket science!
"And are these bacteria in the room with us right now?"
> You irrigate those with water that's fit to drink
To be able to irrigate even a fraction of the US’s crops with potable water, we’d have to build some massive infrastructure to purify, store, and deliver that water. Existing nonpotable infrastructure would be difficult to reuse for this purpose. Doing that would take years and cost billions.
Industrial agriculture is not like a backyard garden; the water infrastructure for irrigation is very different from the infrastructure for drinking water.
It was a false positive for what it was worth - https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fda-says-taylor-f...
It's my understanding that it was traced definitively to Taylor Farms, but the only positive test may have been a false positive.
You don't always get a positive test, but this doesn't necessarily prevent you from concluding the cause of food contamination.
> but the only positive test may have been a false positive
Software getting flagged by anti-malware as a false positive is a great way to get an evil corpo tale of woe to the top of HN with 800 points.
Multiple chains of evidence may be used to support a conclusion. One conclusive chain is sufficient, even if others are equivocal.
You're focusing on the weakest part of the argument, which HN guidelines explicitly request you not do: <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>.
(Less so if others are exculpatory. Which is not the case here. A known false positive is not conclusive proof, but neither does it explicitly clear a source.)
See for more explanation: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49044401>.
> It's my understanding that it was traced definitively to Taylor Farms, but the only positive test may have been a false positive.
So it’s a false positive?
> So it’s a false positive?
They already told you clearly, so it sounds like you're trying to browbeat them with a fallacy of equivocation over the scope of "it".
These things are not equivalent:
1. A biological test for a parasite in a sample of equipment/material from the factory. (Claimed as false-positive.)
2. The analysis of the supply-chain for the food that sickened people which led to that facility as a common factor. (Presumably still accurate.)
___________
To use a criminal-investigation metaphor: Suppose a dead woman is found covered in knife wounds, and the circumstantial evidence leads to one Knifey McStabberson, since he (A) previously dated the woman and (B) sent a death-threat once via text-message, and (C) has a collection of hundreds of suitably-sized knives. Investigators notice one that looks bloody, and test it... It's her blood! Wait, oops, no, false-positive, it was something else.
What is your takeaway from the story so far? Is it that Knifey McStabberson himself is "a false-positive" and obviously totally innocent... or is it that it would be a good idea to check more of the knives scattered around his house and in his car?
Christ, man, hasn’t the McStabberson family been through enough? Do you not have the decency to finally bring this witch hunt to an end?!
Meh, I don't see how I could make anything worse, with how they were featured in Leave it to Cleaver, and recently dissed in that song by the Full-Tang Clan.
Taylor Farms also gave Maga Inc a million dollars six days after the FDA pushed a food safety rule back.
"That $1 million donation came six days after the FDA announced plans to delay the enforcement of a "food traceability rule" that would affect fresh fruits and vegetables, among other products, until 2028. The rule is unrelated to the inspection of fresh produce — it requires companies to track products at seven different key points in the supply chain to better prevent foodborne illness outbreaks."
https://www.snopes.com/news/2026/07/21/taylor-farms-trump-do...
How can you believe this?, look at the signs. Its too obvious someone got paid to say that.
At this point, why would I trust what they say?
This is the most upsetting thing about everything that is happening. Like, sure I have plenty of criticisms about the FDA, but by and large, I thought the body was slowly working in the direction of the public good.
Once you destroy that trust, every single announcement becomes suspect. You no longer have anything you can believe.
And if you don't think the Republican's will use this distrust to their advantage, well, I have a bridge to sell you. It's a very common tactic by them: create a problem that never existed, then wine about said problem.
They'll wine, and dine.
But also whine.
Yep why not both?
It’s so unbelievably destructive. We had a kid recently and I was looking up vaccine research. Do we have to prod the kid with the Hepatitis B vaccine at birth? I looked it up and promptly said, “well, CDC actually just came out with a thing that says it’s optional.” Wife turned to me and said, uh yeah, and who is the new director of the HHS now? Looked it up, and I come to find that many scientists were opposed to the decision to make it optional.
Yep, now I’ll be second guessing everything I read from the CDC. Good news though, I can ask a fucking AI Chatbot what to do. As a normal person with basic civic values this shit makes me so mad. It’s beyond disgusting. The gates of Hell are wide open for these people.
Uhh, I'll just say please run your AI chatbot medical research by your wife first.
I read the AI chatbot part as sarcasm fwiw.
Yeah guess in hindsight that didn’t read as clear as it should have.
The chat bot is only even correct because of obvious, authoritative, trustworthy sources like the CDC. Makes it even more enraging to see bot tech makers meeting with the destroyers of truth.
It’s not worth much because the take away from this is you can call and pay to have heinous crimes pushed under the rug. It’s simple corruption, and devastating.
> FDA says...
This admin has lied repeatedly. Why would any of us believe a statement solely because the admin said it? Do we need to give them the benefit of the doubt despite how many times they lie?
> This admin has lied repeatedly. Why would any of us believe a statement solely because the admin said it?
At this point they've lied enough that the assumption should just always be "They're probably lying again. I need more evidence / facts / details if this is a thing I care about at all." Honestly though, I'm at a point where I simply won't trust much anything anymore without seeing / hearing more (provably true) facts first. Lying / deceit has just become far too common / accepted / normalized these days.
This is the same argument that the anti-vaxers had about the COVID vaccine.
My only advice is to become a domain expert or have friends who are domain experts.
No, it’s not.
During the COVID pandemic situations we’re evolving quickly and the admin admitted they were wrong previously or had updated their views based on new information.
If you ask this admin about their obviously incorrect or fallacious statements their response is to call you a nasty person or piggy and then double down on the lies.
Don't gaslight.
It was very possible at the beginning of COVID that it was an airborne virus. However the CDC proclaimed that there was no evidence, therefore no one should wear masks.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-reverses-agai...
>In March 2020, as the pandemic began, Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to the president of the United States, explained in a 60 Minutes interview that he felt community use of masks was unnecessary. A few months later, he argued that his statements were not meant to imply that he felt the data to justify the use of cloth masks was insufficient. Rather, he said, had he endorsed mask wearing (of any kind), mass panic would ensue and lead to a surgical and N95 mask shortage among health care workers, who needed the masks more.
https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-...
There was also the messaging that the vaccine did not cause myocarditis.
>This obvious error was compounded weeks later during a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The committee met to discuss what we knew and did not know about heart inflammation, or myocarditis, that had been linked to mRNA vaccination, and most notable in young men who received the vaccine.
I agree that the current administration is bad but I can't call it worse because the prior administration worked to illegally censor it's critics.
https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/115561/documents/...
The administrative agencies response to the pandemic was very telling, there were multiple large conversations here with lots of comments about how we were being lied to.
Cool, so they admitted to falsehoods or updating. This admin does not.
The anti vaxxers and people not trusting this admin are not equivalent
You're initial comment was:
>> FDA says... >This admin has lied repeatedly. Why would any of us believe a statement solely because the admin said it? Do we need to give them the benefit of the doubt despite how many times they lie?
The fact of the matter is that both sets of officials lied.
Fauci only admitted to lying when he was brought in front of congress and there was a chance they were going to prosecute him if he lied to them.
We will see what this admin does if they ever get brought up to task.
Fauci thought his intentions were noble.
RFK Jr. believes the same I am sure.
Doesn't make either of them right, understanding why the other side is/was upset is the first step to fixing the problem.
If you can't see the equivalence between saying don't trust the government because it's lying and don't trust the government because it's lying there is nothing that will convince you.
And you said
> This is the same argument that the anti-vaxers had about the COVID vaccine.
It’s not the same argument because one group is a true believer who will never admit fault. The other isnt. There is no equivalence to people who believe in anti vaxx ideology and people who don’t believe in RFK jr.
Yes it is because the argument is that you can't trust the government because they lied.
>Comments on YouTube videos during the COVID-19 pandemic clustered similarly around "concerns about side-effects, effectiveness, and lack of trust in corporations and government".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-vaccine_activism
I don't share the same believes as anti-vaxers but I do believe that their cause was bolster by the government deliberately lying.
In the very early days of COVID, there were numerous studies that backed up the government position that COVID was not spread via airborne route.
>Airborne transmission, either by droplets (route 3) or by aerosol (route 4), contributes less than 1% of the total viruses needed to cause an infection....This finding is consistent with studies that sampled the air where symptomatic COVID-19 patients reside and found that all collected samples were negative for SARS-CoV-2
But earlier it even states:
>Due to the fact that most of these estimates were made in countries that lead a public health policy of immediate isolation of cases upon symptoms’ onset, these estimates represent the effect of pre-symptomatic carrier transmission. In fact, pre-symptomatic transmission was recently referred to as the Achilles’ heel of COVID-19 pandemic control, as symptom-based detection of infection is less effective in comparison to the control of the SARS epidemic in 2003
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.12.20099085v...
So we know that pre-symptomatic transmission is the primary driver but claim it's not airborne because we sampled air of symptomatic patients.
This was the quality of the "Science" that we were supposed to believe.
When you have the scientific establishment publishing what amounts to bullshit to back up the lies of government how can you trust it in the future?
Andrew Wakefield study is discredited, I am not aware of any others but there may be.
I doubt that I am going to change your mind that the argument you presented is the same as anti-vaxers. But my advice remains the same, become a domain expert or be close friends with one you can trust.
I have several family member in the medical field, when the push for adolescent vaccine began some of them quietly cautioned me about the risks that were being downplayed. I read through the studies and made my own decision. Just as I made my own decision about wearing a mask when the government was telling me it increased my risk of infection.
The press seems to think that someone who lies whenever their lips are moving deserves an elevated platform.