I love how the images of Trump trying to look “cool” always end up just adding more comic value whatever the headline or meme.
Those two images are the same.
Can’t wait to see how they turn this into another grift.
I’d bet a shiny nickel one of his cronies gets the contract to eradicate the screw worm where lip service is paid to solving the problem and a few people take in that sweet, sweet gov funding.
Also, I’d bet another shiny nickel this gets blamed on brown people and funding the wall gets pushed as a way to contain the screw worm.
I was on Fox News today and they are already blaming immigrants for this. Something about a liberal conspiracy to let immigrant’s cattle into the US to destroy our ranchers. It was really dumb.
1bn emergency to fund this, probably wont do much the screworm invasion anyways, its likely a slush fund.
And you can bet is made in most wasteful way possible trying to content the fly at Texas instead of Panama because they would not let that benefit central America for that even if it’s cheaper that way.
Socialize the costs, privatize the gains.
P.s. about the picture, I see a screw worm and a worm that screwed us. Which one do we combat first?
Put one in the ass of the other. I don’t care about the order.
They can just engineer a virus to interfere with this creature’s metabolism or reproduction, right?
That’s more or less what we’ve been doing for decades - breeding, sterilizing and releasing screwworms by the million to curb the population. It works too - but Trump & Friends axed the program, and so now it’ll cost $1bil (more than was spent over the entire lifetime of the program previously) to start it back up again (to make the subtext clear it’s because that money will be stolen)
To make the subtext even clearer, it shouldn’t cost that much, but will end up costing even more than the number they say today as they find new opportunities to line their friend’s pockets with your money.
folks please caption your pictures. which one of these is the new world screwworm ?
Well it’s pretty simple, one of these pictures shows a horrible disgusting blood-sucking parasite, and the other is a new world screwworm.
I’ll help. One is the world screwworm (the demented pedo) and the other one has a fancy mustache.
The one causing damage to America that will take decades to repair, if it’s even possible repair.
The right one, the left one is the New Worm Screw World.
2 species invaded, oen has been here 80 years, and the other is coming back after a long hiatus.
Right is just chilling. Left looks screw you, so i wager a guess that’s the one.
They’re blaming Biden.
It started while Biden was in office due to instability in the region of central America that functioned as a wall to the rest of North America, so there is some truth to it. Trump cutting funding was the wrong thing to do at the wrong time, but the problem was already well under way when he took office.
Does the worm have a moustache?
It’s from the darkest timeline.
I’m from the good timeline and I can confirm:
Don’t fuck with screw-worms. Eradicate them. They’re not “good for the ecology”.
Also hello neutral timeliners 👋
As all people and things with mustaches are
They must be Viltrimites!!
I’d love to blame this entirely on DOGE and trump but honestly this was a perfect storm that built up over decades.
The screwworm was eradicated from the US a long time ago using sterile fly releases that pushed the population progressively southward until the Darién Gap became the permanent chokepoint. They maintained the barrier there with sterile fly releases and ground monitoring and it worked. It worked so well that the Mission, Texas facility closed in 1981 and the Mexico facility closed in 1999 because there was no longer a need for them.
That success is part of what caused the problem. Complacency set in, and capacity eroded. Then COVID wrecked the monitoring infrastructure. Ground teams couldn’t operate, sterile fly releases got disrupted, and the barrier at the Gap was breached. The flies started moving north again and the program didn’t have the capacity it once did to respond.
DOGE cuts to USDA APHIS in 2025 hit an already compromised program at the worst possible time reduced staffing and funding when they needed to be scaling up emergency sterile fly production and reestablishing the barrier.
So yes, the current administration made it worse. The vulnerability was already there before those cuts, and once COVID broke the barrier there was always a real chance they were going to make it back to the US regardless.
Fuck DOGE and trump though for real, I just cant get on this “its entirely their fault” train.
That success is part of what caused the problem. Complacency set in, and capacity eroded.
This part is sort of glossed over. There was a report in 2018 that the Panama facility was in dire need of updates. We were talking about a one time $50M investment and an extra $10-15M a year to hold screwworms at the Darien Gap as they had been for decades. Trump did nothing. It’s easy to blame COVID, but there is a very, very avoidable problem and yes, the blame lies squarely with Trump.
Fuck DOGE and trump though for real, I just cant get on this “its entirely their fault” train.
Ah yes, let them blame COVID instead. Because we all know in hindsight that Trump’s response to the pandemic was amazing \s
They’d also cut funding to vaccine and pandemic research in his first term. So it was his fault at more than one step along the way.
So trump is just the last in line whose failure was worst.
That still makes it his fault
He was the one that broke it at first too. It’s just Musk that came later and only finished breaking it.
Texas facility closed in 1981 and the Mexico facility closed in 1999 because there was no longer a need for them.
Nah it was a series of overconfidence and underfunding, this is capitalism.
That old lady was standing near the edge of the cliff. The fence was already broken. I pushed her off the edge. You can’t say it’s entirely my fault.
And to be fair, I was wantonly shoving a whole bunch of people, and lots of them didn’t die. The ones who did had some preexisting vulnerability, so not my fault.
so this is another thing that can be traced back to Reagan? lol
It’s very refreshing to see something so nuanced actually getting upvoted here.
I thought you said it was “frustrating” seeing some with nuance get upvoted and I appreciated the sarcasm on that and the sincerity in this one
I dunno, this just seems like the entire narrative that government ran things are bad. I mean sure everything was crumbling when Trump started actively breaking things with Doge. But the reason they were crumbling before that was Republican policy and Covid was absolutely Trump’s fault from dismantling the programs that monitored pandemics.
Any government run system needs something to trim the bloat down. Otherwise there is nothing to stop it becoming dangerous. Capitalism relies on profit motives to do this. It works, to an extent.
The problem comes with how to trim. E.g. this programme. Once the barrier was established, it could be trimmed. The fact it worked for 25 years after is proof of this. This (in theory) would free up resources for more critical tasks. The catch is that it needed to hard protect the barrier itself. It also needed the capability to rapidly scale back up. It seems that that was trimmed too, leading to the current crisis.
A dam is a good analogy. It takes a lot of resources to build one. But far less to run and maintain it. You also need the option for emergency maintenance, but that can be shared with other dams or construction projects, when not needed.
The first trim got rid of the construction budget. DOGE got rid of the maintenance budget. Now the dam needs rebuilding, not just maintaining.
Any government run system needs something to trim the bloat down. Otherwise there is nothing to stop it becoming dangerous
What does this even mean. Sounds like slippery slope to me.
No department, government or commercial likes giving up resources, once it has them. This can cause them to become quite inefficient.
In commercial companies, this is corrected for by financial pressures (imperfectly). In government systems there is no obvious mechanism. Instead it’s a lot more ad-hoc. This allows for things like “starving the beast” to break government functions. Conversely it allows for a lot of public money being funneled into private hands.
A better option is to have systems in place to control spending. Critically, those systems need to have people who understand what is being done. They simultaneously allow for reduction in spending when appropriate (or at least stop run away), but stop the chainsaw to the knees approach (e.g. DOGE under musk).
A good example would be something like the UKs NHS NICE (National institute for Clinical Excellence). They keep drug prices under control in the NHS. They are powerful enough to give pause to the drugs companies, they stop the government from going “chainsaw massacre” directly and they keep the NHS efficient in their area. They are also small enough to not bloat themselves as easily.
They act as a 2 way shield. They stop governments sticking their oar in too directly. They also keep the service efficient and updated.
Basically we need localised intelligence to filter what rolls down from higher government, while keeping those below accountable.
In this case, it seems like they over trimmed the science. Some stand down from full height is reasonable, but no mothballed facilities were kept to rapidly spool back up in an emergency.
Thank you for the context. Highly appreciated! I had gathered the gradual decline in funding and surveillance from this publication but they didn’t really talk about the damages done by COVID or DOGE.
well if it wasnt cut, there would be a much faster response than it is now. 1bn likely wont stop the screworms in the long run anyways. since they are coming from the south unabated.
Nuanced perspective with historical context is so good. Thank you for sharing it. This is not sarcasm; it’s authentically good to see.
Okay cool then use that same train of thought to make all those involved pay, not the taxpayers. Musk and Trump too.
When you see an animal, there’s likely a bunch of the same species you didn’t see. Specially if it’s a small animal, with a fast lifecycle, and the animal burrows itself into something (like, dunno… the flesh of another animal?). And if the animal can live pretty much anywhere there’s another, warm-blooded, animal living. (Livestock? Wild fauna? Pets? Humans? Yes.)
So a dozen cases isn’t just “a dozen cases”, there’s likely millions of those flies in USA already. I’m taking a wild guess here and say a billion dollars won’t even scratch the surface of the problem there.
(Not that it changes things for me. Here in South America the fly in question goes from “present” to “present”. Just businesses as usual.)
So how nasty are these things to humans? They seem like body horror nightmare fuel.
(I think I live far enough north to not have to worry about them but thinking about them still makes me a bit queasy.)
if you are infirmed, or unable to move its a problem for those people.
In general humans are the least concern. We’re smart enough to know something is wrong with our bodies, and fix it before it gets worse; we wear clothes and bandage wounds so there’s less exposure of vulnerable areas; etc. It’s a bit more concerning because of children, since the flies can attack eyes and mouths, but as long as the parents actually do their job and take care of the kid, no issue. (Bug repellent, pay attention to small wounds, regular visits to the doc, this kind of stuff.)
Dogs and cats are another can of worms (or maggots). Specially urban strays; if anyone here wants some nightmare fuel, websearch images for [NSFL] miíase cachorro or miasis perro [/NSFL], apparently the flies (it isn’t just C. hominivorax) responsible for this sort of infestation will lay multiple eggs in the same wound, if they can; so it can get really nasty. Same deal with the fauna.
I should not have googled that, I should not have googled that…
Well, I told you guys it’s NSFL.
Nope. Leaving that one alone. Not today.
I agree that “a” billion isn’t even gonna start to cover it.
Will it even EVER be controlled down to Panama again?
It will take many years.
and many breeding facilities as well. it takes a very long time to just suppress the invasion. 1bn likely wont do anything AT ALL. since likely south american isnt able to control the infestations.
It was pushed back down to panama before but it took half a century (1950-2000) to do it. All that effort undone by some kid named big balls.
IMO controlling it “down to Panama” is part of what went wrong, I think. Pushing further into South America would’ve been costlier, but if people managed to get those flies completely extinct, the problem wouldn’t come back.
But that requires multiple governments working together with a “helping them out means less problems for me in the future” mindset, and that simply doesn’t roll with USA; USA’s external policy was always “I’m shitting my pants so others smell it”. And working together with a bunch of dictatorships can be a bit hard, specially when those dictatorships were supported by USA so they can’t trust the United-Statian government to die properly.
doubtful you can eradicate the species since the cows are still present, also screworms dont need to use cows, it can be almost any mammal it can get its eggs on.
The species actually got eradicated from both Mexico and USA, using sterile males, and almost eradicated from the southern tip of North America aka Central America.
So yes, it is possible. Regardless of presence or absence of cows. Because, like I already said and you repeated, they can infest any mammal.
The reason they stopped at Panama is simply because it’s a chokepoint; in the short term it’s cheaper to keep releasing sterile males in the Darién gap than to push further. It works until it doesn’t, like another poster highlighted once they stopped doing it in COVID times the flies re-invaded NA.
I’m criticising governments in the Americas (including but not exclusively USA) for not co-ordinating and pushing further, to get it extinct.
It’s almost as though DOGE was doing lots of shit the people involved knew fuck all about. ‘I don’t understand this or see the point, therefore it must be woke wastage.’
“What does this 400-room hotel need to employ a full-time plumber for? The pipes are all fine, and no one ever complains about a clogged toilet. Fire that lazy bum!”
Musk is the living embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect, and his wealth represents the exact monetary value delta of confident ignorance over intelligence.
They will bemoan it and cry there is no money due to evil democrat fraud and the worm is a hoax.
And then give Iran another 50 billion.
I’m GLAD I live in a Country where an ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT can FIRE Hundreds of Thousands of People, KILL Millions of People and DECIMATE my Countries Livestock and in Response we give him TRILLIONS in Taxpayer Dollars!
Ya know I’m really glad that your shtick has become so recognizable and accepted on lemmy that other people enjoy it too. I remember back when you’d be down voted like crazy. Sorry to break the kayfabe on you here but seeing this comment and the votes on it just warmed my cynical satire loving heart.
GLAD ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT FIRE KILL DECIMATE TRILLIONS!
There is no “finding out”. No one will ever hold these deranged weirdos accountable.
I block DOGE, Trump and Elongated Muskrat as keywords, because Lemmy sometimes thinks it’s AmeriLemmy, and I just don’t care. But the blocks don’t work on comments or pictures. Using Voyager app, anyone have any ideas?
Turn off the phone and go for a walk?
The… what.
