Compulsory Voting

[The Grand Nudger]

Gave up on that whole "unintentionally" thing, eh?  Clown.

You do whatever makes you feel better about being an idiot, lol.

In all seriousness, though, this is like playing chess with a pigeon. You are making extraordinary statements with no references to back them up. You are not convincing, you are shocking as to how somebody might actually believe the things you say.

No, I'm not.  You would prefer to argue against extraordinary statements...but I have no interest in that.  I think this stuff is important, obviously.

You are saying there is "no evidence" that the massive use of antibiotics in the egg industry (doesn't matter if it is 50% or 70% or 90% of all antibiotics) gives birth to superbacteria. What kind of evidence are you looking for? Isn't that basic biology?

Case in point.  I've never said any such thing, or anything that could even remotely be construed as such.  

You are saying that 0.5% of all antibiotics that are given to plants are responsible for most antibiotic resistance in humans. Is there any remotely-reliable source that is making that statement? You are saying that USDA says something about that (I do not know what exactly is that you are claiming they say), but you do not link to where it actually says that.

Not only am I not saying that, I have never, and have repeatedly had to make the most ridiculous pre-emptive caveats imaginable - all to no avail...apparently.  

The way you are arguing, you can argue for any position that way. A wall of text is not a reference.

You...could....shamble on over to the usda.  Where you will find no end to papers and regulations and programs which you didn't believe existed, described at length and in excruciating detail.  Because the usda takes this pretty seriously.  In fact, the us has been a model for the world since 1924 on this issue.  

The short version of a long story is that, while AMR reservoirs and antibiotics are ubiquitous at every level of production and in nature, environmental and methodological (redundant, some would say, due to runoff) AMR reservoirs are orders of magnitude greater in their physical extent and in their interaction with people and with the standard diet than livestock AMR reservoirs.  In addition, the livestock and processing reservoirs are heavily regulated while the environmental and methodological are not.  

From the point of view of animal welfare, eliminating antibitoic use in livestock is a non starter.  For all of the same reasons that we're not going to let your damned foot rot off.  We could arguably eliminate antibiotic use in crops without any concerns about wellbeing and we would be hitting the larger set of AMR Rez and the larger contributor to the standard diet.  We could eliminate the use of antibiotics in ag - across the board- when it comes to growth enhancement methods and that would touch both sets - but that would necessarily be exempted in the case of sick animals (which is to say all battery farmed animals, ultimately)....and still..the larger portion of the benefit we'd see would be from the plant side.

You're a coder, this is just an effect of the brute force of large numbers.......? Let's says you understand that it takes a hell of alot to grow a pound of meat. Is it more concerning to you that this pound of meat may have come into contact with am's because the animal was sick and suffering..... or that the many pounds of vegetative matter are also steeped in am's (in addition to whatever am's were directly added to the feed for no reason other than growth? Maybe both? So what if your government offered you the choice between drowning the fields or the livestock in am's? Would you need to be compelled to vote for either...? I'm dealing with something like this in the watershed I help to manage right now. We're deciding whether we should use usda/epa spot checks from the cattle industry or request budget for persistent testing of the water column itself to determine stream health thresholds. According to those cattle spots our water ought to be kosher - but I know it isn't because I run the tests. Someone is dusting their bluegrass with am's - and all of that gets fed to horses and cattle my man. I actually get why theyre resistant to more oversight, they're not fucking up - one of their local suppliers is. They'd get fined all to shit for it, and there would be a hold on their subsidized insurance and on the tax credits the livestock bring - but no one could stop whoever is contaminating our stream no matter how well culpability is established.

The irony here..and this will probably blow your mind, is that the water in this stream is so clean you could dip your hand in and drink it raw.....but it shouldn't be......