Avian Flu Diary: USDA: California Reports Another 41 H5 Infected Dairy Herds (n=335)

At this point California is reporting more than 61% of the nation’s infected dairy herds, with roughly 30% of that state’s dairy herds testing positive.  It is unknown what percentage of the state’s herds have been tested.

Testing in most states remains voluntary except prior to interstate transport, and many farmers have resisted testing.  As a result of this `Don’t test, don’t tell’ policy, we have no idea of how widespread the virus may be across the country.

But if California is any indication, the problem is probably a lot bigger than we realize.

Source: Avian Flu Diary: USDA: California Reports Another 41 H5 Infected Dairy Herds (n=335)

Milei’s War Against Women – Havana Times

Argentina’s recent vote against a UN resolution aimed at preventing and eliminating all forms of violence against women and girls (1) marks yet another chapter in the delusional denialism of a leader like Javier Milei.

I mention this because Argentina was the only country in the world to vote against such a basic and important resolution, one that even authoritarian governments notorious for violating women’s rights daily, such as Iran and Russia, did not oppose.

Argentina’s rationale for voting against this resolution is rooted in Javier Milei’s so-called cultural battle against “wokeness,” joined by figures like Agustín Laje and Emmanuel Dannan, who aim to position themselves as the vanguard of the current far-right.

This ideological dogma takes to the extreme the notion of a sinister global UN agenda—referred to as globalism —designed to destroy nations, with gender policies serving as its primary tool.

It might seem like a bad joke, but it isn’t. Javier Milei genuinely believes that patriarchy and women’s struggles for a less violent and more equal world are part of a global leftist conspiracy to destroy men and impose a totalitarian regime against them.

Consequently, Milei denies the existence of gender inequality, framing it instead as a war between sexes instigated by the global left. He claims that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, the left invented a new opposition to continue generating conflict.

This is the misnamed cultural Marxism, endlessly invoked by today’s far-right, which casts any collective demand or recognition of a particular group as part of a conspiracy orchestrated by a mishmash of actors ranging from the UN’s Agenda 2030 to the Puebla Group, Disney, China, and George Soros.

Source: Milei’s War Against Women – Havana Times

NASA satellites reveal abrupt drop in global freshwater levels

An international team of scientists using observations from NASA-German satellites found evidence that Earth’s total amount of freshwater dropped abruptly starting in May 2014 and has remained low ever since. Reporting in Surveys in Geophysics, the researchers suggested the shift could indicate Earth’s continents have entered a persistently drier phase.

From 2015 through 2023,  showed that the average amount of freshwater stored on land—that includes liquid surface water like lakes and rivers, plus water in aquifers underground—was 290 cubic miles (1,200 cubic km) lower than the average levels from 2002 through 2014, said Matthew Rodell, one of the study authors and a hydrologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “That’s two and a half times the volume of Lake Erie lost.”

Source: NASA satellites reveal abrupt drop in global freshwater levels