To clarify at the end, by “the case”, I mean the original article my comment is replying to. As in they posted an Ohio Supreme Court ruling from 2024

Free range in the US and many other countries just requires “access” to the outdoors. Access is not defined. That can be conveniently interpreted to be as little as “we had a door to a tiny screened area we open up sometimes.” Or just straight up not enforced. Free-range eggs don’t have a legal definition at all in the US from my understanding

And often for a number of the terms, they just have to submit documentation to the USDA, but not actually ever receive inspections on it. Even when clear cut labels like “no antibiotics ever” seems like it’d be hard to have a weak definition around right? Well silly, you can just ignore violations of it. Here’s one example of that for the beef industry

Federal Inspectors Found Antibiotics in Beef ‘Raised Without Antibiotics.’ They Took No Action

Poultry farming is an industry where terms mean nothing. It is rife with horribly misleading terms that are completely unregulated or have weak definitions that are unenforced. This is not as uprising when you see it through that lens. It’s a continuation of existing absurdity that are less talked about

For instance, “free-range” doesn’t actually have to mean being outdoors at all

Bringing up a Tyson competitor, the farm manager wonders how other poultry companies handle supposedly free-range-raised chickens. The short answer: They don’t, really.

“Those birds don’t go outside — you know that,” the technician replies. “They don’t all go out … Look that up online.”

The manager chimes in: “It’s not like they make it like all of ’em come out and enjoy the sun.”

“That is strictly for commercial [advertising] purposes,” the technician says.

[…]

In 2017, the Intercept reported an investigation into a dozen California farms owned by a free-range chicken company that found no evidence of any animals spending any time outdoors. The chief animal care officer for Perdue Farms, a major chicken producer, has even said the vast majority of its free-range chickens stay indoors.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23724740/tyson-chicken-free-range-humanewashing-investigation-animal-cruelty

Also as a note, the ruling on this case was from last year

EDIT: to clarify by “the case”, I mean the original article my comment is replying to

Still happening for some portion of MAGA / republicans, just less focus on it from them at the moment. For a recent example

July 30th: Thomas Massie: ".@SpeakerJohnson has been promoting this non-binding resolution, hoping to give cover to those who don’t want a full release of the Epstein files.

Embarrassingly section 3 of his resolution refers to section 2, which doesn’t exist! Thank you @RepMcGovern for highlighting this."

https://xcancel.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1950626797990588518

I think you mean super relevant actually. As we all know that is precisely what happened here, even with the seal costume and all. Any information to the contrary are total lies /s

The US government uses taxes to buy up dairy and meat that was not purchased based on demand, nullifying individual vegan boycotts and artificially propping up those industries.

That’s taking a really short term view of it. As demand has stayed low enough for long enough, they have cut back on the amount and paid dairy farmers to not operate. These kinds of programs can only prop something up for so long

but instead has found the greatest successes from lobbying governments to pass animal welfare laws and organizing protests to generate pressure and support for those laws

Animal welfare laws do not fix the fundamental issue with these systems. As long as the industry exists in a large scale capacity, it will find the cruelest ways to operate. As long as meat, dairy, etc. are consumed in mass, factory farming will exist

For instance, US beef consumption cannot be supplied by a pasture-based system. There is only enough land to support 27% of the consumption, and that still raises methane emissions by 8% so we would need to be consuming even less if we wanted to avoid emission reductions from a move like that

Various laws and larger action can be effective though. Like putting plant-based options by default has been tested in some places, has substantially reduced demand and still kept satisfaction high. Or things like prohibiting the production of Fur, Foie Gras, etc.

Didn’t make this graph, so not sure why it’s spaced like that

In the dairy industry, calves are separated from their mothers shortly after birth. If they are not being sent to be killed for veal, they then need somewhere to house them. One option is a calf hutch where they hold them individually at scale. Calves there tethered to the hutch or they have a small fenced area around it

The industry claims they use them to reduce disease risk by putting calves apart like this, but the research is mixed on whether it actually reduced disease risk or not

Slaugherhouses and similar lines of work change a person for the worse. Institutionalized killing makes workers often numb and more prone to all forms of violence. PTSD is common as well. Near universal dairy industry practices include things like killing cows after their productivity declines, separating calves from mothers, and more. Some quotes from workers in slaughterhouses I think describe what those kinds of things do to a person most aptly

“Maximum six months then you make a change, because if he shoots continuously it will start affecting him. He gets a murderous attitude in him. He will do it to other people. He will stab you with a knife, turn around and walk away.”

[…]

“As time passes, you get used to it. You feel nothing. You can imagine, if you kill a thing a 1000 times over and over, you wouldn’t have feelings after a while. It kills you on the inside, an abattoir, it kills you. You can be full of blood, it will not bother you”

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4841092/

Here’s another

Down in the blood pit they say that the smell of blood makes you aggressive. And it does. You get an attitude that if that hog kicks at me, I’m going to get even. You’re already going to kill the hog, but that’s not enough. It has to suffer.

https://theconversation.com/animals-suffer-for-meat-production-and-abattoir-workers-do-too-127506

Huh strange doesn’t show on for me, but https://archive.is/tV414 should let you see the article

And that drags out the discussion of it the entire time. Trump wants the story to go away because it’s splintering some of the base, that makes it louder at each step and makes more

So either the files do get release or the story continues to play out and become a bigger and bigger deal. Either way is not great for Trump

I’m not 100% sure he means from their redactions? I think the law only allows senators access to the files, so he might be meaning senators / senator staff releasing it after getting it then redacting victim names?

In either case, doing this still keeps it in the news which hurts Trump. Senate Dems can and should keep doing everything like this instead of Schumer’s previous strategy of stuff like caving on the CR for no reason. This is notable improvement from senate dems even compared to recently

Especially because house dems have shown more fight. They were far more aggressive in trying to force votes on releasing the files which lead to Republicans just shutting down the house instead of voting on it. Which both works to show Republicans are complicit and stops them from pushing through worse bills for an extra few weeks. Senate dems tried a couple of unanimous consent votes, but didn’t see it quite to the level of house dems forcing amendment votes in every committee on damn near everything

They wouldn’t need Gerrymandering if that were the case. They are doing this because they are still afraid of voting. Don’t preemptively build the apathy they want from us.

They want people not to vote because while Gerrymandered maps make things more difficult, but far impossible to overcome. Hell sometimes gerrymandering backfires and leads to more flips when done poorly or there’s a big enough wave against the party. Don’t equate it as fully gone. That’s doing their dirty work for them

Maybe the EU will pass some legislation that will carry over to the US

GDPR requires the right to have your data deleted at least, but a lot of companies will only allow that if you are within the EU (because of profit and spite, I suppose). Though some just allowed it for everyone instead

Similar for California Consumer Privacy Act where a lot of companies will only let you do the stuff it requires if you are within California

Sort of like the “unsubscribe” button you get at the bottom of some emails. Did they have to pass a law to get that enacted?

Yes, see the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003

There already are a bunch out there and increasing. Everything from aquafaba as a binder to things like Just Egg (both cooks & bakes like eggs from Mung beans), and even starting to see some newer companies using precision fermentation to make plant-based eggs with identical proteins to chicken-based eggs

If headlines can’t even mention the battery cages this lawsuit is actually about at all, what are we doing here? Battery cages are horrifying and just the tip of cutlery

If the industry ever tells you that they treat anyone “humanely” remember that they are arguing to remove the smallest sliver of requirements. There is still a massive amount of cruelty allowed in other areas too (for instance chick culling, forced molting, etc.) and they are still angry on any requirement

There also has already been a lawsuit on other provisions in Prop 12 that went up to this current SCOTUS in 2023 and was rejected.

This almost certainly isn’t even actually about the cost of this particular law to the industry. The latest cost changes are almost all driven by bird flu. No, the thing they fear far more than a tiny increase in their costs is that we’ll actually start waking up to this industry. They worry Prop 12 will inspire more action. The more we talk about how things actually look, the more they worry that they’ll become like the fur industry where people wake up and stop buying en masse over its cruelty

Do note that a lot of early reporting on Trump’s “deals” in the past have often been grossly misleading. Often counting existing agreements as new one or leaving critical details out

For instance, I recall a lot of people were questioning a deal with Mexico earlier as bending the knee that turned out to largely be just be puff agreements that they had already made before Trump

There’s a decent chance that this is continuing that pattern. Though I can’t say for certain of course

Indeed, factory farming is quite dominant globally. From one group’s estimate:

We estimate that over 90% of farmed animals globally are living in factory farms at present. This includes an estimated 74% of farmed land animals (vertebrates only) and virtually all farmed fish.[1] However, there is substantial uncertainty in these figures given the land animal estimates’ heavy reliance on information from Worldwatch Institute with unclear methodology[2] and limited data on fish farming.

https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/global-animal-farming-estimates

Leagues already had rules on their own without the government getting involved. Now instead it’s outright bans being enforced by the state. The largest and loudest voices pushing for the government to do this have openly said they are doing this to attack trans rights in other areas. It’s not about sports

Plus beef is a large emitter to climate change. They’ve spread tons of disinformation on this to keep its consumption and production up. The industry is reaping what they’ve sowed

The US beef industry is creating an army of influencers and citizen activists to help amplify a message that will be key to its future success: that you shouldn’t be too worried about the growing attention around the environmental impacts of its production.

In particular, it would like you not to be especially concerned about how meat consumption needs to be reduced if we are to avoid the most violently disruptive forms of planetary heating (even if all fossil fuel use ended tomorrow).

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/03/beef-industry-public-relations-messaging-machine

Can’t find any other reporting on his account being temporarily blocked from anywhere else

Site is even more suspicious than just being really new. nycjournals.com/blog/ has a link in “First time to the site? Start here” that goes to a page on financialbureau.org which is a dead site. Pulling it up in archive.org shows an almost identical site layout also with no real information on who’s behind it