I guess he also wants to divert northern rivers to flow south? Which rivers? Their drainage basins don’t work that way. None of this makes any sense.
We have a madman for a president, what is taking so long to boot him out?
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Just what we need. Advice on forest fires form a man who has never seen a forest. What thew hell is a “water lane”? Is he talking about rivers? Does the President of the United States not understand how rivers work? I feel like none of us really understood how stupid this man truly is until we made him president. Now we have to acknowledge the stupid oozing out of his brain. I really miss ignoring Donald Trump. Not how I wanted to spend the latter half of my 30s.
It takes this long because despite all the calls to “run the government like a business”, CEOs like Trump make businesses go bankrupt, but politicians like Trump can thrive on lies & fantasy
The republicans refuse to do the job they have taken an oath to do. They are, in fact, entirely negligent of their duties and have no shame in their sycophancy.
DJT’s will go down in history as the Dunning/Kruger presidency. Doesn’t know how forests work, doesn’t know how rivers work, and refuses to acknowledge the real world effects of climate change.
He may be under the illusion that south means down and naturally the rivers should flow that way.
“closed water lanes coming down from the north”??11ty!!
I can’t even being to comprehend what that means. Is a “water lane” what we normal people refer to as a “river”? Does he believe that the water we have in the northern part of the state is not being fully utilized? It’s why we have a population of almost 40 million and economy that ranks 6th in the world. Among nations! As far as fire fighting goes, you don’t get water from rivers. You get it from lakes and reservoirs. Finally, these latest fires aren’t even in forests so all the raking of forest floors in world wouldn’t have stopped them.
God, this man is a total, utter embarrassment.
I looked up water lane. It’s probably a phrase he picked-up from wing-nut twitter.
It does have an actual definition though…
water lane
1 : a lane with a stream flowing alongside
2a : a narrow open passageway through water (as amid weeds, ice, or shipping)
An outdated and poorly written constitution that didn’t take the wholesale corruption and ideological fanaticism of an entire political party into account, that’s what.
Inside Trump’s brain is one sick clusterfuck.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/02/us/politics/trump-twitter-disinformation.html?utm_source=digg
“…what is taking so long to boot him out?”
Because, in addition to the reasons given above, only a narrow slice of all possible atrocious activities “counts.”
Nixon didn’t get in any trouble for bombing Cambodia. Clinton didn’t get in any trouble for bombing Bosnia.
Bush Jr. and Obama didn’t get into any trouble for functionally eliminating the 4th Amendment.
You can do anything you want to foreigners. You can do basically anything you want to the American citizenry.
It’s only misdeeds against the government that matter. Break into your rival’s office? Lie under oath? You’re out of here, buddy!
Imagine being an executive in a company that doesn’t care if you rip off the customers, pollute the environment, or maim the workers, but if you take a fellow executive’s lunch from the fridge, you’re fired. That’s America.
And while we’re on the subject of California’s fires, look at how much of it was caused by PG&E not doing any sort of upgrades or preventative maintenance to their lines on the grounds that it would have been too expensive..
I think the delay is the Democrats rigorously adhering to the written process set out in the Constitution of the means to remove a disgraceful president. By following the rules, they are are ensuring he can’t slip through by some technicalities. I agree that the process must be rigorously followed, as it prevents throwing out good presidents by a contrary House. I know it is bloody obvious he needs to be removed, The best way is to do it the right way, and not impulsively.
I guess bone spurs would prevent him helping fight fires?
Not even that. Not one president who was impeached was ever removed from office afterward. (Unless you count Nixon who resigned before the process could take it’s course, but I don’t.) So in this analogous company, if your popular or powerful enough, then all that will happen is that you’ll get a strongly worded reprimand in your file and nothing more.
It’s time we tossed out that piece of 18th Century fish wrap we call a Constitution and replace it with something that takes the last 230 years of political theory, science, economics, and national experience into account. This time, we keep the wealthy, male chauvinist, slave-owners (or their modern counterparts, e.g. billionaires, Bible-beaters, gun nuts, white supremacists, etc.) out of the convention.
The latest poll on his favourability rating is 45%.
Almost half of Americans look at him and think he’s doing a good job.
Tabby @ 15
That’s because almost half of Americans are greedy, bigoted shits who either have no problem with Trump’s obvious corruption (e.g. “What’s wrong the president using his position to help his business? He’s a business man!” or “There’s nothing wrong with Trump withholding military aid from Ukraine to get dirt on the Bidens! He’s fighting corruption!”) or deny it’s happening at all (e.g. “FAKE NEWS!!” “DEEP STATE FRAME JOB!!!”) just so they can keep their money, their guns, their religious stupidity, and their hate. Unless the political landscape changes drastically soon, I don’t have a lot of hope that our country will get out of the next decade intact, much less the current century. I also don’t have a lot of hope that such drastic change will come, either.
@#10, jasonfailes
This is a wonderful comment, and articulates the problem beautifully.
Trump and his supporters in Congress know that if they can hold out until the next election, everything will be fine. If Trump wins, then they can shut down the impeachment process with a claim that voters have vindicated him. If he loses, they know from Carter, Clinton, and Obama that the Democrats will never, no matter how horrifying a Republican President may be, stir up investigations against them after they’ve left office. Bush killed a million people and put us trillions into debt pursuing lies, and the Democrats did nothing — compared with that, all of Trump’s crimes so far as small beer, no matter how much tackier they may be. (And that’s really what seems to make so many tribal Democrats so mad — they didn’t care about Obama trying to detain immigrants indefinitely, or letting them freeze, but Trump trying to do the same thing makes them really, really mad. They don’t like how he looks, they don’t like how nasty he is out in the open — but his actual actions are often just… continuations of the things that were already going on, which were okay before Trump took them over.) Once he makes it to 2020, he’s safe. He knows it, the Senate Republicans know it, Pelosi and Biden know it (and will actively work to make sure it happens), the only people who think otherwise are ones who have already been sold out by their party’s leadership, and I’m not talking about the Republicans.
Ehm…this could be the first non-totally-idiotic thing your idiotic president has said.
I don’t know about “raking” the wilderness, but fire lanes are a very common and useful way to slow down and stop fires. Also, cleaning up the woods helps a lot. Obviously you don’t do it everywhere -dead branches and trees and dried up leaves are ecosystem for so many living creatures-, but at least where the woods are managed by men, cleaning them up is one of the most effective way to avoid fires (apart from shooting pyromaniacs). We see it a lot in my country: many woods have been abandoned by farmers who give up for an easier life: this gives to fires a very favourable environment to spread.
Still, that man is an asshole and I hope you get rid of him next year.
brain
What is your country?
By “raking the forest,” I think Trump has chain saws, tractors and haul-away dirt roads in mind for the timber industries. If there are no forests, there will be no forest fires, and the problem is solved.
Yes they are. But that clearly isn’t what hair furor is twittering about, he said (from the OP, my transcription): Teh traitorous twitterer is clearly burbling about something to do with water — and, as previously mentioned, “water lane” isn’t really relevant in the context of either fire control / prevention or in terms of water supply — and which, in any case, is quite different from a “fire lane” (which, from memory, is usually called a “fire road” in the States, or at least in California).
(Our resident ranger, if he is still around — I haven’t seen him posting in some time now — has experience with forest fires and related matters, and can certainly go into more detail… and has a number of amusing “fire stories” that have happened to him over the years.)
weylguy@20, Ha! Yeah, possibly…
The origin is a lie hair furor told about Finland, claiming (Make America Rake Again: Finland baffled by Trump’s forest fire raking claim, November-2018).
@chigau: it’s Italy (so you known, I’m an expert in idiotic political leaders.
What is taking so long is;
– He is signing their agenda
– His judges are their judges
– His Federal appointees drive out qualified employees and tear down what makes regulations work
– His rhetoric both hides their rhetoric and amplifies it
– ‘Conservationism cannot fail, it can only be failed!’ is their ethos
– His base, their base. And until ‘The’ base has enough of Trump OR their political calculus says that the damage Trump does out-weights the base’s indignation, Trump is the key. Until he gets booted, in which he is just Dubya Redux.
Never-Trumpers are just waiting for a quiet Trump. They will never vote him out.
Thump has experience on how raking forests is done, he has illegal immigrants carefully rake his greens for a dollar a day. And he has water lanes come on automatically too.
I mean, we all know the gist of what the water stuff is about, right? When California started having horrible droughts and there wasn’t enough water for farmers, since the right didn’t want to admit any possibility of climate change, they instead pinned all the shortages on not being allowed to drain one particular river for the sake of an endangered fish. Trump picked that up, and started talking about the state letting its water pour into the Pacific, and now this is the natural end result of his telephone game with himself.
The words may not make sense, but the message has always been clear: environmentalism is bad and anyone from a state that voted against him can go die in a fire. And that’s not such an unpopular view among the rich and powerful, so.
Speaking of hair furor, his contempt for ecology, the corrupt dalekocrazy† he’s hired, and fantasies about water in California, from last month, Trump Admin Moves to End Protections for Endangered Fish Threatened by California’s Water Wars:
So, actual scientists say your plan is bollocks, you ignore them and get another opinion based on junk science and proceed! Simple, really, when you’re at war with reality.
† Dalekocrazy was originally an accidental mispelling of dalekocracy — rule by Daleks — but seems so apt I’ve continued to use it since.
I wonder if future historians will consider Trump to be America’s Commodus.
There is actually a thing called fire smarting where you clear out dead underbrush. It’s usually done in urban green spaces and around acreages. Unfortunately Trump is a blithering idiot.
I suspect that last November, Trump’s strategy advisors told him to blame California’s fires on forest management – already earlier that year he’d blamed the fires on California’s water conservation. Then he probably saw some footage of California firefighters clearing fire lanes, or something like that, and thus the “raking” expression was born in his mind.
Just before responding to last November’s fires, Trump had a brief talk with Finnish president Sauli Niinistö at some summit or other. According to Niinistö’s office, he’d expressed condolences over the California fires and discussed forest policy in very general terms. This topic (logging and forest management) is currently very hot in Finland, and very much tied to climate policy (carbon sinks etc.). I suspect Niinistö also tried to bring the climate angle into that talk – he’s been constantly seeking opportunities/excuses to preach at Trump about climate change. Trump, apparently, only picked up the notion (very much professed here in Finland) that Finns are world class experts on forest management.
“this could be the first non-totally-idiotic thing your idiotic president has said.”
Nope. It’s a word salad of stale, old denialist talking points. Sure we’re still dealing with effects of mid-20th century fire fighting tactics, of which professionals are now very much aware and trying hard to compensate for. Trump however is totally disengaged from any meaningful reality and thinks that if he waves his hands and stamps his feet all the world’s problems will just melt away–if not for all those stupid people who actually know what they’re talking about, of course.
Trump is King of the Fools. And there’s a lotta fools out there…
I should emphasize that the main reason for Trump’s rant is diversion from global warming, which is a significant factor in what is now essentially a year round fire season.
When reality is in conflict with you truth, it’s reality that has it wrong. Rake the forest? Sure. How many square miles do you want raked and how many people do you plan to pay to do it? Make northbound rivers flow southward? No problem how much are you willing to pay to make rivers flow uphill? South ain’t downhill. Someone should do up an estimate to show him how much theses things will cost, not just engineering and manpower but replacing water sources for northern California, disposing of all the waste matter cleared out of the forests, and other associated costs. Such a completely ignorant man. And he could still kill a person in broad daylight on fifth Ave. and it wouldn’t cost him a single vote.