Donald Trump the Megathread part II - mod warnings in OP, Updated 18/03/25

Well elected officials jobs is to plan things for how a state works.

Well if failure of planning is lazy then just blaming climate change as a whole is even lazier as it isn't going away any time soon so they're going to have to do some proper planning to deal with it.

The Dutch have been able to keep out the water despite 25% of it it being below sea level and the rest of it being pancake flat.

It's this thread - send people out to rake the forests!

Calm down.

Have you ever heard of Forest management ?

Controlled burnings, thinning out forests ???

The reason California hasn't conducted more of these controlled burnings comes down to existing environmental laws in the U.S. that have posed bureaucratic obstacles to prescribed fires. It often takes years for proposals to go through reviews before any controlled burning can actually take place.

Wildfires have long been a part of California’s ecosystem, and will continue to be so. 

The key question for living with wildfire is how humans manage the risks, and its clear to see than Newsom and Co are not doing a good job of managing the risks.

The acreage burned is increasing even as the number of wildfires has decreased, thats not necessarily the result of climate change alone.

Instead of removing dead and diseased trees and undergrowth, the state, following environmentalist restrictions, has allowed that natural fuel to build up, creating the conditions for explosive wildfires.

Land use restrictions have also forced development nearer forests, worsening the damage and loss of life.

I do more than most for the environment but environmental policies also need to be practical and use more common sense.

In many ways, the conclusion of this case perfectly symbolises the utter toothlessness of the legal prosecutions against Trump these last couple of years.

They only increased his popularity/notoriety.

Those who instigated the proceedings have all been knocked down pretty comprehensively.

The cases got mired in the kind of procedural molasses that is only really available to the very rich and powerful.

Trump has won, and made a fool out of everyone who's acted against him these last couple of years. I don't say that in a sense that I like it - I certainly don't think his impending presidency is a good development for the USA or the world, where the best case scenario is that his various acolytes get locked into infighting that minimises the amount of damage done, but the funny thing is that people are going to continue to call Trump stupid, this being the man who has won the U.S presidency on two non-consecutive occasions against people who would be traditionally considered more qualified.

Ignorant? Maybe, yes. But stupid ? Oh, no.

Ehh? You think Bragg bringing the case helped? Now, that's a different take, I guess.

Since when is a US District Attorney's achieved rated against whether someone gets into office or not?

Bragg brought a case against him and got a conviction, how is that not a win for him?

The judge has just said that anyone else would receive jail time but the POTUS is to be treated differently.

Americans just voted to remove 'all men are created equal' from their constitution.

The real issue is now that the line has been crossed, where does it stop? Senators surely. Congressman must be. Governors? Sheriffs? School board committee members if they did the act while in office?

These fires have nothing to do with the temperature. It's not hot. At least one person has been arrested for arson and I'm sure there will be more. The way fires were springing up unrelated to each other was completely unnatural, also they seemed to be weirdly concentrated in wealthy areas. The national guard has been deployed to stop looters.

I’m well aware of what forest management is, and that is a literal bandaid solution to the larger issue, which is a changing climate where fires are more frequent and also larger now.

You’re also talking about enormous sizes of land, and humans just don’t have the capability to manage that, that is where things like rain come into play.

I see it first hand here in Canada. What is lost on most is the sheer scale of the areas we are talking about here, there just isn’t the capacity is manage it properly and with climate change, it just gets worse.

I’m also not sure you wrote half of that post, the rouge “n” link in your second last paragraph is a bit suspicious there.

Ah right, so all the scientists, governments etc are totally wrong, and the lack of rain from last year didn’t play a part, right?

You’re into conspiracy territory here with the “weirdly concentrated” garbage, sort yourself out there.

The fires of course, are connected to hot dry conditions. The land is dry because it hasn't rained there in years, and it gets hot when there is a fire there (or an ember from a fire further away lands there)

Controlled burns are difficult to do when theres a multi year drought. How exactly do you do a controlled burn of a forest when a single spark carried by the wind can set off a fire outside of the expected control area?

The wildfires happen when the conditions are extremely dry so that any fire that starts, regardless of the cause, burns out of control.

Blaming Arson is just yet another right wing distraction from the real problem, which is climate change.

The 50 billion dollars in damages this one fire is going to cost would have been a lot better spent on bulding public transport, renewable energy infrastructure, and migrating from fossil fuels 30 years ago when we should have been investing in these changes, instead, now its just going to be devastating natural disasters every year forever, getting worse the longer we continue to allow oligarchs to block action on climate change because it harms their own private wealth interests.

So you assert that all the charges were made up to politically damage a person they had already beaten in the previous election? Although your previous point is that he was done and dusted after 2020, they decided that the only way to beat him was to make up crimes and try to plant evidence on him.

The justice system is so corrupt in the US that despite all the GOP senators, congressmen, judges etc, this was simply allowed to happen and only for Trump's grit and determination against this corruption has he been able to clear his name.

But wait. What about all the other cases? Tax fraud, hush money payments, stealing classified documents, 100's of millions in defamation rulings? Are they all part of the same plot of were these all taken separately but using the same corruption levers?

Remind me, what party was Schwarzenegger from when he was governor? And, hmm, Pete Wilson? Ronald Reagan? The overcrowding took off in California post-WWII, and the laissez-faire attitude about development, around the same time, likewise the endless problems with water rights.

The comparison to the Netherlands is irrelevant insofar as it's completely different issues and the Netherlands has been dealing with them for centuries; California (or anywhere in the US for that matter), not so much.