StumpTownStu

@Midnight1

 As I expected, there are some early moves I support, and some I don't. It will be interesting to see where we stand after year one.

And how is the opposite true. Alliances like NATO, the Paris Accord, etc base contributions on GDP. It will always fall to us to fund these things, and we really don't see return on our investment. It's time we rethink out alliances. We'll provide military support to countries who present some strategic advantage to us, usually based solely on their geographic region. What we shouldn't be is the worlds military. It's a back breaking expense and it doesn't make us safer. It outs us more at risk by antagonizing other military super powers.

Honest question. Do you believe supporting Ukraine made us safer, or more at risk?

Successful in that it allows us to better defend other countries. It is a very one-sided alliance.

Is this forum meant for discourse and debate, or is it meant to be an echo chamber?

Crazy watching liberals get all judgemental. Her marriage, and her faith, in her business. It's 2025. People get have sex before marriage. At least the baby wasn't born out of wedlock. I'm sure she's not getting excommunicated for getting pregnant before marriage and questioning someone's faith based on such a thing, a person who grew up in the church and went to Catholic school, is borderline blasphemy. Only God can judge. Not internet haters.

One was white collar crime. There are dudes getting leniency for gun charges. Armed robberies. As far as the other thing, when there is zero evidence, the court won't even bring charges. If the E.Jean Carroll thing was a criminal matter, it never goes to court. He's never even charged. She gets exposed as being an unhinged, pathological liar.

They wouldn't though. Emphatically, they wouldn't. Even if that woman comes forward within the statute of limitations, no criminal court would evet draw charges forva case where there's zero evidence. Are you trying to imply that Trump got preferential treatment in a New York court? You can't be serious.

@UNIMAN

 In those conditions, fire spreads incredibly fast. The high winds prevented the use of helicopters early on, which would've made a huge difference. The majority ofnthe state, save for the Sacramento/San Joaquin valley, is hilly ot mountainous. Terrain poses issues. High winds posed issues. And an overloaded utility system exacerbated everything.

So of course somethings could've been done differently, and some mistakes were probably made, but not to the level that is being made out in the media.

Screw an ordinary Joe, even if Donald Trump himself was accused of this when it allegedly happened, the case never goes to trial. He's never brought up on charges. The case has too many holes. It's too unbelievable. There's no evidence. It was a civil case though, over 20 years later, and was always a witch hunt. Thst is a sick women. She wanted to write a book about how horrible men are, that's the premise. She looked around. Trump was in the midst of the Stormy Daniels controversy, which was consensual. She took a storyline from Law & Order and said he raped her in a bathroom. Les Moonves was caught up in his own scandal so she said he sexually assaulted her in an elevator. And not to be like that, but we're talking about a 50 something year old mildly unattractive woman that apparently guys couldn't keep their hands off of. Maybe she was attractive in her youth by some conventional standards, tall, skinny, face symmetry, but she wasn't what you would call a not 50+ year old. Not that you have to be hot to be assaulted but this notion that multiple men just couldn't control themselves around her is pure fiction.

There's so much misinformation out there, and our president isn't helping. I appreciate our president because he's willibg to ask why? He's not an expert on things but he'll ask, "Why can't we do this? Why don't we try that?" Sometimes the reason is simply bureaucracy and that's what needs to change but other times, it's simply that things are physically impossible. Or that he doesn't quite understand the issue. He'll talk about water being wasted by flowing into Pacific as if he doesn't understand how river systems work. Regardless of how many times to dam a creek or river, countless times all over California, water ultimately makes it's way to the ocean. He talks as if California diverts the water to the ocean, like just flushing it away. He talks about diverting the Columbia... First of all, the Columbia exists in Canada, Washington, and Oregon. Aside from California having no water rights to the Columbia, I don't know what engineering marvel could be conceived to move that water 1000 miles to LA. It would cost hundreds of billions, possibly a trillion dollars to construct such an aqueduct, if even at all possible.

The problem isn't storage capacity. It's usage. Too much of the water is used to grow almonds for China, grain for Saudis, and too much is bottled by water conglomerates like Nestlé. This is all fact. Also fact is that all the water in the world wasn't preventing those fires. Most of SoCal is what we'd call a semi-arid chaparral environment. It's boderline desert. And then you have the Inland Empire (Palm Springs, for example) which is actual desert. So you have desert to the east of the mountains, and semi-arid desert adjacent to the west. With that chaparral environment comes drought resistant shrubby/bushy plants, and weedy grasses. The type of plant that thrives in such an environment. You pull it, hack it down, it grows right back. They don't need much water and when the rare rain storm comes, the shit explodes. Mitigating some of this stuff is next to impossible. You here people talk about controlled burns. You don't typically see controlled burns that close to densely populated neighborhoods in an area known for dry conditions, both dry vegetation and and warm dry winds. I guess you could hack everything down and concrete over but then you lose canopy, oxygenation, etc. And overall esthetic. People choose to live in such places for a reason.

You posted a flow chart for the Sacramento River. Do you realize the amount of Sacramento River water that is stored? Some of our major dams are impoundments of the Sacramento River or it's tributaries. Where do you think another dam is gonna go?

This is what I mean by people who don't understand the oroblem. You're my bro. I appreciate you. I respect you. You're one of a handful here I consider an actual friend but you just don't understand, with all due respect.

I didn't say more reservoirs are not needed per se. I said they're are tons of reservoirs in the state already, that up until the last couple years, filling the reservoirs that exist has been a problem. That even in years when the state gets rain, not every region, not every watershed gets rain,.no not every reservoirs fills. That when the Oroville dam failed, it costs a billion dollar just to fix it. People think three, or four, or seven billion equates to building a ton of reservoirs. It doesn't. I also believe people think reservoirs are just big buildings to store water. Overgrown swimming pools. Build them anywhere. They aren't.

Infrastructure improvements may be needed but water storage capacity is not the problem.

I find it interesting, and maybe it's just a councidence, that aside from the instances I had already mentioned, every single one of these women "came forward" in 2016. Was there something significant about 2016? What happened in 2016.

Look, to be clear, i'm not some Trump apologist. If he's really a creep, going around randomly kissing girls and putting them on the ass, I have no words for him. I find it interesting that not one of these pageant contestants came forward prior to 2016 but neither here nor there. My position has never had anything to do with other accusations. I don't believe he raped E.Jean Carroll in a Bergdorf dressing room. Her story has too many inconsistencies, and sounds made up. And it's eerily similar to a Law & Order episode. The woman can't even remember in what month/year it allegedly happened. "Maybe it was fall of this year. Maybe it was spring of that year." You never see that. Repressed memories aren't really a thing. Most psychologist agree. Sometimes a child may have a traumatic experience that they are too young to understand, and as they get older, and gain ubderstanding, it takes the form of a "repressed memory" but rape victims don't forget when they were raped. She knows that if she narrowed it down, it would give him the opportunity to possibly show that he wasn’t even in town. Ao she creates an essentially 9 month window. I won't go into all the inconsistencies because I know Democrats don't really care about the truth. They just want to call him a rapist. That's why the judge came out and said thst whst he was found liable for doesn't constitute rape under New York law but it should be viewed as such. There is a lot to unpack in that statement. E.Jean Carroll accused him of rape. She said he penetrated her first withbhis fingers, and then his penis. Even the jury that awarded her a settlement ruled that it was unlikely, but gave her the finger part. The very jury that ruled for her didn't even fully believe her story. Let that sink in. Usually a rape accuser is believed, or disbelieved. They didn't believe her. Her story just doesn't add up but they threw her a consolation prize.

E.Jean Carroll is a sick woman. We read a lot memoirs in my house, my wife especially. Life stories of regular people often faced with horrifying circumstances. I have read many accounts of rape. Nobody writes about the experience like that woman. It's like a harlequin novel. The woman is a writer. She wrote a story. Democrats, 99.9% of which never read her account, ate it up because they wanted to believe.

If Donald Trump is going around groping women and giving them unsolicited kisses, then he is a horrible human being and should be punished in this life or the next but that is a far cry from raping a chick you barely know in a department store dressing room. Democrats though. They want you to believe DONALD J. TRUMP, one of the most recognized faces in the country, certainly New York, even before politics walked into Bergdorf and raped a chick in a dressing room, then slipped out undetected. Ok.

I don't think you realize how many reservoirs there are in California, and what building a new one involves. And wbile California has received rain in the last year, the last two actually, it has been in the form of a few mega storms, and not sustained rain as needed. And when it has rained, southern California has mostly missed out.

Trust me, California has tons of reservoirs. The number of reservoirs is not the problem.

You're wrong.

My coffee doesn't come from Columbia.

Don't bury the lead. Why did he threaten tariffs? They threatened to not land our planes land. And what was on those planes? Illegals. That's called follwing through with a campaign promise.

I'm finding it hard to take you seriously.

@thirdperson

 I'm really trying to stay off of this subject as to not offend any of my brothers who find the topic sensitive. I eill just say this. At the point of it's release, the covid vaccine was more akin to a yearly flu vaccine as opposed to the targeted, strain specific vaccine it was intended to be. Flu vaccine manufactures produce yearly versions based on estimates. They, like all of us, know that every year we're going to see some variant of the flu. So based on available data, based on mutation models, they make an educated guess on what that new variant will be. It's characteristics, how it will act, etc. If they come up with a vaccine that's 60% effective, hey, that's a win. Sometimes it's 40%. Sometimes it's 70% but just the same, sometimes it's 20%. When they whiff, for certain segments of the population, healthcare workers, the elderly, it's still better than nothing.

That's akin to the impact of the covid 19 vaccine. For those who are elderly, those with comorbidities, heathcare workers, airline workers, etc, it was potentially a life saver. For the average human of moderate health, it probably didn't make much of a difference.

You can interpret data in many ways. There are ways to interpret the data that say the number of vaccinated deaths could be attributed to a higher rate of vaccination amongst the elderly and those with existing conditions, or even the a higher percentage of the general population being vaccinated than not. You could also, using those same numbers, extrapolate that covid killed who it was gonna kill. It killed the elderly. It killed those with pre-existing conditions. It killed those who were susceptible. There were outliers, of course. There's no exact science to how these things affect a given person. There were plenty of generally healthy people who died from covid but I would also say to that, there are people who are, for all intents and purposes, healthy yet who sometimes harbor unknown conditions and/or genetic markers that make said seemingly healthy person potentially susceptible. This is what I know to be  unequivocally factual. There is no available data that proves the covid 19 vaccine to be successful. When you throw around numbers, estimates, on the lives it potentially saved, those numbers are pure conjecture. And frankly, covid didn't go away. It just became endemic. I caught a cold last week that was probably covid. I didn't even test, even though I have boxes if tests in my linen closet. There's probably 100 tests in there, though some are expired. It's unnecessary. I travel a lot. People are always sick at airports and on planes. I caught a cold. Was it covid? Possibly. Probably. It doesn't make a difference one way or another than a common cold caused by rhinovirus. A virus doesn't typically reach that point, becoming endemic through vaccination. It comes from herd immunity because it is not through just human immunity but also the virus itself getting the opportunity to spread and mutate into less deadly variants. Deadly variants of respiratory viruses are rare. Viruses don't want to kill their hosts. They want their hosts to help them spread and dead hosts don't socialize. Left to their own devices, deadly strains of respiratory viruses always fade in favor of less severe yet highly transmissible strains, such as Omicron. I mean, can one even categorize Omicron as SARS-CoV2? It doesn't cause SARS.