I know I have to let this stuff go. Life is too short. But but but....
Is this a joke? That's a picture of a creek somewhere, not a part of the Central Valley Project that supplies about 5 million acre-feet of water to California farms annually. Here's what that looks like:
That's Shasta Dam, one small part of the Central Valley project. Behind it is Shasta Reservoir, which stores about 4.5 million acre-feet of water. Like all of California's reservoirs, it's currently at capacity. It was never turned off and Trump didn't turn it back on.
Tomorrow morning around 6 am I expect a Truth Social post announcing that Trump has turned the sun on and soon everyone will have daylight.
POSTSCRIPT: But seriously, who is this for? Does Trump these days think that if he says something it magically becomes true? What's the point?
ZOMG! He actually did it. Trump ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to release water from Terminus Dam and Schafer Dam:
It was not clear where federal officials intended to send the water that was being released from the dams.
Winter is the season for filling reservoirs, not emptying them. Idiot. Literally no one wanted this.
It's possible he believes it to some extent. Good salespeople are able to convince themselves, at least at some level, of whatever they're trying to sell.
But I think he also knows very well, at least at an instinctive level, that (1) distraction serves his purposes, and (2) a VERY large proportion of his
cultistsfollowers arestupidignorant and unpracticed in critical thought, so they'll go along with whatever comes out of his piehole.+1 It's all story...just keep talking, change when their eyes wander.
Remember he thought he could change where a hurricane went after the fact with a magic marker.
President Shit-for-Brains fucks over the right-wing farmers in California.
The likelihood that they blame Democrats? 100%
Because six months from now, it will be reported on Fox News as “President Trump’s heroic actions to fight the deadly fires in Los Angeles that Democrats allowed to rage tragically forced him to divert precious water that farmers now need because Democrats refused to use other supplies. Now, the livelihood of the farmers who sacrificed their water to the incompetence of Democrats in Los Angeles is at risk.”
Could he maybe ‘sacrifice’ himself for the betterment of the country? I’m certain there are lots who would love to assist him.
Really, I just don’t think I can take any more of this. I’ve stopped reading Heather Cox Richardson because it is a fire hose of all the BS the asshole is saying. At least here there is some humor and cat blogging, of course.
Just let it wash over you. Tariffs? Don’t buy stuff you don’t need. Government workers fired? They should quit anyway. Grants and other funds withheld? Oh well. This is what people want. Cut all that waste fraud and abuse.
You know… bring it on. Just bring it on.
It’s a war. It’s a coup. There will be casualties. Take care of your own. Good luck.
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/01/this-is-a-coup
This is one of those cases where things are going to have to get a lot worse before they can get better, so buckle up and hang on.
Who is this for? Seriously? Are you really telling us that, after 8+ years of Trump's shtick, you don't know?
I'm reading that the entire CDC site was wiped today. Hope nothing is catching out there, because we aren't going to hear about it.
Voluntarily disengage. You can’t stop them. You can only protect yourself by hunkering down and laying low for a while. Maybe a long while.
I can lay low somewhere with low enough cost of living that when they shut off my social security I will be ok.
Yep. Helplessness. That's exactly what Musk and Patel want you to feel.
Think of it as a boycott.
Honestly
I am more concerned about the highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department departing after a clash with some Musk toadies over access to sensitive payment systems than this dumbfuckery
Ditto! If I understand what this office does, it's responsible for releasing essentially all payments for all government departments. Or maybe only the civilian ones, but that's already huge enough. It's looking like somehow Elmo has a squad in there that cut off anybody else's access to that system and now controls it. If so, that would mean a private citizen acting at the president's behest has a choke hold on the government and the country, in effect. And they're both madmen.
Elmo's track record with this kind of thing isn't encouraging-- just look at what used to be Twitter. Also I doubt he has any programmers who could keep it running or make any changes-- from what I've read a lot of federal systems go back to the 1960s and have been patched over decades; they need tending by people who know them inside and out, and I'd bet Elmo's people are two generations too young even to read Cobol, let alone code in it.
This has all the makings of a really, really bad heist movie..
The breathtaking speed with which they are executing on Project 2025 has me back to seriously considering leaving the country. Hope y'all got up to date passports.
There’s a good chance the borders out of this country are going to be closed to us because other countries will be afraid of spreading whatever has gone wrong in the US.
Did project 2025 say something about throwing out FBI leaders and replacing them by Trump's toadies?
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/30/politics/senior-fbi-leaders-demoted-wray/index.html
Project 2025 was always a distraction, and it seems to work. Even here people are missing the main danger.
Not a distraction. Trump can be focused on revenge while his appointees are hell-bent on imposing the Project.
I didn't mean a distraction for him. It is a distraction for people that oppose him.
Every minute they think about project 2025 means a minute that they don't think about his main projects. For example, he clearly is going to convert the FBI to his own gang, but even on this form people completely miss it.
This is what he was talking about:
Water managers were relieved Thursday evening after the Army Corps of Engineers agreed to back off of a sudden decision earlier in the day to dump massive amounts of water from Kaweah and Success lakes.
Water managers said they got about an hour’s warning from the Army Corp’s Sacramento office to expect the Tule and Kaweah rivers to be at “channel capacity” by Thursday night.
Channel capacity means the maximum amount of water a river can handle. For the Kaweah, that’s 5,500 cubic feet per second and for the Tule, it’s 3,500 cfs.
https://sjvwater.org/decision-to-dump-water-from-tulare-county-lakes-altered-after-sending-locals-in-mad-scramble/
For those who don’t know these lakes are south of Fresno and have nothing to do with water in the Pacific Northwest.
And has nothing to do with the Edmund G. (Pat) Brown Aqueduct that moves water to Southern California
Being the Devil's advocate for a moment, won't this excess water -- at least some of it -- reach the Delta? The San Joaquin flows into it also. And isn't the Delta the source of the water in the California Aqueduct?
So, technically speaking, some water will be available to the Aqueduct in a couple of weeks that otherwise would not have been.
Therefore, a month after the fires have been contained and largely extinguished, some extra water from these reservoirs might make the trip over the siphon and down into the LA basin.
That water won't be there this summer to water crops, and that will be bad, unreservedly.
So we're back to "President Pampers did a dumb thing".
“Laura Ramos, interim director of research and education at the California Water Institute at California State University, Fresno, said that both the Kaweah and Success lakes are used primarily for flood control and irrigation for Central Valley farms. They do not connect to the aqueduct that carries water to Southern California.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/31/us/trump-water-california-central-valley.html
By the way, that NYT article is surprisingly good. It really explains the situation in a way I haven’t seen up to now.
KD mentioned before how it takes Trump 5 minutes to come up with this crap and hours to check it. It didn't take hours but the story with these 2 lakes is that they are both above historical average but they are also both at about 20% capacity.
https://cdec.water.ca.gov/reportapp/javareports?name=RESSW
Porterville, where Lake Success is located, might get a couple of inches of rain this week but that is hardly enough for a major flood control release. Lake Kaweah is pretty much in the same place with the same forecast. So Trump ordered a release of valuable water that wasn't currently needed, but might be later, for a PR opportunity. That's the sort of "leadership" that makes a country great.
The article is well above the NYT's usual standard but as with the LA Times, they should have lead with "Trump wastes water from California reservoirs to score political points".
You don't know about the San Joaquin River, do you? It is true that the Aqueduct is higher than the river, so the rivers flowing in from the Sierra side cannot be and are not connected directly to it.
But the water on the Aqueduct comes from the Sacramento River Delta into which the San Joaquin, which waters the valley of the same name, flows.
So some -- a relatively small minority of the total fresh water in the Delta estuary to be sure -- comes from the San Joaquin. It's also true that the San Joaquin is normally a shadow of its former self, primarily because its tributaries are dammed in lakes like the two which have been opened.
The water in those reservoirs is used for irtigation, ground water recharge and as a domestic source. VERY little actually makes it to the river's mouth in a normal year.
In 2023 the big snowpack did release enough that the San Joaquin flowed for a few months.
The woman you quoted is certainly correct that the two tributaries are not connected DIRECTLY to the Aqueduct, but if the reservoirs are dumped at channel capacity, some of the water will reach the Delta and become available to the Aqueduct pumps.
Let me be clear: the small amount of water that will make it into the Aqueduct will be way too little and way too late to make a difference in the LA fires.
But really releasing any amount of water from those dams is besides the point. Trump said he was going to release water from the Pacific Northwest and the infrastructure to transfer water from Oregon, Washington and Canada doesn’t exist. He might as well have said he visited Mars on one of Elon’s rockets and marveled at the floating city he has built there.
Farmers in the Central Valley want less California water released to water LA lawns, not more. And they are Trump cultists.
Both the Tule, which drains Lake Success, and the Kaweah flow into the Tulare Lakebed, which is usually dry. Wikipedia notes that ‘outflows’ from the lakebed are “Evaporation, historically underground seepage to San Joaquin River, occasional flow to Suisun Bay”. Not clear if the current release will be sufficient to initiate flow into the Delta (which connects to Suisun Bay).
(I was born in Richmond, Contra Costa County; the county lies along the Delta and Bay)
OK you're right. The San Joaquin turns up into the Sierras at Fresno. The water they're releasing would have to create a sizable flood to make it across the intervening thirty some miles. So it has almost no chance of ending up in the Delta and veing pumped into the Aqueduct.
The Washington Post reports that, as of early Saturday, outflow from the reservoirs totaled 3500 acre-feet. Tulare Lakebed (normally dry) holds 6.5 million acre-feet before it overflows via the Fresno Slough into the San Joaquin (data from Wikipedia). Outflow has happened in very wet years, but this release won’t cause any (assuming it will be stopped when the news cycle moves on).
Presumably the released water will make it to the pacific where the currents will take it to the pacific northwest. Typical Trump. Promises to bring water from the pacific northwest to CA and ends up delivering water from CA to the pacific northwest.
I think the California Current flows south
This, but there is a westerly current at The Equator to take some of it to Asia, where the Japan Current, like the Gulf Stream, will carry a bit of it north to the Gulf of Alaska. From there a small fraction of the small fraction of the small fraction will head south in the California Current past BC, Washington, Oregon and Northern California to the mouth of San Francisco Bay.
Peripatetic water molecules, for sure.
Plus 1 for 'peripatetic'. I just used that water molecule example this week to explain 'stochastic' to a student.
JFC. This guy is gonna get a lot of people killed.
This is water they now can't use come summer.
If anyone's looking for Hollis Mulwray, I think we know where we can find his body.
Video of the water release from the California reservoir:
https://youtu.be/-iR6ZHQ8VZg?si=yxyrlfJHxrZP7eeY&t=20
Or at least his spirit; +1
This is a critical point. I know all intelligent people know that Trump is stupid, but this Trump move is taking stupidity (combined with cynicism) to an all new level.
Yeah, I came to post this.
He flooded out a bunch of farmers who voted for him.
The Corps of Engineers backed off, but only partway; there is still a release. Apparently it is normal to draw down the reservoirs to a certain level, to allow for winter storms and spring runoff from snow melt. What was unusual is that this release was not coördinated in advance with local authorities; notice was very short. Seems late for a winter drawdown, also, does it not?
Hardly necessary, TFM's cult would have believed him if he just attached a stock photo (which maybe this is).
And major rain is expected in Northern California this weekend. Perhaps 6 inch in San Francisco.
He probably will take credit for "making" it rain.
We are getting drenched by an atmospheric river here in north California. Trump's magic faucet comes in all forms and sizes.
The absolute dumbest part of the whole thing is, if there were extreme water scarcity, such that fires could not be put out, then the taps of everyone in the region would also be suffering. Obviously, they are not.
He is dumb. His true believers are dumb. You can't fix dumb.
"How do you know it was DEI?"
"Because I have this thing called 'common sense'."
Brooks column yesterday took too narrow a view of "Stupid".
He's like Rush Limbaugh was, making tons of claims that cast your political opponents as bad people, deluded, hateful (which is rich) whatever, and then keep making more, any tenuous connection to reality or not be damned. Every headline about this sort of this should open with something like "Trump's Latest Lie:..."
And it's not going to stop.
It’s called “rope a dope” and Seth Abramson put out a free article on it a few days ago. Drums meds must be kicking in if he doesn’t recognize it; I’m giving him a mulligan on this instance.
You I now if they just tell him he conquered Greenland . . .
He has been going on about a giant valve in Northern CA since last spring. Told the California GOP the valve is bigger than this room (swinging arms wildly), and told Fox's Mark Levin it took four large men 24 hours to open. It will turn Central Valley green, and allow smelly rich people in Beverly Hills to take real showers instead of drip, drip, drip showers. Press ignored as too busy telling us Biden is really old.
It's a manual valve? Were they big, hunky, bare-chested men, gleaming with sweat and smelling of manly musk?
I live in LA. My co-worker is MAGA. He believes everything Trump says. He lives in his own info bubble, talking about how his hero got the water released. His neighbors houses burned down yet he loves the fact der Fuhrer is playing politics with relief aid. It's like trying to reason with a cult member.
My goal these days is not to "reason with them". I just want to "drown" them in actual facts to the point where they go back into hiding, hopefully not emerging for another 5 generations.
"He believes everything Trump says."
I find it hard to believe that any adult would believe what Trump says. His statements do not comport with reality. Are Trump supporters living in a fictional universe? If so, how do they manage to drive a car? Can they multiply and divide? Think logically?
The prism through which they are viewing this particular reality is how do we make this tragedy look bad for Gavin Newsom? He ran out of water during the biggest fire in history!
Where the facts will hit hardest is in the Central Valley. These guys may have voted for Trump and want to stick it to the libs, but they take their water very seriously and no amount of MAGA sloganeering will convince them this was a good idea. If they get hit in the face with enough Trump stupidity they may start questioning their allegiance.
I'm not so sure. The tarrifs in his first term hit farmers really bad. I seem to remember them all still supporting Trump. Although he did have to bail them out.
Your point about any adults with a functional brain believing what Trump says is correct and something that I still do not fully grok. He is so transparently stupid and ill-informed, in virtually everything that he says, that I really don't know how to deal with someone who takes what he says at face value - other than to stay away from them to the maximum extent possible.
And you will never "grok it" if you continue to believe he is stupid (he is ill-informed, because he doesn't want to be informed).
He is a skilled bamboozler, and until people understand this, he will conitinue to succeed in bamboozling people.
To be bamboozled by him is to be as or even more stupid than him. He's not as good as a bamboozler as people in this country are stupid.
I had a coworker tell me Trump is going to replace the income tax with tarrifs and that other countries pay it. They really do believe everything he says.
They are either profoundly stupid and or ignorant, extremely naive or hopelessly gullible.
But notice he isn’t saying that any more:
REPORTER: You promised to reduce costs, and so many of the products that would be tariffed, the outgoing country is not paying the tariff, the buyers in the US pay that and it's passed on to consumers
TRUMP: There could be some temporary short-term disruption, and people will understand that.
(I got that quote from Aaron Rupar’s Blusky site)
During the campaign he would have insisted that it would be the other countries that paid the tariffs.
e) All of the above
It's not whether or not it becomes true, it is whether his acolytes believe it to be true. Hey, he showed those damn California libtards up!
Here's a news story commenting on it:
https://sjvwater.org/trumps-emergency-water-order-responsible-for-water-dump-from-tulare-county-lakes/
Very informative, thank you.
Oh, and JFC!!!
“This decision was clearly made by someone with no understanding of the system or the impacts that come from knee-jerk political actions.” --Dan Vink, longtime Tulare County water manager
Hey, give DJT some credit. His uncle was a physicist, so obviously he has the best water management know-how in his very good genes.
Once again I will point out that Kevin is an otherwise smart guy. Once again I’ll say: that’s why I read his blog. But once again I will also marvel at the blind spots and the projection in a statement like this:
“But seriously, who is this for? Does Trump these days think that if he says something it magically becomes true? What's the point?”
That’s a perfectly valid point to apply to Trump. But merely applying it to Trump just isn’t good enough. That exact same observation also applies to the Far Left.
When the trans extremists assert that our sex can be determined by self-identification, and that men should therefore be allowed onto women’s sports teams, I’ll just quote Kevin in response:
Do they think that if they say something it just “magically becomes true?”
Perhaps even more offensive (and that’s really saying something) to reason, common sense, and basic human decency is any assertion that DEI is anything other than institutionalized discrimination based on immutable traits (exactly the kind of thing that the Civil Rights Act was supposed to outlaw). Here’s the NYT casually admitting that DEI issues “stir debate”:
“According to a report by Berkeley, Latino candidates constituted 13 percent of applicants and 59 percent of finalists. Asian and Asian American applicants constituted 26 percent of applicants and 19 percent of finalists. Fifty-four percent of applicants were white and 14 percent made it to the final stage. Black candidates made up 3 percent of applicants and 9 percent of finalists.”
This constitutes both an ideological purge as well as a racist assault against whites and Asians. Your average citizen can easily identify it as such. And when everyone else fails to outlaw such egregiously offensive behavior, we wind up voting Trump into office to deal with it.
If and when Leftists try to respond with some sort of twisted rationale to assert that the policy outlined above is anything other than racism, here’s my response:
Do they think that if they say something it just “magically becomes true?”
The fact that you cannot differentiate between sex (which is biologically determined, albeit not as pure of a binary as some would like to claim) and gender (which is socially constructed) is strike one.
The fact that nobody claims that "just saying something"
can change someone's sex is strike two.
The fact that you cite the eternal bothsiderism of the NYT to demonstrate a claim of "stirs debate" is strike three.
Three strikes and you're out!
Bonus: there are at least 2 more strikes against you demonstrated in your comment, but this margin is not large enough for me to explain them.
+1
But I do have a nice little proof concerning the conditions that apply when the sum of two (different) cubes is equal to a third (different) cube.
"That exact same observation also applies to the Far Left. "
Both sides
DRINK!
"This constitutes both an ideological purge as well as a racist assault against whites"
"When the trans extremists assert..."
white grievance amped up with bigotry is such a toxic reactionary centrist brew
Your obsession with demonizing trans people is showing.
"But seriously, who is this for?"
Obviously for TRUMP IN 2028! I wonder if bumper stickers are out yet?
Oh my, just checked, and lots of those available.
Off topic, but remember back when you mentioned that DOGE was no big deal because they were just tasked with computer interoperability?
https://jabberwocking.com/elons-big-task-is-interoperability/
You realize that means Elon Musk is allowed access to literally every government computer system, right? That's not a good thing. In fact, it's horrifying.
The purpose for that is to be able to shut off any payment for something/someone they don't like.
Lawfare? This is weaponized government.
yes. and why grant portals have been taken down this week
The backdoor way to implement that spending freeze. Leavitt did tell us, after all, that only the memo was rescinded, not the EO.
Exactly. Save the constitutional crisis for later and they shut off the spigot in the meantime. My compay (and hundreds of thousands of others) has probably a million dollars in labor on the line that we haven't invoiced for. This is going to financially destroy a lot of businesses.
Your reputation preceds you, Dear Kevin.
Perhaps this is "paranoid", but does that word even apply when Trump is involved?
This could be a way to harm California's agricultural economy and thereby hobble Gavin Newsom in 2028.
Newsom is a much steadier hand than JD or either Don Jr or Eric. Prince Barron isn't old enough, and even John Roberts can read the number "35".
In ruling against that the 14th amendment provision against insurrectionists running for president because it hadn't be operationalized by congress, the SC also ruled that people under 35 and naturalized citizens are now eligible to be president.
I’ve been wondering about this. States have all sorts of rules about qualifying for the ballot. Major parties get a pass, minor parties and independents must petition, with specific rules for number and validation of signers, etc. None of that is in the Constitution.
I listen to John Stewart's podcast every week. This week he was interviewing Chris Christie. Leaving aside what I think of that gasbag, he did have a fascinating story about Trump.
Christie was at some event and Trump showed him around. When they got to the Lincoln bedroom, Trump pointed at the desk and said "That's where the Gettysburg Address was written.
Now Christie knew what you likely know too. We all learned in grade school that it was written on the train from Washington to Gettysburg, about a 20 minute ride so the address is brief.
Christie told him all of this and Trump replied: "Are you saying I'm wrong? I'm the president."
We learn a couple of things here.
First, to Trump and his followers, truth (and therefore falsity as well) is a meaningless concept. It isn't a bent concept or a stretched concept or a misunderstood one, or a conspiracy theory one. Is isn't even that there is no truth. It as a concept literally does not exist, even less than "balloon feet."
Second, he's telling Christie that he is the source of information, even more than your lying eyes. And schoolin'. That is a standard dictator play as far back as history goes. I can make you believe something manifestly untrue, and you will believe it wholeheartedly just because this is Your Side.
And third, what the hell was he doing all through fifth grade? Was it the same thing Musk was doing to become a top rated gamer?
This is the way Republics die, at least as far back as the Gracchi Brothers.
We stopped being a republic last week. We are a dictatorship now, haven't you been paying attention?
It's WAY more than "a 20 minute ride" between Washington and Gettysburg. One had to go to Baltimore and turn west from there on what was later the Western Maryland. It had a secondary line that bellied north through Gettysburg. It had to be eight or ten hours in 1863 at the relatively slow speeds trains achieved in those days.
Trump fired the FAA administrator day one, 'cause....
Trump trying to shut down Biden's infrastructure act that supplied funding for updating air traffic control...
Trump trying to fire air traffic controllers (ok, not just them, but everyone) after the FAA finally met recruiting goals last year (not sure how long it takes to fully train them).
so
Look at ME!!! I'm going to flood California!!!
It is OK, they will be replaced by the best and the brightest straight, white, males. Well, straight, white and male anyway.
FBI:
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/30/politics/senior-fbi-leaders-demoted-wray/index.html
"Tomorrow morning around 6 am I expect a Truth Social post announcing that Trump has turned the sun on and soon everyone will have daylight."
If he doesn't specify that it's shining out his ass I'll be disappointed.
OT PS: Bets on how soon Johnson and Thune fire the Capitol Police who were on duty on J6, and how soon thereafter Bondi and the DC US attorney's office prosecute them for assault, conspiracy, and whatever else they can dream up?
Trump knows that for the MAGA crowd "You just tell them and they believe you" and that objectivity for the MSM just means that you have accurately reported what somebody said, not whether or not it is true. In the current instance, the LA Times neglected to mention at all that this is bat shit crazy and that should have been the lede; "Trump orders bat shit crazy water release from California dams".
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I saw a headline today that said "Dry January Threatens California's Water Supply". I guess I should have had a few more drinks.
As a 3rd career I kind of stumbled into financing (small) and taking over a relocation, immigration company helping American individuals and companies move people overseas for jobs or retirement.
The last month has been.... insane. This week, even crazier. The number of Americans willing to pay any amount to get themselves out of the US as quickly as possible has been....Just breathtaking.
It's no longer just for career opportunities or retirement....it's, 'The sherif made a comment about rounding up the liberals.
Help me get my kids to safety. Can we go next week?'
Panic creeping in around the country.