Climate change has a surprise in store for you Alaskans.
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So this is raking…
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I saw it ridiculing firefighters for raking instead of putting out nearby flames. I don’t have the stomach to search for the clip, but it was several days before its change of heart and approval of the “Finnish” method
lolwut, indeed.
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Most of Finland isn’t inside The Arctic Circle and there were forest fires in Lapland last summer. Twitter: #maastopalotlappi
Helsinki to Rovaniemi is about 700km (435 miles).
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Are… are we still paying attention to Trump’s wortsalat and bothering to compute its truth value?
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Drain swamp!
Rake forest!
What is the next clue?
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He should issue an executive order for the Department of Forest Managing to produce a cost estimate for raking all the forests.
Rake America Great Again
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You have been eaten by a grue.
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So…
Rake America! Great, again!
The way I read what he was saying from the start was that since this activity was stopping the fire, it therefore was something that should have been done before there was a fire, as a preventative measure. (It was equivalent to “Why didn’t the firefighters prevent the fire from happening in the first place by keeping all of California drenched with water?”) When, a day or two later he spoke of the Finish president, it was just a repetition of his previous position, rather than a change of heart. (I think he might even have repeated it again in between those two points.)
But Trump’s initial comments were, essentially, “Why don’t we turn California into a giant fire-break?” Which, of course, is totally fucking insane. With the mentions of Finish forest management (which was neither true nor relevant to California), suddenly the conversation is about (im)proper forest management, because that’s a lot saner than what he said. But it’s still totally irrelevant because the fires had nothing to do with forests or their management - but crazily that’s now the focus of the conversation around the fires, at least in conservative circles.
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From what I can gather the reaction of most foreign leaders to Trump is a mixture of bewilderment (how can a man be this dumb?) and pants-wetting terror (this man is in charge of the largest army and biggest nuclear arsenal on earth).
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Isn’t this kind of dog-bites-man? The only people who don’t find Trump thoroughly repugnant are his base and the corporate media for whom profits are more important than honest reporting – both groups failures at decency.
JK. The Finn responses to Trump’s disgustingly stupid remark still amuses me.
Fans of the Finnish art tradition will appreciate this minor alteration to Eero Järnefelt:
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Jesus Christ… the Baltic/Balkan thing is real?
How do he manage to not get insulted to his face by foreign leaders? I mean, I know, they are grown ups and professionals (most of them), but really, it would really test my temper.
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Well, I listed several reasons why Finland is different than California, the Arctic Circle is only one of them, and I did specify “forest fires like California”, meaning size and intensity. I’m sure Alaska (also only about 1/4 within the Arctic Circle) gets fires too, but they don’t rage out of control like in California.
Well, yeah, we do get wildfires every now and then. Last summer was unusually bad, because of how hot and dry it was. But still, comparing Finland and the humid, often boggy, lake-filled conifer taiga to California’s dry-as-tinder brushland with those hot winds blowing down from the mountains, is silly.
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Alaska is really different from Finland. I think there are few permafrost peat bogs up on northern Lappland… Yeah it’s wetter then California but so is Sweden and that was on fire most of the summer. Last summer was way too hot and dry in northern Europe.
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I feel like, at first, leaders thought they could maybe inform him (of basic facts, at least) or manipulate him. Now it seems like they’re just marginalizing him as much as they can because they’re realizing they can do neither. He’s impervious to facts, and flattering him has only temporary effect as he’s basically hostile to everyone who isn’t a dictator or murderous strongman.
Yeah, reportedly so. Despite his wife being, you know, from the Balkans.
Foreign leaders are smart and even-tempered enough to not create diplomatic incidents (unlike Trump), but honestly, it feels like they’ve moved on to insulting him, at least in subtle ways he won’t understand.
Trump has misunderstood things other leaders have said and taken them as insulting (despite the fact that he himself did actually say things that were the equivalent of what he thought they said - more projection on his part, I guess). So leaders now seem to be saying, to some degree, “fuck it” and are speaking their minds. Some of that may be political self-preservation - going along with Trump’s idiocy just makes leaders look bad in their own countries, after all.
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