I don’t care about the reflecting pool nonsense, but this is some good reporting. These reporters cut through all the bullshit explanations and found the actual scientific cause.
Along the perimeter of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, devices called nanobubblers have been used to combat algae blooms. But officials removed them on June 12. By the next day, the water had turned from blue to green with algae before officials re-installed the nanobubblers.
I mean, you don’t need a PhD in pondology to see why it happened. A large body of water with a shallow depth (24′ / 60 cm) + unlimited sunlight + (new!) dark bottom capturing heat + the guano from a thousand ducks and geese and you really couldn’t make a better environment for wild algae growth.
To fix it for good, they’d need to drain it for weeks to properly patch up the leaks. And they’d need to dig up some pipes along the nice lawn. Since it can’t be done overnight, I doubt it’ll get done during this administration.
The ozone can’t really be a long-term fix. They need to find a way to strip the nutrients out of the water. I’d suggest a large algae turf scrubber, where the pool’s water gets circulated thru a tank with cultivated algae that consumes the nutrients, out-competing the algae in the reflecting pool. Periodically the algae is harvested and dried for use as (excellent) compost, completing the nutrient export. Dr. Walter Adey came up with the idea and still works for the Smithsonian.
That’s a big picture explanation of how it could have happened, and could continue to happen, but doesn’t explain this particular instance. In other words, it would not have happened if they had not removed the bubblers – basically because of the UFC fight.
However, as a long term solution, they will need to consider some changes. As you noted, that is too cumbersome to be a permanent fix, unless they want the whole area to be filled with big, ugly, noisy monstrosities wrapped by industrial-grade fences.
From what I’ve read, they also need to overhaul 100-year-old piping and re-vamp the water circulation system.I think you are right that the complete solution will be a very long process. Will Trump have the patience to consult legitimate experts? Color me skeptical.
Big hat-tip to Dr. Adey for coming up with a scientifically sound fix while still staying employed by this dim administration.
But you’ll need a big scrubber pool, where’s that going to sit?
Ideally, you’d use the sun instead of artificial lighting, so it needs to be an open space.
Got it.
The idea location is right across the Potomac. In place of trump’s “TRiUMPhal Arch,” we build the “Donald J. Trump Swamp-Sucker 250” industrial-size algae turf scrubber. They’d need to run the plumbing along the bottom of Memorial Bridge, but it’s a pretty straight shot.
Fuckin brilliant. Along with the algae, you’d probably want to stock a few bullheads, just so Trump wouldn’t be the only scum-sucking bottom-feeder.
That’s a good idea! America’s fishin’ hole. Bullheads, carp, catfish. I like it.
Because everything the Orange Turd touches turns to shit? Could that be the explanation?
Correct. It’s amazing how many businesses he created that went bankrupt and he still gets to collect all of the money. He’s doing the same with this whole country.
Also, on May 7, the Pedophile of the United States took his motorcade down the middle of the drained and repainted Reflecting Pool in just another one of his many acts of overcompensation. A pool is not a highway, and this more than likely contributed to the failure of the paint to stay adhered.
He is the stupidest fucking person in the world, except for the tens of millions who voted for him.
Correct. And a reason for why democracy should be abolished. Socrates thought it was a bad idea back in Ancient Greece as this is the result. I do not believe that everyone should have the right to vote. It requires an amount of intelligence and rationality. Letting the lowest common denominator having a say is the most dangerous thing that could happen.
It worked pretty well in the USA until recently. I think the main problem is that back in the late 1970’s, very rich people took the concept of the “yellow press”, and turned it up by a couple of orders of magnitude by using, first, “talk radio”, then television (Fox), and then the Internet. Why did they do that? To make money while also changing the direction of politics to a course that benefited them. And, in the eyes of people like the Heritage Foundation, might give them more or less total control of the country.
Because of the way the economy started changing after the post WWII-boom ended, a lot of people were receptive to the misinformation (“lies”) they poured out. By now, a couple of generations have grown up believing that stuff. You feed people only the opinions you want them to have for decades, you get an sizable part of the electorate that votes the way you want because their grasp on political reality is very distorted.
)It helps if you encourage them to blame the people they want to hate anyway. Everything goes better with scapegoats!)
Trump was not a part of this effort. I think he was a sucker too. IMO, he really believed all the misinformation. At least he treated it like it was real and proposed to actually deal with it like it was real, whereas people like Mitt Romney and John McCain turned their noses up at it. That mobilized the people we now call MAGA behind Trump, and also energized the people to the right of MAGA. They all voted for Trump, instead of not bothering to vote.
Anyway, that’s how I think about how we got here. Lots of people have lots of theories about that. Mine may be no better than yours, but I like it.
(Oh, the rich people behind the right-wing media also bought control of the Republican Party about the same time. That’s why we got people like Lindsay Graham in the Senate. Trump stole control from them; the rich guys did not want Trump at all. They knew he was a fraud. But then they saw how he could pull in votes, and how MAGA believed every word he said. Then they began paying tribute to him, in actual cash.)
I couldn’t tell the reflecting pool from the ‘Great State Fair’ – both have lots of green visible! Oh, except the empty booths – at least Alaska brought a stool to sit their pamphlet on!
People who get angry and triggered by the President trying to clean up and beautify the Nation’s Capitol says all I need to know about TDS. It is literally the perfect example of the disease. Nothing to do with politics, … just pure hatred for anything he does. It is both sad and sickening.
TDS is a term lackwits use to describe people horrified by a racist, criminal, narcissistic, incompetent, misogynistic piece of filth who protects pedophiles. His attempts to “clean up and beautify” as you put it have been abject failures due to his predilection for giving jobs to those not qualified to do them. Most of them are actually rather transparent schemes to put his name on things and/or garner attention for himself. Whats sad and sickening are those so foolish they can’t see his corruption and incompetence.
No one’s complaining about the “trying to clean up and beautify”. It’s the failing miserably, yet again (after hyping how great this was all going to be), that has people upset. What you call angry and triggered is more appalled and stunned that Mr. ‘I hire the best people’ can and will keep screwing the pooch. And we’ve got another 31 months of this on deck.
He’s trying the same way a guy off the street would try to fix your breaker box by burning the house down. Completely incompetent and wastes other people’s money to be a complete and total failure in everything he does. The reverse UNO card for electing an idiot who’s spent the past decade plus airing grievances and constantly complaining is ironic.
Are you auditioning for moron of the year?
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: You guys pick the weirdest stuff to get worked up about.
No one was worked up til Rapey McWattles worked them up.
Yeah, you dont have TDS. lol. You’re just mad at everything he does all the time. It doesn’t matter that you think you have legitimate reasons. And when someone doesn’t hate him like you do you call them the worst names you can think of. lol
I saw a guy say that the pool cleanup was a Trump vanity project and it was sickening. When asked if the cleaning of all the monuments and fixing the fountains and erasing graffiti was a good thing he stumbled to say NO because Trump did it. You will never utter a nice word about Trump because you are consumed by HATE.
I don’t like Biden but I was not consumed with hate about him. Don’t watch mainstream media. They have flat out lied and put things in the wrong context. You were literally brainwashed. Gelt help.
Nobody has suggested that Trump shouldn’t clean up the reflecting pool. Perfectly good idea. They have said that he should have consulted experts, that the job should have been proposed and bid in the proper way, that he should not have had the park service remove the nano-bubblers, and he shouldn’t be spewing his lies about vandalism. All his mistakes really happened. Those things are not deranged or illusory. He actually gave the job to his pool guy on a no-bid contract. If a fictional president did that in a movie, everyone would say “nothing like that could ever happen.” But it did. Is it really important? No, not really. It will get repaired eventually. But the process was illustrative of how every single aspect of government has been mismanaged. I suppose not everything he has touched is bungled and/or corrupt, but I’m having a hard time coming up with anything that wasn’t. Are there any examples of something he has done right.
Got rid of the penny.
Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then. W started the Do Not Call list.
Surprisingly, W was an even-handed and mostly competent governor in Texas, with wide bipartisan support. It was his initiative to guarantee admission to UT to anyone in the top 10% of their high school class, thus mitigating the problems caused by the vast disparity in educational quality between rich suburban schools and the poor schools in rural and inner-city districts.
He is, by nature, a decent man, and he was exceptionally popular with liberals and conservatives alike. He won a re-election in 1998 by a historic margin, capturing over 68% of the vote. He carried almost every precinct, including every one in liberal Austin.
His problems as President stemmed from the fact that he knew nothing about foreign policy, and thus ceded too much authority to Cheney and the neocons, who basically hornswoggled him.
I wonder how he feels now in his heart of hearts. Is the wool still over his eyes, or does he realize that he fucked up and let Cheney and Rumsfeld sell him a bill of goods?
He got the part right about making billions in graft.
They don’t have anything, it’s pointless to speak to logic with a cult leader who MAGA has their identity tied to. All because he ‘tells it like it is’ and speaks to a bunch of uneducated angry fools who get easily tricked because they don’t put the effort in to learn cause and effect about anything. It’s why their best defense is the reverse UNO card – it’s everyone else who is obsessed – not them – because they have no material evidence their worldview is correct. Just being angry and lashing out at the other side out of spite like animals because they don’t know anything.
I guess MAGA’s best ‘wins’ are immigration – but good luck trying to get any to explain how it’s made anyone’s lives better in any considerable way. Estimates of an average of tens of thousands of dollars per deportee for ICE to inflict cruelty instead of it going to law enforcement like the supposed point is – to prevent crime.
Supposedly he’s the anti-fraud/waste/abuse anti-Deep State president, but he made huge cuts with DOGE for the very departments who actually enforce those functions, and his own family and administration dodge taxes everyone else foots the bill. Not to mention all the prediction market scams and insider trading these people pull off constantly.
I suppose on the rich libertarian side of things, the benefits are the stock market going up and corporate and taxes for the wealthy going down. Nevermind most of the stock market is the AI bubble about to burst. And more money to rich investors and executives just leads to more monopolies and oligarchies because they don’t invest in making goods and services better, prices cheaper, or adding jobs. They use it for stock buybacks and acquisitions to control more of the market to raise prices and cut jobs. Then funnel more into AI to raise prices and cut jobs even more by removing ‘low value human capital’ as one psychopathic executive put it.
So there it is. Nothing meaningful has been made better, unless you’re a narcissistic psychopath addicted to greed and power like himself. In which Father Time will take care of them all despite the ‘tech gods’ and others trying to biohack their way to immortality due to their psychopathic addiction to evil.
DOGE was based on a sound idea. Every day, corporations try to root out waste and duplication. But good companies do it with systematic analysis. They don’t just go through lists and fire random people, then have to hire half of them back when it turns out that (1) the firings were illegal, or (2) the people they fired were necessary. Or both.
Getting right of violent illegal aliens was also a good idea, but bungled again. They ended up rounding up random people, failing to research whether they were violent, failing to research whether they were illegal, by-passing the legal process, and deporting them to random places – including that brutal prison in El Salvador. In the process, they ended up deporting citizens, separating peaceful families, and telling a lot of lies (remember drawing the fake tattoos on Abrego Garcia’s knuckles.)
As far as the economy goes, all of his actions have simply widened the income gap, leaving people in the bottom 50% of income struggling to fuel their cars, pay their utility bills, afford their groceries, get medical coverage, etc.
OK, I agree with “getting rid of the penny.” There’s one for Trump.
Not much of a legacy.
Fraud, waste, and abuse and trying to combat violent criminals (of any type) have always been the law and have always been funded. They’re not new ideas, Trump simply amplified them as agenda items, and then amplified what would have been backpage footnotes under a Democratic president as ‘big wins’.
The issue with amplification in this country is very one-sided and ridiculous in the media. For example, the DOGE kids stuff – mainframe modernization behind the scenes had been going on quite a while at Social Security. But here comes a famous billionaire with some early 20-somethings with fairly common computer science degrees to suddenly ‘fix everything’. Not understanding the decades of COBOL underneath, not understanding the business logic, all the things actually required to fix issues.
So they ran off the backend administrators and engineers that actually COULD fix it, and brought in a bunch of naive Musk kool-aid drinkers to supposedly fix it. Note, this is the same guy that in his own biography admitted ripping servers out of a loaned datacenter onto a back of a pickup truck that would have landed anyone else in jail and millions of dollars in civil penalties. Then he flat out lied about the ‘savings’ of DOGE, because most people don’t understand the simply concept of a database containing inactive deceased individuals and they’re not getting paid. But hey, tell a bunch of idiots some person listed as 120 years old who died 40 years ago is somehow getting paid to a long since closed bank account, and they’ll believe it.
That’s the problem with all of this – it’s propaganda. And the capitalism media (who most definitely aren’t liberal) go along for the ride. Violent crime is illegal, fraud waste and abuse is illegal – nothing about these are new ideas. They’re done constantly in the background and their effectiveness is not better because they’re amplified by a megaphone when small previously ignored ‘wins’ are had. Things like gun control prevent cartels from committing violent crime more than trying to hunt down some unknown immigrant who may have committed a crime. Community outreach and giving opportunities lowers crime rates (like in Baltimore) versus rounding up randoms.
It’s all a game, yelling about a problem and claiming simple lies as solutions is more effective to most than actual effectiveness. And actual effectiveness is boring backpage news because no one understands the complexities involved, or cares to, versus bitching about a new or nonexistent problem.
Just you wait, when Trump is out of office and if a Democrat wins in 2028, the new line will go right back to deficit spending ruining the country when none of it is talked about now. They’ll find some immigrant somewhere that committed a crime and the nightly FOX News broadcast will spend 20 minutes on it. The same old tricks at play, per usual.
I think a person has to be very naive to believe that DOGE was ever about rooting out waste or that deporting illegals was ever about only deporting violent or other additional crime breaking illegals.
DOGE was always an ideological exercise for Trump and Musk with the important addition that it was also about gutting government agencies that regulate their companies.
The ICE policy has multiple purposes, I think:
1.Getting illegals and many legals to ‘self deport’
2.Threatening Democratic cities
3.Discouraging people (outside of Northern Europe) from wanting to move to the United States.
Every justification they claim is basically just a pretext. Was DOGE designed to eliminate non-productive employees, or was that just a pretext to eliminate people and agencies that were likely to push-back on Trump’s agenda, or were advancing actions contrary to Trump’s … er … philosophy.
Quite frankly, the fact that his loyalists haven’t cottoned on to his ruse yet, all whilst greatly enriching himself, his friends and his family AND keeping the Epstein thing from crippling his ability to get support from anyone, hey, I’d call that a win. Sadly.
The competition for moron of the year is heating up, I see.p
Three things:
1) The relecting pool, pre-makeover, was not a problem! Was it “dirty”? yeah, it’s an outdoor pond, not a swimming pool. But you have two other pools within a mile (3 really, if you count the WW2 memorial) and all are fine. So the idea that this was a long standing issue was true in 2010, before the massive renovation.
2) Trump probably blew his top when he heard how much it costs to fill the pool. DC water is now expensive. Using the river water — really water from the Tidal basin — is cheap but going to have algae. My water bill is 10x what it was in 2010 in DC, so if it used to cost $100,000 in water now it will cost a million. (When the relelctinig pool was built, that water was “free” as the feds owned it. Went to an idependt agency in the 1970s.
3) Trump is funding all of this by taking money from national park fees from the rest of the country and blowing it on these renovations in DC. You can see why most politicians would not do that — taking money from Yellowstone, or fire risks out west, or anything to spend on the nationa’s capital is not popular. That is why NPS has always been underfunded in DC. Maybe’s it wise to do this, but then again that is up to Congress, not the President.
TDS is applicable in most cases because T really is Deranged. All the knowledge and expertise is just a snap of his fingers away, yet he continues to do everything based on his diminishing instincts. Hire a pool guy you like, blame the failure on people “caught” sticking their hands in the water.