Downhill all the way
Dear god.
I’ve figured it out. It’s the map. On the map the Pacific Northwest is “above” California – so Trump thinks that means it’s literally above it – like, at the top of a slope that runs from Vancouver down to Malibu. He thinks he could get on a skateboard in Vancouver and just roll on down to Santa Monica without once having to kick.
“And it pours down naturally, it has for a million years.” Yep – it just pours down I-5 from Vancouver to LA just the way rain pours down a sloping roof. It’s downhill the whole entire way, as anybody who’s ever traveled that freeway can confirm. Downhill all the way from Vancouver, uphill all the way from Los Angeles. That’s why Seattle is 175 feet above sea level on average and Los Angeles is…er…305.
A few people said the reason he wants Greenland is that it looks really big on a Mercator map and he thinks that’s how big it actually is. I thought that was ridiculous because Greenland is a very large island that looks big on ANY map, but now I’m seriously wondering if he actually knows that the Earth is an oblate spheroid.
“Unlimited water.” Dear god indeed. And he really believes it’s unlimited because he says it is, and that nobody else on the face of the Earth has any idea how to turn on a gaddamn faucet. He’s his own stupid person’s idea of a smart person. Trump a living, breathing embodyment of the Peter Principle, Dunning-Kruger, and Murphy’s Law, all blended into one lethally toxic, super-saturated solution of stupid.
I wouldn’t doubt it. The same Mercator magnification applies to Canada as well. To an idiot, ignorant real estate huckster obsessed with size and “bigness”, for whom everything he touches is “the most that anyone has seen,” or “like nobody has seen before”, “properties” of this magnitude would be irresistable.
“Unlimited water”?
“Many people have said” that overpopulation in deserts has drained natural aquifers.
“We have heard” that the Colorado River is running dry.
“Everybody knows” that California has chronic droughts.
Where is this “unlimited water” of which he speaks?
Well, Canada’s near the top if you look at a map or, more particularly, a globe, so the inference must be correct. DT probably spilt his Diet Coke over the globe in the Oval office and drew his conclusions.
Exactly. Which seems to be the literal truth – that really is what he thinks.
I have to own that I have a similar cognitive dissonance. It bothers me when rivers flow north. They can’t do that because water doesn’t flow uphill. Of course, I know the difference between a map and reality, but I still get little irrational twinges from time to time.
Heh, oh yes, so do I, and I’m sure we all do (those of us who live in the northern hemisphere at least). But we can correct for it, and Trump clearly can’t, which is funny in a horrifying way.
Gallows humour?
@7 you reminded me how difficult it was for me as a kid to actually grasp which way the Nile flows.
guest — yes, and “Upper Egypt” is the part to the south.
Didn’t the ancient Egyptians call Mesopotamia “the place where the rivers flow backwards”, i.e., north to south? I remember reading something like that once.
At least the Mississippi does what it’s supposed to. :P
IINM ancient Egyptians used the same word for upstream & south, and the same word for downstream & north
Early British explorers had a similar WTF moment in Australia when rivers appeared to be flowing inland when logic said rivers flowed to the sea. That led to speculation of a vast inland sea until the crossing of the Blue Mountains and watching the Murray Darling system slowly wend its way to the sea, draining a third of Australia’s land mass in the process.
The Murray, Austrlalia’s longets river, flows west and northwest, passes through Hume Reservoir above Albury, and forms most of the boundary between New South Wales and Victoria. At Morgan, South Australia, it bends sharply southward to flow through Lake Alexandrina to Encounter Bay on the Great Australian Bight.
Perhaps someone can persuade him to fixate on Alaska, instead. It’s almost as big as Greenland, is over a thousand times closer to Russia (Diomede islands are less than four kilometres away, compared to over four thousand kilometres between Greenland and Russia), and – bonus! – it’s already owned by the USA! But he doesn’t have to be told that last bit, of course. Just tell him that foreigners moving in outnumber immigrants from other US states, that the numbers of non-Hispanic white people is down to barely over half the population, and imply that they will soon be outnumbered by other races! Will he take the bait?
Mono color ball caps with text on them look like shit. Anyone ever going to inform them of that fact?
There are very few rivers in the continental US that flow north; the Red River in the Great Plains is one, maybe the only one, as I think I heard during the catastrophic flooding of that watershed several years ago.. The reason is topography of course; any river going North from the relatively flat US east of the Rockies won’t get past the Canadian Shield. Up there a lot of rivers do go north to Hudson Bay and the Arctic Ocean.
There’s been a joke image popping up online of a big faucet sticking out of a rock outcrop in a PNW looking landscape that can send water south from a spring. Maybe T**** thinks it’s an actual photo.
Well, it’s always been sort of a joke in water science that water flows downhill, except when it flows uphill toward money. That joke pretty much originated because of Los Angeles and all the rivers they forced uphill to drop back down into the LA area. Maybe Trump thinks it happens naturally.
@Bruce,
There’s also the New River, which flows from North Carolina through Virginia and West Virginia into the Kanawha (and eventually the Ohio). It’s actually one of the oldest rivers in the world, pre-dating the Appalachians.