Salon, Troy Farah, today: Our world map is wrong. MAGA likes it that way, subtitled “Because the US rejects reality, it voted against the UN’s Correct the Map plan”
No doubt MAGA is thinking, doesn’t the rest of the world realize that the US is *exceptional* and deserves to be in the center of the map?
Excerpts:
Perhaps this resolution wasn’t as minor as it seemed at first glance. In fact, it could be that the Mercator map explains President Donald Trump’s strange obsession with seizing Greenland. Maybe he really does think it’s that gigantic? Of course, ignorance isn’t Trump’s only possible motivation — knowing Greenland’s presumed vast troves of natural minerals, some of it comes down to plain old greed.
And
But that probably isn’t why the U.S. voted no. It seems to be more about childish opposition to anything positive the U.N. might do, no matter how inconsequential, in an effort to delegitimize the body, which has been the target of Republican attacks since its founding. Anti-U.N. sentiment has been a broad part of Trump’s agenda since his first term, from abandoning the organization’s bodies like the World Health Organization and the Framework Convention on Climate Change. Trump has tried to recreate his own U.N., ironically called the “Board of Peace,” even though it supports Israel’s ongoing bombing of Gaza and the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. A vote to reject objective reality — the size of continents on maps — verges on pure flat-earther nonsense, existing in the same realm as anti-vaccine rhetoric and the denial of climate change caused by humans. In other words, it fits right into the MAGA worldview, which thrives on A.I. slop and disinformation. It’s also a less-than-subtle nod toward the “glory days” of racist colonialism.
Finishing:
[Stunts like this] work to make the U.S. look even more unserious — and, ironically, smaller — on the world stage. If 164 other countries can’t even expect the U.S. to acknowledge basic geography, what does it say about our ability to lead on far more consequential matters? You don’t need a map to see that this is leading nowhere good.
Included here is that map that shows how the African continent could comfortably hold the US, China, India, and some of Europe. Just look at a globe.
I still don’t care for the new map. The relative sizes are better, but the shapes are distorted, the farther out they are from the center. I still like the Goode homolosine projection, which reduces the distortion, and also makes it clear that the map is a flattening of a global area.
\\\
More and more I’m placing political items like this into the box of evidence about the limitations of human cognition.
NY Times, Katie Rogers, today: Pleading for Votes, Trump Tries a New Spin on an Old Promise: Free Money, subtitled “In his convention speech, the president floated the idea of a $5,000 ‘Trump Dividend’ for every adult American if Republicans keep control of Congress. The idea, like many others, may not come to pass.”
Who believes this will ever happen? Apparently MAGA does.
In several cases, the money Mr. Trump has promised in the past has not materialized. He has proposed $2,000 checks based on tariff revenues (in an interview with The New York Times in January, he said that money could arrive by the end of this year). He has also floated the idea of $5,000 payments from money saved by eliminating thousands of federal jobs, and assorted payments to Americans from government health care subsidies.
And
But Mr. Trump’s latest notion would be exorbitantly expensive.
It would cost more than $1.3 trillion to send $5,000 checks to each of the roughly 270 million adults in the U.S., making such a plan almost prohibitively costly for a country with a $40 trillion national debt.
Mr. Trump said that the money would come with just one caveat: It must be spent in the United States.
And how would that be enforced?
\
More lies.
- JMG, from Mediaite, today: Trump Lies That Ex-NC Gov. Roy Cooper Released Killer
- NY Times, Frank Bruni and Bret Stephens in dialogue, today: It’s My Party and I’ll Lie if I Want To
\
What frightening is how so many people do not see this.
Robert Reich, yesterday: Trump is Totally, Utterly, and Completely Bonkers, subtitled “The question is when, if, and how Congress will stop him”
He’s not just an old crazy ego-maniac. He’s now clearly looney-tunes, out of his head, stark-raving mad.
Lake America? New America (because New Mexico is a “cheating state” he didn’t carry)? “we own the moon”? the Arc de Trump? …
Maybe lots of people are now laughing at him, but I’m not. There used to be guardrails, but now there are none.
If the crazy SOB says let the missiles fly, I honestly fear that those two idiots Hegseth and Caine will do it.
Either every last Republican at the federal level is treasonously irresponsible (which I really don’t want to believe) or they’re trying to ride things out until the election, and then they’ll take action.
They’re afraid that if they do something to Trump now, the MAGA hordes will stay home on Election Day and they’ll all lose their jobs. So they wait until the election, for better or for worse, and then they join the Dems in invoking the 25th, or in impeachment and conviction.
And he appends this NYT piece by Peter Baker: 60 Posts in 10 Hours: How Trump’s Social Media Reflects His Version of Reality
It describes many of the AI slop images posted on Trump Social last weekend. Which I’m guessing Fox News is too smart to show, and so most MAGAites will never see them. Except for the very hardcore.
\\\
But there’s more. Heather Cox Richardson describes some of the more:
Letters from an American, yesterday: September 9, 2026
Yesterday, at a White House event honoring those who sacrificed their lives on 9/11, President Donald Trump went off script and claimed he had taken a crew downtown “right after this happened. They were, they had no hesitation. Everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do, I’ll be honest. It was raw. Nobody’s seen anything like it ever. We had other buildings. United States Steel Building was creaking. Really creaking. And we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is it creaked a lot. It creaked. It still creaks, but uh, it never came down. And uh, I’ll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us and two firemen—big strong guys, and I’m not the smallest guy in the world—they grabbed me under the arm, said, ‘Got to get out of here.’ And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself.’ But they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down, U.S. Steel.”
In fact, as CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale reported, there is no evidence for any of this story.
He just makes stuff up, and his MAGA fans eat it up.
\
One more.
Slate, Fred Kaplan, today: This Trump Speech Sent a Dangerous Message to Iran—and the Rest of the World, subtitled “Even he should know better than to say things like this out loud.”
About nuclear bombs.
\
And this. Which seems to happen regularly at such events.
JMG, from AlterNet, today: REPORT: Grindr Sees Outage During GOP Convention
Grindr, you understand, is a gay hookup app.
