Shitstorm Saturday!

KRAKEN RELEASED!

I start these posts by going back and grabbing the post from five weeks ago (since I currently have five different eagle banners), copying it, then editing. The old post is from before the election (October 24) and talks about Biden’s performance in the third debate.

Yes, that was fresh news only five weeks ago! And now we are in the middle of a horrific fraud mess and an almost-as-horrific refusal by lower level judges to even touch the issue. I’m not sure if the Third Circuit’s decision was proper or not given the lower court’s action (sometimes the normal rules of jurisprudence lead to perverse results), but Pennsylvania will be going to the SCOTUS for sure.

But so much has been going on, and so much has been said by people here about what is going on, that I almost feel like anything I could say would be simply superfluous.

Which isn’t going to stop me from saying something anyway.

My new pet peeve: 2024 offered as a chance for President Trump to come back, if this somehow doesn’t work out. Sometimes it’s even dangled as fruit to get him to concede for the good of the country.

The people pushing this line are either idiots, or they think we are.

Do they seriously believe…or do they just hope we are foolish enough to believe, that the cheating won’t happen in 2024 and Trump will have a fair chance to try again? On the contrary, after four years of Biden/Harris (mostly Harris methinks), the cheating will be baked into the system absolutely everywhere. There will probably be federal guidelines for elections by then, mandating the use of the new Hack-o-matic Voting Systems. (No doubt we will be reassured by the explanation that the name is in memory of Hitlary’s cough.)

But what is even worse, is that whoever runs in 2024, it almost certainly wouldn’t be Trump. He will be in jail long before then, and more than likely Epsteined. They have been calling him a criminal for over four years; once he is out of office they WILL prosecute. It will be as bogus as General Flynn but no one in the government will be allowed to care about that.

I have said it before, and I will say it again, this is for all the Chips. After this, GAME OVER. If we lose this, to such blatant fraud, 2024 won’t matter. Trump won’t matter. Politically speaking, nothing on Earth will matter. There will be no recourse within the system.

A Reminder Of Today’s Big Issue.

Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People...Our campaign represents a true existential threat, like they’ve never seen before.

Then-Candidate Donald J. Trump

Needs to happen, soon.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

Please note that our menu has changed, please listen to all of the options.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Political correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. The first rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government take your guns.
5. The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
9. Social Justice Warriors, ANTIFA pukes, BLM hypocrites, and other assorted varieties of Marxists can go copulate with themselves, or if insufficiently limber, may substitute a rusty wire brush suitable for cleaning the bore of a twelve or ten gauge.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Coin of The Day

The Dime

“Dime” is not a nickname, like “nickel” or “penny.”

In fact, the five cent piece we call a nickel was the third US coin to get a nickname alluding to the nickel in it, and of course, there are collectors who will scold you for calling the one cent piece a “penny.”

But the dime is not such a word; it’s the real name of the coin and the denomination. Look at one, if you’ve got one, and see that the coin says “ONE DIME” on it. This has been true since 1837 so I felt pretty safe in writing the previous sentence. (A smart-aleck would have to have dug up a capped bust or draped bust dime to give me crap about it.)

Five weeks ago I quoted Section 9 of the mint act of April 2, 1792, in talking about the eagle. Continuing on from where I left off, it gives the specifications of dollar coins, half dollars, quarter dollars, and dismes.

Dismes–each to be of the value of one tenth of a dollar or unit, and to contain thirty seven grains and two sixteenths parts of a grain of pure, or forty one grains and three fifths parts of a grain of standard silver.

Act of April 2, 1792, Dection 9

The “grains” in question are the same grains you use at your reloading desk and the same grains bullets are weighed in. 1/7000th of a avoirdupois or “grocery” pound, but in this case, with silver, the troy pound, which was the original pound, is still used, and there are 5760 of the same grains in one of those.

(24 grains = a pennyweight, 20 pennyweights or 480 grains equals a troy ounce, 12 troy ounces or 240 pennyweights to the troy pound, and it is not a coincidence that there were also 240 British pennies to the British pound sterling before “decimalisation” in the early 1970s.)

37 2/16ths grains of pure silver in 41 3/5ths grains of coin metal (the remainder being copper) of course works out to that abominable 1485/1664ths fine standard we used until 1837. (Multiply both numbers by 40 to see this.)

But the most notable thing about what I quoted was the word “disme.” Not only does that make the word legal, it means we apparently don’t spell it right today! What’s with that S?

I’m not sure, to be honest, where that S came from. French? My one quick poke on the internet says disme comes from an “old” English word for “tenth” which in turn came from “old” French. I put old in quotes there, because “Old English” has a very specific meaning–the English language before 1066 and the Norman conquest, and I doubt my source meant that. (For one thing, no self-respecting Englishman from 1065 would ever borrow a word from the French, though he might be willing to borrow from Scandinavian languages.) So I think it’s better to call it an “archaic” English word for “tenth” that we probably borrowed sometime before 1500, bringing it into “Middle” English. (Shakespeare and the King James Bible, by the way, are both written in early Modern English, believe it or not, though many of the usages in the KJV were a bit archaic even in 1610; they deliberately chose to do that to make the work sound more impressive, and they succeeded. As for real Middle English, if you want a sample, read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the original and recognize that most of the vowels don’t sound the same as they did back then.)

Nor do I even know how “disme” was pronounced. A lot of people go with “deem,” and others say it was just like “dime”, either way that pesky S was silent. Otherwise it would sound like “Disney” with an M.

Did we ever issue a coin that says “Disme” on it? Sort of. In 1792 about 1500 “half dismes” were issued, and those are very controversial coins. Technically the US mint couldn’t issue silver that year because there were no people there who had raised the required $10,000 (!) bond to handle gold and silver. This should be unsurprising as this was a yuge amount of money back then. (This wasn’t solved until 1794 by amendment to the act of 1792, lowering the bond to a smaller amount, probably $5000 but my sources are unclear.)

So what was the US doing issuing silver half dames in 1792? Apparently they were done under the authority of an act passed under the Articles of Confederation. But this is being argued over presently. One side maintains those half dismes were illegal.

Also some people regard those half dismes as pattern (experimental) pieces rather than regular issue coins

There are also three known examples of full “Dismes” issued at about the same time, these are universally regarded as patterns. Another fifteen made out of copper are known as well; those are definitely patterns. (Patterns were often made out of a cheaper metal than a normal coin would be.)

Once we got past the bond issue, though, surely dismes could be issued with alacrity, though, right?

Well, they could be. But they weren’t.

The Mint was run as a public service in those days. You brought some raw silver in (or old coins from some other country, or silverware). You deposited it. A couple of weeks later you could go back and pick up silver coins, very likely made from your silver. This was done free of charge. If you wanted coins immediately, you had to pay a fee (less than one percent), because you were basically bumping yourself to the front of the line and getting someone else’s silver. But the point is, if you deposited silver, you could specify how you wanted it. (After 1795 the mint could charge a fee for dealing with below-standard gold and silver, and could refuse small deposits.)

And apparently almost no one wanted dismes. The first silver dollars were made in 1794. The first dimes were made in 1796-1797 and they had that “cormorant” Eagle on the reverse.

These coins were approximately 19mm in diameter, compare to our modern dime’s diameter of 17.9 millimeters. (Also compare this to our modern nickel’s 20.5mm diameter.) I say approximately 19mm because no two coins were exactly the same diameter, nor would they necessarily be perfectly circular, because there was no “collar” in the press. The collar (when present) surrounds the rim of the coin and prevents it from “squishing” out as the press compresses the blank silver round. Today the collar puts the reeding into the coin. Back then any reeded or lettered edge had to be put on the blank with a castaing machine, before the coin was struck. (This was true of all of our early coins, which is why early coins all tend to be wider than the same denominations from later years.)

Then in 1798, 1800-1805, and 1807 you had heraldic eagle reverses, and the 1798, 1805 and 1807 are much more common than the other years.

Then there was another design change, to the capped bust design, and dismes were issued less frequently, at least at first, in 1809, 1811, 1814, 1820-1825, and then finally with some consistency from 1827 onwards.

Starting in 1828, the mint introduced a new piece of high-tech equipment, a press that struck the coins “in collar.” At that point the dime assumed its modern 17.9 mm diameter.

But none of these dismes had the denomination spelled out. Many had no indication of denomination at all (you weighed the coins to determine what they were), others just said “10” or “10 C.” As surprising as the idea of not putting a denomination on a coin (even Russia was doing that back then) was the idea of making no dismes for five solid years (1815-1819 inclusive).

(Maybe, though we shouldn’t laugh too hard. We seem to have had problems with dime supplies recently–the Walmarts here would not let you pay with cash, or get cash back in the self service checkouts for months, apparently because they simply couldn’t find any dimes to put into the machines…and like a crappy printer that won’t print a black and white document because it’s out of magenta ink, they therefore wouldn’t even give you twenties as cash back.)

I don’t know when the disme became the dime, because the entire period from 1793-1837 left us with no coins on which we could see the word abbreviated, much less spelled out. (And half dismes/dimes are no help for the same reason.) I have found no reference to the denomination in any mint act between those two dates, which might help pin it down.

The Liberty Seated series has no less than six sub-types, the first is this one with no stars on the obverse.

Stars were added, and then more drapery was added to Liberty’s elbow. This was not done simultaneously, though, the stars were added during 1838 and the drapery during 1840, so there are “with stars no drapery” coins out there as well (I’ll spare you that one)

In 1861 the words “United States Of America” replaced the stars, and a new wreath went on the reverse:

This coin has little arrowheads on either side of the date. This was done to mark a weight change in 1873, and continued in 1874. (The weight change was early in the year, so you will see some 1873 dimes with no arrowheads. A 1873 dime made without the arrowheads in Carson City sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars a few years ago.) There was another time this was done in the 1850s, with coins from mid 1853 through the end of 1855 sporting the arrowheads as well.

After this point we went through coins I have covered already, the Barber dime (1892-1916), the mercury dime 1916-1945, and of course we all know the Roosevelt dime (1946-1964 silver, 1965-today clad crap).

Obligatory PSAs/Reminders

Just one more thing, my standard Public Service Announcements. We don’t want to forget any of these!!!

How not to get your ass kicked by the police. Chris Rock in 2007

Granted an “ass kicking” isn’t the same as being shot, but both can result from the same stupid act. You may ultimately beat the rap, but you aren’t going to avoid the ride.

Remember Hong Kong!!! And remember the tens of millions who died under the “Great Helmsman” Chairman Mao.

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

For my money the Great Helmsman is Hikaru Sulu (even if the actor is a dingbat).