“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
I knew there was something wrong with the “NSA” spying on Tucker Carlson. NSA spying is traditionally SO deep and so quiet that nobody ever knows anything about it. That’s the way they operate. Big, deep, huge, silent, and NEVER give even a HINT of the magnitude, or the IDEA that it might be abused.
Blowing that on a journalist? Yeah, right.
Even a guy like Tucker.
NSA spying is designed to put all the data in a black hole, out of which any of it ONLY emerges if truly needed. It’s an interesting way to deal with the appearance and disappearance of evidence over time.
IF the cops are honest, and IF they are never conquered, THEN they can hold all our secrets in a black box and ONLY retrieve them if authorized. That’s the basic principle.
We can argue about that all we want, but not today. Just accept it as a REALITY. OK? It’s real. THAT is how the IC deals with the “moving real-time problem”. SAVE it all – sort it out later – LOOK AT IT in an outward-facing way ONLY if authorized.
That’s just the WAY IT IS.
So when we get this story – this NARRATIVE – about the NSA “suddenly” spying on Tucker Carlson – and then we get a story about them releasing information – NAH. It violates two things that I KNOW about an agency which has kept track of me my entire life – FOR GOOD REASONS.
ONE.
The NSA spies on ALL OF US – ALWAYS – ALL THE TIME – EVERYTHING. It’s all saved. There is no NEED to order some special spying on Tucker Carlson. That’s not how it works.
They have all my data. They have all Tucker’s data. It’s a done deal.
The narrative that they “started” spying on him, or even that they spied on him in some special way, is all wrong. It’s bullshit. Whoever came to him was either in on the op to influence Tucker, OR they are a pawn or cut-out in the operation – possibly a true and excellent friend of Tucker – but ANY implication that special spying was done on him is bullshit.
Now the NSA can’t go and deny this, because the TRUTH is untouchable.
Somebody on the other side knows that. An ASSHOLE named Andrew Weissmann.
But we’ll get to him in a minute.
TWO.
NSA does not go around “leaking” stuff, because to do so endangers their mission, their collection, and everything they live for. I’m not saying they don’t care – I’m saying that leaking – the creation of the slightest crack in their “defensive truth” – is not part of the “caring”.
We barely got any information about their HEAD GUY – Admiral Mike Rogers – going to a FISA JUDGE and saying that DOJ and FBI were abusing their data in shocking ways.
THAT is the kind of “leak” that sometimes emerges from NSA. As in, it’s about the NSA.
You know. Like SNOWDEN – a CIA operation.
NSA? They don’t go leaking about journalists. They don’t even leak about ME to counter my ratting out what I know but cannot prove about NSA. They don’t even leak about former NSA whistleblowers.
I’ve been a pain in NSA’s ass my whole life. I’m not going to divulge what they may have done to influence me, but one thing I can tell you is that they did not leak JACK. ZERO. NADA.
SILENCE IS THEIR PRIMARY WEAPON.
SO.
I believe that Tucker is the victim of a multi-pronged discreditation operation as part of a SET-UP to a media-government hit job. I think that Tucker did the EXACT right thing going public with us. I think that NSA data about him WAS and IS going to be used in a hit job on him. But this is NOT an NSA “leak”. Its ABUSE of NSA data.
It’s somebody ELSE doing the leaking.
I think that Tucker was UNMASKED exactly like Trump was – by rogue elements in DOJ, FBI, and/or the Biden administration. I think somebody OTHER that NSA illicitly unmasked and grabbed his *NSA* data, and BLAMECASTED to NSA. Knowing full well – I am sure – that NSA would be stuck holding the bag, with a stupid response full of careful denials that look guilty as hell, and even more, that NSA will be too professional to “respond in kind”.
Now at first, I was just “pretty sure” of the above. I didn’t have what I though was “proof”.
NOT UNTIL TODAY.
Just watch this video, and who is in it.
ANDREW WEISSMANN. The sack of shit behind the MUELLER HOAX.
There are very few people who CAN and WILL call out a dirty prosecutor like Andrew Weissmann for being the slimeball that he is, but The Last Refuge is one of them, and that is why that blog has been relentlessly marginalized by media assets of DOJ and FBI. If there is one thing I learned from Sundance, it is the centrality of Andrew Weissmann to the corruption in Washington – and in particular the DOJ and FBI.
Weissmann is HOLDER-LEVEL.
As soon as I saw WEISSMANN in this thing, I knew what this was – the SAME as when DOJ and FBI went after Trump.
This is MORE DOJ / FBI hoaxing and cover-up.
This is a PHONY INTEL WRAP-UP SMEAR – just like what they did to Trump. And they’re doubling the hit job by using NSA for cover.
Andrew Weissmann should be in PRISON – not out on the street talking to fake conservative Nicollle Walllace. Indeed, he WOULD be in prison, if there was real justice in Washington.
But there is not.
I’m sorry, to all you hopeful people, but I’m not waiting for Durham to do anything here.
But now we know.
Weissmann is back, and like DEMON, he will be causing trouble. THIS is just the beginning.
Unless, of course, somebody decides to actually do their job in Washington.
W
ANDREW WEISSMANN LOVES A FACADE – IT’S HOW TO SPOT HIM AT WORK
Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.
All realistic hope lies in the audits, and perhaps the Lindell lawsuit (that will depend on how honestly the system responds to the suit).
One can hope that all is not as it seems.
I’d love to feast on that crow.
Physics?
It looks like the next couple of months aren’t going to be as busy I had thought so I can do some physics posts. See below.
Justice Must Be Done.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical 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. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: 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. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
UPDATE: Apparently paper prices are getting closer to reality. I was quoted $125 over spot for an American Gold Eagle (the modern day one ounce bullion piece).
Gold is slowly climbing again, Silver down a touch, Platinum and Palladium up a bit, Rhodium is down. In fact at the beginning of the day today it was at $17,500 but jumped a grand sometime before close.
Max Planck: Physics Starts Getting Weird
Introduction
This is going to start to tie together a few dangling threads out there, notably Hertz’s discovery of the photoelectric effect (how even dim, weak ultraviolet light would help the spark jump the gap but glaringly bright visible light would not), and the puzzle of why black body radiation had a “hump” in its frequency distribution (instead of just going to infinity with higher frequency/lower wavelength).
To recap, we knew of the existence of X rays, ultraviolet, infrared and radio, in addition to “ordinary” visible light.
Also, to avoid getting bogged down in Spockian numbers specified to nine decimal places, I’m going to round a lot of things off.
Max Planck
Planck was born in 1858 in Kiel, Holstein (now the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, it’s the area immediately adjacent to modern-day Denmark).
He was raised as a geek, and ended up teaching at the Humboldt University in Berlin. In 1894 he decided to take up the black body radiation problem. Why did it behave the way it did?
To recap, black body radiation is the glow given off by hot objects (in the idealized case that the hot object is perfectly black). As shown in the figure below, if you plot the wavelength of the light versus intensity you get a hump that’s steep on the high frequency side (left side of the diagram), and less steep on the low frequency side. The peak of the curve tends towards blue (leftward) the higher the temperature, and the height of the curve increases very rapidly as the temperature increases.
Figure 10-1 recap of black body radiation curves.
The best physicists could do as of 1894 (when Planck put his shoulder to the wheel) is design a theory (the Rayleigh-Jeans law) that predicted the distribution should look like the black line in the figure. It’s not a bad match at the low frequencies (longer wavelengths, at the far right) but is totally, ridiculously wrong at higher frequencies/lower wavelengths; the prediction was basically that the higher the frequency the more should be radiated at that frequency. Since you can’t get a sunburn (caused by ultraviolet) off of a wood fire–because the wood fire is not super hot and emits no UV–we know that’s not actually what’s going on here.
Figure 10-2 An approximate rendering of the color of glow of a black body, given its temperature (in kelvin). The sun comes in at about 5800 K, so it’s just a tiny bit off white. The only things you’re likely to have seen that are hot enough to appear to be glowing blue are many stars in the night sky and bolts of lightning. That being said, modern LED light bulbs are generally set to simulate some specific temperature, from “warm” tungsten filaments through sunlight, and cloudy days and shade can give a 7-9 thousand kelvin cast to things that your camera has to try to account for if you don’t, when taking pictures.
An alternate law, Wien’s Law, was proposed by Wilhelm Wien in 1896 (after Planck began his work). It worked well at high frequencies and was wrong at low frequencies. It was a much better fit, but not perfect; it was a bit too low. Alas this diagram is “backwards” (compared to 10-1) with high wavelengths on the left.
Figure 10-3 Wien’s Law.
Wien’s Law looks pretty close, but it’s not right-on, so there was still a problem here.
Max Planck’s goal was to solve the problem, to come up with a formula that gave results consistent with what was actually measured. And since the line that’s “true” in figure 10-3 is labeled “Planck” you can probably guess that he ultimately succeeded.
But not without some trials and tribulations. He tried to imagine the atoms in the glowing object as little oscillators, because that way he could apply entropy to an ideal oscillator. He came up with a proposed law (the Wien-Planck law) in 1899…that, alas, turned out not to match measurements either.
In October of the next year, 1900, he did succeed in writing a law that described experimental results well. This derivation avoided any sort of statistical mechanics, which Planck had an aversion to.
Statistical mechanics was a fairly new thing at the time, it studied large assemblies of microscopic units in a statistical manner; in fact modern thermodynamics relies heavily on it. But in 1900 it was still considered suspect by many, including Max Planck. It had philosophical and physical implications that were distasteful to many.
But Planck, having got a law that looked good on paper…couldn’t for the life of him explain why it worked–and without some explanation of that, it was interesting that his law could match what was seen, but not enlightening. Over the course of the next few months, he did finally, in desperation, decide to accept statistical mechanics as a tool, incorporating Boltzmann’s statistical interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics.
This is like a dedicated Marxist coming to the dawning realization that capitalism works and Marxism cannot. That is how desperate Planck was to try new things to figure this out. It was, as he said, “an act of despair … I was ready to sacrifice any of my previous convictions about physics.”
His derivation started with an assumption that seemed totally whacky, and had no obvious basis in reality, but it was: Energy could only be emitted in multiples of a certain base amount. That amount was:
E = h ν
(As a reminder ν is the lower case Greek letter “nu” and stands for the frequency of the light being emitted.)
This meant that there wasn’t just a minimum amount of energy, but that any amount of energy had to be an integer multiple of this amount. It’s sort of like money…you don’t see fractions of a cent. Any amount can be expressed as a whole number of cents, but never is there a fraction of a cent (not withstanding nominal US gasoline prices that end in 9/10 of a cent without fail).
This minimum amount was termed a “quanta.”
But note that it depends on the frequency. So at, say, 600 THz (yellow light) the minimum quanta would be one size, but at 300 THz (infrared), it would be half as much. It’s rather like exchanging your dollars for euros and now the minimum amount you can work with is the Euro cent rather than our cent.
The minimum “quanta” of energy not only depended on the frequency it would be radiated at, but also on this new number, h, which is a constant, now known as Planck’s constant, and it’s one of the most important numbers in physics:
h = 6.62607015×10−34 J s
It’s going to turn up again, and again, and again from here on out.
The units are joule seconds, not joules per second (which is power measured in watts). When you multiply this by a frequency (which is cycles per second) the seconds cancel out and leave you with energy in joules.
In fact, it’s really joules per cycle or per hertz, i.e., one cycle of the wave of the light, but the cycle is expressed as one over seconds (1/s) so when you divide by that, you’re multiplying by seconds.
(As usual when a scientist brings a new constant into things, Planck didn’t actually know the value of h; he just realized that there had to be a value to this number. Today, of course, we know it precisely, because the latest iteration of the metric system actually defines a number of physical constants, including h, to have specific values, and the size of the units involved is set by that action. Thus we have the meter…which is defined to be the distance traveled by light (in a vacuum) in 1/299792458 of a second. Planck’s constant is set to the number above, and from that, we get a definition of the kilogram [because a joule second is a kg m2/s; we have a defined second and a defined meter, so that gives us a defined kilogram]. Before 2019, however, the kilogram was still defined as the mass of a certain metal cylinder kept in a vault in France…a definition which was starting to cause problems, because exact copies made decades ago were no longer the same mass, making one wonder if any of those cylinders was not changing.)
Even with typical visible light, yellow light in particular, having a frequency of about 600 THz, or 6×1014 Hz, you can see that doing the multiplication is going to leave you with a very small number, basically about 4×10-19 joules. Given that a joule is very roughly the energy it takes to lift an apple a meter, this is a very small amount of energy. And as mentioned, the size of the “quanta” depends on the frequency; twice the frequency, twice as much energy in a quanta.
He wasn’t the only one who was skeptical nor was he the most skeptical, Lorentz, Rayleigh and Jeans tried setting h to zero in their work, i.e., meaning that there was no minimum energy unit. That was too conservative even for Planck, who compared Jeans’s inflexibility to Hegel’s: “I am unable to understand Jeans’ stubbornness – he is an example of a theoretician as should never be existing, the same as Hegel was for philosophy. So much the worse for the facts if they don’t fit.”
But, at the time (1900) Planck did regard this as a mere formalism with no real basis in reality, much as there were, at that time, still holdouts in chemistry who thought atoms didn’t really exist, but were convenient conceptual tools. The quantum concept was convenient but didn’t represent something that really existed.
That’s what he thought at the time. Today, we look upon Planck’s use of this concept as the birth of quantum mechanics–which, if it were wrong, would mean that semiconductors don’t work and you are not reading this on a computer screen.
One last wrinkle here; as I mentioned, the constant is “per cycle” which is regarded as analogous to going all the way around a circle. That’s 2π radians. But many formulas (like for angular momentum and rotation rate, when expressed in terms of angles) operate in radians, so there’s a version of Planck’s constant that accounts for this and is expressed in a “per radian” sense instead of a “per cycle” sense. It’s written ħ (a crossed h, called “h bar” in speaking), and is h/2π. This symbol is seen, if anything, even more often than h in modern physics.
But anyway, back to 1900.
Planck was banging on the door to modern physics, unwilling as yet to open it.
Soon, very soon, others would kick the damn thing down.
Obligatory PSAs and Reminders
China is Lower than Whale Shit
Remember Hong Kong!!!
Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
China is in the White House
Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.
Joe Biden is Asshoe
China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.
But of course the much more important thing to realize:
Joe Biden Didn’t Win
乔*拜登没赢 !!! Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!! Joe Biden didn’t win !!!
