Dear MAGA: 20210912 Open Topic


This Sanctuary Sunday Open Thread, with full respect to those who worship God on the Sabbath, is a place to reaffirm our worship of our Creator, our Father, our King Eternal.

It’s also a place to read, post, and discuss news that is worth knowing and sharing. Please post links to any news stories that you use as sources or quote from.

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Please also consider the Guidelines for posting and discussion printed here: https://www.theqtree.com/2019/01/01/dear-maga-open-topic-20190101/

This Sanctuary Sunday Open Thread, with full respect to those who worship God on the Sabbath, is a place to reaffirm our worship of our Creator, our Father, our King Eternal.


Proverbs 3:5 imparts wisdom to its readers: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.” There is a big difference between trusting in the Lord and trusting other persons or things. Our trust is not in angels or people or rituals or methodologies but in the Lord alone. And, as the writer of the proverb points out, our trust is not in our own understanding.

To trust in the Lord with all our heart, we must wholly rely upon God’s promises, wisdom, power, and love to help us in every circumstance. Human understanding is subject to error. God, on the other hand, sees and understands all. He is the One we can lean on and trust. We should trust the Lord with all our heart because human understanding is tainted by sin, limited wisdom, impulsive assumptions, and faulty emotions. We are not always right. Proverbs 14:12 reminds us of this: “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death”. Sin taints our understanding and leads us to destruction (Ephesians 4:17–18). “Our knowledge is partial and incomplete” (1 Corinthians 13:9). Should we base our understanding on what is partial, sinful, or destructive? Or should we trust in the God who is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-wise, loving, and has good plans to guide, satisfy, and establish us (see Isaiah 58:11)?

God does not change (Malachi 3:6), and His decisions are never capricious or evil. Psalm 92:15 tells us, “The LORD is upright; he is my Rock, and there is no wickedness in him.” God is not evil and will not lead us to destruction. Instead, He leads us into paths of righteousness (Psalm 23:3). He never lies (Numbers 23:19; Hebrews 6:18), and He is faithful to keep His promises (Psalm 89:34). God’s plans are perfect, holy, and righteous, and He works all things together for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28). God is worthy of our trust.

Trusting in the Lord begins by believing in Jesus for salvation. When we trust in Him, we acknowledge that “salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). We then get to know God more as we spend time in prayer and Bible study. The more we know God, the more we will love Him. The more we love Him, the more we will trust in Him alone—with all our hearts—for wisdom, for decisions, for everything.

Jeremiah 17:7–8 describes the benefits that come to the person who trusts the Lord with all his heart: “Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, And whose hope is the LORD. For he shall be like a tree planted by the waters, which spreads out its roots by the river, and will not fear when heat comes; But its leaf will be green, and will not be anxious in the year of drought, nor will cease from yielding fruit.”

Those who trust in the Lord have hope and need not fear difficulty or calamity. They know who is in control of their lives and that He is fully good and true. Proverbs 3:5 is a wise instruction that ends in a promise: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths.” What a wonderful thing to trust in God with all your heart and to have Him direct your paths!

* https://www.gotquestions.org/trust-in-the-Lord-with-all-your-heart.html


On this day and every day –

God is in Control
. . . and His Grace is Sufficient, so . . .
Keep Looking Up


Hopefully, every Sunday, we can find something here that will build us up a little . . . give us a smile . . . and add some joy or peace, very much needed in all our lives.

“This day is holy to the Lord your God;
do not mourn nor weep.” . . .
“Go your way, eat the fat, drink the sweet,
and send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared;
for this day is holy to our Lord.
Do not sorrow,
for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”


2021·09·11 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom

You knuckle-dragging barbarians are still trying to muck with this site, so I’ll just repeat what I said last time.

Up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”

Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.

Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?

Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?

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

And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:

OK, with that rant out of my system…

20 Years Since 9/11

I’ve got only three minutes left, so I am going to have to jump to my conclusion.

Over three thousand people died 20 years ago today, they must not be forgotten. There are memorials at three sites; I’ve been to the one in Pennsylvania. Plenty of people were there, including a large group of very patriotic, Q-following bikers.

The deed was done by very evil men, almost certainly Islamic jihadis, but…aided and abetted by whom? Do we really know that yet? Were they acting only with other jihadis’ support, or was someone behind the scenes, pulling the strings? If the latter (and I have no real opinion of this, though I do have one on the physical cause of the buildings’ collapse–let’s leave that aside), then they STILL need to be punished.

After all, justice must be done.

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.

The Audit

The Audit is definitely heating up. Let’s see if the Opposition manages to squelch it and its consequences. I’ll be honest; I expect it to be ignored by anyone capable of ordering Biden/Harris to step down.

Nevertheless, anything that can be done to make Biden look less legitimate is a worthy thing!

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.

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

Spot (i.e., paper) Prices

Last week:

Gold $1828.60
Silver $24.77
Platinum $1032.00
Palladium $2506.00
Rhodium $17,750.00

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $1787.80
Silver $23.78
Platinum $962.00
Palladium $2220.00
Rhodium $16000.00

Wow, they’ve ALL taken a thumping! Is this a buying opportunity or are we watching a bubble burst? Well I’m not one of those kinds of prognosticator.

To be honest, I don’t buy this stuff for the short term. I buy it for the long term, and pretty much everything I hold in precious metals (except for the small amount of platinum I have) is higher than I paid for it.

That will probably be true for anyone buying today, twenty years from now. Assuming western civilization is still running twenty years from now.

Part XVIII – Quantum Weirdness Explained by Richard Feynman

A couple of weeks ago I embedded a video of a lecture by Richard Feynman on just how weird quantum mechanics is.

Here’s a (slightly different) version of the same video. (This one has a short introductory shot of the campus of Cornell U, and a title graphic.)

the Messenger Lectures, PROBABILITY & UNCERTAINTY–the quantum mechanical view of nature

This week’s physics article is going to be me paralleling what is said in this video. I may sometimes duplicate Dr. Feynman’s wording, but mostly I will not. Why am I doing this? Because this is the best explanation I’ve ever seen for just how whacky quantum mechanics is. And I know many don’t have the patience to watch a video…I’m one of those people, 99% of the time.

My summary/regurgitation/mangling of what’s in the video starts in the next paragraph. Things that are purely my own comments rather than me paraphrasing or summarizing Feynman are [in brackets].

When we first began using scientific observation, it largely started with intuition, but that is actually based on our experiences with every day objects. These largely suggest “reasonable” explanations for things. As we continued pursuing scientific knowledge, we observed more phenomena and created generalizations we call ‘laws.’ But we also are seeing a situation where the laws become more and more ‘unreasonable,’ more and more intuitively far from obvious.

With twenty-twenty hindsight, there was no reason this shouldn’t be the case. Our everyday lives involve large numbers of particles (even a dust mote has billions of billions of atoms in it), objects moving slowly (compared to how fast they could be moving), or other very special conditions. Our direct view of the world is actually very limited; all we can see is a narrow set of cases. But with refined and careful measurements using instruments that extend our sensory “reach” we get a more complete picture and we start seeing unexpected things. We see things that are far from what we would guess. We see things that are far from what we could have imagined. Our imagination is stretched, not to create or follow fiction, but just to understand what is actually there.

[Feynman gave the example of special relativity and its conclusion that simultaneity–which we intuitively think is an absolute in that if I see two events as simultaneous, so will you–depends on the observer’s situation.]

It’’s this kind of unexpected thing that is our topic.

Let’’s start with light. At first it was seen to behave as a rain of particles, corpuscles, like rain, like bullets from a gun. Then with further research that turned out to be wrong. Instead light behaved like a wave, water waves for instance. This seemed absolutely solid, thanks to various experiments that could only work for waves, and Maxwell’s equations. Then at the beginning of the 20th century after more research, it looked once again like light was made up of particles, for example with the photoelectric effect, and the particles are now called ‘photons.’ Electrons were first believed to be particles, but further experimentation with electron diffraction shows that they behave like waves. There was a lot of confusion until 1925-26 when the correct quantum mechanical equations were written. [Much of this was covered in prior installments.]

Unfortunately there just isn’t a word for what photons and electrons really are. Particle doesn’t fit, wave doesn’t fit. You can’t use either of these because you give the wrong impression. They behave a third way, a way like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

[My flip joke about this is when someone asks if light (or electrons) is a particle or a wave, I reply, “yes.”]

Well there is one thing that makes the situation simpler than it otherwise could be. Electrons and photons behave the same, that is they’re both screwy, but in exactly the same way. (After all they could have turned out to have been screwy in different ways.)

The newspapers say there was a time when only twelve people understood relativity. [Feynman] doesn’t believe there was ever such a time. There was a time when ONE person understood it, but once he published, a number of people were able to understand it, at least sort of.

But, [Feynman says] no one understands quantum mechanics. [Good then I have plenty of company.]

So we are going to describe the behavior of electrons and photons by a mixture of contrast and analogy. Pure analogy would break down, of course, since they’re not like anything in our normal experience.

Bullets

So we’re going to compare and contrast particles, for which we will use bullets [no PC woke stuff then!], and waves, for which we’ll use water waves. We’re going to describe an experiment run on bullets, then water waves, then electrons or photons. This one experiment will encapsulate everything weird about quantum mechanics. Any other weird thing about quantum mechanics, you can say “you remember the experiment with the two holes? It’s the same thing.”

For bullets, our experimental apparatus is as shown below. This is a view from above. On your left there’s a source (machine gun) firing through a hole in armor plate. The gun is a bit wobbly, so the bullets don’t all follow the same trajectory. To your right from this, is another piece of armor plate, with two holes in it, a bit to the left or right as seen from the source, but from your point a bit above and below the center line, symmetrically situated–number these 1 and 2 since they’ll be talked about a lot. This plate is a ways to your right from the first plate, but just to fit it on the blackboard I’ll draw them close together [and so will I, below]. Also, this is really three dimensions. The plates extend into and out of your monitor, and to repeat you’re looking down on the thing from above, with the plates edge on. Finally at your far right is a line of bullet detectors (a backstop with sand), so we can see where the bullets went.

[Note: I did not have time to draw the diagrams. So unfortunately, I’m going to use a generic diagram I found on line, and modified, quickly! It’s going to have its shortcomings.]

The results of our lumpy bullet experiment. The total distribution is missing, it would look like a double hump with the center not all the way at zero. What IS shown is the two individual slit patterns, for one or the other slit closed, which will be described below.

There are a couple of key differences between this scenario and actual reality. First, these bullets can ricochet off the edges of the holes, so that will tend to spread their impact points out a bit. But if they hit a barrier head on and don’t go through the holes, they stop, rather than ricocheting. They’re also indestructible (not liable to break in half on impact).

So we run the experiment and the first thing we notice is something obvious but we need to take note of it. Bullets are lumps, all the same size (one bullet each). The bullets have distinct locations where they hit the sand at the backstop. Also, we never get two bullets impacting at the same time. If the machine gun is firing slowly you hear “plink, plink plink” rather than “plink, plink, plinkety plink.” These are all aspects of a characteristic that Feynman labels “comes in lumps.”

So say you let the machine gun fire for an hour, then you go from top to bottom on the diagram, (or left to right as seen from the machine gun) along the backstop and plot how many bullets you find in the sand.

You end up with a double-humped distribution (imagine a Bactrian camel). And you can say that this double hump is proportional to the probability that the next bullet will hit at that location. At the tops of the humps it is most likely. Let’s call that distribution N12 because it results from both holes being open. You can run this experiment for even longer and come up with good average figures, even if it’s 2 1/2 bullets hitting a particular spot per hour. (Just like you hear about the average family having 2.4 kids. But no family has .4 kids in it; children come in lumps. Some families have more, some have less.) [Feynman actually brought that up, not me.] You can also run the experiment again but this time covering one or the other hole, in which case you get two different single-hump distributions, N1 and N2. And then you’ll notice a key fact; if you add N1 and N2, you get N12. It works this way because there is, as Feynman says, “no interference” between the two holes.

Water Waves

Okay, we’re done with bullets. Now place this exact layout in a pool or lake. Instead of armor plate, we’re talking breakwaters or jetties or lines of barges. And instead of a machine gun, there’s some big massive object being moved up and down in a regular fashion to make waves, which then pass through the slit in the left hand barrier, then through the two slits in the middle barrier, to reach measuring devices at the third barrier (instead of a sand trap, though if the barrier is the beach, there might still be sand involved). The measuring devices measure the amplitude (height) of the wave that arrives at that point, which is proportional to the energy carried by the waves.

When you do this, whatever arrives at the detectors can have any size at all. It doesn’t come in lumps. [The waves can be a meter high, a centimeter, a micron…] What’s measured is the intensity, not a count of lumps.

The result is a curve like this. [Note, Feynman actually drew the wrong curve in the lecture at about 21 minutes. He later noticed that he had drawn the wrong curve (at about 21:30). “Which is the exact opposite of this curve..” and he did a quick fix.]

Waves. Notice the interference pattern.

The reason for this rather complicated curve is that when the source wave hits the two openings in the middle barrier, it reaches them at the same time, and those two openings themselves act like sources, and waves ripple outwards from them. The two sets of waves will add together. Along the center line the peak of the wave from opening 1 arrives at the same time as the peak from opening 2, so the waves add together to make something twice as tall, or twice the energy. A bit off the center line, the trough from wave 1 will hit the spot at the same time as the peak from wave 2, or vice versa, resulting in canceling out. A measurement here will see no wave height at all and an energy of zero. Even further off the center line, a peak from one opening will arrive at the same time as the following peak from the other opening, and they will add to each other rather than canceling out. (However one of those waves will have traveled farther and will be weaker, so this peak will not be as high as the one on the center line.)

The waves interfere with each other. This is used in science in a funny way because sometimes the interference from a wave strengthens the other wave (“constructive interference”) and sometimes it cancels (“destructive interference”); in ordinary language interference always works against someone, never with them.

The interference creates the complex pattern shown, I12 (I for intensity). If you close one hole or the other, you get a smooth curve, just like you did with the bullets. In fact the patterns are basically identical, N1 looks like I1, and N2 looks like I2. But these two patterns, I1 and I2 do not add up to make I12.

This distribution is known as an interference pattern.

So we see several key differences between particles and waves: lumpiness/non-lumpiness, discrete/continuous values, non-simultaneous/simultaneous arrival times, and the lack/presence of interference.

Electrons

OK now for electrons (metal plates). Or photons (for which the barriers are made out of black paper). But I’m only going to discuss electrons. [But remember, they’re both screwy in the same way.]

What we receive at the detector are lumps. Click, click, click, all the same size, like small bullets. If the source of electrons is made weaker, you hear the clicks further apart, but each individual click remains the same size, just like slowing down the machine gun for the bullets. And no two electrons arrive at the same time, because they aren’t emitted at the same time, again like the machine gun firing one bullet at a time. The key here is that the electrons come to one place, one at a time.

So we can now play the same game we did with the bullets, let the emitter rip for a while and then look at the distribution and equate it to a probability curve, with high areas corresponding to a greater probability of receiving the next electron fired.

We should expect to see the double humped N12 curve, right? That’s how our lumpy bullets behave.

But (@27:20)…we get a probability curve looking like the multiple humped I12 intensity curve, the interference pattern.

THAT is weird. These things are lumpy, and behave just like lumps…except for how they are distributed, where the distribution shows wave interference. But what would a wave have to do with particles? Or vice versa?

[Yes, it makes no sense. But it does work this way, we’ve never seen it not work this way. And this is why light was confusing around the turn of the 20th century. When experimenting with its distribution it appeared like a wave. But when we did things with the photoelectric effect that would actually depend on the lumps, we got lumpy behavior.]

[Ok, it’s mad. Stark raving mad, But this is the way things work.]

Some Additional Subtleties

There are some subtleties.

One might state as “obvious” that an electron–which is a “lump”–has to have gone through hole #1 or hole #2. Call that “Proposition A”

That of course would imply that the total number of electrons that reach the detector is the sum of those which go through hole #1, and those which go through hole #2. But you can’t sum the two one-hole distributions to get the interference pattern, so Proposition A would appear to be false; the electrons must be splitting up, somehow.

This is science, we test it even though it seems like ironclad logic.

So we set up lights over each hole to watch the electrons.

Lo and behold, you will see a flash in one hole, or the other hole, and these match the times of hits on the detector, so Proposition A appears to be true after all!

And it is true. But you can’t add the distributions together to get the interference pattern!

Well, I haven’t told you the whole story. Because when you set people to watching the holes and reporting, for each hit on the detector, which hole the electron went through…the distribution on the detector switches from being the interference pattern to the double hump pattern! So now that you know what I1 and I2 are…I12 is equal to their sum!

So, obviously, the light is doing something to the electrons. This is not surprising, after all, light has enough energy to shove electrons around (hence emission and absorption lines in spectra), so we decide to turn the intensity of the light down enough to have less of an effect.

But light, too, is “lumpy.” Turning down the light reduces the number of lumps or photons. If you reduce the light enough, electrons might get through the hole without running into a photon at all, in which case the guy monitoring the holes will say he didn’t see the electron at all.

Guess what? If you plot the electrons that didn’t get seen, and ignore the rest, you get the multiple hump distribution. If you look only at the ones that were seen, you get the double hump distribution. If you look at them all, you get some sort of weighted sum of the two, depending on what fraction of electrons were or were not seen.

Other methods can be arranged to determine which hole an electron goes through, and they all lead to the same result. If you make the sensor too gentle to muck with the electron…you end up not seeing the electron. There is no way to detect an electron without disturbing it and wrecking the interference pattern.

[Feynman summarizes the way scientists describe the situation:] If you set up an apparatus to monitor the holes, then you can say that it goes through one hole or the other (and Proposition A is true). If you don’t have such an apparatus, then you cannot say that it goes through one hole or the other, because when you’re not looking, electrons don’t behave as if they do go through one hole or the other.

No one can give you a deeper explanation of this than [Feynman] has given you. They might come up with more examples, but this is the basic conundrum of quantum mechanics.

Another subtlety. We use probability in daily life for things like, say, the throw of a dice. We shouldn’t have to do this. We should be able to calculate how the die will land, given its orientation, speed, the nature of the surface it will land on, and so forth. Straight mechanics, even if very, very complicated. But since we don’t know the initial conditions well enough, the die toss appears to be a random event, we can’t predict what it’s going to do. But again that’s because we don’t know the initial conditions and haven’t the skill to do the computation fast enough.

With these electrons, one might think if they behave as though they have a probability of doing something, we could somehow write laws that would tell us where the electron will be. But this turns out not to be the case. True randomness–the randomness we don’t actually see in our macroscopic world–is built into it. We can’t know the state of the electron and be able to compute what it will do; if we could, we’d lose the interference pattern. “Nature herself doesn’t know which way the electron is going to go.”

Feynman’s Concluding Rant

[nearly verbatim]

[Feynman puts on a pompous voice and quotes a philosopher as saying “It is necessary for the very existence of science that the same conditions always produce the same result.”] Well, they don’t. And yet the science goes on. [So much for that philosopher.]

What is necessary for the very existence of science and so forth and what the characteristics of nature are not to be determined by pompous preconditions, they are determined always by the material with which we work, by Nature herself. We look and we see what we find and we cannot say ahead of time what it’s going to look like. The most “reasonable” possibilities turn out often not to be the situation.

What [actually] is necessary for the very existence of science is just the ability to experiment, the honesty in reporting results (the results must be reported without somebody [instead] saying what they’d like the results to have been), and finally an important thing is the intelligence to interpret the results. [Take THAT, Climate Research Unit!]

But an important thing about this intelligence is that it should not be sure ahead of time about what must be. Now it can be prejudiced and say “that’s very unlikely, I don’t like that.” Prejudice is different than absolute certainty, I don’t mean absolute prejudice, just bias, not complete prejudice. Even if you’re strongly biased, the experiments will pile up until you cannot ignore them any longer.

In fact the only thing needed is that minds exist that do not demand that nature must satisfy some preconceived conditions, like those of our philosopher.

[Oh, and we need to fix elections, too. And we need bacon.]

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 !!!

DEAR KAG: 20210910

“Today was a declaration of war against the American people. It’s a bio fascist coup.”

Dr. Naomi Wolf

Wolf’s Pub is open for business! Summer is nearing its end, but the political heat is as hot as ever. I confess to a bit of fatigue regarding the Covidic Religion of the Commie/Davos Crowd. What on earth possessed those people to attempt the takedown of the WHOLE WESTERN WORLD AT ONCE?

Oh wait, it was Saaa-taaan!

The Church Lady

Talk about fighting a two-front war, these arrogant folks thought taking down all the European nations, plus Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States at once would give them a clear road to the rest of the globe. The Total Totalitarian’s Tool, aka Joe Biden, was hard at it yesterday. I was not impressed.

Americanos no likee Beijing Biden

Well, they may think they are ushering in the Great Reset, but I suspect it won’t be the one they have been planning on. Such is how things work out when the Darkness attempts to put out the Light. The light-bearers are awake, each of us shining our little lights in towns and communities across America and the world.

And the darkness comprehends it not. They don’t get us. They can’t get us. We will win.

MASSIVE NON-COMPLIANCE!

Now is the time to put pressure on city councils, school boards, county commissioners, local hospital staff and so on TO DO THE RIGHT THING. Urge them to uphold their oaths to the Constitution of the United States and their medical oath to: First, Do No Harm.

BE RELENTLESS WITH OUR RESISTANCE

Call them out! Some of these people are engaging in the genocide of the most vulnerable among us. Some of them are breaking their oath of loyalty to our nation by upholding tyrannical mandates and emergency declarations. They are indulging in a power grab that attempts to implement a totalitarian government that will have complete control over every aspect of our lives.

I think the time of giving them the benefit of the doubt is over. They need to be called out…good and hard. It’s one thing to call out a national politician who can easily avoid the hoi polloi. It’s another thing for a local politician to get called on the carpet in his own small town.

BE RELENTLESS WITH OUR RESISTANCE

ANOTHER VIEW

The Conservative Treehouse is so good at mixing hand-wringing with good analysis. That said, it’s worthwhile to read this article, which enumerates how the Covidic Secular Religion is opening the door to that power grab we all see and have been experiencing. FTA:

“On October 23rd, 2020, those behind the Biden campaign dropped all pretense, openly having their candidate state publicly his intention to control the lives of all Americans using the authority of a weaponized federal government to advance national COVID-19 regulations.

The Dept of Transportation would be the agency enforcing a national interstate transit mask and/or vaccine requirement. However, don’t focus on the DoT part of what he was saying in 2020… that was only one creek… Instead focus on the downstream use of all federal regulatory agencies and how they align within a Federal COVID compliance agenda… that’s the river.

Think about the Dept of Agriculture (SNAP/food stamps), the Dept. of Labor, the Dept of Education, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Dept of Labor, Dept of Energy and how they would join with the DoT to create the aggregate raging river of regulation.

Think about the federal government using mandates for enforced national COVID-19 compliance rules. Think about USDA (Dept of Agriculture) and OSHA federal inspections for social distancing, masks, vaccinations (etc) in all businesses, not just restaurants.

Think about the COVID-19 regulatory and compliance system and what political beneficiaries stand to gain…”

Yep, they have all kinds of things planned. But it damn sure doesn’t mean they are gonna be able to implement it. The light of millions of people is shining and it’s gonna blind those suckers.

BE RELENTLESS WITH OUR RESISTANCE

Have you noticed that they haven’t been arresting any more people? I mean, the Capitol Police have sued the January 6 attendees. The enormous stupidity and weakness of such a move!

Chase Bank had to backtrack when they tried to cancel General Flynn. They haven’t been able to shut down the truthful doctors like Zev Zelenko and Dr. McCullough and hundreds of others.

The Bidenazis had to withdraw David Chipman’s ATF nomination. And now they are preparing to sue Texas over the heartbeat bill.

Mr. Chimp Man

The information war is being won by the LIGHT-BEARERS. Independent media is destroying the Big Government Corporate Media. Their numbers are dismal. We don’t have to win everyone over. We just have to keep truth’s standard flying.

Frankly, those who want the truth have access to it. Those who don’t will not accept it anyway. So now we begin the offensive in our communities. Letters to the editor, online forums, in our churches, businesses, and local government. Hey, picketing can be very effective!

We put the pressure on and we don’t let up.

SHINE THE LIGHT ON THE DARKNESS WHEREVER YOU FIND IT. GIVE THEM HELL!

What is happening is straight up destruction of our republic and our way of life. Make the local leaders answerable for what they are allowing to happen in your community.

FRIDAY FORTIFICATION

The Americano

How about a light but bracing drink special today? The Americano is on deck. An Italian drink that became popular with traveling Americans in the early 20th century, the Americano was also the first drink that James Bond ordered in Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale.

Composed of Compari (go here for a nice description of Compari), Sweet Vermouth, and Club Soda, the Americano is a drink worthy of James Bond:

Americano!

And just for nice, here’s the poker scene in Casino Royale:

Casino Royale

If I was a betting woman, I would bet on us Americanos over the Commie/globalists. Every day. All day.

HOUSE RULES

We know the drill here. Make nice. Kiss Kiss. Punch Punch belongs at the Utree, which is also a great place to reconvene after we’ve been attacked here. Which is becoming quite common. Oy.

Rules of good play here.

ODDS AND ENDS

That’s the Betsy Ross Flag in the header. Our first official flag of the United States of America. There’s some ignorant CRT lies about it that have been going around. Dispelled here.

Do keep up with the Ice Age Farmer on Telegram. He’s more active there, lately. And he’s right to keep preaching food security.

President Thomas Jefferson, Official Bad Ass.

Bidenazis Target Ohio In Symphony of Mask Destruction, DeWine Plays Along

The Bidenazis and their puppet Mike DeWine have a great plan cooked up for Ohio.

First, I heard about THIS.

LINK: https://www.fox19.com/2021/09/08/ohios-largest-city-reissues-mask-mandate-covid-cases-rise/

Perfect timing after the CANVASING REPORT FROM ARIZONA, and before the AUDITS, wouldn’t you say?


https://twitter.com/pete_grieve/status/1435681669516828677

But this is not happening in isolation of “other items” that are pushing the political animals in Columbus to jump on the stool at the crack of the whip.

Thanks to mollypitcher for spotting this!



“Nice city you’ve got there, Andy Ginther. You ready to play ball again?”

When the answer on mask mandates absolutely, positively has to be “yes”, having some leverage always makes sure that “no” is not a possibility.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MOAR.

Where is the “Republican” Governor?


LINK: https://abc6onyourside.com/news/local/dewine-cant-mandate-masks-health-orders-will-continue-to-speak-out-about-covid-precauti

FTA:

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WSYX) — On the same day the mayor of Columbus reinstituted a mask mandate, Ohio’s governor reiterated his hands are tied when it comes to health orders. But Mike DeWine said he will continue to speak out on the issue of COVID and how to get Ohio’s numbers down.

DeWine said he spoke with Ohio public school superintendents and Catholic diocese schools yesterday, warning them that mandatory masking is the best way to control the spread of COVID in schools. A number of Central Ohio districts are battling high quarantine numbers due to the coronavirus.

“I’ll continue to say to all school superintendents in the state of Ohio if you want your school to stay open, if you want kids not to be quarantined, the best way to do that is to put a mask mandate on, at least for the immediate future,” DeWine said.Volume 90% DeWine can’t mandate masks, health orders; will keep speaking out about COVID precautions

DeWine however cannot make a mandate statewide, at least not without having it overturned by state lawmakers. That’s after they passed a law earlier this year limiting his abilities to issue health orders.

Would the governor have revived a mask mandate had lawmakers not taken that action?

“I deal with the world as I find it and the way the world is, and I don’t spend a lot of time speculating what would have happened if something else happened,” he said.


Yeah.

Trust me – this maskie purple Xi-tie would have Ohio in a state-wide mask mandate at the first opportunity he could.

AND THIS, MOST OF ALL.

If Joe Biden attempts to bring Australia-type lockdowns and mandates to America, Mike DeWine WILL NOT STAND UP TO THEM. In fact, he will SUPPORT THEM.

Anybody thinking Jim Renacci might be a good idea?

NOW…..

If you don’t think this crap is coordinated, check this out.


LINK: https://columbussymphony.com/about/covid-19-vaccination-or-test-requirement/

FTA:

At the Columbus Symphony, we pride ourselves on being here for you and our community in meaningful and transformative ways.  This includes the health and safety of our musicians, patrons, volunteers, guest artists, and staff. 

That is why starting September 25th and until further notice, the Columbus Symphony will require all audience members to show proof of vaccination, or a negative COVID-19 test taken within 72 hours before entering the building, or a negative rapid antigen test within 24 hours before entering the building.  Those who are unable to be vaccinated or are ineligible (including children under the age of 12) will be required to provide proof of a negative COVID-19 test taken within 72 hours before entering the building, or a rapid antigen test within 24 hours of entering the building. In addition, all guests will be required to always wear masks inside the venue, including while seated during the performance.

These measures ensure the safest possible environment for everyone to return to the theatre and enjoy the Columbus Symphony’s inspiring performances.  Please check our website for any updates before you attend a performance.  Thank you for your continued support and we look forward to seeing you at the Ohio Theatre. 


Virtue signaling. Pure, stupid, needless, virtue signaling.

This is not unexpected. The urban end of the artistic world in Ohio was always rabidly anti-Trump during the Trump administration. JUST SAYIN’…..

BUT WAIT – THERE’S MOAR!

Can Columbus ACTUALLY mandate masks?


LINK: https://www.columbusunderground.com/new-state-law-blocks-columbus-from-issuing-mask-mandate-ocj1/

Original Article: https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2021/08/06/new-state-law-blocks-ohios-largest-county-from-mask-mandate-official-says/

FTA:

Amid a COVID-19 surge in Ohio’s most populous county, health officials wanted to once again require the use of face masks indoors to slow the spread of COVID-19.

Unlike July 2020, however, this time they hit a wall. State legislation that took effect earlier this summer forbids health departments from issuing blanket health mandates among people not diagnosed with any disease.

So despite a 56% increase in the average daily case rate in the county, which officials attribute to the hyper-transmissible delta variant flooding the state with new cases, the health department says they can do little more than issue a “mask advisory” that’s not backed by any force of law.

“This is an advisory. It’s not an order and it’s not a mandate,” said Columbus Public Health Commissioner Dr. Mysheika Roberts at a news conference. “The reason why it’s not an order or a mandate is because of state Senate Bill 22, which prohibits us from doing any order that would be a blanket order to the whole population.”

This marks one of the first tangible effects of the legislation, which critics called a naked attack on public health, to play out during an ongoing and now again worsening pandemic.

Republicans passed SB 22 without any Democratic support. They even overrode a veto from fellow Republican Gov. Mike DeWine to do so. Ohio was one of eight states as of May 2021 to pass legislation aimed to limit public health authority during the pandemic, according to a review from The Network for Public Health Law. The bill’s sponsors did not respond to inquiries.

However, this isn’t the only instance of emerging schisms between public health guidance and policy.

Columbus Public Health issued guidance last week recommending schools, some of whom host children 11 and younger who are ineligible for vaccination, to require all students to wear face masks. However, school districts and universities have split on the issue, and health officials said they hope those districts that went mask-optional will reconsider.

MORE…..


So are the Bidenazis trying to work around that using a Mayoral EO? SEE BELOW.

If you read the rest of the article, you will learn this critical information. DeWine did a SNEAKY temporary protection from vaccine mandates – NOT the real thing.


This summer, Gov. Mike DeWine signed legislation that — effective Oct. 13 — forbids schools and universities from requiring a vaccine, unless it has received full authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The COVID-19 vaccines are currently available for use under an “emergency use authorization,” a streamlined regulatory process used during public health emergencies.

The new law also prevents schools from treating vaccinated students differently than unvaccinated ones in terms of masking and social distancing. Pending legislation would go even further, essentially banning vaccination mandates from any employer, business, school, insurer, hospital, nursing home and more.


Yeah, that PHONY FDA approval really worked out there, didn’t it?

Now, how is Ginther working around the Ohio Legislature?

Using LAWFARE.


LINK: https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/politics/2021/09/08/mask-mandates-ohio-how-cities-passing-covid-19-restrictions/5775819001/

FTA:

Local health officials have had their hands tied when it comes to issuing mask mandates after the statewide mandate ended in June and a new law took effect prohibiting them from issuing such sweeping health orders.

But mask mandates have been imposed in several Ohio communities in recent months, not by the boards of health but by other elected officials. Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther announced Wednesday he would reinstate a mandate for all individuals, regardless of vaccination status, with an executive order.

Ohio mask mandate:Columbus mask order to require masks for all publicly accessible indoor spaces

The mandate is not subject to the law, Ginther’s office said, because the law only restricted public health agencies from issuing such orders, not city governments. The Ohio Constitution’s “home rule” powers granted to cities and villages include the authority to make regulations for public health and safety.


SO – here we are.

The DEMON DEMS will not back down.

But we are making progress.

Time for the Legislature to pound these bastards down AGAIN.

And then WE have to primary the RINOs.

W

No Mask

DEAR MAGA: Open Thread 20210909

3905

Q !!Hs1Jq13jV6 ID: fead75 No.8600954 
Mar 28 2020 14:15:18 (EST)

A person(s) value:
1. vote
2. monetary value (tax contribution)
3.
Why is ‘free thought’ ridiculed, challenged, and threatened when a person is opposed to the ‘mainstream-narrative’?
[2] remains fixed (degree allowable by ‘economic recession/expansion’)
[1] remains a variable
[1] dependent on a ‘controlled’ system of information dissemination
What happens when 90% of the media is controlled/owned by (6) corporations?
What happens when those same corporations are operated and controlled by a political ideology?
What happens when the news is no longer free from bias?
What happens when the news is no longer reliable and independent?
What happens when the news is no longer trustworthy?
What happens when the news simply becomes an extension/arm of a political party?
Fact becomes fiction?
Fiction becomes fact?
When does news become propaganda?
Identity creation?
How does the average person, who is under constant financial stress (by design), find time to research and discern fact v fiction?
Majority of people more prone to believe someone in power sitting behind a big brand ‘news’ name?
Do people [human psyche] tend to follow the ‘majority/mainstream viewpoint’ in fear of being isolated and/or shunned?
‘Mainstream’ is used for a reason [dominate trend in opinion].
[If majority of people believe ‘x’ then ‘x’ must be validated / true]
Why do ‘mainstream’ media heads, within different orgs, always use the same keywords and/or catch phrases?
Coordinated? By who? Outside entity providing instructions?
Do they count on the fact that people [human psyche] are more prone to believe something if heard over-and-over again by different ‘trusted’ sources?
Do ‘echo chamber’ tactics provide validation / credibility to the topic/point being discussed?
Threat to intellectual freedom?
Would control over[of] these institutions/organizations allow for the mass control of a populations viewpoint re: a desired topic?
Read again – digest.
Would control over[of] these institutions/organizations allow for the mass control of a populations viewpoint re: a desired topic?
Logical thinking.
Why, after the election of 2016, did [D]’s and media corps jumpstart a [coordinated & planned] divisive blitz intended to create falsehoods re: illegitimacy of election, character assassination of POTUS through sexism, racism, every other ‘ism’?
Pre/post 2016 election?
Why were violent [masked] terror orgs such as Antifa immediately created/funded?
Why were these orgs tasked w/ immediate intimidation/shut down of any pro-POTUS rally[s] and/or events?
Why were marches immediately organized to counter and silence pro-POTUS rally[s] and/or events?
Why were marches immediately organized which divided people into sex/gender, race, [ism]?
When you control the levers of news dissemination, you control the narrative.
Control of the narrative = power
When you are blind, what do you see?
They want you divided.
Divided by religion.
Divided by sex.
Divided by political affiliation.
Divided by class.
When you are divided, and angry, and controlled, you target those ‘different’ from you, not those responsible [controllers].
Divided you are weak.
Divided you pose no threat to their control.
When ‘non-dogmatic’ information becomes FREE & TRANSPARENT it becomes a threat to those who attempt to control the narrative and/or stable [livestock kept – sheep].
When you are awake, you stand on the outside of the stable (‘group-think’ collective), and have ‘free thought’.
“Free thought” is a philosophical viewpoint which holds that positions regarding truth should be formed on the basis of logic, reason, and empiricism, rather than authority, tradition, revelation, or dogma.
THIS REPRESENTS A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER TO THE CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
Q

Let there be more of this:

https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1435585468377313284

Because it’s starting to get ugly out there and sooner or later someone is going to get hurt.

My grandmother, let alone my mother, would break that finger. Not that they would agree with the sentiment.

Truthfully, the people have had enough and the tide is turning.

And then there’s this reality that so many of the brainwashed just don’t want to hear.

And for the doubters out there about the existence of the Deep State, Inouye was no tin foil hat wearer.

In other news:

The prosecution of alleged September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others restarts Tuesday, just days before the 20th anniversary of the attacks, stirring new hopes for justice and retribution. 

Mohammed and his co-defendants, who have been locked up at the “War on Terror” prison at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for nearly 15 years, will appear in the military tribunal here for the first time since early 2019.  

But after a 17-month halt due to the coronavirus pandemic, the proceedings appear likely to continue where they left off, mired in the defense’s efforts to disqualify most of the government’s evidence as tainted by the torture the defendants underwent in the Central Intelligence Agency’s, or CIA’s, custody. 

On Sunday, the new military judge, Air Force Colonel Matthew McCall — the case’s eighth — signaled a slow start, deciding that an initial hearing focused on his own qualifications will take place on Tuesday. Lawyers for both sides are allowed in a war crimes tribunal to question a new judge for possible bias. 

The rest of the week will mostly involve meetings with the military prosecutors and defense teams. 

With scores of motions lined up to demand evidence that military prosecutors refuse to hand over, defense attorneys said the pretrial phase could easily last another year, placing far over the horizon any hope for a jury trial and verdict. 

Asked if the case could ever reach that point, one defense attorney, James Connell, replied, “I don’t know.” 

https://twitter.com/frenchanon1111/status/1435463030758789123

Well….

Given the money angle and who benefitted and profited, it’s worth asking.

If it was an inside job, hopefully a whole lot of people are going to end up here.

https://twitter.com/4_04_Not_Found/status/1435499836363706370

That’s a darn good question since Biden’s handlers seem to have him trying to undo Trump’s years as if they never happened.

This is why we are here.

And now for the business portion.

Please review our HOST and site owner’s Guidelines for posting and discussion for this site. Wolf is kind enough to put up with *most* of us and our antics after thorough vetting. Violators of the baiting and deliberately attempting to divide the group rules WILL face consequences.

The discourse on this site is to be CIVIL – no name calling, baiting, or threatening others here is allowed. Company manners are appreciated. Those who are so inclined may visit Wolf’s other sanctuary, the U-Tree, to slog out discussions best saved for a wrestling mat. If, for some reason, this site is not available, head over to the UTree and visit the post at the top of the list or the closest rescue thread.

This site is a celebration of the natural rights endowed to humans by our Creator as well as those enshrined in the Bill of Rights adopted in the founding documents of the United States of America. Within the limits of law, how we exercise these rights is part of the freedom of our discussion.

THAT MEANS THAT ALL OF US HERE ARE ENTITLED TO OUR OPINIONS AND PREJUDICES, ETC., SO LONG AS THEY CAUSE NO PHYSICAL HARM TO OTHERS OR DOXX OUR FELLOW TREE DWELLERS.

All opinions here are valued for the diversity they bring to the issues, and the shaping of understanding regarding topics for which many of us do not have all information. Correcting the record on any one topic is appreciated.

Be careful in expressing thoughts as we would all like to think well of the rest of the group, and ill-thought out comments have a way of wrecking that for everyone.

Fellow tree dweller Wheatie gave us some good reminders on the basics of civility in political discourse:

  1. No food fights
  2. No running with scissors
  3. If you bring snacks, be sure they are made with bacon

Auntie DePat’s requests as we are all supposedly adults and don’t just play them on TV like the body doubles pretending to be the squatter in chief:

If you see something has not been posted, do us all a favor, and post it. Please, do not complain that it has not been done yet.

The scroll wheel on your mouse can be your friend. As mature adults, please use it here in the same manner you would in avoiding online porn.

Thank you so much for any and all attention to such details. It is GREATLY appreciated by more than one party here.

____________________________________________________

All three daily Mass readings are good today:

COLOSSIANS 3:12-17

12Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, and patience, 13forbearing one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 14And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. 15And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. 16Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teach and admonish one another in all wisdom, and sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God. 17And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

PSALMS 150:1-6

1Praise the LORD! Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty firmament! 2Praise him for his mighty deeds; praise him according to his exceeding greatness! 3Praise him with trumpet sound; praise him with lute and harp! 4Praise him with timbrel and dance; praise him with strings and pipe! 5Praise him with sounding cymbals; praise him with loud clashing cymbals! 6Let everything that breathes praise the LORD! Praise the LORD!

LUKE 6:27-38

27“But I say to you that hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. 29To him who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from him who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. 30Give to every one who begs from you; and of him who takes away your goods do not ask them again. 31And as you wish that men would do to you, do so to them. 32“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. 33And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. 34And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. 35But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. 36Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful. 37“Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; 38give, and it will be given to you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

That psalm selection actually is the text to one of my favorite songs…and for the life of me, I can’t come up with the title. It was removed from our hymnals back in the 1990s. Have sung this one, though.

_____________________________________________________

This guy has entirely too much time on his hands.

Dear KAG: 20210908 Open Thread

https://twitter.com/Michael_J_Matt/status/1435307210003959808

Heaven help us, I hope not. I mean, there is not one cafe I know of where the Roulette is rigged.

Unless that authority is religious in nature, and then only if it is Christ centered. And then it gets questioned from all sides and torn apart before the explanation is complete.

Cheerleading is not going to make this go any faster, but the Democrats are going full on communist anyway. This is an actual plank in the blasted manifesto.

I don’t think that life beginning at conception has anything to do with this move.

Just imagine if this happened.

Enough with that dystopian nightmare stuff that Orwell, Huxley and so forth wrote about.

The secret about Guantanamo getting a big expansion hit the mainstream.

https://twitter.com/4_04_Not_Found/status/1435118135242366976

Just in case you missed it:

Joe Biden went to New Jersey and a Trump rally broke out.

https://twitter.com/PapiTrumpo/status/1435356821724745735

Hey, where’s the Beast? Did I miss it in that motorcade?

And just an FYI…we dodged a bullet.


John Cardillo@johncardilloWhen soy and low-T collide:

Sorry about today being tweet heavy, but memes were scarce other than the sites where Pat gets hers. This is what I’ve got:

Have a good day y’all.

(I don’t remember who brought this to a daily in the comments, but thanks.)

And, of course, the obligatory George Carlin:

Per the Boss:

And now for the obligatory message from our sponsors:

Here at the Q tree we believe in the concept of CIVIL open free speech and the discussion that fleshes out ideas. When commenting and participating in the OPEN discussion on this thread all comments MUST NOT CONTAIN personal threats, baiting, name calling, or other anti-social words fomenting hate, violence or destruction. Our host Wolfm00n has strict rules about that.

Fellow tree dweller Wheatie gave us some good reminders on the basics of civility in political discourse:

  1. No food fights.
  2. No running with scissors.
  3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone

Please, stock up on blanks for celebratory gunfire, be ready to swing from the chandeliers…and no messing with the nuclear weapons.

Please remember to remain locked and loaded and ready for trouble should the insurrectionists try to invade your space.

Those who have things to say that do not fit the generally accepted limits of “civil” discussion, Wolf has provided a venue known as the UTree. You’re welcome to visit over there and say hi to anyone hanging out over there. The “Rescue Thread” is also over there. In the event a rendezvous of the tree is needed, please check it out.

Auntie DePat’s requests as we are all, ahem, adults, not uncivilized pygmies:

If you see something has not been posted, do us all a favor, and post it. Please, do not complain that it has not been done yet.

The scroll wheel on your mouse can be your friend. As mature adults, please use it here in the same manner you would in avoiding online porn.

Thank you so much for any and all attention to such details. It is GREATLY appreciated by more than one party here.

One other vital note:

Please, review these rules that our host Wolfm00n outlined toward the beginning of the growth of the tree itself. it won’t take long.

__________________________________________________

MATTHEW 1:18-23

18Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit; 19and her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. 20But as he considered this, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit; 21she will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 22All this took place to fulfil what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: 23“Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel” (which means, God with us).

Do not be afraid to take a chance on peace, to teach peace, to live peace. Peace will be the last word of history” – St. Pope John Paul II

As always, prayers for the fight against that which seeks to enslave us are welcome.

Please include: President Donald Trump, the Q team, our soldiers in the field, special forces, tactical units, first responders and those working behind the scenes…and any and all people with family members in the hospital, COVID or not.

Wolf Moon

July 6, 2021 17:07
Thanking everybody for your patience. Whether happenstance, coincidence, or enemy action, I’m dealing with some technical issues. In addition to those, and the obvious spiritual attacks, I am dealing with the obvious site stuff in what are best maintained as unobvious ways.

I suspect we struck a nerve.

A combined technical / spiritual / strategic response by all of us will prevent this attack from succeeding. Hold the line – bite the bullet – gird the loins – bite the lip – pray for guidance, discernment, and strength – whatever YOU believe keeps the ship aright for the moment. Everything else is lower priority.

In that spirit, the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel from Tuesday’s threads, and the Breastplate of St. Patrick, not to mention the Litany of Humility are favorites recommended by exorcists in spiritual warfare.

Just like Carlin, the way to get the truth out these days is comedy and satire.

Or…maybe you’d like this one better.

Dear KAG: 20210907 Open Thread

Cover image: Lowcountry Sunrise by Mary Hoffman.

Remember this?

Using a rebel to sell the Rebel?

There’s a perception in the image of the rebel, just as there was perception in all the video we were seeing from Wuhan in the fall of 2019.

https://twitter.com/austere_wyatt/status/1434608595648356360

Was it real?

Or total psyops to scare the living daylights out of humanity and get them to further submit to tyrany?

It’s not like life in the world was all picnics and sunshine all the time.

There’s a reason for all of this with the fear.

Was it done deliberately?

We all know the answer to that question.

H/t NebraskaFilly:

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. ON THE REALITY OF OUR TIME: “Every part of our lives will be subject to control. This virus is about training us for submission, training us to do what we’re told. To not go to the beach unless we’re told, to not kiss our girlfriend without their permission. They’re turning us into production units and consuming entities. They are going to rob us not only of our democracy and our liberties, but our souls. They are going to inject us with the medicines they want and they’re going to charge us for the diseases they give us. They are going to control every part of our lives. What we are doing at Children’s Health Defense is using the last instruments of democracy we have left – the Courts – to fight them. “We are in the last battle. We are in the apocalypse. We are fighting for the salvation of humanity. We all knew this was coming, though I never believed it would come in my lifetime. But here it is.”

The truth is that video, like opera, or oratorio, music videos even, puts images, action, words and other sound together like no other communication medium. It’s always there to provoke a response. Even oft repeated phrases are used to influence and sway. Repetition leads to brainwashing, after all.

Which is why “follow the science” is so popular with the other side.

The final goal?

Yeah, no.

That INCLUDES mainstream media.

Wow, was that depressing.

Here’s an antidote.

Don’t forget, we’re in this fight for us, yes, but for them, too.

Oh, I think we found the kid from Deliverance.

Something to remember, always.

Per the boss’s instruction:

I’d throw in a few Rockefellers and Rothschilds also.

Of course, this does not mean committing felonies, but standing up to the forces that want to tear this nation – and humanity apart. The very people XVII told us will be destroyed by the time this movie comes to an end are currently roaming the halls of power…supposedly. It’s a sickening sight.

And now for some mood music:

Your weekly reminder to take the pledge, and if the non-mainstream people are to be believed, including Lin Wood, we will need to take this seriously very soon:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.”

And now for the nitty gritty of the Q Tree 5 minute, stand up, Tuesday morning meeting version of the Daily Thread.

Ahem.

Guidelines for posting and discussion on this site were outlined by our host, WolfM00n. Please, review them from time to time.

The discourse on this site is to be CIVIL – no name calling, baiting, or threatening others here is allowed. Those who are so inclined may visit Wolf’s other sanctuary, the U-Tree, to slog it out. There is also a “rescue” thread there for members of the Tree to rendezvous if the main site goes kablooey.

This site is a celebration of the natural rights endowed to humans by our Creator as well as those enshrined in the Bill of Rights adopted in the founding documents of the United States of America. Within the limits of law, how we exercise these rights is part of the freedom of our discussion.

Fellow tree dweller Wheatie gave us some good reminders on the basics of civility in political discourse:

  1. No food fights.
  2. No running with scissors.
  3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.

And Auntie DePat’s requests as we are all, ahem, allegedly adults:

If you see something has not been posted, do us all a favor, and post it. Please, do not complain that it has not been done yet.

The scroll wheel on your mouse can be your friend. As mature adults, please use it here in the same manner you would in avoiding online porn.

Thank you so much for any and all attention to such details. It is GREATLY appreciated by more than one party here.

__________________________________________________

COLOSSIANS 2:6-15

6As therefore you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so live in him, 7rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. 8See to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ. 9For in him the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily, 10and you have come to fulness of life in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. 11In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of flesh in the circumcision of Christ; 12and you were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead. 13And you, who were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14having canceled the bond which stood against us with its legal demands; this he set aside, nailing it to the cross. 15He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him.

I would not usually include a homily in full from the previous Sunday, but Father Meeks – again – had an excellent one this past Sunday. The readings themselves were very powerful, and I did give thought to substituting one of them for the Epistle selection for today.

109

Anonymous ID: hHkrVD7x No.148156632 
Nov 5 2017 20:06:36 (EST)

Anonymous ID: pqW40Wgk No.148156518 
Nov 5 2017 20:05:48 (EST)

>>148154137

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray. And do thou, Prince of the Heavenly Hosts, by the power of God, cast down to Hell Satan and all his evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

>>148156518
Amen brother.
Q

As always, prayers for the fight against that which seeks to enslave us are welcome. Via con Dios.

Dear KMAG: 20210906 Joe Biden Didn’t Win ❀ Open Topic

Joe Biden didn’t win. This is our Real President:

This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread is VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).

Yes, it’s Monday…again.

But it’s okay! It’s a Holiday, so you can go back to bed. 

Free Speech is practiced here at the Q Tree. But please keep it civil. We’re on the same side here so let’s not engage in friendly fire.

If you find yourself in a slap fight, we ask that you take it outside to The U Tree…which is also a good place to report any technical difficulties, if you’re unable to report them here.

Please also consider the Important Guidelines, outlined here. Let’s not give the odious Internet Censors a reason to shut down this precious haven that Wolf has created for us.

Please pray for our real President, the one who actually won the election:


For your listening enjoyment, I offer this from Phil Rey Gibbons, titled ‘The Road to Freedom’:

And this from Gibbons, titled ‘Flight of Pegasus’:

_______________________________________________

Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.

We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.

I will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.

_____________________________________

Wheatie’s Word of the Day:

fudgel

Fudgel is a verb which means…pretending to work when you’re not actually accomplishing anything at all.

Used in a sentence:

He spent Friday afternoon fudgeling at the computer on his desk, counting down the hours until the weekend.

_____________________________________

Dear Maga: 20210905 Open Topic

This Sanctuary Sunday Open Thread, with full respect to those who worship God on the Sabbath, is a place to reaffirm our worship of our Creator, our Father, our King Eternal.

It’s also a place to read, post, and discuss news that is worth knowing and sharing. Please post links to any news stories that you use as sources or quote from.

In the QTree, we’re a friendly and civil lot. We encourage free speech and the open exchange and civil discussion of different ideas. Topics aren’t constrained, and sound logic is highly encouraged, all built on a solid foundation of truth and established facts.

We have a policy of mutual respect, shown by civility. Civility encourages discussions, promotes objectivity and rational thought in discourse, and camaraderie in the participants – characteristics we strive toward in our Q Tree community.

Please show respect and consideration for our fellow QTreepers. Before hitting the “post” button, please proofread your post and make sure you’re addressing the issue only, and not trying to confront the poster. Keep to the topic – avoid “you” and “your”. Here in The Q Tree, personal attacks, name-calling, ridicule, insults, baiting, and other conduct for which a penalty flag would be thrown are VERBOTEN.

In The Q Tree, we’re compatriots, sitting around the campfire, roasting hot dogs, making s’mores, and discussing, agreeing, and disagreeing about whatever interests us. This board will remain a home for those who seek respectful conversations.

Please also consider the Guidelines for posting and discussion printed here: https://www.theqtree.com/2019/01/01/dear-maga-open-topic-20190101/

Wait Patiently On The Lord

Recently, we read about resting in the Lord, where that rest referred to a spiritual rest from confusion, worry, stress, useless human effort, and a break from all internal, external, mortal, and spiritual enemies. The Hebrew word translated as “rest” means “to be at peace,” “to be still,” “to be quiet or calm.”

In place of “rest in the Lord,” some Bible translations say, “Be still before the Lord” (ESV and NIV), “Be silent before the Lord”(CSB), “Surrender yourself to the Lord” (GW), and “Be still in the presence of the Lord” (NLT). These versions convey the essential idea that to rest and be at peace, one must dwell in the presence of the Lord, surrendered to His lordship.

A main verse referenced for resting in the Lord was Psalm 37:7 “Rest in the LORD, and wait patiently for Him” which introduces waiting patiently for the Lord as a companion to resting in the Lord.

In the Psalms, Proverbs, and many other books of the Bible, we find commands to wait on the Lord” like this one: “Wait on the LORD: Be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: Wait, I say, on the LORD” (Psalm 27:14, KJV). Most modern translations use “wait for the Lord.” To English readers, the idea of waiting on the Lord might seem like a passive exercise, but a closer study reveals that it’s nothing of the sort.

Patient, confident trust in the Lord is the central idea of the exhortation to wait on the Lord. The entire Psalm 27 is a prayer to God for help. It beautifully illustrates the meaning of waiting on the Lord. Throughout the psalm’s eloquent lines, David expresses authentic faith and courageous trust in God, based on his confident expectation that the Lord will rescue and save him in his time of trouble.

First, we see that we can wait on the Lord by trusting in Him. David expressed great confidence in the Lord, who was his light, salvation, and stronghold (Psalm 27:1–2). This kind of dynamic trust dispels fear and despair: “When the wicked advance against me to devour me, it is my enemies and my foes who will stumble and fall. Though an army besiege me, my heart will not fear; though war break out against me, even then I will be confident” (verses 2–3).

We can wait on the Lord by seeking Him. David conveyed his trust in the Lord by longing to be with Him, to commune in God’s presence and worship in His temple: “One thing I ask from the LORD, this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the LORD and to seek him in his temple” (Psalm 27:4). In God’s dwelling place, praising and worshiping the Lord, David felt safe and secure: “For in the day of trouble he will keep me safe in his dwelling; he will hide me in the shelter of his sacred tent and set me high upon a rock. Then my head will be exalted above the enemies who surround me; at his sacred tent I will sacrifice with shouts of joy; I will sing and make music to the LORD” (verses 5–6).

We can wait on the Lord through prayer, as David did in eager expectation of deliverance (Psalm 27:7–14). David asked God for wisdom, direction (verse 11), and protection (verse 12), wholly believing he would “see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living” (verse 13). Those who wait on the Lord can fully expect Him to fulfill their hope: “Indeed, none who wait for you shall be put to shame” (Psalm 25:3, ESV).

Waiting on the Lord involves the confident expectation of a positive result in which we place a great hope. This expectation is based on knowledge of and trust in God. Those who do not know the Lord will not wait on Him; neither will those who fail to trust Him. We must be confident of who God is and what He is capable of doing. Those who wait on the Lord do not lose heart in their prayers: “This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us” (1 John 5:14). Waiting on the Lord renews our strength (Isaiah 40:31). Waiting on the Lord by trusting, seeking, and praying establishes our faith and brings serenity and stability: “I waited patiently for the LORD; he turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear the LORD and put their trust in him” (Psalm 40:1–3). As this passage affirms, waiting on the Lord is also a testimony to others who will see our faith and, as a result, put their trust in God.

Waiting on the Lord brings God’s blessings: “Since ancient times no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him” (Isaiah 64:4; see also 1 Corinthians 1:7).

Sometimes we might feel as though the Lord does not see or hear us—that He’s not answering our prayers. During these moments, we can put our complete faith and trust in the living God. We can wait on the Lord in eager anticipation, knowing that He is with us and in control of our lives. He will do what He has promised. He will rescue and save us. He is always working for our good, even when we don’t feel Him (Romans 8:28). Through patient, courageous, active trusting, seeking, and prayer, we can learn to wait on the Lord.

Why is waiting on God so difficult?

Waiting on God is not only difficult; sometimes it seems impossible. We want things to happen in our own timing, according to our plans. But God doesn’t operate on our schedules, and expecting that He will sets one up for disappointment.

Waiting on God means going without answers to prayer, wondering why the wicked seem to prosper, and having desires delayed and hope deferred. God has a greater perspective of life’s events, and His perspective, plans, and schedules are perfect and holy, because He is perfect and holy. The psalmist tells us, “As for God, His way is perfect” (Psalm 18:30). If God’s ways are “perfect,” then we can trust that whatever He does—and whatever His timing—is also perfect. When we grasp that fact, waiting on God is not only made less difficult, it actually becomes joyful.

The promises of God are clear on this matter—in waiting on God, we find our strength renewed (Isaiah 40:31). But we are human, and we live in a fast-paced culture that demands everything now. That’s one reason why waiting on God is difficult. Sometimes, the prayers we lift up to the Lord of Hosts are answered immediately, and that encourages us to further trust and confidence. However, sometimes the Lord’s answers are delayed. Over a period of time, the Lord tests our faith, and that’s when we can really struggle. We may even start to wonder whether the Lord is really listening to our prayers.

Waiting on God should not cause the believer to doubt or to worry. The apostle Paul exhorts us to not be anxious about anything (Philippians 4:6). The King James Version translates this as the command to be “careful for nothing.” This means we are not to be full of care over anything; we should be mindful of nothing that might cause concern, except to bring it to God in prayer. Anxiety in the believer suggests a lack of faith, and that grieves the Lord (see Matthew 8:26).

Waiting on God can keep us out of trouble. Abraham had God’s promise of a son through whom the covenant would be fulfilled (Genesis 15:4). Abraham and Sarah tried and waited, but they could have no child. Rather than waiting on God and His timing, they unwisely took matters into their own hands, and Ishmael was the result (Genesis 16).

One divine attribute that will enable us to patiently wait on God is His sovereignty. We can have complete confidence in His total, independent control over every creature, event, and circumstance at every moment in history. Subject to none, influenced by none, and absolutely independent, God does what He pleases, only as He pleases, and always as He pleases. Nothing can stay His hand: “I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say: My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please” (Isaiah 46:10). Once we better understand God’s sovereignty, coupled with His goodness, waiting for God to act becomes a matter of a child trusting in his father’s faithfulness, sure of his father’s strength.

Waiting on God is never easy, but we wait in the knowledge that God knows our situation, He cares for our needs, and He is good to the end. “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life” (Proverbs 13:12).


On this day and every day –

God is in Control
. . . and His Grace is Sufficient, so . . .
Keep Looking Up


Hopefully, every Sunday, we can find something here that will build us up a little . . . give us a smile . . . and add some joy or peace, very much needed in all our lives.

“This day is holy to the Lord your God;
do not mourn nor weep.” . . .
“Go your way, eat the fat, drink the sweet,
and send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared;
for this day is holy to our Lord.
Do not sorrow,
for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

2021·09·04 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread


SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom

I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”

Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.

Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?

Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?

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

And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:

OK, with that rant out of my system…

False Flag?

I think in some cases people on our side misuse False Flag. Unless, of course “FF” stands for something else.

This became apparent to me when I had a very valuable conversation with DePat and FG&C about the notion that the Arizona Audit people were waiting for a “FF” before dropping their results. Once FG&C explained what he meant by FF, it made a LOT more sense than it did with my reading of the term.

I first heard the term False Flag many, many years ago in an intelligence context. It’s a method of recruiting spies. The signature example is the KGB “handler” who finds someone in his host country who has access to classified information and is sympathetic to Israel, then arranges to meet the Israel sympathizer “by chance.” Once he does so he lets slip that he is an agent…but not for the USSR, rather for the Mossad. He’ll even explain that he knows government employees aren’t supposed to leak sensitive stuff but if the sympathizer could just alert him to harmless stuff, it’d help Israel out.

Before the Israel sympathizer knows it, he’s “helping Israel” a lot more than that, but in fact he’s really passing stuff on to the Soviet Union.

The thing that makes it “false flag” is that the Soviet agent, whose flag SHOULD be red with a yellow hammer and sickle in the upper left, is (figuratively) displaying a false flag–that of Israel.

In the more modern United States Cold Civil War context, a false flag is when some leftist does something while pretending to be on the Right, in the hopes that it will damage the Right politically. This is everything from posting a bunch of stereotypical “right wing hate” on the internet then going off and shooting up a black church (to prove “right wingers are racists”) to…well, January 6 with Antifa pretending to be “right wing militia” types–which was very damaging to us.

Just like the Soviet agent was pretending to be an Israeli agent, the leftist douchebag(s) is (are) pretending to be on the Right politically.

I can’t be certain but I suspect some conflate this with something different: A big spectacular event staged to distract from something they don’t want you to notice. False flags can certainly do this (have some “right wing nut” shoot up a school and that will indeed saturate the media for a few days) but not all such things are “false flags” because many of these events don’t try to discredit the Right.

Now the Opposition does pull that trick too, and quite often, but when they do so, it’s not a “false flag,” it’s something else with a name that may just be best described as “distraction” or “misdirection” (the magician’s term for such a tactic). Basically the staged event sucks all of the oxygen out of the media room and nothing else gets looked at for some short period of time (a day to a week). It doesn’t matter if it ends up making the Right look bad (though if it does, bonus!!!), if it keeps people from noticing something else that happened, the operation was a success.

In this particular instance, the suggestion was that the Audit Results We Have All Been Waiting For are being timed to drop when disgust with Biden reaches a (new) all time high. This is certainly plausible though I would have a multitude of detail questions about it before I’d go beyond that. But what this scenario does NOT describe is a “false flag.”

OK, that off my chest…lets hope that Arizona Audit drops soon. If that implies something else must happen first, then let THAT happen, already! Too much death and destruction is being meted out by the Biden Facade Administration and the people behind it.

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.

Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.

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.

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

Spot Prices

All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend).

Last week:

Gold $1817.80
Silver $24.08
Platinum $1016.00
Palladium $2498.00
Rhodium $18,400.00

This week, markets closed for the weekend at 3:00 PM Mountain Time

Gold $1828.60
Silver $24.77
Platinum $1032.00
Palladium $2506.00
Rhodium $17,750.00

Gold broke out and up into the 1830s this week but much of that gain was lost by close on Friday. Silver is up a bit too, the PGMs however are down (or steady).

I attended a talk about the silver market last week; the speaker actually alluded to the folks who pushed the price of the gaming company in order to try to bankrupt a bunch of institutional traders, and then went on to try the same with silver. He described their effort as a failure (and from what I’ve seen so far, their effect on silver prices was, in fact, minimal). However one effect that they did have was they got me to post articles on the nine precious metals AND give these updates every week.

Part XVII: Nuclear Physics Finds A Hammer

Introduction

Today, there is a subdiscipline of physics called “nuclear physics.” It deals with the nucleus of the atom, but does not typically dive any deeper than that (and there is most assuredly a “deeper than that” today known as “particle physics,” though there was no hint of its existence in the 1920s).

The sorts of investigations Rutherford and Co. performed in the first two decades of the 20th century were the very beginning of nuclear physics, though it’s often not considered to have been founded until 1932.

Why 1932? That’s the subject of today’s story.

There’s a modern trope among nuclear physicists. Someone asks “how do you find out what’s inside an atom” and the response is: “Just like a toddler trying to figure out what’s inside an alarm clock. He gets a hammer, smacks it, and sees what flies out of it.”

When we left off the physicist’s best subatomic hammer was the alpha particle, known to be a bare helium nucleus, mass number A = 4, electric charge +2. This would come flying out of certain atoms (like those of uranium and thorium) when they underwent what is called “alpha decay.” This process would reduce the atomic number (i.e., the element number, Z) of the parent nucleus by 2, and reduce its mass number, A, by 4. So uranium-238 (the isotope of uranium, Z=92, A=238) would become thorium-234; the mass number has decreased by four, and thorium is element #90, so the atomic number has dropped by 2.

Physicists used these alpha particles with some limited success as hammers to hurl at nuclei. In fact, that was how the nucleus had actually been discovered; Rutherford used alpha particles as a hammer on gold atoms and found there was a lot of empty space in an atom, but a very small hard kernel in the middle that would cause the alpha particles to ricochet. Physicists had even figured out how to give alpha particles more energy, by using electrically charged plates and so forth to get them to speed up.

But here’s the problem. The nucleus has a positive electrical charge, a substantial one. And an alpha particle, also a nucleus, has its positive electrical charge, too. And like charges repel each other.

Imagine if your hammer, and the nail you were trying to hit with it, strongly repelled each other. That’s a recipe for deciding a hammer is for hitting your thumb with, isn’t it? (Or perhaps your wrist, or even your face if the hammer bounces back at a sharp angle.)

Alpha particles were, to put it mildly, suboptimal as nuclear hammers.

There was also another glaring mystery in the early 1920s. What actually held a nucleus together?

As far as they knew back then, the nucleus of (say) oxygen-16 (Z=8, A=16) held a mixture of protons and electrons, 16 relatively heavy protons to give it the 16 mass number, and eight very light electrons (1/1836th the mass of a proton) to cancel out the charge of eight of the protons, leaving a net charge of 8, which was recently understood to be the very definition of an oxygen nucleus–a charge of eight.

It certainly looked as if there were electrons in a nucleus; consider beta decay. This is when the nucleus spits out an electron and goes up one in charge. For instance, the thorium-234 I referenced will spit out an electron (in this context, it’s known as a “beta particle”), uncovering another proton, raising the atomic number, therefore. from thorium’s Z=90 to Z=91, which means it’s now a protactinium-234 nucleus. So it certainly seemed as if nuclei had electrons in them; otherwise how on earth do electrons end up coming out of the nucleus during beta decay?

So let’s consider a helium-4 nucleus; under this model it contains four protons and two electrons. Those four protons can actually all touch each other (you can convince yourself of this with marbles, ping pong balls, or billiard balls). What keeps them from flying apart? The protons are all positively charged; and there are only two electrons to cancel that repulsion out.

Well, let’s list what we know about protons:

mass = 1.672×10−27 kg
electric charge, e = 1.602×10−19 C
radius = 0.8414 fm

[e is the symbol used for the electrical charge of a proton in particular; an electron has charge –e.]

[“fm” is “femtometer,” a femtometer is 10-15 meters, or a quadrillionth of a meter. Most people have heard the “nano” prefix, meaning one billionth; fewer have heard of pico (one trillionth), femto (one quadrillionth) or atto (one quintillionth).]

We can get an appreciation of the size of the problem by simply computing the electrical repulsive force between two protons that are touching each other. Their center-to-center distance is double the radius, or 1.6828×10-15 m, so we can plug everything into Coulomb’s Law to see how big the force is:

{\displaystyle |F|=K{\frac {|q_{1}q_{2}|}{r^{2}}}}

The vertical bars stand for “magnitude” (in other words, drop the vector stuff and just deal with the scalar values, because we want a size, not a direction.)

both Q values are the charge of the proton, e, and K = 8.988×109 Nm2/C2. You can do the math.

The answer I got is 81.456 newtons.

NOT 81.456 billionths of a newton, or trillionths of a newton, but 81.456 newtons. That’s the weight of 8.3 kilograms (81.456 N/(g=9.8 m/s2)) under Earth gravity.

This much force, between two itty, bitty, teensy, tiny particles!!! It’s an actual macroscopic amount of force. It’d be as if a proton could hit you so hard it’d be like taking a 60 mph pitch on the chin.

(Actually, now that you mention it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle.)

The force is enormous compared to the size of the particles.

Since all four of the protons in the alpha particle touch each other, each proton is being repelled by three times this much force (244+ newtons). The two electrons that are attached to two of the protons attract with 167 newtons, but that still leaves 81 1/2 newtons of repulsion unbalanced, and that’s simply yuge.

Well, that’s the electromagnetic force. There’s one other force that could come into play: Gravity.

Now a physicist would know, instantly, that gravity doesn’t matter more than a mouse fart in a hurricane here, but many of you don’t, so let’s just check that.

{\displaystyle F=G{\frac {m_{1}m_{2}}{r^{2}}},}

The radius is the same, but the numbers of the masses are much lower than the numbers of the charges, roughly 1/100,000,000 as much. And G is only 6.67×10-11, much much less than K was, very roughly 1/100,000,000,000,000,000,000 as much.

I get 6.59 x 10-35 newtons.

“Drop in the bucket” doesn’t begin to describe that number in comparison to 81.456 newtons. Basically a quintillionth of a quintillionth the amount.

Nuclear physicists generally ignore gravity as a force between the objects they study. There’s no way its effect could even be measured as a fraction of the electromagnetic effect.

So, by everything known in the 1920s, nuclei should simply fly apart, in a nanojiffy. Or perhaps an attojiffy. The two fundamental forces act in opposite directions, but gravity shows up like Biden’s rally crowds showed up last year (and gravity can’t cheat to make up for that).

So by rights any nucleus bigger than hydrogen’s one-proton nucleus should simply fly apart. It should never have formed to begin with.

Since we’re still here, and not simply big Swalwellian clouds of hydrogen gas, clearly something else, something new, is at work.

And that is today’s story.

Can Nuclear Electrons Actually Exist?

Leaving aside the fact that the nuclear electrons can’t, all by themselves, keep a nucleus together, there was plenty of reason to question whether nuclear electrons even existed at all. There are, essentially, three reasons that I could explain to you. Number Three had to do with Dirac’s Equation which came along in 1928 and I want to save for another column. So going back to the other two reasons…

Issue #1: Binding Energy

In the introduction I described the prevailing model of the atomic nucleus as of the 1920s. Ernest Rutherford made the suggestion around 1919, but he decided shortly afterwards that it didn’t make sense; and this is one reason why.

One of the still-standing 1895 puzzles has to do with atomic weights. The atomic weight of, say, carbon is not quite twelve times that of hydrogen. Even after accounting for the presence of atoms with different mass numbers (uncommon isotopes of the same element), it still doesn’t quite work out; even accounting for all those nuclear electrons…it doesn’t work out.

In fact, heavier atoms (i.e., heavier than hydrogen) are always lighter than they would be if they were simple multiples of the proton’s mass, much less including some nuclear electrons as well. Even hydrogen-2 (deuterium) is less than twice the mass of hydrogen-1 (protium).

This, it turns out is due to something called binding energy. It’s the energy required to pull the protons apart.

This is directly analogous to the binding energy between, say, you and the earth. How much energy would it take to separate you from earth? At least as much as it would take to accelerate you to escape velocity. This is gravitational binding energy, because it’s the force of gravity that creates the potential difference between you standing on the surface of the earth, and you out in interstellar space.

It takes, very roughly, 7 million electron volts (MeV) to pull a proton out of a nucleus. Alternatively, if a proton is shoved into a nucleus, 7 MeV is released (just like, as you fall from a great height, you release a lot of kinetic energy).

That energy actually shows up on the books as missing mass. E = mc2, after all. So the particles in a large nucleus are all just a bit lighter in weight than they would be if they were separated; to separate them you have to add enough energy to make up the mass deficit.

If you were able to convert an entire proton to energy, it’d yield 938 MeV. The binding energy is therefore about seven tenths of one percent of the total mass/energy of the nucleus. We can actually measure that shortage…and, it turns out, had been measuring it for decades. This is the reason for the discrepant atomic masses.

Another sort of binding energy is the electromagnetic binding energy, keeping electrons in atoms. This ranges from a fraction of a single electron volt, to a bit over a dozen electron volts, for hydrogen. Is some fraction of the mass of an atom disappearing during chemical reactions, when chemical energy is released? The theory says yes. But it’s a small enough change (roughly one millionth the size of the nuclear binding energy) we haven’t actually measured it…yet.

I tried to discover exactly when this was first explained. It was sometime before the 1920s. Wikipedia says Einstein did it in 1905, but it simply points to the fact that he derived E=mc2 that year; I can’t quite nail down that he said, in that paper, that this is why nuclei heavier than protium are all lighter than they “should” be. If he did say that then, then I should have crossed off yet another mystery the week I talked about the incredible year Einstein had in 1905. If someone else (or Einstein himself) put two and two together after the fact…well, it certainly happened by the 1920s.

The reason I bring this up right now, is that it ties to the first issue with nuclear electrons. Ny Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, an electron bouncing around in something as tiny as a nucleus must have a kinetic energy of at least 40 MeV (its position is very well defined, its momentum therefore isn’t going to be anywhere close to zero). Not only is this a lot more than the energy of beta radiation (presumed to be one of these electrons escaping the nucleus), it’s more than the binding energy of the protons; one bound electron bouncing around in there contains enough energy to kick five or six protons out of a nucleus! And what would keep it from flying out as super-energetic beta radiation?

Issue #2: Spin

Probing into quantum mechanics eventually established that protons and electrons have a spin of 1/2. Or, alternatively, -1/2.

But the term “spin” is misleading. The particles don’t actually spin like a top. They do something else that’s pretty whacky and has no sensible referent in day to day life. Nuclear and particle physicists will hijack an everyday term to describe these phenomena, however, so they speak of “spin.” They picked this word because it is measured in the same units as angular momentum. The actual value is 1/2 of ℏ, so the physicists simply label it “1/2.” It can point in two opposite directions, so the “other” direction is labeled -1/2.

If you have some even number of electrons or protons, they could be any combination of 1/2 and -1/2 spins, but since there is an even number of them, you can pair particles with 1/2 spin with particles of -1/2 spin, cancelling each other out, and some even number of particles will be an excess of 1/2 spin (or -1/2) spin particles. The excess will always be an integer, if there is no excess the total spin is zero–which is also an integer. (In practice, the + and – 1/2 spins will cancel each other as much as possible, in this case leaving a total spin of zero.)

An odd number, n of electrons or protons will always have 1/2 or -1/2 spin left over, on top of the integer spin that the even number n-1 of the particles will give.

So let us consider the nitrogen-14 nucleus (Z=7, A=14). It should have 14 protons and 7 electrons in it, which total to 21. Thus if the spin is measured, the net spin should have a 1/2 (or -1/2) fraction in it.

They did measure the spin of nitrogen-14 nuclei, and it always came out to integer spins. So there have to be an even number of protons plus electrons in that nucleus.

Therein lies an apparent contradiction, and there are no actual contradictions in reality; there must be some unknown fact or bad assumption that when identified, will resolve the apparent contradiction.

The Nuclear Force

I’ve described two issues with the concept of nuclear electrons. But I kind of skated past something in my discussion of binding energy. As I said, you are bound to the earth by gravity. Electrons are bound to atoms by the electromagnetic force. Protons are bound to a nucleus by…anyone? Anyone?

Clearly there’s some other force out there. A force strong enough to overpower the eighty newtons of force between adjacent protons. But weak enough that we’d otherwise never have noticed it–because we hadn’t noticed it. It should have been about as conspicuous as AOC in front of a TV camera, yet we never noticed it.

It seems odd to postulate a force that’s very strong at close quarters, yet unnoticeable at a distance. If were anything like electromagnetism or gravity, it should drop off as the square of the distance…twice as far away, you feel 1/4th the force, three times as far away, you feel 1/9th of the force. So if this hypothetical force is an attractive force stronger than the electromagnetic repulsion at some distance, it ought to still be stronger than the electromagnetic force twice as far away–both forces are a quarter as strong at that location as they were before, so the one that was larger before, should still be larger here.

But we all know of something that doesn’t behave that way, and that is magnets. Sure, one pole of a magnet has a force that drops off as the square of the distance, but there’s always a nearby opposite pole. If you’re right up against a north pole, the south pole of that magnet is, say ten times further away, and only cancels out 1/100th of the force. But double your distance from the north pole, and now the south pole is about five times further away and cancels out 1/25th of the force, as you move further and further away the two poles are (propotionally) closer to being the same distance away from you and cancel each other out quickly.

So magnetic forces appear to drop off as the cube of the distance from the magnet.

In order to match what we see, this hypothetical force should be almost nothing at 2.5 femtometers’ distance, strongly attractive at about 1 femtometer, and actually be repulsive at distances less than 0.7 femtometers. In other words, two protons would have to be almost touching for this force to become a factor.

The repulsion at very close distances actually puts a lower bound on the size of nuclei, since the protons can’t get closer than that without being pushed apart. That’s the effective size of a proton. And indeed these distances are roughly the size of a proton.

This force turns out to be very, very complex computationally, but it was consistent with everything they saw at the time, so, just like gravitational and electromagnetic forces, it was accepted as being true even if a lot of details needed to be ironed out. (And even though we know a lot more about it today (1920s physicists had no idea), there are still issues.)

Enter: the Neutron

I mentioned that even though Rutherford had originally suggested the nuclear electron, he grew dissatisfied with it for many of the reasons already mentioned, and a year later, in 1920, had come up with another idea. Perhaps, instead of proton/electron pairs, the extra, dead-weight mass of a nucleus that doesn’t contribute to its electrical charge was due to a neutral single particle about the mass of a proton. He even gave it a name, the neutron. This rather neatly solved the spin issue: If a nitrogen-14 nucleus contained 7 protons and 7 neutrons, the spins would add to zero. Repulsive forces would still be about the same, though: too much without positing a “nuclear force.”

But most physicists didn’t accept this conjecture. Though it solved a lot of the issues that the nuclear electron hypothesis introduced, physicists weren’t going to accept that this “neutron” thingie existed until someone actually detected one. Throughout the entire decade of the 1920s, most physicists continued to accept the nuclear electron hypothesis as being likeliest to be true, despite all the problems it seemed to raise.

If it seemed like this attitude was inconsistent with their fairly ready acceptance of the nuclear force, well…no. A force is intangible, but you can see its effects. You write some equations to build a model of how the force works, and if all of the effects match, you’ve probably got a good description of a real force, at least until you learn more. But if you posit a particle, you’ve posited something tangible that you should be able to detect in a much more direct way. And so far, the neutron had not been.

So we need to detect a neutron. But how? Protons and electrons are easy to detect, and relatively easy to manipulate, because they had electrical charges. One could see the effect of the electrostatic force, both caused by the particles, and also the effect of the force on the particles…in particular being able to deflect them to measure their mass, but also to accelerate them, like happened to electrons in a Crookes tube.

A totally neutral particle would be invisible based on these methods of detection…and impervious to being manipulated by electromagnetism.

But the first crack in this problem appeared in 1930. Walter Bothe and Herbert Becker, in Giessen, Germany, were using alpha particles from polonium (Z=94) in an experiment. They picked polonium because it spits out particularly energetic alpha particles (in other words, the alpha particles are moving faster than usual), and they wanted those energetic particles to use as a hammer on light elements, like beryllium (Z=4), boron (Z=5), and lithium (Z=3). When the alpha particles hit these light nuclei, an unusually penetrating radiation was produced. It couldn’t be deflected, so they tentatively concluded that these were very strong gamma rays. But it was hard to interpret the results definitively.Two years later, in Paris, Irene Joliot-Curie (the daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie) and her husband Frederic Joliot sicced this radiation on paraffin, a compound of carbon and hydrogen. It resulted in protons being ejected from the sample; the protons had kinetic energy of 5 MeV. This radiation, if it were gamma rays, would have to be 50MeV gamma rays, much stronger than anything seen to date.

Ettore Majorana, a young physicist in Rome, analyzed all this data and announced his conclusion: This radiation had to consist of neutral particles.

When Rutherford, and his Cavendish laboratories colleague James Chadwick had heard about the Paris experiments and they, too didn’t believe this radiation was any kind of gamma ray. Chadwick devised a bunch of experiments to prove it wasn’t gamma radiation, then went on to subject more materials to the mystery rays, and eventually demonstrated that whatever it was, it consisted of neutral particles about the mass of a proton.

In other words, Chadwick had found Rutherford’s neutron.

Now that the neutron had been found…whoosh!!! the nuclear electron hypothesis was discarded; the notion that a nucleus contained protons and (except for hydrogen-1) neutrons now made a lot of sense and we could be sure that neutrons actually existed rather than being a convenient shorthand.

Back to Binding Energy and the Nuclear Force

With the correct understanding of a nucleus consisting of protons and neutrons, things become a bit clearer. In many ways these particles are a lot alike, and collectively, they’re called nucleons. They are of almost identical mass, and both are subject to the nuclear force.

The mass number (A) of an isotope is now understood to be how many nucleons it contains. Atomic number (Z) is now strictly equal to the number of protons in the nucleus, since we no longer have additional protons masked by nuclear electrons. We now have a new number N, the number of neutrons, and N + Z = A.

Nucleons are bound together by the nuclear force, which is very short range, its maximum strength basically covers the distance from one nucleon to the next.

So picture a nucleus with (say) about sixty nucleons in it. A nucleon near the center of the nucleus is completely surrouned by other nucleons and they each exert a strong attractive force on it; the forces balance, that nucleon is pretty happy where it is. But note, this nucleon does not feel any attraction from a nucleon that is two nucleons away, rather than adjacent.

Nucleons near the surface of the nucleus only experience about half as much nuclear force, because they’re not surrounded by nucleons, they just see a few to one side of them…and again, no effect from the nucleons further away.

A very small nucleus, say carbon-12, has a large percentage of its nucleons at the surface of the nucleus, maybe a handful in the center are surrounded by other nucleons. This means that the average nuclear force on a nucleon is less than it is in larger nuclei, where most of the nucleons are surrounded by other nucleons.

Now, going to a very large nucleus, like that of uranium-238, the vast majority of nucleons are surrounded and thus tightly bound. But those near the surface, just like those on the surface of carbon-12, feel half of the nuclear force attraction. But the protons there actually feel more electrical repulsion, because that force is long range and there are a lot of other protons in that nucleus, all pushing them away. So that particular nucleus is teetering on the edge of falling apart. Indeed, given a few billion years, it will fall apart.

This is sort of a hand-wavy argument that the most stable nuclei are the medium size ones; ones where a large number of nucleons are completely surrounded (maximizing the attractive force they feel) but also where ones near the surface don’t get repelled by so many distant nucleons. Either side of that happy middle ground, the average nucleon either just feels less attractive force (smaller nuclei, fewer near neighbors on average to attract), or feels more repulsive electromagnetic force (larger nuclei, lots of protons repelling the nucleon).

The total nuclear binding energy of a nucleus can be plotted versus the number of nucleons; when you do this you get a diagonal line, down to the lower left, up to the upper right. It’s almost a straight line, but if you look closely, there’s a slight bend to it. (I’d show you but I can’t find that plot on line…and it’s not nearly as illuminating as the one I’m about to describe.)

If you then go through and plot the average binding energy per nucleon, you now get a very striking curve, like this:

Nuclear binding energy per nucleon, versus number of nucleons. The line jumps up from zero to 7 going from hydrogen-1 to helium-4 (7 MeV each); it then drops going through lithium, beryllium and boron, then climbs through carbon and oxygen, eventually reaching almost 9 MeV at iron-56. From there it’s a slow decline to uranium-238 at about 7 1/2 MeV.

Now you can see that at about 56 nucleons, the binding energy per nucleon is highest; it takes more to pull one of those nuclei apart than any other nucleus. There’s a huge jump from hydrogen-1 (zero binding energy) to helium-4 (alpha particle).

Conversely, if you can build up to iron-56, you can release about 8 1/2 MeV per nucleon, which is a huge amount of energy. You can get most of that just going from hydrogen to helium-4.

Alternatively, if you can pull nucleons away from uranium-238, you can release about 1 MeV for each nucleon by the time you bring it down to iron-56. Uranium will actually help you get started on this by undergoing five alpha decays spontaneously as it decays to lead.

This was to have explosive implications. Quite literally.

But in the meantime, in 1920 Arthur Eddington–the same astronomer/physicist/mathematician who had measured the sun’s bending of the light from distant stars to prove general relativity correct just the year before–put forward the suggestion that perhaps this is what powered the stars…specifically the fusion of hydrogen into helium-4. In 1928 George Gamow did a lot of the math to figure out just what it would take to get this to happen. But hydrogen wasn’t thought to be any more common on stars than it is on earth. (The earth as a whole has little hydrogen in it; we think it’s common because there’s a lot of water up here on the surface). Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkin had, in her doctoral thesis in 1925, proposed that the sun was mostly hydrogen, but this was largely ignored because the prevailing theory was that the sun’s composition was similar to that of the earth. Eventually she was proved right, and Eddington, too was proved right. Most of the energy of stars does indeed come from hydrogen fusion; the rest comes from fusion of helium and heavier nuclei, releasing 7 MeV per nucleon. Further fusion happens in heavier stars to get that last 1 1/2 MeV / nucleon out of the “stuff” stars are made of. I discuss this in my older articles on stars, and we’ll be coming back to this in a future installation of this series.

[Semi-personal note: Gamow spent the last part of his career, 1956-1968, at the University of Colorado in Boulder (a/k/a “Berkeley by the Mountains”). This tower (physics faculty offices, one of the two or three tallest structures on the main campus with eight floors)…

…is named after him. (The physics lecture halls and labs are in the building at the bottom, and it looks like the picture was taken from a similar looking tower within which a lot of work is done for NASA–perhaps including the New Horizons probe that visited Pluto. I would cut through these buildings often going from one end of the campus to the other, particularly in bad weather. Football stadium in the background.)

The Neutron Hammer

Imagine that you are a lone proton, a/k/a an H+ ion, and you are headed directly towards, say, a carbon-12 nucleus. As you approach, you are slowed down by the repulsion of the six positively charged protons in that nucleus. If you aren’t moving very fast, you will eventually stop and be pushed away. If you are moving quite fast, you will get very close to that nucleus before stopping. If you are moving fast enough, you’ll manage to get close enough that suddenly, you’ll feel the nuclear force and now you’re caught–you just became part of a nitrogen-13 nucleus (which, by the way, is unstable and will want to decay–but not by either of the radioactive decay modes known so far).

Imagine a proton coming in from the side, towards the nucleus (not shown) at center. It has to have enough velocity to travel over the “coulomb barrier” (repulsion from electrostatic forces), after which it can drop into the well because it is attracted by the nuclear force. This is actually a very good analogy because gravitational potential barriers are actual hills you’d have to be able to coast over. This one is a combination of the electrostatic and nuclear forces as they act on protons. In red is shown the situation for neutrons, which only respond to the nuclear force.

Now imagine you are a neutron. You don’t feel any force at all, either repulsive or attractive, until just before impact, you feel the nuclear force, and now you’re caught like a fly on flypaper…you are now part of a carbon-13 nucleus (which is stable).

If you are a scientist looking to hit atomic nuclei with things, do you see that it might be fairly easy to hit nuclei with neutrons? Both protons and neutrons need to hit almost head on, but at least the neutron doesn’t need to be given a good hard shove just to get past the electrostatic repulsion.

Suddenly, it became very easy to take some perfectly ordinary, stable nucleus, like, for instance, calcium-42 (Z=20, A=42) and hit it with neutrons to make Ca-43, Ca-44 and so on. Eventually, you’ll get to a nucleus that’s unstable, Ca-45, which will beta decay to scandium-45 (Z=21, A=44).

There’s no calcium-45 found in nature on earth. It has to be made in a laboratory. But by irradiating various things with neutrons, isotopes like this, and literally thousands of others, were discovered, and their radioactivity studied. It turns out that every isotope that beta-decays releases a characteristic amount of energy when it beta decays, and usually the half lives are fairly short (days or years at most).

(Occasionally it turns out the half life is ridiculously long–quintillions of years, trillions of times the age of the universe, and it’s very hard to even tell that that isotope is radioactive. Only fairly recently, in fact, has it been proved that bismuth 209 (Z-83) is actually radioactive with a half life of 20 quintillion years; it had been considered a stable element, the heaviest one in fact, before then.)

In fact, you can turn this around. If you have a sample of unknown composition that has a lot of beta decay going on in it, you can measure the beta decay energy (or energies) and get a good idea what’s in the sample.

Which is well and good, but in most cases, your unknown sample will not consist of a bunch of these short-lived beta-decaying isotopes. They don’t exist in nature, unless they’re part of a uranium or thorium decay chain.

There’s a way around this. You can expose your sample to a strong beam of neutrons. Some of the atoms in it will capture the neutrons, become unstable isotopes, and reveal what they are. For instance, if you irradiate a sample with neutrons, and then detect Ca-45 decays, you know the sample must have a lot of Ca-44 in it (some of which captured neutrons and became Ca-45). Only a vanishingly tiny fraction of the atoms are altered by this treatment, but you do have the issue of your sample being radioactive for a while after the analysis is performed. This technique is effectively non-destructive since only a small fraction of the nuclei end up moving to the right one on the periodic table, and does see use, it’s called “Neutron Activation Analysis” (the neutrons are deemed to “activate” the nuclei by making them radioactive).

Neutron activation analysis will not tell you about what molecules a sample is made of, only what elements. So, for instance, if it detects some small amount of lead in a rock, you can’t know which ore of lead it is (though you might be able to infer it from what else is in the sample). An atom’s being in or out of a molecule has no effect on its radioactivity, which is what this analysis looks at.

Conclusion

The nuclear force is, today, considered the force that governs alpha decay, as well as nuclear fusion. As well as nuclear fission, but that had not been discovered yet. The neutron was going to be a very useful tool for nuclear physicists, and only thirteen years after it was discovered, the world would be slapped across the face with the realization that it had very practical applications as well.

We can cross a few 1894 mysteries off our list. But we have a new one to take their places.

If there are no electrons in the nucleus, what the heck is up with beta decay? Where does that zippy little beta particle, i.e., electron, come from?

Plus the mystery of the current age: Who the hell actually intentionally voted for Biden?

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 !!!