“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone.
As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – 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).
And yes, it’s Monday…again.
But we WILL get through it – even if only by workarounds!
We will start our mornings with Wheaties and Winnamins!
Please forgive us, Wheatie, we did not know That you had left us with armor in tow We had no idea with what you dealt We did not know the pain you felt And now we can only imagine With you what really did happen Cause rarely did you complain And/or share your personal pain Of one thing we are most certain You are flying high behind the curtain Watching over us above the crowds Our Warrior Angel above the clouds Thank You, Wheatie, for caring for us While you were here among the fuss We miss you dear you have no idea Since time began in the pangaea With you there was no time In your wisdom you would chime To clarify and magnify The what where how and why We did not question when you left We were not slightly bereft But over time we wondered why You did not at least stop by Now we know where you have gone With the break of this new dawn We could be angry but are not Tho with an arrow we’ve been shot Rest peacefully Warrior Angel dear Send us a sign that you are near A butterfly a flower a kiss of rain From your love do not refrain God sends Angels to watch over us And now we have an Angel Plus A Warrior Angel of Magnificence From today and forward hence
(Not true, but I thought this GIF was too cute to pass up!)
TL;DR –
Wheatie’s Rules:
No food fights.
No running with scissors.
If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
Boilerplate, more or less, but worth reading again and again, if only for the minor changes, and to stay out of moderation.
MINOR CHANGE NUMBER 1
Never talk about committing violence in a reply to Wolf or in response to anything Wolf has said, or you may get put into moderation so that your comments can be screened. This is ONLY because DHS is now playing door-knock Gestapo with people who have spoken at school board meetings, made public comments, etc. DHS regime jackboots are knocking on doors of school board mama bears and stupidly insinuating potential violence from things people say or don’t say on social media. A guy in Ohio pointed his FINGER at the school board, and they went after him, armed with pictures of the pointing, and screen captures of online comments. Yeah.
SO – give the Nazis ZERO ammo. Keep any mention of violence, even joking, away from Wolf, so that he doesn’t have to “explain” humor to humorless jackboots who pretend not to know things.
As for discussion of “violent humor” among yourselves (e.g., “#TeamHeadsOnPikes”), just use whatever discretion you think is appropriate for yourselves. I will only put you in moderation if your comments create problems for ME or THIS SITE, but not if they only impact you.
YOU are responsible for your own comments, if they come knocking. YOUR choice. Just remember this…..
OTHER THAN THAT…….
The bottom line is Free Speech. Theories and ideas you don’t agree with must be WELCOME here, and you must be part of that welcoming. But you do NOT need to be part of any agreement.
Bottom line – respect other people’s FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS.
Our only additional requirement is that you do so NICELY. Or at least try to make some effort in that direction.
SO….. [ENGAGE BOILERPLATE…..]
We must endeavor to persevere to love our frenemies – even here.
Those who cannot deal with this easy requirement will be forced to jump the hoops of moderation, so that specific comments impugning other posters and violating the minimal rules can be sorted out and tossed in the trash.
In Wheatie’s words, “We’re on the same side here so let’s not engage in friendly fire.”
That includes the life skill of just ignoring certain other posters.
We do have a site – The U Tree – where civility is not a requirement. Interestingly, people don’t really go there much. Nevertheless, if you find yourself in an “argument” that can’t really stay civil, please feel free to “take it to the U Tree”. The U Tree is also a good place to report any technical difficulties, if you’re unable to report them here. Please post your comment there on one of Wolf’s posts, or in reply to one of Wolf’s comments, to make sure he sees it (though it may take a few hours).
We also have a backup site, called The Q Tree as well, which is really The Q Tree 579486807. You might call it “Second Tree”. The URL for that site is https://theqtree579486807.wordpress.com/. If this site (theqtree.com) ever goes down, please reassemble at the Second Tree.
If the Second Tree goes down, please go to The U Tree, or to our Gab Group, which is located at https://gab.com/groups/4178.
We also have some “old rules” and important guidelines, outlined here, in a very early post, on our first New Year’s Day, in 2019. The main point is not to make violent threats against people, which then have to be taken seriously by law enforcement, and which can be used as a PRETEXT by enemies of this site.
In the words of Wheatie, “Let’s not give the odious Internet Censors a reason to shut down this precious haven that Wolf has created for us.”
Praying in the Spint.jpeg
A Moment of Prayer
Our policy on extreme religious freedom on this site is discussed HERE. Please feel free to pray and praise God anytime and anywhere.
Thus, please pray for our real President, the one who actually won the election.
You may also pray for our nation, our world, and even our enemies.
Musical Interlude
In honor of dear Wheatie, we now present some music to soothe, inspire, invigorate, or relax.
On quick notice, some STEAMPUNK EPIC ORCHESTRAL music!
Let’s add some Christmas music (but yeah, a bit modern!)
And if that’s not enough, let’s try 11 and 1/2 hours of Christmas music in one video!
That should hold you over!
Call To Battle
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
Dr. Fauci is a national hero who will be remembered for generations to come for his innate goodness & many contributions to public health
Despite your business success, you will be remembered most for fueling public hate & divisions.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Dr. Fauci killed countless Americans, destroyed countless businesses, destroyed the education and daily lives of countless children, and lied repeatedly to accomplish all of that. No wonder an America-hating communist piece of garbage like @JohnBrennan thinks he’s a hero. https://t.co/pqkf4yxUf1
— Nick Searcy, Actor/Director/Producer/Author (@yesnicksearcy) December 11, 2022
No, Fauci will be remembered for his demented obsession with Gain of Function research which drove him to evade Obama & Trump administration rules to commission the reckless experiments in Wuhan that are the most likely origin of the pandemic that killed millions of people. https://t.co/htS5JblHpG
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the DayYear Week:
pulchritude
noun
Great physical beauty and appeal
Beauty; comeliness; handsomeness
That quality of appearance which pleases the eye; beauty; comeliness; grace; loveliness
Attractive moral excellence; moral beauty
Used in a sentence or two:
When I was a kid, and more specifically a pesky brat, who loved to gossip with my no-good buddies about which girls were rumored to STRIP for the boys, I thought pulchritude meant something more like voluptuousness, curvaceousness, or ample breasts, and that it was typically the quality of an adult woman with WGTT (see below) or an “hourglass figure”. Obviously, my exposure to borrowed, stolen, and otherwise laundered issues of Playboy magazine was not exactly teaching me proper word definitions, let alone pulchritude of character.
Used in a better sentence:
By the pulchritude of their souls make up what is wanting in the beauty of their bodies.
This Rejoice & Praise God 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 your opinion addresses the issue only, and does not confront or denigrate 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.
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.”
Our Chief Cornerstone
In Matthew 21:44, Jesus says, “He who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed.” The meaning of this statement lies in the context of the verse and the larger conversation Jesus was having.
Jesus was teaching in the temple courts when the chief priests and elders approached Him and demanded to know the source of His authority. In response, Jesus asked them about John the Baptist—was he a prophet of God or not? The religious leaders, fearing the people’s response to their answer, refused to reveal their true opinion on the matter. In turn, Jesus refused to reveal the source of His authority (Matthew 21:23-27). In doing so, Jesus made it clear that the Jewish leaders themselves had no authority to judge Him.
Jesus then related two parables concerning vineyards. In the first, Jesus told of two sons who were told by their father to go work in the vineyard. The first son initially refused but later changed his mind and went to work. The second son promised to work, but he never went to the vineyard. Jesus applied this to the religious leaders of Israel, who were like the second son—they expressed agreement with the Father but then were disobedient. The sinners who responded to John the Baptist’s message were like the first son—they seemed unlikely candidates for heaven, but they repented and will enter the kingdom (verses 28-32).
In the second parable, Jesus tells of a landowner who, at harvest time, sent some servants to his vineyard to collect the fruit. However, the farmers who were tending the vineyard were a wicked lot, and when the servants arrived, the farmers beat some of them and killed others. Finally, the landowner sent his own son to collect the fruit, expecting that the farmers would show him respect. But the farmers treated the son worst of all, throwing him out of the vineyard and killing him (Matthew 21:33-39).
Jesus then asks a question: “When the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” (Matthew 21:40). The chief priests and elders respond, “He will bring those wretches to a wretched end” (Matthew 21:41). Jesus then presses His point home with a quotation from Psalm 118: “The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone; the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes” (Matthew 21:42). After a warning that the religious leaders will not inherit the kingdom (Matthew 21:43), we come to the statement in question, which is the culmination of a series of dire pronouncements aimed at the chief priests and elders.
Jesus begins with a question about John the Baptist in Matthew 21:25, but by the end of the conversation, Jesus is plainly speaking of Himself, referring to a “father” sending his “son” who was killed (Matthew 21:37). He then immediately quotes a Messianic prophecy (Matthew 21:42), in effect claiming to be the long-awaited Messiah. The progression is logical: a rejection of John leads one naturally to a rejection of Christ, to whom John pointed (John 1:29, 3:30).
The stone, which “the builders rejected” in verse 42, is Jesus. Although rejected, He nevertheless becomes the “chief cornerstone” (NKJV). See also Acts 4:11; Ephesians 2:20; and 1 Peter 2:6-8. The builders’ rejection of the stone is a reference to Christ’s crucifixion. The Lord’s choice of the stone to be the cornerstone is a reference to Christ’s resurrection. God chose His Son, despised and rejected by the world, to be the foundation of His church (1 Corinthians 3:11). “See, I lay a stone in Zion, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone for a sure foundation” (Isaiah 28:16).
Now, there are consequences for coming into contact with a stone. If you trip over the edge of a rock and fall on it, you may break some bones. If a large enough rock falls on top of you, you may be killed. Jesus uses these truths to deliver a warning to the Jewish leaders.
The stone in verse 44 is also Jesus. In saying that those who fall on this stone “will be broken to pieces,” Jesus is warning against opposing Him. Defying Jesus is like beating one’s head against a solid rock—a foolish action. In saying that those upon whom the stone falls “will be crushed,” Jesus is warning against ignoring Him or trivializing Him. Apathy towards Jesus is like standing in the way of a falling rock—another foolish action. “I am here to do God’s work,” Jesus essentially says. “The foundation for the church will be laid. It is unwise to oppose Me because God’s work is not inconsequential.”
Rejection of the Savior is fatal. Unfortunately, many do reject Him. “He will be a stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall” (Isaiah 8:14). To persistently reject the Savior is to court judgment so severe that the only thing left will be dust. The prophet Daniel gives a similar picture of the Messiah, likening Him to a rock “cut out, but not by human hands,” which smashes into the nations of the world and completely obliterates them (Daniel 2:31-45).
Matthew 21:44 is a call to faith, an appeal to open one’s eyes and see that Jesus is indeed the Son of God sent into the world. The verse is also a strict warning against rejecting Jesus Christ. He is the sure Rock of salvation for those who believe, but an immovable stumbling stone for those who do not.
For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know Him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
I must admit it’s having more of an effect than I expected. The Left is having to squirm really hard to pretend it’s not there, meaning it’s penetrating their MSM armor…somewhat.
We got another dump Friday night, and this time more directly to do with the 2020 election, instead of some very-well-connected shit-for-brains’s laptop.
May the Left go apeshit and stroke out. They deserve worse, so I guess I’ve practiced charity/mercy just this once.
A Caution
Just remember…we might replace the RINO candidates. (Or we might not. The record is mixed even though there is more MAGA than there used to be.) But that will make no difference in the long run if the party officials, basically the Rhonna McDaniels (or however that’s spelled–I suspect it’s RINO), don’t get replaced.
State party chairs, vice chairs, secretaries and so on, and the same at county levels, have huge influence on who ultimately gets nominated, and if these party wheelhorses are RINOs, they will work tirelessly to put their own pukey people on the ballot. In fact I’d not be surprised if some of our “MAGA” candidates are in fact, RINO plants, encouraged to run by the RINO party leadership when they realized that Lyn Cheney (and her ilk) were hopelessly compromised as effective candidates. The best way for them to deal with the opposition, of course, is to run it themselves.
Running good candidates is only HALF of the battle!
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:
Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.
Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.
Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!
It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.
In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.
Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.
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).
It looks like gold didn’t move, to speak of! Actually it dropped and (unusual for a Friday) came back up. It’s trying to bust through $1800 but hasn’t done so. In a normal (non-manipulated) market, you would expect it to either bust through and then just keep going, or turn around and go the other way. In this distinctly not non-manipulated market, who knows?
Artemis I Coming Home
The unmanned Artemis I mission is on its way back, after three weeks in space. In the days of the Space Shuttle going just to orbit (instead of to the ISS) that was a fairly long mission. But this time it not only went to the moon it went significantly farther. It even took a picture of the (round) Earth behind an (also round) Moon, the sort of view you would expect if you were arriving from interplanetary space.
This is the furthest any spacecraft designed to carry people in it has ever gone from Earth. And, presuming that the manned flight slated for 2024 follows the same path, those four people will set a record for furthest distance from Mother Earth, ever. And even before they are more than a thousand miles above the surface they will have been further than anyone has been in half a century.
Apollo only took roughly three days to go to the moon (each way); Artemis was about as fast, actually, but took some side trips once it got there. (It would actually be harder to go to the Moon more slowly…orbital mechanics can be surprising sometimes.) But the fact that the missions are slated to take three or more weeks is an indication we have deep space exploration in mind now…as in other planets, as in Mars. (Which sucks, but much less than anywhere else other than Earth.)
The Orion module has a solar array, there are cameras mounted on it so it’s possible to see the spacecraft from the outside. No need for NASA animations like they did for Apollo, and if something like Apollo 13 should happen [I certainly hope NOT], they’ll be able to actually look at the outside of the spacecraft to see what happened. In the actual Apollo 13, the astronauts couldn’t see the damage until they separated from the service module to start re-entry.
Which brings me to today’s topic.
I have to explain something up front, and that is: how a rocket works. It’s not rocket science (seriously; I tell people that rocket science isn’t rocket science, at least it sure ain’t compared to particle physics). In essence a rocket moves because of Newton’s third law…every action comes with an equal but opposite reaction. If you push something away from you in the direction opposite of the one you want to go, you react by going the direction you want to go. A rocket functions by adding a bunch of energy to a bunch of mass and letting that mass go out one end…the rocket goes the other way. The rocket changes speed; and that’s the goal…the change in speed is called delta V, delta V costs reaction mass, and the heavier you are at the time, the more reaction mass it costs.
With nothing to grab onto in space–like, say, tires on pavement, that’s pretty much the only way to get moving (with the exception of a solar sail). You can’t push on something outside your spacecraft, so you have to push on something you brought with you. But that means you must carry a bunch of mass with you for the sole purpose of throwing it away en route! (It is called “reaction mass” for that reason.) And that mass requires even more mass to get moving. The engineering trick is to find the fuel (as it turns out liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen are the best readily available) that will generate the most impulse (change in momentum) for the least amount of weight. (Heating it up by burning it and letting it blast out the back end under high pressure is basically how we do it.) And to design your rocket to be as light as possible and as efficient as possible. That is hard, and we seem to be doing it as about as well as can be done; there’s little room for improvement without an (likely as yet unimagined) radically different way.
We’ve done halting experiments with using a nuclear reactor to heat the reaction mass hotter than burning it would; that would help but few people relish the thought of setting up an almost-explosion under a nuclear reactor and sending that reactor up into the air.
Anyway, in a nutshell, and without supplying numbers, that is the “30,000 foot” “granular” view of what rocket science is trying to overcome.
Apollo was just barely possible. The biggest rocket we could build could barely do the job. Think of it in terms of how many times you have to change velocity, each of which requires reaction mass. And you need to think of it back-to-front. You have to change velocity to safely land on Earth (rather than go splat! and leave a very Moon-like crater), after traveling through space at, basically escape velocity because you just did a ballistic orbit from somewhere far away. That takes reaction mass–a lot of it because the delta-V is something like 25,000 miles per hour. (Except we found a way to avoid that…but I am getting ahead of myself.) That fuel has weight, just like the capsule and astronauts do; in fact it would weigh many times as much as the astronauts and capsule. But in order to get to Earth from the Moon, they have to leave Lunar orbit and get to escape velocity. So you need enough fuel to push the astronauts, and that fuel being brought along for landing, through a second-to-last delta V. That’s much more fuel than you would need if it was just the astronauts and spacecraft you needed to push. And then, you have to get off the Moon in order to be in lunar orbit. More fuel, and it’s like compound interest, all the way back through landing on the moon, entering lunar orbit, leaving earth orbit, and getting to Earth orbit…such that it would require a truly gigantic amount of fuel for the initial boost off of Earth, because most of what you’d be lifting was…fuel. The rocket would be as big as a mountain. And that is not that much of an exaggeration; it might not be any exaggeration at all.
We couldn’t do that then. And we can’t do that now.
No I am not claiming we never went. I am claiming we did a lot of creative engineering, instead of just building a massive one-piece rocket. We set things up in such a way as to save fuel. We didn’t, for example, land the whole spacecraft on the moon, just a very tiny, fragile part of it, and we only sent two of the three astronauts down. We also threw away empty fuel tanks (i.e., rocket stages) on the way (a trick we need to do just to get to Earth orbit, unfortunately), so at least we weren’t coming back to earth with a gigantic (read massive) spacecraft that was mostly empty fuel tanks, then trying to land it gently. We were coming back with the bare minimum mass. And of course one other thing, perhaps the most essential, which I’ll get to very shortly.
Even with all those savings, it’s insane. Artemis weighed 5,750,000 pounds at launch. What’s coming back to us in Sunday weighs 18,200 lbs, less than 1/300th as much. That’s 99.7% overhead or 0.3% payload. And they did their best to make sure as much of that was fuel as possible. If you want to double the weight of that capsule, you don’t just add another 18,200 pounds to Artemis’s liftoff weight…no, you make Artemis 11,500,000 pounds. Every pound sent to the moon and then back to Earth requires 300 pounds of rocket plus fuel. (I expect they make sure the astronauts don’t eat too much the night before launch.)
You are, I hope, beginning to understand why space travel costs so damned much.
I promised to tell you about one more savings, and I saved it because it’s going to cover the rest of this post: The most critical and scariest thing we did was to come up with a way to make the final delta-V–the one that would make the rocket as big as a mountain–without expending any fuel at all! That was a yuge savings, because that gets compounded through all of the phases of the mission, not just the first two or three of them. And that alone might just have reduced Apollo to one 1/4 the size it would have been, otherwise–changing 25,000 miles an hour into zero miles an hour takes a lot of fuel there at the end.
I refer, of course, to slamming into the Earth’s atmosphere at escape velocity and letting air resistance slow the capsule down for us. No fuel burned.
The trick was (and is) to do so in a way that didn’t result in spacecraft+astronauts burned instead. Slamming into the atmosphere at 32 times the sea-level speed of sound will heat things considerably; five thousand degrees Fahrenheit is quite toasty. (And incidentally, this is one of the major reasons hypersonic travel in the atmosphere is a challenge.)
It’s called aerobraking, when it isn’t called “bring me my brown pants.”
Because the rocket equation (which implies all that compounding) was well known since WWII if not earlier, we knew we’d have to do this if we were to go to the moon, and tests had been done well before Apollo 11. The first thought was to make the spacecraft extremely streamlined, but that turned out to be a bad idea. So instead a nearly flat face with as much air resistance as possible would be presented to the atmosphere smacking into the vessel at 25000 miles per hour. (And I thought the wind here was bad.) But it had to be a material that wouldn’t just burn away, so that took a lot of materials engineering. In the case of the Space Shuttle the heat-resistant tiles did the job (though the Space Shuttle didn’t come back at nearly as high a speed).
But that wasn’t the only issue. We had to hit the atmosphere at an almost perfectly precise angle. Too steep, and the spacecraft would burn up anyway. Too shallow and the spacecraft would actually skip off the atmosphere like skipping rocks off a pond. (Before you object that the air–certainly not the thin upper atmosphere–isn’t as substantial as the water, try hitting it at 25,000 miles per hour and report back.)
Skipping off the atmosphere would not be instantly fatal, but the spacecraft would now be moving away from Earth at escape velocity and there’s be absolutely no way to rescue the astronauts and (remember, no fuel) no way for them to turn around and come back.
As the spacecraft is approaching Earth, which presents a circular cross section to it, it has to aim near the edge of that cross section…somewhere in a ring about 22 miles thick (but thousands of miles cross). Outside the ring…skip. Inside…slag.
The movie Apollo 13 had one clip in it from an actual newscast at the time, where a blowtorch was aimed at a model of the capsule as the “news”reader talked about what had to happen. I tried to find that clip and failed, but it was an understatement of the peril they had to go through.
So you gotta hit the right angle. And you have to hit the right part of the arc of the ring, too, or you end up landing in Antarctica or Siberia instead of near the Navy ships sent to retrieve you.
Your arrival time at the ring (hopefully not ‘of fire’) is dictated by one thing: the time you left lunar orbit. Because once you’ve done that, you’re basically a bullet, only much bigger and much faster. (Yes, you can make tiny course corrections…but those are basically windage and elevation, not arrival time at target. And you need windage and elevation, because that’s how you make sure you’re going to hit that ring.) So where the astronauts came down was dictated days in advance and they didn’t have much in the way of choices, which is why they came down at the corner of No and Where out in the Pacific. It was a matter of which way the Earth was facing when they hit that ring, which, again, depended on when they left lunar orbit.
And yet, we did this nine times for Apollo 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17. (As well as for Apollo 7 and 9, but only from Earth orbit.) Nary a hitch. The Columbia disaster was a failure of the Shuttle tile system and is similar, but Apollo had a perfect record handling a tougher problem.
In the last fifty years almost nothing has changed. We still have to play meteor to get back to Earth. We’ve gotten better at building spacecraft, but we didn’t use the mass savings on fuel to brake at the return; we just made the spacecraft bigger. Artemis is supposed to hold at least four astronauts, not just three. And it has to do the same trick the Apollo astronauts had to do.
We have a couple of advantages they didn’t have though, and they all boil down to better computing. The computers on Apollo were extremely primitive by today’s standards; you have thousands of times more computing power in your phone. More computing power means finer control over those tiny midcourse corrections, which means more control over how you come back.
The other one, which also comes back to computing power, is that Artemis actually will, deliberately, skip off the atmosphere…but very late in the process, after it has slowed down to merely a nice suborbital velocity. It’ll do this by tumbling in just the right way at just the right time. Once it’s back up in space it can cool off a bit, but then it will come back at a slower speed (typical of mere low-earth-orbit craft) and there will be a lot of control over where it comes down. In fact, they’re going to splash down just off of San Diego. This reduces the maximum g-force during reentry from 6.8 g to about 4 g. (And I’ve actually been on amusement park rides at 4 g.)
This is, as far as I know, a first time trying this, so keep your fingers crossed on Sunday.
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 !!!
In a large pan, heat the red wine, triple sec, orange juice, cranberry juice, sugar syrup and cinnamon for about seven minutes or until it begins to steam. Take off the heat, add the almond extract and brown sugar and keep stirring until they are dissolved. Serve in latte glasses or mugs.
Or…Irish Coffee mugs. We have those.
Before we deck the halls lets get the [BAD] trade of the century out of the way.
Biden’s entire “presidency” has been one red pill event after another. Whatever the worst decision is, he does it. And he does it in a way that gives us ammunition to wake others up with on a daily basis. If it truly had to be this way to highlight the stark contrast between globalist puppets and Donald Trump, then it’s working just fine. More than fine. Non-political people hear that Biden just released a merchant of doom for a lowly America-hating NBA player and they begin to question things. From now until the actual precipice, expect events that bring people to their Neo waking up from the Matrix moment. This means for you, who are already awake, there needs to be peace and laughter to go along with your deep desire to see justice carried out around the world. Else you lose your mind at the absurdity of this journey. There are laughs to be had even on the serious trek down the abyss. Know that this story doesn’t end in doom.
We traded a world renowned arms dealer that took years to catch and whom represents an existential threat as a free man for a pothead that wasn’t smart enough to obey the laws of another country?
Why aren’t more than 50 former intelligence officials writing a letter condemning Biden for swapping a terrorist arms dealer for an America hating drug smuggler while leaving a retired Marine to rot in a Russian prison?
You guys know how to make sure Putin keeps arresting Americans and severely punishing them?
Trade him an arms dealer aka “The Merchant of Death” someone guilty of conspiring to kill Americans and aiding a terrorist organization for an America Hating WNBA activist.
MORE: To secure Griner’s return, Biden has freed arms dealer Viktor Bout. Bout gained infamy as the “Merchant of Death” & was found guilty for conspiring to sell AK-47’s that would’ve been used to kill DEA agents.
“The ‘Merchant of Death’ Victor Bout, is one of the most dangerous men on the face of the earth.”…@60Minutes Yet we traded him for an American-hating, third rate, basketball player. pic.twitter.com/UeQKGg0tQR
She’s someone who hates the USA, was arrogant enough to smuggle drugs into Russia, and now she’s the sole reason one of the world’s biggest terrorist was released back to Russia.
All future crimes of this Russian mobster – will be 100% her fault.
Truly a stupid moment for Biden since he abandoned Paul Whelan and Marc Fogel to rot, trading a washed up basketball "star" for an arms dealer likely responsible for thousands of deaths.
Only Biden… The US negotiated a Trade deal where we give back a very bad dude “the merchant of death” and we get back a very bad Dude “Brittney” Griner who was perfectly happy to disrespect our country and Veterans!
The mainstream media refuses to acknowledge or look into the claims Q has made because they are complicit in crimes against children. Who do you think hid Epstein Island from the public? It was the mainstream media. It all goes back to the children. Full stop. This is why the anon must replace them and We the People must learn to become the news for ourselves. It is happening.
After being awakened I feel like I’m living in one big mental asylum 😩 How are people getting away with the things they’re getting away with 🤯 What is going on?
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. A third site has been added for site outages of longer duration.
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. In that spirit, though, threats of violence real or hypothetical are out of bounds.
Fellow tree dweller the late Wheatie gave us some good reminders on the basics of civility in political discourse:
No food fights.
No running with scissors.
If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
And Auntie DePat’s requests:
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.
17Thus says the LORD, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: “I am the LORD your God, who teaches you to profit, who leads you in the way you should go. 18O that you had hearkened to my commandments! Then your peace would have been like a river, and your righteousness like the waves of the sea; 19your offspring would have been like the sand, and your descendants like its grains; their name would never be cut off or destroyed from before me.”
PSALMS 1:1-4, 6
1Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; 2but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night. 3He is like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. 4The wicked are not so, but are like chaff which the wind drives away. 6for the LORD knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.
MATTHEW 11:16-19
16“But to what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market places and calling to their playmates, 17`We piped to you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’ 18For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, `He has a demon’; 19the Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, `Behold, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds.”
SATIRE!
Library Kids Excited To Hear Story Read By Mysterious New Drag Queen Kirkdazzle Glameroni https://t.co/fGe1CY5Iyh
We expected them to cheat. Feel the frustration of another rigged election but then give it over to God. Figure out what God is calling you specifically to do. Pray for this country. Remember Trump’s recent statements. We need an unprecedented cure so don’t hang your hopes somewhere where they don’t belong. Only God can truly deliver this nation and we get to play a role together with Him and the beautiful Patriots we stand together with. You’re not the only one feeling the anguish. Get your eyes on Him. We need a revival in this nation. We need unity and truth. It’s not over until God says it is.
At this moment in history, the awakening mind needs encouragement and faith more than ever.
Without it, the black pill, ‘Doomer’s Refrain’ and defeatism can embed themselves deep into the psyche, and once it does, it often refuses to let go.
This cannot be allowed to happen.
We are witnessing a near-constant bombardment of information designed to bring others into contact with their red pill moment, and that is not always what the individual patriot is meant to digest on a daily basis. Thus, taking the eagle-eyed view might be your only true reprieve as we transition through these dire times. Cultivating that view should be one of your core priorities, or else the noise of the day-to-day news could drown out your hope until it becomes too difficult to defend your emotional well-being.
This Macro Viewpoint is why I’ve been such a proponent of feeding ourselves with more than just the same ‘precipice’ narratives designed for the normie and the half-awake. We do not need to continually risk our own mental health by incessantly reporting what is not always meant for you, the awakened patriot. Yes, these negative realities persist in our world and they need to be addressed, but there are also beautiful moments happening all around us, and your ability to see and focus on those moments that uplift you is imperative for mental and emotional survival in this barren season.
This is why I am writing this to you today, because not every season you pass through is destined to feel satisfying.
Sometimes you’re simply going through a transition, leaving something behind in order to reach something new.
On the one hand, you can’t give up the promises and faith you have for the good that might come into your life, but on the other hand, by living in the tension of not being where you want to go, you risk upending all of the progress you’ve made on this journey.
But the Founders were prescient in their understanding of mankind. Ben Franklin’s warning to the woman who asked what kind of government had been created surmises their awareness of the tendencies of men: “A republic, madam… if you can keep it.” The Founders knew that government, not foreign powers, would be the biggest threat to the rights and freedoms of citizens.
So the Declaration states, “…whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these Ends, it the Right of the people to alter or abolish it.” They acknowledged man’s tendency to stick with the status quo, even in the face of assaults on their rights and freedoms: “…all Experience hath shown, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed.”
/1 🚨🦠BREAKING: Following the #TwitterFiles, AFL has obtained new documents uncovering a secret Twitter portal U.S. Govt officials used to censor dissenting COVID-19 views and violate the First Amendment.
Follow along for disturbing findings from the 500+ page release ⤵️
People feel the Biden White House has turned the American Dream into the American Game—and it’s fixed.
That’s why Middle America sees too many people at the top getting bailouts and too many people at the bottom getting handouts. pic.twitter.com/Mm0bDZEgX8
The RINO Lt. Gov of Georgia, @GeoffDuncanGA, ran to the liberal media a couple days ago & said he won’t be voting for Herschel Walker. He encouraged others to stay home as well.
Paul Ryan & other RINOs will wrongly blame Trump for the loss.
FACT: “Batteries do not produce electricity, but store electricity produced elsewhere, mainly by coal, uranium, natural gas plants or diesel generators. To say that an electric car gives zero emissions is another hoax of the 2030 Agenda..” pic.twitter.com/VzML9eD0mH
Kirk Cameron isn't allowed to read his children's book to kids in over 50 public libraries, but the secular religious cult of drag queen story hour is considered "family friendly"
Who has enough time on their hands to think up this sort of stuff to research?
Excess deaths in Australia ‘incredibly high’ at 13%: Actuaries Institute analysis of ABS data | https://t.co/ATuS3UWSMv — Australia’s leading news. And yet, they say it’s “not clear” what’s causing rise in deaths🙄. All explained at https://t.co/L6UAypIu1Ahttps://t.co/eC1IVdfYEm
— Dr Rashid A Buttar, FAAPM, FACAM, FAAIM (@DrButtar) December 7, 2022
Please, note I’m trying to keep mentions of unexplained and excess deaths to a minimum for my own sanity.
Grocery chain Kroger is expecting Republicans to save them from Dem regulation after years of going woke. Sen. Tom Cotton told them to pound sand. https://t.co/lpr7In8IBB
— LaughLoveLive, identifies as Deplorable Patriot 🐞 (@LaughLoveLive1) December 7, 2022
____________________________________
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, the late Wheatie, gave us some good reminders on the basics of civility in political discourse:
No food fights
No running with scissors
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.
3Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, 4even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. 5He destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, 6to the praise of his glorious grace which he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. 11In him, according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to the counsel of his will, 12we who first hoped in Christ have been destined and appointed to live for the praise of his glory.
Clapper and Brennan (and many others) and their dishonest “Russia” narrative along w/ collusion w/ big tech (twitter +) likely changed the outcome of our 2020 presidential election (never mind 2022). If you care about America’s Future and our rights as free citizens under a functioning constitutional republic, you better speak now or forever hold your tongue.
As a free citizen in still a relatively free country, I ask what recourse do we have? Do we run the election again?
Facebook threatens to remove all news content if U.S. lawmakers approve the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) pic.twitter.com/RmFWmgZYou
“We purchased bulk cell phone data and tracked migrants over a 1 month period from 30 NGOs at the southern border to the interior.” pic.twitter.com/bUh9tFDyHa
The Venezuelan corruption also leads to Glencore, the Swampy commodities trading firm. It's founder & former CEO Marc Rich required a last minute pardon from President Clinton to shut down investigations into other cases…https://t.co/zbKhb1LUCH
Democrats claim everything is a conspiracy theory. But the one thing they’ve never disputed is the fact that America is turning into a communist country.
6) I am among the millions of those low propensity Trump voters who historically don't vote because we are able to see the US two party system for what it truly is – two equally worthless parties who don't give a shit about the American people.
— Bias Monitor | Unbiased Daily (@monitor_bias) December 6, 2022
The BCCI case started because of mafia prosecutions where Donald & Robert Trump had helped FBI against the mob. The mobsters being prosecuted by Rudy, Comey & Mueller were using many of the same money launderers that the CIA used in illegal operations.https://t.co/VbhiHNWJNS
Oh my GOSH, this jabbery has gotten so out of control! Dr Masanori Fukushima's warning to the Japanese Ministry of Health is terrifying. https://t.co/N4AxVkwmB2
Don't let desperate Democrats sneak the JCPA into the NDAA. It has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with silencing conservative voices and independent journalism.
Deuteronomy instructs, “You shall not oppress a hired worker.” Apparently, no one told President Biden or the rest of the political-industrial complex when it came to the rail workers.@matthewschmitz and I are honored to publish this by Sen. @HawleyMOhttps://t.co/JFtxVToo5d
(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, the late Wheatie, gave us some good reminders on the basics of civility in political discourse:
No food fights.
No running with scissors.
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, as well as the newest rescue venue.
Auntie DePat’s requests:
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.
28Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
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.
And…members of the QTree who no longer participate for one reason or another.
We are getting ready to experience a level of evil that will be hard to comprehend. Stay strong. Be prepared.
It is quite clear, as per Wolf’s message from July, that we are under spiritual attack. Building up a robust arsenal of prayer and discipline is a must in fighting the enemy and his minions.
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.
Cover image: Skating in Central Park, Agnes Tait, 1934
Okay, the fruitcakes are in the oven (until you’ve mixed and packed them in the pans on your own…it’s NOT easy), I have a collection from the last four days and the Couch Commando will not SHUT UP, so, please, excuse any testiness.
Before iPhones and the internet and Twitter and outrage culture, there was an understanding that beneath the veneer of civilization was something wild, dangerous, and joyful.
And it could be lived in much better looking clothes.
El Gato Malo, darling, as wonderful as that piece is, you are not e.e. cummings. When you get to that level of recognition you can misspell your name and no one will care.
No $#!+. Bunch of suburbanite white…when I was a kid, we had Jews, Catholics, Protestants, blacks and the kids who were half Chinese, half Japanese and deaf in our backyard on a regular basis. Please, don’t preach “diversity” to one who has lived it.
I know it’s a book review, but sometimes they do give good information.
How amusing that Trump tricked the mainstream media into reporting that he wants the constitution to be thrown away when it’s the Democrats, Rhinos, and the deep state that have been trampling our constitution for generations. The fact that Trump tricks liberals and normies into talking about how we must defend the constitution after they tried to forcefully inject us with vaccines, bring in passports, cancel our free speech, and take away our guns is truly the height of irony. Trump is always forcing the media to humiliate itself at every turn.
I don’t remember where I left off, so, sorry for any overlap.
The people who believe men can get pregnant, there's 1,267 genders, and cow farts are going to destroy planet earth … are having meltdowns because they're worried about misinformation on new Twitter. 😂
The thing about free speech is that it is not only vital for good ideas to thrive, it is also the best way to extinguish shockingly terrible and dangerous ones.
So we have proof: Biden’s team engaged in *bright red line* violations of free speech principles to suppress disfavored speech- especially as it related to their election prospects
This is a massive scandal, and Biden should rightly be IMPEACHED for it
Last night’s news was what I wrote my last book about! With a ton of info on the coordinated suppression of news and debate about the Biden family business and corruption. “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections” https://t.co/eqQZF9vgRR
Facebook is even more powerful than Twitter with far more influence on the electorate, so just imagine what the internal chats were like there when they decided to suppress the Hunter Laptop story and then later *boot the sitting president of the United States off the platform*
Firmly standing my ground. Steve Bannon is correct, @joebiden was installed by the national security & intelligence apparatus. @elonmusk's #TwitterFiles prove their insurrection against us, the American people. Unless we get control of them, we don't have a country @JudiciaryGOPhttps://t.co/z4lODMwNHW
Sad fact: it took a billionaire with a conscience buying twitter for the American people to find out what our government has really been doing behind the scenes to keep us in the dark
Joe Rogan: “No one is being held accountable, no one is going to jail for it…the deep state is 100% real. The swamp is real. They're real monsters” 🔥pic.twitter.com/DG9KfOjlnj
Why are huge crowds across the globe paying to hear a Canadian psychology professor?
Maybe they’re desperate for a wise person to tell them things don’t have to be this way. They crave insight and solutions in making their lives and world more civilized. .@jordanbpetersonhttps://t.co/EGbmFkNDrX
Don’t remember anyone giving a funk about the Constitution when Joe Biden was jailing protesters without trial and booting troops who refused a forced Covid vax
I’d throw in a few Rockefellers and Rothschilds also.
There are not nearly enough music videos on Rumble. I’ll just use what I can find even if there are pieces I’ve posted before reprising.
On the Glockenspiel?
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.
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. A third site has been added for site outages of longer duration.
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, the late Wheatie, gave us some good reminders on the basics of civility in political discourse:
No food fights.
No running with scissors.
If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
And Auntie DePat’s requests:
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.
By now, I have learned to keep my reactions pretty close to my chest. There is such a thing as reacting too soon before more information is released, and it’s easy to make assumptions if you don’t see the whole picture. There’s power in observation.
1Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. 2Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the LORD’s hand double for all her sins. 3A voice cries: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. 4Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. 5And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.” 6A voice says, “Cry!” And I said, “What shall I cry?” All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field. 7The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the LORD blows upon it; surely the people is grass. 8The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand for ever. 9Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, fear not; say to the cities of Judah, “Behold your God!” 10Behold, the Lord GOD comes with might, and his arm rules for him; behold, his reward is with him, and his recompense before him. 11He will feed his flock like a shepherd, he will gather the lambs in his arms, he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young.
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.
Satire
DNC, Media Collude To Suppress Story About DNC, Media Colluding To Suppress Story https://t.co/et4UFFXUlb
Thanks to Darren Beattie, Elon Musk, and Gail Combs, I have been struck by lightning, and can now see the origins of the highly successful “trust and safety” censorship paradigm.
I survey the catastrophe that “Trust & Safety” has been for not only Twitter and Apple, but all of Big Tech, America, and the world, and I cry out “Well played, CCP! Well played!”
And you, my fellow coders who watched it all turn to crap, know I’m right. We did not object to the early assaults on Free Speech, as CHINA slyly moved into our tech businesses, and now we have paid the price.
Or if we really want to be complete…..
The part about “can’t code” welcoming in the Trojan Horse is important. In my opinion and experience, it was the non-coding “verbal world” of bureaucratic policy which welcomed “trust and safety”, then forcing it on the more mathematical geek world which had once been a bastion of honesty, truth, and freedom.
Free speech mattered to old tech. Not so much to the people who took control of tech.
This is relevant, in that WOMEN tend to show up as the cops, police chiefs and ambassadors of “trust and safety”. It’s a very female and “beta male” thing, even at the high levels.
BEFORE ELON:
After Elon:
Yeah, those pictures are a bit of an unfair comparison, because they’re different company functions as well, but in other ways, that in itself is exactly the problem.
Coders versus the people who tell them what to do. Twitter was filled with chiefs and not enough Indians.
ALTHOUGH perhaps one too many……
NOW PROVEN: Vijaya Gadde had more interference in the US election than Russia ever did.
This corporate cultural insanity ("satire is dangerous") was a product of the cultural over-feminization of Twitter, steeped in woke, into which was seeded the "problem" of free speech and the "solution" of moderation. Then add authoritarian influence by Eric Holder and DOJ. https://t.co/iReTmDGI4qpic.twitter.com/SrlDJNvENV
Yoel Roth’s problems don’t end with his refusal to “manspread” like a man, but the problems surely start there. Any “man” who is threatened by the Babylon Bee needs help, not power.
Turns out that Eric Holder’s former chief of staff was the head of censorship at Apple for quite a while, including the 2020 election.
Here is the brief version of what happened. Please go to the original for the full story. I am only including a highly edited snippet of the middle of the story (and yet it’s VERY long).
FTA…..
The current head of Apple Trust and Safety is someone who is clearly aware of the value of having a low profile online. Look for details on Jessica Gimarc-Savini and you’ll find her sparse LinkedIn page, her (lesbian) wedding page, and not much else.
While we know little about Jessica Savini, we can learn much from a profile of her predecessor, former head of Trust and Safety at Apple Margaret Richardson.
Richardson served as Apple’s top trust and safety figure from August 2020 through May 2022.
As you read the following, keep in mind that Apple is the largest company in the world, with a market capitalization of $2.3 trillion dollars. Its annual revenues exceed the GDP of most U.S. states. It’s annual net profits are worth more than the GDP of Bulgaria. Apple might as well be a country unto itself, and a powerful one at that. Of all of the people they could have chosen to be the key decision maker for content moderation and safety — that is, censorship — you’d think they’d at least choose someone with the appearance of moderation and lack of political bias.
Think again.
While Richardson wisely avoided tweeting during her tenure at Apple, at her previous job, first as “director of global policy” and then “director of trust” as Airbnb, Richardson was entirely unrestrained. Her still-extant tweets from August 2020 and before give a stark demonstration of her thinking, a perpetually-spinning hamster wheel of stock left-wing political tropes. For starters, Richardson’s Twitter banner screams “Black Lives Matter”!
But that’s only scratching the surface.
Dig back through 5+ years of tweets and retweets, and you see a type that is disturbingly common: A person’s whose public life consists almost wholly of mindlessly affirming, then reaffirming, and then re-reaffirming, far-left and liberal partisan orthodoxies.
It’s not that any one tweet from Richardson is particularly bad. It’s that that’s all there is. She never strays into talking about her family or her favorite books or even, say, her favorite vacation spots (she was working at a lodging company, after all!). It’s just the current partisan lib obsession du jour, every time, with ruthless tedium.
Richardson isn’t just deeply ideological, pro-BLM, and so forth. She’s also narrowly and almost pettily partisan.
If this was your barista at Starbucks, or a Congressional staffer, or heck, an ordinary Apple engineer, this would be rather lame but unremarkable. But this is the person Apple chose to lead its Trust and Safety division, the person chosen to be head censor at the most powerful company in the world. This is the person who was empowered to make crucial, politically-loaded decisions during one of the most hotly-contested elections in American history.
Five months after Richardson started at Apple, the company made one of the most ideologically aggressive cancellations ever when it banned Parler from its app store. While Apple works hard to obscure its decision-making process, Richardson was without a doubt central to that decision, and with her involved, it wasn’t a surprising one. In April 2022, shortly before she left, the company also committed itself to a ridiculous internal “racial equity audit.”
So, where did this person come from? Well, just looking at her tweets, one notices that Richardson doesn’t just have a habit of boosting left-wing causes. She has a noticeable preference for boosting senior figures from the Obama Administration itself — Valerie Jarrett, Arne Duncan, John Kerry, and so forth. Richardson was particularly active when President Trump dismissed acting attorney general Sally Yates for insubordination after she refused to enforce his executive order implementing a travel ban on several nations linked to Islamic terrorism.
This isn’t random.
After earning dual degrees in law from UC-Berkeley and in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School, Richardson spent three years working at a free legal clinic in the Bay Area. From there, she went to the Obama campaign, and after his election she joined the Justice Department as a top adviser to Eric Holder, eventually ascending to become his chief of staff.
Wolf again….
SO – I hope that is crystal clear.
The Obama-Holder DOJ directly controlled Apple’s view of “acceptable content” during the engineered fall of the Trump administration (a.k.a. “The Coup”) as well as first two years of the Biden administration.
This is exactly why I absolutely cannot stand Apple News, for it’s horrible, judgmental, left-wing slant.
If you read the rest of the Revolver article, it is VERY clear that the “Trust and Safety” racket is largely an infiltration of Big Tech by an ideology centered on Eric Holder and the DOJ.
In my opinion, Trust & Safety in Big Tech was ultimately a downstream effect of the disastrous Obamacare website, which was used to “lure in” Big Tech for what became an infection operation.
People who had no idea how to deal with criminals and communists were sheep led to the slaughter.
SO – back to Twittergate.
I didn’t really make the connection of Twitter’s “Trust and Safety” machine to DOJ, until Elon Musk revealed The Twitter Files to the world, via left-trusted journalist Matt Taibbi, in a massive act of transparency.
Somewhere in the middle of Matt Taibbi’s tweet-thread, I realized that Apple and Twitter were undoubtedly similar stories – and that Eric Holder likely had an insider at Twitter.
17. On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published BIDEN SECRET EMAILS, an expose based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop: https://t.co/q4zaMw6aVV
19. White House spokeswoman Kaleigh McEnany was locked out of her account for tweeting about the story, prompting a furious letter from Trump campaign staffer Mike Hahn, who seethed: “At least pretend to care for the next 20 days.” pic.twitter.com/CcXTfsdzCT
23. The decision was made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde playing a key role.
https://t.co/j4EeXEAw6F can see the confusion in the following lengthy exchange, which ends up including Gadde and former Trust and safety chief Yoel Roth. Comms official Trenton Kennedy writes, “I'm struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe”: pic.twitter.com/w1wBMlG33U
But THIS is where the DOJ comes back into things. The next tweet (28) is like discovering Eric Holder working at Twitter.
28. To which former Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker again seems to advise staying the non-course, because “caution is warranted”: pic.twitter.com/tg4D0gLWI6
Crooked FBI Lawyer James Baker, the main architect of Spygate was involved in Twitter's Decision to Suppress Hunter Biden Laptop From Hell Story!!!https://t.co/2oTfJrufII
I had figured there was some Holder groupie analogous to Richardson at Apple, inside Twitter’s Trust & Safety apparatus. I had no idea that Holder’s henchman – THE Jim Baker, fired as part of Spygate – was there.
Let’s just look at that Jim Baker message more closely…..
This is an incredible stall tactic. Twitter can hold off the truth forever with this thinking.
Note how the “hacked materials” policy is already anti-journalism, but combine it with a DOJ Obama/Hillary toadie INSTALLED INSIDE TWITTER, and, it’s every bit like Apple. Complete DOJ commie control.
SO – it’s clear that “Trust and Safety” is a DOJ gig – right?
How could this possibly be worse?
The trick is understanding the “environmental push” for “Trust and Safety” over free speech, which overwhelmed both government and tech. It almost certainly had foreign help.
Gail Combs Exposes Trust-and-Safetygate
Today, Gail posted a series of deep dives into the subject of where much of the “trust and safety” censorship has appeared and festered in both government and Big Tech – spilling over into everything, including elections, journalism, STEM, and even White House policymaking.
The big picture blew me away, as I saw how successful this movement was, in transforming our own government and national security complex away from freedom and toward CCP-style totalitarianism, without even being fully understood by the victims.
Some of the CCP infiltration is obvious – some of it is not.
I present it to you now, largely unedited except by Gail herself, in preparing it for this post. I have also taken the liberty of embedding the videos by hand, rather than just leaving links. I have further included some comments that Gail left out, because I feel they are still important, even though she did not.
From BadKitty’s Thread — The KEY INFO showing GOVERNMENT CENSORSHIP IMPACTING ELECTIONS!!!
They also submit reported tweets to CISA at DHS. Boom!
DHS puts on its CISA website for election misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation to be reported to Misinformation@Cisecurity. (NGO Katie Hobbs used for reporting.)
RUMOR CONTROL PAGE START-UP GUIDE Misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (MDM) can present risks to the election infrastructure community, its owners and operators, and the public. MDM can spread quickly, causing rumors to undermine facts.
The risks of MDM range from undermining confidence in institutions to activating and inspiring dangerous behaviors and violence. This Rumor Control Page Start-Up Guide is for organizations seeking to dispel specific MDM narratives through transparent and authoritative information. Designed for use by state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) government officials and private sector partners, this guide cites the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Rumor Control page as a model for debunking inaccurate narratives. The recommendations in this guide are not intended to be one-size-fits-all and should be adapted to the capabilities and resources available, as well as the MDM risks facing the community. Organizations should only set up a rumor control webpage related to issues for which they have access to information and expertise necessary to properly dispel MDM narratives and articulate facts. Each organization that plans to set up a rumor control page may want to consult with the appropriate organization legal counsel, if possible, prior to beginning operations. What is a rumor control page? A rumor control page is a web page that offers the public accurate and authoritative sources of information which will help address common MDM narratives. It is provided by a trusted voice to either preempt or respond to developing narratives. Credible messengers are most effective at disproving falsehoods. A rumor control page should not be considered the sole source of truth, rather it should drive people to seek more information about a complex subject by directing them to other trustworthy sources.
With a rumor control page, election officials and stakeholders can dispel rumors about the systems and assets they manage and have unique insight into. Some election offices may already have public information websites, which commonly include a “Frequently Asked Questions” page and/or press releases that seek to clarify information. In this sense, a rumor control page can be viewed as an extension of existing efforts….
It is important to note that a rumor control page is only one element of a successful MDM response strategy. Improving resilience of elections to MDM also requires reporting MDM narratives. The Center for Internet Security (CIS) was established to support the cybersecurity needs of the election subsector. The CIS can be leveraged to report real-time MDM via email at misinformation@cisecurity.org
Be sure to include links and screenshots as well as details on the misinformation and your jurisdiction.
Breaking thread! The CCP is heavily involved with the majority of orgs involved in disinformation work, social media, and targeting of conservatives as extremists thru the Carnegie Endowments. What’s worse is Bidens CIA director was president of Carnegie Endowments from 2015-2021 pic.twitter.com/GZgdfNBQcQ
Texas Republican Rep. Lance Gooden called on CIA Director William Burns to address his “strong ties” to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) while formerly heading an elite Washington, D.C., think tank, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
At least 20 undisclosed CCP members worked at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace during Burns’ presidency of the think tank, the DCNF recently reported.
“Evidence would suggest Director Burns lied under oath during his confirmation hearing,” Gooden told the DCNF, referring to Burns’ February 2021 CIA confirmation hearing.
Texas Republican Rep. Lance Gooden called on CIA Director William Burns to address his “strong ties” to the Chinese Communist Party while formerly heading an elite Washington, D.C., think tank, according to a letter shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation Monday….
“The vast influence the CCP had at Carnegie during your tenure as president and the continued influence they have today — despite claims you made at your confirmation hearing that you had ended the CCP’s influence — presents a significant lapse in judgment and brings into question your ability to identify and mitigate national security risks,” Gooden’s letter said. (RELATED: Biden’s New Green Energy Adviser Has Ties To Chinese Communist Party Front Group)
There is a lot of information coming out and We want to capture it before it disappears.
First a Youtube from August 25, 2020 just before early voting started.
Are We Ready? Foreign Interference, Disinformation and the 2020 election Streamed live on Aug 25, 2020 Public and private sector leaders join the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council to discuss what steps they have taken to secure the information space around the 2020 presidential election. For further information, please visit: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/event…
——————————————————————————————– Subscribe for more! https://www.youtube.com/user/Atlantic…
Driven by our mission of “shaping the global future together,” the Atlantic Council is a nonpartisan organization that galvanizes US leadership and engagement in the world, in partnership with allies and partners, to shape solutions to global challenges.
The Department of Homeland Security has hired the former chairman of the Election Assistance Commission, Matt Masterson, to help federal, state, and local authorities coordinate cybersecurity efforts ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, the department announced Monday. Masterson will serve as senior cybersecurity adviser within the National Protection and Programs Directorate’s Office of Cybersecurity and Communications. “There are few who have Matt’s experience working with all levels of government and the private sector to protect our nation’s election systems. His wealth of experience and depth of knowledge make him highly respected on both sides of the aisle,” Chris Krebs, NPPD senior official performing the duties of the undersecretary, said in a statement. Krebs added that Masterson’s previous work as chief information officer in the Ohio secretary of state’s office and at the EAC “significantly advanced” the country’s cybersecurity efforts.
Matthew Masterson, former chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, has been named senior adviser for the Department of Homeland Security‘s cybersecurity unit, Washington Examiner reported Monday.
DHS expects Masterson to continue working with federal, state and local officials to protect election systems against cyber threats.
He served as EAC commissioner for nearly four years, following his nomination by then President Barack Obama and subsequent confirmation by the Senate in late 2014.
Masterson previously held various positions within the Ohio secretary of state’s office, where he managed voting system certification procedures and led the development of online voter registry and ballot delivery platforms for military and overseas voters.
Christopher Cox Krebs (born 1977) is an American attorney who served as Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the United States Department of Homeland Security from November 2018 until November 17, 2020 when President Donald Trump fired Krebs for contradicting Trump’s claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election.[1]
Clara Tsao is a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. Clara is a national security and disinformation expert and technology entrepreneur currently serving as the co-founder and on the board of the Trust & Safety Professional Association and the Trust & Safety Foundation. Clara previously was the Senior Advisor for Emerging Technology at the Department of Homeland Security and the Chief Technology Officer of two U.S. Government task forces focused on countering foreign influence, election security, and homegrown extremism. Clara also serves as a nonresident expert at the German Marshall Fund, a senior advisor for the UN-backed initiative, Tech Against Terrorism, and the President/Chair of the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows Foundation. Clara has also held fellowships focused on national security and technology policy with the Mozilla Foundation and Google.
Clara Tsao is Cofounder of the Trust & Safety Professionals Association (“TSPA”), a new, nonprofit, member-based organization for trust & safety professionals that launched in June 2020. The TSPA will support the global community of professionals who develop and enforce principles & policies that define acceptable behavior online.
Clara was inspired to build an association for trust & safety professionals due to her background as a national security/disinformation expert and technology entrepreneur. She is President of the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows Foundation and a Senior Advisor at the UN-CTED-backed Tech Against Terrorism.
Clara has held various national security and tech policy roles for the U.S. Government, Google, and Mozilla.
most of the page is just icons with very few words. I wondered if she was a non-native English speaker while Hubby suggested it was a method to prevent word searches.
Her Awards/honors/networks section shows:
Fulbright Canada Clinton Global Initiative Hesslbein Global Academy Pembroke College Cambidge Univ California United Nations: Many Cultures One Humanity – Linked to spam Alliance of Civilizations – Linked to spam GES Malaysia 2013 – Linked to spam Global Startup Youth Malaysia – Linked to spam Yale School of Management [Emerging Leaders Seminar Entrepreneurship & Innovation] – Access denied TITLE – Global Network for Advanced Management
Clara Tsao is an entrepreneur and a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow. Prior to government, she led global strategic partnerships in education for Microsoft. In addition to corporate roles with Google, Apple, Sony, Playstation, HP, and AT&T, Clara is also the co-founder and former Executive Director of the Congressional App Challenge.
Clara Tsao – Guidance on building better digital services in government Through the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, Clara has worked across various national security roles in US Government, serving as a senior advisor and Chief Technology Officer focused on emerging technology policy, countering terrorist use of the internet, and foreign influence operations online. News and Events
About Clara Tsao Clara Tsao was a non-resident fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. She is an online disinformation expert and a civic tech entrepreneur, who recently co-founded the Trust & Safety Professional Association and the Trust & Safety Foundation to support the global community of professionals who develop and enforce principles and policies that define acceptable behavior and content online. Clara is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. Her previous roles include CTO at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Foreign Influence Task Force and the interagency U.S. Countering Violent Extremism Task Force and Senior Advisor for Emerging Technology at the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency. She has spent a decade working in the technology industry across global teams at Microsoft, Apple, Sony PlayStation, AT&T, and also as a Google and Mozilla Technology Policy Fellow. Clara is also the Board Chair and President of the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows Foundation and a Senior Advisor at Tech Against Terrorism.
MUST READ about her views on ‘Disinformation’ Interesting tidbit”…we need to encourage more technologists to lend their expertise to support better policy-making, through incubators like Aspen’s Tech Policy Hub….”
…..Much of your current work lies at the intersection of tech and policy, focusing on issues like disinformation and online safety. How did you first become interested in these issues?
JFK once said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.” In a similar way to how JFK committed the nation to the ambitious goal of landing on the moon,I believe the field of “trust and safety” (including online safety / disinformation), is the most difficult challenge of this decade that technology companies, governments, civil society, and internet users must stand united behind.
This is a challenge we need to win. From live-streamed mass shootings, terrorist content, online sexual exploitation and conspiracy theories, to election interference, there are endless problems that require collaboration, starting with strengthened dialogue. I have always been fascinated with how people behave online, and I spend my free time evaluating how people behave on social media. I especially love testing and exploring new technology platforms to understand the new ways in which people interact and connect with one another.
However, I was first exposed to the offline consequences of fake news and misinformation while I was at Microsoft in early 2014. At Microsoft I was managing a partnership program focused on growing the capacity of libraries in Myanmar to serve as trustworthy information hubs. We piloted new platforms and approaches to tackle digital and information challenges in the lead-up to the country’s critical 2015 general elections, the first time the nation could participate in a democratic vote after nearly 50 years of military rule. Over the span of months,I saw firsthand the impact of rampant disinformation as Facebook unintentionally introduced the country to a new digital era that causing offline chaos, violence, and eventually, ethnic genocide.
Years later, I joined the US Government as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence’ where I served as the CTO of two teams within the Department of Homeland Security focused on online safety issues, ranging from terrorist use of the internet, to foreign influence operations and election security. Most recently, I worked with human rights defenders, civil society groups, and policy professionals at Mozilla, evaluating regulatory policies and tools around harmful content online. My Passion for problem solving in this space was cultivated by these experiences.
What particular questions/challenges have you been tackling recently, and why is now the right time to address these?
Over the last year, I have been building a new organization to support and advance the trust and safety profession through a shared community of practice. Today the biggest challenge in trust and safety is the lack of formalized training and support for the professionals that determine and enforce acceptable content policies and behavior online.Professionals working in trust and safety teams at technology companies are tasked with adjudicating what is acceptable behavior or content, while also protecting free speech, user safety, and society. Trust and safety teams are also asked to make difficult decisions to protect users, while also having limited support from product and engineering teams to carry out and enforce these policies at scale.
There has never been a better time to support trust and safety professionals and to do their best work. Due to recent media coverage of content moderation, there has been more awareness of the psychological and mental health risks associated with content review that impact employee wellness.
As fake news and misinformation has gone rampant in election processes, governments around the world have threatened regulation or fines for the inability of timely content review and removal. Some countries, like Germany, have introduced and are enforcing such regulations. Hate speech that stays online in Germany for more than 24 hours can accrue a fine of €50 million under Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz. Examples like these have led companies to invest more resources in their trust and safety operations and have more transparency in their decision-making practices.
Furthermore, technology companies are increasingly realizing the impact that toxic users and behavior have on “user churn” and bottom line.
“Advertisers like Unilever have threatened to take their marketing budgets elsewhere if platforms don’t mitigate the spread of toxic content or toxic users.”
Are certain types of misinformation more dangerous than others? What criteria should companies use to evaluate whether a piece of content should be removed from their platform as misinformation?
The perceived danger of misleading content is a key element that influences the way many companies prioritize and investigate removal. Misinformation can include false or misleading information, ranging from rumors, gossip, errors, propaganda. While misinformation can be harmless (i.e married celebrity having an affair), information can become dangerous when the content has offline or behavioral consequences for users and goes viral (i.e. drinking diluted bleach will prevent you from COVID-19 infections).
When evaluating misinformation, companies can evaluate the actor behind the campaign, the behavior of the post (is it a bot network?), and the context of the content to determine how to prioritize removal. Other times, misinformation is automatically detected by AI/machine learning or flagged manually by users reporting the post
One challenging part of misinformation is when content is further bolstered by recommendation engines and algorithms, originally designed to heighten user engagement but now leaving users in partisan and polarized filter bubbles.
When Someone searches for content reinforcing fake science such as the flat earth theory, they become stuck in a “rabbit hole”of other conspiracy theories unknowingly, of which many include content from the anti vaccine movement. To Counteract this, AI researchers like Guillaume Chaslot have advocated internet platforms to have increased algorithmic transparency.…
Alicia Wanless is the director of the Partnership for Countering Influence Operations at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Alicia researches how people shape — and are shaped — by a changing information space. With over a decade of experience in researching and analyzing the information environment, focusing on propaganda and information warfare, Wanless applies this learning to support government, military, and major tech companies to develop policies and integrate information activities into training programs that better reflect how the information environment is manipulated. Wanless is currently a PhD Researcher at King’s College London exploring alternative frameworks for understanding the information environment.
In 1836, King’s became one of the two founding colleges of the University of London…
Biography Alicia researches how we shape — and are shaped — by a changing information space. With more than a decade of experience in researching and analysing the information environment, focusing on propaganda and information warfare, Alicia conducts content and network analysis, and has developed original models for identifying and analysing digital propaganda campaigns. Alicia applies this learning to support government, military and major tech companies to develop policies and integrate information activities into training programs that better reflect how the information environment is manipulated. She has shared her work and insights with senior government, military, industry leaders and academic experts at Wilton Park, the Munich Security Conference, the Hedayah Centre, NATO’s ARRC and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Alicia’s work has been featured in the CBC, Forbes, and The Strategy Bridge
Alicia Wanless is the director of the Partnership for Countering Influence Operations at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Wanless is a PhD Researcher at King’s College London exploring how the information environment can be studied in similar ways to the physical environment.
This interest led me to research things like nationalism, propaganda, and language engineering in my undergrad, and later in the 2010s, to start analyzing how influence operations were changing in a Digital Age. That research, which covered political campaigns and alternative media outlets, led me to work with militaries, major tech platforms, and civil society organizations—and ultimately to pursue a Ph.D. in War Studies at King’s College London….
The disinformation landscape surrounding the 2020 elections was so different than what we saw in 2016, with domestic, verified users supplanting bots and fake accounts, and new narratives focusing on both Covid and electoral fraud. The actors, behaviors, and content keep changing. How do you see the disinformation landscape evolving in the future? I’m not sure it’s the information environment changing quickly so much as our focus on what happens within it shifting. In researching the U.S. primary election in 2016, it was apparent that domestic actors were likely far more active and prevalent than any foreign actors, and this was later confirmed in Benkler, Faris, and Roberts’ Network Propaganda. The disclosure that Russian actors were actively running influence operations made for more shocking news, whereas disentangling the complex web of domestic actors can be difficult and highly politicized. The role of domestic actors engaging in influence operations has certainly come to the fore in the wake of the attack on Congress on 6 January. One major challenge in understanding the information environment is that research tends to focus on threat actors, tactics, and the content they produce, often in the form of case studies— interesting and informative, but fairly narrow in scope. Unless it is all brought together in bigger meta studies, it leaves us focused on the last bad thing that happened, which is not great for being strategic about addressing the problem. To that end, I think we need to move towards a more systemic understanding about disinformation and influence operations, looking at the wider information environment in which these things occur to find patterns that might offer a warning where the next problem is emerging. That would allow us to intervene sooner.
Breaking thread! I found the directions for submitting tweets to El-ISAC (CiSecurity) like Katie Hobbs did. They land at Stanford for determination
There is also a hidden Twitter Portal and a gov Twitter email address.😹
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FjLxKJWWIAAnyc0.jpg (see below)
The Stanford Partnership site that fact checks submitted tweets etc:
1. It’s home page changed dramatically in months. 2. They lied and said Trump supporters went to J6 Armed. 3. They work with the Zinc Network/Integrity Initiatives Graphika and DFRLAB.
I missed putting the biggest part in the top tweet because I was eating ham salad crackers. And ran outta edit time.
They also submit reported tweets to CISA at DHS. Boom! 💥
DHS puts on its CISA website for election misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation to be reported to Misinformation@Cisecurity. (NGO Katie Hobbs used for reporting.)
It is important to note that a rumor control page is only one element of a successful MDM response strategy. Improving resilience of elections to MDM also requires reporting MDM narratives. The Center for Internet Security (CIS) was established to support the cybersecurity needs of the election subsector. The CIS can be leveraged to report real-time MDM via email at misinformation@cisecurity.org Be sure to include links and screenshots as well as details on the misinformation and your jurisdiction.
RUMOR CONTROL PAGE START-UP GUIDE Misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (MDM) can present risks to the election infrastructure community, its owners and operators, and the public. MDM can spread quickly, causing rumors to undermine facts. >> The risks of MDM range from undermining confidence in institutions to activating and inspiring dangerous behaviors and violence. This Rumor Control Page Start-Up Guide is for organizations seeking to dispel specific MDM narratives through transparent and authoritative information. Designed for use by state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) government officials and private sector partners, this guide cites the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Rumor Control page as a model for debunking inaccurate narratives. The recommendations in this guide are not intended to be one-size-fits-all and should be adapted to the capabilities and resources available, as well as the MDM risks facing the community. Organizations should only set up a rumor control webpage related to issues for which they have access to information and expertise necessary to properly dispel MDM narratives and articulate facts. Each organization that plans to set up a rumor control page may want to consult with the appropriate organization legal counsel, if possible, prior to beginning operations. What is a rumor control page? A rumor control page is a web page that offers the public accurate and authoritative sources of information which will help address common MDM narratives. It is provided by a trusted voice to either preempt or respond to developing narratives. Credible messengers are most effective at disproving falsehoods. A rumor control page should not be considered the sole source of truth, rather it should drive people to seek more information about a complex subject by directing them to other trustworthy sources. >>With a rumor control page, election officials and stakeholders can dispel rumors about the systems and assets they manage and have unique insight into. Some election offices may already have public information websites, which commonly include a “Frequently Asked Questions” page and/or press releases that seek to clarify information. In this sense, a rumor control page can be viewed as an extension of existing efforts….
ADDED NOTE BY WOLF
This stuff is just off-the-charts suspicious to me.
The Big Picture – CCP Subversion and Influence
I’m going to let people draw their own conclusions here. I’m not going to do anything other that talk about my own experiences with Chinese spies and assets in tech. You do the math.
It is beyond any doubt that the CULTURE of “trust and safety” is off-the-charts CCP in tone. There is SMOKE everywhere. And where there is smoke, there is probably fire.
It is my suspicion that “trust and safety” is filled with CCP-bots of various kinds, both Chinese and non-Chinese. However, diagnosing a spy from a non-spy is difficult, and requires an enormous amount of personal knowledge. I may have suspicions, but they are little more than that. Some may think I have TOO MANY suspicions, and that is fine.
However, it is my opinion that anybody with a potential CCP spy or asset background (thus including non-Chinese Americans) who strongly advocates or (even more tellingly) creates outcomes for things which serve CCP’s interests, and which oppose freedom-loving Americans’ interests, needs to be treated as such, particularly in regards to sensitive information or access. Just my opinion.
CCP loves to use women spies, operatives, and agents of influence, just like CIA. CCP girl spies are not just out of the mainland – many come out of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, England, Canada, America, and Latin America. Having them come out of somewhere other than the mainland, gives them a lot of flexibility, by lowering people’s guard and defenses.
CCP girl spies are smart, and the ones in tech tend to be excellent at both the coding side AND the schmoozing, verbal, business and policy side. They will sometimes HIDE one side of their abilities, if that deception is useful. However, in many cases, they will leverage both sides openly.
ChiSpies are often (but not always) among the most relentless social climbers you will ever meet. It’s the job – get as high as they can, targeting higher and higher up the chain. The Russian spies Maria Butina and Anna Chapman were the same way. I saw this much more often with the women than the men. The men tended to be far less obvious in trying to make new connections, whereas the women were extremely socially focused.
Many CCP spies are what I call “two-steppers”, which involve two generations of family as a form of cover. The parents may appear in America as refugees or economic migrants, being apolitical or (less often) even anticommunist. They may come from a place or background which throws off suspicion. The child, however, ends up in a sensitive position, and engages in actions, both of which clearly serve CCP interests. Thus, “two steps” to achieve a solid and easily dismissed infiltration.
CCP spy girls will often change their stories quickly and believably when questioned. They are quite good at planting false or compromising background information in social networks, although men tend to be used when planting something directly to another man, as a technique of peer influence.
Washington is the perfect environment for CCP players, because the operatives don’t stick out. The culture is one of influence and networking, so it looks like everybody else. ChiSpies tend to stick out more in the hinterlands.
Non-Chinese who carry water for CCP can be of many different types. Many are CCP allies, such as old Russian communists, American leftists, American rightists with economic ties to China, or dupes who become personally or professionally involved with agents.
It is important to understand that CCP operatives can have dramatically negative effects on other nations without doing ANYTHING illegal. I saw this form of stealthy sabotage over and over in tech. Just by burying into a key position and turning into an unremovable goldbrick, a CCP operative can create negative effects that have an organization chasing its tail. With only a bit more effort, such as engineered incompetence, organizations can be made weak, unprofitable, and ripe for takeover.
I put the “Trust and Safety” movement in this category of organizational sabotage. I think this entire movement serves CCP goals, and not American interests.
Others may disagree. They may assert that China helped America, if anything, by supporting “trust and safety” in any ways that it did, such as by providing “moderation” services.
To those who might think so, I simply add one more “unit” to my previous assessment of “4”.
Twitter acting by itself to suppress free speech is not a 1st amendment violation, but acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech, with no judicial review, is
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – 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).
And yes, it’s Monday…again.
But we WILL get through it – in CAT STYLE with our DOG FRIENDS!
Please forgive us, Wheatie, we did not know That you had left us with armor in tow We had no idea with what you dealt We did not know the pain you felt And now we can only imagine With you what really did happen Cause rarely did you complain And/or share your personal pain Of one thing we are most certain You are flying high behind the curtain Watching over us above the crowds Our Warrior Angel above the clouds Thank You, Wheatie, for caring for us While you were here among the fuss We miss you dear you have no idea Since time began in the pangaea With you there was no time In your wisdom you would chime To clarify and magnify The what where how and why We did not question when you left We were not slightly bereft But over time we wondered why You did not at least stop by Now we know where you have gone With the break of this new dawn We could be angry but are not Tho with an arrow we’ve been shot Rest peacefully Warrior Angel dear Send us a sign that you are near A butterfly a flower a kiss of rain From your love do not refrain God sends Angels to watch over us And now we have an Angel Plus A Warrior Angel of Magnificence From today and forward hence
Boilerplate, more or less, but worth reading again and again, if only for the minor changes, and to stay out of moderation.
MINOR CHANGE NUMBER 1
Never talk about committing violence in a reply to Wolf or in response to anything Wolf has said, or you may get put into moderation so that your comments can be screened. This is ONLY because DHS is now playing door-knock Gestapo with people who have spoken at school board meetings, made public comments, etc. DHS regime jackboots are knocking on doors of school board mama bears and stupidly insinuating potential violence from things people say or don’t say on social media. A guy in Ohio pointed his FINGER at the school board, and they went after him, armed with pictures of the pointing, and screen captures of online comments. Yeah.
SO – give the Nazis ZERO ammo. Keep any mention of violence, even joking, away from Wolf, so that he doesn’t have to “explain” humor to humorless jackboots who pretend not to know things.
As for discussion of “violent humor” among yourselves (e.g., “#TeamHeadsOnPikes”), just use whatever discretion you think is appropriate for yourselves. I will only put you in moderation if your comments create problems for ME or THIS SITE, but not if they only impact you.
YOU are responsible for your own comments, if they come knocking. YOUR choice. Just remember this…..
OTHER THAN THAT…….
The bottom line is Free Speech. Theories and ideas you don’t agree with must be WELCOME here, and you must be part of that welcoming. But you do NOT need to be part of any agreement.
Bottom line – respect other people’s FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS.
Our only additional requirement is that you do so NICELY. Or at least try to make some effort in that direction.
SO….. [ENGAGE BOILERPLATE…..]
We must endeavor to persevere to love our frenemies – even here.
Those who cannot deal with this easy requirement will be forced to jump the hoops of moderation, so that specific comments impugning other posters and violating the minimal rules can be sorted out and tossed in the trash.
In Wheatie’s words, “We’re on the same side here so let’s not engage in friendly fire.”
That includes the life skill of just ignoring certain other posters.
We do have a site – The U Tree – where civility is not a requirement. Interestingly, people don’t really go there much. Nevertheless, if you find yourself in an “argument” that can’t really stay civil, please feel free to “take it to the U Tree”. The U Tree is also a good place to report any technical difficulties, if you’re unable to report them here. Please post your comment there on one of Wolf’s posts, or in reply to one of Wolf’s comments, to make sure he sees it (though it may take a few hours).
We also have a backup site, called The Q Tree as well, which is really The Q Tree 579486807. You might call it “Second Tree”. The URL for that site is https://theqtree579486807.wordpress.com/. If this site (theqtree.com) ever goes down, please reassemble at the Second Tree.
If the Second Tree goes down, please go to The U Tree, or to our Gab Group, which is located at https://gab.com/groups/4178.
We also have some “old rules” and important guidelines, outlined here, in a very early post, on our first New Year’s Day, in 2019. The main point is not to make violent threats against people, which then have to be taken seriously by law enforcement, and which can be used as a PRETEXT by enemies of this site.
In the words of Wheatie, “Let’s not give the odious Internet Censors a reason to shut down this precious haven that Wolf has created for us.”
A Moment of Prayer
Our policy on extreme religious freedom on this site is discussed HERE. Please feel free to pray and praise God anytime and anywhere.
Thus, please pray for our real President, the one who actually won the election.
You may also pray for our nation, our world, and even our enemies.
Musical Interlude
In honor of dear Wheatie, we now present some music to soothe, inspire, invigorate, or relax.
Let’s start off with an entire concert by The Beths – recorded on an iPhone by an apparent expert in the art. It’s a bit rustic, but fun!
OK – maybe that’s not your thing. If not, try this!
An awesome version of Great Is Thy Faithfulness, which hymn I was reminded of, by Carl on Sunday.
Finally, check out this epic orchestral musical selection called Tree of Life.
Call To Battle
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
“Tackling Creating the climate crisis with innovative understandably disastrous and phony green technologies”
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
New Study: "cardiac autopsy findings in five persons who have died unexpectedly within seven days following anti-SARS-CoV-2-vaccination… Our findings establish the histological phenotype of lethal vaccination-associated myocarditis." https://t.co/L4ciyWbgec
This is a German study from a reputable group. It's very hard to conduct this research in the U.S.
Germany also did the study showing that no healthy child 5-17 yrs of age died of Covid in that country. They also recommend against the Moderna vax in ppl <30. Not so with the CDC.
Dr Jha says its "crystal clear" that a healthy young male needs a bivalent (4th) Covid vax dose but..
he can't tell you how many *healthy* children have ever died of Covid &we have no biv trial data. How can he know the risk:benefit calc without the data? https://t.co/8dKZmMIlvS
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the DayYear Week:
decimate
verb
To destroy or kill a large part of (a group of people or organisms).
To inflict great destruction or damage on: The storm decimated the region.
To reduce markedly in amount: a profligate heir who decimated his trust fund.
To select by lot and kill one in every ten of (a group of soldiers).
Used in a sentence:
A required or mandated drug or vaccine, which decreases lifespan and fertility, but which cannot be questioned by science or the public, due to controlled media, can be effectively used to decimate a population with little or no risk of discovery.
Hidden by a “Look! Squirrel!” Racial Kabuki PR Move
Used in a Generalization of a Concept
What part of “never again” do people not get here?
This Rejoice & Praise God 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 your opinion addresses the issue only, and does not confront or denigrate 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.
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.”
Safe and Secure
At the Festival of Dedication, the Jews asked Jesus to tell them plainly if He was the Messiah. His response was not “Yes” or “No” but rather, “I did tell you, but you do not believe. The works I do in my Father’s name testify about me” (John 10:25). But then Jesus continued with a reason why they did not believe: “You do not believe because you are not my sheep. My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand. I and the Father are one” (John 10:26–30).
Jesus states that the eternal life He offers is permanent. He holds His sheep—believers—in His hand, and no one can snatch them out of His hand. Jesus’ sheep were given to Him by the Father, who is greater than all and who also holds the sheep in His hand. No one can snatch believers out of the Father’s hand, either. Believers are eternally secure, held by the power of God.
In an extended metaphor, Jesus compares believers to sheep. A sheep without a shepherd can easily be snatched from the fold. “To snatch” refers to attacking, scattering, and stealing sheep like a wolf (John 10:12). There are people who claim to have truth but are really seeking to deceive believers (Matthew 24:5). The devil is described as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour (1 Peter 5:8) and as a thief who comes to steal, kill, and destroy (John 10:10). Yet believers are part of Jesus’ flock and cannot be taken away by spiritual wolves, lions, or anything else because Jesus is the Good Shepherd protecting His sheep (John 10:11). Those who belong to Christ are safe from anyone or anything seeking their destruction: no one can snatch them out of the Father’s hand.
Jesus is God, and no one can take the sheep out of Jesus’ hand, either (John 10:28). Romans 8:38–39 assures us, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Absolutely nothing can separate a child of God from the Father’s love, and absolutely nothing can take that believer’s salvation away.
A believer’s eternal security is purchased by Christ, promised by the Father, and sealed by the Holy Spirit. It is given and maintained by God’s hand, and it is permanent and irrevocable. The eternal life granted by Jesus to His “sheep” cannot and will never be stolen, revoked, or lost. A Christian who has trusted in Jesus Christ as the Savior is declared righteous before God for all eternity (John 3:16; Acts 16:31; Romans 5:1) and cannot lose his salvation. The Good Shepherd protects His sheep and ensures that no one and nothing snatches them from the fold.
“Great is Thy faithfulness,” O God my Father, There is no shadow of turning with Thee; Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not As Thou hast been Thou forever wilt be.
Summer and winter, and springtime and harvest, Sun, moon and stars in their courses above, Join with all nature in manifold witness To Thy great faithfulness, mercy and love.
Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth, Thine own dear presence to cheer and to guide; Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow, Blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside!
“Great is Thy faithfulness!” “Great is Thy faithfulness!” Morning by morning new mercies I see; All I have needed Thy hand hath provided— “Great is Thy faithfulness,” Lord, unto me!
It is important to note that a rumor control page is only one element of a successful MDM response strategy. Improving resilience of elections to MDM also requires reporting MDM narratives. The Center for Internet Security (CIS) was established to support the cybersecurity needs of the election subsector. The CIS can be leveraged to report real-time MDM via email at 
