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:
OK, with that rant out of my system…
Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit
…we can move on to the next one.
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.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Spot Prices
All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend).
Last Week:
Gold $1,866.70
Silver $23.92
Platinum $1,100.00
Palladium $1,889.00
Rhodium $13,250.00
So here it is, Friday, 3PM MT after markets closed and we see:
Gold $1,921,60
Silver $24.38
Platinum $1,073.00
Palladium $1,863.00
Rhodium $13,000.00
Gold is going somewhere–we’re not at record levels (~$2070), but at the rate things are going it won’t be long, unless of course it reverses course (let’s face it: “they” will do their darndest to make that happen). Silver is too, though not as much. The others…not very much at all. This looks like the prime “pusher” is people worried about the economy. They will tend to pick gold over silver…and the other metals won’t share in that.
My gut feel is that it will end up dropping again, hard. If I am wrong and the dollar is going to collapse to the point where you can pay off your house with a silver dime because silver is at a million toilet-paper bucks an ounce…well, so be it.
If inflation gets THAT bad, expect your credit card companies to amend their agreements so as to index your balance to inflation. And certainly any other new loan. But old car and house loans cannot be amended!
How Far Are the Stars?
Thanks to Hollywood, it’s easy to imagine that since we’ve gone to the Moon (and yes, we have gone to the Moon), the planets are just one step away–one we inexplicably didn’t just take right after Apollo–and the stars one more step after that.
The moon’s orbit’s semi-major axis (which is one half of the length of the elliptical orbit, measured across the longest part; this serves as a good average distance) is 384,399 kilometers. But you should subtract the earth’s radius from that, as well as the moon’s, as it’s center-to-center. Let’s call it, very roughly, 375,000 kilometers.
Compare that to the distance between the earth and the sun, one “astronomical unit” of 149,597,870.7 kilometers. It’s 398.9 times as far…call it four hundred times. And these are the sorts of distances we’d have to travel to get to Mars. Sure it gets closer to us than 150 million kilometers, but we would not be traveling that shortest distance; we’d be using a “Hohmann Transfer” or something very similar to that (because it would take a lot less delta-V to do that; i.e, a lot less fuel), and that would easily be over 300 million kilometers.
Traveling 400-800 times as far is not a “small step.”
Compare Columbus traveling 3000 miles or so (one way) to the sorts of things people did before him, where they hugged the coastline but often traveled thousands of miles. Comparatively speaking, that’s a much smaller jump than going to Mars, having gone to the Moon, would be.
This is in large part why we’ve been doing everything with robot probes. It takes them as long as it would take astronauts, but they don’t have to bring along food and life support for months or years of travel…so that makes it possible to do it with smaller rockets…smaller meaning rockets smaller than a mountain.
Neptune, the outermost planet, is at about 30 AUs distance; that’s a 15-fold jump over a trip to Mars. Significant, especially when you consider the time it would take, but not that big a jump from getting to Mars. If we can start sending people to Mars, it won’t be that much harder to go other places (assuming there’s something there at the other end that’s not instantly lethal…and let’s face it Jupiter’s moons are mostly close enough to Jupiter’s radiation belts that astronauts would be broiled alive without a lot of heavy shielding…and that word “heavy” is a deal breaker). But, nonetheless, the planets are at similar distances to each other…compared to the jump it will be to go from moon travel to planetary travel.
What about the stars?
Proxima Centuari is the nearest star. And it is 268,000 AUs away. In other words it’s basically ten thousand times as far as Neptune.
We could have Southwest Spaceways running daily (except when their computers go tango uniform) trips to Neptune for tourists…and we’d be nowhere near ready for star travel. For a number of reasons, the main one of which would be having to go a thousand times as fast just to get there in a lifetime. But that’s just a consequence of the YUGE jump in distance.
That day we first set out for the stars, will represent a “giant leap for mankind” bigger than everything before it, put together.
Calculus Made Easy (No Joke)
This is a conceptual introduction to calculus; the meat of it starts about three minutes in–assuming, of course, that it posts at all! There’s no actual math drudgery involved for the conceptual part (though he does start flinging it at you around 12 minutes or so), though you do need to understand graphs. You should come out of it with an understanding of what integration and differentiation are, even if you don’t actually know how to do them.
If it buggers up here’s the link: h ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuOxDh3egN0 (remove the space).
Obligatory PSAs and Reminders
China is Lower than Whale Shit
Remember Hong Kong!!!
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 !!!