Joining The Herd Of Lemmings

I’ve had cause to consider a few things. Maybe we’re going about it the wrong way, and we need to ditch Trump

Yeah, NO

Trump all the way! Why? Because being hated by the people who hate him is a sign of impeccable character, that’s why.

The haters can go fuck themselves with rusty twelve gauge bore brushes. I’d prefer ten gauge but that’s kind of scarce, so…I’m willing to compromise.

The RINO’s Dilemma

The RINOs who who have burrowed in and taken over most GOP organizations, from the state down to local organizations, have quite a dilemma on their hands, and most of them have their heads too far up their asses to realize it.

OK, I’m not talking about the liberal in a Republican area, who knows they’re in the wrong party, but is there because it’s the only game in their town; they hope to capture a nomination someday, at which point they’re guaranteed to be elected…otherwise, they never will be. These people are a hazard in any heavily conservative area.

No, I’m talking about the guys who are a little bit conservative and want to do some good by going into politics, and they’re in a closely matched area, closely enough that they can join the party they are most aligned with and still have a chance. They think the Democrats…particularly the ones who end up running for office…are nuts.

They don’t think much better of the Deplorable types, either. A bunch of bumpkins whose hearts are in the right place, mostly…OK a bit extreme. But they think Deplorables can’t understand that first you have to get elected, then work within the system to change things…a slow process. They genuinely want many of the things Deplorables want…just not as much. The government is spending too much. Or they need to spend money on highways instead of welfare for illegal immigrants. But they want to work within the system to get these things done.

Or maybe they think things are pretty close to ideal right now, and they want to nail it in place.

The problem is, that means they don’t stand for anything in particular. And it shows. They’re about as unappetizing to the electorate as a puddle of dog vomit. The folks in the middle, who they think they are appealing to because they themselves are not extreme, would honestly prefer a clear-spoken radical to someone who qualifies everything they say to the point where they sound like they don’t believe anything at all.

The problem these “Mild RINOs” have, is they just can’t see that. And the reason they just can’t see that, is their entire sense of self-worth is tied up in not seeing that. In their minds, they’ve worked tirelessly for their party, to keep those crazy Democrats out…only to have to constantly fight with a small number of crazy Republicans–who are only liabilities if they end up as candidates. They’ve fought the good fight, and if they can just find the right candidate, someone with some charisma, they might stop the crazies…without being too beholden to the OTHER crazies. In the meantime it’s not working. What’s a responsible guy in politics to do?

They simply cannot understand that the Republicans can’t succeed as the party of nothing in particular. Not really in the past, and certainly not today when people are starting to realize that no matter what they do in the voting booth, the country is still about to fly off a precipice. If they did see it, they’d suddenly have two choices: Go away and let the GOP succeed, or stay and fight. But “go away” isn’t really an option, because what’s the point of having a party now owned by the crazies, win?

Well, they have a dilemma…and WE, therefore have a problem. And we would have that problem even IF they realized that they had a problem…that they were the problem.

No one ever thinks they are the bad guy. Even Epstein probably thought he was the good guy. Right up to the moment where he didn’t kill himself.

So if you ever wonder why these unappetizing dufuses cling on even when their fingernails are being left behind…that’s why. They don’t understand no one wants them, and can’t imagine that no one should want them. And oftentimes their greatest pride is in all the hard work they’ve done for the party. They’re not going to give that up; it’d be psychological suicide.

If you’ve worked with these people, there’s a good chance you like them and consider some of them your friends. But even if so…we’re going to have to give them a good, hard shove. Because America is more important than those milquetoasts’ egos.

Justice Must Be Done

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

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

Spot (i.e., paper) Prices

Last week:

Gold $1,921,60
Silver $24.38
Platinum $1,073.00
Palladium $1,863.00
Rhodium $13,000.00

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

Gold $1,927.30
Silver $24.01
Platinum $1,052.00
Palladium $1,800.00
Rhodium $13,000.00

Mixed movement this week. Gold up a tad, rhodium flat, everything else down. If I were one of those guys paid by the YSM to write the rationale for why the stock market went up or down that day, I’d say something like “Precious metals consolidated their gains this week.” And collect my paycheck. Why do I have to code for a living when that clown never learned to code?

Fuck Joe B*d*n

Due to complaints about foul language, I’ve censored the most objectionable word in the title of this section.

B*d*n, you don’t even get ONE scoop of ice cream today.

(Please post this somewhere permanent, as it will continue to be true; the SOB will never deserve a scoop.)

Orbital Elements (Part I?)

Valerie asked me to explain what I was talking about when I talked about Starlink having to be in an inclined orbit, so here’s my attempt.

It turns out there are six numbers that can, taken together, uniquely and completely describe an orbit. Actually, there are many such sets of numbers, but the most popular ones are symbolized by the letters a, e, i, ω, Ω, and t.

But first we’ve got to make some simplifying assumptions. We are talking about two bodies (primary and satellite), and both can be treated as point masses.

As it turns out Newton showed that a spherical body (or whatever size) could be treated as a point mass, provided you’re outside the sphere and it’s radially symmetric. And what that last bit means is that if you start at the surface and drill down, you see the same things at the same depths, no matter where you start from. Earth turns out to have a solid iron core, surrounded by molten iron, surrounded by mantle rocks, surrounded by the crust; since these layers are pretty much the same thickness everywhere, Earth is spherically symmetric.

Well, almost. It does have an equatorial bulge, and the crust is of slightly varying thickness depending on whether you’re on land or out in the middle of the ocean, and the ocean itself doesn’t cover things completely. But it’s close enough for a first approximation.

You can, from an orbital mechanics standpoint, treat the Earth as if its entire mass were at a point at the center of the Earth.

One more assumption is that there is no atmosphere to cause drag.

Under these circumstances, orbits are governed completely by the force the primary (usually Earth) exerts on the satellite. That force “points” directly towards the primary’s center of mass. And in fact you can simply even further. The force on the satellite is proportional to the satellite’s mass; if you want, you can divide through by the mass, and just talk about the acceleration the satellite will experience as a result of gravity–that will be the same whether we’re talking about a baseball, or the International Space Station…or the Moon.

So we have two objects, pulling on each other, out in space. If they are moving slowly enough with respect to each other, one of them will travel in an ellipse around the other; it’s “in orbit” about the other object. (And technically the other object is also in orbit around the first one at the same time…but if one object is huge, like a planet, and the other is an artificial satellite, it is dang close to being “satellite in orbit around planet and not the other way around.”)

If the satellite is moving fast enough, though, it’s not going to go around and around the big object, though; it will escape, and not come back. This too is technically considered an orbit, but that doesn’t fit people’s mental image of an orbit, so I won’t insist on that here.

So, we have some object “in orbit” around the Earth. But that mere statement doesn’t tell you anything about where it will be, when it will be there, or how fast it will be moving, or in which direction.

That’s what you need those six numbers for. They encapsulate all of those things, and given those six numbers, you can (with a lot of computation), figure out where the satellite is, how fast it’s moving at that time, and in what direction. And you can pick any time, too; the computation is good for a thousand years from now, or last week. (Again, with those simplifying assumptions.)

OK, so what are they? Well depending on how much time I have to write this, I can cover two or three of them.

The first and most important is a. This is the size of the orbit. A non-escape orbit will be an ellipse of some kind (or possibly a perfect circle, but that’s actually just thought of as a special case of an ellipse). a is the semi-major axis of the ellipse…halfway across the ellipse the long way. If the ellipse is actually a circle, there’s no long way, or you can think of it as every diameter being the long way, and the semimajor axis becomes the radius of the circle.

[Johannes Kepler, around 1600, showed that all planets orbited the sun in ellipses (close to being circles). But that was simply showing that they do it. Newton was able to prove that an attractive force that fell off proportionately to the square of the distance would result in elliptical orbits, at least for things not escaping; thus he could describe the cause of all of those elliptical orbits and eventually show it was the same force that makes an apple fall to Earth or which makes the Moon orbit Earth.]

Now here’s the key thing–the amount of time it takes to make one orbit around some planet (called the “period”) depends only on the value of a. If the orbit is a perfect circle, it takes that amount of time. If the orbit is a narrow ellipse with the same semi major axis…it takes that same amount of time.

So, that’s one down: We have the size of the orbit. How about its shape? That is e, the eccentricity. There are multiple different definitions of this number, all with the same result. For our purposes, measure the distance from the center of the ellipse to one focus. Divide that by the semi-major axis. For a circle, the distance to the focus is zero (since both foci are at the center), so your eccentricity will be zero. For a really long, skinny ellipse the focus will be nearly at the end of the ellips and the eccentricity will be almost, but not quite, 1. You can get as close as you like to 1 without actually reaching it; just keep drawing skinnier and skinnier ellipses.

But everything I’ve shown you is two dimensional. What about three dimensions? Couldn’t an orbit be perpendicular to the ones in the last figure I showed, into and out of your computer screen?

Absolutely!!! And the next three numbers will describe the orientation of the orbit, in 3D.

But to describe the orientation with numbers, you must have a coordinate system and then you’ll want to do math. I can relieve you of the math (since I just want you to have a picture of what’s going on) but we’re going to need that coordinate system.

The first thing about that system is that it’s much, much more convenient if it’s inertial…in other words the coordinate system can’t move. That seems kind of trivial and something you shouldn’t have to mention, but that’s not true: we use a coordinate system every day that does move, and that’s latitude and longitude. Sure, 105 West longitude runs through Colorado, and will continue to do so–so it’s stationary, right? No. Colorado moves…because the Earth rotates.

So to best do orbital mechanics, you need a three-D coordinate system, that does not rotate with the Earth. You’d also find it easier if the system were a square grid, which latitude and longitude aren’t (even with altitude thrown in for a third dimension). The most commonly used such system is one called “Earth Centered Inertial (ECI).” In Earth Centered Inertial, every location in space is described by three numbers, x, y, and z. I won’t go too much into x and y (yet), but the Z axis, along which z is measured, is Earth’s axis of rotation. It goes through the north and south poles, and the center of the earth. If some object is on Earth’s axis, it will have a z value, but x and y will both be zero.

But that also means Earth’s equator has a z value of zero, just like Earth’s center does. So the xy plane represents the plane of Earth’s equator.

So what’s the first thing you can do with an orbit, now that we’re thinking in 3D? Up to now you’ve probably been imagining these orbits as being in the earth’s equatorial plane (if you’ve thought about it at all).

The first thing we can do is tilt the thing so it is no longer in the earth’s equatorial plane. So you can imagine measuring the angle between the plane of the orbit and the plane of the earth’s equator. But that’s not what we do, actually; it’s mathematically simpler to draw a line perpendicular to the plane of the orbit, and measure the angle it makes with the earth’s axis, i.e. the z axis. In the diagram below, h with the hat on it is perpendicular to the orbital plane (green disc) and forms an 11 degree angle with the north pole (k).

[Math note: Take the velocity vector for the satellite. Normalize it, so its length is 1. Take the cross product of it and the z axis unit vector. Take the magnitude of that product. You now have the sine of the inclination angle. For those of you who didn’t understand that, be assured that it’s dead damn easy and you don’t have to watch the satellite in orbit to figure out its inclination, so long as your velocity measurement is accurate.]

Or here’s another one, though it’s showing the angle between two planes definition:

Note that you can go all the way up to a 180 degree inclination, in which case you’ve flipped the orbit over as if it were a flapjack. The difference is, if the satellite were going counterclockwise around the planet before you flipped it, it’s now going clockwise. (Counterclockwise, as seen from over the north pole, is the “normal” direction, the one the moon and planets follow, and is also called prograde. Clockwise is retrograde.)

Note that a satellite will go over the north and south poles only if the inclination is 90 degrees. It will go over every possible latitude. This is called a “polar orbit” and it is the only orbit that can go over every spot on earth. (The orbit has to be of such a period that it doesn’t just hit the same spot at the same time every day, or you’ll repeat the same thing over and over again.)

If it’s only at a 60 degree inclination, it will only go as high (or low) as 60 degrees north (or south) latitude. But you can also get this with a 120 degree inclination! Because the plane of the orbit will at that point be at a 60 degree “slant” just like a 60 degree inclined orbit, but the satellite will be going “backwards” in its orbit.

For a satellite at over a 90 degree inclination, you can figure out the maximum latitude it will go over by subtracting its inclination from 180 degrees, so working that example, (180-120) = 60 degrees.

But you can actually work that backwards. If you’re launching from Cape Canaveral into orbit, what orbits can you get to, directly, without having to maneuver “up there”? (Such a maneuver is a “plane change” and is very expensive in fuel.) Well, ones that pass over Cape Canaveral of course. Cape Canaveral is at 28.5 degrees north latitude, so Cape Canaveral can only launch directly into orbits inclined at least that much. An orbit with a 20 degree tilt, for example, simply will never pass over Cape Canaveral. Cape Canaveral can launch into a polar orbit by aiming the rocket to the north or south, or into a 60 degree orbit by aiming northeast, a 28.5 degree orbit by launching straight east, but it can’t go less than that, because no 20 degree orbit can ever have Cape Canaveral in its orbital plane.

At least some of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites have to be launched into a very highly inclined orbit, or they will never pass over the Arctic. Since Musk wants his starlink to be useful anywhere on earth, he has to have at least some of his satellites be in polar (or very nearly polar) orbits.

Well, with any luck I’ve achieved my goal of confusing Valerie quite thoroughly. And I haven’t even gotten to the other three numbers yet. Maybe some other time.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0

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 !!!