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 $1,984.90
Silver $25.17
Platinum $1,134.00
Palladium $1,682.00
Rhodium $9,000.00
So here it is, Friday, 3PM MT after markets closed and we see:
Gold $1,991.60
Silver $25.15
Platinum $1,084.00
Palladium $1,588.00
Rhodium $9,300.00
Things aren’t moving around all that much lately.
Globular Clusters
Time for a wrenching change of subject…because JWST took a picture of a globular cluster.
I was pretty much done with orbits anyhow.
A globular cluster is a grouping of stars, tens of thousands or even millions of them, forming an approximate sphere. The stars are very closely packed in the center and as you move away from the center the density decreases markedly.
This is Messier 2, a globular cluster that (as seen from Earth) is in the constellation Aquarius. (Note this is not the JWST’s image–it’s from Hubble.)
Charles Messier in the 1700s was interested in comets. In telescopes, before they get close to the sun and (possibly) become bright enough for people to see with the naked eye, they simply look like fuzzy blobs. Also, since they orbit the Sun, they move against the background stars (which are at least ten thousand times further away). So Messier would record a fuzzy blob in a certain location then check that location again a few days later. If the blob had moved, he likely had a comet. Otherwise, it was a permanent feature of the nighttime sky.
There were enough permanent blobs that Messier made a list of them, so when he stumbled across that blob again, he’d know he could ignore it. This is now the Messier catalog of about 110 objects. Many of the most famous nebulae in the night sky are Messier objects; many nearby galaxies are too. (Andromeda, for instance, is M-31, and the 800 bazillion ton gorilla of the Virgo cluster, M87 (the one with the really, really big black hole in its center), well, is a Messier object.
Many of Messier’s blobs were fuzzy spheres in his telescope (which was fairly primitive); as optics got better it became apparent they were clusters of tens of thousands or even millions of stars.
It also became apparent that there were quite a number of these in our galaxy…but they do not lie in the plane of the galaxy like the spiral arms do; they are in a swarm in what’s called the galactic halo, a spherical region centered on the bulge at the center of our galaxy. So if you imagine the Milky Way galaxy as, say a CD, some of the clusters are above it, and some below, most are just a few inches from the center of the cd. Other galaxies have them too, and they’re readily visible in powerful telescopes.
Another quirky feature about globular clusters is that the stars in them tend to be very old, over ten billion years old. For a while, astronomers would measure the age of a globular cluster, and come up with a number greater than the cosmologists’ number for the age of the universe. Of course this was absurd…how can an object in the universe be older than the universe. Over a number of decades as measurements were refined the discrepancy went away, but nevertheless, globular clusters are old.
Probably the most famous globular cluster (often just called “globulars”) is Omega Centauri. It’s so bright it was mistaken for a star by the ancients. It does not have a Messier number as it’s not readily visible from northern Europe where Messier worked–but folks living in Australia get to enjoy it. Another famous one is the Hercules cluster, M 13. It’s an easy one to find even with binoculars since it lies on a line between two stars in the Hercules “keystone” pattern (four stars that look like they outline a keystone).
JWST took the following picture of M 92, which is also in Hercules. It’s one of the brighter and more spectacular ones but is overshadowed by M 13. It’s particularly interesting because it’s one of the oldest globular clusters, somewhere between twelve and 13 billion years old. (The universe itself is presently believed to be 13.787 billion years old, give or take 0.02 billion years.) Scientists hope to learn something new about the universe as it was back then.
(We already know from spectrographic analysis the stars shown have almost no “metals” (astrophysicist terminology for elements other than hydrogen and helium) in them…they formed before the elements themselves were formed in more massive stars.)
The first thing you’ll notice is that the center of the cluster is missing. This was deliberate. The astronomers using JWST were interested in the outlying stars and the millions of stars clumped together in the center would have washed them out. They were able to use a gap that exists between two of the NIRCam long wavelength detectors. Talk about making lemonade from lemons!
M92 is about 27,600 light years away. It’s 16,000 light years outside of the plane of the Milky Way and 33,000 light years away from the galactic center. (We are about 27,000 light years from the center.)
This is of course a false-color image, because it’s JWST. None of what you see in this picture is actually visible to the human eye. Rather, this image was taken at four infrared wavelengths we can’t see, then the four each given their own color of visible light and the group combined together into one image. From the NASA website: “This image is composite of four exposures using four different filters: F090W (0.9 microns) is shown in blue; F150W (1.5 microns) in cyan; F277W (2.77 microns) in yellow; and F444W (4.44 microns) in red.” For reference, red light is about 0.7 microns and blue light is 0.4 microns. All of the things seen in the picture are therefore “redder than red.”
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 !!!