What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

January 6 Tapes?

I won’t beat this dead horse too much. We got some kind of weirdly redacted release of some number of tapes.

Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.

News Flash

Today, it is still the case that Joe Biden didn’t Win.

I realize that to some readers, this might be a shock; surely at some point things must change and Biden will have actually won.

But the past cannot actually be changed.

It will always and forever be the case that Joe Biden didn’t win.

And if you, Leftist Lurker, want to dismiss it as dead white cis-male logic…well, you can call it what you want, but then please just go fuck off. No one here buys that bullshit–logic is logic and facts are facts regardless of skin color–and if you gave it a moment’s rational thought, you wouldn’t either. Of course your worthless education never included being able to actually reason–or detect problems with false reasoning–so I don’t imagine you’ll actually wake up as opposed to being woke.

As Ayn Rand would sometimes point out: Yes, you are free to evade reality. What you cannot do is evade the consequences of evading reality. Or to put it concretely: You can ignore the Mack truck bearing down on you as you play in the middle of the street, you won’t be able to ignore the consequences of ignoring the Mack truck.

And Ayn Rand also pointed out that existence (i.e., the sum total of everything that exists) precedes consciousness–our consciousnesses are a part of existence, not outside of it–therefore reality cannot be a “social construct” as so many of you fucked-up-in-the-head people seem to think.

So much for Leftist douchebag lurkers. For the rest of you, the regular readers and those lurkers who understand such things: I continue to carry the banner once also carried by Wheatie. His Fraudulency didn’t win.

Let’s Go, Brandon!!

Hey China!

Or rather, “Hey Chinese Communist Party and your entire array of servitors, ass-wipers, and fellators!”

You’re not even worth my time this week. When you decide to act like civilized people, maybe I’ll give you a lesson or two in how non-barbarians behave.

Hey BiteMe!
(Or, Whoever Has Their Hand Rammed Up That Putrefying Meat Puppet’s Ass)

[Language warning]

You and yours have caused a lot of injury. Literal injury with your war on people who don’t want to take an untested vaccine. When people die in an emergency room because a hospital won’t admit them because they haven’t had their clot shot, that’s a crime.

I’m going to address here the insult on top of the injury, because I am among the insulted. I still have my health but apparently you want me to live under the 8th Street Bridge (which actually isn’t on 8th Street, but whatever, that’s what the I-25 overpass over Cimarron is called), so maybe if you have your way that won’t be true for long. Dreadful time of year to become homeless.

No, you’re just trying to make me unemployed, because I won’t take your fucking shots.

Well, that threat is NOT going to work. I. Won’t. Take. Your. Fucking. Shots.

And it looks like enough people agree, that you’re having to back down, you worthless asswipe.

You’re LOSING.

You LOSER.

You Chinese-bought ratfucking traitor.

I would love to see you die an agonizing, humiliating death. (This isn’t a threat, because I am not threatening to cause that death. I am just announcing my intention to party if it happens.) It would be just recompense for the way you’re killing America…and millions of Americans.

His Fraudulency

Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, we haven’t heard much from the person who should have been declared the victor, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

(I’d like to add, I find it entirely plausible, even likely, that His Fraudulency is also His Figureheadedness. (Apparently that wasn’t a word; it got a red underline. Well it is now.) Where I differ with the hopium addicts is on the subject of who is really in charge. It ain’t anyone we like.)

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 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 Prices.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

Gold $2,030.20
Silver $22.69
Platinum $909.00
Palladium $972.00
Rhodium $5,050.00

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $2,019.90
Silver $22.88
Platinum $923.00
Palladium $984.00
Rhodium $5,050.00

No fresh commentary this time, other than that palladium was over $1200 five weeks ago. Yikes (unless you are in the market to buy)!

Tides

After the article on Everyone’s Asshole I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I thought maybe it’d be interesting to go over all of the planets, and other objects of the solar system.

But then I realized that I’d simply be referencing tidal forces, again and again like a leftist using the word “privilege” and I didn’t want you scratching your head wondering what I was talking about. Unlike that leftist, I want to explain the concept before I keep bringing it back.

One thing to keep in mind…this has been well-understood since the 1600s.

OK, to start out with, Isaac Newton was able to write one equation, that ultimately explains the motions of the stars and planets, at about this time. And he showed that that same force is also what causes things to fall to the ground and stay there. And that force–or rather a side effect of it–causes the tides.

Later astronomers realized that the same effect that causes our tides, has a hand in causing moons to always present the same face to their primary, and even causes a lot of heating in the four large moons of Jupiter.

So here is a tidy little formula for gravity:

You have two particles, of masses m₁ and m₂. Each exerts a force, F, on the other. And that force is the product of the two masses, divided by the distance between them r, twice. Then multiply by the fudge factor G. And note that the force is in a certain direction. The force exerted by m₁ on m₂ is towards m₁ whereas the force exerted by m₂ on m₁ is towards m₂. The two forces are equal in strength but in opposite directions.

When working with distances in meters and masses in kilograms, the fudge factor is 6.674×10⁻¹¹ m³⋅kg⁻¹⋅s⁻². This is a pretty small number, so you will have difficulty detecting, let alone measuring, the force of gravity between two BBs even if they are only an inch apart.

So what about, say, the Earth and the Moon? There it gets a bit more complicated…but not as bad as it could be. The way that formula works, is that it talks about point masses. In order to assess the effect the Earth has on the Moon, you have to look at each bit of the Earth individually, assess its contribution, then add them all up to get the Earth’s net effect on the Moon. When doing this you have to remember that each bit of the Earth is in different locations so that will affect both the amount of force that bit contributes, and the direction of that force.

Yikes! It’s a big planet, and that means a lot of computations!

Newton again comes to the rescue, though! He was able to use his self-made power tool, calculus, to show that provided a body is spherically symmetrical (I’ll explain that in a moment) you can treat it as if it were a single point with as much mass as the whole thing, at the center of the actual not-a-point mass. Or in other words, you can, for purposes of figuring out what effect the Earth has on the Moon, treat the Earth as if it were a point mass at the center of the (actual) Earth, with a mass of 5.972168×10²⁴ kg.

What does “spherically symmetric” mean? It means that if you start at the center and go outward in any direction, you’ll see the same thing no matter which direction you pick. In the case of Earth, you’ll see a hot compressed core of iron for the first 1300 kilometers (very dense, a lot of mass concentrated here), followed by liquid iron for 2200 kilometers (again compressed), followed by rock the rest of the way, then a thin crust of (possibly) ocean, and then air.

It’s not absolutely perfectly spherically symmetrical, but it’s close enough, particularly given that the differences matter less the further away you are (well, that’s sort of the point of this whole post).

In fact if the Earth were a hollow shell, you’d get the same result (that too, is spherically symmetric). Or you can think of Earth as a nested set of shells, like an onion or a matryoshka doll; that’s spherically symmetric too. (In fact, that’s the way to prove this…start with a hollow shell, prove it for the hollow shell (a bit difficult), then any set of nested hollow shells should just add together (easy).)

OK so let’s give this a bit more thought, to grasp it intuitively. Imagine we want to compute Earth’s effect on you, not the Moon. Certainly the ground right where you’re standing is pulling you straight down, but what about all the other ground around you? There’s some bit of ground out there, maybe a mile away, pulling you toward it…and that’s not down, that’s nearly horizontal, just a bit below because of the curvature. And there is a lot of ground “out there” compared to the ground under your feet. Ah, but the patch of ground a mile in front of you pulls the same amount toward it as the patch of ground a mile behind you, but in almost opposite directions! The forces almost perfectly cancel each other out, except for the slight downward tilt of the forces, which is the same direction (down) for both of them, and adds up…to pointing down. Sweeping all round the horizon and adding them all up, all that’s left is a downward force. So you can hopefully see this makes sense. Then take another case: Imagine all the bits of Earth twenty miles away and two miles deep…that’s another ring of rock where all the sideways pulls will cancel, and you’re just left with a pull down, towards the center of the ring. Repeat until you’ve handled every bit of Earth, and you get a net force…downward, towards the center of the Earth.

Similarly the Moon’s effect on the Earth is computable, as if the Moon were a single point mass of 7.342×10²² kg.

So you can use that formula I gave above, after all, without having to run it zillions of times and add it all up.

That will certainly suffice (with a lot more development that I gave the results of in all those orbital mechanics posts) to explain the Moon’s orbit about the Earth, or technically, its orbit around the center of mass of the Earth-Moon system.

But here’s the key thing. The Moon, pulling on the Earth, can be treated as point mass “out there”, but the Earth being affected by the Moon can’t quite be treated as a point mass.

Imagine you are part of the Earth and the Moon is directly overhead. (If you have difficulty with this, superglue your feet to the floor and make it so.) The Earth has a radius of (roughly) 6,378 km. So you’re 6,378 kilometers closer to the Moon than the center of the Earth is. So the Moon is pulling on you just a bit more strongly than it is on the Earth as a whole. And consider some guy standing on a boat in the Indian Ocean, directly on the opposite side of the Earth [yes, I am assuming a North American audience here. Folks in Europe can adjust to South Pacific, folks in Oz can adjust to North Atlantic]. That guy is 6,378 kilometers further away from the Moon than the Earth as a whole is, and feels less force. Not only that, if you consider the difference between your felt force, and his, it’s about twice as much as comparing either one of you to the center of the Earth.

The net effect is as if the Moon is trying to pull you away from your antipodal friend. Or push him away from you, depending on how you look at it.

That differential force is the cause of the tides and is called the tidal force. Imagine that the Moon is over an ocean. The water directly under it feels more pull, and since it is a liquid, can actually respond to that force by flowing towards the Moon. It forms a hump. Likewise the Moon is exerting a net push on the water on the other side…so it too forms a hump.

People had for centuries noticed that the Moon was high in the sky during every other high tide, but that it was nowhere to be seen during the other high tides. So it was easy to dismiss any notion that the Moon caused tides. But, as it happens, it does.

OK this is already late, but I have to finish this. How does the tidal force behave?

If the Earth were somehow twice as wide as it actually is, the force trying to pull you and your antipodal buddy apart would double. In other words, the tidal force on a body (like the Earth) acted on by the Moon is directly proportional to the diameter of the object (Earth). OK, go back to Earth’s actual size, but bring the Moon in closer…to half its current distance. What’s the tidal force now? It is eight times as much. (Don’t believe me? Well, good, actually, don’t believe me! The derivation is in the Wikipedia article on tidal force: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_force (section titled Formulation).) In other words, tidal force follows an inverse cube law rather than the inverse square law that gravity follows.

OK, I could follow this further. But A) this is late and B) we’ll have the chance to do that anyway, in various (and directly relevant) ways as we talk about various phenomena all around the solar system.

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 !!!