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

Speaker Johnson: A Reminder.

January 6 tapes. A good start…but then nothing.

Were you just hoping we’d be distracted by the first set and not notice?

Are you THAT kind of “Republican”?

Are you Kevin McCarthy lite?

What are you waiting for?

I have a personal interest in this issue.

This Man is Pissed!

And if you aren’t…what the hell is wrong with you?

Is This Our Anthem?

Or at least our song to march to?

I’m sure most of you know I don’t believe in “devolution” or any variant of “we’re really still in charge” and certainly not the ones that come with “They’re waiting for everyone to wake up.”

No, I don’t think the good guys are in charge. But that makes it even more necessary that people wake up.

This might be the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of our age. (Or perhaps the recent trafficking movie was it. Or maybe both.)

Certainly there seem to be a huge number of people who are finally having the light bulb turning on when they hear this song.

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 $2,025.40
Silver $22.69
Platinum $884.00
Palladium $887.00
Rhodium $4800.00

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

Gold $2,014.20
Silver $23.49
Platinum $915.00
Palladium $972.00
Rhodium $4,850.00

On Wednesday gold got clubbed by the markets like a baby seal. It dropped well below $2000. In essence the Big Money in the financial markets finally decided the Fed wouldn’t be dropping interest rates any time soon. That, of course, increases the nominal yield of dollar-based instruments, so the Big Money hominids moved at least some of their money out of gold.

Friday’s close price represents a recovery from that Big Dump.

The Moon

I was originally going to write about Mercury, but it turns out to be more complex than the Moon, and since I like to build on prior ramblings, it’s more logical to do it this way.

The Moon and Sun are the two compact objects in the sky that you can see detail on without magnification. Though you’d better have a filter to cut out 999,990/1,000,000ths (or thereabouts, call it 17 stops if you are a photographer) of sunlight before you go looking at the Sun for any length of time.

Everything else up there looks like a point of light, or is a cloud of gas or dust that will be a bit fuzzy (those are non-compact objects). The visible planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and just barely, Uranus) actually have a little more breadth as seen from Earth, than do stars, which is why they don’t usually twinkle…ripples in the atmosphere are unlikely to blot the whole thing out.

So let’s consider the Moon.

It’s very close, vastly closer than other planets. I mentioned that the Astronomical Unit is the basic “yardstick” for distances in the solar system; it’s the average distance between Earth and Sun and comes in at about 150 million kilometers or 93 million miles.

The Moon averages 0.00257 AUs away, in other words about 1/400th of an AU. Which means it is 1/400th as far away as the Sun.

Using bare eyeballs, the obvious features of the Moon are that it has bright and dark areas, and it goes through phases.

Paying a bit of attention to patterns, we note that the Moon is sometimes close to the Sun, and sometimes far away in the sky, and that the phases correlate to the distance; when the Moon is close to the Sun, it’s a crescent…the closer it is, the thinner the crescent. When the Moon is roughly 90 degrees away from the Sun, it looks like a half circle; when its more than 90 degrees away but less than 180, it’s in a shape called “gibbous,” and when it is 180 degrees away, at the opposite side of the sky, rising at the same time the Sun sets and vice versa, it’s a full circle. The pattern then reverses, the Moon becoming gibbous, than half full, and a crescent. The sequence repeats every 29.5 days, this is the lunar month and is ultimately the origin of our calendar months even though the lengths don’t match up.

This is one of those many times that geometry plays a role in understanding astronomy. If you understand the relative positions of things, and are able to imagine your point of view being at one corner of a triangle, the phases of the Moon become very understandable. It’s a sphere, and the part we can see is what the Sun is shining on. The next time you see the Moon during the daytime, draw in your mind’s eye the complete circle, and note that the lit part is the part nearest to the Sun.

(I apologize to those who find this too obvious to need me to belabor this. But I know from personal experience there are some who not only don’t understand this, but will assert the exact opposite is true, asserting the lit side of the Moon faces away from the Sun, etc.)

The direction of motion is invariable, too. If you sit and watch it one evening, it’s obviously going from east to west…but that’s an illusion, caused by the Earth’s rotation. If the Moon is just above the western horizon after sunset one day (and it will be a thin crescent), the next day, it will be higher above the horizon at sunset, further from the Sun, and a fatter crescent. This tells you it’s really moving west-to-east (right to left if you’re in the northern hemisphere). If instead of comparing it to the Sun, you compare it to the background stars (a much better “absolute” reference frame), you’ll see it’s moving west-to-east a bit faster than you thought comparing it to the Sun. (And it will become evident, as you notice that stars set earlier and earlier each evening, that the Sun is itself moving west to east against the background stars, at least from our point of view here on Earth. It’s just not doing so nearly as fast as the Moon is.)

That about wraps up the phases, now let’s discuss those dark and bright areas. This is like the case of the “dog that did not bark” (which realization helped Sherlock Holmes solve the case in one of the classic stories). The important thing is what is not happening. Those dark and bright areas don’t change. Oh, they may or may not be visible depending on the phase of the Moon, but they don’t change. They don’t move.

If the Moon is a sphere, as shown from its phase behavior, it always presents the same face to us here on Earth. It doesn’t rotate.

Actually, it does. If you step away from Earth and adopt the stars as your frame of reference, the Moon does indeed rotate, once every orbit. Since the rotation is in the same direction as its orbital path around the Earth, the effect is to present the same face to the Earth, all the time.

In this diagram, on the left the Moon is shown rotating (relative to a “God’s Eye View” once per month, but keeping the same face to the earth. If it didn’t rotate, you’d have a situation like the right hand side of the diagram, where people on Earth can see all of the Moon’s surface over the course of a month.

This 1-1 match of rotation to orbital period is sometimes presented as a cosmic coincidence and I’ve even seen people try to present it as proof that Someone set it up that way to send us a message. But as I will show later on, it would be more incredible if it did not do this.

OK so on to the Moon itself.

We know the Moon better than any other astronomical body, both from the fact that it’s practically sitting in our laps, comparatively speaking, and from the fact that we’ve actually sent people there and brought pieces of it back. Unlike almost everything else up there we can put pieces of the Moon in a test tube.

Here is a comparison of sizes, Moon to Earth, with a lot of other planets’ moons for comparison:

(And that brings up a point: moons are astronomical bodies that orbit planets, which in turn orbit the Sun. But the Moon (and notice the capital M), is the particular astronomical body that orbits the Earth. Before 1609 it was the only moon known, so it naturally ended up with the generic name…or rather, it gave its name to the entire class of objects–that being reference in the diagram’s title. Of course, in a sentence it’s awkward to just say “Moon” without “The” in front of it: “Moon orbits the Earth” sounds like a headline, not like good grammar. It’s a proper noun, so it shouldn’t need a “the” in front of it, yet it does. In most other cases “the” in front of a noun makes it not a proper noun. For example, “The president” versus “President Trump”; in the first case it’s not a proper noun, in the second case it’s part of a proper noun. Note in the diagram it’s just capital-M “Moon”. The Sun has the same issue. It’s never just called “Sun.” Earth has a tendency to glom onto “the” too but a bit but less so; you can leave off “the” without having it sound awkward because no class of bodies are called “earths”. Personally I’d be perfectly happy giving “the Moon” a unique proper name that doesn’t mean every body like it, and in science fiction it’s often called “Luna” [though that’s just “Moon” in another language].)

So you have a size comparison. How about mass? It turns out the Moon has 1/81 the mass of Earth, yet it’s about 1/50th the volume. That indicates that its average density is less than that of Earth. The average cubic centimeter of Earth is 5.5 grams, for the Moon it’s 3.344, 60.6% of Earth’s; for reference water comes in at 1.0, typical rocks range from 2 to 3 g/cc, and iron comes in at 7.87.

You could take a wild guess and say this means that the Moon has much more rock and less iron in it than Earth, and you’d be right. It is believed that the Moon has a solid iron core, a small one maybe only 200 miles across, with some liquid iron above it, but it’s mostly rocks.

The Moon has essentially no atmosphere. The atmosphere it does have is so thin it might as well be a vacuum; the total mass of the entire atmosphere is estimated at about ten (metric) tonnes. (When you consider that is spread out over a surface that’s larger than North America…that’s thin.)

Because the Moon is essentially airless, the day side bakes under the Sun, and the night side freezes because there is no insulating blanket to keep it from doing so, and no wind to carry heat from one side to the other. Temperatures range from 100-390 K (with 0 Fahrenheit being 273 K), or -173 to +117 C.

The Moon has almost no carbon or nitrogen, and water is absent except in permanently shadowed craters at the poles, where it is in the form of ice. What about oxygen? The Moon has plenty of that, but not in the form of air; rocks are largely composed of oxygen. That’s true on Earth, too; the oxygen in the air and in the water is but a tiny fraction of all of the oxygen on (and in) the Earth. Crustal rock (what you see) is on average 47% oxygen by mass. Yes almost half of what you stand on is oxygen, down for hundreds or even thousands of miles.

The surface gravity is 1/6th that of Earth. The following gif shows (in real time, not slo-mo) an astronaut jumping as he salutes the Flag.

At such low gravity people lose their balance easily; the gravity isn’t quite enough to trigger the body’s “gut sense” of up and down. That plus the mass of those big backpacks throwing off their centers of gravity tended to make the astronauts clumsy on the Moon.

OK, so let’s go back to the Moon always presenting the same side to the Earth. This is, in fact a perfectly normal effect of (wait for it) tidal forces. [I told you they’d come up again and again…well, this is the first time so maybe you still doubt the “again and again” part.]

As prominent as the tides are on Earth, the lunar contribution to them, the tidal effect of the Moon on the Earth, is only going to be 1/81 the tidal effect of the Earth on the Moon.

Even though the Moon is essentially a ball of rock, it will flex under tidal forces and that will have some unexpected effects. (The Earth’s solid surface rises and falls almost 40 centimeters in response to the tidal forces from the Moon and Sun.)

What happens is the Moon elongates a bit, roughly along a line from Earth to Moon. It is thought that the Moon rotated at a very different rate at some point in the past, so the tidal bulge would actually move along the Moon’s surface as it rotated with respect to Earth. However, this wasn’t instantaneous. If you were standing on the Moon back then, you’d expect the tidal bulge to be maximum when the Earth was directly overhead, but in fact the bulge arrives sometime after that time. Which means your bit of the Moon has rotated past the point where Earth was overhead. The Earth, having raised the bulge, also pulls on it…giving the Moon a slight tug to slow its rotation down. Run that for millions of years and the Moon eventually just stops rotating with respect to the Earth.

This isn’t just our moon, it’s every moon. Every one of the twenty moons in that diagram I presented above that’s large enough to be round is tidally locked to the planet it orbits. (If you’re going back to count, Hyperion is the largest one that’s not round.) It would be weird if any of them weren’t. It’s also an important piece of evidence that the solar system as a whole is many millions of years old. Or to flip that around, if some moon weren’t tidally locked to its primary, it would be clear evidence that that moon had not been in that orbit for very long, geologically speaking.

Speaking of orbits, these tidal effects have another consequence: They’re causing the Moon’s orbit to get larger over time. This isn’t just theory, we’ve measured it by bouncing lasers off reflectors left on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts.

How does this work? One contributing factor is those tidal bulges. Just as the Earth pulls on those tidal bulges on the Moon, the Moon pulls on those tidal bulges on the Earth, slowing our rotation down (and our days are, indeed growing gradually longer. Given a lot of time we would become tidally locked to the Moon, but the Sun will have gone red giant and possibly destroyed the Earth and Moon long before then). But since the tidal bulges on Earth’s surface are basically ahead of the Moon’s position, they pull on it, and the Moon pulls on them. That actually causes the Moon to speed up, just a tiny bit. But if you’re in an orbit and you speed up, you end up making the orbit larger (and ironically, then slowing down more than you sped up). So, the Moon gets further from the Earth, at a rate of 38 millimeters per year. (And, as I said, this has been measured.)

More info on tidal locking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking

Earth and Moon are unusually close to each other in size. All of those other big moons in the diagram above orbit planets much larger than Earth. Since bodies actually orbit their common center of gravity, the sheer size of the Moon makes the center of gravity 4,670 kilometers above the center of Earth. Although this is still below the Earth’s surface (which is 6378 km out), it’s still most of the way to being outside of the Earth. In fact, many regard the Earth and Moon as a double planet. (Pluto and its moon Charon are actually closer to each other in size and the barycenter is actually outside of Pluto. Were they planets, they’d definitely qualify as a double planet.)

So what accounts for this freakishly large Moon? How did it get there?

Based on analysis of the rocks brought back from the Moon, our best theory is that, shortly after the Earth formed, when it was still red hot, another planet, about the size of Mars (but not Mars) collided with Earth, not directly head on but a bit obliquely. A lot of Earth’s outer layers were blown out into space, as well as most of the matter from the other planet, and went into orbit about Earth, very rapidly (over tens of thousands of years) collecting to form the Moon. Since the Moon ended up mostly made of the stuff from the other planet, that explains why its composition is subtly different from Earth’s.

This is called the “Big Thwack.” And astronomers have even named the planet that hit the proto-Earth; they call it “Theia.”

Immediately after its formation from all of the debris, the Moon would have been much closer to Earth (and tidal forces much, much, much stronger); its present distance of roughly a quarter of a million miles is the result of over four billion years of tidal action. Tides on earth would have been measured in hundreds if not thousands of meters.

One other “big result” from studying rocks from the Moon is that we are pretty confident of an event called the “Late Heavy Bombardment.” The solar system formed between 4.6 and 4.5 billion years ago, and in those early days, before planets had coalesced, there were a lot of rocks out there, small objects in orbit about the Sun. Planets grew by impacting with and absorbing these objects. After a (comparatively) brief amount of time most of that junk should have been swept up, but about 500 million years later, there was another spate of bombardments by sky junk, asteroids and comets. This hit every planet in the inner solar system, and the Moon and Mercury in particular bear the scars, because their surfaces are essentially unchanged since then. Of course if all we can do is look we just see craters. But we were able to radio-isotope date the moon rocks so it became apparent that many of those rocks formed well after the crust should have solidified after the initial formation. So now, we believe, something happened to cause a later barrage of material to plunge into the inner solar system. This is, however, based largely on lunar samples and we might just have happened to get a bunch of rocks from one impact (it’s unlikely but possible). So we want to collect many more samples from all over the moon to try to confirm this.

As I mentioned before the Moon has light and dark blotches on it. The light areas turn out to be mountainous areas with terrain; the dark areas are flat, reminding many of seas. (And the Latin names get translated into English, for example the Sea of Tranquility, where Apollo 11 landed.) In fact they are called maria (plural of Latin mare) for that reason. And it turns out they probably were seas once; seas of lava brought to the surface by big strikes from the Late Heavy Bombardment.

The presence of our Moon has had major effects on Earth, not “just” the tides; its presence acts as a stabilizing factor on our axis of rotation. Were it not for the Moon, the Earth’s axial tilt could vary a lot more than the one or two degrees that it actually does, and that would make it hard for life to survive here. And there’s speculation that the significant tides we have, may have been necessary for life to get started in the first place. If so, that makes life a rarity, because Earth sized planets with large moons are likely a rarity too.

There’s one last random factoid I want to share. I mentioned earlier that some believe that the Moon’s turning the same face toward the Earth is a cosmic coincidence, when it actually isn’t. But there really is one cosmic coincidence that should be mentioned. As I mentioned before, the Moon is 400 times closer to us than the Sun. I didn’t mention that the Sun is about 400 times the Moon’s diameter. Which means that the Sun and Moon look almost exactly the same size as seen from Earth. And indeed there are times when the Moon passes directly between the Earth and the Sun, and at that point it covers the Sun’s disc quite neatly, resulting in a solar eclipse that covers the Sun, but not much of the Sun’s atmosphere (also called the Sun’s corona). This relationship isn’t perfect, and it’s possible for a lineup like this to happen when the Moon is as far away as it gets in its orbit, and, because it looks smaller at that distance, it doesn’t quite cover the Sun resulting in an annular eclipse (one happened last year, I posted photos).

Coming up on April 8, we will see a total eclipse of the Sun across much of the United States, in a swath running from Texas to Maine. I highly recommend you go see it if at all possible…do not settle for anything less than totality. If you see a 99% eclipse because you weren’t quite in the right place, you’ve wasted an opportunity.

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.)

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 !!!