2025·03·22 We Will Have Justice Daily Thread

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

January 6 Tapes?

Where are the tapes? Anyone, Anyone? Bueller? Johnson??

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

Evading Reality

Many things the Left believes are simply not true. Right now the focus is on the size and scope of our government, and the many many billions of dollars the government has been spending on no-one-knew-what. None of that money is going to a key role of government. Which, after all, has the sole purpose of protecting rights.

And if you, Leftist Lurker, want to dismiss this 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, well here we go for another week of WINNING against the Deep State.

I confess that the novelty has not worn off.

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.

Yes, we won this time around. Not only did we win, we got to KEEP that win instead of having it stolen from us.

But no one should imagine that that’s the end of electoral fraud. Much work needs to be done to ensure it doesn’t just happen again next time around. And incidentally to rescue those states currently in the grips of self-perpetuating fraud, where the people who stole the last election, make sure it’s easier to steal the next one.

This issue, though it’s not front-and-center right now, is not going away, and if we ignore it, we’ll pay the price. See the article above about the consequences of evading reality.

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 $2,985.50
Silver $33.87
Platinum $1004.00
Palladium $988.00
Rhodium $5,700.00
FRNSI* 143.424-
Gold:Silver 88.146-

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $3,024.40
Silver $33.10
Platinum $988.00
Palladium $984.00
Rhodium $6,100.00
FRNSI* 145.305+
Gold:Silver 91.372-

Gold was actually up in the 3040s Wednesday and Thursday but dropped on Friday, (which has been a common pattern for years). Platinum went nowhere. Silver is actually down. My understanding is that gold’s rise has been driven by central bank purchases. Since they don’t bother with silver, that explains why silver is basically tango uniform. The gold:silver ratio has been above 100 before, and I would be surprised if it doesn’t get there again soon.

*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.

The Math Behind Radiometric Dating

This is going to be a bit brutal for those who are math phobic. For the rest it will reward careful attention.

Radiometric dating involves, at the very least, measuring the quantities of parent isotopes and daughter isotopes. In some situations it gets more complicated than that, and to be honest those situations are actually the usual ones.

Introducing Uranium-Lead Dating

So let’s take an actual case as an example, a method called uranium-lead dating, because the parent isotope is uranium, and the daughter isotope is lead. Actually there are two sets of parent-daughter isotopes in this case: uranium-238 with daughter isotope lead-206, and uranium-235 to lead-207. (Check: The differences between the mass numbers must be a multiple of 4, because a change of 4 is the effect alpha decay will have. And yes it looks like I got the right numbers. I saw a video recently that swapped the lead isotope numbers; an easy mistake to make.) This makes it a favorite because you can do two datings with one sample.

For simplicity we will start by considering only the uranium-238 to lead-206 pairing. Most dating methods use an isotope that decays directly into the daughter product. U-238 does not do this. It decays into thorium-234 by alpha decay, then there are a chain of thirteen more decays (there are alternate paths, but all are thirteen steps long, not including that first alpha decay) for total of fourteen steps before it gets to lead-206.

[Check this one too. The difference in mass numbers is 238-206=32; dividing by four that is eight alpha decays. But eight alpha decays reduces the number of protons by sixteen, so if that’s all that happened uranium-238 would become osmium-206. (Uranium is element 92; 92-16=76; 76 is osmium.) In order to actually end up with lead (82), we need to, somewhere along the way, get six additional protons; we do that with negative beta decay (β^–) which turns a neutron into a proton. So six beta decays are needed. Eight alpha decays + six negative beta decays = 14 total decays.]

Is this huge number of decays a problem? In principle it could be, but in this case it’s not. The initial uranium-238 to thorium-234 decay is very slow, with a half life of 4,468,000,000 years. Compared to this the others are practically instantaneous, with uranium-234 to thorium-230 requiring 245,000 years and thorium-230 to radium-226 requiring 75,400 years. Radium-226 to radon-222 has a half life of 1600 years. All of the other decays happen in less than a year and some take less than a second. So, basically, once a uranium-238 atom cuts loose and spits out an alpha particle, it’s going to be a lead-206 atom in less than a couple of million years, tops; which in comparison to the half life of uranium-238 (4,468 million years) is negligible.

Half Lives and the Radioactive Decay Equation

So, let me remind you about half lives. This is the amount of time it takes for half of the atoms in the sample to decay. It’s a little tricky wrapping one’s head around this at first. Surely, if half of the atoms are gone in 4,468 million years, the other half ought to be gone in another 4,468 million years. But it doesn’t work that way.

Each atom is independent of the others, and any given U-238 atom has a totally random 50 percent chance of going “kablooey” sometime within the next 4,468 million years. It could be right now while you’re watching it, or it could be 4,467.999 million years from now. If it doesn’t happen between now and then, guess what? You are still looking at an atom that has a 50 percent chance of going “kablooey” in the next 4,468 million years. The past history doesn’t matter. If the atom is 100,000 million years old already, versus created last year, it still has the same changes of blowing up in the same period of time.

Go to multiple atoms in a sample; billions, trillions or quadrillions of them [a one-gram sample of uranium-238 has 2.53 sextillion (or 2.53 trillion billion) atoms in it]. Since each individual atom has a 50 percent chance of blowing up in the next 4,468 million years, half of them, you don’t know which ones in advance, but half of them will do so. OK, so let’s say your very distant descendant takes your one gram sample and separates out all of the lead and intermediate decay products (the other things on the chain), and he has half a gram of uranium-238. His past does not matter; he has a half-gram sample of uranium-238 and half of it will decay in the next 4,468 million years, leaving his distant descendant with a quarter of a gram of uranium. (And maybe by that time an honest Leftist will have been born.)

The following GIF is a simulation of radioactive decay, with four samples each of four and four hundred atoms. The number at the top is the number of elapsed half lives. (It runs a bit fast unfortunately, so watch closely.)

Another way to talk about it is to say that, for a given isotope, the number of decaying atoms in some time interval is proportional to the current number of atoms.

In fact since the decaying atoms reduce the size of the sample, the number of decays is the rate of change of the size of the sample. Twice as many decays? Twice as fast a reduction.

In order to truly understand radiometric dating we have to understand this, and be able to express it mathematically. And I want you to truly understand it.

Intense Math Alert! Go to the bolded paragraph below to skip this.

Expressing this semi-mathematically, using ∝ for “is proportional to”:

(Number of decays in a specified time interval) ∝ (Current size of sample)

Or:

(rate of change of the sample size) ∝ (Current size of sample)

Or a bit more formally, with N(t) being the number of atoms in the sample at time t, expressed in calculus notation:

−dN/dt ∝ N

(The negative sign is because the change is in the downward direction, yet we will want to use a positive constant when we introduce it shortly.)

Or we can make it an equation by creating a proportionality constant, λ, (Greek lower-case lambda); in this case it’s called the decay constant.

−dN/dt = λN

And rearrange just a bit:

dN/N = −λdt

Welcome to the world of differential equations. This one is easy to solve, since the only way a function can be its own derivative is if the function is e^t, and if you want a function to be its own derivative but multiplied by some number is for the function to be something like e^kt., in which case the derivative will be ke^t. So taking advantage of this fact, we get:

Key Equation: N(t) = N₀e^−λt

Where N₀ is the size of the sample at some particular time, and N(t) is the size of the sample at some earlier or later time, t.

[e is the base of the natural logarithms and I talk about it (and logarithms) here: https://www.theqtree.com/2023/05/20/2023%C2%B705%C2%B720-joe-biden-didnt-win-daily-thread/ and here: https://www.theqtree.com/2023/06/17/2023%c2%b706%c2%b717-joe-biden-didnt-win-daily-thread/.]

This concerns the so-called parent nuclide. The daughter product increases, of course. What’s the formula for that? It’s convenient that the number of atoms does not change; even if fewer and fewer of them are the parent isotope. In other words, the total number of atoms, parent + daughter, is always N₀ no matter how much (or how little) decay has happened. That means that to get the number of daughter atoms, you can simply subtract the number of parent atoms from the original number of parent atoms. I’m using subscripts p and d here to indicate number of parent and daughter atoms

N_d(t) = N₀ − N_p(t)

Substituting in the Key Equation for N_p:

N_d(t) = N₀ − N₀e^−λt

But this just begs to be simplified a bit:

N_d(t) = N₀(1 − e^−λt)

Earlier I was talking in terms of half lives, but we don’t see that here; we see this funky lambda constant instead. Can we get to a formula that uses half lives?

Yes but before we proceed I should say something about λ. We’re eventually going to want to put an actual numerical value on it, but it’s important to note that this is a number that applies to some given time interval. A second, a year, a million years. This number is actually the fraction of the sample that decays in whatever time interval you choose. So if a trillionth of the sample decays in one second, λ is one trillionth (0.000000000001), but to express that in years, you need to multiply it by 60 × 60 × 24 × 365.25, and if you want it to express it for millions of years, you have to multiply it again by another million. In this case we’re dealing with geology and our λ values will be set for million-year units.

The first step is to simply invert λ, defining a new constant τ:

τ = 1/λ

This gives you the average lifetime for an atom of the parent isotope, in whatever unit (seconds, years, millions of years, whatever) that you used for λ.

Note that this is not the same as half life. Half life is the time it takes for half of the atoms to go kablooey, but that’s not the average time it will take for one to do so. Some atoms ( one in 1024) will survive ten half lives, and they pull the average up. But it’s easy to get to the half life, t_1/2 from here–multiply by the natural log of 2 (about 0.693):

t_1/2 = τ ln(2) = ln(2) / λ

The reverse process:

λ = ln(2) / t_1/2

And it turns out that there’s a version of the Key Equation with the half life…actually two versions that are equivalent to each other.

Cumbersome Half Life Key Equation: N(t) = N₀e^{−ln(2)t/t_1/2}

This is ugly so it gets simplified as follows:

Simple Half Life Key Equation: N(t) = N₀ 2^-(t/t_1/2)

This one is intuitive in terms of half lives. Raise 1/2 to the power of the number of half lives that have elapsed to get the fraction of atoms remaining, then multiply by the original number. Or equivalently raise 2 to the negative power of the number of half lives.

So do we prefer working with λ or with t_1/2? Scientific calculators come with an e^x key; they never come with a 2x key–which forces us to work with that cumbersome formula above if we want to use half lives. (Honestly I’d write a program if it were a programmable calculator: store the half life in memory, and input the time, let the program do all the steps in the Cumbersome equation.) On the other hand I am having a very difficult time finding a table of isotope decay rates; half lives are easy to find.

END OF INTENSE MATH but be aware there will be a lot of applying the equations from here on out. That’s basically arithmetic, though, not differential equations.

For those of you rejoining us here, I’m going to repeat the formulas and definitions:

Decay Rate Key Equation: N(t) = N₀e^−λt

Cumbersome Half Life Key Equation: N(t) = N₀e^{−ln(2)t/t_1/2}

Simple Half Life Key Equation: N(t) = N₀ 2^-(t/t_1/2)

N(t) is the number of atoms of the parent isotope (the one that’s decaying away) at any given time t. N₀ is the original number of atoms of the parent isotope.

t_1/2 is the half life. λ is the decay constant, the fraction of the sample that decays in some specified time (seconds, or millions of years, as appropriate). Dividing 1 by λ gives τ, the average lifetime of an atom in the sample.

I rarely see λ used. But for uranium-238 it’s: 4.916 x 10^-18 (when working in seconds) and 1.551 x 10^-10 (when working in years). If you use the latter number you need to supply t in years, not seconds–which, let’s face it, is more likely what you want to do anyway. In fact, this is geology (or have you forgotten?): You probably want millions of years, in which case λ for uranium-238 is 1.551 x 10^-4.

In fact, let me supply the numbers for U-235, U-238, and thorium-232, since we’re going to be mentioning them at some point below.

Isotope
U-235
U-238
Th-232

Half Life (My) t_1/2
704
4468
14,050

Decay Rate λ
984.6 × 10⁻⁶
155.1 × 10⁻⁶
49.33 × 10⁻⁶

(I here took the liberty of using “engineering” numbers rather than strict scientific notation (where the power is set so only one number is left of the decimal point) so that you could compare the decay rates more readily. The engineering mode uses powers that are multiples of three so it’s easy to write out a metric prefix, e.g, 1.32 × 10⁴ watts (scientific notation) becomes 13.2 × 10³ watts (engineering notation) or 13.2 kW (very readily read off the engineering notation).)

OK, there is some more math but at least I’m not slinging differential equations any more:

Determining Age (The Simple, Ideal Case)

Since we are dating a sample rather than predicting how much will be left after some time, these formulas are backwards. Instead of telling us how much is left after a known time has elapsed, we expect to know how much is left, and want to know how much time it took to get to that point.

Rearranging the Decay Rate Key Equation we get:

t = ln(N/N₀) / –λ

or, getting rid of the minus sign by taking the natural log of the reciprocal instead:

The Dating Equation: t = ln(N₀/N)/λ.

(“ln” is the natural log; the logarithm to the base e.)

OK so how do we apply this?

In principle, we can analyze some rock to determine how much U-235, Pb-207, U-238, Pb-206, and for bonus, Th-232 and Pb-208 is in it. We will want to know numbers of atoms–or at least the ratio of the number of atoms, not weight, but it’s easy enough to convert. We can then use the last formula above three times, remembering that (for the U-235 case) N₀ is actually the sum of the U-235+Pb-207 numbers, whereas N is just the U-235 count. So you have two (or three, if you are checking thorium as well) pairs of numbers; run the calculation with each one. You now have three answers; if they are all the same, you’re in business.

Here’s an example: A rock that happens to be 704 million years old. You don’t know this (real science doesn’t have the answers in the back of the book), but you want to, so you take a tiny sample. For now we’ll assume no pre-existing daughter nuclides, no losses of any atoms over time from the sample, and no contamination of the sample. You put that sample into a mass spectrometer, which vaporizes the sample, ionizes the atoms, and sends them past a magnet at high speed. The atoms, being charged, will follow curved paths past the magnet. Heavier atoms will be bent less by the magnet. We put a detector downstream and it notes how many atoms hit where an atom of mass 206 should strike. Also for 207, 208, 232, 235, and 238.

What does our scientist see? It so happens I picked that number for a reason; it’s the half life of U-235. So our scientist will see equal numbers of U-235 and Pb-207, say 5 million of each. It doesn’t matter, it’s the ratio between the two that matters, and in this case it’s 1:1. That will probably make him smile because he won’t even have to pull out his calculator for that one–he will already know the answer. But he decides to check that, so what about U-238 and Pb-206? He will see 11.54 atoms of Pb-206 for every hundred atoms of U-238. Say, 1 billlion atoms of U-238 and 115.4 million atoms of Pb-206 But in order to use the formula above, he needs N₀/N, the ratio of the remaining parent atoms (1 billion) divided by the total number of atoms involved in this (parent + daughter), to the number of remaining atoms. So what he wants is (1 billion + 115.4 million)/1 billion = 1,115,400,000/1,000,000,000 = 1.0577. When he plugs that into the dating equation t = ln(N₀/N)/λ, being careful to use the value of λ for U-238, he gets 703.98 million years. Now he’s really happy because his numbers match. If he checks Th-232/Pb-208 he’ll get (regardless of the actual amounts) 3.534 atoms of lead-208 for every hundred atoms of thorium-232. Using this, he gets N₀/N of 1.0353, divides by λ for Th-232 (49.33 × 10⁻⁶), hits the e^x key on his calculator…and the age comes out as 704.1 million years. Now he’s grinning ear to ear, because he took three sets of measurements, independent of each other, and got the same result every time. What could be easier? (Actually a lot of things could be easier; actually analyzing the sample in order to get those six numbers is painstaking work.)

That’s the third grade version of what is called “uranium-lead dating.”

[In the light of a joke Pat Frederick made last time, uranium-lead radiometric dating is when her father shoots you full of lead or depleted uranium because he caught you shooting his daughter full of something else. But that’s the high-school level version.]

How To Deal With Non-Ideal Cases

I said this was the third grade version. That’s because I made a bunch of assumptions for this case. I said so before, and now I am going to repeat them.

No initial daughter nuclides (in other words the rock contained no lead when it was formed).
Neither a) any lead nor b) any uranium (or thorium) leached out of the rock since it was formed, since that will mess up our ratios when we measure them.
No contamination of the sample either from natural processes or as it is collected and analyzed.

The problem is when dealing with rocks it’s never that tidy, though it can get close. We cannot simply assume that the sample started out with no daughter isotope in it. Or make any of those other assumptions, at least not without justification.

So when uranium-lead dating is done (in the lab, not in her house), it’s usually done with the mineral zircon. The chemical formula for this is ZrSiO₄. It’s a silicate of zirconium, element #40. Here is an insanely nice specimen of zircon:

But hold on here. There’s no uranium in this mineral!

There’s no uranium, if it’s pure. However these crystals form in a mass of molten rock (magma), and this is Planet Earth unfiltered and unpurified. There will, therefore, almost always be impurities in it. (This is why pure white diamonds are very valuable; they have little to no impurities in them and that is a rare situation indeed.)

Zircon crystals will form in any igneous rock as it solidifies from magma. In fact, they’re practically the first thing that will form. (This is good because it’s easier for a crystal in still-liquid medium to reject impurities than it is, if almost everything surrounding it is already solidified.) They typically end up being the size of sand grains, and so any sizeable igneous rock will have a number of them in it. Zircons are also harder than quartz, with a Mohs hardness of 7.5 vs. quartz’s 7.0. (They will scratch steel and glass.) Which means they will be hard to damage, and can erode out of an igneous rock and end up incorporated in a sedimentary rock, essentially undamaged.

As it happens, if there is any uranium (either isotope, it doesn’t matter because we’re doing chemistry at the moment) in the magma, it can be incorporated in the zircon quite readily. So can thorium. The uranium atoms end up as part of the crystal, replacing some of the zirconium. But the cool thing about it, and the reason we want zircon crystals, is that lead is rejected as the crystal forms. So the innards of the new crystal will contain some uranium, and no lead whatsoever.

Furthermore, uranium won’t leach out of the zircon crystals over time.

That’s handy! And sedimentary rocks will have the crystals too, once they erode from igneous rocks. The thing to remember about the crystals in sedimentary rock is that dating those crystals will not give you the age of the sedimentary rock, but rather the age of some igneous rock that eroded, the grains from which became part of the sedimentary rock. They will put a maximum on the age of the sedimentary rock, but no minimum (maybe it formed last Tuesday).

This is a bit of a pain, because we find fossils, including index fossils, almost entirely in sedimentary rock. It’s not insurmountable, but that’s a topic for a future post. For now let’s stick to igneous rock.

If we take care to use the innards of the zircon crystal, rather than the surface, and run our lab like a clean room, we can reduce the possibility of contamination. If there is contamination in spite of all of these, we won’t get consistent answers (as we did in our example above) and can just disregard the results from that sample.

We’ve taken care of every assumption, except for 2a: We don’t know whether or not any lead leached out of the crystal after it was formed. And that does happen. Zircon crystals don’t like lead, so they’ll push it out if they have a chance, while hanging on to the uranium and thorium that’s still left.

One thing that can cause this is if the zircon is heated to over 900 C after it is formed, like happens when the rock it is part of is transformed into a metamorphic rock. Also, ironically, the uranium’s radiation can actually damage the crystal as it decays, allowing lead to leak out at lower temperatures. (And remember, every uranium-238 atom that decays emits radiation fourteen times!)

OK so how do we deal with this?

Let’s go back to our example of the 704 million year old unicorn rock that had no issues with it. Make it a rock with some number of zircon crystals, and we’ll use the crystals.

The crystals will all have different rates of lead loss, slightly different but different enough for this to work. So let’s take a specific crystal, and let’s say it has lost fifty percent of its lead.

How does a scientist use this to date the rock?

Let’s first see what he measures.

In our previous example, the scientist saw 5 million atoms each of U-235 and Pb-207. This time, though, unbeknownst to the scientist, half of the lead leaked out before the sample was collected. So what he sees instead is 5 million atoms of U-235 and 2.5 million atoms of Pb-207. It looks like N₀ is 7.5 million (not 10 million) so he does the division N₀/N and comes up with 3/2 (instead of 2).

He plugs that into the Dating Equation:

t = ln(N₀/N)/λ

using λ for U-235 and gets: 411.8 million years (probably rounding it to 412).

We happen to know this is wrong. He doesn’t.

Not yet, anyway.

Next, he works U-238 and Pb-206. This time he sees a billion atoms of U-238, but instead of 115.4 million atoms of Pb-206, he only sees 57.7 million. So he is dividing 1,057,700,000 by 1,000,000,000, and getting 1.0577. Plugging that into the Dating Equation with the decay constant for U-238, he gets 361.597…okay, 362 million years. Doing the same exercise with thorium (I’ll save you the gory details) yields an age of 355.1 million years, or 355 million.

These numbers are all over the freaking map. None of them are even remotely right…and this guy has been doing this sort of work for more than two weeks so he knows that this variation actually means he’s nowhere close, and he’s dealing with crystals that lost some of their lead.

What to do now?

Concordia Diagrams to the Rescue

Analyze another zircon crystal, and another. Let’s say the next one has only 40 percent loss of the lead. In that case the U-235 date is 477 million years, the U-238 date is 432 million years, and the thorium date is 425 million years.

He accumulates at least a few of these sets of data.

OK now the mathematical tool comes in. Bring out a sheet of graph paper and label the horizontal Pb-207/U-235 and the vertical Pb-206/U-238.

Before doing anything with the data collected, we have a bit of prep to do. We have to draw a line that shows the values where the two dates are in “concord” (agreement) with each other, and this will be called a “concordia diagram”

For instance, for an age of 100 million years, a perfect rock (like in my first example) will show 90.6 percent U-235 and 9.377 percent Pb-207. Dividing the two we get a ratio 0.1035. The same ideal rock would be 98.5 percent U-238 and 1.54 percent Pb-206. (We’re going to ignore the thorium for now), the ratio is 0.0156. So put a mark at 0.1035 on the horizontal and 0.0156 on the vertical. Label that mark “100.”

Do this for a bunch of different ages and you get this sort of curved line, with different points on the line labeled with different ages. It goes up to the right, but instead of being a straight line it bulges slightly upward.

Note this is a bit different from the graphs we made in Algebra 1. There, we had the independent variable along the horizontal axis, and the dependent variable on the vertical axis. This time we have two dependent variables, those two ratios, off of one independent variable (the age that would give those ratios under ideal circumstances). We are plotting the two dependent variables against each other.

(You don’t have to do all of this math every time, because the points are always the same. I would bet that it’s in tables. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was graph paper with this line pre-printed on it, though in the modern digital age that may have fallen by the wayside.)

In fact, I just used a spreadsheet to compute the values for 100, 200, 300…and so on up to 1000 million years, and plotted them. (I wasn’t able to get the spreadsheet to label the points.) In this case, 100 million years is at the lower left, and 1 billion years is at the upper right.

OK, now that you have this blank template, plot all of your measurements on it. For the first sample, there were 2.5 million atoms of Pb-207 and 5 million of U-235, so the ratio is 0.5. That’s your “x” value. And there were 57.7 million Pb-206 atoms versus 1 billion U-238 atoms, so the ratio is 0.0577. That’s your y value. Plot a point at (0.5, 0.0577)

Repeat for the other samples. These data points should lie along a straight line (if it’s not exact there are mathematical methods to find the “best fit” line). Extend it, and it will cross the curved line in two places. The upper right intersection represents the original ratios, you then can backtrack to figure out what age that point on the curved line represents. And you will get 704 million years, which is the actual age of the rock you pulled the zircon crystals from.

I can’t seem to get sample points onto the graph I just uploaded, but what I can do is show you an actual concordia diagram. This one was used to date rocks from the Klamath Mountains in Northern California. In this case as you can see the age is 461.17 +/- 31 Ma. (Spoiler: This turns out to be the middle of the Ordovician period. My example 704 million year old rock would, if real, come from the Cryogenian period.)

The upshot of this is, the concordia diagram lets you use the fact that there are two measurements to account for loss of daughter isotope, provided you can take multiple samples (with different amounts of loss) from the same rock.

What about the thorium-to-lead part? One could use Pb-208/Th-232 in a concordia diagram, instead of one of the two lead/uranium isotopes, but thorium decays more slowly so its ratios are smaller and a tiny variation in the measurement leads to a bigger variation in the date. The two uranium-lead numbers are more sensitive, so they get used instead.

There is a closely related method called Lead-Lead dating. I’ll cover that next time. Meanwhile, you’re probably wondering. What’s the oldest rock we’ve found?

Quit Holding Out On Us

The oldest “hit” found using zircons and uranium-lead dating so far is some zircon crystals taken from a rock in the Jack Hills in Western Australia, north of Perth. The crystals were found in a sedimentary rock, so the rock as a whole is younger than the zircons, which came out of an igneous rock that eroded a long time ago.

And that number came out to be: 4,404 +/- 8 million years.

Remember that this is a minimum age for the Earth. We’ll improve on it.

Here’s a picture of a Jack Hills rock:

It is believed that this rock (as a combined entity) is about 3 billion years old (that’s not a very precise number, but that’s the point; it’s hard to date sedimentary rocks), but obviously it’s made of older stuff, including those ancient zircon crystals.

I want to close by emphasizing that uranium-lead dating has been used countless times, and between that and other methods of dating I’ll be covering soon–also used countless times–we have built up a consistent notion of Earth’s age and ages for events during Earth’s “lifetime.” This isn’t a one-off that was then uncritically accepted.

Other, slightly newer zircons (4.3 billion years old) from the same area have had their oxygen atoms examined and the isotopic mix there (O-16 vs. O-17 vs. O-18, all stable) implies there was already liquid water on Earth’s surface.

And accepting these numbers isn’t a “presupposition” (as some people would claim) because the numbers are the results of a lot of evidence and scientific investigation.

If you want to dispute numbers in the millions and billions of years, you are going up against, quite literally, tons of hard evidence.

Health Friday 3.21.2025 Open Thread: More on the N1-Methylpseudouridine in the modRNA COVID-19 “Vaccines”

The above image of the chemical structure of Uridine is courtesy of SOMA Analytics and Google Images.

Health Friday is a series devoted to information regarding Big Pharma, vaccines, general health, and associated topics. As today’s post speaks of the disaster of COVID-19 (the COVID-19 virus itself, and the COVID-19 “vaccines”), Yours Truly dedicates it to the memory of all persons, or whatever age of locations, who have passed away from the negative effects of these lab-created bioweapons.

There are Important Wolf Moon Notifications; the Rules of our late, good Wheatie; and, certain caveats from Yours Truly, of which readers should be aware. The are linked here. NOTE: Yours Truly has checked today’s offering for any AI-generated content. To the best of my knowledge and belief, there is none. Also: If readers wish to post anything in the discussion thread for today’s post that is AI-generated, they must cite their source.

Today’s post is one of a Health Friday “mini-series” devoted to discussion of a single topic. The topic for this offering is the chemical compound N1-Methylpseudouridine in the modRNA COVID-19 “vaccines.”

Yours Truly has written in broader form about this compound. Please see: https://www.theqtree.com/2024/11/08/health-friday-11-8-2024-open-thread-the-insidious-n1-methylpseudouridine-in-the-covid-19-vaccines/. Today’s offering is some further information regarding this compound and how it can affect COVID-19 “vaccinated” persons.

The purpose for putting N1-Methylpseudouridine into the modRNA COVID-19 “vaccines” was for this compound to replace the RNA of the natural Uridine in the “vaccinated” person’s body with a synthetic form of Pseudouridine, plus a form of methane.

Uridine (U or Urd) is an RNA synthesis component of the human body. It is present in blood plasma and in the cerebrospinal fluid. It is synthesized by the mitochondrial cells of the body. Two sources of information are: One: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/uridine, 14 May 2010. A screenshot of part of Chapter Four of one reference book from this source is below:

The Chapter Four is found here: https://doi.org/10.1016/8978-0-12-374927-7.00004-2, “Chapter 4 – Substances Involved in Neurotransmission”, George M. Kapalka. Note the mention of food sources for Uridine in the screenshot above.

And, Two: https://nootropicsexpert.com/uridine-monophosphate/, David Tomen, 3 April 2024. A screenshot from this article is below:

Both of the above make it clear that Uridine is an important RNA synthesis component of the human body. It is also very clear that Uridine is an important element in both parts of the “gut-brain connection.”

What is Pseudouridine, and what does it do? Please see: https://pmc.ncbi.mln.nih.gov/articles/PMC8007080/, “Regulation and Function of RNA Pseudouridylation in Human Cells”, Erin K. Borchardt, et al., 23 November 2021. A screenshot from the Introduction of this paper is below:

Note that Pseudouridine interacts “with protein and other RNAs.”

Now, to the lab-created compound N1-Methylpseudouridine: and here, in Yours Truly’s opinion, is where the topic gets “very interesting.” A detailed and meticulous paper on how this compound works is here: https://doi.org/10.1093/narlgkad, “Nanopore sequencing for N1-methylpseudouridine in RNA reveals sequence-dependent discrimination of the modified nucleotide triphosphate during transcription”, Aaron M. Fleming, Cynthia J. Burrows, 16 January 2023. (Note: the monophosphate in Uridine is “transformed” into a triphosphate in N1-Methylpseudouridine.) Several screenshots from this paper are below; first, the Abstract:

Note the mention of T17. Yours Truly will return to this later.

Followed by Figure 1 from the paper:

Followed by Figure 7C, the new “base pairs” created by N1-Methylpseudouridine in RNA:

And, followed by one more item from the paper, regarding T cells, from the Results section:

Now, to T17 cells. These T helper cells are also called Th17 cells orT_H17 cells. They belong to the CD4 helper lymphocyte cell subset. T17 helper cells are found in Uridine: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4137509/, “Th17 Cells in Autoimmune and Infectious Diseases”, J.F. Zambrano-Zaragoza, et al., 3 August 2024. This paper discusses multiple roles for T17 cells. These cells produce a protein called interleuken 17 (IL-17.) Below is a screenshot from the section 1. Introduction of the above paper:

Yours Truly concludes: The N1-Methylpseudouridine in the modRNA COVID-19 “vaccines” replaces the natural Uridine (along with the T17 helper cells present) with Pseudouridine plus a form of methane. Neither of these “replacement elements” can perform the functions of the natural T17 helper cells in Uridine. In fact, the effect of N1-Methylpseudouridine in the modRNA COVID-19 “vaccines” is to “kick the door open” for the onset of multiple types of inflammation, both in the body and in the brain of the “vaccinated” person. In the brain, this can, and does, include: onset of mood changes (that can signal the onset of psychosis); onset of cognitive impairment; pave the way for the onset of dementia and/or of Alzheimer’s disease; and more. In the body, this can, and does, include the onset of abdominal / bowel disorders; general inflammation; and more. The addition of of N1-Methylpseudouridine to the modRNA COVID-19 “vaccines”, in Yours Truly’s opinion, is one of the major “can’t find the fingerprints down the road” elements related to persons presenting with serious adverse effects after COVID-19 “vaccination.” The perpetrators who lab-created the modRNA COVID-19 “vaccines” drew on accumulated knowledge regarding the role of the T17 helper cells in the Uridine RNA—and inserted N1-Methylpseudouridine into these “vaccines” to negate the beneficial effects of the T17 helper cells in the Uridine RNA. The “scientific rationale” for the inclusion of N1-Methylpseudouridine was that this compound “increased the effectiveness of the vaccine.” One of the plethora of papers that “heralded” this “discovery” is here: https://doi.org/10.1021/acscentsci.1c00197, “Modifications in an Emergency: The Role of N1-Methylpseudouridine in COVID-19 Vaccines”, Kellie D. Nance, Jordan L. Meier, 6 April 2021. While it is a correct statement that N1-Methylpseudouridine does indeed “increase the efficiency” of the modRNA COVID-19 “vaccines” — it was “conveniently” left out of the “scientific rationale” explanation that this compound would also serve as a sort of “master switch” to “turn off” the beneficial T17 helper cells in the “vaccinated” person’s body (with no option to go back to the “on” setting) — and what would be the consequences.

THERE. MUST. BE. JUSTICE.

Peace, Good Energy, Respect: PAVACA

DEAR MAGA: Open Thread 20250320 & Rural v. Urban

^Welcome.
^{Please visit this post for our long-standing site rules.}
^{### Kindly identify all AI products, per warning in the header ###}

2024 Presidential Election Map by County. (an uncertain credit)
**Let us Never Forget: our VOTES gave the Trump Administration a Mandate to FIX IT ALL.**

Do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore,
and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. — Galatians 5:1

We got our miracle.
America is back.

Let us dedicate ourselves to the cleansing, healing, and rebuilding of our beautiful nation.

God will guide us.
Prayers & thanks to God for President Donald J. Trump.

Rural v. Urban.

Last week’s discussion of separatist movements was thin on the details regarding the motivations of those wanting to redraw the lines for their state. But the most common issue mentioned seems to be that nearly all of the time, the urban areas of a state are running the state without much consideration of the people living in the more rural areas.

Fourteen States – or more.

Will Trump will sew a 51st star on our flag?

From the article referenced last week, there are active separatist movements in at least 14 states: California, Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington.

The goals aren’t the same in each place — and some movements are far more serious than others. Dozens of counties in Illinois and Oregon, for example, have already voted in favor of some form of separation from their current states.

The rural v. urban dynamic is called out in an essay from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, College of Law (2018), “Splitsylvania: State Secession and What to Do About It“

[Intrastate] secession is the true secession fever: Not the perennial postelection calls of losing parties to secede from a nation controlled by the opposition, but a growing movement for secession from states, with the parts of states (sometimes geographically very large parts of states) wanting to separate from the population-dense urban areas that essentially control state decisionmaking. Feeling ignored, put-upon, and mistreated, secessionists want to take their fate into their own hands. These movements are common, but not likely to succeed on their own, as intrastate secession is, though not entirely unknown (see, e.g., West Virginia) very difficult to pull off.

But these movements do indicate a widespread sense of dissatisfaction among (mostly rural) populations who feel that they are governed by people in distant urban centers who know little, and care less, about their way of life. Such sentiments, which in a way resemble those regarding Britain in the lead-up to the American Revolution, have probably worsened since the Supreme Court’s decisions in the line of cases beginning with Baker v. Carr weakened rural areas’ political position in favor of urban areas. This problem was, to a degree, foreseen by contemporary critics of those decisions.

In conclusion the author proposes:

In this short Essay, I have argued that allowing different standards for urban and rural areas in key subjectmatter areas, something that can be done by both state and federal governments without any constitutional changes, is likely to accomplish that goal. I believe that little of value would be lost by this approach, and much, potentially, might be saved.

An Example.

“Leave Illinois Without Moving – Demand a New State”

In Illinois, the proposal is for all but one county to leave the state of Illinois with essentially only Chicago (about 1/2 of the state population) remaining under the current state government of Illinois. The New Illinois organization will be holding their 7th Constitutional Convention in a little over two weeks from now.

The History of New Illinois

Not long ago, those of us who founded New Illinois were talking about moving away. Just like more than half the state’s residents, we found that in Illinois the taxes were too high, the opportunities limited, and the government corruption outrageous. Then one day the thought struck – Why should WE have to leave? Our families and our roots are here, going back to 1870. Why not stay and fight for our home? In June 2018, we formed New Illinois, a nonprofit organization with the mission of educating Illinoisans about their RIGHT, under the U.S. Constitution, to pursue the formation of a new state. Rather than moving away, we wanted to leave Illinois without moving.

Their vision is compelling for many others living in rural areas who feel out of step with the urban-centered governments running their states.

OUR VISION
New Illinois envisions a NEW State free from a tyrannical form of government, where residents will be able to experience a government representing their Constitutional Rights.

Our Turn.

We can’t leave this to others. We can get informed on what has been found, what is being done about it, and what more needs to be done.

We can make a difference.
And we must make a difference.

May God bless and guide you
as you pray and take action for our nation.

Twitterati, etc.

May I recommend to you @40daysforlife. Each year during Lent, all around the world, a 40 Days for Life prayer vigil is observed to pray for the protection of the unborn.

These prayers and outreach have made a difference. Since the start of 40 Days For Life to now, they have recorded 25,386 babies saved, 162 abortion centers closed, and (perhaps the most stunning) 268 abortion workers have quit, often being assisted in finding a new career through help from 40 Days For Life volunteers.

Prayer.

God Bless America,
Land that I love.
Stand beside her, and guide her
Thru the night with a light from above.
From the mountains, to the prairies,
To the oceans, white with foam
God bless America, My home sweet home.

KMAG 20250319 OPEN TOPIC & OPERATION GLADIO — JFK ASSASSINATION

The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I hope you take the time to read this because it may very well have a great impact on events in the near future.

I wrote most of this over the weekend so I have no idea if these theories are true. Also we do not know how true the JFK files actually are either. I will be looking at the video I link to further down.

I am going to cut this hour-and-a-half video in half. I am again going to do a rough transcription and I will not put it in quotes. My comments and other information that I add should be obvious.

In the middle was this section on JFK and Cuba.

CUBA & JFK

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT

50:30 – Colonel Towner: When the opium came out of the far east it transited Sicily for the lab preparation after the CIA got rid of the Corsica mafia… talks of Godfather movie… Propaganda two [P2] is the masonic lodge that was set up by the Black Prince of Italy. Almost a thousand–mafia, Vatican, or Italian officials–were members, including the president, chief of intel. Top guy set up that Sicily was going to be the lab for refining, the refined heroin would be transported to Cuba, and Cuba was going to stage it into Miami, New York, LA… they used plastic oranges for transport…. Military also was used for shipping and that is why you have wars. The Vietnam war, the Afghan war. The Flying Tigers in Burma, had to do with opium harvested in China.

OPERATION NORTHWOOD

Colonel: Operation Northwood was created, & drafted by CIA, Allen Dulles and General Lyman Lemnitzer chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was an Operation Gladio Event. In it they purposed, to McNamara [secretary of defense] and JFK, — they wanted Cuba back so bad – that Operation Northwood featured all of the major US cities having terror attacks by Stay-behind trained people. The people would be dressed as Cuban Nationalists. They would basically say we had been invaded by Cuba, communism was taking over however the entire time it would be people dressed as Cubans. They were going to kill tens of thousands of Americans to instill fear, so they could do a ground invasion of Cuba.

JFK says absolutely not, we are not doing this. Allen Dulles, just before this had been fired. Lyman Lemnitzer, in what should have been a demotion and a resignation, JFK thought, was reassigned to NATO.

SIDE NOTE FROM WIKI: “He [Lyman Lemnitzer ]was appointed as commander of U.S. European Command and as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, which was a positional demotion.”

Colonel: JFK had never been told about Operation Gladio. He had never been told that a sub unit of NATO called ACC [Allied Clandestine Committee – GC], was the planning cell for all Operation Gladio events. Unknowingly JFK put Lemnitzer in charge of Operation Gladio. Why that is important is because…

[END VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION]

Charles de Gaulle kicked out NATO after they tried to kill him!

After 31 US-NATO assassination attempts on his life, President De Gaulle kicked NATO out of France

March 10, 1966: After 31 assassination attempts against his life, Charles De Gaulle ordered France’s withdrawal from NATO’s military integrated command. This decision was formally reversed almost half a century later under Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency. De Gaulle adopted a foreign policy independent of the Anglo-american axis.

His March 10 1966, not only pertained France’s decision to withdraw from NATO’s integrated military command, but also to remove NATO’s headquarters from French territory, thereby leading the establishment of the Alliance’s headquarters in Brussels…

A Damned Murder Inc: Kennedy’s Battle Against the Leviathan

…After returning from Kennedy’s Nov. 24th funeral in Washington, de Gaulle and his information minister Alain Peyrefitte had a candid discussion that was recorded in Peyrefitte’s memoire “C’était de Gaulle,” the great General was quoted saying:

“”What happened to Kennedy is what nearly happened to me… His story is the same as mine. … It looks like a cowboy story, but it’s only an OAS [Secret Army Organization] story. The security forces were in cahoots with the extremists.

…Security forces are all the same when they do this kind of dirty work. As soon as they succeed in wiping out the false assassin, they declare the justice system no longer need be concerned, that no further public action was needed now that the guilty perpetrator was dead. Better to assassinate an innocent man than to let a civil war break out. Better an injustice than disorder.

America is in danger of upheavals. But you’ll see. All of them together will observe the law of silence. They will close ranks. They’ll do everything to stifle any scandal. They will throw Noah’s cloak over these shameful deeds. In order to not lose face in front of the whole world. In order to not risk unleashing riots in the United States. In order to preserve the union and to avoid a new civil war. In order to not ask themselves questions. They don’t want to know. They don’t want to find out. They won’t allow themselves to find out.“

It remains to be seen if JFK’s assassination was an Operation Gladio and how much LBJ was involved.

The other aspect of this I wish to point out is this:

Operation Northwood featured all of the major US cities having terror attacks by Stay-behind trained people. The people would be dressed as Cuban Nationalists. They would basically say we had been invaded by Cuba, communism was taking over however the entire time it would be people dressed as Cubans. They were going to kill tens of thousands of Americans to instill fear, so they could do a ground invasion of Cuba….
— Colonel Towner

Even WIKI mentions:

…As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lemnitzer was responsible for drafting Operation Northwoods, a proposed plan to create support for military action against Cuba, by orchestrating false flag terrorism acts in the United States…

Now consider these facts:

1. POTUS Trump had read the JFK files during his first term.

2. When he lost the election he wrote a schiff load of EOs and other secret documents.

3. He appointed new military leaders.

4. There was a new branch of the armed forces organized under Trump 45. This people were hand picked.

Jon Herold was yapping about ‘Devolution’ in 2021 and beyond. I brought it to the Qtree because it does exist. Devolution is fallback plan not a legal coup d‘état however the flurry of activity AFTER the election was certainly note worthy.

The Continuity of Government Devolution Plan, often referred to simply as COG, is a highly classified protocol designed to ensure the continuity of essential government functions in the event of a catastrophic event or crisis. This plan was originally created during the Cold War to protect the United States from the threat of nuclear war. LINK

However, what if Trump’s flurry of activity post the 2020 election was not about the stolen election but was aimed at preventing an ‘Operation Northwood’ false flag aimed at ‘Deplorables’ instead of Cubans? I mention this possibility because I am surprised something of this nature was NOT deployed given all the falsehood surrounding Jan 6^{th .}.

A second observation. I do think Q is legit. However Colonel Towner’s comment on another video, that Fort Bragg is where Gladio Operatives are trained to be assassins, gives me pause since Fort Bragg is also home to several psychological operations units, including the 4th Psychological Operations Group (Airborne) and the 8th Psychological Operations Group (Airborne).

An added tidbit to keep in mind as you read this transcript.

Declassified files expose British role in NATO’s Gladio terror armies

Newly declassified British Foreign Office files have added disturbing details to the history of Operation Gladio. The covert operation was uncovered in 1990, when the public learned that the CIA, MI6 and NATO trained and directed an underground army of fascist paramilitary units across Europe, deploying its assets to undermine political opponents, including through false flag terror attacks.

Among them was a young Silvio Berlusconi, the media oligarch who served as Italian Prime Minister in four separate governments between 1994 and 2011. Listed as a member of the P2, the secret Cold War-era cabal of political elites devoted to Gladio’s aims, Berlusconi undoubtedly took some weighty secrets to the grave when he died this June 12th [2023].

It is almost impossible to believe that inconvenient truths were not weeded from Britain’s documentary record on Operation Gladio prior to declassification. Nonetheless, the recently released material is highly illuminating. Covering a fraught twelve month period after the first public disclosure of Gladio’s existence, the papers illustrate how London’s foreign intelligence apparatus kept a keen eye on the continent as events unfolded.

The papers not only shed fresh light on the conspiracy, they underline Gladio’s relevance as British intelligence joins its America counterparts in contemporary plots involving secret partisan forces from Syria to Ukraine….

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT

0:26 – Introductions of the Colonel & Brady. The Colonel has several degrees including a Masters Degree in Strategic Studies (Political & Military history of last 100 yrs) Brady spent 20 years in banking and finance on Wall Street.

2:30 – They came to similar conclusions from different directions.

3:00 – Colonel: I came across Operation Gladio in the book The Third Way. It is written about the erroneous assumption that there is a far left and a far right. There is not. There is a perception that Communism is on the left and Fascism is on the right. They are both very leftist ideologies. You need them to psychologically funnel people in a particular direction, you need to have something on the left and on the right to funnel people into what I call the cattle car. The narrative got built around the early WWI, WWII that Fascism was going to be DESIGNED as a Right Issue so that as the author points out, you can come at people from the left and from the right and herd them in the direction you want. I found that concept fascinating.

4:25 –5:15 Brady: I agree 100%, I should mention I am an amateur constitutional scholar, and I help Douglas B Gibbs, teach a constitution class both on line and it used to be in person. One of the things we describe is the far left is 100% authoritarianism. And the far right is 100% anarchy but that is also 100% individual liberty. So what the Founding Fathers goal was is to be as far right as you could be, with the most individual liberty and still maintain order. What you are talking about is the artificial calling of Communism left and Fascism right, that is just the divide and conquer strategy. It does not matter what is right or what is left, what is white what is black, they want to distract us so we never look up and see who is pulling the puppet strings.

5;20 – 8:10 Colonel: One of the things I noticed right away, in Trump’s narrative, he never allows people to create the false narrative, and then answer it. He calls them immediately on them phrasing a question with it being fiction and then expecting him to answer. It is like the wife beating trap.

Anyone who has a conversation about the ‘Far Right’ I ignore because they have completely destroyed their credibility by the use of that term. I just will not accept that hypothesis. I wish more of us in a dialog would do that. It is based on knowledge. I have spent literally hundreds of hours reading and beginning a podcast helping people who still work and have a day job, to have the information to be able to refute this in a concise manner.

When I got to the end of The Third Way, I feel like I am fairly competent in military operations, and things that have gone on in the past. He talked about a concept called Operation Gladio. Because that was new. I had no idea what that was, I am instantly intrigued. It is also referred to as Stay-Behind Units and as the Strategy of Tension. All three of those things are synonymous with each other.

I started looking and reading articles just on the internet. I found a couple of authors who were detailing in like volumes of books about the extensiveness of Operation Gladio. I was flabbergasted that in all of the research, all of the historical documents I have read, I had never come across that.

So I immediately get on the phone to my network. I have retired National War College friends, I have retired general friends, as a matter of fact I was just talking recently to a 3 star general. He has never heard of it! And he was in charge, commanded the Air War College and the Air Command and Staff College!!! And he never heard of it!!!

That just blew me away! And that made me more interested in exposing it, because it is HUGE.

8:10 – 8:30 Brady: Just to be crystal clear this is NOT A CONSPIRACY THEORY! This is documented in CIA , government documents and Congressional testimony. THIS IS REAL. Everything we are talking about is NOT a theory. It is not somebody trying to put pieces together. There are actual sourced documents behind all this stuff.

8:30 -11:30 Colonel: Correct. Newspaper clippings, The best investigation into it was in Italy and we will get into that. But also to set the stage and capture what you were saying Brady about your Wall Street experience, which is why I think this team is going to be so awesome, in discussing this particular topic . Because also this was in context for me about having just recently learned thru Anthony Sutton’s Trilogy about Wall Street and the Bolsheviks, Wall Street & FDR, and Wall Street and Nazism – Hitler. That the funding of ALL of those, the funding of FDRs campaign, the funding of the Bolsheviks that went into Russia and turned it Soviet quote unquote Communism. The effort to fund Hitler both when he was still in jail but after he became the Chancellor of Germany as well. ALL came primarily from one location near Wall Street and the address was 120 Broadway NYC…. Anthony Sutton is on Youtube with all proven fact with cables, State Department cables. He goes into a lot of detail on exactly how that happened.

It is interesting to note for the purpose of today, that Lenin was put up in London UK and Trotsky was put up in NYC. [ Note that for years I was not allowed to use the word Trotsky at Jo Nova’s, ChiefIo’s or Tony Heller’s sites. I was told by Jo and E.M. Smith the comments went straight to trash and NOT TO MODERATION. – GC 🤔] They were housed there with no apparent income yet Trotsky in the early 19 teens had a refrigerator, and all the luxuries that most Americans did not have access to. They both traveled from their protective custody to Russia to create communism AFTER the revolution in Russia. That ties directly into where we are going to get to the operational control of Operation Gladio. It comes both from the USA, Germany, because Lenin went thru Germany to get to Russia and from downtown London.

11:30 – 12:50 Brady: You cannot tell this story without talking about London PERIOD. That may just be the epicenter of all these schemes and plots.

It is funny you mentioned Anthony Sutton. I started my research with the history of Banking and Finance and how it got, shall we say, as creative as it has. It’s the wrong term. You go deep enough into the formation of money. The very first presentation I ever did, I called the dystopian history of money and banking and I went all the way back to Roman times. The first creation of making private coin in the 1600s. If you go down that path, you can’t not run into Anthony Sutton at some point in time. I ran into him pretty early on. G. Edward Griffin among others. Dr John Coleman did some really good work in this area. He was dismissed as a quack for a number of years, but his theories are becoming more and more true over the last decade or so. It’s funny, so let’s not dismiss these people out of hand. Some of these people did do real research.

The work that Sutton did is amazing and the same with Griffin because they actually dug thru boxes and microfiche and real articles and actual cables and communications.

12:50 – Colonel: Exactly

Brady: Source documents as we like to call it….

You mentioned Trotsky coming from NY but you also mentioned the Russian Revolution. I would state that a little differently. It was not so much a Russian Revolution as it was a Russian Invasion.

Colonel: Correct.

Brady: And it was financed by British & NY banking interests. We do not have to talk about the long feud between British and Russian, but it definitely plays a part.

13:30 Colonel: But for another show, that will include all the royalty that got deposed to include France, Austrian. We lost thousand-year reigns of monarchies, I am not saying it was good or bad, but I am saying it was intentional.

13:45 Brady: Yeah, and they may be all related. Much of them are descended from the Venetian Royalty who infiltrated thru marriage throughout Europe. And that’s a whole show unto itself.

14:00 Colonel: Probably a whole series of shows.

14:05 Brady: So where are we? 1917 or what.

Colonel: If you back up a little bit. It is important to note the Boer wars that happened in Africa. Because you set the stage for the colonization that had been going on both pre-world wars and post world wars. However the Boer wars are the first time we get introduced to Winston Churchill. So for the people who do not know, there were 2 Boer wars. And in the first one, the English got their butt kicked by the totally ill-equipped Boers who were basically farmers. And the way they got their butt kicked was, the Boers knew where the British were going to attack them because they had infiltrators. And a young British reporter, named Winston Churchill, was covering this. And as the British forces went in to attack the different settlements of these farmers, the farmers, had what we will call, stay-behind units. They had hid both munitions and people so as the British went by they ambushed them from behind. That struck Winston Churchill as genius. So he wrote about it…. They used that knowledge when they came back and attacked the second time after they found gold there. It was all about resources. They wanted the gold and they wanted the diamonds in South Africa. And that is the reason why South Africa became a British Colony. They wanted to steal all the resources.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I want to interject what my South African friend told me this past Sunday. First if I understood her correctly the South African area was NOT occupied by Blacks at the time. The Dutch (Boers) colonized it. Second she told me that DURING THE 2ND Boer WAR, the British took Women and children prisoners AND FED THEM FOOD LACED WITH GLASS SO THEY DIED LINGERING HORRIBLE PAINFUL DEATHS!! The colonel also mentioned that the Brits took women and children prisoner and slaughtered them. — GC

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Colonel: This leads us to the Fabian Society, the London School of Economics, the Balfour Agreement and all of those.

This sets the stage for what is the next phase of Operation Gladio, and that is their view of the African Continent as a slave colony. It was never going to be allowed to have sovereign states. It was never going to be allowed to have its own monetary system. It was ALWAYS, and many of them still think that today. It was ALWAYS TO BE A SLAVE COLONY of the Europeans.

17:10 Brady: I want to introduce a story from one of the more influential Brits by the name of Cecil Rhodes. He is the one who founded the Rhodes Foundation right before his death. Early 1910s and it is still influential today. His is a fascinating story. He came from a relatively well-off family. Wanted to go to Oxford but did not get in. His family sent him to S. Africa to get some worldly experience. Two years after he got there they discovered diamonds in S. Africa and that really started the diamond rush there. By the age of 24 he had accumulated quite a bit of wealth and started buying up other people’s claims. He was a pretty good businessman to the point they named two countries after him. Not just Rhodesia, but I forgot the other one. He was at the heart of the Boer wars. He was pushing British interest against Dutch interests and instigated the whole thing… he goes back to London and goes to Oxford and does some interesting writing…. A couple of quotes from him.

He wanted society to insure the spread of British rule to the entire continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of Euphrates, the islands of Cyprus and Canada, the whole of South America, the islands of the South Pacific, the whole of the Malaysian archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, And in GOLD CAPS, THE ULTIMATE RECOVERY OF THE UNITED STATES, AS AN INTEGRAL PART OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE.

That is in his own writing.

18:50 Colonel: I have the same quote and was going to read it. That is hilarious.

19:00 Brady: More from him:

I contend we are the finest race in the world and the more of the world that we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts of the world that are inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings.

We could go on but he was pretty prolific…. He was a Free Mason but he thought the Free Masons were not using their influence effectively enough. He said:

Why should we not form a secret society with but one object, the furtherance of the British Empire and bring the whole uncivilized world under British rule.

And so if you go back and look at these Rhodes Scholars this is what they were taught at Oxford. You have some pretty influential Rhodes Scholars today, Rachel Maddow, Bill Clinton, Strobe Talbott, Cory Booker, General Wesley Clark just to name a few. [Do not forget that judge Boasberg, who wanted the terrorist brought back to the USA from El Salvador. – GC]

The thinking of Rhodes and his ideology permeates today.

Colonel: Keep in mind General Wesley Clark when we get to Operation Gladio.

Brady: So that is the background on Rhodes. This is when those other institutes, like the Tavistock Institute were coming into play. Council of 300, RIA and CFR, the American version,… [I think RIA is the Royal Institute of International Affairs, now Chatham House. – GC]

20:25 Colonel: We have the creation of the Fabian Society, the London School of Economics, all coming under the Cecil Rhodes financing if you will. [Nathan Rothschild was the executor of the Rhodes will – GC] The Balfour Agreement, the people involved in the drafting of the Balfour Agreement. What is interesting about the quote that you just read, and them Capturing the Holy Land, I will make the argument as part of Operation Gladio, that is exactly what we are seeing today. It is what happen in the late 1940s when they set-up the country of Israel and how they went about doing it.

The same people that drafted the Balfour agreement, Milner and that group. They were all involved in the Fabian Society, the Round Table, the Chatham House, all those secret societies if you will. It is interesting that you mentioned the Masons because those of us who have looked into this, you realize that it goes back to the late 1700s when Adam Weishaupt wrote they were going to create a secret society within a secret society. Basically infiltrate the Masonic Orders, which at the time were just trade associations. They were literally masons, because that was the major trade throughout all of Europe and very Christian oriented. So they created within the Masonic Orders, this secret society that Adam Weishaupt talks about. It permeated throughout Europe and came over to the USA. So what you just read is literally the playbook. You realize that he outlines they are going to retake America, they are going to take over the Holy Land and I would argue they have been very successful in a very evil way.

22:30 — Brady: Successful in that if you look at the United Nations, the USA has one vote there and the members of the British Commonwealth have 55.

22:50 — Colonel: I want to outline the concept, especially for those of us in the military who will recognize this immediately. We [in the military] from a strategy standpoint, have segregated the world into what we consider combatant commands… and that is so we can formulate policies for like areas that have common economic systems, common resources issues, and normally have common concepts of government. The Rhodes Round table people… I want to introduce Oswald Mosely, he did a lot of writing as well. He is part of the Round Table, he is a Fascist by his own admission. He set up multiple Nazi/Socialist/Fascist organizations as political entities inside of England. He is famous for this concept I am going to introduce. They created, and it was also talked of in The Third Way book, they created Pan-America, Pan- Europe, Pan- British Empire, Pan-Asia. There was a total of 6 or 7. They were breaking up the world in the same way we do in the military, common currency, common customs and common trade.

24: 32 — Brady: They did that to such an extent that they had the North American currency which was to be named the Amero. We already have got the Euro. You can read about this in United Nations documents, WEF and many others.

25:00 — Colonel: What is important about this is how they view Russia. Russia was viewed as being everything west of the Urals as part of Europe. Everything east of the Urals part of Asia. Russia was not going to exist. That is why today there is so much focus on destroying Russia. Russia as it is today does not fit what they want it to be. They will continue to attack it until it does. That is something to keep in the back of your mind as we go forward on how this whole thing unfolds.

25:40 — Brady: When we get to the 21^st century, circle back on that and we will talk about the Primakov doctrine. Because the Russians understood this very well and their entire foreign policy is a game plan on how to resist that. A lot of it is about getting off the mono-polar currency system. Which they have successfully done. We will get back to that.

26:00 — Colonel: As we get into WWII, you have Churchill. Let me set the stage for Churchill too because we have already associated him with the Round Table. Churchill is very much a closet fascist. We could spend a whole hour on why that is and what the connections are. I am going to point out a couple of things. Churchill actually sets up, what they refer to as Stay-behind Units in case they were invaded by Germany. I would argue that is not at all why they were set-up because he KNEW they were not going to be invaded and the way he knew was there was a family known as Mitford. They had five girls. One was a stated communist. The rest were socialists or fascists. The parents were all part of the Oswald Mosley [ The fascist, he was a real sweetheart. 🙄 GC] clique. But I am going to talk of two of them. One of them is named Unity and one is named Diana. Diana becomes Oswald Mosley’s wife. Churchill’s wife is cousins with the Mitfords. They go to dinner all the time they are part of the same dinner clubs and they talk often. Unity becomes Hitler’s lover. Diana travels routinely to Germany throughout WWII. It is now believed that she was the go-between between Churchill and Hitler as far as intel goes. Dig away on that, because that is a fascinating story. [No wonder Queen Elizabeth was willing to stay in London! Besides I do not think Hitler would touch the City of London bankers. –CG]

28:10 — Brady: If I wanted to read more about that what book would you recommend?

Colonel: I do not know if I would recommend a particular book, but I’ll find a reference for you. I first read about the Mitford girls in The Third Way. That was my first introduction into that family.

I had at the time someone who did a lot of German research and it is on my Truth Social page called #International Syndicate. That is my term for the Cabal. Because we hit ALL religions, ALL politics, and as soon as you start talking about any aspect of that, such as the Jews or Israel you get Oh, that is fake…. So I avoid all those conversations by referring to this structure that orchestrates things like Operation Gladio as the International Syndicate. So I set up a page where I first started doing book reviews as #International Syndicate on Truth Social so you can find all the information there. Just search for Mitford and my post will come up.

29:50 — Brady: There is probably a pretty good reason why we do not have a universal term for this global corporate oligarchy that actually rules over all of us. They did not invent a word because they did not want us talking about it.

Colonel: It is like the first couple of posts I made, and all the squabbles that went back and forth, I am not going to do this. I am not going to argue with you about whether someone is a real religious advocate or not. It is the same thing as with the right and left…. So I came up with my own term, you cannot argue because I made it up.

So anyway we go on to Germany’s role in setting up Operation Gladio. We know where it originated from, the Boer Wars and Churchill. I cannot say that Churchill came up with the idea and transmitted it to Hitler, but I would not be at all surprised, because as I said there was a lot of informal communications. But as Germany took territory, Germany created Stay-behind Units. They did it in Czechoslovakia and they did it in Ukraine. I will add the ones in Ukraine are the Neo-nazis we are seeing today because Operation Gladio is still in existence today. All that territory, Poland had them, the ones in Poland were vicious, France had them, Italy had them. Stay-behind Units had weapons, they had explosives, they had money and they had comm equipment. The purpose we were told originally was if the German territory got taken over by the quote-unquote Communists, which you will remember are ALL THE SAME PEOPLE, they would be able to spring up and fight against the awful communists. I do not believe for a minute, and I can make the argument of why I do not believe that. My contention is that they were designed to stay behind for the refocusing of WWII to a much longer war. We think WWII ended, I make the argument that it never ended. They changed operational and tactical levels but their goal is still the same. World domination, New World Order.

32:50 — Brady: 100% agreed. I did a presentation called American Fascists, talking about the American financial interests that financed the Germans. How we had the Wall Street Law Firms created our intelligence agencies. That is where Allen Dulles comes into the picture. Wild Bill Donovan gave him a huge leash. Dulles was over there working in Bern Switzerland, he had also been in Switzerland 30 years previously at the Treaty of Versailles, him and his brother both, John Foster Dulles. Allen Dulles was the mastermind of the American Stay-behind program. I cannot remember the name of the operation….

33:35 — Colonel: Operation Gladio is the Stay-behind units and Allen Dulles is responsible for its transition to its current use.

33:40 — Brady: Yeah, he ex filtrated Nazis like Reinhard Gehlen

Colonel: Gehlen you are getting ahead of me. In Germany in 1942, Gehlen gets together with, at the time a colonel, but eventually becomes general Wolf, they create these stay-behind units put into all the countries. They were originally called Werewolf Units. Citizen by day, werewolf, killer by night. They stood them up all over in these forested areas that most people would not transit. This is interesting when you look at the Safari Club, the World Wildlife Fund, all focused on forested preservation areas that they put off limits to people. As we go forward, the war takes a bad turn for Germany and Gehlen reaches out to Allen Dulles. As you pointed out, Allen Dulles and his brother John Forester Dulles represented a lot of the German companies both in Germany and their branches in the USA leading up to WWII. Gehlen says [to Dulles] if you can guarantee me my freedom, I am going to turn over my Gladio Units to you… I will tell you where they are, I will help you set-up new ones in all the allied countries and we can work this operation together.

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The Railroad Robber Baron was actually Edward H. Harriman

…Born in 1848, Harriman began his career as a stockbroker and later became the director of the Union Pacific Railroad, turning it into a highly efficient business.

Harriman’s aggressive business tactics and significant influence on the American railway system earned him a reputation as a ruthless “robber baron.” He died in 1909…

His son was W. Averell Harriman.

Averell Harriman, The Old Crocodile of Diplomacy

W. Averell Harriman was one of the more prominent public figures of the 20th Century, holding major positions in diplomacy, government, and business. Harriman served as Ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1943, and later Ambassador to the United Kingdom in 1946. Less than a year into his position of Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Harriman was selected as the Secretary of Commerce by President Harry S. Truman. He was then put in charge of the Marshall Plan to rebuild infrastructure and support the economies of Europe after the destruction of World War II.

His political ambitions came to the fore when he was elected Governor of New York in 1954. He was a candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1952 and again in 1956 but lost out to Adlai Stevenson both times. Although unsuccessful, Harriman became a respected advisor in the Democratic Party and went on to hold numerous positions in the government. In the Kennedy Administration, Harriman served as the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs and in 1963, he became the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. In these positions, he was a key negotiator in the Vietnam peace talks….

The man was everywhere. From that article:

Moscow, Acting Director for the Office of War Information, 1943-45 dealing with Stalin.

Information Officer for the Marshall Plan in Paris, 1942 to 1952

Ambassador to Algeria, 1977 to 1981 [And a heck of a lot more places]

Ulric Haynes Jr.:

….in about 1960, ’61 when I was working for the Ford Foundation in Nigeria, John F. Kennedy asked Averell Harriman to make a tour of the emerging nations of Africa to give him advice on the formulation of American foreign policy in Africa. Harriman got in touch with me in Nigeria and asked me to accompany him on his mission to Africa because I was again, fluent in French and familiar with Africa….

[On] my trip with Harriman to the Congo with Lumumba, you will recall that the Americans, there has always been a suspicion — never proven, yet — that we were — our CIA was — involved with the demise of Patrice Lumumba (with Harriman, at left). And one of the reasons why we wanted Lumumba out of the way was that he was cozying up to the Soviet Union, realizing that, that this was a way of, of playing his cards in a way to get something from both the Soviet Union and the United States.

But it’s interesting, Lumumba was very, very conscious of the fact that the Americans were trying to subvert his government. He was very, very suspicious of the activities of the CIA in the Congo at the time. And I’ll never forget when Harriman went to his office to speak to him (he was prime minister at the time) about U.S. relations, he ushered us both (I was interpreting) into his bathroom.

He would not speak in his formal study because he was suspicious that it was being bugged. And the gist of his conversation was a complaint about the subversive activities of the American government….

Looks like Lumumba was correct, the CIA was planning to assassinate him and did.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

38:00 Colonel: I will say all of this was on purpose, because when you go into the Soviet Union, you find that GE is electrifying the Soviet Union. You find all the railroad barons putting all the railroads throughout the Soviet Union. You also find between WWI and WWII the way Germany got around the barring of them re-developing their military capability, is that they went into the Soviet Union, their “supposed enemy,” and built military production capability in the Soviet Union to re-weaponize Germany.

38:50 — Brady: When they had their oil tariff, [I think he means sanction – GC] when they were at war with England and were not able to get foreign oil, They started using GE plants to basically convert organics into oil. That was American technology.

39:00 — Colonel: Anyone who thinks these are all separate issues is ignorant.

There is a cycle… in order to set up Operation Gladio, it is going to take a lot of money for weapons, it is going to take a lot of money for the stashes of money, it is going to take a lot of money for the training and the travel to the training locations. So they are setting up a major business. It is like a paramilitary world wide personal army…. So they are going to bust in on the drug trade that at that time been monopolized by the French and the Corsican Mafia in Marseilles. They had a huge pharmaceutical company that actually was the heron refineries. You will find the Operation Gladio operations will travel around the drug harvesting. There will be banks that pop-up for money laundering. There will be weapons that go into an area mainly in the form of military operations. They will use false flags like we did in Vietnam. Because Vietnam was a huge poppy supplier. Britian had already done it in the Opium Wars in China… That is why you have the bank HSBC in Hong Kong. That was to money launder all the opium money coming from China.

So you have patterns of large banks, BCCI got setup when the poppy fields moved to Afghanistan. They are on the border with Pakistan so you have the big money laundering … So you have these patterns, of drugs, money laundering, weapons, because every time you have a military operation those weapons get siphoned off. That is how you find them fed into Operation Gladio. As we move forward and talk about operations that were carried out in Italy, both explosions and assassinations. You will find guns from NATO. You will find explosives ONLY supplied to NATO by the USA because they skim off the top.

The reason they have these military operations is to guard the poppy fields and steal weaponry.

42:00 Brady: I will take it back a step further. The OSS was operating in China alongside Chiang Kai-shek and his drug mafia called the Green gang. When Mao won the war when the USA pulled its support for Chiang Kai-shek, the opium trade in China had to move so they moved it into the Triangle; Afghanistan, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Fast forward a decade and we have another Intervention War with the CIA. They are flying all this stuff into Cuba to be refined before it hits the American streets. When Castro took Cuba, the CIA was NOT HAPPY at all. It has always been a burr in their saddle.

[End Transcript]

I placed the rest of the Cuba, CIA, JFK part of transcript at the top of the article.

To be Continued next week.

DEAR MAGA: Open Thread 20250318 ❀ Tuesday Placeholder ❀ Cholesterol and Statins

We continue to mourn the untimely passing of our beloved compatriot DePat, known in real life as Susie Sampson, and also as author Patricia Holden.

Until we have a dedicated author for the Tuesday daily open thread, I will be posting “placeholders” like this one, which may or may not be spiced up with additional content.

Gudthots will take DePat’s old Thursday daily open thread.

Please notify me in advance if you would like to post anything in lieu of the Tuesday placeholder. We welcome all content – the topic doesn’t matter.

W

Cholesterol and Statins

by Gail Combs

Since many of us on the Qtree are older I wanted to document my adventures with the medical establishment. Hopefully my digging will help others avoid harmful drugs by providing the information you need to make an informed decision.

My Labs came back:

LDL = 114(H)

HDL = 98(H)

The Doc wanted to put me on STATINS and my answer was HELL NO!

What I found incredible is the lack of knowledge of the three doctors I have encountered so far. The first, despite my telling her I had a major problem with losing potassium, put me on a high level of Prednisone WITHOUT mentioning the fact I might have to take addition potassium (K) to offset the additional loss of K from the drug. This is well documented in the literature.

In the follow-up visit, not only was a statin recommended but the connection between chronic inflammation (my asthma) and higher cholesterol levels was completely ignored.

Don’t Worry About Cholesterol; Inflammation Is Your Biggest Problem — The Liver Doctor

As I mentioned, the vast majority of cholesterol in your body was made in your liver. Cholesterol production increases when the body is under stress: emotional stress can cause elevated cholesterol because the stress hormone cortisol is made out of cholesterol. Physical stress on the body can also elevate cholesterol. Because cholesterol helps to repair and heal your body, you will produce more if there is a great deal of inflammation occurring in your body. So all those factors above that raise inflammation, can raise your cholesterol too.

Therefore the cure for elevated cholesterol can be quite simple –lower the inflammation and you’ll also lower the cholesterol.

Seems the research community is FINALLY looking into Cholesterol, inflammation and immunity.

Manuscript Submission Deadline 29 April 2025. This Research Topic is still accepting articles.

Background

Cholesterol metabolism and immune response are closely linked. Cholesterol is critical for the synthesis of lipid rafts, which activate receptors involved in antigen recognition, influences the production of NET and modulates the activation and polarization of macrophages. Oxysterols in turn regulate macrophage activation, migration, and cytokine production. While the immune response modulates the expression of genes involved in the synthesis, absorption and efflux of cholesterol. Cholesterol accumulation in immune cells promotes proinflammatory immune responses creating a vicious cycle that sustains immune inflammation. High-density lipoproteins (HDL) are typically reduced during inflammation, when reverse cholesterol transport is impaired, thus promoting hyperactivation of TLR2 and TLR4 by lipopolysaccharide (LPS) and other microbial products, resulting in inhibition of stress-induced activating transcription (ATF) 3 and enhanced production of cytokines by macrophages. Further endangering an already delicate balance, HDL proinflammatory subfractions with lower content of apoA-1, antioxidant enzymes, and L-CAT, are produced, and further fuel inflammation.

Alterations in the biochemical network between cholesterol, inflammation and immunity are emerging as a pathogenetic mechanism of numerous human disorders, among which atherosclerosis, cardiovascular diseases and their complications, metabolic diseases and diabetes, infectious diseases and sepsis, autoimmune and auto-multiinflammatory disorders, acquired and congenital hypo-immune diseases, and cancer….

So the Cabal’s bio-weapon, SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, is likely to raise cholesterol levels given the body’s response to the spike protein is inflammation and in many cases chronic inflammation known as Long Covid.

Be aware of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein: There is more than meets the eye

Abstract

….other papers showed that the spike protein by itself (without being part of the corona virus) can damage endothelial cells and disrupt the blood-brain barrier. These findings may be even more relevant to the pathogenesis of long-COVID syndrome that may affect as many as 50% of those infected with SARS-CoV-2. In COVID-19, a response to oxidative stress is required by increasing anti-oxidant enzymes. In this regard, it is known that polyphenols are natural anti-oxidants with multiple health effects. Hence, there are even more reasons to intervene with the use of anti-oxidant compounds, such as luteolin, in addition to available vaccines and anti-inflammatory drugs to prevent the harmful actions of the spike protein.

As a side note:

Luteolin, a flavonoid with potentials for cancer prevention and therapy

Abstract

Luteolin, 3′,4′,5,7-tetrahydroxyflavone, is a common flavonoid that exists in many types of plants including fruits, vegetables, and medicinal herbs. Plants rich in luteolin have been used in Chinese traditional medicine for treating various diseases such as hypertension, inflammatory disorders, and cancer. Having multiple biological effects such as anti-inflammation, anti-allergy and anticancer, luteolin functions as either an antioxidant or a pro-oxidant biochemically…. Vegetables and fruits such as celery, parsley, broccoli, onion leaves, carrots, peppers, cabbages, apple skins, and chrysanthemum flowers are luteolin rich….

Next I want to get into the vilification of cholesterol and it’s history. The following is a great article and well worth reading. This is just a sample.

Is Your Cholesterol Level Really ‘High’? Tearing Down the Cholesterol Myth

The mean would be 224 so my LDL is actually on the very low end of the scale! And even if the chart is actually looking at the combined amount of LDL + HDL, then my 114+98 = 212 is still lower than average.
From the article:

This same range of cholesterol levels has been seen in people who do have heart disease and people who do not have heart disease, as documented by Professor Brisson using data from the Framingham Study – which is one of the largest studies ever done in it.

Since the Framingham Study, other studies have also confirmed that people WITH heart disease have the same cholesterol levels as people WITHOUT heart disease.

For example, in the UK, the typical person who has a heart attack tends to have the same cholesterol level that is seen for healthy middle-aged and older people in the general population. Something that is not unique to the UK.

A study published in the Lancet, included 5,754 patients from Australia and New Zealand who had already had a heart attack. The average cholesterol level of this group of people was around 220 mg/dl (5.7 mmol/l). Data from the WHO Global Infobase shows that around the same time, the average cholesterol level for the general population was also 220 mg/dl (5.7 mmol/l).

So people who suffered a heart attack had the same average cholesterol level as the general healthy population.

How Ancel Keys Brainwashed the Masses Into Fearing Meat (He’s Wrong)

How Ancel Keys FAKED IT!

CORRUPTION

Reducing meat intake and cholesterol hurts sex hormone production. This is why we have the least masculine men in history today.

Sperm counts are at all time lows

Testosterone is at all time lows

Mental toughness is at all time lows

This is a direct and explicit consequence of the shift to eating garbage.

Processed food is INHUMANE. It’s the fastest way to kill off our population, which it looks like these people are trying to do.

The Real Research Has Been Buried

One of the most comprehensive studies on heart disease was COMPLETELY buried.

Data from the Minnesota Coronary Experiment was unearthed in 2017 after 40 years of sitting dormant.

Ancel Keys, the progenitor of the diet-heart hypothesis, was the lead on the study. It was one of the most comprehensive to date: randomized, controlled and 9,400 participants.

Subjects were in mental health institutions or nursing homes, which helped to ensure the dietary guidelines were followed to a tee for 56 months.

The control group continued to eat a diet high in saturated fats and animal fats. The intervention group ate a serum cholesterol lowering diet that replaced saturated fat with vegetable oils (from corn oil and corn oil polyunsaturated margarine).

Results:

The intervention group had a 14% reduction in cholesterol

But this didn’t reduce death rate. There was a 22% HIGHER risk of death for each 30 mg/dL reduction in cholesterol….

A Sharyl Attkisson clip of 9 minutes, giving some history. In 2004, recommended cholesterol levels were lowered based on a study by doctors connected to the drug manufacturers. When this conflict of interest was pointed out the FDA ignored it. And then the recommended levels were lowered even further in 2013. Half of the ‘advisors’ recommending the levels were compensated by the Drug manufacturers. And then there is the American Heart Association who develops the standards and its relationship to the drug manufacturers.

What is worse, is not only are statins a money waster, they are also very bad for you.

The Truth about Statin Drugs

Since their introduction in the 1980s, statin drugs have been almost universally hailed as “wonder drugs” by medical authorities around the world. The global market for statins was $16 billion in 2016, and approximately 40 million Americans (that’s one in every five adults!) takes a statin….

Dangers of Statin Drugs: What You Haven’t Been Told About Popular Cholesterol-Lowering Medicines

Why Statins are Bad for You…Really Bad

As you know, we have seen statin cholesterol drugs do really bad things to stem cells in culture. On the other end of that spectrum, we’ve also seen high triglycerides due to metabolic syndrome hurt stem cells. One of our patients who was instructed to get off statin drugs before her stem cell procedure recently sent this article by MIT professor Dr. Stefanie Seneff, which is so well done and does such a great job of explaining why statins are bad for you, I had to share. It is also so scientifically dense; I thought a quick summary would be helpful for my readers. Here goes:

Statins have tiny health benefits that are way over played. My comments-Basically, you get about the same cardiac protective effect from a square or two of dark chocolate a day.

Statins decrease cholesterol by blocking an important enzyme pathway, yet cholesterol is needed for the normal health functioning of all cells. In particular, cholesterol is a key component of all healthy cell membranes.

Cholesterol is also needed to make vitamin D3, sex hormones, and steroid hormones.

The brain is only 2% of the body’s total weight, but houses 25% of the body’s cholesterol.

LDL cholesterol is what we have been trained to believe is “bad” cholesterol, when in fact it’s an important transport container for many key items.

The outer shell of the LDL transport container is vulnerable to attack by high blood sugars, so in patients with poor blood sugar control (metabolic syndrome) these important transport containers for key nutrients get gummed up by these extra sugars in the blood.

These “gummed up” LDL containers get attacked by cells of the body in the walls of blood vessels which lead to “plaques” that clog arteries.

Artificially lowering cholesterol by statin drugs causes the LDL transport containers to have too little protection. The function of these containers would normally be to transport excess blood sugars from the liver as fat and get rid of this throughout the body. However, these cholesterol deficient containers can’t perform this important function, magnifying the bad effects of excess sugar consumption. This is what makes high fructose corn syrup so dangerous, as fructose as a sugar is ten times more efficient in gumming up the LDL transport system.

This damaged sugar to fat transport system due to a lowered cholesterol level also results in too much fructose in the blood stream (which would normally be converted to fat in the liver and transported by the LDL transport system). This excess blood sugar causes damage to the proteins in the blood.

Co-enzyme Q10 synthesis is hampered by the blockage of the cholesterol enzyme pathway and this is needed to run cells and muscles. This can result in problems in the batteries of the cells and muscles (mitochondria).

Since the muscles can’t use CoQ10, they decide instead to use all of that extra fructose in the blood serum, which is now in plentiful (and damaging) supply because statins block it’s conversion into fat by the liver and it’s transport out of the liver by the LDL containers. When they do this, it’s without oxygen, so it’s anaerobic and lactic acid builds up, causing painful muscles.

The muscles do process the fructose, but they do so in a really inefficient way, requiring 19 times more energy to get the same muscle output-causing a sense of fatigue.

This alternative fuel system for the muscles leads to damaged muscle cells. After several years of lactic acid build-up due to statin use (the equivalent of being forced to run a constant marathon), the muscles “give out”. This author believes that this leads to a higher rate of severe muscle disorders like rhambdomyolysis as well as kidney failure (due to the renal system processing all of these muscle break down products). The author also believes that these muscle breakdown products can lead to nerve damage. She believes that this nerve damage can lead to a higher incidence of severe diseases such as ALS. My comments: These claims will take intensive study to see if they hold up.

The lack of cholesterol in the system eventually results in the heart and other tissues becoming dependent on an alternate fuel supply-sugar. There is also impaired uptake of glucose by the cells, which leads to the higher prevalence of diabetes that shows up in statin studies.

Cholesterol is critical for normal brain function. As mentioned already, the brain contains a lot of cholesterol as it makes up the important covering of the nerves (myelin sheath). Think of this as like the plastic covering of a wire, which insulates the wire and allows it to conduct electricity. This would explain the common reports of memory loss in patients taking statin drugs. A recent study that involved careful manual labeling of statin side effects from large studies showed a higher degree of neurological disorders in patients taking statins. These include neuropathy, parasthesia and neuralgia, and debilitating neurological diseases, ALS and Parkinson’s disease.

Longer life in one study that followed patients for 17 years was associated with higher cholesterol levels and full function of the enzymes that statin drugs inhibit. The author concludes that statins are a great way to fast track aging.

This author belives that eating foods rich in cholesterol and sulfur (like eggs) and sun exposure are ways to increase your cholesterol sulfate levels which can help clear arteries, not block them.

The upshot? Dr. Seneff believes that these statin side effects will eventually cause the recall of the drug class. Is she right? All I can say is that much of the science she explains makes sense and that we’ve seen what statin drugs can do to cells in culture and it isn’t pretty!

From: Cuppa Covfefe(@guest_1428881) March 7, 2025 21:01

Statins can cause issues with the mitochondrial respiratory chain… lots of conflicts, interactions, and contra-indications when mito issues exist or are suspected…

-Gail

GC/wm

Dear KMAG: 20250317 Trump Won Three Times ❀ Open Topic

Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.

AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.

This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).

And yes, it’s Monday…again.

But we WILL get through it!

We will always remember Wheatie,

Pray for Trump,

Yet have fun,

and HOLD ON when things get crazy!

We will follow the RULES of civility that Wheatie left for us:

Wheatie’s Rules:

No food fights.
No running with scissors.
If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.

And while we engage in vigorous free speech, we will remember Wheatie’s advice on civility, non-violence, and site unity:

“We’re on the same side here so let’s not engage in friendly fire.”

“Let’s not give the odious Internet Censors a reason to shut down this precious haven that Wolf has created for us.”

If this site gets shut down, please remember various ways to get back in touch with the rest of the gang:

Our backup site, The Q Tree 579486807, https://theqtree579486807.wordpress.com/
Our old alternative site, The U Tree, where civility is not a requirement
Our Gab Group, which is located at https://gab.com/groups/4178
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar

Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.

Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.

We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.

Joe Biden didn’t win.

And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.

Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:

brevicaudate

adjective

short-tailed
having a stump tail
short-ended

Used in a sentence

The bobtailed cat is a brevicaudate breed that is known for its short tail.

Shown in a picture (Manx cat)

Shown in a video

MUSIC!

Some traditional Manx music!

This next one is excellent, but I can only give the link.

https://youtu.be/lLMULtULWkU

THE STUFF

Wait a minute! This is St. Patrick’s day! What’s Ireland up to?

Let’s see how well that ages!

Sometimes the brevicaudates need some assistance.

Or perhaps I mean assistance from other brevicaudates.

Juuuuuuust sayin’!

And remember…….

Until victory, have faith!

And trust the big plan, too!

And as always….

ENJOY THE SHOW

W

American Stories: When in the Course of human events – Part 10

As I have been researching and writing these stories I have been deeply moved by how each patriot started as well as how they finished their respective journeys in life. I am of the philosophical camp that it is not how you start, it is how you finish. However, the exercise of researching and writing these stories has led me to remember the primary message of the following song. I guess we are never too old to be reminded of a valuable lesson.

Y’all probably did not know that this old gray hair has enjoyed some of TobyMac’s works through the years, especially when he was in DC Talk. I have never been a fan of secular rap or hip hop, but music dominated, poetic rap of Toby and a few other Christian artists is a different story. I also especially enjoy the works of (David) Crowder with the earthy raw emotion in his words, observations and musical style. I am big fanboy of him, however, I enjoy many styles and genres of music. This song may or may not be familiar to you, so I am happy to provide this official lyrics version.

As we have dug into the lives of these incredible patriots I have been struck by the intention and commitment to doing what they individually believed was right for all colonists no matter the cost. This also was expressed in the behavior and support of their wives and families. They were globally focused on the greater good and not just on themselves and their families. Some seemed to throw all caution to the wind and attack the prospect of independence and freedom from the chains of oppression. Others sought compromise and accommodation until they were boxed into corners and forced to choose. All seemed to relish the opportunity to give their input and insights while serving in the governance of assemblies and congresses. They sensed they were playing a part in something much bigger than themselves and spoke of it in their letters and journals. When it became obvious to most that it was time to change history; all of the signers found consensus and were ready to accept whatever fate awaited them. They walked to the table to sign with solemn minds and hearts.

Fellow Christian – don’t you just love it when the Lord implements His plans and you get to play a part in it? This American Experiment was more than just a bunch of pizzed off rebel colonists. Something that grand developed from people who were of a similar ancestral lineage with linked family bonds who were placed under the thumbs of the leaders of the world’s great superpower of the day. Where have you seen that before, Christian? Oh yeah, in stories of struggle throughout the Holy Word. Fast forward to the past decade here in America. Can you see and feel the parallels, interconnections, etc. with history in America today?

The song speaks to that dash between birth and death that we see on many tombstones. You will read of the personal history, the dash, on one such tombstone below concerning a Declaration signer. It leads us to see that the time we spend in the dash is about the choices we make. It addresses how we spend that time has eternal consequences. We should choose wisely what we do and not waste it. Our time may not be one of a bitter war or strife, but it will always be a time of reaching the lost and hurting. Many God fearing men and women in these stories went about doing just that even when some had much safer options. We are the beneficiaries of their choices. They modeled what we know from John 15:13, which says, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (NKJV)

I am eternally grateful for what those great founding fathers and their families did with their dashes. I have peace in doing these stories because I now see how the details of history relate to what God planned for America. To think that approximately 250 years later we are in the same camp as the Sons of Liberty and working out our freedom and liberty as AMERICA FIRST MAGA movement patriots is humbling as well as inspiring. Thanks to our collective commitment and response, our George Washington is in the White House saving and helping America prosper along with his patriot Vice President, who is performing the modern role of John Adams. While Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and others were building the rep and security of America in other lands, so is our equivalent Secretary of State and various cabinet members. The revolutionary warfighters stayed on the alert and protected the homeland against all enemies foreign and domestic, just as ours today under the leadership of a man who has been there and done that with honor and distinction on the battlefields as well as with a man who has defended our borders from illegals invading for decades.

We may even have advantages the patriots did not have with a hugely wealthy and successful man in a Darth cap with incredible vision, talent and intelligence who can slice through those who create their own fiefdoms within our central government. This man can deliver a modern, fiscally responsible operational system of government unlike any other on the planet that by its presence will prevent much of the corruption and fraud that we have endured for so long. He is doing what always must be done to starve the evil doers – follow the money and cut off the flow.

We also have men and women with steely resolves leading the work to root out those alien criminals and terrorists who would take us down that were invited in by past incompetent and even demonic administrations to infiltrate our ranks. This restoration that will lead to The Golden Age for America is being accomplished with perhaps the greatest cabinet and patriots backing any POTUS in history since the Declaration was signed. All desire to be a part of something bigger than themselves and we can all feel the success that awaits. They are ready and willing to protect and provide for America with the personal time they have left within their dashes, so that we can make the most of the time left within ours and all future Americans. They have been chosen for this great moment in history.

It is now time to discuss a couple more great founding fathers who accomplished much during their dashes.

George Walton

This signer was supposedly born in 1741 in Prince Edward County, VA, although it is not known with certainty and guesses range from 1740 – 1750. George Walton‘s education was informal and for the most part he taught himself. Both parents died when he was young, so he was adopted by an uncle who did not believe in schooling. As a result he apprenticed as a carpenter under that uncle. In 1769 after realizing he had an interest and the intelligence to do so, he moved to Savannah, GA to study law. He was later admitted to the bar in 1774. It is in this independence infused area that he joined the patriot movement. He spent many years in the state in its development as well as in a political feud with the infamous Button Gwinnett that we previously discussed.

In the lead up to the Revolutionary War he was elected Secretary of the state’s Provincial Congress and President of the Council of Safety. He became a delegate in the second Continental Congress that led to him being a Declaration signer. Somehow in the period he found time to marry Dorothy Camber and they had two sons together.

After the Declaration signing he entered into the Revolutionary War as Colonel of the First Regiment Militia in the state. He was hit in the leg by a musket ball, thrown from his horse and taken prisoner in the Battle of Savannah while serving under Gen. Robert Howe. Unlike some of his fellow colonist prisoners throughout the war, he was allowed to heal before being sent to Sunbury Prison. He was later released in 1779 in a prisoner exchange.

As a political ally and friend of Lachlan McIntosh he was involved in controversy his entire political career. He was even censured by the state legislature in 1783 for his role in the famous duel that resulted in Gwinnett ‘s death, but never formally charged. By this point he was considered to be one of the most competent and successful lawyers in the state. He was used to negotiate a treaty with the Cherokees in TN as well. He was requested to assist at the U. S. Constitutional Convention with its preparation, but declined due to all he was doing for the state.

None of the previous conflicts with Gwinnett prevented him from being named as the Chief Justice for the state that same year. He served in that role until 1789 while becoming a Presidential elector. He was also the acting Governor of the state in 1789 – 1790. He served as Superior Court Judge starting in 1789, which continued until 1798. In 1795 he served as a U. S. Senator on an interim basis.

He retired to the Augusta area and passed away in 1804. Though he owned a plantation, he had no slaves. This was possibly due to his upbringing as well as his understanding that all people were created equal. He was an abolitionist in a period and region where it would least be expected. Only one son survived from the marriage to Dorothy; George, Jr. He became the first Secretary of the Territory of Florida as well as the acting Governor. He was of great comfort to his father during his later years. Dorothy lived in Pensacola after her husband’s death and she passed away in 1832. Walton County, GA is named after him.

From an Augusta Press article of 10/14/21 by Scott Hudson:

In the center of Greene Street and across from the Municipal Building in Downtown Augusta sits an obelisk known as the Signer’s Monument. Underneath it lies the graves of Lyman Hall and George Walton, two of the three signers of the Declaration of Independence from Georgia.

Less than a mile away from the Signer’s Monument is Meadow Gardens, Walton’s home. The modest home is located near the corner of Walton Way and 13th Street. It has been preserved and holds weekday tours.

George Walton lived through very difficult, humble beginnings. He was self taught and driven to both learn and do his best for his country. He was a doer, not a public speaker known for his inspiring quotes. He gave his entire life to the independence movement as well as on the battlefield. After that he threw himself into public service and the law. As a result Georgia and America benefitted greatly. We have much to appreciate about this great American patriot.

John Witherspoon

With the previous discussion in Part 9 about Stockton and son in law, Rush, meeting with John Witherspoon in Scotland pre war, it is probably time to review him as a Declaration signer. John Witherspoon was born in 1722 or 1723 in Gifford, Scotland. His parents were James Witherspoon and Anna Walker. His mother taught him in the early years and he was able to read by age 4. She used the Bible and later in his youth he was able to recite the New Testament. His father was a minister of Yester Parish and very involved in the General Assembly. His mother came from a long line of ministers as well. The couple had six children.

John was so advanced in his education and in the understanding of English, Latin, Greek, French, the classics and mathematics that he was sent to the University of Edinburgh at age 13. By age 16 he had a Masters of Arts with a thesis in Latin. By age 20 he received a Doctor in Theology and was licensed to preach. At age 22 he received his first parish. Three years later he married Elizabeth Montgomery. They had nine children with five surviving that traveled with them later to the colonies.

When Dr. Samuel Finley died as President of the College of New Jersey, Witherspoon was solicited for the role by Stockton and Rush among others as mentioned previously. He had been requested to do so years before and declined. This time he was persuaded and they left for Philadelphia in 1768. He was successful almost immediately. He grew endowments, improved the curriculum, and helped bring peace within the Presbyterian Church. By 1770 the students began advocating for independence and Witherspoon agreed, including stating this belief in a commencement address. He was soon chosen to represent the county in the Provincial Assembly and went on to be chosen as a delegate to the Continental Congress.

When others in the period waffled on independence by suggesting the time was not ripe to do so, he replied to one such complainer, “Not ripe sir, we are not only ripe for the measure but in danger of rotting for the want of it”. Not long after the Declaration signing and the war increasing, the college was taken by the British. They proceeded to occupy the campus, burn down the library, and destroy his documents and personal writings. The next year he lost one son in the Battle of Germantown.

He stayed with the Continental Congress until 1782. He helped reorganize the Board of Treasury along with performing other duties that utilized his expertise. Prior to that in early 1778 he had begun the difficult rebuild of the college and was able to restart classes later in that year. As the war ended Witherspoon became more active than ever. He was in the voting delegation that approved the Constitution for NJ. He was a key contributor to the newly organized, independent Presbyterian Church in America. His contributions as a pastor, educator and patriot brought great recognition to Princeton.

In 1789, his wife passed away. A month later he turned his attention to involvement in the NJ Assembly. He soon had responsibilities that included prisoner treatment, pensions of invalids, public debts, promotion of religion and morality, divorce, paper money, vital statistics and promotion of manufacturing. The seemingly odd thing was he kept two slaves, although as he aged he turned his attention toward abolition and the systematic acclimation of slaves into society as free men. It seems that a number of his descendants were involved in Confederate causes in the years that followed. Witherspoon believe as Charles Carroll did, that the nation was heading toward abolition anyway. He preferred the slave be assisted into freedom and the world that laid ahead rather than cutting them loose to make a go without preparation and acceptance by society.

Apparently, Witherspoon was not done with living at this point, so at age 68 he married 24 year old Ann Marshall Dill. The couple had two children, one of whom died a week or so after birth. It was not long before he lost his eyesight and passed away in 1794.

He left us with many memorable quotes, a handful of which are below:

It is only the fear of God, can deliver us from the fear of man.

Never rise to speak till you have something to say; and when you have said it, cease.

Those who wish well to the State ought to choose places of trust men of inward principle, justified by exemplary conversation.

The people in general ought to have regard to the moral character of those whom they invest with moral authority either in the legislative, executive, or judicial branches.

Never read a book through merely because you have begun it.

Wisdom. Words for all of us to take to heart just like they were in that day. The following is inscribed on his tombstone in Princeton Cemetery, a description of his dash.

Beneath this marble lie interred
the mortal remains of
JOHN WITHERSPOON, D.D. LL.D.
a venerable and beloved President of the College of
New-Jersey.
He was born in the parish of Yester, in Scotland,
on the 5th of February, 1722, O. S.
And was liberally educated in the University of Edinburgh;
invested with holy orders in the year 1743,
he faithfully performed the duties of
his pastoral charge,
during five and twenty years,
first at Beith, and then at Paisley.
Elected president of Nassau Hall,
he assumed the duties of that office on the 13th of August, 1768,
with the elevated expectations of the public.
Excelling in every mental gift,
he was a man of pre-eminent piety and virtue
and deeply versed in the various branches
of literature and the liberal arts.
A grave and solemn preacher,
his sermons abounded in the most excellent doctrines and precepts,
and in lucid expositions of the Holy Scriptures.
Affable, pleasant, and courteous in familiar conversation,
he was eminently distinguished
in concerns and deliberations of the church,
and endowed with the greatest prudence
in the management and instruction of youth.
He exalted
the reputation of the college amongst foreigners,
and greatly promoted the advancement
of its literary character and taste.
He was, for a long time, conspicuous
Among the most brilliant luminaries of learning and of the Church.
At length,
universally venerated, beloved, and lamented,
he departed this life on the fifteenth of November, 1794
aged 73 years.

John Witherspoon made his mark on America that will long be remembered especially as a patriot and leader of what became Princeton University. He laid a foundational building block for education and faith that has stood the test of time. He was a great American patriot.

Conclusion

I will stop here with this part. The lessons learned appear profound. We find the dash on every tombstone represents the results of the breath God gives all of us. We find that with the Declaration of Independence signers that they gave all for freedom and liberty. None were perfect men, they all had feet of clay just like all of us today. Yet, they allowed themselves to be used by the Lord to achieve what we now experience despite all of the hardship and strife.

With Walton and Witherspoon we see two very different men and a study of contrasts. One was raised in hardship, not even permitted to experience the love and care of parents for a time due to life and death getting in the way. He was self taught by his own curiosity and intelligence to achieve. He had the internal fortitude to take on the challenges of his life and overcome while finding meaning for his existence.

The other was raised in plenty and of good repute. He experienced the benefits of societal standing and parental love and care. He learned the value of his Christian upbringing and threw himself into learning all he could as quickly as he could with the religious and educational opportunities that were made available. He achieved at an incredible pace and was placed in positions of trust in his native Scotland as well as later in America.

When it came time to walk to the table to sign, they both did in solemn agreement and despite their very different journeys. They both did so knowing it could result in their deaths and harm to their families and communities. How is it that an orphaned southern colonist boy who grew up hard in GA and a Scottish born boy brought into a world of privilege who immigrated to America to restore a college in New Jersey, could equally share legacies as great American patriots? That is our shared American legacy. Both were needed, both answered the call, and both were honored to serve all of the citizens and as a result, all of us.

The hand of God was on display then and is now. We need to hear him and respond. As Isaiah said in Isaiah 6:8, “Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!” (NASB)

Dear MAGA: 20250316 Open Topic

This Rejoice & Praise God Sunday Open Thread, with full respect to those who worship God on the Sabbath, is a place to reaffirm our worship of our Creator, our Father, our King Eternal.

It’s also a place to read, post, and discuss news that is worth knowing and sharing. Please post links to any news stories that you use as sources or quote from.

In the QTree, we’re a friendly and civil lot. We encourage free speech and the open exchange and civil discussion of different ideas. Topics aren’t constrained, and sound logic is highly encouraged, all built on a solid foundation of truth and established facts.

We have a policy of mutual respect, shown by civility. Civility encourages discussions, promotes objectivity and rational thought in discourse, and camaraderie in the participants – characteristics we strive toward in our Q Tree community.

Please show respect and consideration for our fellow QTreepers. Before hitting the “post” button, please proofread your post and make sure your opinion addresses the issue only, and does not confront or denigrate the poster. Keep to the topic – avoid “you” and “your”. Here in The Q Tree, personal attacks, name-calling, ridicule, insults, baiting, and other conduct for which a penalty flag would be thrown are VERBOTEN.

In The Q Tree, we’re compatriots, sitting around the campfire, roasting hot dogs, making s’mores, and discussing, agreeing, and disagreeing about whatever interests us. This board will remain a home for those who seek respectful conversations.

Please also consider the Guidelines for posting and discussion printed here:
https://www.theqtree.com/2019/01/01/dear-maga-open-topic-20190101/

On this day and every day –

God is in Control
. . . and His Grace is Sufficient, so . . .
Keep Looking Up

Hopefully, every Sunday, we can find something here that will build us up a little . . . give us a smile . . . and add some joy or peace, very much needed in all our lives.

“This day is holy to the Lord your God;
do not mourn nor weep.” . . .
“Go your way, eat the fat, drink the sweet,
and send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared;
for this day is holy to our Lord.
Do not sorrow,
for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

Fallen Angels

When exactly God created angels is open for debate, but what is known for sure is that God created everything good because God, in His holiness, cannot create something sinful. So when Satan, who was once the angel Lucifer, rebelled against God and fell from heaven (Isaiah 14; Ezekiel 28), one third of the angelic host joined his insurrection (Revelation 12:3-4,9). There is no doubt these fallen angels are now known as the demons.

We know that hell was prepared for the devil and his angels, according to Matthew 25:41: “Then He will say to those on His left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.’” Jesus, by using the possessive word his makes it clear that these angels belong to Satan. Revelation 12:7-9 describes an end-times angelic battle between Michael and “his angels” and the devil and “his angels.” From these and similar verses, it is clear that demons and fallen angels are synonymous.

Some reject the idea that the demons are the fallen angels due to the fact that Jude verse 6 declares the angels who sinned to be “bound with everlasting chains.” However, it is clear that not all of the angels who sinned are “bound,” as Satan is still free (1 Peter 5:8). Why would God imprison the rest of the fallen angels, but allow the leader of the rebellion to remain free? It seems that Jude verse 6 is referring to God confining the fallen angels who rebelled in an additional way, likely the “sons of God” incident in Genesis chapter 6.

The most common alternate explanation for the origin of the demons is that when the Nephilim of Genesis 6 were destroyed in the Flood, their disembodied souls became the demons. While the Bible does not specifically say what happened to the souls of the Nephilim when they were killed, it is unlikely that God would destroy the Nephilim in the Flood only to allow their souls to cause even greater evil as the demons. The most biblically consistent explanation for the origin of the demons is that they are the fallen angels, the angels who rebelled against God with Satan.
xhttps://www.gotquestions.org/fallen-angels.html

2025·03·15 We Will Have Justice Daily Thread

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

Do We Still Need the Kang (Mis)Quote?

I’m still using the quote about winning the battles but losing the war. It seems like this doesn’t make sense right now given that we seem to be going from triumph to triumph.

On the contrary. This is the exception that proves the rule. The quote isn’t just a lament, it’s to point out why we can never seem to win.

You see, the RINOs cannot interfere and that is why, just for once, we are actually winning. And that is just one more piece of evidence (for the willfully blind) as to what I have been saying with that quote.

It stays.

Speaker Johnson
Pinging you on January 6 Tapes

Just a friendly reminder Speaker Johnson. You’re doing some good things–or at least trying in the case of the budget–but this is the most important thing out there still hanging. One initial block released with the promise of more…and?

We have American patriots being held without bail and without trial, and the tapes almost certainly contain exculpatory evidence. (And if they don’t, and we’re all just yelling in an echo chamber over here, we need to know that too. And there’s only one way to know.)

Either we have a weaponized, corrupt government or we have a lot of internet charlatans. Let’s expose whatever it is. (I’m betting it’s the corrupt weaponized government, but if I am wrong, I’d like to see proof.)

Justice Must Be Done.

The 2020 election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Yes this is still true in spite of 2024. Fraud must be rooted out of our system and that hasn’t changed just because the fraud wasn’t enough to stop Trump winning a second term. Fraud WILL be ramped up as soon as we stop paying attention.

Otherwise, everything ends again in 2028. Or perhaps earlier if Trump is saddled with a Left/RINO congress in 2026, via fraud.

Small Government?

Many times conservatives (real and fake) speak of “small government” being the goal.

This sounds good, and mostly is good, but it misses the essential point. The important thing here isn’t the size, but rather the purpose, of government. We could have a cheap, small tyranny. After all our government spends most of its revenue on payments to individuals and foreign aid, neither of which is part of the tyrannical apparatus trying to keep us locked down and censored. What parts of the government would be necessary for a tyranny? It’d be a lot smaller than what we have now. We could shrink the government and nevertheless find it more tyrannical than it is today.

No, what we want is a limited government, limited not in size, but rather in scope. Limited, that is, in what it’s allowed to do. Under current circumstances, such a government would also be much smaller, but that’s a side effect. If we were in a World War II sort of war, an existential fight against nasty dictatorships on the brink of world conquest, that would be very expensive and would require a gargantuan government, but that would be what the government should be doing. That would be a large, but still limited government, since it’d be working to protect our rights.

World War II would have been the wrong time to squawk about “small government,” but it wasn’t (and never is) a bad time to demand limited government. Today would be a better time to ask for a small government–at least the job it should be doing is small today–but it misses the essential point; we want government to not do certain things. Many of those things we don’t want it doing are expensive but many of them are quite eminently doable by a smaller government than the one we have today. Small, but still exceeding proper limits.

So be careful what you ask for. You might get it and find you asked for the wrong thing.

Political Science In Summation

It’s really just a matter of people who can’t be happy unless they control others…versus those who want to be left alone. The oldest conflict within mankind. Government is necessary, but government attracts the assholes (a highly technical term for the control freaks).

His Truth?

Again we saw an instance of “It might be true for Billy, but it’s not true for Bob” logic this week.

I hear this often, and it’s usually harmless. As when it’s describing differing circumstances, not different facts. “Housing is unaffordable” can be true for one person, but not for another who makes ten times as much.

But sometimes the speaker means it literally. Something like 2+2=4 is asserted to be true for Billy but not for Bob. (And when it’s literal, it’s usually Bob saying it.) And in that sense, it’s nonsense, dangerous nonsense. There is ONE reality, and it exists independent of our desires and our perceptions. It would go on existing if we weren’t here. We exist in it. It does not exist in our heads. It’s not a personal construct, and it isn’t a social construct. If there were no society, reality would continue to be what it is, it wouldn’t vanish…which it would have to do, if it were a social construct.

Now what can change from person to person is the perception of reality. We see that all the time. And people will, of course, act on those perceptions. They will vote for Trump (or try to) if their perception is close to mine, and vote against Trump (and certainly succeed at doing so) if their perception is distant from mine (and therefore, if I do say so, wrong). I have heard people say “perception is reality” and usually, that’s what they’re trying to say–your perception of reality is, as far as you know, an accurate representation of reality, or you’d change it.

But I really wish they’d say it differently. And sometimes, to get back to Billy and Bob, the person who says they have different truths is really saying they have different perceptions of reality–different worldviews. I can’t argue with the latter. But I sure wish they’d say it better. That way I’d know that someone who blabbers about two different truths is delusional and not worth my time, at least not until he passes kindergarten-level metaphysics on his umpteenth attempt.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the Q Tree Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Political 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:

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

(Paper) Spot Prices

Kitco “Ask” prices. Last week:

Gold $2,911.50
Silver $32.60
Platinum $974.00
Palladium $934.00
Rhodium $6,000.00
FRNSI* 139.844-
Gold:Silver 89.310-

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

Gold $2,985.50
Silver $33.87
Platinum $1004.00
Palladium $988.00
Rhodium $5,700.00
FRNSI* 143.424-
Gold:Silver 88.146-

Gold blooped up over the 3000 dollar mark briefly Friday, but retreated a bit and closed at the level shown above (it actually closed a bit higher than that on Thursday). So of course the FRNSI is at an all-time weekly high. Silver did very well this last week; long overdue; gold is now worth over an ounce less silver than last week. Platinum shows some signs of life. Maybe it is only mostly dead.

The Ides of March

Yes, our calendar is a direct descendant of the Roman calendar, particularly after Julius Caesar’s reforms.

That doesn’t mean we’d have any idea WTF we were looking at when looking at a Roman Calendar. They didn’t lay out months in tidy little rectangles like we do, with days numbered from 1-31. (Or 30, or 28 or fairly rarely 29.)

Nope they did something totally wacky, at least from our point of view.

The Kalends was the first day of the month. The Nones was the ninth day before the Ides. The Ides were, in turn the 15th day of full months (months of 31 days), or the 13th day of hollow months (months of 30 days) [Before Julius and Augustus Caesar, February had 30 days.] After some reforms months could have four different lengths and even the 31 day months were handled two different ways.

Counting through the days of the month, the 1st was “on the Kalends”. the 2nd was “the day after the Kalends” OR it could be called (in March, May, July and October–MMJO) the “Sixth day before the Nones” and for every other month the “Fourth day before the Nones”. Then count down each subsequent day until on the 7th (MMJO) or 5th (all others), was “On the Nones.” But beware because the “Third day before the Nones” was followed by “the day before the Nones” (there was no “second day before the Nones). The next day (8th or 6th) was “The day after the Nones.” OR that day could be called the 8th day before the Ides. Then the 7th, 6th, 5th, 4th, 3rd days before the Nones…and then skipping over “the second day before the Ides” to “the day before the Ides.” Then the Ides…which was on the 15th (MMJO) or 13th (all other months).

Then it gets tricky. For MMJO, the day after the Ides (the 16th) could be called “The day after the ides” or “the 17th day before the Kalends” Note, though that (for example) March 16 was called “the 14th day before the Kalends of April.” So April was being named…even though it was really still March! For January, August, and December, the “day after the Ides” (the 14th) was also “the 19th day before the Kalends”. For April, June, September, and November (all 30 days at the time), the “Day after the Ides” (the 14th) was “the 18th day before the Kalends”. For February (28 or 29 days) the “Day after the Ides” (the 14th) was either the 16th or 17th day before the Kalends of March”.

You would then count down to the second-to-last-day of the month and that would be the 3rd day of the Kalends, and the last day would be “the day before the kalends.”

Of course they did this in Latin, not English, so for example, they’d say “ante diem tertium decimum Kalendas” (the 13th day before the Kalends) and write it down as “a.d. XIII Kal.” since who wants to write all that out?

The day after Kalends, Nones, or Ides were considered “black” days and unlucky. (Though they were off one day for Julius Caesar.)

[Note before the Julian reforms, there were no thirty day months; there were MMJO (31 days), February (28 days) and everything else (29 days) and they followed the rules for MMJO, 28 day Februaries, and the 29 day February, respectively). When the caesars made January, August and December into 31 day months, they actually left the Ides in the same place relative to the Kalends (i.e., on what we call the 13th of the month) rather than moving the Ides to the 15th, to avoid messing up festival days.]

Somehow, they were able to use this insanely complex system and still have enough brainpower left to conquer the entire Mediterranean world.

And NO I don’t have this memorized, I had to look it up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar. Otherwise I’d not have the brainpower left to butcher the topic of geology.

A Deeper Dive on Isotopes

Last time I described the atomic nucleus as it came to be known during the early 20th century, and I discussed radioactivity. I touched on isotopes a bit; time for a deeper dive.

As chemists worked to measure atomic weights for all known elements (painstaking and unglamorous work; the ones doing this are the unsung heroes of chemistry) it became apparent that most elements had atomic weights that were almost an integer multiple of the element with the lightest atomic weight: hydrogen (for example, taking hydrogen as 1 (not the currently used value!), helium comes in at 3.971, very close to 4. But there were a few oddballs, too, elements with a not-very-close multiple, like (and now I’ll use the current values, with hydrogen at 1.008, not 1.000) boron (10.81), neon (20.18), chlorine (35.45). Just eyeballing the list it looks like about a quarter of all elements are “off” like this.

It wasn’t until people started ionizing elements and sending the ions through a magnetic field to see how much their trajectories bent that we started to understand this. This was first done by J. J. Thomson (who had discovered the electron, and loved to play with magnets and charged particles) in 1912 with neon gas. Neon is atomic number 10, ten protons, and as I mentioned its atomic weight is 20.18. Thomson discovered that neon is actually mixture of two different things, one with an atomic weight of 20, another with an atomic weight of 22. The signal was weaker for 22, so he figured it neon was mostly the atomic-weight-twenty stuff.

These were both undeniably neon; there was no way to separate them chemically because they both behaved the same (which is to say, being totally unwilling to engage in chemical reactions; neon is a noble gas). They just weighed different. Thomson however had been brought up believing that atomic weight was an inherent property of an element, so he thought of it as two separate gases. We don’t think this any more. They’re both neon. And we now know there’s a very small amount of neon atoms with a mass of 21.

As more and more of these experiments happened, it became clear; if an element’s atomic weight was far off from an integer, it was a mix of these “isotopes.” Aston (who formulated the “whole number rule” for isotopic masses) showed in 1920 that chlorine’s 35.45 atomic weight was due to being a mixture of atoms with mass 35 and mass 37 units.

When talking about just the nucleus of an atom, we often use the term nuclide instead of isotope (which is the whole atom). It’s not a hard and fast rule but chemists will tend to use “isotope” and nuclear physicists including those researching fusion will be a bit more likely to say “nuclide.”

Again, the chemical behavior is nearly identical. In principle a heavier isotope should be slightly slower to react than an lighter one, but the practical difference is nil except in one case. Thus when it matters (and it usually doesn’t), chemists and physicists will write something like neon-20 or neon-22. When they can do so they will follow the formal convention: ²⁰Ne or ²²Ne. I am able to do that here (writing the post) but not in comments; but it’s such a pain to do so (wordpiss), that I will stick with writing either neon-20 or Ne-20.

And by the way, for our purposes here, it does matter. Quite a lot.

The one exception regarding chemical differences is the case of hydrogen, which usually has mass number of 1, but some few atoms have a mass number of 2. If you concentrate the mass-2 stuff, and use it to make water, you have heavy water, which even though it’s technically hydrogen monoxide just like tap water is, will kill you. (It also melts at 4 degrees Celsius so it’s possible to put a heavy water ice cube in a glass of water at 1 degree Celsius and it won’t melt. It will sink to the bottom, too, which is even weirder.) In fact for hydrogen and hydrogen alone, there are “special” names for the heavier isotopes; hydrogen-2 is called deuterium and (in this context) hydrogen-1 is called protium. There is also hydrogen-3, which is radioactive and is called tritium.

Once the neutron was discovered by James Chadwick in 1932, we got some clarity as to what was going on. Neutrons, it turns out are very slightly more massive than protons, We now know that neon-20, neon-21 and neon-22 all contain ten protons (neon has ten protons, by definition), but they contain 10, 11, and 12 neutrons, respectively, the total of the two numbers 10+10, 10+11, 10+12 gives you the mass number.

So what happens when you do this sort of analysis on other elements as found in nature? Fluorine (#9) has one isotope, F-19. Tin (#50) has no less than ten isotopes: Sn-112, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, and 124. The natural proportion for each of these ranges from 0.34 percent to 33 percent.

It is possible to create isotopes in the lab. So long as the number of neutrons isn’t too high or low, you’ll get a nucleus that hangs together for a while, perhaps even permanently. Otherwise the excess neutrons will “drip” off (fail to stick even momentarily) or if there are too few neutrons, a proton will “drip” off.

Between these bounds, the isotope will be intensely radioactive, less intensely radioactive, even less intensely radioactive, dang near stable, or actually stable. (Those are not “official” terms by the way.) And if you include all those made-in-a-lab-and-very-unstable isotopes the isotope counts go way up. Tritium is one of them for instance, and tin actually has isotopes ranging from 99 through 140.

Why do we need to make those highly radioactive isotopes in a lab? Because if there were any on earth originally, they have long since decayed away and none are left.

[If you poke around on wikipedia you may see references to something being “observationally stable.” That means an isotope that they believe on theoretical grounds is almost stable but it’s so close to stable they haven’t caught it decaying yet. In other words “we think this ought to be very very mildly radioactive–so mild we haven’t detected it yet so maybe it’s really stable after all.” Three of the ten tin isotopes I mentioned are “observationally stable”]

Because we are able to produce almost-arbitrary nuclides in the lab, we have pretty complete tables of nuclides–both a table with columns and a bunch of numbers in them, like you see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_tin, or nice graphical ones like this:

You can click on this to make it larger, but even there you can’t see what’s written in the boxes. Here is a link to a version that is 17,800 pixels across: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/NuclideMap.svg

Going across the bottom, you have the number of neutrons, going up you have the number of protons, as shown in this excerpt from the very lower left corner. Note that the same isotope number for different elements lie on a diagonal. (They also threw in a bare neutron, mass number 1, element zero.)

The colors indicate how the isotopes decay; black is a stable isotope. Blue is a β⁺ (positron) decay (or capturing an electron), orange is losing a proton (technically it’s “dripping” the proton), deep purple is dripping a neutron, yellow is alpha decay (note that ⁸Be alpha decays–and what’s left over is a helium nucleus, which is itself an alpha particle; so really it just splits in two). Green (visible at the other end of the chart) is spontaneous fission where a nucleus splits into two or more large pieces. Finally the pink or light purple squares like ³H are β^– (ordinary beta decay).

If you paid attention last time, you should be able to figure out what the isotope will turn into. For example ¹⁰Be undergoes beta decay, so it goes up one in charge (it now has 5 protons) but stays the same mass. It becomes boron-10, which is stable.

This chart also indicates half life. And I will more than likely be pasting in other pieces of it in future posts.

OK, so we have this list of all possible isotopes (and ones that arguably shouldn’t be considered isotopes because they “drip” when you try to create them). What do we see when we look “out there” on Earth? This is, after all, supposedly a series on geology, right?

The isotopes we see fall into three broad categories.

Stable isotopes. Every single stable isotope is found on Earth. Every last one.

Long lived isotopes. Isotopes over a certain half-life (which I will discuss below) will be found on Earth too. Again, every last one. (And by the way some of those half lives exceed present day estimates of the age of the earth by millions or even billions of times. And “observationally stable” isotopes, if they turn out to be radioactive, will have even longer half lives.)

Short lived isotopes. Some of the known short-lived isotopes can be found in nature. Here’s the thing though. In all of these cases, we can identify a natural process that is creating those isotopes, even at the present moment. For example, carbon-14 with a half life of about 5,760 years is being produced in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays impacting nitrogen-14 nuclei. Uranium-234 has a half life of 245,500 years, and is created by uranium-238 decay (U-238 becomes thorium-234 due to an alpha decay, then Th-234 becomes protactinium-234 via beta decay, then Pa-234 becomes U-234 after another beta decay). All of those intermediate products, of course, we also detect in nature (and they have very short half lives of days or hours) so they fall into this category too. But, very important: We do not have any short lived isotopes we cannot account for this way.

This actually paints a picture: We have a situation where we have primordial isotopes–ones that apparently were always here on Earth, and the others, that weren’t. Since anything that could be a primordial nuclide based on being stable or having a long half life, is here, there’s no reason to suppose that some other nuclide that is now not found in nature wasn’t actually once here–only to have decayed completely away. Which means the Earth would have to be old enough for them to be gone by now.

OK, so what’s the dividing line between short lived and long lived isotopes? Somewhere between 100 and 700 million years.

I found this table: https://sites.astro.caltech.edu/~dperley/public/isotopetable.html which bills itself as all radio isotopes with half lives over 1000 years. I am going to excerpt everything between 1 million and one trillion years, below:

Selenium-79
Iron-60
Beryllium-10
Zircon-93
Curium-247
Gadolinium-150
Neptunium-237
Cesium-135
Technetium-97
Dysprosium-154
Bismuth-210m
Manganese-53
Technetium-98
Palladium-107
Hafnium-182
Lead-205
Curium-247
Iodine-129
Uranium-236
Niobium-92
Plutonium-244
Samarium-146
~~Uranium-236~~
Uranium-235
Potassium-40
Uranium-238
Rubidium-87
Thorium-232
Lutetium-176
Rhenium-187
Lanthanum-138
Samarium-147
Platinum-190

1,130,000
1,500,000
1,510,000
1,530,000
1,560,000
1,790,000
2,144,000
2,300,000
2,600,000
3,000,000
3,040,000
3,740,000
4,200,000
6,500,000
9,000,000
15,300,000
15,600,000
17,000,000
23,420,000
34,700,000
80,800,000
103,000,000
~~234,200,000~~
703,800,000
1,280,000,000
4,468,000,000
4,750,000,000
14,100,000,000
37,800,000,000
43,500,000,000
105,000,000,000
106,000,000,000
650,000,000,000

Uranium-236 is listed twice (I just noticed). The 234,200,000 figure should not be there, so I crossed it out.

We cannot find plutonium-244 in nature. We’ve tried, some claim to have found it, but it’s inconclusive. Likewise with samarium-146. But we have no trouble finding uranium-235…and were even able to send Hiroshima, Japan a care package of the stuff on August 6 of 1945, the first nuclear bomb to be detonated in anger.

As it happens, samarium-146, if any were present on our Earth 4.5 billion years ago, would have gone through over 40 half lives, which is to say less than a trillionth of it would be left today. Uranium-235 (which we know was here) has gone through six half lives, so over one percent of it is still left.

In other words, this situation is consistent with Earth being 4.5 billion or so years old, as dated by other methods. If there were significant amounts of Pu-244 or Sm-146 around, the Earth would have to be considerably younger than this (though it could still be in the billions of years) for that to make sense.

All told, there are 251 stable nuclides, and 35 long-lived primordial nuclides.

As it happens many of the primordial nuclides can be of use in radiometric dating. We’ll dive into that next time. It’s now 10:16 PM here and I’m sure people are getting antsy.

Health Friday 3.14.2025 Open Thread: Heart Issues After COVID-19 “Vaccination”: And About the Virus Itself

The above free image of heart shapes is courtesy of iStock and Google Images.

Health Friday is a series devoted to information about Big Pharma, vaccines, general health, and associated topics. As today’s post speaks about the disaster of COVID-19 (the COVID-19 virus itself, and the COVID-19 “vaccines”), Yours Truly dedicates it to the memory of all persons, of whatever age or location, who have passed away from the negative effects of these lab-created bioweapons.

There are Important Wolf Moon Notifications; the Rules of our late, good Wheatie; and, certain caveats from Yours Truly, of which readers should be aware. They are linked here. NOTE: Yours Truly has checked today’s offering for any AI-generated content. To the best of my knowledge and belief, there is none. Also: if readers wish to post anything in the discussion thread for today’s offering that is AI-generated, they must cite their source.

Today’s post may be regarded as a “narrow-focus” offering, one of a “mini-series.” This first “narrow-focus” offering regards the inducement of cardiac issues after COVID-19 “vaccination”; and, the potential for cardiac issues also induced from an infection of the COVID-19 virus itself. Yours Truly begins here: https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/new-study-fatal-malignant-cardiac, “NEW STUDY — Fatal Malignant Cardiac Tumors Following COVID-19 mRNA Injection”, by Nicolas Hulscher, MPH, 6 March 2025. The paper that is cited in the article is here: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehjcr/ytaf009, “Heart-breaking tumours: a case series of malignant pericardial effusion”, Abdur Rahman Mirza, et al., 18 January 2025. The paper is also found here: https://academic.oup.com/ehjcr/article/9/3/ytaf009/7960074. Below are screenshots of the Introduction of the paper; followed by a screenshot of the graphic of the paper that traces the “journey of pericarditis”:

And, the final portion of the Discussion section of the paper:

Note the mention of “diagnostic bias” regarding whether or not a cardiac issue presents after the patient has been COVID-19 “vaccinated.” In Yours Truly’s opinion, the young physician who is the lead author of the cited paper has likely not studied how the COVID-19 “vaccines” affect the heart (for example, this article: https://doctors4covidethics.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/causality-article.pdf, “Vascular and organ damage induced by mRNA vaccines: irrefutable proof of causality”, Michael Palmer, MD, and Sucharit Bhakdi, MD); has likely not read the BNT162b2 5.3.6 Postmarketing Experience report that Pfizer-BioNTech gave to the FDA in April 2021 (https://phmpt.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/5.3.6-postmarketing-experience.pdf); and, has likely not read any of the posts that Dr. Peter A. McCullough, MD, has on his website (https://www.thefocalpoints.com/.) One suspects that many other physicians have not read these items, either.

Turning to the Hulscher article on The Focal Points blog, cited above: It is known that the COVID-19 “vaccines” can, and do, cause pericarditis, a type of inflammation involving the heart (please refer to the BNT162b2 Postmarketing Experience report cited above, page 36 of the report, in the Appendix 1. List of Adverse Events of Special Interest section of said report.) The Cleveland Clinic has an article on pericarditis, found here: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17353-pericarditis. Below is a screenshot from the Cleveland Clinic article:

It is also known that the COVID-19 “vaccines” can, and do, cause myocarditis (another type of cardiac inflammation.) Both pericarditis and myocarditis can, and do, cause permanent damage to the heart. Both pericarditis and myocarditis can ultimately result in the death of the patient. However, the COVID-19 “vaccines” contain BOTH the ingredients of the original Wuhan Hu1 virus (SARS-CoV-2 virus, aka COVID-19 virus), AND lab “enhancements” (dangerous lipid nanoparticles; N1-methylpseudouridine; “loose DNA” from the manufacturing process; a piece of the SV40 African Green Monkey cancer promoter gene code) — that make the COVID-19 “vaccines” much more dangerous and/or deadly to the cardiac system of the “vaccinated” person. There is more new information on this situation (thank you to Valerie Curren): https://slaynews.com/news/epidemiologist-new-data-linking-covid-vaccines-global-heart-death-surge/, by Frank Bergman, 1 March 2025. The paper linked in the article is found here: https://doi.org/10.4330/wjc.v17.12.1039909, “Risk stratification for future cardiac arrest after COVID-19 vaccination”, Peter A. McCullough, MD, and Nicolas Hulscher, MPH, 26 February 2025. Below are two screenshots from the paper: the Abstract; and, the McCullough Protocol for spike protein detoxification:

Note the clear statement that cardiac issues can appear years after the person is COVID-19 “vaccinated.”

And, the McCullough Protocol:

Yours Truly finds it ** interesting ** that the above paper was given a “Grade C” for “scientific quality” by the paper’s reviewers, none of whom are identified except by their initials.

**** However, malignant pericardial effusion is a form of cardiac cancer. It is not an inflammation. Below is a screenshot from the National Cancer Institute definition of this condition (https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-terms/def/malignant-pericardial-effusion):

Malignant pericardial effusion is the subject of the Mirza, et al., paper cited above in today’s post.

**** On the other hand, the COVID-19 virus itself can cause cardiac issues in persons who contract an infection of said virus. The following paper is from July 2020, well before any COVID-19 “vaccines” was granted an Emergency Use Authorization in any country: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41569-020-0413-9, “COVID-19 and cardiovascular disease: from basic mechanisms to clinical perspectives”, Masataka Nishiga, et al., 20 July 2020. This paper is a good source of information regarding how the COVID-19 virus itself works; and, how this virus can affect the cardiovascular system. A screenshot of the Abstract of the paper is below:

Another paper, also from 2020, well before any COVID-19 “vaccine” was granted an EUA, regards how the COVID-19 virus itself can affect the cardiovascular system: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7095524/, “COVID-19 and the cardiovascular system”, Yi-Tong Ma, et al., 5 March 2020. Yours Truly finds it ** interesting ** that the authors of this paper are affiliated with either the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or to medical facilities linked to the People’s Liberation Army (all CCP.) Below is a screenshot from the Background section of the paper:

The following article has more information on the ACE2 receptors in the human body: https://www.cas.org/resources/cas-insights/ace2-covid-19-target, “ACE2: Targeting a potentially important receptor in disease pathogensis”, by Angela Zhou, 15 December 2022. Below is a screenshot from this article:

The point here is that BOTH the COVID-19 virus itself (aka SARS-CoV-2), AND the COVID-19 “vaccines” (since these injectables contain SARS-CoV-2), target and attack the ACE2 receptor cells in the human body.

Yours Truly will again emphasize that the COVID-19 virus itself, AND the COVID-19 “vaccines”, were BOTH designed to cause as much damage to the human body as possible. They are BOTH lab-created bioweapons. The COVID-19 virus is not “just another type of virus.” The COVID-19 “vaccines” were designed to be capable of “shedding” elements of these injectables onto other persons (whether those persons are “vaccinated”, or not.) What is of utmost importance is that all people, “vaccinated” or not, must be doing all that is possible to have, and to maintain, the highest degree of personal health. The COVID-19 “vaccines” must be removed from use worldwide — now.

THERE. MUST. BE. JUSTICE.

Peace, Good Energy, Respect: PAVACA

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

January 6 Tapes?

Evading Reality

Justice Must Be Done.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

Spot Prices.

The Math Behind Radiometric Dating

Introducing Uranium-Lead Dating

Half Lives and the Radioactive Decay Equation

Determining Age (The Simple, Ideal Case)

How To Deal With Non-Ideal Cases

Concordia Diagrams to the Rescue

Quit Holding Out On Us

Do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

We got our miracle.America is back.

Rural v. Urban.

Fourteen States – or more.

An Example.

Our Turn.

Twitterati, etc.

Prayer.

CUBA & JFK

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

We continue to mourn the untimely passing of our beloved compatriot DePat, known in real life as Susie Sampson, and also as author Patricia Holden.

Until we have a dedicated author for the Tuesday daily open thread, I will be posting “placeholders” like this one, which may or may not be spiced up with additional content.

Gudthots will take DePat’s old Thursday daily open thread.

Please notify me in advance if you would like to post anything in lieu of the Tuesday placeholder. We welcome all content – the topic doesn’t matter.

W

Cholesterol and Statins

by Gail Combs

Don’t Worry About Cholesterol; Inflammation Is Your Biggest Problem — The Liver Doctor

Background

Abstract

The Real Research Has Been Buried

-Gail

Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.

AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.

And yes, it’s Monday…again.

But we WILL get through it!

We will always remember Wheatie,

Pray for Trump,

Yet have fun,

and HOLD ON when things get crazy!

We will follow the RULES of civility that Wheatie left for us:

And while we engage in vigorous free speech, we will remember Wheatie’s advice on civility, non-violence, and site unity:

Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.

Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.

We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.

Joe Biden didn’t win.

Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:

brevicaudate

adjective

Used in a sentence

Shown in a picture (Manx cat)

Shown in a video

MUSIC!

Some traditional Manx music!

This next one is excellent, but I can only give the link.

THE STUFF

Wait a minute! This is St. Patrick’s day! What’s Ireland up to?

Let’s see how well that ages!

Sometimes the brevicaudates need some assistance.

Or perhaps I mean assistance from other brevicaudates.

Juuuuuuust sayin’!

Until victory, have faith!

And trust the big plan, too!

And as always….

ENJOY THE SHOW

W

On this day and every day –

God is in Control. . . and His Grace is Sufficient, so . . .Keep Looking Up

Hopefully, every Sunday, we can find something here that will build us up a little . . . give us a smile . . . and add some joy or peace, very much needed in all our lives.

“This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn nor weep.” . . . “Go your way, eat the fat, drink the sweet, and send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared; for this day is holy to our Lord. Do not sorrow, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

Fallen Angels

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

Do We Still Need the Kang (Mis)Quote?

Speaker JohnsonPinging you on January 6 Tapes

We got our miracle.
America is back.

God is in Control
. . . and His Grace is Sufficient, so . . .
Keep Looking Up

“This day is holy to the Lord your God;
do not mourn nor weep.” . . .
“Go your way, eat the fat, drink the sweet,
and send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared;
for this day is holy to our Lord.
Do not sorrow,
for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

Speaker Johnson
Pinging you on January 6 Tapes