“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
With ruthless clarity, Trump’s first 100 days have described a “fork in the road” for America. For all of us. The choice could not be clearer: either America reasserts control over its own government, or it will soon become a managed province in someone else’s empire. — Coffee & Covid by Jeff Childers
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I mentioned that I believed that Colonel Towner was revealing facts based on other information I have unearthed over the years. Today I want to go over some of that information.
“Prussia is not a nation with an army, but an army that controls nations” comte de Mirabeau 1749 – 1791
Sounds a bit like Operation Gladio.
I want to start with the Prussiagate Series. King Frederick the Great of Prussia was alive during the American Revolution. Frederick was the eldest surviving son of Frederick William I, king of Prussia, and Sophia Dorothea of Hanover, daughter of George I of Britain. He was born January 24, 1712 and died August 17, 1786. He was a brilliant military campaigner who, in a series of diplomatic stratagems and wars against Austria and other powers, greatly enlarged Prussia’s territories and made Prussia the foremost military power in Europe. Britannica LINK
The series was a paid subscription substack however now some are available. Zoll lays out an interesting hypothesis and backs it up with historical references. (Zoll is actually two people BTW) The Will Zoll essays. The table of contents also has pointers to Patrick Gunnels reading the essays. Skip the first 10 minutes of the videos which are intro.
The following substack articles are available to the public.
…Beside [these listed] Presidents, there were many others who opposed the future Federal Reserve. There were also wealthy and powerful bankers and industrialists who opposed it. John Jacob Astor IV, the man who invested in Tesla, opposed the plan, as did Benjamin Guggenheim and Macy’s owner Isidor Straus. They were the wealthiest men of the day, and unfortunately all met their end in the fateful sinking of the Titanic in 1912. It’s the stuff of conspiracy theories, but find comfort in the fact-checkers who have spent an awful amount of time reassuring us it is simply a coincidence – albeit a huge one…
In 1971, Nixon interrupted the primetime show, Bonanza, to announce the end of the US Dollar’s gold exchange system. Ever since, the world has been flooded with dollars, wars, welfare, bubbles and busts. The only thing that is stable is the never-ending printing of fiat-money and the debt based monetary system it supports. We are now a world “drowning” in debt, that one day must be paid back by us, our children and grandchildren. With the central banks still at the helm of monetary control, this trend will not end until our children wake up homeless on the land our fathers conquered. Which, of course, was the plan all along…
Before the Federal Reserve, there was the Bank of England, the Bank of Amsterdam and the German Reichsbank. We can explore the establishment of the BoE (during what we call the 1666 – 1702 window) and the Bank of Amsterdam another time (Prussia never ends), but the evolution of the German Reichsbank begins with King Frederick the Great in 1765….
Jefferson also knew that central banks were an even greater danger. Whether he knew this was to be of Prussian origin, we will never know. All the big players laying the foundations of the Federal Reserve had connections to Prussia: Kuhn, Loeb & Co., Warburg, Kahn, Schiff (Rothschild), [Y]ale, Skull & Bones, Johns Hopkins, the Carnegie Foundation, Marburg, Reynolds, the Reichsbank, President Taft and many more…
The Soldier King may have formed the largest military standing army in Europe, but his son Frederick the Great formed them into the most dangerous army in the world. Through a slow process of infiltration, his army of weaponized philosophers, educators, bankers, and PhDs were able to slowly usurp control of the freedoms and liberties granted to Americans in 1776.
This process which was largely complete by 1913. The same year of the founding of the Alfalfa Club, who claims that their “secrets” were obtained from Germany, and that the Kaiser depended on these for his successes…
…Similar to the colonization of [Y]ale by Skull and Bones, the infiltration of the world education system, the creation of Karl Marx, the financing of the Bolshevik revolution, or the weaponizing of philosophy, the Invisible Enemy pushed hard to implement their version of central banking upon America.
Spoiler alert. It was Prussia.
…The head of the Royal Main Bank, which was effectively the central bank of Prussia, had no time for the Jewish banking circles, yet there was nothing he could do about it and they continued to thrive. Prussia was a micromanaged administrative state.
It would never allow a competing activity to occur without the expressed consent of the king. The Rothschilds, Kuhns, Loebs, Warburgs were all originating from or near Prussia. How could these prosperous banking families have escaped the watchful eye of the formidable Prussian secret police without first paying homage and loyalty to the kingdom that allowed their businesses to operate? The answer is that they didn’t. It was all coordinated.
….The Royal Main Bank was about the monopoly of currency. The merchant banks (like the Jewish bankers) would complement this by facilitating trade and currency exchange for Prussia’s new bank note. This would ensure the economic power of Prussia would be expanded and solidified.
Who do you think Mayer Amschel Rothschild learnt his famous quote from?
Drawing attention to the Marburg Virus simply aims to show it was, and still is, potentially real. According to Bill Gates’ GAVI institute, if you get this virus, you have a 90% chance to develop fever, chills, vomit, then bleed out from every orifice, until you die.
And according to GAVI, it could be the next pandemic to strike humanity…..
Marburg the Town: The Apocalypse of the Four Horsemen
The origins of Marburg date back to 1140 A.D. It was subject to many wars, the most famous being the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), where Marburg and surrounding territory lost more than 66% of its population. It suffered a loss of life that surpassed WWI and WWII…..
The war was so bad, it reshuffled the European Order. It was the Great Reset of its day, and Prussia would to rise to prominence from it. There is that familiar pattern, again…..
Marburg became a backwater-town thereafter, under the Electorate of Hessen. Eventually Prussia was able to annex Marburg around 1866. Until then, Marburg was known only for its university, but it was also chosen as the administrative center of the Prussian empire. It became known for its academics, students and public servants. Its library housed many documents that were important to Prussia, as we shall unpack later….
Apart from discovering a deadly disease after fiddling with the African green monkey, [HMMMmmm GreenMonkey DNA Found in COVID-19 Shots –GC] the university is also popular for another academic reason: Its proud academic-Marxist stronghold.
Most are aware of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its devastating effects in the schools across the USA. CRT was born from an ideology espoused by the Frankfurt School, known as “critical theory”. The Frankfurt School fled Germany in 1933 when the Nazis came to power, finding a home at Columbia University.
The Frankfurt School birthed devout cultural Marxists such as Saul Alinsky, who in turn inspired disciples, such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
However, as the Frankfurt School fled Germany, a sister-school remained and would blossom over time. That would be later known as the Marburg School…..
So far, Marburg is known for a virus, an Apocalyptic war, becoming the Prussian administration centre, and a Marxist university.
Let’s see what else we can unpack about the wonderful Prussian town of Marburg.
Fairy-tale Anon: Marburg and the Grimm Tales of Child Abuse…
….
Shady Grooove showed the high Ranking Nazis were transferred to NATO and SourceWatch showed the High ranking Nazis were transferred to Medical & Chemical Companies. See my Old Comment:
If you take things a step further this information supports Will Zoll’s Prussiagate. & ReichsWEF and the idea that PRUSSIA is now an idea AND AN ARMY without a country. In my opinion Colonel Towner documents that army. The Werewolf Units, were organized and trained by SS Officer Otto Skorzeny. Hitler’s Chief of staff, Adolf Heusinger, became NATO’s Chief Of The Military Staff in 1961. Skorzeny allegedly came to the U.S. after the war under Project Paperclip.
Operation Gladio was formally revealed in 1990 by the Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in an official statement to the Italian parliament. By then, Gladio had already been exposed in the courts and elsewhere, but Andreotti’s ‘official’ revelations widely exposed the unpalatable reality. Italian investigations, into the ‘Years of Lead‘, revealed NATO’s hand in a series of terrorist atrocities that had taken place in Italy throughout the 1950s to the 1980s. These included bombings, assassinations, kidnappings and mass shootings by terrorist organisations. There is no doubt that elements within the NATO deep state were routinely using false flag terrorism to control and manipulate public opinion and shape policy.
This is not the speculation of ‘looney conspiracy theorists,’ it is proven, well documented historical fact…
Another snippet from one of the Will Zoll Articles.
The incredible history behind the formation of the World Economic Forum is founded on the vision set out by Frederick the Great centuries ago, where every aspect of a humanity would be controlled through 17,000 rules and regulations. Adolph Hitler and the Nazis disastrously tried to restore Germany back to its illustrious Prussian past. The current attempt to establish this regime globally was why the first 10 years of the ReichsWEF hosted a myriad of ex-Nazis and national leaders tied to brutal regimes, communist-ideology, and much worse.
To circumvent democratic principles, national sovereignty, and the Constitution, the ReichsWEF implemented the Young Global Leaders program to effectively penetrate government cabinets and steer nations toward the vision of Klaus Schwab and, more importantly, the matrix of globalist corporations that now serve the horrible invisible enemy that is Prussia.
Klaus, it would appear, has taken a leaf out of Joseph Goebbels playbook:
The ReichsWEF is not a friend; it is the enemy of humanity.
We conclude with a message to every member of the Young Global Leaders Community and every member of the World Economic Forum:
You are all citizens of sovereign nations built on the premise of freedom, democracy and the rule of law. In this invisible war, the WEF has appointed you to be enemies of your own nations. As Tyranny begins to destroy itself by unleashing wave-upon-wave of crises, Freedom will most-certainly prevail. As members of Klaus’ army, it is important to understand you are involved in one of the highest crimes known to man: TREASON…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
As I have mentioned before, the motive is MERCANTILISM.
“So, in 1765 he [Fredrick the Great] founded the Royal Main Bank, and monopolized the issuance of currency (coin) that could be used for trade.” — LINK
[An] economic theory and practice common in Europe from the 16th to the 18th century that promoted governmental regulation of a nation’s economy for the purpose of augmenting state power at the expense of rival national powers. It was the economic counterpart of political absolutism. Its 17th-century publicists—most notably Thomas Mun in England, Jean-Baptiste Colbert in France, and Antonio Serra in Italy—never, however, used the term themselves; it was given currency by the Scottish economist Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations (1776).
Mercantilism contained many interlocking principles. Precious metals, such as gold and silver, were deemed indispensable to a nation’s wealth. If a nation did not possess mines or have access to them, precious metals should be obtained by trade. It was believed that trade balances must be “favourable,” meaning an excess of exports over imports. Colonial possessions should serve as markets for exports and as suppliers of raw materials to the mother country. Manufacturing was forbidden in colonies, and all commerce between colony and mother country was held to be a monopoly of the mother country….
“The Biggest Corporation You’ve Never Heard Of” —The Guardian
How does one corporation — a mammoth British transnational corporation at that — provide so many critical services throughout the USA’s Military-Industrial Complex and yet very few have ever heard of them?
In view of its sheer size, scope of operations, and far-reaching penetration of both the American and British national security states, it’s inconceivable that SERCO has remained so conveniently under the radar for so many years.
Just how much “Bringing service to life” does SERCO do here in the United States? The following is a truncated list of their affiliations in and around the U.S. Federal Government and Armed Services. Their website is quoted as follows: “Skilled resources and a global presence to execute any CONUS or OCONUS*task”.
*OCONUS = Outside [the] contiguous United States
It is only by correctly understanding the true role that the SERCOs of the world have in the running of the planet that anyone can even begin to apprehend the enormity and complexity, pervasiveness and profundity of the Government-Corporate Complex. Truly, the warnings of George Orwell’s 1984 have found their full manifestation in the real 800 pound gorilla that currently rules the realm — the entire planetary civilization. As follows: The Government-Corporate Complex Takes Complete Control Of The USA
The SERCO website goes on to say:
“Serco is dedicated to providing military support in ways that matter most to our clients’ missions. The vast majority of our employees are embedded in military bases, working side-by-side with servicemen and women to deliver military support—real mission-critical and mission-support solutions.”
[An incredibly long] list of agencies and departments within the U.S. Federal Government and U.S. Armed Services is by no means exhaustive where it concerns SERCO’s direct and indirect involvement. There are, in fact, many other secret organizations and classified projects that are not shown below in which SERCO not only participates, but is also quite prominently configured in case claims of plausible deniability may be necessary to shield the US Govt and its employees.
…So the 64 thousand dollar question is how, and most importantly why, a British Corporation controls so many critical functions within the United States of America, as well as within many other key industrialized nations around the world?
[The long list includes Social Security Administration. — GC]
There is only one answer: Because SERCO is a foreign multinational corporation, it can do things at its headquarters in Hook, Hampshire, England, United Kingdom, that a U.S. company could simply not get away with….
Obamacare: A SERCO Contract that Controls the US Healthcare System
Obviously it was no accident of good fortune that SERCO was chosen to process Obamacare applications.[1] What, pray tell, is more important to control than the healthcare delivery system of any nation. When you control the healthcare services, you control the health of the citizens. When you control their health, you effectively control them. If you don’t believe this, then please read the flowing exposé….
Certainly makes you wonder exactly what that company is actually up to!
Just think the USA has a British company doing Intel work & ‘services’ for our military and Chinese companies providing our military gear/weapons/transportation. No wonder POTUS Trump is emphasizing Made in America!
It is now a very appropriate time to discuss political parties since they have been doing their best to disrupt the will of We the People for many years.
In our newly formed nation during the subject period of this series, the Federalists were the first organized political party that apparently formed in 1789, although some sources hold out for as late as 1795. When one considers that Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison produced and published the Federalist papers from 1787-1788 in NY newspapers, this writer chooses to use the earlier date.
That would be the year the Constitution was ratified. That did not take long, did it?
The Federalist movement and party dominated the affairs of America during the 1790’s, then never won an election after 1801 before disappearing not long after the War of 1812. Their lasting legacy will always be the Constitution, for better or worse.
To provide some background and more of a basis for this part, please review this summary of political parties in America.
Before we go further I have a confession to make. I firmly believe as POTUS James Monroe stated, “Surely our government may go on and prosper without the existence of parties. I have always considered their existence as the curse of the country”
You will find that statement in the fourth paragraph of the linked letter below from said James Monroe to James Madison on May 12, 1822.
Preach it, James. You understood this subject well in my opinion. It would not be long (1828) before a political party rose up against the freemasons, the Anti-Masonic Party. Seems you were a freemason. Oh well. That party was absorbed into the Whigs a decade later.
However, please do not miss what Monroe said in the sentence previous to the above referenced quote. “Public opinion will react on this body, & keep it right.“
Seems that is still the key over 200 years later; transparently keeping the citizens truthfully informed while they remain engaged with their government officials and related activities. Which is why the current day Uniparty worked successfully to take over the opinion shaping in media. They were successful in keeping the masses in the dark about what the usurpers were really doing while also cultivating a general disinterest or distaste of politics and voting within the general public.
The major problem they now have, thanks to POTUS Donald J. Trump, is a very large group of Americans no longer believe a stinking word they say and are now fulfilling James Monroe’s prediction of keeping the politicians more honest (“right”). The fake media’s effect is being relegated to the sheeple with Bob Uecker’s view. In honor of the recent start to MLB’s season…
Dang, I miss that guy.
British Legacy
We cannot really blame our founders for establishing political parties. The vast majority of them and other patriots who formed our new nation came from the United Kingdom. As a result, let’s take a look at the political party history and landscape there before the nation of America was a thing. Check out #3 in the link below.
Tory and Whig parties formed beginning in the 1680 time frame. Which makes it easier to understand how and why political parties formed in America. Colonists had been conditioned to their existence as subjects of Great Britain. They had seen the Tories remain loyal to the Crown and viewed as traditionalists all of those years. The Whigs were the reformers and liberals. As a result it was a natural reaction when opposing viewpoints developed in America during and after the war to create the Federalists and Antifederalists. The supporters took sides and the first to become organized appears to be the Federalists. They were soon followed by the Democratic-Republicans (Antifederalists), also known as the Jeffersonian Republicans in the 1792-95 time frame. The actual dates are disputed among many historical accounts, but are in the general time frame of late 1780’s to mid 1790’s for both parties.
Conditions On The Ground Then
As we know, political parties generally form to advance common interests. Alliances on issues of importance make it easier to advance those common interests. However, those alliances also tend to create issues to gain power and money while moving public opinion to their points of view.
That is clearly what the Federalists did. Seven of the thirteen states in the new nation of the United States of America were fine with the Articles of Confederation. The Federalists foresaw big trouble on the horizon as stated in the previous part, or, felt they could not gin up enough fear porn to hopefully move public opinion their way. At that point they did not believe they could influence the seven states sufficiently to gain the nine votes needed to produce a new, nationally governing document. The seven states were entrenched in their thinking and operation. The Federalists were obviously opposed to states’ rights exceeding federal authority and believed in a strong central government. So, they used a provision in the Articles to have state conventions to elect special delegates to amend the Articles at the Philadelphia Convention. It worked. The bottom line is they wore down their political opponents and succeeded in flipping three states to their views of terminating the Articles and replacing with the Constitution that resulted.
Who were those founding fathers who could be so formidable in support of their beliefs and persuasive in their arguments? Well, that would be political heavyweights George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Robert Morris, and John Jay primarily; along with many others who were friends and allies. They were a formidable, respected block of patriots.
Washington said, “I do not conceive we can last long as a nation without having lodged somewhere a power whick(h) will pervade the whole union in as energetic a manner as the authority of the state governments extends over the several states.” He wrote letters to the governors of all thirteen states expressing his views. His beliefs in a stronger central government weighed heavily on the leaders and the people.
To be sure there were heavyweight patriots lined up against the loss of the Articles and the provisions it contained. Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Elbridge Gerry, and William Paca among others opposed its discontinuance. Some changed their views during the negotiations or after the Constitution was ratified. Jefferson took the opposite view about the internal rebellions the Federalists feared. He felt they were good for the nation to experience occasionally to improve itself. He felt those involved in such events such as in Shays’s Rebellion should not be harshly punished as an example. As a student of the Enlightenment he believed the good of people would win out in the end. This was directly opposed by many Federalists who did not share his views. They pointed to the perceived selfish responses of state leaders in not paying federal war debts as well as rebels and insurrectionists in the general populace as evidence.
As in most things of importance in government, history indicates that both camps were probably right and wrong in their various assessments.
Conditions On the Ground Now
Fast forward to January 6, 2021. What say you, America? It is the day We the People realized fully that elections have been fake for some time. It is the day many realized the federal government had become fully corrupted and had become agents of criminal leaders.
I guess the Federalists did not foresee a day when America’s federal government and elected officials leading it would authorize its Intelligence and law enforcement agencies to plan and instigate domestic terror operations against fellow citizens to influence the views, activities and votes of the general populace. But yet, here we are still dealing with the same shiz the colonists faced when the Brits did so on behalf of the Crown and Parliament.
With the Constitution’s ratification there have proven to be precious few effective triggers for citizens and even states to pull to counter the corruption as the bad faith is exhibited. That has led to outright rebellion at times in our history, as Thomas Jefferson suggested it probably would and should. As it turned out there is a large segment of We the People who have been good and faithful citizens abiding by the laws while many elected leaders, the supporting federal bureaucracy, and judiciary have not been.
It has been an infuriating experience for many patriotic American citizens through the years who point to the Constitution and tell the tyrants of the day that their actions cannot stand per the rule of law. These have been the same We the People who are viewed as We the Peasants by their greaters. Peasants who have endured corrupted elected officials, bureaucrats, law enforcement agencies, and judiciary who turn blind eyes or even openly support the criminal activities without recourse for the lessers.
Is it any wonder that POTUS Trump frequently promotes the song, “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from Les Miserables in his events? He knows how we deplorables have been treated.
There have been clear violations of the intent of existing law in the Constitution over two centuries now. In response to it there is Monroe’s, “Public opinion will react on this body, & keep it right.“ Was the 2020 election, among other disputed elections throughout our history, supposed to be rectified through that statement? How about the related treatment of American citizens on J6 who objected to the obvious election steal and the authorities’ circumvention of keeping it right? Did we keep the federal government right?
When the interpreters, administrators and enforcers are corrupted; can there even be justice outside of divine intervention or rebellion by the peasants?
Need more evidence of federal government failure to protect in America? Per numerous government sources somewhere between ten and twenty million illegal invaders poured over our borders in four years from 2021 through 2024. Elected officials in bothpolitical parties along with federal law enforcement agencies and the judiciary did nothing to enforce the law and Constitution despite the catastrophic on-going effects it had on the nation and We the People. Instead many made the paths of these illegals smooth and easy to navigate with taxpayer money to also help them along while ignoring the needs of citizens. Many of these enemies of the state are still in seated roles of power and authority and are circumventing the laws daily despite the attempts of POTUS Trump and patriots to administer them legally.
If our government actually did operate as a republic and in accordance with the law we would not be $36+ trillion in debt, rife with corruption, and illegally ruled as subjects by evil doers and incompetents. There would be no need for DOGE.
Unlike our independence movement brothers and sisters who were not involved in political parties until after the Revolutionary War; who depended on Committees of Correspondence to make everybody aware pre-war along with newspapers and horseback delivery of letters post war; we have the capacity to know where each candidate and elected official stands or votes on every issue in real time every moment of every day. All that is truly needed is the will to do so with required transparency, improved use of existing technology, and the deemphasis of the propagandist media that provides misleading to false information.
Think about who we are today. One big convoluted mess in politics for over 200 years that led to wars, genocide, carpetbaggers, robber baron rule, corrupted institutions, and so on. Perhaps we need to consider what POTUS Monroe believed, “I have always considered their existence as the curse of the country.”
Back in the founders’ day as well as now in ours; it seems only sunlight, integrity, backbone and accountability are needed to make good things happen. Something they and we have available in state capitals in legislative houses and governors mansions located in the midst of We the People and not in the jackboot protected District of Criminals.
We will not solve this ages old problem here. It may never be. However, our thoughts and beliefs can be seen and heard to help provide sunlight. The more informed We the People are, the more impact we can have on the political process. With this in mind I say; kick azz, DOGE and POTUS Trump! We the Peasants support your efforts fully. Just let us know how we can help.
Signer time. We will only do one as his involvement is extensive, yet, rarely prominently discussed by historians and pundits except for his part in establishing one pain in the azz political procedural exercise.
Elbridge Gerry
Born in 1744 in Marlblehead, MA, Elbridge Gerry was the son of a wealthy, ship operator and merchant, Thomas Gerry and mother, Elizabeth, who was also from a wealthy merchant family. He was educated by private tutors before entering Harvard College at thirteen years of age, where he went on to earn BA and MA degrees by the age of twenty. He then joined the family merchant businesses, which was active with shipping routes into the West Indies, Spain and all along the North American coast. His father was also active in local politics as well as the militia.
Gerry aligned with other notable Massachusetts patriot leaders Samuel Adams, John Adams, and Mercy Otis Warren among others. He won election to the state assembly in 1772 and worked closely with Samuel Adams for colonist causes against Parliament. He established the Marblehead’s Committee of Correspondence, but ran into trouble with the people there when he supported small pox inoculations being done at a local hospital. This was met by violence against the supporters and hospital as the people were not sure about the transmission of the disease at that time.
He rebounded politically a couple of years later when the Boston Port Act closed it and pushed the activities to Marblehead, where Gerry was instrumental in keeping supplies flowing back to the Boston area while caring for his dying father. He was elected to the First Continental Congress, but declined due to the grief from losing his father. When the governor began making moves against the colonists, he helped store weapons and supplies in Concord, which became a target of the British military at the start of formal hostilities in the Revolutionary War. While the Siege of Boston was ongoing, he helped supply the developing Continental Army as he continued to do throughout the war. He used his business contacts in France and Spain to continue to supply weapons and supplies the entire period. Despite all of his merchant activities he chose not to overtly profit from the war and spoke out against price gouging. He desired price controls to help increase the quantity of supplies they could obtain. The Descendants site indicates he was the 11th wealthiest signer of the Declaration.
With his election to the Second Continental Congress he had the honor of approving and signing the Declaration. His support was so strong, John Adams wrote, “”If every Man here was a Gerry, the Liberties of America would be safe against the Gates of Earth and Hell.”
He was accused of being one of the Conway Cabal against the leadership of George Washington, but quickly brought that to an end with a rebuttal that strongly countered the accusers. In the early years post war he was against a strong central government other than having concerns over Shays’s Rebellion. He remained an opponent of political parties until around 1800. At that point he felt it necessary to align and join the Democratic-Republicans in opposition to the continuing Federalist push for a dominant central government.
In 1780 he resigned from the Congress and refused all other public service appointments and offices until 1783 when the Confederation Congress met to make improvements and reforms to that document, many of which he strongly supported. He served two years before resigning from it. It was one year later that he finally married. He wed Ann Thompson, some twenty years younger, who was the daughter of a wealthy NYC merchant. His good friend, James Monroe, was his best man in the wedding. The couple went on to have ten (some say nine) children together over the next fifteen years, which needless to say strained the health of his wife. With wealth earned pre and during the war, he sold off his merchant business and made land purchases. This included a 100 acre estate of a former royal lieutenant governor that he named Elmwood that was located in Cambridge, MA. It became his home for the remainder of his life.
He returned to public life with the Constitutional Convention, making sure to represent the interests of the states in the negotiations. However, the Shays event had an impact on his beliefs about individual citizens having the right to vote to affect government. He strongly advocated for indirect elections. He was unsuccessful in the House, however, he helped make that happen in the Senate. He was very unhappy the Constitution as proposed did not enumerate specific personal liberties and did not want the central government strengthened in its position. As an Episcopalian he fought specifically for stronger language relating to religious freedom, which did not go far enough in his opinion. As a result of it and other differences he voted against the Constitution along with George Mason and Edmund Randolph – the only three against its ratification. At this point John Adams seemed to change his opinion of Gerry and called him obstinate and focused only on small things, although they remained cordial and continued working together.
When it came time for Massachusetts to take up the issue he was not chosen as a delegate due to his stance, although he was invited to attend. Even with that state’s strong Federalist involvement it still only passed by a 187 – 168 vote. This vote and the beliefs of many he knew soured him against numerous formerly friendly officials.
Per the Descendant’s site, “Overcoming his objections to the Constitution, Gerry served in the House of Representatives from 1789 to 1793. To the dismay of his anti-federalist friends, he supported the Federalist agenda, including Hamilton’s proposals to fund the War debt and establish a national bank.“
This reversal and acceptance led to Gerry being brought back into the good graces of John Adams. The following information from the Descendants site gives an interesting look at America’s position in the world at that time.
“On June 20, 1797, President John Adams sent Gerry along with Charles Pinckney and John Marshall to France, to negotiate a peace treaty with Talleyrand, Napoleon’s new foreign minister. The mission was a disaster, with the French trying to bribe the American commissioners, and came to be known as the XYZ affair with the letters representing the three chief French bribers. Finally, the Treaty of Mortefontaine was completed in 1800 and is considered a great achievement by the Adams administration in keeping the United States neutral in the expanding war between Britain and France.
In 1800, maligned by federalists who believed him partial to France, and concerned about the likelihood of Alexander Hamilton becoming General of the army, Gerry joined the moderate wing of the Republican party. He ran for Governor of Massachusetts, a strong Federalist stronghold, in the early 1800s but was unsuccessful.”
He ran again for governor as a Democratic-Republican in 1810 and was elected and reelected in 1811; only to lose in 1812 for the following that leads to the reason most folks would ever remember his name. From the Descendants site,
“He had become unpopular after supporting a redistricting bill that gained him lasting fame. By rearranging voting districts around Amesbury and Haverhill to favor the Republicans, the resulting district resembled a salamander, thus earning the famous sobriquet of a “gerrymander.”
So he was the trouble maker responsible for what is still happening today! For those who want to know more about it…
I noted in one source that even as an older man he must have had an eye for female beauty.
“He paid special attention to Betsy Patterson Bonaparte, the American-born sister-in-law of Napoleon, whose revealing attire caused a stir wherever she went.” For those like me who were clueless about Ms. Bonaparte there are the links below. Lady readers may be especially interested in the second one.
Despite Gerry’s election loss for governor, he was added to the ticket of James Madison as VP. With their election and the War of 1812, his work became very contentious. However, he enjoyed the aristocratic lifestyle and DC parties despite the rancor in the Senate over which he presided. He died on his way to the Senate in 1814. His wife Ann lived until 1849, the longest surviving widow of a Declaration signer.
The following Descendants site description gives us a more personal look at the man.
“Elbridge Gerry was a small, dapper gentleman possessed of pleasant manners, but never very popular because of his aristocratic traits. He had no sense of humor, frequently changed his mind on important issues, and was suspicious of the motives of others. But he was a conscientious businessman who paid attention to detail. His patriotism and integrity could never be questioned.
While Gerry’s actions can be considered those of a maverick, they can also be viewed as those of a man of principle with independence of thought and action independent of party influence. He signed the Declaration and the Articles of Confederation but vigorously opposed the Constitution. He then served in Congress where he supported Alexander Hamilton’s federalist agenda ensuring the future financial security of the young republic. He became a Republican in 1800, lost several contests for Governor of Massachusetts. But he was elected Madison’s Vice President and stayed loyal to him when most of the Republicans split off over Madison’s handling of the war.
Dr. Benjamin Rush wrote that he was “a genuine friend of republican forms of government.” One of Gerry’s own statements was “I hold it to be the duty of every citizen, though he may have but one day to live, to devote the day to the good of his country.”
His home at Elmwood is located a half mile from Harvard’s campus and has remained a place where Harvard people have lived. The school purchased it in 1962 and its President has resided there ever since. Gerry was buried in the Congressional Cemetery in DC.
Elbridge Gerry was a great American Patriot who worked tirelessly for the betterment of our nation. His expectation was for all of us to do likewise.
Please remember Wolf’s rules for our community. In general that means to be respectful to each other and to pull no shenanigans that your mom might find offensive or otherwise cause jail time. That said, free speech is honored here.
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).
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:
onomasiology
noun
the study of nomenclature
a branch of lexicology concerned with the names of concepts
the study of words and expressions having similar or associated concepts and a basis (as social, regional, occupational) for being grouped
a branch of linguistics concerned with the question “how do you express X?”
Used in a sentence
The onomasiology of Trump enemy nicknames will one day be a scholarly sub-specialty.
Used in another sentence
Onomasiology, as a part of lexicology, starts from a concept which is taken to be prior (i.e. an idea, an object, a quality, an activity etc.) and asks for its names.
How the Gab AI “Gabby” illustrates the idea of onomasiology
Shown in an image of text
MUSIC!
A Bhutanese folk song about onomasiology (seriously)
Some musical, medical journalism featuring Heart!
THE STUFF
More math and computer stories, featuring that annoyingly happy woman with a British accent.
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.
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.”
God’s Providence
Divine providence is the governance of God by which He, with wisdom and love, cares for and directs all things in the universe. Divine providence asserts that God is in complete control of all things. He is sovereign over the universe as a whole (Psalm 103:19), the physical world (Matthew 5:45), the affairs of nations (Psalm 66:7), human destiny (Galatians 1:15), human successes and failures (Luke 1:52), and the protection of His people (Psalm 4:8). This stands in direct opposition to the idea that the universe is governed by chance or fate.
Through divine providence God accomplishes His will. To ensure that His purposes are fulfilled, God governs the affairs of men and works through the natural order of things. The laws of nature are nothing more than God’s work in the universe. The laws of nature have no inherent power; rather, they are the principles that God set in place to govern how things normally work. They are only “laws” because God decreed them.
How does divine providence relate to human volition? We know that humans have a free will, but we also know that God is sovereign. How those two truths relate to each other is hard for us to understand, but we see examples of both truths in Scripture. Saul of Tarsus was willfully persecuting the church, but, all the while, he was “kick[ing] against the goads” of God’s providence (Acts 26:14).
God hates sin and will judge sinners. God is not the author of sin, He does not tempt anyone to sin (James 1:13), and He does not condone sin. At the same time, God obviously allows a certain measure of sin. He must have a reason for allowing it, temporarily, even though He hates it.
An example of divine providence in Scripture is found in the story of Joseph. God allowed Joseph’s brothers to kidnap Joseph, sell him as a slave, and then lie to their father for years about his fate. This was wicked, and God was displeased. Yet, at the same time, all of their sin worked toward a greater good: Joseph ended up in Egypt, where he was made the prime minister. Joseph used his position to sustain the people of a broad region during a seven-year famine—including his own family. If Joseph had not been in Egypt before the famine began, millions of people, including the Israelites, would have died. How did God get Joseph to Egypt? He providentially allowed his brothers the freedom to sin. God’s divine providence is directly acknowledged in Genesis 50:15–21.
Another clear case of divine providence overriding sin is the story of Judas Iscariot. God allowed Judas to lie, deceive, cheat, steal, and finally betray the Lord Jesus into the hands of His enemies. All of this was a great wickedness, and God was displeased. Yet, at the same time, all of Judas’s plotting and scheming led to a greater good: the salvation of mankind. Jesus had to die at the hands of the Romans in order to become the sacrifice for sin. If Jesus had not been crucified, we would still be in our sins. How did God get Christ to the cross? God providentially allowed Judas the freedom to perform a series of wicked acts. Jesus plainly states this in Luke 22:22: “The Son of Man will go as it has been decreed. But woe to that man who betrays him!”
Note that Jesus teaches both the sovereignty of God (“the Son of Man will go as it has been decreed”) and the responsibility of man (“woe to that man who betrays!”). There is a balance.
Divine providence is taught in Romans 8:28: “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” “All things” means “all things.” God is never out of control. Satan can do his worst, yet even the evil that is tearing the world apart is working toward a greater, final purpose. We can’t see it yet. But we know that God allows things for a reason and that His plan is good. It must be frustrating for Satan. No matter what he does, he finds that his plans are thwarted and something good happens in the end.
Divine providence can be summarized this way: “God in eternity past, in the counsel of His own will, ordained everything that will happen; yet in no sense is God the author of sin; nor is human responsibility removed.” The primary means by which God accomplishes His will is through secondary causes (e.g., laws of nature and human choice). In other words, God usually works indirectly to accomplish His will.
God also sometimes works directly to accomplish His will. These works are what we call miracles. A miracle is God’s circumventing, for a short period of time, the natural order of things to accomplish His will. The blazing light that fell on Saul on the road to Damascus is an example of God’s direct intervention (Acts 9:3). The frustrating of Paul’s plans to go to Bythinia is an example of God’s indirect guiding (Acts 16:7). Both are examples of divine providence at work.
There are some who say that the concept of God directly or indirectly orchestrating all things destroys any possibility of free will. If God is in complete control, how can we be truly free in the decisions we make? In other words, for free will to be meaningful, there must be some things that lie outside of God’s sovereign control—e.g., the contingency of human choice. Let us assume for the sake of argument that this is true. What then? If God is not in complete control of all contingencies, then how could He guarantee our salvation? Paul says in Philippians 1:6 that “he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” If God is not in control of all things, then this promise, and all other divine promises, is in doubt. If the future does not belong completely to God, we do not have complete security that our salvation will be made complete.
Furthermore, if God is not in control of all things, then He is not sovereign, and if He is not sovereign, then He is not God. So, the price of maintaining contingencies outside of God’s control results in a belief that God is not really God. And if our free will can trump divine providence, then who ultimately is God? We are. That conclusion is unacceptable to anyone with a biblical worldview. Divine providence does not destroy our freedom. Rather, divine providence takes our freedom into account and, in the infinite wisdom of God, sets a course to fulfill God’s will. xhttps://www.gotquestions.org/divine-providence.html
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.
Gold went on QUITE a ride this week!. It came within a loud shout of $3500 but then plummeted, dropping all the way into the 3200s, and ended up almost where it began. Silver didn’t drop as hard, and Gold:Silver dropped below 100, but again it seems almost as if silver really wants to be right there at 1/100th of an ounce of gold.
*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.
Carbon Dating
Carbon dating is when you date identical twins, one of whom is a carbon copy of the other. Generally available only to people as cool as the Fonz (who IIRC dated triplets at one point). Alternatively it is defined as dating having reached the point where a diamond is involved, possibly because uranium-lead dating or potassium-argon dating got out of hand.
OK, more seriously…it involves the isotope 14C or carbon-14 or C-14, depending on who’s writing the stuff you’re reading and how lazy they are. I’m lazy enough not to bother with the first, most technically correct, notation.
Carbon dating is generally not relevant to geologists, but is very relevant to archaeologists, who dig up human remains and/or human artifacts. Why? Timescale. The half life of carbon-14 is 5700 years (give or take 30 years). This makes it worthless for geological time; they generally don’t want to push it past 50,000 years. But it’s eminently suitable for modern humans and gets us well back into the prior ice age which ended roughly 12,000 years ago.
Even though this is supposed to be a geology series, I decided to cover carbon dating anyway because it has a number of features that make it a contrast to the other methods used. And also hopefully to immunize my readers against the next earnest-sounding ignoramus who complains about carbon-dating the age of the Earth.
Carbon, element 6, has two stable isotopes, carbon-12 (6 protons, six neutrons), and carbon-13 (6 protons, 7 neutrons). And then there is carbon-14, with six protons and eight neutrons. As noted above, it’s unstable with a half life of 5700 years (give or take 30 years). It undergoes regular ol’ beta decay and turns into an atom of nitrogen-14, which is quite stable.
Carbon dating is sometimes conflated with radiometric dating in general, especially by the general public. They talk about dating rocks, or determining the age of the Earth, with carbon dating, oftentimes with a sneer because they don’t believe the result. Ironically, they’d be right to do so if we actually tried to use carbon dating for these purposes. (It’s much more hilarious when a professional young earth creationist makes this particular blunder.) Carbon dating is radiometric dating, but not all radiometric dating is carbon dating.
Carbon-14 is not used to date rocks, it’s used to determine when something organic died. Living things ingest carbon-14 with their carbon dioxide, food, you-name it, when they die, they no longer bring carbon-14 in and the radiometric clock starts ticking.
For a number of reasons, carbon dating is the oddball method of all the ones I’ve discussed, because it does not depend on a primordial isotope. Uranium-235 and -238, thorium-232, rubidium-87, potassium-40 are all primordial isotopes, meaning what we see out there today was “with us” when the Earth formed.
Obviously this won’t be true for carbon-14; the Earth is way too old for that. So carbon-14 must be getting created today.
(Indeed, the mere fact that no short lived isotopes are around any more except in cases where we can demonstrate they are being created now, is evidence that the Earth is quite old. The shortest lived primordial (non-renewed) radioisotope is U-235 with its 704 million year half life. In general after about 40 half lives the radioisotope is effectively gone; roughly one atom in a trillion is still around. The next longest half life of any radioisotope after U-235 is samarium-146 at 92 million years. [That’s quite a gap! It’s surprising nothing other than U-235 has half lives in the hundreds of millions of years.] And sure enough 40 half lives of that is 3,680 million years…so it would be essentially gone after that amount of time. And guess what. It is in fact all gone [actually traces should still be around, we haven’t detected them yet], as one would expect if and only if the Earth is old.)
Most carbon-14 is generated by cosmic rays plowing through our upper atmosphere. This creates free neutrons, some of which will glom onto nitrogen-14 atoms, and kick out one of the protons; this replacement of a proton with a neutron is as if the C-14 to N-14 beta decay is run in reverse. This apparently happens (depending on who is doing the calculation) 16,400 or 18,800 times per second per square meter of the Earth’s surface, all at altitudes between 9 and 14 km. (As you can imagine this is tough to measure under those circumstances; hence the approximate calculations that do match what we observe later on in the process.)
The nitrogen (N2) molecule becomes a CN radical and eventually the C-14 atom ends up in carbon dioxide, where it can be sucked in by plants. Once incorporated in the plant tissue it can make its way through the entire food chain as some animal eats the plant, some other animal eats the first animal, and so on. Every living thing is constantly pulling carbon-14 into its system, replacing any that happens to decay while it’s living. When it dies, this process ends and decaying C-14 is no longer replaced. We now have something we can radiometrically date, just as we can date rocks once they solidify.
In this particular case they take their sample and count carbon-12, carbon-13, and carbon-14 atoms, and compare the ratios to what we see in atmospheric CO2 today. After doing the same sorts of calculations I’ve highlighted in previous posts, they get a date which is reported as “Before Present.” That has become a bit of a misnomer, now, because “Present” was 1950, and 75 years have since elapsed.
And therein lies the need for an asterisk. As it turns out the C-14 to C-12 ratio in our atmosphere is not constant. Not only is it not constant over time, it’s not constant over location either. Even today we can measure it’s lower near cities than out in the middle of nowhere; that’s due to the extra CO2 emissions near cities. Fossil fuels have essentially no C-14 in them, so when they burn they add purely to the amounts of C-12 and C-13, which pushes the ratio down. Time variation can be caused by anything from solar flares, other variations in cosmic ray flux, and even nuclear tests which tend to dump large numbers of neutrons, giving a big boost to C-14 production.
What effect does this have on carbon dating? Let me illustrate with an example, a made-up one. Let’s say that (for whatever reason) 43,000 years ago the C-14:C-12 ratio in the atmosphere was twice as high as it is today. At that time a Neanderthal grabs a piece of deadfall and takes it to his cave to build a fire, but for whatever reason it doesn’t end up being burned.
Today, an archaeologist finds that piece of unburned wood right next to a bunch of cave paintings, and decides he wants to know how old that Neanderthal dwelling is. So he sends it off to the lab to get it dated. What he doesn’t know is that when the tree grew, the C-14:C-12 ratio in the atmosphere was twice as high as it is today. 43,000 years is about 7 1/2 half lives of C-14; after each half life has elapsed, the C-14 count is still twice as high at that age as it would have been if the wood had started with today’s amount of C-14 in it.
So as far as the lab can tell, 6 1/2, not 7 1/2, half lives have elapsed since the sample was formed (because they don’t know the sample started out a half-life “behind”), so they send back: 37,300 (43,000 – 5,700) years old.
That’s quite a difference!
Scientists realized this was a potential issue at least as far back as 1955–in fact the first to point it out was Willard Lilly, who invented radio carbon dating! And it became an absolute certainty when samples of known ages started coming back with variant ages. So they started working on ways to calibrate carbon dating.
The unadjusted age number is now called radiocarbon years. That’s the “flag” to warn the reader that the date is not calibrated. In our example, the firewood came back as being 37,300 radiocarbon years old, even though we (with our god’s eye view) know it’s really 43,000 years old.
What is needed is a way to look up a figure given in radiocarbon years, and read off the corrected age. In our example, the archaeologist (or perhaps the lab that did the work) would look up in the right table (it turns out we need different tables for marine and land, and northern and southern hemisphere) “37,300” radiocarbon years and read off “43,000” calendar years.
So how do we make such a table? By radiocarbon-dating samples of known age, and seeing what the results return.
Of course, these are scientists. Why would they use a table when they can make a graph? Here’s an actual graph.
In actual fact, I chose that 43,000 number for the example fairly carefully. If you look up 43,000 on the horizontal axis (the true, calendar ages) and read up you hit one of the spots where the blue crooked line is furthest from the diagonal line where the calendar age would equal the radiocarbon age [no correction needed]. It’s almost, but not quite, off by a half life. So my example wasn’t all that exaggerated.
A graph is also handy because of another potential problem. If you look really closely where the squiggly line crosses 10,000 cal years…that bit of the line looks flat. What that means a bunch of numbers close to 10,000 cal years all have the same radiocarbon age. In fact looking at about 14,000 cal years, there’s almost a thousand year long stretch with nearly the same radiocarbon age.
So because of the variation, sometimes the age will come back ambiguous.
This is actually much more of a problem for recent times.
Consider the fact that these numbers always come out with a margin of error, e.g., +/- 80 radiocarbon years.
Here’s the calibration curve for things that date 1000-1400 radiocarbon years.
Looking over at the left, sample one returned (eyeballing it), a range of 1360-1380 radiocarbon years (blue lines). Reading across, we find a place where the calibration curve is steep, so we end up with a very narrow, 10 year calendar range, 1290-1300 years BP, which is to say 650-660 CE. Steep is good!
It’s shallow that can be a bit of a disaster. Look at sample two, 1260 to 1280 radiocarbon years (red lines), just one century newer in radiocarbon terms than sample 1.
But here the curve zigzags across our range! There are therefore three distinct ageranges that our sample could actually date from, roughly 1185-1190 years BP, 1205-1215 years BP, and 1230-1260 years BP. A 55 year spread, with gaps in it.
The third sample is maybe better, maybe worse depending on how you look at it. No gaps but an even bigger spread. Radiocarbon age is 1180-1205 BP, but because here the curve is very shallow, basically horizontal with ups and downs, the calendar age is is 1075-1175 years BP–a full century of uncertainty.
And even this method (which is called the “intercept” method is now out of date, there are much more complex probabilistic methods that require computing power, which we now have readily available. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject of radiocarbon calibration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_calibration
Ambiguity can be combated by working on ways to have the lab be more accurate but note that in case 2 even if we had the radiocarbon age to an exact number of years, we’d still have three answers.
OK, I showed curves, but how did we come up with those curves?
As it happens we have plenty of other ways to date some artifacts that can also be radiocarbon dated, enough that we can fill in a lot of the table (or plot points on the graph). This of course is very tedious work and whoever does it won’t get a Nobel prize, but they are unsung heroes of archaeology. It is thanks to them that we can have great confidence in our data, in most cases (and know when we shouldn’t, as in the case of the poor guys who had samples 2 and 3 in the graph above).
What are some of those ways of determining absolute ages? Actually the first attempts to do this were from Egyptology. Because ancient Egyptian records sometimes reference astronomical events happening during such-and-such reign, we know when that reign happened–because we can calculate when the astronomical event happened (good ol’ astrodynamics…). If we have papyrus from that time, we can see how old it is in radiocarbon years. This has since been extended to other civilizations.
But the most famous means used (though by no means the only one) is a product of nature: dendrochronology, which is, in essence, counting and matching up tree rings. As trees grow they leave annual rings in the wood grain. (They’re rings going across the log, otherwise, running the length of the log, they have the sort of “woodgrain” pattern you see in lumber of any kind.) In fact, this pattern will tend to have thicker and thinner rings depending on whether the tree got a lot of water or less water that particular season; more growth equals a thicker ring. Different trees from the same region will show the same pattern of thick and thin rings for the same years. And it’s even possible to match up the pattern in old pieces of wood to the corresponding years in either a) newer pieces of wood or b) trees growing today. We’ve managed to construct at least one sequence that goes back 13,900 actual years BP (i.e., 13,975 years before today).
The oldest tree-ring series are known as floating since, while their constituent rings can be counted to create a relative internal chronology, they cannot be dendro-matched with the main Holocene absolute chronology. However, 14C analyses performed at high resolution on overlapped absolute and floating tree-rings series enable one to link them almost absolutely and hence to extend the calibration on annual tree rings until ≈13 900 cal yr BP.
In this case we can simply date the wood taking samples from (say) every tenth or hundredth ring. We know the actual age from simple counting of the rings; we can fill in the entries of the calibration table based on the uncalibrated results the lab returns to us. We can supplement this from atmospheric gases trapped in ice cores (which also have annual layers) and organic debris in varves (layers of sediment).
And this is why I left carbon dating for last. The other sorts of dating don’t need calibration, not because ratios were constant but because we have ways of accounting for variation, built into the method. With radio carbon dating we don’t have that luxury, at least not purely by analyzing the sample, so we have to calibrate. Luckily at the short (by geological standards) timescales radio carbon dating covers we have other means of correcting what we get.
As I said before, carbon dating won’t help geologists date things in the geologic column (at least not before the very topmost thin layer), but I felt I had to cover it because it gets confused with the other forms of radiometric dating. It also has the additional complication of needing calibration; someone might get the impression from this that the other methods have the very same issue. They don’t.
(And of course if you run into someone complaining about “carbon dating” dinosaur fossils, he literally doesn’t know what he’s talking about; he’s hopefully misremembering something he heard from someone else, or [less hopefully] the someone else he’s remembering is himself clueless…or a charlatan. The good news is most of the well-funded young-Earth creationist organizations today do know better than to make this particular blunder.)
One last point to make: There are Young Earth Creationist talking points about finding radiocarbon in diamonds (up to billions of years old) or in carbon in fossils of dinosaurs (66-235 Mya). If these held up of course that would be serious trouble for old earth viewpoints, but the problem here is that there’s every sign that they’re measuring contamination. Samples are sent to multiple labs all around the world, and the reported ages are a) not far below the upper limit of C-14 dating and b) wildly different from each other, by at least a half life. Whereas what we see with properly collected samples is consistent ages. (More about this in the second video below at about 13:30.)
Bonus Videos
Here is a video by Aron Ra (as far as I can tell that’s his legal name), talking to an actual scientist (Dr. Jonathan Baker) while said scientist runs a rock sample in the lab, measuring uranium and thorium isotopes–he’s actually using a method different from any I covered, one suitable for ages less than a million years. Aron Ra is famous in atheist circles for combating creationism (all types not just Young Earth) so he does kid the scientist about his data popping out with 6000 years. Between the two of them they make the point that there are literally hundreds of studies that return consistent results.
There are some fundamental differences between this method and other methods, having to do with the fact that the daughter isotope is even more radioactive than the parent (and the parent is water soluble while the daughter is not, so it’s used for dating stalactites), but I am sure you don’t want another Saturday open devoted to that topic, so I’ll punt you over to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium%E2%80%93thorium_dating
A more general video by the same two people. Aron Ra got hit by a troll who threw a bunch of AIG talking points; he has Dr. Baker respond, and the responses are educational (not simply anti-YEC polemics). A lot of info on carbon dating here starting about 13:30 in.
Quotable line: “They do seem fascinated with carbon dating, it’s like they’re not even aware that there’s like well over a dozen, maybe a dozen and a half other radioisotopes that they would be using for dinosaurs, that they don’t use carbon dating for dinosaurs, and why they don’t. I don’t know why they insist on doing that.” Hence this “intruder” topic into a geology series.
Another line: the troll asks “Do you know that forest fires, atomic activity, volcanic eruptions, factories that produce carbon, solar flares, carbon reservoirs, contribute to the inconsistent decay rate and contamination that results to the inaccuracies in carbon dating?” and Dr. Baker responds…”uh, yes, I did know that.” But we know how to take these things into account and can often cross-check with other methods of dating (which is what he was doing in the first video).
And from Dr. Baker’s channel (Age of Rocks):
Ted Talk by a paleontologist about hunting for dinosaurs, he talks a lot about geology here (interestingly that diagram behind him in the thumbnail also appears in the prior video; I guess it’s a pretty popular graphic). Please excuse the “sixth mass extinction” stuff at the very end. (Well, at least he didn’t say “global warming.”)
The free vintage image above of children being vaccinated is courtesy of iStock and Getty Images, via Google Images.
Health Friday is a series devoted to information regarding Big Pharma, vaccines, general health, and associated topics. As today’s post speaks to the disaster of the COVID-19 “vaccines” (Bioweapon Toxin Injections), 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 Notifications from our host, Wolf Moon; 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 her knowledge and belief, there is none. If readers wish to post anything in the discussion thread for today’s post that is AI-generated, they must cite their source. Thank you.
Yours Truly has written about the American Medical Association (the AMA) on previous occasions. The AMA is one of the most powerful professional organizations for physicians in the United States. The organization, which does not provide a list of its members to the general public, is also one of the most powerful lobbying agents in Congress. In addition, the AMA owns the rights to use the CPT codes, which are the codes for medical procedures, examinations, tests, for ordering medical equipment, and much more. The CPT codes are used to bill CMS (Medicare / Medicaid), and to bill private insurers. Please see below for screenshots from, first, https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/american-medical-association-summary; and, second, https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/american-medical-association/, regarding AMA spending on lobbying:
And, not surprisingly, the CPT code royalties paid to the AMA for use of these codes appear to generate the bulk of income for the organization — no wonder the AMA can spend over $21 million on lobbying efforts. Please see: https://paddockpost.com/2024/12/16/how-revenue-is-spent-at-the-ama-2022/.
The AMA has multiple “sub-units” within the organization. These “sub-units” range from DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), to “health equity”, and to LGBTQ++ “health inclusion”, among others. The organization offers numerous CME (Continuing Medical Education) online courses and webinars for AMA members, to assist them in accumulating the yearly CME credits they must earn in order to maintain their License to Practice Medicine. It also publishes numerous medical papers, articles, and other media; among them, JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association.) Please see: https://www.theqtree.com/2024/04/24/the-ama-edhub-window-to-establishment-medicine/.
An example of an AMA-published article regarding “physician strategies to combat vaccine hesitancy among patients” is here: https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/public-health/covid-19-vaccine-hesitancy-10-tips-talking-patients#, “COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy: 10 tips for talking with patients”, by Tanya Albert Henry, 15 December 2023. Here are the “10 tips”: “Know you are the most trusted information source”; “Tell patients they need to get the vaccine”; Understand your patients’ concerns”; “Ask why a patient is hesitant”; Counter any misinformation”; “Tailor your message”; “Address patients’ fear about side effects”; “Prepare our staff to answer questions”; “Show your vaccination pride”; “Tell stories to make impact”.
But, what are physicians supposed to say to the patient in order to “convince” them to take a COVID-19 “vaccine”? Again, the AMA has answers: for example, the “templates” in this published study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X24004377, “Patient concerns and physician strategies for addressing COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy”, Joy Melnikow, et al., 22 May 2024. Below are three screenshots from this paper: section 2.1 Study sample; followed by Table 2, then Table 3:
All of above is to get a patient to agree to having a COVID-19 Bioweapon Toxin Injection (aka a COVID-19 “vaccine”) injected into their body. In Yours Truly’ opinion, if a physician follows the above “templates”, they are functioning not as physicians who swore to “Do No Harm”; in fact, they may be considered as “government representatives” under the current “extension” of the PREP Act for COVID-19 Countermeasures” that was signed by then-HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra in December 2024. Notice also the use of various aspects of direct psychological manipulation and of gaslighting in the “templates” for the physicians to follow. One wonders: What would these physicians say in response to a “vaccine-hesitant” patient who gives them a hard copy of a published study that clearly shows what the COVID-19 “vaccines” actually do to damage a “vaccinated” person’s body?
And now, to the most recent AMA “strategies for physicians to use on patients with vaccine hesitancy” effort, from the AMA EdHub series: https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2025.4882, “Strategies for Communicating with Parents About Vaccines”, Sean T. O’Leary, MD, MPH, 9 April 2025. This article is full-access for AMA members; through an institution; or, via renting it through DeepDyve. Yours Truly went to DeepDyve and was able to get the following screenshot from the first page of Dr. O’Leary’s article, below:
Note the “strategies” that are to be used by the physician, listed in the Table above. Again, it appears to be yet another mixture of “your physician is the most trusted source of information”; plus, “It’s the responsible thing to do for your child”; plus, something new, “Prebunking“, which appears to be a type of psychological manipulation of / gaslighting of, the parent regarding any information they may find online from other physicians (say, Dr. Peter A. McCullough) regarding the dangers of taking the COVID-19 “vaccines”; or, other researchers (say, Steve Kirsch, about how childhood vaccination can induce autism [via the aluminum in the vaccines], and who cites medical statistics to support his contention.) Please see: https://kirschsubstack.com/p/two-pieces-of-evidence-that-together, “Two pieces of evidence that together show that vaccines cause autism”, 21 April 2025. Please also see: https://jessicar.substack.com/p/aluminum-exposure-and-autism-prevalence, 19 April 2025. Dr. Rose cites the following image, from data collected by the CDC:
Why is the AMA still pushing psychological manipulation / gaslighting “strategies” for physicians to use to “convince” patients to take a COVID-19 “vaccine”, or to allow their child (children) to be COVID-19 “vaccinated”, or to allow their child (children) to be “vaccinated” with injectables that contain substances such as Aluminum? Why does the CDC have dozens of “vaccines” listed on the agency’s Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/imz-schedules/downloads/child/0-18yrs-child-combined-schedule.pdf)? With “vaccines” that are to be administered to newborns immediately after birth? Why do almost all public school systems “require” certain “vaccines” to be given to a child in order to attend public school? Why do state legislatures give the force of law to the CDC Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule through legislative fiat for public school attendance — given that the CDC states on the schedule that the injectables are “Recommended”, not “Required”? Why do the AMA, the CDC, and the FDA refuse to acknowledge that the COVID-19 “vaccines” are dangerous and deadly, given the mountain of evidence currently in print which proves this to be the case?
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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.
Exodus Jubilation.
This is the first week of the Eastertide season.
Eastertide (also known as Eastertime or the Easter season) or Paschaltide (also known as Paschaltime or the Paschal season) is a festal season in the liturgical year of Christianity that focuses on celebrating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The church refers to this period of time after the resurrection as the Paschal Season. What are they referring to?
It’s all about the Passover.
…the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus comes clothed to us in the imagery, symbolism, and language of the Jewish Passover. In fact, the name these early Christians give to their Easter festival is the Greek word pascha. Pascha is a Greek translation of the Hebrew Pesach, which is the Hebrew name for Passover. The Latin church picks up this usage and calls Easter in Latin as pascha as well. And from that Latin origin, modern European romance languages get their name for Easter: French: Paques, Spanish: Pascua, Italian: Pasqua. — Gordon Lindsey, The Bible is in My Blood
Drawing parallels between the exodus and the resurrection, Christians see the Exodus as a type, a foreshadowing of the massive jailbreak when Christ frees the righteous dead from the shadow-lands of the underworld, leading them in triumph from darkness into His light. And Christ’s defeat of sin and death is indeed, Good News.
This parallel is highlighted not only within the Gospel accounts themselves, but throughout the New Testament.
For Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us, therefore, celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. — 1 Corinthians 5:6-8
Rejoice!
Easter’s message rings out in the traditional greeting; one says, “Christ is risen!” and to which the response is, “He is risen indeed, Alleluia!” There is joy in the air. An exuberance, a jubilation, as believers celebrate the defeat of their enemy, and the triumph of their Savior.
Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life! — Paschal troparion, Christos anesti
In the book of Exodus, after witnessing the Egyptians absolute defeat by the hand of God, the people of Israel, led by Moses, break into song–not only singing–but dancing in celebration. Finally, they are beginning to believe that they have been freed from their oppressors.
We see a people filled with exuberant jubilation rejoicing over the utter defeat of their enemy, and the stunning triumph of their saving God.
And we are right there with them in this Eastertide season. God has mightily delivered us. Let us rejoice!
The Song of Moses
Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the LORD: (Exodus 15:1-21)
I will sing to the LORD, for he is gloriously triumphant; horse and chariot he has cast into the sea.
My strength and my refuge is the LORD, and he has become my savior. This is my God, I praise him; the God of my father, I extol him.
The LORD is a warrior, LORD is his name!
Pharaoh’s chariots and army he hurled into the sea; the elite of his officers were drowned in the Red Sea.
The flood waters covered them, they sank into the depths like a stone.
Your right hand, O LORD, magnificent in power, your right hand, O LORD, shattered the enemy.
In your great majesty you overthrew your adversaries; you loosed your wrath to consume them like stubble.
At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up, the flowing waters stood like a mound, the flood waters foamed in the midst of the sea.
The enemy boasted, “I will pursue and overtake them; I will divide the spoils and have my fill of them; I will draw my sword; my hand will despoil them!”
When you blew with your breath, the sea covered them; like lead they sank in the mighty waters.
Who is like you among the gods, O LORD? Who is like you, magnificent among the holy ones? Awe-inspiring in deeds of renown, worker of wonders, when you stretched out your right hand, the earth swallowed them!
In your love you led the people you redeemed; in your strength you guided them to your holy dwelling.
The peoples heard and quaked; anguish gripped the dwellers in Philistia.
Then were the chieftains of Edom dismayed, the nobles of Moab seized by trembling;
All the inhabitants of Canaan melted away; terror and dread fell upon them.
By the might of your arm they became silent like stone, while your people, LORD, passed over, while the people whom you created passed over.
You brought them in, you planted them on the mountain that is your own—
The place you made the base of your throne, LORD, the sanctuary, LORD, your hands established.
May the LORD reign forever and ever!
When Pharaoh’s horses and chariots and horsemen entered the sea, the LORD made the waters of the sea flow back upon them, though the Israelites walked on dry land through the midst of the sea.
Then the prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand, while all the women went out after her with tambourines, dancing; and she responded to them:
Sing to the LORD, for he is gloriously triumphant; horse and chariot he has cast into the sea.
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.
There are Important Notificationsfrom our host, Wolf Moon; the Rulesof our late, good Wheatie; and, certain caveatsfrom Yours Truly, of which readers should be aware. They are linked here. Note: Yours Truly has checked today’s post for any AI-generated content. To the best of her knowledge and belief, there is none. If readers wish to post any AI-generated content in the discussion thread for today’s post, they must cite their source. Thank you.
Do not forget to LABEL AI articles, video and such.
“The hand-written copy of the proposed articles of amendment passed by Congress in 1789, cropped to show just the text in the third article that would later be ratified as the First Amendment” — WIKI
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
USA Bill of Rights
Scott467on April 17, 2025 brought an article from Sundance that covers the US Government’s attack on Free Speech.
SD: “The State Dept. Global Engagement Center was the epicenter of the Dept of State operation to control speech on social media platforms. Following revelations from within the Twitter Files, and facing increasing scrutiny, the GEC operation was shut down – but the remnants of the operation remained active within the State Dept.
The terms “disinformation, misinformation and malinformation” were weaponized by the State Dept to define speech against their interests and block, deplatform and remove any voices, including in the U.S., they determined were against the interests of the U.S. government. The COVID-19 and vaccine narrative were both examples of speech targeted by the GEC and later the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office (R-FIMI).
Today, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Acting Undersecretary of Public Diplomacy, Darren Beattie, delivered notice to congress the speech and platform control operation has been shut down. Secretary Rubio sat down with Mike Benz to discuss [Transcript Here]. .
15 minute interview of Secretary Rubio by Mike Benz..
para59r then chimed in with:
Yes, this should be coupled with yesterdays post by eilert as it’s a direct answer to Benz’s brilliant exposure talk thing. But somehow he had to know about Rubio doing this before hand.
look at January 6th 2020 and the “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”
The Following legal information makes it clear WHY there were Agents Provocateurs such as Ray Epps dispatched into the Jan 5th & 6th crowd = KNOWINGLY
WHY the cyclone fence barricade & any signs were all removed prior to MAGA arriving. = KNOWINGLY
WHY ANTIFA/LEFTEST trouble makers were imported and dressed as MAGA = acts of physical violence SEE: Agents Provocateurs as a Type of Faux Activist by Professor Gary T. Marx. Professor Emeritus of Sociology, M.I.T.
WHY pepper spray and grenades were sprayed DIRECTLY AT PEACEFUL protestors in order to anger them into committing acts of violence.
WHY the Capitol police were short staffed and the National Guard was NOT deployed = “Police protection at the scene was” NOT “at alltimes sufficient to meet any foreseeable possibility of disorder.”
FIRST AMENDMENT:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people PEACEBLY to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
This is a legal discussion about these two protected rights.
The “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” protects two distinct rights: assembly and petition. The Clause’s reference to a singular “right” has led some courts and scholars to assume that it protects only the right to assemble in order to petition the government. But the comma after the word “assemble” is residual from earlier drafts that made clearer the Founders’ intention to protect two separate rights….
How about criminalizing the RIGHT of Assembly and the RIGHT to PEACEABLY petition the government?? Notice the strawman (Free Speech) used to deflect from the rights this law actually attempts to wipe out.
…..HR 347, the “Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011,” amended Title 18, Chapter 84, Section 1752 of the U.S. Code — just as then-President George W. Bush did in 2006 when he signed the Patriot Act. (Click on the link to the U.S. Code and you can see how it was amended in 1982, 1984, 1994 and 2006.)
It specifies that it is unlawful to enter secured areas of the White House and its grounds, [aka private residence of POTUS. -GC] or the vice president’s official residence and grounds. Previously, according to the report, the law prohibited unlawful entry to any building or ground, secured by the Secret Service, where the president or vice president is “temporarily” visiting. That forced the Secret Service to rely on a District of Columbia law that “addresses only minor misdemeanor infractions” even if somebody were to breach the White House residence itself.
The new law revises the standard that prosecutors must meet to gain a conviction, from proving that a violation was committed “willfully and knowingly” to merely proving that it was committed “knowingly.”
(1) knowingly enters or remains in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority to do so;
(2) knowingly, and with intent to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions, engages in disorderly or disruptive conduct in, or within such proximity to, any restricted building or grounds when, or so that, such conduct, in fact, impedes or disrupts the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions;
(3) knowingly, and with the intent to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions, obstructs or impedes ingress or egress to or from any restricted building or grounds; or [1]
(4) knowingly engages in any act of physical violence against any person or property in any restricted building or grounds; [2]
(5) knowingly and willfully operates an unmanned aircraft system with the intent to knowingly and willfully direct or otherwise cause such unmanned aircraft system to enter or operate within or above a restricted building or grounds; or attempts or conspires to do so, shall be punished as provided in subsection (b).
(b)The punishment for a violation of subsection (a) is—
(1)a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than 10 years, or both, if—
(A) the person, during and in relation to the offense, uses or carries a deadly or dangerous weapon or firearm; or
(B) the offense results in significant bodily injury as defined by section 2118(e)(3); and
(2)a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than one year, or both, in any other case. (c)In this section—
This archived content from the U.S. Department of Justice website discusses the Constitutionality of this and a similar law. It cites Supreme Court cases.
Constitutional attacks on 18 U.S.C. § 1752 would most likely fall in two categories–vagueness or violation of the First Amendment.
Allegations of vagueness should be overcome by the formal designation of the buildings and grounds that are subject to the regulations published in the Federal Register. In addition to appropriate signs providing notice of a temporary residence or of a restricted area, the Secret Service will endeavor to post personnel in appropriate locations to give verbal notification to persons seeking to enter without authority or otherwise act in violation of the statute, to meet the special problems of notice in restricted areas. Peaceful assembly where the President or the President’s office is located will still be permitted. Presidential security is conducted pursuant to Federal authority, and thus does not depend upon differing local ordinances.
The basic legal theory underlying the provisions of this statute is that of trespass. The government has the right to control presence on government property, and physical presence on the designated grounds is clearly covered by regulations. Since demonstrations involve conduct, they are subject to reasonable regulations when necessary to protect other legitimate government interests. SeeCox v. Louisiana, 379 U.S. 559 (1965). Even-handed application of a precise and narrowly drawn regulatory statute should pass constitutional muster. SeeEdwards v. South Carolina, 372 U.S. 229, 236 (1963). See alsoShenck v. Pro-Choice Network, 117 S.Ct. 855 (1997) at 868-869, (upholding fixed buffer zones to permit ingress and egress at an abortion clinic).
Section 1752 of Title 18 is aimed at specific categories of knowing and willful conduct, and 18 U.S.C. § 1752(a)(1) is far more circumscribed than the general trespass statute upheld in Adderly v. Florida, 385 U.S. 39 (1966).
First Amendment objections may be raised as to the validity of 18 U.S.C. § 1752(a)(2) which outlaws the intentional disruption of government business at designated residences and offices. Section 1752(a)(2) is not aimed at suppression of peaceful and orderly protests and does not apply where there is no disturbance of others and no disruption of government activities.
SeeUnited States v. O’Brien, 391 U.S. 367, 376 (1968), and the opinion of the Court in Cox v. Louisiana, supra….
Argued: December 13, 1962 Decided: February 25, 1963 (Just before JFK’s assassination.)
…The City Manager testified that he recognized some of the onlookers, whom he did not identify, as “possible trouble makers,” but his subsequent testimony made clear that nobody among the crowd actually caused or threatened any trouble. 4 There was no obstruction of pedestrian [372 U.S. 229, 232] or vehicular traffic within the State House grounds. 5 No vehicle was prevented from entering or leaving the horseshoe area. Although vehicular traffic at a nearby street intersection was slowed down somewhat, an officer was dispatched to keep traffic moving. There were a number of bystanders on the public sidewalks adjacent to the State House grounds, but they all moved on when asked to do so, and there was no impediment of pedestrian traffic. 6 Police protection at the scene was at all [372 U.S. 229, 233] times sufficient to meet any foreseeable possibility of disorder.7 ….
In the situation and under the circumstances thus described, the police authorities advised the petitioners that they would be arrested if they did not disperse within 15 minutes….
And it is clear to us that in arresting, convicting, and punishing the petitioners under the circumstances disclosed by this record, South Carolina infringed the petitioners’ constitutionally protected rights of free speech, free assembly, and freedom to petition for redress of their grievances.
It has long been established that these First Amendment freedoms are protected by the Fourteenth Amendment from invasion by the States. Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652 ; Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357 ; Stromberg v. California, 283 U.S. 359 ; De Jonge v. Oregon, 299 U.S. 353 ; Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296 . The circumstances in this case reflect an exercise of these basic constitutional rights in their most pristine and classic form. The petitioners felt aggrieved by laws of South Carolina which allegedly “prohibited Negro privileges in this State.” They peaceably assembled at the site of the State Government 10 and there peaceably expressed their grievances “to the citizens of South Carolina, along with the Legislative Bodies of South Carolina.” [372 U.S. 229, 236] Not until they were told by police officials that they must disperse on pain of arrest did they do more. Even then, they but sang patriotic and religious songs after one of their leaders had delivered a “religious harangue.” There was no violence or threat of violence on their part, or on the part of any member of the crowd watching them. Police protection was “ample.”
That Supreme Court case gave the template needed to arrest and convict MAGA during January 6th 2020.
Remove notifications that the area was off-limits. Short staff the Capitol Police and refuse the National Guard so Police protection was NOT “ample.” Employ Agents Provocateurs to do actual damage/threat of violence and lead the gullible. INTENTIONALLY injure and kill protesters to get them very angry.
You’re missing the point. The current abuses of the security state could only have happened because of 9/11. Vast amounts of money were stolen on the day, and as a result of it trillions more.
Cui bono ? The THREE towers were not brought down by planes. Or fire. Not possible. How and why did THREE towers come down in their own footprint with zero resistance,also not possible. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Basic physics. Floors cannot pancake in free fall as if no structure existed, unless….no structure existed. The only way they can.
Even I, a structural engineer,was in enough shock for a week that it did not seem fishy until the end of that week. Then it stank. Then after doing basic calculations it really stank. With computer modeling the stench became unbearable. Watching the videos a thousand times in slow motion and it was clear what had happened.
Then an experienced demolition engineer confided in me with his ideas which agreed with mine. Many engineers will not come forward, they’re scared with good reason,but 3000 have dared to.
You want to drain the swamp ? Cui bono ? Its always about the money. Even mass murder that’s televised live.
Money and power. Problem=reaction=solution.
Create the problem, to get the reaction, to bring in your desired prepared solution, in the chaos you created. If you can steal trillions while you do it, even better. They did. That’s why I call them the Merchants of Death,so will you. Our psychopath rulers will kill anyone for a profit. Millions of dead is just a bigger profit , more power for them and nothing else. No human emotions except greed exist in them.
Can you handle the truth ? Then seek it.
AEfor911truth.org 3000 architects and engineers that want to know what really happened that day. We absolutely know what did not happen that day,what the official narrative tells us happened. The laws of physics don’t change whatever NIST might say. Apart from anything else,for future design safety. Why has the Govt. lied to us all ?
These are two YouTube videos of Trump’s reporting of 9/11 as seen through workers and the building’s structure, respectively. These are short and instructive videos:
Donald Trump interview 2 days after 9/11 at ground zero
The result was the Patriot Act HOWEVER given most of the terrorist were Saudi muslims NONE of the rest of the US government’s moves made sense.
1. The FBI shephard out of the country Saudis CONNECTED to the terrorists. h t t p://www.wanttoknow.info/saudisflown913fbi
2. Americans have to put up with Grope-N-Fly while Saudi’s get EZ-Pass privileged boarding. h t t p://www.examiner.com/article/u-s-confers-ez-pass-status-on-travelers-from-saudi-arabia
3. The number of muslims immigrating into the country DOUBLED after 9/11. h t t ps://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2015/05/1m-immigrants-from-muslim-countries
4. Saudi Arabia is NOT the target of retaliation by the USA.
5. DHS Killed Investigations into muslim terrorist cells because of ‘Political Correctness’ and destroyed the files. link
Forget the analysis by engineers (see Winston’s comment a few days ago.) Everything else stinks to high heavens and points to a false flag operation used to bring in the Patriot Act, the Secret FISA court and SPYING on Americans…. Not to mention wiping out the possibility of an audit into the theft of TRILLIONS.
It is time for to take a breather of sorts relating to the signers of the Declaration of Independence. We will return to a specific founding father next week. I thought it would be interesting to spend some time on the important value of American women during the period. There was nothing of more importance to America’s survival than the families who lived here. This meant men and women needed to build lives together, get Biblical and multiply.
The role of women in accomplishing the mission of our nation should not be ignored as it was vital to our survival.
Courting
Shall we discuss the ancient art of attraction between females and males? Or is it science; and if it is, is it settled science?
From the Colonial Williamsburg website,
It may be that the traditional route to conjugal correctness—chaste courtship, formal engagement, church wedding, consummation, and parenthood, in that order—is less traveled. But historians say the modern, mixed-up, anything-goes form of bonding that includes physical intimacy and permanent or temporary cohabitation, with children born in or out of wedlock, is not altogether different from some of the practices of segments of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century populations.
As far as chaste courtship is concerned, the good old days have been overrated, almost as mythical as the Standish-Mullins-Alden triangle that Longfellow invented. Blame human nature if you like, but for want of a better phrase, hanky-panky was as prevalent among some eighteenth-century folks as it is among some of the twenty-first’s. Beyond doubt, most people stayed strictly within the bounds of propriety, but in the mid to late 1700s, more than one girl in three was pregnant when she walked down the aisle. In parts of Britain, 50 percent of brides were great with child.
Well, well, well. It seems some things never change.
There are many sources one can read that reflect on the patriarchal dominated aspects of families during the period. Marriages were often prearranged for business and wealth purposes. The requirement of attraction and love between partners was nearly non existent with some. Outward displays of affection even between married couples were generally frowned upon leading into the Revolutionary War period. Courtship for many was a formal process of marrying two families together to pursue common goals. That is unless you were a commoner in which case you could pair up and just say vows to each other to start cohabitating legally.
With independence and as America began to develop its own ways of doing things, courting practices gradually changed with it. Which leads to the linked story below involving a few founder couples and their marital situations.
Cupid’s arrow hit some hard as expressed in the following,
“You engross my thoughts too entirely to allow me to think of any thing else—you not only employ my mind all day; but you intrude upon my sleep. I meet you in every dream—and when I wake I cannot close my eyes again for ruminating on your sweetness.” — Alexander Hamilton to Elizabeth Schuyler, October 1780
The Enlightenment era had brought change in many beliefs and practices. As previously discussed it was a major motivator of the attitudes and approaches of Thomas Jefferson. It seems the timing was good for a better way to view courting and marital relationships in America. Below is a section from an article in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts that describes the change well.
For the men and women who came of age after the Revolution, selecting a marriage partner was the most important decision of their lives. In generations past, parents had played a decisive role in these negotiations. But over the course of the 18th century, young people gained more independence in their choices. And romantic love—based on mutual affection and companionship—became the ideal.
Putting love at the center of courtship also raised the stakes. Men became more vulnerable to personal rejections. For women, the perils were greater. A string of broken engagements could cast the woman as a flirt—a “coquette” in the language of the day—or, worse, prompt speculation about her virtue. A marriage entered into too hastily held its own dangers. A woman’s husband largely determined the comforts and privileges she would enjoy as a wife. While he could participate in the public world of commerce and politics, she had only the home she created with him from which to draw happiness.
Discovering the personality of a potential spouse could be a delightful adventure—conducted through breathless dances, nighttime walks and, of course, intimate cups of tea—but it was also a serious matter that demanded careful consideration.
Sounds like a big improvement from dad and mom picking one out to me.
Childbearing
In doing these American Stories it has been very obvious that having children during those days was not an easy task and that it frequently was met with great sorrow. Many of these celebrated founding fathers lost their wives and children during childbirth. Based on research of records some sources estimated that 1-2% of the women died during delivery. The odds escalated with each childbirth thereafter. In addition it is estimated that 20% of the children died between birth and five years old. The average woman had seven live childbirths during her lifetime in the 18th and 19th century. According to a number of their personal journals it appears many prepared for their own deaths mentally as well as by writing wills when they learned they were pregnant.
For slaves the odds were far worse. Estimates range from 28-40% of the children died at birth with an estimated 40-50% mortality rate by age ten. Malnutrition, being overworked, lack of access to medical care, diseases and so on made things worse for them.
Despite all of that the population of America doubled about every 25 years and the odds of surviving childbirth for both mother and child improved as the nation became more settled.
Women Warfighters?!
Check this out from the linked article below.
There are known cases of women who chose to actively join the armies as fighting soldiers. One of the most famous of these women was Deborah Sampson. Originally from Massachusetts, she disguised herself as a man in order to fight in the Continental Army. Serving under the alias of her deceased brother, she fought with the light infantry company of the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment. She was wounded in action in Tarrytown, New York, with two bullets in her thigh and a gash on her forehead. Not wanting her identity to be revealed, she had her head wound treated and then left the field hospital unnoticed. She was later able to extract one of the bullets from her thigh with a knife. Her identity was finally revealed during the summer of 1783 when she contracted a fever while on duty in Philadelphia. After the Treaty of Paris, she was given an honorable discharge from the army. She went on to marry and had three children, settling down back in Massachusetts. To help make ends meet, she often gave public lectures about her wartime service. By the time she died in 1827, she was collecting minimal pensions for her service from Massachusetts and the federal government.
She was a major league bad azz. That article opens the eyes about the real involvement of women in support of the war efforts as well as keeping families and communities going back home. The following digs deeper into the women that traveled with their husbands in the military.
From it we also learn the meaning behind the Molly Pitcher name that I am sure our mollypitcher can opine about. Another link below gives more names and the nature of their contributions.
Prior to the war, it appears the primary education for women was to learn to read and do basic math to help teach the children and run the home. In doing so the women were to teach the children religious studies. It is no secret that religion had a major place in the homes and society of the colonies. Many colonists had previously fled religious persecution and wanted no part of it in America – freedom of religion was a requirement. They worked to make sure it was built into the fabric of the American Way.
After the Revolutionary War the efforts of leaders seemed to evolve into providing more opportunities for women to gain a broad based education and to eventually become educators as a result. They knew America and its future was dependent upon an educated population. However, there was forward thinking about the subject prior to and during the war as the following article discusses for women in Concord, Lincoln and Lexington, MA. The activities even included women teaching and administering.
The link below goes into more detail that involves founding father Benjamin Franklin’s evolution in understanding the value of a broader education for women.
Many of the founding fathers desired to provide public education for all male and female children to gain acceptance and to be provided throughout the states post war. Some took steps to accomplish the vision that eventually led to women receiving a more robust education. At times it was met with great resistance from traditional, fundamentalist religions as well as from those who viewed formal education as impractical. A handful of founders agreed with what founder Charles Carroll sought, that younger women slaves should be educated so they could teach their husbands and children. They felt it would help them integrate into society better since they believed the slaves would inevitably be freed.
Religion And The Family
To better understand the value and place of women in the period one needs to understand the order and nature of families. The following linked article is provided as a teacher resource and it provides some really good information on giving a summary view from a Protestant denominational standpoint using several books as sources.
The vast majority of our founders and general population were Protestant in their beliefs. The article gives examples from one source that divided the families into three groups.
We will discuss the overall importance of religion in America in a later Part in a few weeks.
For Entertainment
As the wife of a commoner colonist husband the following might describe the man who came home to her after a night out with the boys, or, might describe her own activities out on the town with her husband. From the Revolutionary War Journal comes the following,
Toasts and common songs brought people of all stations together. Taverns were male domains where men drank heavily, cursed frequently, gambled, fenced goods, passed money, and fought – at times resulting in murder. Women rarely set foot in a tavern unless she was traveling with a male companion or were a prostitute. Occasionally dances were arranged which allowed women who entered and exited separately from the men.
Songs sung in taverns was usually performed by patrons for their own entertainment singing solo or in large groups. Tavern owners rarely hired musicians to perform. Entertainers would show up at a tavern hoping to entertain the patrons, making them happy enough to make a donation. These musicians often mixed ballads of laments that were subdued and reflective, with rowdy drinking songs that encouraged the clientele to join in. These musicians often played an instrument. The violin was most common followed by the flute, fife, and trumpet. The Pochette or “traveling violin” was small and very portable. Occasionally tavern owners would own instruments and provide them for the musician’s use such as a violin or harpsichord. Most performers made their own instruments and composed many of their own ballads.
Below is a song originating in Scotland that undoubtedly would have been sung in those taverns.
For the more refined couples of that day, there might be a performance of Handel’s Messiah at Trinity Church in New York City.
If in Philadelphia those same couples might take in a Alexander Reinagle piano concert with friends.
At least it gave the wife a break from the kids.
Prominent Women
There is some interesting summary background information on these ten “amazing” women discussed in the linked article below.
Pay attention next week, we have an American woman married to a French guy that makes a cameo appearance near the end.
We give thanks for these women as they made us better as a nation while fulfilling equally important roles as the founding fathers for We the People.
Please remember Wolf’s rules for our community. In general that means to be respectful to each other and to pull no shenanigans that your mom might find offensive or otherwise cause jail time. That said, free speech is honored here.
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).
From the throats of herons and lost wolves, we learn of a mistake made by the gods. They gave us red-winged birds and vesper sparrows who make songs of leaf-light and flying. The gods thought we’d be so happy— all that fruit, one big garden, our nakedness in sun and water. They never counted on our needing a sound for longing, too. They gave that to the loon, to wild dogs whose teeth throb from the light of the moon; they poured it into the long necks of birds. How could they have known? Where in our bodies would they have moored the slender cry of the crane who calls out that night is closing the sky, taking away the glinted green of the frogs’ moist backs, the dazzle the sun makes of every hair, of every shining wing?
MUSIC!
A “deep house” electronica playlist called “Orectic Mix”……..
Epic orchestral video found by searching on “orectic music”
THE STUFF
SO – for “Action April” we are taking two weeks to study something called the Principle of Least Action.
Here is the second of TWO videos covering the topic.
Not sure I’m buying this, as my colleague, Prof. Suspicious Cat, has questions similar to those mentioned in the video, about the significance and interpretation of the role of the diffraction grating, and its potential behavior in lensing at odd angles.
Child Abuse…
