“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
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.”
Love the LORD
“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” (Deuteronomy 6:4–5)
This is known as the Shema, taken from the first word “hear” in Hebrew. Modern Jews consider the recital of the Shema both evening and morning to be one of their most sacred duties. It was cited by Jesus as the “greatest commandment in the Law” (Matthew 22:36–37).
This command seems to be impossible to obey. That’s because, in the natural state of man, it is impossible. There is no greater evidence of the inability of man to obey God’s Law than this one commandment. No human being with a fallen nature can possibly love God with all his heart, soul, and strength 24 hours a day. It’s humanly impossible. But to disobey any commandment of God is sin. Therefore, even without considering the sins we commit daily, we are all condemned by our inability to fulfill this one commandment. This is the reason Jesus continually reminded the Pharisees of their inability to keep the Law of God. He was trying to get them to see their utter spiritual bankruptcy and their need for a Savior. Without the cleansing of sin that He provides, and the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit who lives in the hearts of the redeemed, loving God to any degree is impossible.
But, as Christians, we have been cleansed from sin and we do have the Spirit. So how do we begin to love God the way we should? Just as the man in Mark 9:24 asked God to help his unbelief, so too we can ask God to help us in areas where we don’t love Him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. It is His power that we need to do the impossible, and we begin by seeking and appropriating that power.
In most cases, our love and affection for God grows more intense as time goes by. Certainly, young Christians newly saved are very much aware of the love of God and their love for Him. But it is through the witness of God’s faithfulness during times of struggle and trial that a deep love for God grows and grows. Over time, we witness His compassion, mercy, grace, and love for us, as well as His hatred for sin, His holiness, and His righteousness. We cannot love someone we don’t know, so knowing Him should be our first priority. Those who pursue God and His righteousness, who take seriously the command to love Him above all else, are those who are consumed with the things of God. They are eager to study God’s Word, eager to pray, eager to obey and honor God in all things, and eager to share Jesus Christ with others. It is through these spiritual disciplines that the love for God grows and matures to the glory of God.
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
Our Turn
[Yes, I did this one just after the election. But it was too cathartic to just throw away.]
We’ve often seen that quote from David Plouffe: “It is not enough to simply beat Trump. He must be destroyed thoroughly. His kind must not rise again.”
This was of course a declaration of intent to annihilate not just Trump, but rather “his kind.”
You know what? I think we should flip it around. David Plouffe’s kind should be destroyed thoroughly and their kind must not rise again.
What is Plouffe’s kind? I suppose it depends on who’s talking and what they are thinking of in particular. Well, at the moment it’s me talking and I am thinking of the sort of maggot who is attracted to politics not to better his world but rather so that he can wield power over others, or line their pockets with “free” money. Often these people end up as what Ayn Rand called “pull peddlers,” receiving money in exchange for using their connections to do favors.
This type is parasitic. Utterly parasitic. And they should be destroyed thoroughly and not allowed to rise again.
The bad news is we will never eradicate them. Useless turds who can’t do anything productive will always be with us. As will the outright sociopaths.
Of course they find Trump to be their enemy. And of course they find us to be their enemy. If we won’t simply lie down and let our “betters” have their way with us, we’re a problem, we’re something to be got rid of. And of late, we haven’t lain down without a protest, as we are “supposed” to do. Dang uppity Garbage Deplorables! We don’t know our place!!!
The good news is we can provide far fewer niches for these parasites. The niches come into being when something that people formerly did of their own free will is taken over by the government; then every aspect of that activity becomes a political football.
Take for instance education. Since the government runs it, if you don’t like what’s being done, you have to form a political movement and try to work your way around the maggots embedded in the bureaucracy. If education were private, then if you didn’t like what they were doing to your child, you’d take your money and your child elsewhere. And people who didn’t even have school-age children presently would have no voice–and not have to pay money. Making it a government “thing” turned it into a political thing, and the maggots began to swarm.
So we wreck them by seriously cutting government and giving them fewer places to exist. Among all of the other benefits, the body politic would have fewer sociopaths and parasites in it.
People like Plouffe are the same type, but they are the full-on political hacks who set policy, rather than implement it. They’re just as bad if not worse; they help government grow, and steer it into serving its own ends, rather than those of the people it is supposed to be serving.
The Deep State is nothing more than a government that serves its own ends.
And we have had enough of this.
They must be destroyed thoroughly, and their kind must not rise again.
This election wasn’t the end, it was the beginning. There are millions of these malignancies in this country and we’ve just defeated two of them. Keep pushing. Now we can go after them wholesale.
It’s our turn.
Our turn.
Our turn.
OUR TURN!
You stole the 2020 election. You’ve mocked and ridiculed and put people in prison and broken people’s lives because you said this thing was stolen. This entire phony thing is getting swept out. Biden’s getting swept out. Kamala Harris is getting swept out. MSNBC is getting swept out. The Justice Department is getting swept out. The FBI is getting swept out. You people suck, okay?! And now you’re going to pay the price for trying to destroy this country.
And I’m going to tell you, we’re going to get to the bottom of where the 600,000 votes [are]. You manufactured them to steal this election from President Trump in 2020. And think what this country would be if we hadn’t gone through the last four years of your madness, okay? You don’t deserve any respect, you don’t deserve any empathy, and you don’t deserve any pity.
And if anybody gives it to you, it’s Donald J. Trump, because he’s got a big heart and he’s a good man. A good man that you’re still gonna try to put in prison on the 26th of this month. This is how much you people suck. Okay? You’ve destroyed his business thing. And he came back.
He came back in the greatest show of political courage, I think, in world history. Like, [Roman statesman] Cincinnatus coming back from the plough [returning to politics to rescue the Roman Republic]. He’s the American Cincinnatus. And what he has done is a profile in courage. We’ve had his back. But I got to tell you, he may be empathetic. He may have a kind heart. He may be a good man. But we’re not. Okay? And you deserve, as Natalie Winters says, not retribution, justice. But you deserve what we call rough Roman justice, and we’re prepared to give it to you.
Steve Bannon, on election night
OUR TURN!!
OUR TURN!!!
OUR TURN!!!
OUR TURN!!!
January 6 Tapes?
Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.
For all your high talk about your Christian moral background…you’re looking less and less like you have any kind of moral background.
If You are a Patriot and Don’t Loathe RINOs…
Let’s talk about RINOs, and why they are the lowest form of life in politics.
Many patriots have been involved with politics, often at the grassroots, for decades. We’ve fought, and fought, and fought and won the occasional illusory small victory.
Yet we can’t seem to win the war, even when we have BIG electoral wins.
I am reminded of something. The original Star Trek had an episode titled Day of the Dove. It was one of the better episodes from the third season, but any fan of the original series will tell you that’s a very low bar. Still, it seems to get some respect; at a time when there were about 700 episodes of Star Trek in its various incarnations out there, it was voted 99th best out of the top 100.
In sum, the plot is that an alien entity has arranged for 39 Enterprise crew, and 39 Klingons, to fight each other endlessly with swords and other muscle-powered weapons. The entity lives off of hostile emotions, you see and it wants a captive food source. (The other 400 or so Enterprise crew are trapped below decks and unable to help.) Each side has its emotions played and amplified by the alien entity; one Enterprise junior officer has false memories implanted of a brother who was killed by Klingons. The brother didn’t even exist.
Even people killed in a sword fight miraculously heal so they can go do it again.
The second best line of the episode is when Kang, the Klingon captain, notes that though they have won quite a number of small victories including capturing Engineering, can’t seem to actually finally defeat the Enterprise crew. He growls, “What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*”
Indeed. He may have been the bad guy, but his situation should sound familiar.
We are a majority in this country. We have a powerful political party in our corner. There is endless wrangling.
And yet,
What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?
In our case, that power is the RINOs in our midst. They specialize in caving when on the verge of victory. Think of Obamacare’s repeal failing…by one Republican vote. Think of the way we can never seem to get spending under control (and now our entire tax revenue goes to pay interest on the debt; anything the government actually does now is with borrowed money).
We have a party…that refuses to do what we want it to do, and that refusal is institutionalized. If you’ve been involved with GOP politics, but haven’t seen this, it’s because you refuse to see it. Or because you are part of the problem yourself. (If so, kindly gargle some red fuming nitric acid to clear the taste of shit out of your mouth, and let those not part of the problem alone so they can read this.)
We fight to elect people, who then take a dive when in office. But it’s not just the politicians in office, it’s the people behind the scenes, the leaders of the national, state and county branches of the party. Their job is to ensure that real patriots never get onto the general election ballot. They’re allowed a few failures…who can then become token conservatives who will somehow never manage to win (Jordan), or can be compromised outright (Lauren Boebert?).
That way it doesn’t actually matter who has a congressional majority. I remember my excitement when the GOP took the Senate in 1980. But all that did was empower a bunch of “moderate” puddles of dog vomit like…well for whatever reason forty years later the most memorable name is Pete Domenici. And a couple of dozen other “moderates” who simply had no interest in doing what grassroots people in their party–those same grassroots people who had worked so hard to elect them–wanted them to do.
Oh, they’ll put up a semblance of a fight…but never win. And they love it when we fight the Dems instead of fighting them. Just like that alien entity, whose motto surely was “Let’s you and him fight. It’ll be delicious!”
If you think about it, your entire political involvement has come to nothing because of these walking malignant tumors.
That should make you good and mad.
The twenty five who blocked Jordan, and the hundred people who took that opportunity to stab Jordan in the back in the secret ballot should make you good and mad.
I’ll close this with another example of RINO backstabbing, an infuriating one close to home.
In my county, the GOP chair is not a RINO. She got elected when the grassroots had had enough of the RINOs. Unfortunately the state organization is full of RINOs, and the ousted county RINOs have been trying to form a new “Republican Party” and get the state GOP to recognize them as the affiliate. I’m honestly amazed it hasn’t happened yet.
In other words those shitstains won’t just leave when they get booted out; they’ll try to destroy what they left behind. It’s an indication that they know we know how important that behind-the-scenes party power is.
So they must be destroyed. That’s the only way they’ll ever stop.
We cannot win until the leeches “on our side” get destroyed.
What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*
We know it. What is going to be done about it?
*NOTE: The original line was actually “What power is it that supports our battle yet starves our victory.” I had mis-remembered it as feeds. When I checked it, it sure enough was “supports” and that’s what I originally quoted. On further reflection, though, I realized my memory was actually an improvement over the reality, because feeds is a perfect contrast with starves. I changed it partway through the day this originally posted, but now (since this is a re-run) it gets rendered this way from the start.
If one must do things wrong, one should do them wrong…right.
RINOs an Endangered Species? If Only!
According to Wikipoo, et. al., the Northern White Rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) is a critically endangered species. Apparently two females live on a wildlife preserve in Sudan, and no males are known to be alive. So basically, this species is dead as soon as the females die of old age. Presently they are watched over by armed guards 24/7.
Biologists have been trying to cross them with the other subspecies, Southern White Rhinoceroses (Rhinoceri?) without success; and some genetic analyses suggest that perhaps they aren’t two subspecies at all, but two distinct species, which would make the whole project a lot more difficult.
I should hope if the American RINO (Parasitus rectum pseudoconservativum) is ever this endangered, there will be heroic efforts not to save the species, but rather to push the remainder off a cliff. Onto punji sticks. With feces smeared on them. Failing that a good bath in red fuming nitric acid will do.
But I’m not done ranting about RINOs.
The RINOs (if they are capable of any introspection whatsoever) probably wonder why they constantly have to deal with “populist” eruptions like the Trump-led MAGA movement. That would be because the RINOs stand for absolutely nothing except for going along to get along. That allows the Left to drive the culture and politics.
I well remember 1989-1990 in my state when the RINO establishment started preaching the message that a conservative simply couldn’t win in Colorado. Never mind the fact that Reagan had won the state TWICE (in 1984 bringing in a veto-proof state house and senate with him) and GHWB had won after (falsely!) assuring everyone that a vote for him was a vote for Reagan’s third term.
This is how the RINOs function. They push, push, push the line that only a “moderate” can get elected. Stomp them when they pull that shit. Tell everyone in ear shot that that’s exactly what the Left wants you to think, and oh-by-the-way-Mister-RINO if you’re in this party selling the same message as the Left…well, whythefuckexactly are you in this party, you lying piece of rancid weasel shit?
Justice
It says “Justice” on the picture.
And I’m sure someone will post the standard joke about what the fish thinks about the situation.
But what is it?
Here’s a take, from a different context: It’s about how you do justice, not the justice that must be done to our massively corrupt government and media. You must properly identify the nature of a person, before you can do him justice.
Ayn Rand, On Justice (speaking through her character John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged):
Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.
Ayn Rand identified seven virtues, chief among them rationality. The other six, including justice, she considered subsidiary because they are essentially different aspects and applications of rationality.
I’m sure enough of this that I put my money where my mouth is.
The 2020 election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point.
This will necessarily be piecemeal, state by state, which is why I am encouraged by those states working to change their laws to alleviate the fraud both via computer and via bogus voters. If enough states do that we might end up with a working majority in Congress and that would be something Trump never really had.
Martin Luther King
When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice
President Donald Trump, 20 January 2017 (The “Dark” Inauguration Speech).
[NOTE: Yes, technically this is something I should delete since it’s not January 18th any more and it is dated, but I decided to give it one more run, because some things said here don’t depend on what’s showing on the page-a-day calendar.]
….But I’ll still say something about MLK. He was a decidedly mixed individual. As are we all. But I think he, and many others of his time, did something important and unpleasant; he (and those others) forced a recognition that even after the Civil War we were being hypocritical on the subject of equality under the law. Those people who descended from those who (shall we say) involuntarily migrated to what is now the United States were still getting the shitty end of the stick in many parts of this country, as a matter of law.
He was one hundred percent correct on that.
Unfortunately his successors have turned the point full circle and want a leg up from the law, supposedly to make up for the past mistreatment, but that can only lead to an endless round of back and forth. There are some signs that MLK himself had he not been killed (he would be turning 96 this year were he still alive), would have been right alongside the race baiters (which include some who were with him), other signs that he wouldn’t have.
But just as Thomas Jefferson penned these words, in spite of owning slaves, the words that eventually shamed us into abolishing the “peculiar institution”:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…
I’ll go with what Martin Luther King said…not all that far from where the Inauguration will take place:
And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Emphasis mine. Judge people by the content of their character.
That is as it should be.
I see that at Trump rallies. His words about opening hearts to patriotism were true.
I see nothing but reverse racism on the Left. To them the world is defined by what one group does to another, some group must be on top shitting on everyone else. And it shows. There’s a false dichotomy in their thinking. Either white shits on black, or black shits on white. The way to deal with this false dichotomy, though, is not to gin up a third “group” to make it a trichotomy, or a fourth group to make it, what, a tetrachotomy? quadrichotomy? Is either of those actually a word? Gee maybe we can have a different group on top every week of the year at least until some jackass makes up a 53rd group! (Let’s leave aside the one or two day remainder you get from dividing 365(or 6) by 7. These are leftists studying critical race theory, not mathematicians.)
How about we do something different? How about we work towards a system where the law shits on NO ONE except those who violate the rights of others?
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 got very close to $3,400 earlier this week but has been declining ever since. It ended up not having moved all that much.
But SILVER is doing very well, very well indeed; it’s finally over $36. Consider that the price of gold in terms of silver has dropped over seven ounces of silver in just one week! Apparently the Chinese are buying it up like crazy right now, and we’ve long been in the situation where there really isn’t enough silver being mined to meet demand. Platinum, too has gone up over ten percent this last week–it’s doing even better than silver!
*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.
Use the (Strong Nuclear) Force
Spacecraft Reentry
I have explained in other posts that we use the atmosphere to slow down manned spacecraft when they return to Earth…rather than firing a rocket to do all of it. This seems almost suicidal, the heat generated during the process would kill instantly if something went wrong. In fact we lost the space shuttle Columbia this way.
But this is necessary; if we had to carry the fuel necessary to kill our orbital velocity, that would be the reverse of launching into orbit, and so we’d need a rocket big enough to carry the rocket we do launch, into orbit fully fueled. No way.
However the mechanics of the process turn out to be very interesting indeed; it’s not just “send the thing through the atmosphere in just such a way it doesn’t burn up.” This video is actually a debunk of someone who can do math (surprise) but doesn’t understand the process, and so the conspiracy theorist claims that we couldn’t possibly have slowed the Apollo command modules down fast enough without turning the astronauts into red goo. McKeegan explains why he’s got it wrong and it’s enormously informative about how atmospheric re-entry.
Hot Spots and Plate Tectonics
Some Go-Backs
Why Live Near Volcanoes?
From last week: I spent a fair amount of time stressing how bad it can be to hang out around volcanoes. Yet people still do it. Why? As it turns out volcanic soil is very fertile, which should be no surprise; all those mineral nutrients washed out into the ocean, then concentrated in the melt below the subduction zone, into nice fresh undepleted soil. Sicily most famously has Mount Etna on it, a stratovolcano that is the tallest volcano in Europe. Etna is pretty much constantly active; there’s always smoke coming out of it and it periodically spits up some lava. This is very mild activity though, and it’s just part of the weather to the people who live there, particularly to those in Catania, the port city at the foot of the mountain. There is (or was until recently?) plenty of US military presence there, and Americans stationed there often have to field calls from relatives worried because they saw on the news that Etna was acting up. Sicily is a volcanic island, and for a while served as the granary of the Roman republic and the early empire. In a time when 90 percent of all people were farmers, they lived where the soil was good.
And as it so happens Etna just acted up again a couple of days ago.
Volcanic Glass
Also from last week: I didn’t say nearly enough about volcanic glass. “Glass” is a generic term; it doesn’t imply a specific composition. It’s the result of a liquid freezing so quickly that it cannot form crystals; the completely disordered structure of the solid is described as amorphous. We’ve seen how granite has large crystals in it because it cooled slowly well below the Earth’s surface, affording crystals a lot of time to grow, whereas basalt is formed by lava flows and has a very fine grained structure because it cools so fast. A volcanic glass has no grain at all. It often forms when small blobs of lava are flung through the air and solidify almost instantly. There are many types of volcanic glass; the iconic one is obsidian, which is has a high silica content (it’s basically amorphous rhyolite).
However, pumice is also technically a glass. Pumice doesn’t look “glassy” in any way at all. It has so many gas bubbles in it that it’s often less dense than water; this example from the Canary Islands is 1/4 as dense as water.
There are Pele’s hair, Pele’s tears, and even Pele’s Seaweed, all volcanic glasses from Hawai’i; these tend to be more basaltic in composition.
Back to obsidian:
Obsidian is of special interest because it flakes very well with extremely sharp edges. This made it of use during the stone age, for knives, arrowheads, and the like and it was used by the Aztecs for swords. They’d embed obsidian blades into sticks, essentially, this was called a macuahuitl. So just barely over 500 years ago obsidian was still used for weaponry.
Trading networks thousands of miles long developed in prehistoric times to carry obsidian to users.
Obsidian is sometimes used today where a very sharp edge is needed, yes even preferred over our most modern steels.
Geologic Time Scale to Scale
Five weeks ago I posted a couple of diagrams showing the geologic time scale. Wolf complained that they weren’t to scale. It’s not surprising they aren’t. We know a lot more about more recent times and can subdivide it more finely; putting together a full scale diagram that could show the Holocene (the last 11,700 years) large enough to be labeled, to the same scale as the Hadean, would give you a chart with acres of nearly-blank spaces in it.
But there is a partial solution. This diagram:
Is a log spiral, and it is to scale…so long as your scale is in angular measure! One turn of the spiral is 3,045 million years (or so), meaning 8.46 million years per degree. Since the inside of the spiral is thinner than the outside, and the actual linear length subtended by an angle is also less there, this makes the older stuff smaller while still giving you a sense of scale provided you think in angles. Note that Epochs cannot be labeled, and Ages often are so narrow they look almost like smooth color gradients (so you can kiss being able to see the Holocene goodbye). Around the outside are arcs delineating how long ago certain key events in the history of life happened (the formation of prokaryotes–i.e., the first cells, eukaryotes, multicellular life, kingdom Animalia, land plants, dinosaurs, mammals, and humans and our closest relatives).
Hot Spots
This one is a bit difficult to write, because this is still an area where geologists themselves are still trying to work it out. I’m seeing conflicting statements in the same Wikipedia article.
Hot spots (or “hotspots,” one word) are volcanic locales thought to be fed by underlying mantle that is, itself, hotter than the surrounding mantle. (The mantle is the thick layer of Earth below the crust.) Hawaii, Yellowstone, and Iceland are all hot spots; Iceland is also on a divergent (rift) plate boundary.
I can’t quite nail this down and get someone who really knows about such things to confirm it, but I don’t think that’s a coincidence. There are a lot of hot spots on plate boundaries, generally divergent boundaries (i.e., rift zones including oceanic ridges).
What causes a hot spot? There are two hypotheses (not theories). One is that the hot spot is over a mantle plume, a hot mass rising from the boundary between the mantle and the core. The other hypothesis is that the hot spot itself isn’t inherently hotter than the rest of the mantle, but rather that the crust is so thin there that it’s just more exposed to the surface and thus looks hotter than the surrounding area.
It’s hard to tell which one is right largely because the mere concept of a mantle plume is controversial. At least, according to that paragraph; nearly every other bit of Wikipedia I have read on this topic assumes the plumes are real.
The concept can be attributed to J. Tuzo Wilson, who suggested (in 1963, midway through the plate tectonic revolution) that the Hawaiian Islands were the result of a tectonic plate moving over a hot region beneath the surface. He was thinking in terms of what we’d now call mantle plumes.
In a way this is a continuation of volcanoes, because hot spots seem to explain any volcano that isn’t on a diverging plate boundary (like the mid-Atlantic ridge) or a converging plate boundary (like the trench right of the South American and Alaskan coasts–both part of the “Ring of Fire”). The two most famous examples of such non-plate-margin volcanoes are of course Hawai’i and Yellowstone.
The map below shows suspected hot spots (red dots) in relation to plate boundaries.
Some authorities distinguish between “primary” hot spots (where the plume [if it is a plume] originates from the boundary between the mantle and the core (thousands of miles down), and “secondary” ones which originate between the upper and lower mantle. “Confirmed” primary hotspots are Easter Island, Iceland, Hawai’i, Afar, Lousivile, Reunion, and Tristan, with Galpagos, Kerguelen, and Marquesas as “likely” primary hot spots. Secondary hot spots seem to be more likely to create island chains, like Samoa, Tahiti, Cook, Pitcairn, Caroline, MacDonald and perhaps 20 more possibilities.
How many? Estimates have ranged from 20 to several thousand, but most today think it’s a few tens.
Most hot spot volcanoes are basaltic like Hawai’i and Tahiti; this leads to relatively gentle volcanism especially as compared to subduction zone volcanoes (like Mazama, Mt. Saint Helens, Tambora, Krakatoa). But there is at least one exception–ONE GIGANTIC EXCEPTION–to that rule: Yellowstone. I’ll talk mostly about Hawai’i-like cases first then cover Yellowstone.
Hotspot volcanoes shouldn’t be confused with island arc volcanoes like the Aleutians; the Aleutians formed near a subduction zone where the Pacific plate is subducting under the North American Plate. Similarly with the Kurile Islands from Kamchatka to Japan, and Japan itself. (Even the Kamchatka peninsula is really a volcanic arc writ large.) Sometimes the subduction can happen with two ocean plates, in which case you’ll see arcs like the Windward isles.
The hot spots are considered by many (including my geologist friend) to be stationary. If they appear to be moving, like the one in Hawai’i or the one under Yellowstone, it’s the crustal plate that’s moving over the hot spot. For example, here’s what’s going on with Hawai’i. [However, at least some geologists believe the hot spots themselves can move.]
I can say this, but what’s the evidence? Start by considering the fact that the largest island in the chain is the last island in the chain (or the first, depending on which way you look at it). It’s the only island with active volcanoes, in fact Kilauea is the most active shield volcano in the world; it erupted continuously from 1983-2018.
Dribbling away from the “big island” of Hawai’i, the islands trend smaller and smaller and all are extinct volcanoes. The Hawai’ians themselves could see obvious signs that the further an island was from the “big island”, the older it was.
Eventually you get to Wake and Midway islands, very tiny (but by no means unimportant), then, nothing.
Nothing, that is until you look under the water’s surface.
When you do you will see a chain of seamounts thousands of miles long stretching to near where the Aleutians meet Kamchatka. That end is some 85 million years old. Anything older than that has been subducted below Kamchatka. You will also have noticed there’s a bend in the line, indicating (possibly) that something caused the Pacific plate to change its direction of motion. The other possibility (apparently more likely) is that the hot spot may have been in motion as well as the Pacific plate, with the two motions resulting in a nearly north-south trail of volcanoes, then the hot spot stopped moving and the net result was the west-north-west trail. Right now the velocity seems to be about 5-10 centimeters per year.
Analysis of seismic waves makes it sound like the plume is a near certainty here; it’s apparently 500-600 km wide and as much as 2000 km deep, with its base at the core-mantle boundary.
The other signature far-away-from-plate-boundaries volcano is Yellowstone. Yellowstone’s hot spot reaches the underside of the continental crust (not sea floor crust), and the heat melts that crust, resulting in a rising body of rhyolitic granite–sticky and full of water; this causes some of the most violent volcanic eruptions ever. (Note that once the rhyolite magma gets blasted out, some basaltic magma may follow it using the same fissures, now that that pesky rhyolite is out of the way.)
The eruptions happen at intervals of about 600-800 thousand years (but it’s quite variable), and we’re basically due; but there is at present no reason to panic. (And this would be worth panicking over.)
When a volcano like Yellowstone goes, it doesn’t just blow up a mountain, it wipes out a mountain range.
Let me show you a relief map of Idaho.
Remember that Yellowstone is right off the top of the right hand side of the “wide” part of the state, in the northwest corner of Wyoming.
See that big flat area running down and left from Yellowstone? That is the track of the Yellowstone hot spot. That entire valley that is somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 miles wide has been blown out of the middle of the Rocky Mountains, bit by bit, as North America has moved southwest over the Yellowstone hot spot, and Yellowstone has periodically laid waste to the mountains above it. (I mentioned Craters of the Moon national monument last week as a place to see lava landscapes and lava tubes and a few cinder cones. It’s here, in this valley.)
Most of the geysers on Earth are in Yellowstone (not Iceland). It’s a geothermal paradise. It’s unique in all the world; even the BBC did a miniseries on it. Surprisingly I never got around to visiting it until 2021; I was probably unusual in being more interested in the volcano-type stuff than the bison.
Make no mistake: It’s a sleeping fire breathing dragon.
Push, Suck or Pull?
(That ought to get Pat Frederick’s attention!)
What makes the plates move? We know they move–we can measure the motion–but why?
There are four forces that seem to be in play: Slab suction, slab pull, ridge push, and mantle convection.
Ridge push seems intuitively to be a great candidate. All of that magma welling up in the mid ocean ridges surely is pushing the two halves of the ocean apart, right? Not so fast, perhaps the magma is welling up because it can–because something is pulling the two halves of the ocean apart!
In the Atlantic, the eastern and western halves of the ocean floor are actually part of the continental plates on either side (African, North American, South American, Eurasian). So if it’s some kind of pull, it’s actually operating on the continents, which in turn are pulling on their associated ocean floor.
Looking at the Pacific with its mid ocean ridges, there’s the “Nazca plate” which is all ocean floor, starting at the East Pacific rise (running up and down the left half of the diagram below) and subducting under South America. South America is moving west, and the Nazca plate is moving east. The diagram shows the direction and amount of motion with arrows (the longer the arrow, the faster) in millimeters per year.
By looking at the arrows, note the Cocos plate is moving north, with the boundary between it and the Nazca plate running east west (and being a rift). Note the Galapagos island located on a very tine plate wedged in where three oceanic plates meet. (Remember it’s a likely hot spot.)
The Nazca plate is being subducted under South America, and as it is pushed underneath, the cold, dense rock actually wants to sink even more. In doing so, it pulls on the rest of the plate, pulling it away from the East Pacific Rise. This is slab pull.
Another thing you’ll notice is red lines running in one direction, and green lines at 90 degree angles to the red lines. Oddly enough a ridge isn’t usually one continuous line (which would be red), it gets broken into segments, and the segments move relative to each other. The “breaks” become places where the two plates slide past each other.
But one more force is being exerted. Not only does the subducting Nazca plate pull on the parts of the plate to the west, but the sinking generates a suction force that acts on South America, pulling it west. This is similar to the way someone in the water near a sinking ship will be pulled toward it as it slides beneath the surface. You can also demonstrate the effect with two pieces of cardboard floating on the water in a sink. Set them next to each other, then grab the far edge of one of them and tip the side closest to the other down into the water; the other piece of cardboard will be sucked towards your hand. This is slab suction.
Which of these is the most powerful? What’s the main impetus? The strongest of these is slab pull, followed closely by slab suction. Ridge push comes in a very distant third, maybe 10 percent of the total. (I was able to find actual numbers: apparently total slab pull force worldwide is 1.9 x 1021 newtons, while slab suction is 1.6 x 1021 newtons.)
OK with that in mind perhaps we can explain why so many hot spots appear in ridges. (I have tried to bounce this off my geologist friend, but I think he believes I’m advocating for ridge push being the main driver…I will have to try to look him up when he has more than 5 minutes to spare.)
I’m going to lay out a scenario, and remember I am going out on a speculative limb here.
Imagine a large continent on a world just like Earth…but which has no plate boundaries; it’s all one big “plate” or “shell.” Rivers will flow from the interior and dump their sediments into the ocean. Miles thick layers of sediment. The sediment piles up, and piles up, and pushes down on the ocean floor. Eventually the weight of all that sediment cracks the ocean floor, and it sinks. That’s the start of both slab pull and slab suction. So now, if this is happening all around the margins of the continent, there is a lot of force pulling outwards on the continent on all sides. That’s going to eventually stretch the continent…until it cracks, and the two sides go their separate ways. The birth of an ocean much like our Atlantic ocean.
Where is the big continent most likely to crack? How about the places it’s under stress…like say any hot spot that might be under the continent? So, if I am right, the rift has to form somewhere, and it ends up forming where it does because of the hot spots, because that’s where the continent will “tear” when the now-subducting ocean floor pulls on it (slab suction), not because the hot spots are somehow forcing the two halves of the continent apart (which would be ridge push). There is some ridge push, but that’s only a factor after the continent rips apart.
And the ocean floor–in this case the Pacific–gets stretched too by all that slab pull from the subducting margins, and it, too, will want to break wherever there is a hot spot, so we see the formation of midocean ridges in the Pacific.
This was an imaginary world with no plate tectonics–it somehow ends up with plate tectonics after a while anyway. Perhaps this is how it started on Earth, with a first continent billions of years ago eroding and starting subduction.
So now I’ll be a bit more concrete. Our last big supercontinent was Wegener’s Pangaea–we use his names. Pangea is shown below, with modern outlines superimposed.
This is how things looked 280 million years ago, as near as we can reconstruct it. The big superocean surrounding the continent is the “Panthalassa” and the Pacific is its remnant. The ocean immediately to the right surrounded by all the shallow areas is the Paleo-Tethys, which became the Tethys Ocean, basically the ancestor to our current Indian ocean.
The first split to happen was between North America and Africa, it divided Pangaea into Laurasia (Laurentia + Asia; Laurentia is often used by geologists to refer to ancient North America) and Gondwanaland (which became today’s southern continents). This is 190 million years ago:
But Wegener’s Pangea wasn’t the first such supercontinent; before it was Pannotia; before that, around 1260-900 million years ago Rodinia assembled and then broke up 750-633 Ma. Before Rodinia was Columbia (sometimes called Nuna or Hudsonland) from 2500 to 1500 Ma. The biggest single piece of that continent was what is now North America. And so on. The further back, of course, the more speculative.
One trend that you can see in the above diagram (which admittedly is a bit crude) is that over time there is more and more land. The lighter minerals that form continental crust seem to be getting segregated out of the mantle rocks over time. (I don’t know how much of this is going on now; perhaps the land isn’t growing any more.)
The Rocky Mountains
There’s no obvious reason for the Rocky Mountains. They’re not volcanic; they aren’t being pushed up by the collision of two continental plates (like the Himalaya today, and the Appalachians 325-260 Ma). They’re well inland. So why are they there?
The explanation will have something to do with plate tectonics–plate tectonics underlies (ahem) everything. So let’s have a look at the current configuration of tectonic plates:
Look at the west coast of North and South America. There’s the Juan de Fuca plate, the Cocos plate, and the Nazca plate. But run the movie backwards, shift North America towards Europe and Africa.
Is it possible that there was a larger plate there, connecting the Juan de Fuca and Cocos plates…and North America just ran almost completely over it, with just those two bits surviving (but not for long)?
It’s not just possible, it’s likely, and geologists have given it a name, the Farallon Plate. It also included the Nazca plate. Here’s a reconstruction of 180 Ma. Note that the present-day Pacific plate is brand new, growing as the three plates surrounding it move away from each other. Today the Phoenix and Izanagi plates are long gone, the Farallon is almost gone.
For some reason, when the Farallon plate subducted under North America, it did so at a very shallow angle, and apparently that pushed up the Rocky Mountains from below. [I’ve even seen suggestions that the ridge between the Pacific and Farallon plates is still functioning hundreds of miles below North America and the upwelling there is helping to push up the Rockies, but my geologist friend discounts that and I haven’t seen it in enough places to think it’s still a “current” idea.] This is a very different process from the head-on collision between two continental crust masses that is forming the Himalaya today. (One possible reason: especially close to the Farallon-Pacific ridge, the Farallon ocean floor was still warm and buoyant, and might not have “wanted” to sink into the mantle.)
Another thing about the Farallon plate was that it must have included some shards of continental crust, because those bits are now glued to the west coast of North America as basically foreign bits of crust called terranes. Much of the western North America is actually terranes, which as you might imagine makes the geology a bit of a jumble.
Final Thoughts
OK, so these were some “advanced” topics, some of which you won’t get in a completely introductory class in dumbed-down geology.
As such it’s a bit “bleeding edge” science and that explains some of the conflicting statements I’ve been reading. The geologists are still arguing with each other about what’s happening.
Next time…well, I’m not a hundred percent sure, other than that it will be geology.
The above image of TLR Signalling Pathways is courtesy of BioFinder and Google Images.
Health Friday is a series devoted to information about Big Pharma, vaccines, general health, and associated topics. As today’s offering is related to the disaster of the COVID-19 virus itself, and of the COVID-19 “vaccines”, Yours Truly dedicates it to the memory of all persons, of whatever age or location, who have passed away from the negative effects of these lab-created Biological ToxinWeapons.
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 any AI-generated content in today’s discussion thread, they must cite their source. Thank you.
And now, to the reader’s Edification Smorgasbord, a “feast of information” regarding just how dangerous and potentially deadly mRNA-1283 (mNEXSPIKE) is, Yours Truly offers the following Menu:
APPETIZER: WHAT IS TLR4?
TLR4 (aka Toll-like receptor 4) is a transmembrane protein that exists across a cell membrane. TLR4 functions as a kind of “sensing device” within the body. It detects foreign bacteria and viruses. When a foreign element is detected by TLR4, it begins to send messages to the natural immune system to activate the immune response. TLR4 is crucial to the correct functioning of the natural immune system. Please see the screenshots below for more information:
FIRST COURSE: THE FDA APPROVES “mNEXSPIKE” IN MAY 2025:
The “newest version” COVID-19 “vaccine”, mRNA-1283 (aka mNEXSPIKE), was “fully approved” by the FDA on 30 May 2025. Yours Truly wrote about this situation here: https://www.theqtree.com/2025/06/01/stop-press-edition-hhs-secretary-robert-f-kennedy-needs-to-resign-now/. This “vaccine” claims to be “more effective” in “preventing” an infection of COVID-19. The claim is based on the fact that mRNA-1283 (aka mNEXSPIKE) uses “only” the S1 protein and the N sector of said S1 protein of the COVID-19 virus spike protein, as opposed to using the entire spike protein (as in mRNA-1273, the original “flagship” modRNA COVID-19 “vaccine” by Moderna.) Please see: https://doi.org/10.1093/infdis/jiaf022, “Safety and Immunogenicity of SARS-CoV-2 Spike Receptor-Binding Domain and N-Terminal Domain mRNA Vaccine”, Spyros Chalkias, et al., 15 April 2025 (most of the authors of this “informational paper” are either affiliated with Moderna, or are employees of Moderna.) A screenshot of the Background section of the Abstract of this paper is below:
At first glance, this “new development” by Moderna may appear to be a “positive” achievement. However, there are other issues that arise:
First, there is the fact that the S1 protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus contains both the RCB (Receptor-Binding Domain) AND the N-terminal domain of the virus. It is the RCB that allows the virus to “attach” itself , or to “dock” itself, to cells in the body — for example, to the ACE2 cell receptors; and, to TLR4 cells. The N-terminal domain is the “end part” of the S1 protein; it is a “free” group at the end of the protein, while, at the same time, it “initiates” a polypeptide chain.
While the above article refers to the Pfizer-BioNTech modRNA COVID-19 “vaccine” BNT162b2, the modRNA COVID-19 “vaccine” from Moderna, mRNA-1273, also targets the RBD, which interacts with TLR4 cells in the “vaccinated” person’s body. In addition, all of the modRNA “descendant clone” COVID-19 “vaccines” by both companies also use the RBD, there interacting with TLR4 cells in the “vaccinated / boosted” person’s body.
TLR4 cells are also present in multiple areas and organs of the body. The modRNA COVID-19 “vaccines” will interact with these cells. This is due to the fact that the S1 protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus contains certain amino acids residues (numbers 1-1208) that interact with TLR4 cells. Please see: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2021.306187, “SARS-CoV-2 spike protein S1 subunit induces pro-inflammatory responses via toll-like receptor 4 signaling in murine and human macrophages”, Ken Shirato, Takako Kizaki, February 2021. A screenshot of the Abstract of this paper follows:
Regarding the S1 amino acids residues 1-1208 and TLR4, please see this paper, from 2020: https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr170060, ” Structural characterization of a nanobody derived from a naive library that neutralizaes SARS-CoV-2″, M Dumoux, et al., 1 June 2020. Below are screenshots from the Methods section and from a portion of the Supplementary Table section of this paper (the Supplementary Table portion shows some of the gene code for the S1 1-1208 residues):
Further information regarding SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and its interaction with TLR4 is found here: https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2024.1368946, “TLR2/4 are novel activating receptors for SARS-CoV-2 spike protein on NK cells”. Nadine Landolina, et al., 30 May 2024. “NK” stands for “Natural Killer” cells in the body. A screenshot from this paper is below:
Then, there is the issue of clinical trial used by the FDA to “justify” the “full approval” of mRNA-1283 (aka mNEXSPIKE), NCT05137236 (https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05137236.) There was NO Placebo Control Group in this study. The study participants (study subjects) were injected with the following Moderna modRNA COVID-19 “vaccines”: mRNA-1273; OR, mRNA-1283; OR, mRNA-1283.211; OR, mRNA-1283.529. Why was there no Placebo Control Group? Assuming that the study subjects knew, in advance, they would be injected with any one of FOUR different variations of a modRNA COVID-19 “vaccine”, were they fine with that?
And, there is the “opinion piece” by Dr. Martin Makary (FDA Commissioner) and Dr. Vinay Prasad (new head of the FDA’s CBER division), regarding the “new approach” that the FDA will use for COVID-19 “vaccines.” Please see:
SECOND COURSE: WHAT DOES THE modRNA COVID-19 “VACCINE”, mNEXSPIKE, CONTAIN?
Please see the FDA-issued Fact Sheet for Healthcare Providers (aka the Package Insert) for mRNA-1283, mNEXSPIKE: https://www.fda.gov/media/186738/download. Below is a screenshot of section 11 Description, section 12 Clinical Pharmacology, and section 13 Nonclinical Toxicology of this document:
Which plainly states that mNEXSPIKE contains the same types of dangerous, deadly lipid nanoparticle and excipient that all the other modRNA COVID-19 “vaccines” by Moderna contain: SM-102, and PEG2000-DMG. This means that mNEXSPIKE will be rapidly spread into every cell in the “vaccinated” person’s body. It is also clear that mNEXSPIKE has NOT been tested for mutation potential, cancer-inducement potential, or reproductive impairment potential.
Yours Truly then performed a search to ascertain whether or not mNEXSPIKE contains N1-methylpseudouridine. She has written extensively on this board about this lab-created “fake Uridine plus a form of methane”, which completely replaces the natural RNA in the Uridine in the body. Recall that natural Uridine is crucial to multiple body functions and mechanisms: regulation of mood, of learning and memory, and of “gut-brain connection” functions. Lo and behold, the US Patent for mRNA-1283 (aka mNEXSPIKE) does have language describing “various types” of pseudouridine, including N1-methylpseudouridine, are used in all of Moderna’s modRNA COVID-19 “vaccines” — which would also include mNEXSPIKE. The US Patent for mRNA-1283 is found here (US 20240382581A1): https://patents.google.com/patent/US20240382581A1/en?q=(mRNA-1283)&oq=mRNA-1283, “Pan-human coronavirus vaccines”, ModernaTX, published 21 November 2024. Please see sections 0120, 0121, 0122, and 0123 of this document for descriptions of the “various types” of pseudouridine.
Lastly, there is the question as to whether mNEXSPIKE contains any saRNA (self-amplifying RNA) component. Yours Truly searched for information regarding this, since the IM dose (intramuscular injection dose) of this COVID-19 “vaccine” is a very small amount — 0.2mL. She found this, which appears to be a “dancing all around the truth” description of this “vaccine.” Please see: https://synapse.patsnap.com/article/what-is-mrna-1283-used-for?, 28 June 2024. A screenshot from this article is below:
Read the last sentence in the second paragraph above, especially “…a robust and durable immune response, potentially requiring fewer doses and offering longer-lasting immunity compares to other vaccines.” Sounds like a description of the saRNA H5N1 “vaccine”, KOSTAIVE, currently approved for use in the EU / Scandinavia, and in Japan; and, a version of which “vaccine” is to begin clinical trials in the United States (NCT06602531), under the name ARCT-2304.
DESSERT AND BEVERAGES: REACTIONS AND QUESTIONS:
First, this: https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/maha-movement-flabbergasted-covid, “MAHA Movement Flabbergasted COVID-19 Vaccines Remain on Market”, Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH, 2 June 2025. There is an embedded interview with Dr. McCullough in this article, along with a linked copy of the “Kabuki Theater performance” regarding “stopping” the COVID-19 “vaccines” in the United States by Dr. Martin Makary (FDA), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (NIH DIrector), and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on 27 May 2025. A screenshot from the McCullough article is below, giving his views on the current situation:
Second, this tweet, from Dr. William Makis: https://x.com/MakisMD/status/1930296443434348771, 4 June 2024. Two screenshots from his tweet are below: first, a statement from HHS Secretary Kennedy, Jr.; and, second, from Dr. Makis:
Questions, posed by Yours Truly: Why did the FDA “fully approve” a “new”, modRNA COVID-19 “vaccine” that specifically targets person over age 65, and persons who “fit” a detailed list of “persons at risk of severe COVID-19 infection”, as complied by Dr. Martin Makary and Dr. Vinay Prasad? Why was there a “Kabuki Theater performance” on 27 May 2025 by Drs. Makary and Bhattacharya, along with HHS Secretary Kennedy, Jr., when it was obvious by that date that the FDA “full approval” of mNEXSPIKE was “a done deal”? Why did the FDA issue an Approval Letter to Moderna for mNEXSPIKE that has so many “caveats”, “requests for more information”, and an “order” for the company to perform a Phase 4 clinical study on the “vaccine” — a “vaccine” that the FDA had just “fully approved”? Please see: https://www.fda.gov/media/186740/download; and, the screenshot of Page 9 of this document, regarding the “order” for the Phase 4 study, below:
More questions, posed by Yours Truly: How many elderly persons are going to be pressured / cajoled / “mandated” (by the nursing home or care facility where they live), to take mNEXSPIKE? Will they be told that this injectable is “safer” than mRNA-1273, “because the dose is smaller”? What about persons who “fit” into the multiple categories of “persons at high risk for severe COVID-19 infection” according to Drs. Makary and Prasad? What pressure will these persons be subjected to in order to get them to agree to take mNEXSPIKE? Finally, will people be told the truth that mNEXSPIKE, just because it does not contain the S2 portion of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, is NOT “mRNA-1273 Lite” — but, rather, it is another version of a dangerous, potentially deadly modRNA COVID-19 ‘”vaccine”?
This man, making Christmas calls from the White House, believes the world is a sphere. And he has even flown around it! So has our beautiful FLOTUS, who happens to be his wife!
Truth and common sense must be valued by us, as individuals, in order to lastingly disempower the authoritarian fake news media. This includes the perniciously smarmy science media, which never answers for its errors and lies. I believe that the media has been responsible not only for leftist pathologies like scientism, medical fascism, and radical gender ideology, but also for reactionary movements like modern flat Earth, rejection of all medicine, and Biblical geological literalism.
Just as Wheatie’s Stormwatch Monday Open Thread was created as a place for people to openly express their thoughts and opinions, so, too, is this Thank God Thursday Open Thread, where honest but civil discussion of all topics is encouraged. This thread is also to be known as Theistic Evolution Thursdays, due to the author’s expected “pontification” about his scientific, religious, and political opinions. You are welcome to pontificate back! Free speech matters!
Please label all AI-generated content as being such, unless it is patently obvious (e.g., humorous AI images). It is important that we as individuals not begin to pretend that socially derived artificial intelligence is actually our own, as this form of stealthy social information averaging and feedback would be one more pretense and deception between people, in service of stupid Marxist socialism, and of those who wish to substitute their communally protected lies for actual truth.
The source of alleged truth matters, not for the truth itself, but for validation.
And yes, it’s THURSDAY…again.
And that’s it. We’re done stealing from Wheatie.
OK – maybe her rules need to be posted.
No food fights.
No running with scissors.
If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
Other rules may be derivable from these, and that conjecture is left for discussion.
If there is nothing beyond the “W” below, then this is a placeholder. For health reasons, I can’t always post a timely opinion before each Thursday, but I will try. Otherwise, you have this placeholder post, where YOU provide the content. Enjoy!
W
Like highly welcomed but ultimately skimpy food on a woke airline, we are giving you three choices in random videos that were suggested by YouTube. Each video is interesting at first, but we’re not sure you’ll make it to the end of any of them.
Take your pick! And come back for seconds or thirds if you dare.
Too-Mild Chicken Wings – a somewhat tasty but incompletely breaded explanation of how an airplane wing REALLY works (Steve’s further explanations and corrections are welcome)
Crispy Crunchy Pork Rinds – a young anthropologist offers 5 MOAR reasons why there are massive problems with young-Earth creationism
Overpriced Mass-Produced Seafood – a fascinating documentary on the gnarly but tasty King Crab’s Atlantic invasion. NOT KOSHER!
Gail Combs is being tormented by the volcanic devastation of blissful blogging that is WordPiss.
A little girl watches a mushroom-shaped cloud forming in the sky as the nearby Guagua Pichincha volcano near Quito, Ecuador, spouts boiling water and ash during the third consecutive phreatic eruption of the day 7th October 1999. (Photo by Martin Bernetti/AFP/Getty Images)
You must now suffer the heartache of placeholder.
This is a placeholder.
Most of this post is boilerplate, but with sprinkles of minor mirth.
Just as Wheatie’s Stormwatch Monday Open Thread was created as a place for people to openly express their thoughts and opinions, so, too, is this Wolfian Wednesday Persnickety Placeholder and Open Topic, where honest but civil discussion of all topics is encouraged. This thread is also to be known as Wolfie’s WOO-WOO Wednesday, due to the author’s expected rambling about his most WOO-WOO opinions. Please bear with us!
We are living in an episode of The Outer Limits.
Please label all AI-generated content as being such, unless it is patently obvious (e.g., humorous AI images). It is important that we as individuals not begin to pretend that socially derived artificial intelligence is actually our own, as this form of stealthy social information averaging and feedback would be one more pretense and deception between people, in service of stupid Marxist socialism, and of those who wish to substitute their communally protected lies for actual truth.
The source of alleged truth matters, not for the truth itself, but for validation.
And yes, it’s WEDNESDAY…again.
So are we halfway through the week? Is this really HUMP DAY?
Let’s try that again.
OK – maybe Wheatie’s rules need to be posted on Wednesday, too.
No food fights.
No running with scissors.
If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
Other rules may be derivable from these, and that conjecture is left for discussion.
If there is nothing beyond the “W” below, then this is a pure placeholder. For health reasons, I can’t always post a timely opinion before each Thursday Wednesday, but I will try. Otherwise, you have this placeholder post, where YOU provide the content. Enjoy!
How did Q put it? Ah, yes.
“Enjoy the show!”
W
OK, people. I was going to use this placeholder to post about a recent essay by Robert Malone, regarding MAHA and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. This is a great essay, and I hope you will read it.
Let me just pull a teaser out of this essay. It is a preface of a book by a naturalist and explorer, who was a member of the wealthy family that brought you Tabasco Sauce.
Yup. Tabasco Sauce. That man was a friend of Malone’s great-grandfather.
Here is the quote:
Let those who would live happily and approach the inevitable with a peaceful mind, take heed to nature’s teachings, live a natural life; watch, listen, and think; for the more of these three things you do, the sooner you will realize that your happy, natural fate, lies solely in yourself and your life on earth, and not in the future.’
-McIlhenny
It’s a nice essay that I think many of us “older” people will enjoy.
Before we return to the remaining signers of our Declaration of Independence we need to move the ball down the field more on the present subject that originated with Scott’s and Wolf’s posts of May 3.
Put simply, why has the statutory nature of the Constitution and law been abused so radically by those who give their oaths to defend it? The creation of shadow governments and legal systems that sustain them appears to be the vehicles used to do the dirty deeds. The instigators apparently want undeserved, unearned, and unauthorized power over the assets and people of our nation.
The use of rules, procedures and practices that they develop, sell to the public at large as necessary for the safety and/or prosperity of citizens, and then implement with colluding enforcement arms is what keeps them in power and control. With the current version of swamp critters, they added illegal invaders and provided access to the rights of citizens to insure their continued dominance of our nation. This corrupted the election system even worse to go with everything else in society, which was the primary purpose of COVID and the jabs in addition to depopulation efforts. The propagandists lied their ways into the heads of sheeple to move the needle toward accepting the unacceptable that has been tanking our society.
We can continue to discuss how it all is rectified, however, it will not change a basic, historical truth. What has happened in the past 250 years in America is not new to the world stage. It has happened in other civilizations who turned their faces from God and/or righteous living since the beginning of time. Some of those civilizations never recovered and disappeared from the planet. Others were reduced to a remnant. Some of those remnants never regained their prominence, while others went on to become even more prominent and dominate segments of the world. For this latter group, the common factor contributing to success seems to be a return to more equitable treatment of their populations. It usually took the common people coming together to force the replacement of their former leaders or when God otherwise directly intervened through events of nature. Remember, even the insurance industry calls them “acts of God” in their contract provisions.
Just like Biblical accounts of the ancient nation of Israel, this concept of the righteous remnant surviving and rebuilding is also built into the fabric of America. It is expected of us to do so and has been stated within our founding documents. How else can you explain our recovery and development into a great, superpower nation after the horrible Civil War that erupted some 70 years after the ratification of the Constitution, which was followed by WW I, the Great Depression and WW II? How else could it possibly be explained when the America First MAGA movement led by a bullet dodging brilliant patriot changes the world for the betterment of all mankind?
Judicial Discretion
Nothing makes my point better about judicial rules, procedures and practices than the following recent post from Covid & Covid with Jeff Childers. It truly is an interesting read anytime, but especially so with the current subject matter and ongoing events within our government. The article to read is the first on Blind Justice.
Did you spot all of the judicial discretion that was employed? Jeff Childers is an experienced, accomplished attorney who has taken on an unenviable task of challenging the PREP Act successfully. The weight of the federal government as well as Big Pharm is aligned against all challenges. Even with that situation, the judge chose not to shut this one down. In fact, he handed Jeff the ticket to use to attend the show. To say Jeff was pleasantly surprised is an understatement.
What is most interesting to me is the approach Judge Young used in questioning counsel of both sides from the outset is one that could be used by all judges, but rarely is. Why? Unless you are into performance art and deception as a judge; it would seem that if you truly desire to make an honest, legally correct ruling you would use all avenues of inquiry to reach a solid decision. Which tells me that in all of the previously unsuccessful challenges, there probably was no judge who was serious in their consideration of the merits of the PREP challenges. They went along with what the government wanted to not rock the boat. Anybody who has ever sat in pre-trial conferences knows exactly to what I am referring. The rules of the game (trial) are set by the judge after input from the opposing attorneys representing sides in the case.
Now, I could be a conspiracist and tell you that frequently those rules have already been worked out (as well as the decision) in advance over a meal or drinks at a bar together beforehand, but that would just be speculation, right? That never actually happens, does it? Justice is always blind like it was in all of those Perry Mason TV shows, right? The attorneys from both sides give their best efforts and whoever wins, wins. The decision always represents what the law states.
Granted that latter statement does happen in some higher profile cases that attract widespread attention from the general public and media. Sometimes rules, procedures and practices are insufficient to blunt the will of the We the People and law. But what about those cases of We the People that are ongoing in lesser courts all across America every day that are similar to what Geddes described? For that matter, what about J6 cases that were high profile? Whatever little credibility the feds and DC legal system had prior to that event has been totally washed away by their violations of the law through obvious corruption and oppression.
The aftermath of J6 is the very definition of politicization of the judiciary and legal system followed by weaponization. Add in the usual skullduggery with rules, procedures and practices with the courts that Jeff Childers discusses and you can see how hard it is to break through when the shadow government and judiciary are aligned against We the People.
We need to keep a watch on this one from Jeff. Removing Big Pharm’s liability protections is a game changer.
Good Stuff Happens At The Right Time In America
The recently released interview below discloses more than the average person knows about how things really work in and around the current federal government. If you have not done so, watch it and think about the insiders in DC and our federal government going back centuries. Then consider the magnitude of POTUS Trump’s undertaking. Skip it ahead to the actual interview a few minutes in if you want to conserve time.
In particular there is very interesting commentary starting around the 51 minute mark. Some of the pertinent discussion topics will ring bells relating to the Information War. They discuss many current topics we hit hard on here such as…
Wiki is a weapon and the IC is involved. Weaponization of the government against the citizens has been underway. It is not about the information you have they let you see, it’s about what you have to find (Ed Martin’s paraphrased words that means they intentionally withhold or hide it). Certifications of elections systems – fraud and money rule. Election in Poland soon – Obama is there. Why? The fed system used to be politicized and now it is weaponized. It started big with Obama and accelerated with Biden. Jack Smith under the microscope. All the big cases recently including cases related to Trump, IRS against citizens, school boards, IC, Crossfire Hurricane – all Bondi ordered investigations. Elections – aspects of things did not make sense in their construct.
Ed Martin stated, “I don’t think there is a way for the people to petition…”as it applies to forcing release of information regarding any of the on-going “investigations” or even past classified events that have been declassed like the JFK assassination from 62 years ago. No way to petition for judicial relief even when POTUS Trump declassified all of the documents? No standing as American citizens whose lives have been hugely negatively impacted by the events? Is that like having no standing to file a lawsuit against proven election fraud? Really?
Which leads to where are the releases of the rest of the Kennedy, MLK, and Epstein docs? How about the J6 tapes and some honesty on 911? For goodness sakes, how about a real accounting of what happened in Butler less than a year ago that was witnessed on live TV? Nope, even PDT’s handpicked top cops from FIB will not go there.
Besides the usual criminal corruption, these events and people are all hidden behind rules, procedures and practices. Ed Martin would not even go there in response to many of Tucker’s questions. He knows the issues, yet skirted around answers with his responses. Why? An answer of “dunno” does not work for us. We know better. An answer of it being classified does not work for us either. We saw many of the events in real time as they occurred. Years have gone by and nothing is disclosed officially. We know what that means.
Just the content in this one interview reveals a depth of criminality and corruption that is mind blowing. It is also clear that Ed Martin believes people were more honorable in their personal conduct 100 years ago as he stated. If true, it indicates the primary problem today is the breakdown of morality, ethics and personal integrity within our society as it has become more politicized and now, weaponized. Personally, I don’t think his belief is true. I believe people have been equally corrupt and criminal in their activities throughout human history. The farther back you go the more the official history is cleaned by the corrupt. My brief FIRE! series highlighted some of that going back into the 1800’s.
We do not have to look far to see even more current abuse through rules, procedures and practices; this time in civil rights. Tucker’s interview of Harmeet Dhillon is a major eye opener of their use in destroying the quality of life in many cities, racism in colleges, religious persecution, elections steals and so on.
I confess the leftist pity parties as they exited that department would have been great fun to observe.
But it does not stop there, stories come out multiple times per week to substantiate what is now obvious. If you have not followed, read this short article.
If you have never been employed in the legal industry or interacting branches of government you probably never knew that the ABA was used by our elected federal officials for ratings of judicial nominees. It has been used for decades despite the org being a private, non-government controlled organization of over 400,000 legal worker members. So, the federal government authorized and utilized rules, procedures and practices associated with this proven partisan org that led to the confirmation support from azzhat elected officials/staffs for the corrupt, wacko federal judges we have seen circumventing the will of We the People this entire time. How convenient.
Oh yeah, did you notice that the ABA was formed in the late 1800’s? Folks – the ABA and many other divisive, anti-patriot orgs are nothing more than NGO’s that have been funded and weaponized by subversive globalists and wannabe dictators from times long ago. Many trace their lineages back post Civil War, some before. As an example you will find names of major industrialists with deep pockets such as Rockefeller who seeded them into American society. The AMA is another one as Gail has posted. This is the same org that walked lock step with Fauxi’s NIH and the CDC. Next, think about all of the NGO’s that trace back their funding back to subversive globalists that brought us the alien invasion.
Don’t get me started (yet) on the World Council of Churches or even the National Council of Churches. That will be a segment I address down the road as well, God willing.
If you have not I highly advise deeper dives into Gail’s research. I also advise you to focus on the results of the globalist cabal’s seed planting as WW I and WW II ended. What orgs and acts were undertaken during and immediately following? Where did the funding of same come from as well as what elected officials and globalists were in their corner? We are in the middle of the exposure and destruction of some that occurred at the end of WW II over 75 years ago; whose seeds were actually planted leading up to WW I.
All of the corruption, manipulation and circumvention links together, just find the connecting dots. There are not multiple movies. There are many scenes that tie together in a blockbuster movie that has gone on in America since the Declaration of Independence was signed.
The situation is and remains as described below in the immortal words of 81 year old Benjamin Franklin:
“A republic, if you can keep it.”
We will return to this in future parts detailing the signers of our founding documents.
Steve/Wolf’s Solution Confirmed
The evidence has been presented. The verdict will be decided by a jury of We the People and not some idgit leftist judge placed in a position of fake authority by corrupted politicians and swamp. We the People who are America First still desire the republic that our founding fathers provided.
We are not going to solve the lack of ethics and deterioration of morals of our nation and world on here, much less within our intentionally polarized American society. However, the practical answer to it all has actually been by initiated by PDT subject to being fully supported by We the People and not stalled by the globalists and swamp. That gives hope. Reducing and defanging government means there are less azzhats in positions of authority to screw things up and mess with We the People. That has to be the current and most focused approach to solving the weaponization that was actually seeded through politicization first beginning with the strong central government backers’ efforts to create and pass the Constitution while building on the British legal system that the colonies employed here in America.
We will never know, but would we have been better off with the previous Articles of Confederation and any amendments as needed for enumerated powers, handling Treasury needs and military preparedness?
As discussed in previous Parts, we see how it happened in ancient Israel through the time of Christ just as it has in other civilizations in world history. Keeping things simple is just not normal behavior for many humans. The problem the power hungry as well as We the People have in America is that our nation has been dedicated to God and His providence from its founding. As a people we can stray from that and attempt to take things over on our own. However, until the Lord returns it will always be met by His discipline until a God fearing patriot remnant persevere through the fires and rebuild in accordance with His will. Again.
The better, most fulfilling American Way is to do things His way from the onset. Which means the manipulation, corruption and deception built into the rules, procedures and practices need to be practically and firmly eliminated.
I repeat for emphasis this statement from a great American we all dearly love on here,
So we wreck them by seriously cutting government and giving them fewer places to exist. Among all of the other benefits, the body politic would have fewer sociopaths and parasites in it.
– Steve–
Edited 1:23 PM, 6-3-25
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).
The above image of a vintage vaccine vial and syringe is courtesy of Google Images.
This post is a STOP PRESS EDITION. It has to do with the FDA BLA (Biologics License Application) approval of the Moderna COVID-19 modRNA “vaccine” mRNA-1283. This “vaccine” was FDA-approved without any clinical trial in which there was a placebo control group. mRNA-1283 contains a “shorter portion” of the COVID-19 virus spike protein. This “vaccine” also contains elements of the H7N9 Avian Influenza strain that was used in Gain-of-Function experiments by Dr. Yoshihira Kawaoka, DVM, PhD, in 2013, along with other scientists, at the University of Wisconsin (Madison.)
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 this 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 of today’s offering, they must cite their source. Thank you.
Please see the following breaking news outlets pieces regarding the FDA granting the BLA for the Moderna “newest COVID-19 “vaccine”, mRNA-1283: First, this one: https://www.thefocalpoints.com/cp/164898171, “BREAKING: FDA Goes Rogue — Approves Moderna’s Next-Gen COVID-19 mRNA Injection Without a Placebo-Controlled Trial”, Nicolas Hulscher, May 2025. Please see the screenshots from this article, below:
HOWEVER, there is another aspect to the mRNA-1283 modRNA COVID-19 “vaccine” — this injectable appears to be a combination of BOTH the SARS-CoV-2 virus AND elements of the deadly H7N9 Avian Influenza virus. Please see: https://jonfleetwood.substack.com/cp/164803097, “FDA Approves Moderna COVID Jab Containing GOF Bird Flu Gene Segment That PCR Could Mistake for Infection”, 31 May 2025. The “bird flu gene segment” is from the Gain-of-Function experiments with the H7N9 Avian Influenza virus conducted by Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka, Ron Fouchier, and other scientists, under the aegis of the University of Wisconsin (Madison), where Dr. Kawaoka has his lab. These Gain-of-Function experiments were “outed” when serious lab accidents occurred; it appears that the experiments were then stopped. But not before Dr. Fouchier wrote this article: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1243325, “Gain-of-Function Experiments on H7N9”, 9 August 2013, in which Dr. Fouchier attempted to justify further Gain-of-Function experimentation.
The archived article regarding the H7N9 experiments at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), is found here: https://archive.ph/LX7MP, “Study: Lab-derived H5N1 virus component binds to human receptors”, Robert Roos, 13 April 2013.
In Yours Truly’s opinion, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, is not doing his job. BOTH the FDA and the CDC have now “gone rogue” — first, with the “sleight-of-hand” regarding the CDC’s “new recommendations” about the COVID-19 “vaccines” (per Dr. Susan Monarez, PhD, the current Acting Director of the CDC, as of 30 May 2025); and, second, with the FDA (Dr. Martin Makary, Commissioner) granting approval of the Moderna modRNA COVID-19 + H7N9 gene pieces combination “vaccine”, mRNA-1283 (as of 31 May 2025.) It is time, in Yours Truly’s opinion, for Secretary Kennedy, Jr., to either get control of the FDA and CDC — after all, these agencies are part of HHS — or, to resign, and allow President Trump47 to find someone who will.
FLASH UPDATES! MORE ON THE “DIRTY BACKSTORY” RELATED TO THE FDA’s APPROVAL OF mRNA-1283 ON 30 MAY 2025:
ONE: The FDA’s Approval Letter to Moderna on 30 May 2025, regarding mRNA-1283: https://www.fda.gov/media/186740/download. Please see the screenshot of page nine of this document, below:
This is the PHASE 4 clinical study that Moderna is requested to perform for mRNA-1283, but which has NOT begun yet, nor has it ENROLLED any subjects yet.
TWO. This is the slide presentation for the CDC’s ACIP committee meeting for April 2025 related to the “2025-2026 COVID-19 Vaccines Formula” selections. Notice that there is NO vote that ACIP planned to take regarding mRNA-1283. Please see: https://www.cdc.gov/acip/downloads/slides-2025-04-15-16/05-Panagiotakopoulos-COVID-508.pdf. Below is a screenshot of the pertinent image from the slide presentation:
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.”
Dragged to GOD!
The clearest verse on God’s drawing to salvation is John 6:44 where Jesus declares that “no one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day.” The Greek word translated “draw” is helkuo, which means “to drag” (literally or figuratively). Clearly, this drawing is a one-sided affair. God does the drawing to salvation; we who are drawn have a passive role in the process. There is no doubt that we respond to His drawing us, but the drawing itself is all on His part.
Helkuo is used in John 21:6 to refer to a heavy net full of fish being dragged to the shore. In John 18:10 we see Peter drawing his sword, and in Acts 16:19 helkuo is used to describe Paul and Silas being dragged into the marketplace before the rulers. Clearly, the net had no part in its being drawn to the shore, Peter’s sword had no part in being drawn, and Paul and Silas did not drag themselves to the marketplace. The same can be said of God’s drawing of some to salvation. Some come willingly, and some are dragged unwillingly, but all eventually come, although we have no part in the drawing.
Why does God need to draw us to salvation? Simply put, if He didn’t, we would never come. Jesus explains that no man can come unless the Father draws him (John 6:65). The natural man has no ability to come to God, nor does he even have the desire to come. Because his heart is hard and his mind is darkened, the unregenerate person doesn’t desire God and is actually an enemy of God (Romans 5:10). When Jesus says that no man can come without God’s drawing him, He is making a statement about the total depravity of the sinner and the universality of that condition. So darkened is the unsaved person’s heart that he doesn’t even realize it: “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). Therefore, it is only by the merciful and gracious drawing of God that we are saved. In the conversion of the sinner, God enlightens the mind (Ephesians 1:18), inclines the will toward Himself, and influences the soul, without which influence the soul remains darkened and rebellious against God. All of this is involved in the drawing process.
There is a sense in which God draws all men. This is known as the “general call” and is distinguished from the “effectual call” of God’s elect. Passages such as Psalm 19:1-4 and Romans 1:20 attest to the fact that God’s eternal power and divine nature are “clearly seen” and “understood” from what has been made, “so that people are without excuse.” But men still do deny God, and those who acknowledge His existence still do not come to a saving knowledge of Him outside of His drawing them. Only those who have been drawn through special revelation—by the power of the Holy Spirit and the grace of God—will come to Christ.
There are tangible ways in which those who are being drawn to salvation experience that drawing. First, the Holy Spirit convicts us of our sinful state and our need for a Savior (John 16:8). Second, He awakens in us a previously unknown interest in spiritual things and creates a desire for them that was never there before. Suddenly our ears are open, our hearts are inclined toward Him, and His Word begins to hold a new and exciting fascination for us. Our spirits begin to discern spiritual truth that never made sense to us before: “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). Finally, we begin to have new desires. He places within us a new heart that inclines toward Him, a heart that desires to know Him, obey Him, and walk in the “newness of life” (Romans 6:4) that He has promised.
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.
I’m making a minor change here. Before, I quoted “ask” prices; i.e., the spot price corresponding to what you would pay a precious metal seller (if they actually paid attention to the spot price). The other price is “bid,” what they nominally pay you. The “bid” prices are what usually show up in the news. So from here on out it will be bid/ask, with the part after the slash corresponding to what I used to post. I’ll still use the ask prices to compute gold:silver and FRNSI.
Gold stayed above 3300 this week, but finally took a hit on Friday. Similar with the other metals. On the plus side for silver people, silver gained half an ounce (of silver) against 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.
Volcanoes
I’ve talked about streams. I’ve talked about glaciers (and judging from reactions, that was a better effort than the one on streams). Now it’s time–and we have the background–to talk about volcanoes.
Isaac Asimov was famous as a science fiction writer (most famous works being the Foundation Trilogy and the Robot stories and novels–he popularized the putative three laws of robotics) but he also was a biochemist and science popularizer. (In other words, when I read his work I realize how bad a job I am doing at this.) For decades he wrote a column for the monthly magazine Fantasy and Science Fiction. The editors gave him free rein. He usually wrote about some scientific topic. These got collected into books which I read, and oftentimes remember.
One of the essays I remember to this day is one he wrote in 1959. Asimov considered some of the most vital elements for living things (chlorine, sodium, potassium, sulfur, phosphorus, calcium, magnesium, iron, manganese, zinc, cvopper, molybdenum, cobalt and iodine). That list isn’t complete, obviously, but he was focused on soil and land life. He then compared the abundance of each in the soil to the abundance in living things. For instance, soil he lists as being five percent iron, but living things are 0.0027 percent iron (this is presumably before the IRS bleeds you dry and gets all your hemoglobin). The idea being that land life will never run out of iron, because it’s actually more strongly concentrated in dirt than it is in living things. But work it the other way around: sulfur is 0.052 percent of all dirt, but 0.104 percent of living things–it’s twice as concentrated in living things as it is in the soil. Conceivably, life could be fruitful and multiply…until it weighed half as much as the upper layers of earth and there was no more sulfur left. OK, that wouldn’t happen, would it? We’d never have that much living stuff on Earth. The king though was phosphorus, which is concentrated 5.9 times in living things, versus the soil. Given how little of the Earth’s upper layers is living things, there should be no issue with running out of phosphorus, though, right?
Well, no. If it’s locked up in solid rocks, it’s useless; plants can’t use it and therefore, we animal types won’t be able to either. Add to that the fact that these elements aren’t distributed uniformly, and well, after a lot of discussion he states that phosphorus is “life’s bottleneck.” (And that is the name he gave the essay.) Then he pointed out that phosphorus tended to wash out into the oceans (3 and a half million tons per year), and there was no way for it to come back other than in waterfowl poop, which recovers maybe 3 percent and in any case (let’s face it) won’t help Kansas out. Furthermore, the ocean water was already saturated in phosphorus, so it’s carrying as much life as it can, and so what phosphorus washed out of the land would settle to the bottom of the ocean in sediment.
(There, I just used the “S” word so now you might be thinking there’s actually geology coming up sometime.)
He actually suggested trying to capture some of that phosphorus so it wouldn’t be lost forever; given enough time the Earth’s land would be nearly lifeless simply for lack of usable phosphorus.
Actually, it’s not a bad argument. He sounded more worried about that than about running out of oil and coal (but then, he liked nuclear power). As he said at the end, “We may be able to substitute nuclear power for coal, and plastics for wood, and yeast for meat [ick!]…but for phosphorus there is neither substitute nor replacement.”
But there was one factor he didn’t take into account, and that’s no surprise whatsoever, because as I said before he wrote the article in 1959. No one could have taken that factor into account because we were only beginning to get a glimmer of it.
And the factor is (drumroll): Volcanoes…fed by plate tectonics.
Volcanoes can be thought of as Earth-scale zits popping, and thus regarded as a big negative, especially since they can be hazardous, but in fact they play a vital role, as they bring back to land what gets washed into the ocean. It’s by no means a fast process, since ocean crust can last up to two hundred million years, but it’s there.
Most volcanoes (I say most) appear either over subduction zones, or at divergent zones. The latter of these is the more intuitive, and the signature example is Iceland. As the plates move further apart, magma wells up to fill the gap and becomes ocean floor, literally hot off the conveyor belt. Magma welling up to the surface will of course make one think of volcanoes.
The first diagram shows the mid-Atlantic ridge from above, and also a profile, showing that the ridge comes comparatively close the surface, then slopes away to the more level bottom of the Atlantic ocean.
If that mid-ocean ridge should happen to break the surface of the ocean, it will form a volcanic island, and indeed we see this happen at Iceland, but also Jan Mayen, Pico island in the Azores, Ascension Island, St. Helena, Tristan da Cunha, Gough Island and Bouvet Island in the Atlantic ocean. In other oceans, the Galapagos islands are on a divergent boundary in the Pacific, and Rodriguez, St. Paul, Amsterdam, MacDonald, Heard, and Kerguelen islands in the Indian ocean.
(St. Paul and Amsterdam islands, by the way, are antipodal to Colorado; directly on the opposite side of the Earth from here. Kerguelen–a much larger but still-small island–is antipodal to the Montana/Alberta/Saskatchewan border. The rest of the Lower 48 is opposite of water.)
Why are there islands at these particular locations and not other places on the ridges? Hot spots. Which I’ll get to later.
But most volcanoes are on convergent boundaries, in particular subduction zones, which pretty much ring the entire Pacific ocean. To refresh memories, here’s a picture:
Why would there be volcanoes there? New crust isn’t forming, it’s disappearing. The ocean floor is basically being pushed down deep below the surface of the earth, presumably never to be seen again.
What’s happening is that the lighter continental rock sediments on the ocean floor are being heated, melt, and force their way upward through the denser rock until they reach the surface…and there they form volcanoes, usually not right on the subduction zone (which generally forms a deep oceanic trench like the Marianas trench) but a ways “downstream” from it; the sedimentary rocks need time to heat up and melt.
So this is how we get our continental crust (including phosphorus) back after it washes into the oceans! Asimov had no idea in 1959.
These account for almost every volcano out there, but of course there are two famous exceptions, Hawaii and Yellowstone. What accounts for them? Hotspots. Which I’ll get there later.
Volcanic lava tends to determine how explosive a volcano is. The more basaltic, the better; basaltic magma is very fluid and doesn’t have a lot of water trapped in it, so mid-ocean ridge volcanoes tend not to go “kablooey!” when they erupt. Near subduction zones, the magma is less basaltic (it has all that melted continental sediment in it after all) and has water trapped in it, so it tends to be explosive. As soon as that magma gets close to the surface the water in it flashes to steam and…well…(cued to 13:02):
Mount St. Helens was likely the largest landslide in recorded history. Worldwide. But it was by no means a superlatively large eruption as eruptions go. Big, but not humongous.
(The remainder of the video covers four other eruptions around the world, caught on camera.)
Also worth watching, the Smithsonian making itself useful (though you will want to stop it before it plays the next video):
Lava Types
There are two major types of lava flow, readily identifiable when they solidify. Logically enough they have Hawaiian names; the Hawaiians deal with lava like Inuit deal with snow.
The first is ‘a’a, roughly pronounced “ah, ah”. It tends to look chunky and jagged; the lava is a bit viscous. Then there’s pahoehoe (“pa hoy hoy”) which is much more smooth; it can look ropy because the top layer will get compressed and “scrunch up” as the still-liquid lava below it continues to flow. Here’s a picture of a new ‘a’a flow making its way across an older pahoehoe surface. The blocky chunks it is solidifying into are called clinkers.
Because lava tends to solidify at the top of the flow while the lower layers remain liquid, lava tubes can form, essentially caves through which lava once flowed. Here’s one in Hawaii:
you can see “step” lines in the walls, as later lava flows that didn’t fill the tube, used it as well.
Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho is probably one of the best places to see these sorts of things. It has cinder cones, lava fields that stretch to the horizon (it’s eerie to see almost no signs of life as far as you can see), pahoehoe and ‘a’a lava all over the place, and lava tubes. (And those are extremely unforgiving; I managed to bang my knee up pretty well tripping over something when I walked through one of the tubes–which was not nearly as smooth as the one in Hawaii; it was ‘a’a lava.)
Other Volcanic Stuff
Volcanic ash is the dusty stuff that gets ejected high into the atmosphere. It may not travel very far. When it comes down in thick layers it can consolidate into fairly soft rocks called tuff. (Tuff is sometimes erroneously called tufa, which is actually the name of a kind of marble.) Ash particles are 2mm or smaller, larger stuff gets labeled lapilli, at least until it reaches a diameter of 64mm.
Blobs of lava sent flying through the air are called volcanic bombs or lava bombs when they are more than 64 mm in diameter. They can fly many kilometers if they’re that small, but ones five to six meters across have been recorded, flying a few hundred meters. Here is an example from Kilauea:
If the eruption sends an already-solid rock through the air that would otherwise be a bomb, it’s a volcanic block. This example is from Cotopaxi in Ecuador.
Types of Volcanoes
There are quite a number of different types of volcanoes, including a number of types for volcanoes in the ocean–and I mean in the ocean, not above it–but the major ones are:
Cinder Cones. These are basically piles of small cinders, ash, clinkers that have spewed up vertically and fallen back to earth in a fairly neat, conical pile. They can range from tens to hundreds of meters tall. Mount Capulin in northeastern New Mexico is an example, they are also present in Craters of the Moon national monument in Idaho. (What’s a volcanic field doing in Idaho, nowhere near a plate boundary? Hot spots. Which I’ll get to later.)
Quite possibly the most famous cinder cone is Paricutin, in Michoacan State in Mexico. Picture this, a farmer in 1943 minding his own business when a vent in the ground opens up and starts spewing cinders. His name was Dionisio Pulido, and his account is:
At 4 p.m., I left my wife to set fire to a pile of branches when I noticed that a crack, which was situated on one of the knolls of my farm, had opened . . . and I saw that it was a kind of fissure that had a depth of only half a meter. I set about to ignite the branches again when I felt a thunder, the trees trembled, and I turned to speak to Paula; and it was then I saw how, in the hole, the ground swelled and raised itself 2 or 2.5 meters high, and a kind of smoke or fine dust – grey, like ashes – began to rise up in a portion of the crack that I had not previously seen . . . Immediately more smoke began to rise with a hiss or whistle, loud and continuous; and there was a smell of sulfur.
He–along with two whole towns–was SOL, his farm is now under a 424 meter tall cindercone (which did spew some lava). This happened over the span of nine years, and it has been dormant since then. Luckily only three people were killed.
Next we have the shield volcano. These will form when a volcano consistently erupts highly fluid, low viscosity lava, and have very gentle slopes. They’re named shield volcanoes because they reminded someone of one of those round hoplite shields (like Leonidas had), laying flat on the ground…just a low mound.
Hawaii is an example of a shield volcano. Here’s another in Iceland, named Skjaldbreidur…
…which is considerably easier to pronounce than Eyjafjallajökull, a troublemaker underneath a glacier. (Iceland Air, by the way, names its airplanes after Icelandic volcanoes.)
Mauna Kea/Hawai’i is the largest shield volcano on Earth, but Olympus Mons on Mars beats it handily. The total area within the escarpment is roughly the same as the country of Poland, and it is 21,900 meters tall (compare to Everest which is less than 9000, and to Hawai’i which measured from its base on the ocean floor, is 9330 meters tall.
And we can do combinations. Here’s a cinder cone that is in the San Francisco volcanic field near Flagstaff in Arizona…a nice symmetrical one, but the big black blotch upwards from it in the photograph is a basaltic lava flow from before the cindercone formed. (This field contains volcanoes anywhere between 1000 and 4 million years old. Mt. Humphreys (12,600 ft) is part of this field. The field is considered active, but likely not due for an eruption for a couple of thousand years.)
But probably the one you form a mental image of when you hear the word “volcano” is the stratovolcano…the type Mount St. Helens, and Ranier, and Shasta, and Hood, are.
Here is Mount Ranier:
It’s very prominent, when I first laid eyes on it on a road trip I immediately thought of “Fist of God” from Larry Niven’s Ringworld novels.
The internal structure will look something like this (vertically exaggerated):
Key to the diagram: 1) Large magma chamber 2) Bedrock 3) Conduit (pipe), 4) Base 5) Sill 6) Dike 7) Layers of ash emitted by the volcano 8) Flank 9) Layers of lava emitted by the volcano 10) Throat 11) Parasitic cone 12) Lava flow 13) Vent 14) Crater 15) Ash cloud.
These volcanoes tend to have a layered structure and in fact this is Broken Top, an eroded volcano in Oregon:
The crater at the top is often also known as a caldera, particularly if it’s big.
Another famous eruption in the Pacific Northwest is that of Mount Mazama. If you’ve never heard of that one, that’s because it is much more famous as Crater Lake. The 12,000 foot mountain erupted 7700 years ago–and it erupted so much that the magma chamber under the mountain was now empty. The peak of the mountain collapsed into the magma chamber, forming a caldera six miles across. The highest point on the rim of the crater is now 8,157 feet above sea level.
From the outside it’s an unassuming line of tree-covered peaks (they look like hills to me, honestly, since they don’t bust the tree line). From the inside, on the other hand:
I can attest that that is what the water actually looks like. This image has not been enhanced to exaggerate the color. The rim is hundreds of feet high or more. In the center is Wizard island, the result of a much smaller eruption a few thousand years ago.
Add it to your bucket list. I’m not joking, add it to your bucket list.
Volcanic Eruptions Ranked
Scientists will measure absolutely anything on a scale, and for volcanic eruptions they have the Volcanic Explosivity Index, or VEI, largely based on how much stuff the eruption spewed into the atmosphere.
Each step in the scale is ten times as much ejecta. Ten thousand cubic meters is a 1, a hundred thousand cubic meters a 2, and so on; at this rate when you get to a 5, that’s a cubic kilometer. The scale runs up to 8, 1000 cubic kilometers. When you realize that’s a cube six miles on a side, you realize that’s a LOT of crap spewing into the atmosphere.
So how do some famous eruptions stack up? Mt. St. Helens was a 5 (one cubic kilometer). Vesuvius in 79 CE was also a five. Pelee in 1902 was “only” a 4…but that volcano, on Martinque, destroyed the town of St. Pierre, killing 29,000-30,000 people almost without warning, the worst loss of life to a volcano of the 20th century. There were, by the way, three survivors. (That is not a typo. 3. Out of 30,000.)
Krakatoa, 1883, and Pinatubo, 1991, were VEI 6s, 10 cubic kilometers. Remember when the Phillipines kicked us out of the bases we had there? Well one of those bases got destroyed by that eruption.
Mazama was a 7, roughly 100 cubic kilometers of spew. Santorini in 1600 BCE was also a 7, and it was suggested it may have destroyed the Minoan civilization, but the timing isn’t quite right. There are Minoan ruins on what is left of that island, formerly Thera, now Santorini. And then there is Tambora, 1815. Tambora is on Sumbawa island, east of Java and Bali. Tambora’s eruption was heard 2600 kilometers away in Sumatra. In the northeastern US the next year, there was a persistent “dry fog” in the atmosphere from sulfur kicked up by this volcano, it dimmed the sun enough that people could see sunspots with their naked eyes. And that was the year without a summer; so much dust was in the upper atmosphere that massive crop failures were the result…world wide. It snowed June 6, 1816 in Albany, New York.
That was the biggest eruption in recorded history, but it is by no means the biggest eruption ever.
At a VEI of 8 we have Toba, on Sumatra, 74 thousand years ago, Taupo in New Zealand 26.5 thousand years ago, and, America is not to be outdone! Yellowstone, 2.1 Ma, and 640,000 years ago. (We’re due, folks…and the only safe place is Mars.)
Volcanic Plugs
One more thing I’ll cover, and that’s the subject of volcanic plugs. This is where lava hardens in the conduit of a volcano, and then the rest of the mountain erodes away.
By far the most famous of these is Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, made famous in Close Encounters of the Third Kind:
Aliens not included. [The wikipedia article on volcanic plugs hedges a bit and says many geologists believe that Devil’s Tower is a volcanic plug. Which means at least some do not.]
The striated look is because basalt likes to shrink and fracture into hexagonal columns, like this (the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland):
Wrapping Up
I said I’d talk about hot spots. And that’s true. I thought I’d do it today but I realized that subject is closely tied to a slightly deeper look at plate tectonics that I wanted to take. So I will (hopefully) do both next time. In the meantime I’ve given you quite a bit to digest already.