McCarthy 2.0 seems a vast improvement over Speaker Dungsmear. So here’s the question. Was he once a conservative with a little fire in the belly that got captured by the system and now is finding the bellyfire again? Or is this all completely under duress?

For the moment, it doesn’t matter which one. But some day it will matter, and we will have our answer.

Lenin’s Birthday

By the old Julian Calendar in effect when and where he was born, Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov was born on 22 April (Old Style), 1879 in the town of Simbirsk in Russia. Alexander II (the LIberator, for he freed the serfs) was tsar of Russia. Before Ulyanov was done, his name had become Lenin, Russia was becoming a charnel house, terrorized into submission to Marxism, and the stage was set for Stalin (formerly Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili).

And that town of Simbirsk is still named Ulyanovsk in Lenin’s honor. The constant hagiography under the Bolsheviks has resulted in many Russians continuing to regard Ulyanov as a hero.

The 20th was Hitler’s birthday; it’s rather amusing that Queen Elizabeth II and Catherine the Great both are wedged in between and have their birthday on the 21st (in Catherine’s case, again Old Style).

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 so-called populists stand for absolutely nothing except for going along to get along. That allows the Left to drive the culture and politics.

Given the results of our most recent elections, the Left will now push harder, and the RINOs will now turn even squishier than they were before.

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?

In Defense of Ranked Choice Voting

One of the biggest obstacles to direly-needed change is RINOs, and one of the weapons in their arsenal is the “Wasted Vote” argument.

Periodically a third party has arisen, trying to hold RINOs to account by putting pressure on them from outside of the party, since doing so from the inside has historically done very little good. But, even if you find a third party candidate who perfectly reflects your views, you’re likely to vote for the RINO anyway. Why? Because if you don’t, the Democrat might win, and that would be even worse. So if you vote for that third party (that few will vote for), you’re throwing your vote away and increasing the likelihood of the Democrat winning. (It’s half as much a gain for the Democrat, as actually voting for the Democrat would be. Not as much, but half as much. Because although you denied the R your vote, you did not flip your vote to the Democrat.)

The Republican Party Establishment knows you don’t love them. But they know you hate the Democrats worse, and they use that to continue to herd you into supporting them. With gritted teeth you cast your vote, but your vote counts the same whether you cast it enthusiastically. And the other alternative, pissing on the voting apparatus to express your actual feelings, is probably a felony.

But what if you could vote for that third party without increasing the chances of the Dem walking away with the prize?

This is what ranked choice voting, or instant runoff voting, can do provided it is properly implemented. (And this includes the votes, and only genuine votes, being counted honestly, of course. However, I’m going to compare it to what we have today, and pretend that is honestly done too. RCV can’t work if it’s not honestly administered, just like our current system isn’t working because it isn’t honestly administered.)

The idea behind RCV is to vote by expressing your order of preference. You could vote for the Patriot Party, then for the RINO Party as your second choice (and ignore the Democrat, the Green, the Overt Socialist Schmuckmonkey Party, etc).

What does this do? It nullifies the wasted vote argument. Your vote will be counted for the Patriot party, first, then instead of it being “wasted” when the Patriot Party loses, it ends up going to the RINO. Actually, it’s just barely possible that the Patriot Party would actually beat the RINO, if people weren’t all individually afraid to vote for it.

It’s just like the famous “Prisoner’s Dilemma” where your fear of other peoples’ actions prevents you from doing the optimal thing–and vice-versa. As long as Job Lowe is afraid to vote Patriot because he’s afraid you’ll vote RINO, you’ll have to vote RINO because you fear that Job Lowe will, because he fears you will.

So on the whole I like RCV. It gives you a no-risk way to vote against the RINO scum, and in favor of someone who deserves your vote.

The problem is, as done here in the US, it comes packaged with a “jungle primary.” A bunch of candidates get to put their name out there, and the top four (or so) candidates get onto the “main” ballot. This gives party establishments their way around the threat of a good third party bumping them off. Because they know that few people bother with primaries, and third parties don’t have the resources to run in a primary…so they throw two or three establishment hacks into the primary and they will probably beat the third party. The result is the RINOs end up with two of the four slots in the general election, and the Dems get the other two. Now there’s suddenly no third party candidate on the ballot at all.

If we were to combine RCV with the present system where each party could nominate exactly one candidate to appear on the November ballot, or at the very least, ensure minor parties could get onto the ballot with at least one candidate regardless of the primary, we would be getting somewhere, but the establishment is smarter than we like to give them credit for. They will support the jungle primary + RCV “solution” rather than the more appropriate one-candidate-per-party + RCV solution.

It’s not RCV that is the problem, it’s the primary structure grafted onto it.

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.

—Ayn Rand Lexicon (aynrandlexicon.com)

Justice Must Be Done.

Trump, it is supposed, had some documents.

Biden and company stole the country.

I’m sure enough of this that I put my money where my mouth is.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system. (This doesn’t necessarily include deposing Joe and Hoe and putting Trump where he belongs, but it would certainly be a lot easier to fix our broken electoral system with the right people in charge.)

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is pointless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud in the system is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

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.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

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

Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $2,005
Silver $25.42
Platinum $1,056.00
Palladium $1,589.00
Rhodium $8,450.00

This week, 3 PM MT on Friday, markets closed for the weekend

Gold $1,984.90
Silver $25.17
Platinum $1,134.00
Palladium $1,682.00
Rhodium $9,000.00

Gold was above 2000 still as of Friday morning, and got pushed down 21 dollars worth on Friday. Silver lost 21 cents on Friday. What I find interesting is the platinum group metals are starting to climb again.

Rocket Science

I’ve been exposed to rocket science in a formal setting. And I’ve been exposed to quantum mechanics. And many aspects of electrical engineering.

And I am here to tell you, rocket science ain’t rocket science, at least not by comparison.

A lot of what people call “rocket science” is really engineering, building devices that will work in a hostile environment. Hard vacuum (more of a vacuum than we can create here on Earth), radiation (both cosmic and solar-based), and temperature extremes. The simplest-seeming things can fail under those circumstances. And many materials we think of as “inert” will turn into bearded dragon poo up there. (No, not literally but you get my meaning.) Add people into the mix and then zero g –ahem, microgravity–becomes an issue, and the radiation protection becomes even more critical. And with people you have to build a pressurized environment, an enclosure strong enough to withstand an an enormous amount of outward force. 15 pounds per square inch doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s a ton per square foot. Every square foot. Yes, they can breathe a richer atmosphere at lower pressure, but the issue remains.

And all this has to be done as lightweight as possible. Which means, basically, that the Apollo astronauts landed on the moon in an aluminum “tin” can.

Why is weight an issue?

That goes back to actual rocket science.

By now I hope it’s abundantly clear that out in space, Newton’s first and second laws (objects in motion will remain in motion (and objects at rest will remain at rest) until acted on by an external force; and the force is proportional to the mass times the acceleration) are not just approximations. They hold. (And even here they do, but friction and a solid surface to stop our response to gravity and thus provide the sensation of weight introduce complications.)

Which means if you want to quit going endlessly around the same orbit, and want to go somewhere, you must apply a force in order to accelerate and change your speed.

By far the most common way to do this is with a rocket. There are solar sails and ion propulsion units, and they can be much more efficient than a rocket, but they must necessarily operate much, much more slowly. They can’t be used to go into orbit from the surface of the earth, because they don’t work fast enough to overcome the effects of the 1g pull near the surface. To go up, you need more than 1 g acceleration upwards; one g of it cancels gravity, the rest goes into increasing your speed. Solar sails and ion propulsion won’t do that.

The force usually ends up being supplied by a rocket; a rocket will change your velocity nearly instantaneously, which is how you change which orbit you’re in (if you’re in orbit) or accelerate to a speed high enough to be in orbit (if you’re not). It’s essentially a deliberate perturbation of an orbit.

People often wonder how a rocket can work out in the vacuum of space when there’s “nothing to push against,” in fact this is a common (and specious) argument in the quiver of those who deny the moon landings ever happened. The objection actually gets partial credit, because it acknowledges (even if it mis-applies) Newton’s third law of motion, which is that every action has an equal but opposite reaction. If you push against something, both you and it feel a push, in opposite directions; if you happen to be on roller skates you move away from what you pushed.

The fact is that the rocket moves forward simply because it flings its own exhaust out its tail end. The act of pushing the exhaust out, pushes the rocket forward; it changes speed in that forward direction.

It doesn’t have to be “exhaust” by the way; pushing any mass out the back will do the job. However, it happens that exhaust of burning fuel is by far the easiest thing to arrange for. When they want to be generic, they talk of “reaction mass” being the mass you push against to change your speed.

So let’s say you are sitting in a space capsule in orbit, and you want to change to a different orbit…and after doing all of the calculations, you find you must change your velocity by exactly one kilometer per second.

You and your capsule put together mass one metric ton, 1,000 kilograms or about 2200 pounds (mass). And let’s say this mass does not include the mass of the rocket fuel you happen to be carrying. So what if you have a metric ton of rocket fuel with you? If you can shove it away at 1 km/sec, you will also move at 1 km/second away from where you shoved it. On the other hand, if you only have half a metric ton of reaction mass…you gotta push it away at 2 km/sec.

This is from conservation of momentum. The mass of the fuel, times its velocity after the maneuver, must equal the mass of your craft, times its velocity. The two velocities will be in opposite directions, so they cancel each other. Zero total momentum before (0x0+0x0=0), zero momentum afterwards (1×1000+ -1×1000=0 or 2×500 + -1×1000=0).

But there’s a gigantic gaping hole in this analysis. And that is the fact that we can’t accelerate all of the fuel at once. We have to do it a kilogram at a time. So, returning to our metric ton of fuel at one kilometer a second, we’d expect each kilogram to speed us up by 1 meter per second; all 1000 kilograms would therefore give us one thousand meters, or one kilometer, per second.

Right?

WRONG.

The first kilogram of fuel, pushed out the back of the rocket at 1 km/sec, is having to push a spacecraft with a mass of 1,999 kg…the actual spacecraft plus the fuel that hasn’t been burned yet. NOT 1,000 kg. So it will barely accelerate the spacecraft half a meter per second! The second kilogram will have to accelerate a 1,998 kg spacecraft, and will do a little better as a consequence.

Only the last kilogram will produce the full 1 meter/second of change in velocity.

So we need more than a metric ton of fuel to do this, even if the exhaust velocity is 1 km/second.

And actually even this isn’t quite right becuase you can subdivide the kilograms into grams, each with a very slightly different effect; you can subdivide the grams into milligrams…you’ll get more accurate results, the lower you go, but honestly the only perfectly accurate answer is some sort of continuous calculation.

That sounds really, really hard. It’s like that numerical integration I was talking about a few weeks ago, with smaller and smaller step sizes. And indeed you could solve this that way, but you don’t have to. There’s a closed form solution.

But to see how that is, let’s work the problem in reverse.

Let’s start with the empty (or “dry”) spacecraft, 1000 kg. We know that at one km/second exhaust speed, it will take ever so slightly more than one kilogram of fuel to change our speed by 1 meter/second. To compute what it will take to do two meters per second, you can work it backwards: Assume your rocket is already doing one meter per second when you burn that kilogram+ of fuel to add on the second meter per second. But realize at the start of that your mass is 1,001+ kilograms, so in order to have done that first meter per second, you need enough fuel to accelerate 1001 kilograms; that will be 1.001+ kilograms of fuel.

You can imagine doing this a thousand times, adding a tenth of a percent of the mass of what you’ve already got to figure out what that particular meter per second of change in velocity is going to cost.

Now that I’ve phrased it that way…doesn’t that sound like compound interest?

We know how to handle that. In fact, we know how to handle continuously compounded interest (rather than periodic, step by step) so we can solve the issue of having to think about what each microgram of fuel does.

And it turns out, therefore, that to accelerate your spacecraft 1 km/second with fuel that has an exhaust velocity of 1km/second…you need not just 1,500 kg of fuel, no, you need 1,718.281828 kilograms of fuel.

YIKES! Almost two times as much fuel as actual spacecraft!

And it’s worse than that. You’re going to need a BIG tank to hold all that fuel, and the tank itself adds to the weight–or alternately, reduces the weight you can use for the astronaut, his life support, his food…and so on.

Well, I’ve talked around it a bit…but here it is. The equation at the heart of all of this is known, quite simply, as “the rocket equation.” There are several equivalent forms, which are solved for different things, but we’re interested in the mass of the fuel in this scenario, so let’s use this one:

This is usually credited to Константи́н Эдуа́рдович Циолко́вский…er, Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovskiy (usually spelled Tsiolkovsky but the Russian ends with their “iy” so I’ll stick with that…see my rant about Chaikovskiy a few weeks ago). [And yes, that’s a TS at the front so you will probably have this insane urge to make the T silent.] He derived the formula in 1903.

OK, let me unpack this a bit. Δv is the desired change in the rocket’s velocity (1 km/sec). [the triangle is the Greek letter delta and is commonly used in mathematics and science to indicate “change.” So the change in the rocket’s velocity is often called “delta-vee.”] That’s divided by v_e, the exhaust velocity (also 1 km/sec). The result of that division is 1, so you are now raising the mathematical constant e to the first power…which is just e. That is 2.718281828…it’s a transcendental number like pi (π) is, never falling into an endlessly repeating sequence and never ending. It’s a little bit easier to memorize the first few digits of, though, because the 1828 repeats itself (once) .

Now m_f can either be a reference to a RINO politician (I may not have made myself clear on how much I despise them), or it could be the “final” mass, i.e., the mass of the spacecraft after all the fuel is burned. And m₀ is the “starting” mass. The mass of the fuel is the difference between the two m numbers. So our final mass is 1,000 kg, and that must be multiplied by e to get the initial mass, which is 2,718.281828 kilograms. Subtract 1000 from that number to get 1,718.281828 kilograms fuel mass.

Now picture what happens with a mission where there are two 1 km/second burns. For the later of the two burns, you must start with 2,718+ kilograms total weight…so that is m_f for the first burn. Which means the total mass before the first burn must be e times that. Well, that’s e² times the original thousand kilogram dry weight of the spacecraft…which is 7,389+ kilograms, subtract a thousand for the dry spacecraft weight and you now need 6.398 tons of fuel. You get the same result, by the way, for a single 2 km/second “burn”; just put 2 in for Δv keeping v_e as 1, and you see you have an e² in the formula. That’s important: Many small burns (delta-vees) are the same as one big delta-V equal to the sum of all the small delta-vees. (If you think about it, that makes sense. Why does it matter to the rocket whether it fires continuously or intermittently to do the same job?)

You can see this is going in a really, really bad direction. The more delta-vee you need the more fuel you need…and it mounts up quickly! This is where compounding works against you, and believe me it sucks to be on the brown smelly end of that stick.

(If you’re thinking that (in spite of what I said about rocket science not really being rocket science) this sounds like pretty complex math, it is nothing compared to general relativity. Or quantum mechanics. Or electrical engineering. Where, OBTW it’s possible to raise e to a complex power involving the square root of minus 1…and some reaaaaally interesting stuff happens when you do that.)

There are some ways to mitigate this. Obviously…anything you can do to reduce the weight pays big dividends in reducing fuel mass. And if you can figure out a way to do your mission with a smaller delta-vee, that’s great too…this is why NASA loves gravity assists. Every bit of speed they can get out of a gravity assist allows them to make the spacecraft bigger–read, pack more scientific instruments on the spacecraft, OR use less fuel (a smaller rocket). Or some combination of the two. And this is why NASA sends returning astronauts through a fireball re-entry too: No fuel is used to slow down. Apollo would not have been possible if they had needed a 25,000 mile per hour delta-vee in fuel to land on Earth at the end…think about how that would affect the rocket equation!

But the most potent method is to increase the exhaust velocity. If you can make your exhaust velocity 2 kilometers/second, then going back to the first problem where you want to change your spacecraft’s velocity by 1 km/sec, you now have Δv/v_e = 1.0 km/sec divided by 2.0 km/sec and you’re now raising e to the 1/2th power (e^1/2)…which is to say you take the square root of e, and multiply your 1000 kg dry mass by that. The square root of e is 1.64872+. The initial mass of your spacecraft is now 1,648+ kilograms, not 2,718+ kilograms, and your fuel mass is 648+ kg, not 1,718+kg. Wow, you’ve saved over 62 percent of your fuel mass (almost exactly 5/8ths in fact), and you can have a smaller fuel tank or more other things in that spacecraft.

Of course when you decide to do a 2 km/sec delta vee, you’re back to needing 1,718 kg of fuel…but that’s much better than 6,398 kg!

Basically if you increase the exhaust velocity by some amount…you’ve increased the amount of delta vee from the same amount of fuel by the same percentage.

This is why rocket scientists…er, engineers, will sell their left testicle or ovary for a faster exhaust velocity.

OK so how do you do that? Your taking a mass (the mass of your rocket exhaust) and speeding it up. That’s kinetic energy, and thanks to conservation of energy, that energy must come from somewhere.

In a rocket, that comes from simple chemical energy. You burn the fuel. If your fuel is kerosene, and you burn it (with oxygen) your exhaust has a lot of energy in it, it will want to expand, the pressure builds…and you give it a nozzle to squirt out of. Voila! Exhaust velocity.

Robert Goddard used kerosene and liquid oxygen. (And, note: You have to carry the oxygen with you into space [which rather conspicuously has very little oxygen ready for use] not just the stuff you’re lighting on fire. Fortunately the oxygen counts towards the mass of the exhaust so it doesn’t really matter how much is oxidizer and how much is “fuel.”)

It turns out that what the fuel is makes a great big difference. You can calculate how much total momentum change (“impulse”) a certain weight of fuel (and oxidizer) will produce, and that becomes the “specific impulse” which is symbolized I_sp (not to be confused with an internet service provider). By the time you fiddle around with unit analysis, it ends up being measured in seconds. Yes, just plain seconds. But you can also look at it as the amount of time a certain weight of fuel can provide a thrust equal to that weight, which is seconds, also. The longer it does that, the more delta-vee it can impart to whatever it’s pushing.

You can in fact take the rocket equation, and work the opposite problem: If I have a certain amount of fuel, how much delta vee will it give me? You can rearrange and solve the above and get the other commonly seen form of the rocket equation.

The first two terms (to the left of the second equals sign) are the rearrangement (ln is the “natural log,” the reverse operation to raising e to a power). The second expresses v_e in terms of the I_sp of the fuel, instead of the exhaust velocity. g₀ is standard gravity (9.8 meters/second/second, or 32 feet/second/second) since the thrust is in pounds weight instead of pounds mass.

So I_sp makes a big difference, because exhaust velocity makes a big difference. What has the best I_sp out there?

There is often a theoretical maximum, but just simple inefficiencies sap it…so that’s something else rocket engineers can work on. But the best rocket fuel out there is liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, with a specific impulse of 450 seconds. This is what NASA used in the Saturn V, and in the Space Shuttle main engines (and is using in Artemis). It can be expensive to liquefy hydrogen–then you have to engineer systems that can take that cold as well as the heat from the burning fuel, but when you absolutely, positively have to wring everything out of a BIG rocket, it’s the way to go.

Other fuels do less. The solid rocket boosters on the shuttle had specific impulses of 250 seconds. Solid rocket boosters generally have low ISPs but they are dead simple, have a long shelf life (unlike liquid hydrogen, where if you scrub the mission you must de-fuel the rocket because you cannot refrigerate it in the tank…because refrigeration is heavy).

I’ve now explained why NASA aerobrakes, and does gravity assists. It’s not a virtuosic stunt, it’s absolutely necessary to maximize the amount of “stuff” you can send to Jupiter or Mercury or the Parker solar probe or…Apollo 11, where you can’t exactly reduce the weight of the astronauts to save fuel. [I’m sure they were encouraged to hit the restroom right before launch though.] The more you can do that sort of thing the better; which is why the advent of cheap computing has been a huge bonus…those seven-gravity-assist missions couldn’t have been planned with a slide rule.

One last thing…and hopefully by now it’s obvious. Why do rockets have stages?

Remember what I said about the (literally) exponentially increasing amount of fuel requiring bigger and bigger tanks? Well, there’s one way to mitigate that. And that’s to put the fuel in several tanks, and throw them away as you empty them since once they’re empty they’re just dead weight you do not want to have to push.

This works, and works well. We could not get to orbit, much less the moon, without doing this. The problem is, it’s expensive. You either throw away the rocket (old school) or recover the parts and rebuild it (new school, complicated work). It’d sure be nice if the rocket stayed intact going up and back down again, and just needed to be inspected and refueled…like an airliner. And it seems like we can almost do this.

But alas, we need more specific impulse. But 450 is as good as we’re going to get by chemical means. It turns out that specific impulse is higher the lighter the molecule of exhaust is, and you’re just not going to get anything lighter than water out of liquid propellants. So liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for the win!

But I said, by chemical means.

Experiments have been done in using a nuclear reactor to heat hydrogen (by itself) and of course hydrogen (by itself) will have a much higher specific impulse. Testing in the 1960s gave a specific impulse of 850 seconds! BUT…the reactor is heavy and it would really suck if one of those blew up in flight, say shortly after launch or shortly before landing. So we’ve been reluctant to pursue that further. There are other more pie-in-the-sky technologies with much higher specific impulses, but in general they tend to be very low thrust. (The fuel can change the delta v a lot…but it will take a long time…and we can’t use that to boost from the surface to Earth orbit. These would be great, though for use in spacecraft once they are out in space and have the luxury of time.)

OK, so there’s an introduction to rocket science and engineering.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

To conclude: My standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!

Remember Hong Kong!!!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

News Flash

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

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

But the past cannot actually be changed.

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s Go, Brandon!!

Hey China!

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

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

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

[Language warning]

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

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

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

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

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

You’re LOSING.

You LOSER.

You Chinese-bought ratfucking traitor.

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

His Fraudulency

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

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

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

Justice Must Be Done.

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

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

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

The Former Tax Day

Today used to be Tax Day. An abomination, to be sure. The Income Tax was one of a number of nearly simultaneous factors that came together in the 19-teens to push us further into decline (others being the Fed and direct election of senators). Oh, the Regressive Era. (No I didn’t misspell that. It was deliberate.)

But it seems like nowadays taxes are never due on the 15th. It used to be that they’d only slip it one day if it was a Sunday (Post Office won’t postmark it on a Sunday). Now it seems like it’s routinely the 18th, largely because of some special holiday in DC (that somehow affects the whole country anyway even though DC could practically fit in my back yard…or the back yard of someone living in Rhode Island even after I park my truck in it).

Tranheuser Busch

Those asshats either get the world, all time record for obtuseness…or this is deliberate somehow. And their namby pamby non-apology that amounts to a “We’re sorry you’re too much of a knuckledragger to appreciate what we did” simply underscores the stupid. It’d be like a 400 pound golfer wearing spikes tromping on your instep and being utterly clueless why you are screaming in pain.

Me Ducking Out On Doing A Science Post

Been hectic here; likely to continue to be. I’ll still be posting but “extra” content is likely to be more limited, at times even I can’t predict.

Someone on Friday posted a video that is part of a playlist titled “The Entire History of the Universe.”

It has largely (so far) concerned itself with the earliest times of the Universe, and a lot of the episodes are good discussions about things like string theory, brane theory and so forth–stuff I considered too speculative to cover in the physics posts.

But this one (until recently the latest) is a fairly good discussion of light.

Spot Prices.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

Gold $2,008.60
Silver $25.07
Platinum $1,017.00
Palladium $1,550.00
Rhodium $8,900.00

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $2,005
Silver $25.42
Platinum $1,056.00
Palladium $1,589.00
Rhodium $8,450.00

Gold was as high as $2,040 yesterday while I was looking. This morning it dropped below $2K for a while but has worked its way back over the $2K threshold to close.

Rhodium behaved almost the opposite, dropping during the week and then net climbing @250 on the last day, but (here the dissimilarity ends) also in this case ending below the prior week’s level.

Platinum and palladium, the two cobalt congeners, both a bit up. Silver, up. I get the sense that people are waiting to see if this really takes off…or doesn’t. I know on Friday someone posted a rumor that the organic fertilizer will be impacting the rotating ventilation device within the next couple of weeks.

DEAR MAGA: TGIF Open Thread 20230414

https://www.theqtree.com/2023/04/14/dear-maga-tgif-open-thread-20230414/#comment-1082026

Tense!

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

Language Warning

In the next piece I had to discuss a particular topic. Unfortunately, I couldn’t discuss it without naming it. Therefore I apologize in advance for having to do so, and apologize to anyone offended by the sight of the name.

RINO McDaniel

RINO McDaniel continues to infest the GOP. But RINO McDaniel isn’t the problem.

Let me be crystal clear on this, RINO McDaniel is a lower-than-whale-shit, piss guzzling ratfucking shit eating traitorous rancid syphillitic cunt. Her worth as a human being is substantially less than zero, any oxygen sucked into her lungs is wasted, and it would be, no matter what job she had.

I fear I haven’t been clear enough, but that will have to suffice.

But she is not the problem…or rather, she would not be a problem were it not for others. She’d still be as I have described, but we wouldn’t know who she is and would not care, because she could do no damage. She’d just be anonymous human refuse.

No, the real problem is the fact that a majority of the 168 top GOP people voted for her. And now that has happened five times so they cannot claim they didn’t know what she was.

In spite of the fact that under her “leadership” the party has deliberately sabotaged the will of its base, has deliberately refused to challenge blatant election fraud, had gone out of its way to ensure certain candidates do not get nominated, has diverted donor money to namby-pamby candidates who have all the electoral appeal of a puddle of dog vomit…and in general has done nothing whatsoever to help fix the problems that plague America.

However that last is to be expected; I cannot expect anyone who IS the problem to help FIX the problem.

RINO McDaniel would be powerless without an entire party leadership of the same mind as her. They want this dismal performance; they want to ignore the party base.

If she were to drop dead this instant, it would solve nothing as someone just like her would be elected by those same pustulous people.

According to Charlie Kirk, about 55 people voted against her, 10-12 wanted something different but were too chickenshit to do the right thing, and roughly 100 people voted for her enthusiastically, and even had the unmitigated gall to complain to Kirk about US. Fuck ’em. Rusty 12 gauge bore brushes would be too good for these arrogant pricks and cunts.

Every single one of those hundred is just as bad as she is. In other words, they are all worse than I described at the beginning of this piece. And no doubt those people in turn have people who supported them to be state party chairs and whateveritis they call the other two people from each state and territory who were voting.

It’s time to face up to the fact that the Republican party is effectively owned by the shit-eating RINOs. We’ve got more work to do, a lot more work, to make the GOP an instrument for the restoration of the United States of America. And that’s in addition to cleaning up our elections.

There’s no point in cleaning up elections just to elect ratfucking RINOs.

OK, hopefully now you will have some inkling of my true attitude towards RINOs. Sorry that words were inadequate to give you the full picture.

The Real Fascist is His Fraudulency Joe Biden*

*Or whoever has his hand rammed up that meat puppet’s ass.

Brandon (which I will use as a term for whoever is the power behind the Porcelain Throne) has thrown down the gauntlet…but in a way where most of America will never see it. The networks didn’t carry his tirade. CNN air brushed it (or whatever you call editing the red background) for its five viewers (who aren’t trapped in airports).

Luckily for me I live in Colorado, and therefore, despite my best efforts, I probably didn’t vote for Donald Trump.

Of course, for this purpose who I actually did try to vote for will be essential, and they undoubtedly know.

Come and get us, asswipes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h6ZZ28QtX4

Justice Must Be Done.

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

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Small Government?

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

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

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

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

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

Political Science In Summation

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

A Few Things We Cannot Blame on His Fraudulency

I am pretty sure Joe Biden had nothing whatsoever to do with the 30 Years War that ran from 1618-1648 and probably killed about a third of the people then living in what is now Germany.

Nor did he cause the collapse of either Roman empire (Western, 476 CE, Eastern 1453 CE). Nor the ignominious failure of most of the Crusades. Nor the collapse of Bronze Age civilization around 1200 BCE (including the collapse of the Minoans and the blowup of Santorini).

However, my utter lack of ability to imagine how he could possibly be responsible for these things is not a valid argument against them, so I await correction if appropriate.

His Truth?

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

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

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

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

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

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

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

(Paper) Spot Prices

Kitco “Ask” prices. Last week:

Gold $1,970.70
Silver $24.17
Platinum $1000.00
Palladium $1,551.00
Rhodium $8,000.00

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, markets have closed for the weekend. (This week they had the day off on Friday for Good Friday. Kudos to them for not even attempting to salvage a Monday by moving the holiday around, by the way. All that does is dump all the Monday suckage onto Tuesday.)

Gold $2,008.60
Silver $25.07
Platinum $1,017.00
Palladium $1,550.00
Rhodium $8,900.00

Yes. GOLD HAS BROKEN $2,000. It did so earlier this week, reaching as much as 2,030 or so, very close to the all-time record. It actually closed down on Friday-I-mean-Thursday and it is still above that psychological mark.

This could be the sign of really, really bad times. Yes, I have a fair quantity of metals that would hurt to drop on my foot because they’re heavy, BUT…the collapse of the dollar especially if all those overseas dollars come home would be a catastrophe. I’m not the type of person whose thought bubble is “I have prepared, you can suffer because you haven’t” with glee. And if it’s bad enough…then I am sure no one on a middle class budget (and that assuredly includes me, except when I don’t have even that) is truly prepared for it.

Science Break

I know what I want to write. I’ve even mapped it out in my head, a bit.

Just…no time yet, but the fact that I’m thinking about it makes it more likely to happen next time.

In the meantime, here’s some Čaykovskiy. (As I prefer to spell it; it’s more one-to-one phonetic with the original Cyrillic–though Chaikovskiy works too. The T is superfluous in English.)

I love the way she seems to be launching the orchestra at about 6:12. Which, by the way is one of the best moments in orchestral music.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

Reconsidering Things

Well you may have noted less output here from me, and less interaction. I’ve been doing some thinking.

And I’ve come to the conclusion that the cultural Left might just have a point.

As a white heterosexual male, I truly can have no idea what it’s like to be a person of color, I haven’t walked a mile in their shoes and seen first hand they way they are treated. No, not every white, but enough, treat them with obvious contempt and many just have a bias they are blind to. This does lead to a systemic sort of racism, and similar mechanisms exist with sex and sexual preference.

As such we simply can’t understand the level of offense Trump has committed by using Stormy Daniels then discarding her and then offering a relative pittance to her to shut up, thus devaluing her just because she is a woman and (of course) exercising his white, cis, hetero male privilege. Not only that he had the infernal gall to pay this small amount of money out of monies he shouldn’t have used for that purpose. He richly deserves whatever punishment the New York courts mete out.

Now you may want to argue with me about this, but first I’d like you to spend some time in introspection, to be sure you can truly say you don’t have an unconscious behavior pattern that could be causing issues.

But before you do that, scroll to the top of the page and read the damned date.

F*ck Donald Trump

Note: for purposes of just this one section, I’ve redefined the word “f*ck” to mean “heap tons of blessings on as a just and inadequate reward for all that he has done.”

But I had to write a headline that wouldn’t just give away the April Fool’s joke.

Oooookay, with the joke now over, (and the English language now reset to its normal values) we can proceed.

Joining The Herd Of Lemmings

I’ve had cause to consider a few things. Maybe we’re going about it the wrong way, and we need to ditch Trump

Yeah, NO

Trump all the way! Why? Because being hated by the people who hate him is a sign of impeccable character, that’s why.

The haters can go fuck themselves with rusty twelve gauge bore brushes. I’d prefer ten gauge but that’s kind of scarce, so…I’m willing to compromise.

The RINO’s Dilemma

The RINOs who who have burrowed in and taken over most GOP organizations, from the state down to local organizations, have quite a dilemma on their hands, and most of them have their heads too far up their asses to realize it.

OK, I’m not talking about the liberal in a Republican area, who knows they’re in the wrong party, but is there because it’s the only game in their town; they hope to capture a nomination someday, at which point they’re guaranteed to be elected…otherwise, they never will be. These people are a hazard in any heavily conservative area.

No, I’m talking about the guys who are a little bit conservative and want to do some good by going into politics, and they’re in a closely matched area, closely enough that they can join the party they are most aligned with and still have a chance. They think the Democrats…particularly the ones who end up running for office…are nuts.

They don’t think much better of the Deplorable types, either. A bunch of bumpkins whose hearts are in the right place, mostly…OK a bit extreme. But they think Deplorables can’t understand that first you have to get elected, then work within the system to change things…a slow process. They genuinely want many of the things Deplorables want…just not as much. The government is spending too much. Or they need to spend money on highways instead of welfare for illegal immigrants. But they want to work within the system to get these things done.

Or maybe they think things are pretty close to ideal right now, and they want to nail it in place.

The problem is, that means they don’t stand for anything in particular. And it shows. They’re about as unappetizing to the electorate as a puddle of dog vomit. The folks in the middle, who they think they are appealing to because they themselves are not extreme, would honestly prefer a clear-spoken radical to someone who qualifies everything they say to the point where they sound like they don’t believe anything at all.

The problem these “Mild RINOs” have, is they just can’t see that. And the reason they just can’t see that, is their entire sense of self-worth is tied up in not seeing that. In their minds, they’ve worked tirelessly for their party, to keep those crazy Democrats out…only to have to constantly fight with a small number of crazy Republicans–who are only liabilities if they end up as candidates. They’ve fought the good fight, and if they can just find the right candidate, someone with some charisma, they might stop the crazies…without being too beholden to the OTHER crazies. In the meantime it’s not working. What’s a responsible guy in politics to do?

They simply cannot understand that the Republicans can’t succeed as the party of nothing in particular. Not really in the past, and certainly not today when people are starting to realize that no matter what they do in the voting booth, the country is still about to fly off a precipice. If they did see it, they’d suddenly have two choices: Go away and let the GOP succeed, or stay and fight. But “go away” isn’t really an option, because what’s the point of having a party now owned by the crazies, win?

Well, they have a dilemma…and WE, therefore have a problem. And we would have that problem even IF they realized that they had a problem…that they were the problem.

No one ever thinks they are the bad guy. Even Epstein probably thought he was the good guy. Right up to the moment where he didn’t kill himself.

So if you ever wonder why these unappetizing dufuses cling on even when their fingernails are being left behind…that’s why. They don’t understand no one wants them, and can’t imagine that no one should want them. And oftentimes their greatest pride is in all the hard work they’ve done for the party. They’re not going to give that up; it’d be psychological suicide.

If you’ve worked with these people, there’s a good chance you like them and consider some of them your friends. But even if so…we’re going to have to give them a good, hard shove. Because America is more important than those milquetoasts’ egos.

Justice Must Be Done

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

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

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

Spot (i.e., paper) Prices

Last week:

Gold $1,978.30
Silver $23.31
Platinum $993.00
Palladium $1,507.00
Rhodium $9,300.00

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

Gold $1,970.70
Silver $24.17
Platinum $1000.00
Palladium $1,551.00
Rhodium $8,000.00

Apparently some (still) solvent bank decided to help bail out SillyCon Valley Bank, so the dollar strengthened and gold dropped a bit. But gold is still firmly in the upper $1900s as of the middle of the week. Silver meanwhile moved up quite a bit this week. I guess “they” were so busy suppressing gold they forgot about silver.

Fuck Joe B*d*n

Due to complaints about foul language, I’ve censored the most objectionable word in the title of this section.

B*d*n, you don’t even get ONE scoop of ice cream today.

(Please post this somewhere permanent, as it will continue to be true; the SOB will never deserve a scoop.)

Slingshots

Patched Conics

A few weeks ago I explained how most three (or more) body problems require a lot of iterative computation to solve and that such solutions must necessarily be approximate, even if initial conditions are known perfectly. (Which they never are.)

This isn’t that big a problem today; I know that an old Intel 80386 (even without a 80387 coprocessor), a reasonably up-to-date computer in the early 1990s, could do work like this. (The coprocessor just made it 20-30 times faster.) But back in the 50s, 60s and early 70s computer time was expensive. And the machines were a lot slower too, so they couldn’t just run the numbers as quickly as my bright shiny new 80386 did just a few years later. Thus you couldn’t just plug things in on a whim to see what would happen. Not if you were NASA and had other things for those computers to be doing.

So if you’re brainstorming missions, how do you get a sort of rough idea what can be done?

One method is called “patched conics.”

Let’s say you’re planning to land on the Moon. There are multiple steps involved: 1) Get off the earth. 2) Get into an orbit that will take you out as far as the moon’s orbit (you’ll have to time it so when you get to the moon’s orbit, the moon is actually there at that spot in its orbit instead of the other side of the earth). 3) Settle down into orbit around the moon. 4) You then send down a landing craft, and let it come back up, but in the meantime your main spacecraft stays in lunar orbit. 5) You break out of lunar orbit into one that returns to Earth. 6) Land on Earth.

We have Earth, Moon, and spacecraft. (Let’s give it a snappy name like, say, “Apollo.”)

Three body problem.

But…remember we’re just doing an approximation here, to check feasibility; once they decide they like the idea enough to really spend time on it, they will shove it through their expensive, stone-knives-and-bearskins computer. So we can treat it as three separate problems that can be solved readily.

First, the trajectory from Earth to Moon. That’s either an escape orbit, or a highly elliptical one. You just need to get to a certain point in space…the point where the moon’s gravity is stronger than Earth’s. And it’s straightforward to compute the spacecraft’s velocity at that point (pretending for a moment that there’s no moon there). Note that that is both a speed and a direction of motion, in Earth’s reference frame.

Now, leaving that velocity fixed, put the moon there. But also note that the moon is orbiting the earth too, and it has a velocity in Earth’s reference frame as well.

But now you change reference frames. You subtract the moon’s velocity vector from the spacecraft’s velocity vector, and get a new velocity vector, the velocity of the spacecraft in the Moon’s reference frame.

Now you ignore the earth, and pretend it’s a spacecraft-Moon two body problem. You’ll probably find that your spacecraft is in a hyperbolic (escape) orbit with respect to the Moon, so you’ll need to fire your thrusters to slow yourself down and drop into a nice, tidy lunar orbit. Note how much you have to change your velocity; that’s an absolutely key bit of information since that ultimately determines the rocket fuel you must bring with you (and if it’s too much, you’re not going to be able to do this mission). This process of slowing down and getting into a “regular” elliptical orbit is the process NASA used to call things like “Lunar Orbital Injection” but it has nothing to do with clot shots.

Coming back is the reverse process.

So note: 1) You can break a complex problem down into smaller pieces to get an approximate answer, and 2) Each piece works in the frame of reference of one large “primary” body.

So now maybe you’re getting a glimmering about why I ranted about Galilean relativity last time. Groundwork.

OK, let’s do another one. Let’s build a spacecraft named…hmmm…Pioneer 10 and send it on a flyby past Jupiter. If we put it on a big honkin’ rocket and make the probe as light as possible, we can put it into an elliptical orbit whose far end is a bit further than Jupiter’s orbit (but not as far as Saturn’s orbit). Now we just time it so it gets there when Jupiter is there and fly by, take a bunch of pictures, and radio them back to Earth.

Now we can alter the timing just a little bit and either aim for just ahead of Jupiter, or just behind it, as we cross Jupiter’s orbit. Either way, we’re close enough to take pictures and make a bunch of other observations at other wavelengths.

But let’s fly behind Jupiter and see what happens. And let’s do it in Jupiter’s frame of reference.

Note that our elliptical (non-escape) orbit about the sun, in Jupiter’s reference frame is a classic hyperbola, a Jupiter escape trajectory.

Jupiter’s direction of motion is shown in purple, left to right (but that’s kind of a misnomer in a diagram that’s in Jupiter’s frame of reference, where Jupiter is not moving). Pioneer 10 came in from the upper right, and exits, state lower right. All motion is counter-clockwise (including Jupiter’s motion when we look in the Sun’s frame of reference).

Here’s an animation of the same thing, showing all the Galilean satellites’ motion as well. If you watch the timing you’ll see it got fairly close to three of them, Io (red), Europa (blue), Ganymede (yellow), and not so close to Callisto (cyan)

You’ll note that when the spacecraft leaves Jupiter’s little mini-solar-system, its velocity is in almost the same direction as Jupiter’s velocity, left to right.

Which means when we switch back to the Sun’s reference frame, we’ve now added Jupiter’s velocity to Pioneer 10’s velocity.

Let’s see that in the Sun’s reference frame…which is slightly rotated with respect to the other diagrams, as you’ll see Jupiter isn’t heading nearly horizontally across this diagram but is instead moving a bit upwards as well at the time of the encounter.

Pioneer 10 just got a speed boost…a big one. Notice that just before the encounter it’s moving at 10.4 km/second relative to the sun, just afterwards it’s doing 23 km/second.

That’s enough to escape the sun, and in fact Pioneer 10 is the first object we’ve ever managed to send permanently outside of our solar system.

Now you might have noticed, in the Jupiter-centered diagrams Pioneer 10 comes in from the upper right, but in the Sun-centered digram it looks as if it’s coming in from the upper left. But again, notice that Jupiter is moving faster than Pioneer 10 at that point…so it’s catching up to it, and from Jupiter’s point of view therefore it comes in from the upper right.

Just like that slow moving asshole in the left lane on the Interstate, as you’re driving east, appears from your point of view to be moving west; first he’s east of you, then he’s west of you.

Pioneer 10 will likely pass by a faint red-dwarf star named HIP 117795 in about 90,000 years (at a distance of 0.75 light years…not terribly close!), but we won’t be receiving any data from it; it was powered by a nuclear battery which appears to have died. The radioisotope that powered it has decayed away. (It still kicked the Energizer bunny’s ass all over the solar system.) Our last successful contact with it was in 2003, at over 80 AUs (over twice the distance to Neptune).

(“Why didn’t they just put a solar panel on the thing?” someone asks. Are you kidding? At 12 billion miles from the Sun? Go stand in the corner and write “solar panels only work 1/6400th as well at 80 AUs and couldn’t power even so much as a light bulb the size of my brain” 100 times.)

OK, let’s have some real fun. Let’s time it really carefully, so that on its way out the solar system after getting kicked in the butt by Jupiter, it then flies past Saturn.

Well, that’s Pioneer 11.

We actually timed that one in such a way that Jupiter sent Pioneer 11 back closer to the sun, on its way to Saturn!

Also note we got it out of the plane of the planets’ orbits a bit; those white lines show you how far above and below the plane Pioneer 11 got.

Here are Jupiter and Saturn centered animations. Note that Pioneer 11 also got timed perfectly to get some really close shots of three of the Galilean moons (all but Europa).

The same trick was done by Voyager I in the 1980s, and Voyager II not only went past Jupiter and Saturn, it went past Uranus and Neptune! FOUR gravity assists! So far it’s the only spacecraft to visit either of those two ice giant planets.

Voyager I is right now the farthest manmade object out there, it passed up Pioneer 10 in 1998. Pioneer 10 is still second-farthest, though…except that sometime this month Voyager 2 will pass it as well. (They’re in completely different directions, so they won’t be waving “Hi” to each other.)

We’re expected to lose contact with these other spacecraft in the next few years, just as we have with Pioneer 10. Again, the radioisotope that powers the spacecraft is decaying away.

Note that in all of these cases, we just had to get the spacecraft to Jupiter; gravity assists did the rest of the work. And back then, getting to Jupiter was all we could manage without those assists.

As far as Uranus and Neptune are concerned, they have to be lined up just right to be able to benefit from these multiple assists. We just happened to luck out and have this happen just as NASA was figuring out second-generation deep space probes (the Voyagers are much improved over the Pioneers). The alignment is very infrequent, less than once a century (Uranus takes 84 years to orbit the sun, it will have to orbit for more than that to “lap” Neptune again, because Neptune is in a 165 year orbit.)

But there is one other spacecraft on an escape trajectory, and that’s New Horizons, which did a flyby of Pluto. (We went from having very fuzzy, pixelated pictures from Hubble…to having razor sharp pictures of Pluto in a matter of weeks. Before Hubble Pluto was literally a dot on a black and white photo. That’s what I saw as a kid; now I have an actual globe of Pluto. Astounding!) In this case, the spacecraft was light enough that we were able to launch it directly into a solar escape trajectory. We could have sent it directly to Pluto, however we decided to use a gravity assist from Jupiter to cut five years or so off the travel time. (Ironically, we got more data from New Horizons on its flyby of Jupiter than we did from its Pluto flyby.)

But I am going to pause here to emphasize a key point. To speed up you pass behind the planet. In doing so, the spacecraft pulls backward on the planet, slowing it down just the tiniest, tiniest bit…giving the momentum to the spacecraft. This isn’t free; the planet is being ransacked of momentum. But the planet is so much larger that we’ll never be able to measure the difference. (It’s another one of those femtometer type things.)

What happens if you pass in front of the planet? Well, the spacecraft slows down. And this is useful if you want to visit the inner solar system. Mercury can be just as tricky to get to as the outer planets, because in order to drop the perihelion of a spacecraft’s orbit, you have to slow down, a lot. And if you want to go into orbit around Mercury and study it for a while, you need to bring along fuel to do the orbital “injection” which means you need a bigger rocket…or you need to do some gravity assists.

The Mariner 10 mission to Venus and Mercury, of course, used a gravitational assist from Venus to get to Mercury. More recently, however, MESSENGER was sent to orbit Mercury, and used no less than six gravity assists to get itself slowed down enough to do so, one of Earth, two of Venus, and three of Mercury itself. That took seven years of travel time.

Hold onto your hats. The speed of this one is the same as the others…but Mercury orbits a LOT faster than Jupiter:

And we’ve also used inner planets to go to the outer planets. The Galileo probe was sent to orbit Jupiter, but first it got an assist from Venus and two from Earth; it even sent us pictures of Earth as it flew by. Cassini, which orbited Saturn, got assists from Venus, Earth, and (of course) Jupiter. Juno, another Jupiter orbiter, got an assist from Earth.

And of course we’ve now sent probes to the Sun…well we can’t get too close to it, but Parker Solar probe has done five assists off of Venus with two more to come.

A lot of NASA and the ESA’s space achievements, particularly orbiters around other planets, would simply have been impossible without these gravity assists. As computing power increases, we can plan more and more elaborate combinations of gravity assists to do things we couldn’t have before. Who would have imagined a Saturn Orbiter way back when?

But why? Why do we have to do such ridiculous amounts of hoop jumping to do these things? Why not just build a bigger dang rocket?

Next time…

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

McCarthy 2.0 seems a vast improvement over Speaker Dungsmear. So here’s the question. Was he once a conservative with a little fire in the belly that got captured by the system and now is finding it again? Or is this all completely under duress?

For the moment, it doesn’t matter which one. But some day it will matter, and we will have our answer

Giving Our “Love” To the RINOs and the Dipshits Going After O’Keefe

And OBTW you dipshits may have won the battle of O’Keefe…but he’s making sure you find that what you are holding is worthless bearded dragon poop. I hope you enjoy the fruits of conquest.

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 so-called populists stand for absolutely nothing except for going along to get along. That allows the Left to drive the culture and politics.

Given the results of our most recent elections, the Left will now push harder, and the RINOs will now turn even squishier than they were before.

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?

In Defense of Ranked Choice Voting

One of the biggest obstacles to direly-needed change is RINOs, and one of the weapons in their arsenal is the “Wasted Vote” argument.

Periodically a third party has arisen, trying to hold RINOs to account by putting pressure on them from outside of the party, since doing so from the inside has historically done very little good. But, even if you find a third party candidate who perfectly reflects your views, you’re likely to vote for the RINO anyway. Why? Because if you don’t, the Democrat might win, and that would be even worse. So if you vote for that third party (that few will vote for), you’re throwing your vote away and increasing the likelihood of the Democrat winning. (It’s half as much a gain for the Democrat, as actually voting for the Democrat would be. Not as much, but half as much. Because although you denied the R your vote, you did not flip your vote to the Democrat.)

The Republican Party Establishment knows you don’t love them. But they know you hate the Democrats worse, and they use that to continue to herd you into supporting them. With gritted teeth you cast your vote, but your vote counts the same whether you cast it enthusiastically. And the other alternative, pissing on the voting apparatus to express your actual feelings, is probably a felony.

But what if you could vote for that third party without increasing the chances of the Dem walking away with the prize?

This is what ranked choice voting, or instant runoff voting, can do provided it is properly implemented. (And this includes the votes, and only genuine votes, being counted honestly, of course. However, I’m going to compare it to what we have today, and pretend that is honestly done too. RCV can’t work if it’s not honestly administered, just like our current system isn’t working because it isn’t honestly administered.)

The idea behind RCV is to vote by expressing your order of preference. You could vote for the Patriot Party, then for the RINO Party as your second choice (and ignore the Democrat, the Green, the Overt Socialist Schmuckmonkey Party, etc).

What does this do? It nullifies the wasted vote argument. Your vote will be counted for the Patriot party, first, then instead of it being “wasted” when the Patriot Party loses, it ends up going to the RINO. Actually, it’s just barely possible that the Patriot Party would actually beat the RINO, if people weren’t all individually afraid to vote for it.

It’s just like the famous “Prisoner’s Dilemma” where your fear of other peoples’ actions prevents you from doing the optimal thing–and vice-versa. As long as Job Lowe is afraid to vote Patriot because he’s afraid you’ll vote RINO, you’ll have to vote RINO because you fear that Job Lowe will, because he fears you will.

So on the whole I like RCV. It gives you a no-risk way to vote against the RINO scum, and in favor of someone who deserves your vote.

The problem is, as done here in the US, it comes packaged with a “jungle primary.” A bunch of candidates get to put their name out there, and the top four (or so) candidates get onto the “main” ballot. This gives party establishments their way around the threat of a good third party bumping them off. Because they know that few people bother with primaries, and third parties don’t have the resources to run in a primary…so they throw two or three establishment hacks into the primary and they will probably beat the third party. The result is the RINOs end up with two of the four slots in the general election, and the Dems get the other two. Now there’s suddenly no third party candidate on the ballot at all.

If we were to combine RCV with the present system where each party could nominate exactly one candidate to appear on the November ballot, or at the very least, ensure minor parties could get onto the ballot with at least one candidate regardless of the primary, we would be getting somewhere, but the establishment is smarter than we like to give them credit for. They will support the jungle primary + RCV “solution” rather than the more appropriate one-candidate-per-party + RCV solution.

It’s not RCV that is the problem, it’s the primary structure grafted onto it.

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.

—Ayn Rand Lexicon (aynrandlexicon.com)

Justice Must Be Done.

Trump, it is supposed, had some documents.

Biden and company stole the country.

I’m sure enough of this that I put my money where my mouth is.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system. (This doesn’t necessarily include deposing Joe and Hoe and putting Trump where he belongs, but it would certainly be a lot easier to fix our broken electoral system with the right people in charge.)

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is pointless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud in the system is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

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.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

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

Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $1,868.90
Silver $20.63
Platinum $971.00
Palladium $1,468.00
Rhodium $10,100.00

This week, 3 PM MT on Friday, markets closed for the weekend

Gold $1,990.30
Silver $22.70
Platinum $985.00
Palladium $1,495.00
Rhodium $10,000.00

Gold has resumed its climb. Almost seventy bucks on Friday alone. Silver up almost a dollar today, too. There’s no obvious specific headline for this…I think it’s just people worried about what comes next. Palladium isn’t moving much…and that’s one whose primary value is industrial; it’s not a “safe haven” nor especially traditional (It was only discovered in 1802, about the same time as rhodium in 1804).

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

To conclude: My standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!

Remember Hong Kong!!!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

News Flash

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

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

But the past cannot actually be changed.

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s Go, Brandon!!

Hey China!

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

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

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

[Language warning]

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

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

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

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

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

You’re LOSING.

You LOSER.

You Chinese-bought ratfucking traitor.

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

His Fraudulency

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

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

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

Justice Must Be Done.

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

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

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

Spot Prices.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

Gold $1,857.50
Silver $21.35
Platinum $989.00
Palladium $1,512.00
Rhodium $10,850.00

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $1,868.90
Silver $20.63
Platinum $971.00
Palladium $1,468.00
Rhodium $10,100.00

Gold went up 2 percent today, after threatening to drop below $1800. (Silver and platinum went up too, roughly as much percentage wise) I noticed as I was editing (and changing the prices from five weeks ago) that gold had not moved much from five weeks ago, and overall just a bit up from last week but everything else (even silver) is down. So basically, all metals were going down, but then today gold (and only gold) made up five weeks of losses. Silver had been hit more than gold in the last five weeks, apparently, since it’s still a buck and a half below the 5 week old price.

When comparing to last week, gold is the only thing that is up…and when gold goes up and nothing else follows, it’s being sought as a safe haven.

The two purely industrial metals (palladium and rhodium) were down today, especially rhodium which fell six percent.

I think this all means people are very nervous about the economy…maybe those rumors of bank failures are telling; certainly manufacturing seems to be in trouble too.

.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

Language Warning

In the next piece I had to discuss a particular topic. Unfortunately, I couldn’t discuss it without naming it. Therefore I apologize in advance for having to do so, and apologize to anyone offended by the sight of the name.

RINO McDaniel

As you no doubt know, RINO McDaniel got re-elected to RNC Chair Friday. I hope no one has already managed in the intervening time to suppress that memory; if so I apologize for the PTSD trigger.

RINO McDaniel isn’t the problem.

Let me be crystal clear on this, RINO McDaniel is a lower-than-whale-shit, piss guzzling ratfucking shit eating traitorous rancid syphillitic cunt. Her worth as a human being is substantially less than zero, any oxygen sucked into her lungs is wasted, and it would be, no matter what job she had.

I fear I haven’t been clear enough, but that will have to suffice.

But she is not the problem…or rather, she would not be a problem were it not for others. She’d still be as I have described, but we wouldn’t know who she is and would not care, because she could do no damage. She’d just be anonymous human refuse.

No, the real problem is the fact that a majority of the 168 top GOP people voted for her. And now that has happened five times so they cannot claim they didn’t know what she was.

In spite of the fact that under her “leadership” the party has deliberately sabotaged the will of its base, has deliberately refused to challenge blatant election fraud, had gone out of its way to ensure certain candidates do not get nominated, has diverted donor money to namby-pamby candidates who have all the electoral appeal of a puddle of dog vomit…and in general has done nothing whatsoever to help fix the problems that plague America.

However that last is to be expected; I cannot expect anyone who IS the problem to help FIX the problem.

RINO McDaniel would be powerless without an entire party leadership of the same mind as her. They want this dismal performance; they want to ignore the party base.

If she were to drop dead this instant, it would solve nothing as someone just like her would be elected by those same pustulous people.

According to Charlie Kirk, about 55 people voted against her, 10-12 wanted something different but were too chickenshit to do the right thing, and roughly 100 people voted for her enthusiastically, and even had the unmitigated gall to complain to Kirk about US. Fuck ’em. Rusty 12 gauge bore brushes would be too good for these arrogant pricks and cunts.

Every single one of those hundred is just as bad as she is. In other words, they are all worse than I described at the beginning of this piece. And no doubt those people in turn have people who supported them to be state party chairs and whateveritis they call the other two people from each state and territory who were voting.

It’s time to face up to the fact that the Republican party is effectively owned by the shit-eating RINOs. We’ve got more work to do, a lot more work, to make the GOP an instrument for the restoration of the United States of America. And that’s in addition to cleaning up our elections.

There’s no point in cleaning up elections just to elect ratfucking RINOs.

OK, hopefully now you will have some inkling of my true attitude towards RINOs. Sorry that words were inadequate to give you the full picture.

The Real Fascist is His Fraudulency Joe Biden*

*Or whoever has his hand rammed up that meat puppet’s ass.

Brandon (which I will use as a term for whoever is the power behind the Porcelain Throne) has thrown down the gauntlet…but in a way where most of America will never see it. The networks didn’t carry his tirade. CNN air brushed it (or whatever you call editing the red background) for its five viewers (who aren’t trapped in airports).

Luckily for me I live in Colorado, and therefore, despite my best efforts, I probably didn’t vote for Donald Trump.

Of course, for this purpose who I actually did try to vote for will be essential, and they undoubtedly know.

Come and get us, asswipes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h6ZZ28QtX4

Justice Must Be Done.

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

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Small Government?

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

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

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

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

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

Political Science In Summation

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

A Few Things We Cannot Blame on His Fraudulency

I am pretty sure Joe Biden had nothing whatsoever to do with the 30 Years War that ran from 1618-1648 and probably killed about a third of the people then living in what is now Germany.

Nor did he cause the collapse of either Roman empire (Western, 476 CE, Eastern 1453 CE). Nor the ignominious failure of most of the Crusades. Nor the collapse of Bronze Age civilization around 1200 BCE (including the collapse of the Minoans and the blowup of Santorini).

However, my utter lack of ability to imagine how he could possibly be responsible for these things is not a valid argument against them, so I await correction if appropriate.

His Truth?

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

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

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

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

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

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

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

(Paper) Spot Prices

Kitco “Ask” prices. Last week:

Gold $1,812.50
Silver $20.86
Platinum $919.00
Palladium $1,490.00
Rhodium $11,100.00

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

Gold $1,857.50
Silver $21.35
Platinum $989.00
Palladium $1,512.00
Rhodium $10,850.00

And now, they’re going up. One could make a lot of money in this market, simply by buying low and selling high, but the trick that’s hard to learn (I never did!) is timing.

Three Bodies

So far with the occasional exception everything I’ve discussed has been “straight” Newtonian two body astrodynamics. Aside from perturbations due to irregular shapes, under these circumstances an orbit is unchanging. If something is in an elliptical orbit with such-and-such a semi-major axis (size) and eccentricity (shape) at some inclination, some longitude of the ascending node, and some argument of perigee (all discussed in the first few parts of this series), then it will stay that way, forever.

What I didn’t mention is the sixth element, which defines where on the ellipse the object is. That can be stated as some time it was at periapsis, or how long since a reference time (the epoch) it has been since it was at periapsis (“time since periapsis passage”)

Once you know that number plus the others, you can literally calculate where the satellite is at any given time…an hour from now, a billion years from now, a billion years ago (if it has been in that orbit for that long). If the epoch is midnight, 1 January 2000, and the satellite is in an orbit whose period is three hours, and at the epoch the satellite was at apoapsis, then, well that’s half an orbit, so time since periapsis passage is 1.5 hours, even for some date a billion years in the future it’s easy…in this case, because the satellite orbits exactly eight times in a day, its position at midnight any day is the same. It’s at apoapsis. (If it’s not this tidy, you can divide number of days since epoch by the orbital period…and keep the remainder.) Now there is a complicated way to turn any arbitrary time since the satellite was last at apoapsis into a position in the elliptical orbit. but the point is, it’s “closed form” and you can readily compute it for any time without being concerned with all the intervening times between epoch and that time.

Fairly routine.

Put in a third body, and all this tidiness goes right out the window. Given three bodies, in certain locations traveling at certain speeds in certain directions at some time, there is no formula to tell you where the three bodies will be…not even thirty seconds later!

There are some extremely special cases…imagine five bodies spaced equally far apart, marking the vertices of a giant pentagon in the sky. If they’re all moving in exactly the right way, you’ll simply see them all going in circles and the five points of the pentagon will simply rotate around the center of the pentagon. You can calculate positions by computing how many revolutions have occurred since your reference time. (But that has to be set up deliberately.) And there are others too.

But generally speaking…no formula.

Now given that this is the real-life case, how on (or off) Earth do we handle this?

There’s no formula to describe, say, the solar system with the sun, eight planets, and innumerable asteroids, Kuiper Belt objects, comets and so forth, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be computed (in practice they only bother with the more prominent objects).

Consider: Start with your three objects in certain positions traveling in certain directions at certain speeds.

You can compute, at that instant, the forces acting on each object, because of the other two (or more, if there are more) objects. That’s a simple matter of computing the force between the first object and each one of the other objects with Newton’s law of gravitation, then adding them up. You can turn that into accelerations, and then you can apply those accelerations to the initial positions and velocities…for a very small period of time.

It’s straightforward to compute where the objects will be after that very short period of time, and how fast they will be traveling. But now positions and speeds have shifted slightly. You have new positions and velocities. So do it again: compute new forces, and apply them to the newer situation. Compute the new situation, and repeat. Again, and again and again, until you get to the time you’re interested in trying to predict. In a way, it’s a bit like a stop-motion claymation animation.

This is called numerical integration because you’re doing computations and successively accumulating the results.

There is of course a problem: Your steps won’t be entirely accurate, because you’re assuming things don’t change during your interval. But in fact the positions, velocities and forces change continuously, not step by step. So your first computation will be a little bit off; the second one starts with a situation that’s slightly wrong, so the result of it will be a little bit more wrong because it too introduces new errors, and so on.

You can try to alleviate this by making your intervals shorter and shorter, but every time you halve the interval, you double the amount of steps you need to compute. But you can make the interval as small as you need to, to get the accuracy you want.

There are also some other tricks to make it more accurate, one called the trapezoid rule and one called the Simpson rule (and there are others); unfortunately those terms only make sense if you’re using numerical integration to approximate the area under a curve; but they apply to this much more complicated six-dimensional problem as well. (If interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_integration. If not interested, there is still information there to read.)

Which should bring up a question in your mind. I just got through telling you we can’t compute the exact answer, so, given that numerical integration gives you an approximation, how can you tell how close the approximation is?

There are two methods. One is you experiment with decreasing step sizes. When it gets to the point where the answer doesn’t change much even if you divide the step size by (say) ten, your step size is probably so small the accumulated errors are insignificant.

Or you can apply numerical integration to a two body problem, one you know the answer to, run it for the same length of time, and cut the step size until the error is acceptable. Then you’ll have a good notion what step size will work..

I actually had to write a numerical integrator for orbital mechanics once, and I “calibrated” it by setting it to work computing a circular orbit for one period. So I just kept decreasing the step size until the spacecraft “returned” to a position less than a millimeter off from its starting point. That was good enough to attack the short-duration three body problem I was really interested in.

But as you probably noticed…you need a computer to do this.

NASA had to do this sort of thing in the 1960s when computer time was very, very expensive (and the computers were slow), so they really didn’t want to mess with it until they knew it was worthwhile. So checking out a planned probe to (say) the moon, which involved three bodies, earth, moon, and probe (and maybe–OK, definitely–include the sun too), you would want to be fairly sure what your approximate answer would be before you got started; you’d be doing this computation to get the exact answer, once you know from the approximation that the mission is possible given the rockets you have available.

So that means there had to be methods to do an approximate plan, at least one to let you know whether the mission was feasible; methods that might take a day or two with a slide rule (still cheaper than a computer back then) but not use a computer. And those methods do exist.

And that’s for a future post. But in the meantime I can leave you with some eye candy. The numerical integration method is not limited to three, or a dozen, or even a million bodies, provided you have the computing power to do it.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is actually traveling toward M 31, the Andromeda galaxy (or it toward us, depending on how you look at it), and in about 5 billion years they will collide. (to give you an idea of scale, the two galaxies are each roughly 100,000 light years across and they are about 2 million light years apart, so right now you can set two quarters about 20 inches apart and get a reasonably to-scale diagram of the situation,) It’s not really a big deal. The stars within a galaxy are so far apart compared to their sizes, that there might not be any collisions between the individual stars. But what will happen is that under the influence of the other galaxy’s gravity, stars will be sent flying out of their galaxy and then what is left over will coalesce into “milkdromeda.” Hundreds of billions of stars are involved. To analyze this astronomers can put a hundred thousand or a million representative stars in each galaxy (perhaps a bit more into Andromeda because it’s larger than the Milky Way) and…run the sim, for several billion years of simulation time. This is a lot of computer time, even today, but there are supercomputers that can “crunch” the numbers.

In this video, the Milky Way is on the left, and Andromeda is on the right. I’ve seen ones with longer run times, and what happens is the two “cores” eventually coalesce into one core…and about 50 percent of the stars remain to be part of the new galaxy.

Of course we will never be able to verify the accuracy of that (by the time it happens, this column will have been forgotten for 4,999,999,999.99 years), but we can find other pairs of galaxies in the process of colliding right now, and you’ll see similar looking things, like below:

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

Joining The Herd Of Lemmings

I’ve had cause to consider a few things. Maybe we’re going about it the wrong way, and we need to ditch Trump

Yeah, NO

Trump all the way! Why? Because being hated by the people who hate him is a sign of impeccable character, that’s why.

The haters can go fuck themselves with rusty twelve gauge bore brushes. I’d prefer ten gauge but that’s kind of scarce, so…I’m willing to compromise.

The RINO’s Dilemma

The RINOs who who have burrowed in and taken over most GOP organizations, from the state down to local organizations, have quite a dilemma on their hands, and most of them have their heads too far up their asses to realize it.

OK, I’m not talking about the liberal in a Republican area, who knows they’re in the wrong party, but is there because it’s the only game in their town; they hope to capture a nomination someday, at which point they’re guaranteed to be elected…otherwise, they never will be. These people are a hazard in any heavily conservative area.

No, I’m talking about the guys who are a little bit conservative and want to do some good by going into politics, and they’re in a closely matched area, closely enough that they can join the party they are most aligned with and still have a chance. They think the Democrats…particularly the ones who end up running for office…are nuts.

They don’t think much better of the Deplorable types, either. A bunch of bumpkins whose hearts are in the right place, mostly…OK a bit extreme. But they think Deplorables can’t understand that first you have to get elected, then work within the system to change things…a slow process. They genuinely want many of the things Deplorables want…just not as much. The government is spending too much. Or they need to spend money on highways instead of welfare for illegal immigrants. But they want to work within the system to get these things done.

Or maybe they think things are pretty close to ideal right now, and they want to nail it in place.

The problem is, that means they don’t stand for anything in particular. And it shows. They’re about as unappetizing to the electorate as a puddle of dog vomit. The folks in the middle, who they think they are appealing to because they themselves are not extreme, would honestly prefer a clear-spoken radical to someone who qualifies everything they say to the point where they sound like they don’t believe anything at all.

The problem these “Mild RINOs” have, is they just can’t see that. And the reason they just can’t see that, is their entire sense of self-worth is tied up in not seeing that. In their minds, they’ve worked tirelessly for their party, to keep those crazy Democrats out…only to have to constantly fight with a small number of crazy Republicans–who are only liabilities if they end up as candidates. They’ve fought the good fight, and if they can just find the right candidate, someone with some charisma, they might stop the crazies…without being too beholden to the OTHER crazies. In the meantime it’s not working. What’s a responsible guy in politics to do?

They simply cannot understand that the Republicans can’t succeed as the party of nothing in particular. Not really in the past, and certainly not today when people are starting to realize that no matter what they do in the voting booth, the country is still about to fly off a precipice. If they did see it, they’d suddenly have two choices: Go away and let the GOP succeed, or stay and fight. But “go away” isn’t really an option, because what’s the point of having a party now owned by the crazies, win?

Well, they have a dilemma…and WE, therefore have a problem. And we would have that problem even IF they realized that they had a problem…that they were the problem.

No one ever thinks they are the bad guy. Even Epstein probably thought he was the good guy. Right up to the moment where he didn’t kill himself.

So if you ever wonder why these unappetizing dufuses cling on even when their fingernails are being left behind…that’s why. They don’t understand no one wants them, and can’t imagine that no one should want them. And oftentimes their greatest pride is in all the hard work they’ve done for the party. They’re not going to give that up; it’d be psychological suicide.

If you’ve worked with these people, there’s a good chance you like them and consider some of them your friends. But even if so…we’re going to have to give them a good, hard shove. Because America is more important than those milquetoasts’ egos.

Justice Must Be Done

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

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

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

Spot (i.e., paper) Prices

Last week:

Gold $1,843.20
Silver $21.81
Platinum $930.00
Palladium $1,583.00
Rhodium $11,900.00

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

Gold $1,812.50
Silver $20.86
Platinum $919.00
Palladium $1,490.00
Rhodium $11,100.00

Industrial metals down…that’s not good news for the economy…well, actually, it’s simply not news for the economy; we all know it’s in the crapper. But gold and silver still decline, because in the foreign exchange markets the dollar is still strong (largely due to high interest rates here).

Fuck Joe B*d*n

Due to complaints about foul language, I’ve censored the most objectionable word in the title of this section.

B*d*n, you don’t even get ONE scoop of ice cream today.

(Please post this somewhere permanent, as it will continue to be true; the SOB will never deserve a scoop.)

Another Conjunction

You might recall the Great Conjunction of December 21, 2020, where Jupiter and Saturn got so close to each other in the sky (as seen from Earth) that you could literally look at both of them at the same time in a telescope. (What a boon for lazy astronomers!)

This coming Wednesday we have a similar situation with Jupiter and Venus, again in the evening sky after sunset. Similar, but by no means close enough for both of them to be in the same view in a telescope. You can still see a nice little alignment shortly after sunset looking west; Jupiter will be furthest above the horizon, and bright. Venus will be closer to the horizon, and even brighter. (There was hype about this on this last Wednesday, too, because the moon was nearby that night.) They will get within a half a degree of each other, which is less than the width of the full moon.

Venus and Jupiter are the two brightest objects in the night sky, other than the Moon.

Beyond The Simple Cases

Distributed Gravitational Mass & Tidal Forces

Orbital Mechanics VI

Thus far in talking about astrodynamics, I’ve been careful to consider only two bodies (a satellite and its primary), and I’ve been assuming they’re both point masses.

Neither of these assumptions is ever actually true. Because we live in a universe with more than two things in it, and nothing other than a black hole is a point mass–with the entire mass of the object all at one single point in space (and if we are dealing with black holes, Newton’s laws go out the window anyway, at least close in to the black hole).

However in many cases the effects from third, fourth, and other bodies are very very minor and there are actually conceivable cases where you can assume a point mass even when it isn’t.

The first one seems obvious. If other bodies are far away, they won’t have much gravitational influence. (People arguing that the positions of the planets at the moment of birth actually matters have to contend with [or more commonly, ignore] the fact that the obstetrician or midwife has more gravitational influence on the newborn than any other planet ever will.)

The second simplification, that you can sometimes pretend a large body is actually a point mass, is much less obvious.

Here is Newton’s law of universal gravitation, in mathematical form:

And if I were to translate that into plain English, it would read, “The force due to gravitation between two point masses is proportional to the product of their masses, divided by the square of the distance between them, and multiplied by the gravitational constant.”

What this form of the equation doesn’t address is the direction of the force; it’s directed from one object to the other along the straight line between them.

But there’s that awkward “point mass” thing again. What if it’s not a point mass?

What you do then, is (mentally) divide the object (let’s stick with the primary, since it’s much bigger than the satellite) up into much, much smaller pieces, then do this computation for each piece, including accounting for the direction, then add them all up. You’ll get a more precise answer the smaller you make your pieces, but you’ll also do more work because there are more pieces to do the computation for. And if you’re wondering how to add forces in different directions, that’s where vectors come into play (it’s pretty easy actually).

So let’s say you’re aboard a satellite near Earth, and you’re looking out the window at the earth. What’s the sum total of all of the gravitational attractions, of each sandgrain in the Australian outback, of every beer stein in England, of the iron at the earth’s core, and everything in between?

Hmmm, tricky. Or maybe not. Maybe we can sneak up on it.

Let’s replace the earth with a hollow sphere of, say, iron. The sphere is a perfect sphere, the iron is of uniform density, and the shell is of uniform thickness. (Imagine a very, very large ping pong ball made of iron instead of plastic.)

It turns out that under these circumstances you can do various mathematical tricks and shortcuts (these would be tricks and shortcuts that bear the name “integral calculus”) to discover that the aggregate attraction of that entire sphere is the same as another hypothetical object, a point mass at the center of that sphere, weighing the same as the entire iron shell. It makes no difference how thick that shell is, it makes no difference what it’s made out of–balsa wood, platinum, glass, whatever…as long as it’s of uniform density. It can be swapped with a point mass at the center of the shell.

[As a side note, it can also be shown that if you are inside the sphere, anywhere inside it, the net gravitational force is zero. If you’re at the very center, obviously, the mass on one side cancels the mass on the other (they’re the same, and at the same distance, but in opposite directions). But even if you’re near the shell somewhere, you have a small amount of matter close to you in one direction, and lots more matter in the other direction, but farther away…and they cancel each other out again. So the entire inside of the sphere is one big Zero Gravity zone.]

This is what you get when you divide that hollow sphere up into little pieces and add up their gravitational influences. And Newton did this…he invented calculus, in part, to be able to do this. (And yes, Leibniz was also inventing calculus about the same time, but Newton didn’t know about that, so he had to do it himself.)

Now back to talking about the earth. The earth is made up of layers, the crust, the mantle, the outer and inner cores. They’re each of fairly uniform composition, but no two layers…or even depths below ground within the same layer are quite the same. If nothing else lower spots within the same layer are denser because they’re under more compression. (The iron at the earth’s core is notably compressed and is denser than iron on the surface.)

So you can divide the earth into layers, like an onion, treat each of them like a hollow sphere, use Newton’s result above…and what you find yourself doing is adding point masses, all at the center of the earth, to get a total…which is to say, you’re going to end up with the equivalent of a point mass, as massive as the earth, at the center of the earth. Note: you don’t need to know what’s inside the earth for this to work, but you do have to assume that the density profile is the same in every direction out from the center of the earth (which is equivalent to saying that the onion layers will each be uniform).

So this is why you can treat a typical big round astronomical body as if it were a point mass.

Well, almost. In fact you can do it with objects far away. If you’re so far away from an object that it looks like a point to you, you can treat it as one.

But if you’re close to Earth, really really close, then the fact that it’s not a perfect sphere starts to tell.

Most importantly the earth rotates. Because it spins on its axis, centrifugal force makes Earth bulge a bit at the equator. (The same effect is used to make round disks of dough for pizza crusts; the pizza maker tosses a lump of dough in the air with a spin on it to get it to flatten out.)

That bulge will pull on satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and it does so quite a lot, causing orbits’ longitude of the ascending node to shift. The effect can cause the satellite to be 500 miles away from where it “should” be, in just one day. If you pick precisely the right size of orbit, you might even get the ascending node to shift through 360 degrees over the course of a year. This means that the orbit will basically always maintain the same orientation with respect to the sun; these are called “sun synchronous” orbits.

Even without the bulge, the Earth has continents and oceans, and there’s just enough difference in density between those items that even they can perturb a satellite. I talked about geostationary orbits, but in fact most locations above the equator will suffer from perturbations from the small irregularities in the shape of the earth, and a satellite in GEO will actually drift a little bit if it doesn’t use its thrusters for stationkeeping.

The moon is even more irregular; it has “mass concentrations” as if it were a gigantic lump of pudding with bowling balls rather than raisins. I remember being told when I was studying this stuff in college, that the effect of all those “mascons” was that a satellite in low lunar orbit simply wasn’t stable and would eventually crash into the moon.

So much for what happens in a close orbit when the primary is at least somewhat irregular.

What happens if the satellite is irregular?

Imagine a telephone pole in Low Earth Orbit.

Unless it is in precisely the right orientation, one end of the telephone pole will be slightly closer to the earth than the other. Because it IS slightly closer, it will feel earth’s gravity a bit more strongly than the other end. They’re physically attached to each other, and the telephone pole as a whole is moving with the center of gravity (which is what is “in orbit” around Earth). The center of gravity feels no force, because it’s responding freely to gravity. It’s in free fall. Every other spot on and within that telephone pole feels a slight force, the extra gravitational pull from being closer to earth, or the deficit from being further.

Anyhow, since the near end of the pole feels more force towards Earth, and the farther end of the pole feels less force..the whole telephone pole will eventually rotate about its center of gravity, so that it points towards/away from Earth. It’s not much, but there’s no other force to counter it, not even friction. And even after it has done that rotation, the near end and far end feel a very slight “tugging” force, as if some giant were to grab each end of the telephone pole and try to stretch it.

The name for this phenomenon might be surprising: it’s known as a tidal effect. Yes, as in ocean tides. Because they are caused by the same thing. The side of the earth closest to the moon feels more gravity; the side away from the moon feels less gravity. Water can flow freely in response to this so it tends to pile up at both ends; one end feels a net attraction to the moon, the other end feels a net repulsion.

How much is this apparent “stretching” force? Let’s say the length of the telephone pole is 2L; so the near end is L units closer to earth than the center of the pole, and the far end is L units farther away. So if, at some moment, the telephone pole is at distance a from the center of the earth, what happens? The force due to gravity of the center of mass of the telephone pole is proportional to 1/a². But the near end of the pole will feel a force that is 1/(a-L)², and the far end will feel a force that is 1/(a+L)². The apparent stretching force is the difference between these two, so it’s going to be proportional to 1/(a-L)² – 1/(a+L)². Now, doing a bunch of algebra, this will simplify to: 4aL / (a⁴-2a²L²+L⁴). Now, a is much, much larger than L, and a⁴ is much, much, much larger than L⁴, so you can approximate that gigantic mess on the bottom with just a⁴. Cancelling, the stretching force is proportional to L/a³.

So tidal effects have an inverse cube effect going on. Move your telephone pole to twice the distance (from the center of the earth), and the tidal effect is 1/8th what it was before (not one half, or even one quarter). But it’s also proportional to L; double the length of the pole, you will double the tidal effect.

OK, so imagine something like the moon. It feels a tidal effect. In fact the moon’s shape is such that tidally it should always point the same face towards earth, and it does. In the billions of years since it formed, whatever rotation it started out with has gone away under the relentless, never ending pull from the tidal effect caused by Earth.

Of course we know the moon has a tidal effect on Earth. Is it trying to pull the Earth into a situation where the Earth always presents the same face towards the moon? Yes it is, and that is one reason the Earth is, very gradually, slowing its rotation down, resulting in having to add leap seconds here and there over the years to keep our clocks synchronized with Earth’s rotation. The earth is 81 times as massive as the moon, though, so the moon has 81 times as much work to do slowing Earth down to tidally lock it. Nevertheless the loss of Earth’s rotational angular momentum is causing a rise in the Moon’s angular momentum (angular momentum is conserved, so if Earth loses it, something else must gain it), so the Moon is slowly receding from Earth. (This has been measured by bouncing lasers off reflectors the Apollo astronauts left on the moon.)

The four “big moons” (or “Galilean moons” of Jupiter are all tidally locked to Jupiter in the same way the moon is to Earth. Pluto and its satellite Charon are almost the same mass, each is tidally locked to the other. Seen from the surface of Pluto, Charon never rises nor sets; seen from the surface of Charon, Pluto never rises or sets, either; each of the two objects appears stationary from the other, just like, on the surface of the Moon, Earth does not appear to move; if it’s above the horizon to the west where you’re standing…it will stay there.

Imagine, though, if the Moon were much closer to Earth. Really close. Like, so close that when standing on that spot on the moon closest to earth, the tidal force equals the Moon’s surface gravity.

Nothing would hold you to the moon then; you could just drift off. And that would be true of the lunar soil and rocks nearby too; they would just driff off since there’s no net force holding them to the moon. (And the same would be true on the far side of the moon too, since it feels the same tidal force away from the center of the moon.)

The moon could, if it were even closer to earth, actually be disassembled, since now objects on the surface would be actively pulled away from it!

We think this is how Saturn’s rings formed. Some object got too close to Saturn and was pulled apart by the tidal forces. Or perhaps the “stuff” in orbit around Saturn when Saturn formed simply couldn’t form a moon in the first place! (But the rings themselves are slightly unstable and won’t last more than a couple of hundred million years, which argues for them being formed well after Saturn was.)

Tidal forces can get really strong. Near a black hole for instance. Since a black hole is a point mass, greater, perhaps even much, much greater than the sun’s mass, you can get very, very close to something with very strong gravity. And remember it’s an inverse qube law…getting very, very close means having a LOT of tidal force.

Even enough to rip you apart, if you get close enough. Or anything else for that matter. Astronomers call this “spaghettification” (no, I’m not joking), this alludes to the fact that anything will be stretched until it looks like a strand of spaghetti…and then it will be stretched even more.

Right now astronomers are watching a gas cloud being pulled into the black hole at the center of our galaxy and it, sure enough, is being stretched as it gets closer and closer. I can’t seem to link to the video (and it’s on msn.com so that’s just as well), but it actually labels the gas cloud as being “spaghettified.”

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!