RTFM

That’s an acronym meaning Read The Flippin’ Manual, except it’s not “Flippin'” there in that word starting with F.

The manual is the Supreme Law of the Land, the United States Constitution.

Article II, Section I describes, in the 2nd-4th paragraphs, the means of choosing a President. The third paragraph was replaced by the 12th amendment, but the other two are still current. The fifth paragraph gives the qualifications (including the famous natural born citizen clause). The sixth paragraph discusses succession, but was modified by the 25th amendment.

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

US Constitution, Article II, Section 1, 2nd Paragraph

The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.

US Constitution, Article II, Section 2, 4th Paragraph

The second paragraph seems pretty straightforward; legislators get to determine how the electors get picked. In every case, they’ve chosen to defer to a vote of the people in a state. Each party picks a slate of electors who will vote for their nominee, when you cast your ballot for president, you’re really voting for that slate of electors. The fourth paragraph simply states that Congress gets to pick the date on which the electors are chosen, and the date on which they themselves assemble to vote.

There are grounds for complaint here about the 2020 election, since in many states the Legislature’s rules weren’t followed by the election bureaucrats. I know of less controversy regarding Paragraph 4 being violated, though some have tried to claim that with Congress having set Nov 3rd as the date last year, the selection process had to stop at midnight that night.

Congress’s rules for picking electors and when they vote.

The law that Congress passed in order to pick dates is now codified in Title 3 of the United States Code. In fact Title 3 is entirely about the Presidential Election.

Sections 1 and 2 read:

The electors of President and Vice President shall be appointed, in each State, on the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November, in every fourth year succeeding every election of a President and Vice President.

Whenever any State has held an election for the purpose of choosing electors, and has failed to make a choice on the day prescribed by law, the electors may be appointed on a subsequent day in such a manner as the legislature of such State may direct.

US Code Title 3, sections 1 and 2

Section 2 appears to obviate the complaint about the count not having ended at midnight, provided that the individual state’s law allows for it.

Sections 5 and 6 are more painful, but they basically boil down to requiring the states to certify, to the federal government, the names of the electors. Section six mentions votes cast, but it’s votes cast for the electors, not the votes cast by the electors.

If any State shall have provided, by laws enacted prior to the day fixed for the appointment of the electors, for its final determination of any controversy or contest concerning the appointment of all or any of the electors of such State, by judicial or other methods or procedures, and such determination shall have been made at least six days before the time fixed for the meeting of the electors, such determination made pursuant to such law so existing on said day, and made at least six days prior to said time of meeting of the electors, shall be conclusive, and shall govern in the counting of the electoral votes as provided in the Constitution, and as hereinafter regulated, so far as the ascertainment of the electors appointed by such State is concerned.

Section 5

It shall be the duty of the executive of each State, as soon as practicable after the conclusion of the appointment of the electors in such State by the final ascertainment, under and in pursuance of the laws of such State providing for such ascertainment, to communicate by registered mail under the seal of the State to the Archivist of the United States a certificate of such ascertainment of the electors appointed, setting forth the names of such electors and the canvass or other ascertainment under the laws of such State of the number of votes given or cast for each person for whose appointment any and all votes have been given or cast; and it shall also thereupon be the duty of the executive of each State to deliver to the electors of such State, on or before the day on which they are required by section 7 of this title to meet, six duplicate-originals of the same certificate under the seal of the State; and if there shall have been any final determination in a State in the manner provided for by law of a controversy or contest concerning the appointment of all or any of the electors of such State, it shall be the duty of the executive of such State, as soon as practicable after such determination, to communicate under the seal of the State to the Archivist of the United States a certificate of such determination in form and manner as the same shall have been made; and the certificate or certificates so received by the Archivist of the United States shall be preserved by him for one year and shall be a part of the public records of his office and shall be open to public inspection; and the Archivist of the United States at the first meeting of Congress thereafter shall transmit to the two Houses of Congress copies in full of each and every such certificate so received at the National Archives and Records Administration.

Section 6

The Electors Vote

Finally, The actual vote by the electors takes place, and the results are sent to the President of the Senate, sections 7-10

The electors of President and Vice President of each State shall meet and give their votes on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December next following their appointment at such place in each State as the legislature of such State shall direct.

Section 7

The electors shall vote for President and Vice President, respectively, in the manner directed by the Constitution.

Section 8

(This would be as specified in Amendment XII, which we’ll get to.)

The electors shall make and sign six certificates of all the votes given by them, each of which certificates shall contain two distinct lists, one of the votes for President and the other of the votes for Vice President, and shall annex to each of the certificates one of the lists of the electors which shall have been furnished to them by direction of the executive of the State.

Section 9

The electors shall seal up the certificates so made by them, and certify upon each that the lists of all the votes of such State given for President, and of all the votes given for Vice President, are contained therein.

Section 10

The electors shall dispose of the certificates so made by them and the lists attached thereto in the following manner:

First. They shall forthwith forward by registered mail one of the same to the President of the Senate at the seat of government.

Second. Two of the same shall be delivered to the secretary of state of the State, one of which shall be held subject to the order of the President of the Senate, the other to be preserved by him for one year and shall be a part of the public records of his office and shall be open to public inspection.

Third. On the day thereafter they shall forward by registered mail two of such certificates and lists to the Archivist of the United States at the seat of government, one of which shall be held subject to the order of the President of the Senate. The other shall be preserved by the Archivist of the United States for one year and shall be a part of the public records of his office and shall be open to public inspection.

Fourth. They shall forthwith cause the other of the certificates and lists to be delivered to the judge of the district in which the electors shall have assembled.

Section 11

[In case someone doesn’t realize this: The “President of the Senate” is the Vice President, at the current time that’s Mike Pence. Or is it? If it’s not him…is there any provision for who is “acting” VP until Trump can nominate, and congress approve, a successor?

UPDATE: Sylvia (she of the shovel) made a point that makes me think this is the wrong question. It’s not “acting VP” we are after, but rather “acting President of the Senate.” (That’s a description, not a formal title.) I strongly suspect that the President Pro Tem steps up when there is no President of the Senate available. As of right now, that President Pro Tem is Chuck Grassley.]

Sections 12 and 13 talk about what happens if the state’s slate of electors isn’t received by the President of the Senate by the 4th Wednesday in December; in essence he goes to the secretary of state for that state and asks him for HIS copy of the certificate; if that fails he then goes to the judge in that jurisdiction.

Section 14 basically says if the messenger doesn’t deliver, he forfeits $1000.

What I don’t see here is any sort of thing Pence had to do by some date in December to reject the certificates he had. There was an awful lot of noise about that for about two days, and whatever it was that Pence was (not) supposed to do, he didn’t do it so a lot of people got upset with him. For what, precisely?

Are some people supposedly on our side making up their own laws here to fit a narrative?

Twelfth Amendment: The Rest of the process.

The original process from Article II, Section I called for each elector to cast two distinct votes for President, neither vote carrying more weight than the other. Whoever came in first would be the next President, whoever came in second became the Vice President. However, one thing our Framers didn’t anticipate (or maybe they did but they certainly didn’t want) were political parties, and this process could, and did, lead to bitter rivals being elected President and Vice President in 1796. So the Twelfth Amendment was passed by Congress, sent to the states, and was ratified by September of 1804.

The Electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President, and they shall make distinct lists of all persons voted for as President, and of all persons voted for as Vice-President, and of the number of votes for each, which lists they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate;–the President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted;–The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice. [And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President.–]The person having the greatest number of votes as Vice-President, shall be the Vice-President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed, and if no person have a majority, then from the two highest numbers on the list, the Senate shall choose the Vice-President; a quorum for the purpose shall consist of two-thirds of the whole number of Senators, and a majority of the whole number shall be necessary to a choice. But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

Amendment XII to the United States Constitution. The bit in the brackets was superseded, in turn, by the XXth Amendment.

Essentially they now had the electors vote for President and Vice President separately, and they modified the rules slightly for what to do if no one got a majority.

Speaking of which: “The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed” would mean that the winner must get 270 votes or more to win at this point in the process. As far as I can discern, no one is disputing that 538 electors have been appointed. Maybe that dispute will be taken up on the 6th of January. And this is probably what American Thinker is imagining Pence could do on Wednesday. If he refuses to acknowledge their appointment somehow, then that reduces the aggregate number of electoral votes.

It doesn’t look, at the moment, like someone’s going to fail to get a majority, but here’s what happens if no presidential candidate gets 270 or more: and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice.

In other words, the House drops what it is doing, and picks a president from the top three electoral vote winners. However, each state’s delegation casts one vote, so Wyoming has exactly as much to say as does California. At least two thirds of the states (34 or more) must have at least some of their Reps present for this to proceed (the quorum) and the winner must get the votes of at least 26 states. (Not a majority of those present, a majority of all states.)

This doesn’t seem like it would be much of a problem for Trump, provided we can get to that part of the process, because most state delegations are majority Republican. Except of course that I wouldn’t necessarily trust a bunch of RINOs to vote for him. On the other hand their other two options are Biden, and whoever comes in third in electoral votes.

I have heard nothing whatsoever about a third candidate getting any electoral votes from faithless electors. Seven or eight people switched their votes last time. (Countering this point is the claim that the electors vote by secret ballot; I don’t believe this is actually the case as 1) it’s not specified anywhere that they do this and 2) it would be impossible for those states who require the electors vote for their party’s candidate to apply that law. And I do know that some electors last time were replaced on the spot when they refused to vote for Trump or Hitlary.)

(Last time around, Colin Powell got three electoral votes and was therefore in third place. I believe someone was trying to set up an attempt to put him in the White House as a compromise choice if the election were kicked to the House–which it wasn’t.)

Who is third this time around? Is anyone third this time around? Does anyone know? The one source I have (Wikipedia) states there weren’t any. (Take that for what it’s worth.)

But in order to even get to a point where this matters, Joe Biden has to lose a bunch of electoral votes between now and Wednesday. How might this be accomplished?

Run On Legalese

Back to Title 3. Now we’re up to Section 15. And someone ought to be beaten by a rubber hose for this massive run-on pile of verbalistic schiff.

Congress shall be in session on the sixth day of January succeeding every meeting of the electors. The Senate and House of Representatives shall meet in the Hall of the House of Representatives at the hour of 1 o’clock in the afternoon on that day, and the President of the Senate shall be their presiding officer. Two tellers shall be previously appointed on the part of the Senate and two on the part of the House of Representatives, to whom shall be handed, as they are opened by the President of the Senate, all the certificates and papers purporting to be certificates of the electoral votes, which certificates and papers shall be opened, presented, and acted upon in the alphabetical order of the States, beginning with the letter A; and said tellers, having then read the same in the presence and hearing of the two Houses, shall make a list of the votes as they shall appear from the said certificates; and the votes having been ascertained and counted according to the rules in this subchapter provided, the result of the same shall be delivered to the President of the Senate, who shall thereupon announce the state of the vote, which announcement shall be deemed a sufficient declaration of the persons, if any, elected President and Vice President of the United States, and, together with a list of the votes, be entered on the Journals of the two Houses. Upon such reading of any such certificate or paper, the President of the Senate shall call for objections, if any. Every objection shall be made in writing, and shall state clearly and concisely, and without argument, the ground thereof, and shall be signed by at least one Senator and one Member of the House of Representatives before the same shall be received. When all objections so made to any vote or paper from a State shall have been received and read, the Senate shall thereupon withdraw, and such objections shall be submitted to the Senate for its decision; and the Speaker of the House of Representatives shall, in like manner, submit such objections to the House of Representatives for its decision; and no electoral vote or votes from any State which shall have been regularly given by electors whose appointment has been lawfully certified to according to section 6 of this title from which but one return has been received shall be rejected, but the two Houses concurrently may reject the vote or votes when they agree that such vote or votes have not been so regularly given by electors whose appointment has been so certified. If more than one return or paper purporting to be a return from a State shall have been received by the President of the Senate, those votes, and those only, shall be counted which shall have been regularly given by the electors who are shown by the determination mentioned in section 5 of this title to have been appointed, if the determination in said section provided for shall have been made, or by such successors or substitutes, in case of a vacancy in the board of electors so ascertained, as have been appointed to fill such vacancy in the mode provided by the laws of the State; but in case there shall arise the question which of two or more of such State authorities determining what electors have been appointed, as mentioned in section 5 of this title, is the lawful tribunal of such State, the votes regularly given of those electors, and those only, of such State shall be counted whose title as electors the two Houses, acting separately, shall concurrently decide is supported by the decision of such State so authorized by its law; and in such case of more than one return or paper purporting to be a return from a State, if there shall have been no such determination of the question in the State aforesaid, then those votes, and those only, shall be counted which the two Houses shall concurrently decide were cast by lawful electors appointed in accordance with the laws of the State, unless the two Houses, acting separately, shall concurrently decide such votes not to be the lawful votes of the legally appointed electors of such State. But if the two Houses shall disagree in respect of the counting of such votes, then, and in that case, the votes of the electors whose appointment shall have been certified by the executive of the State, under the seal thereof, shall be counted. When the two Houses have voted, they shall immediately again meet, and the presiding officer shall then announce the decision of the questions submitted. No votes or papers from any other State shall be acted upon until the objections previously made to the votes or papers from any State shall have been finally disposed of.

Title 3, Section 15.

At 1 PM on January Sixth, Four appointed “tellers,” two senators and two reps, in the presence of both the House and Senate, presided over by the President of the Senate, open the states’ votes in alphabetical order, and read them off. Last time around, they simply rotated; I remember one of the Senators was Klobuchar. This is normally a ritual; they were even reading from a prepared script.

The President of the Senate then accepts the vote of the state…at which point, it’s final for that state. There is no recourse.

But before that happens, objections can be made from the floor. “Upon such reading of any such certificate or paper, the President of the Senate shall call for objections, if any. Every objection shall be made in writing, and shall state clearly and concisely, and without argument, the ground thereof, and shall be signed by at least one Senator and one Member of the House of Representatives before the same shall be received. When all objections so made to any vote or paper from a State shall have been received and read, the Senate shall thereupon withdraw, and such objections shall be submitted to the Senate for its decision; and the Speaker of the House of Representatives shall, in like manner, submit such objections to the House of Representatives for its decision;“

Note that all objections to a states vote must be made before the session breaks up. Once they’re done deciding, you can’t object again. You can make 25 objections before and they’re all to be considered simultaneously, but none after. So as I read this, we can’t tie this up simply by filibustering with objections to the same state, over and over. The run-on-sentence champion who wrote this law tried to ensure the process would come to an end someday.

[We will have, however, a very early indicator of how it’s going to go. You see, Arizona is one of the states rotten with fraud, and it’s quite early in the alphabet! I should expect there to be objections, we already have a senator and several house members who say they will do so. When that happens, we will see what comes of it.]

Basically the house and senate can only reject on the grounds that the slate of electors wasn’t valid or didn’t follow the process correctly. THIS IS WHERE ANY ALLEGATION OF ELECTORAL FRAUD WOULD COME INTO PLAY. (Or, if there are two competing slates, they get to pick the right one. Of course a bunch of competing Trump electors sent certificates to Washington, but those may have been rejected as invalid already–apparently the governor didn’t sign them; I’d certainly be surprised if the tellers open them up and read them; if they don’t, then the alternate certificates don’t matter since they haven’t been opened in the joint session. I don’t think anyone knows what happened to all of those alternate slates.)

The problem is, both the House and Senate must uphold the objection(s). If only one agrees, the objection(s) fail. And nothing is specified here about voting by states in the House. That only comes into play when the House selects the president-elect.

Do you expect the House, which will be a narrow Democrat minority on January 6, to uphold any objection to a Biden elector? Do you even trust the RINOs in the Senate to toe the line? The only way I can imagine it happening is if there is a lot of D/RINO absenteeism in both chambers.

I admit that I don’t see the President’s strategy here–what I can think of seems doomed to fail–but it seems pretty obvious that he thinks he has one, else why the Rally? I very earnestly hope he sees something I do not.

So let’s assume someone gets a majority of the electoral vote, or the House gets it and makes a decision in a timely manner. In that case, the person chosen becomes the President-Elect.

There is, at that point no appeal, and no remedy for the loser. As Joe Biden told an objector back in 2017 when no senator would join her objection, “it is over.”

January 6th is Wednesday. By next Friday, when I do my next daily, we will know who the President Elect is, or America will be glued to their TV screens watching Congress deal with an historic mess as we go into Day Three of Congress adjudicating the election.

I’ll close by quoting my own paragraph from five weeks ago.

I have said it before, and I will say it again, this is for all the Chips. After this, GAME OVER. If we lose this, to such blatant fraud, 2024 won’t matter. Trump won’t matter. Politically speaking, nothing on Earth will matter. There will be no recourse within the system.

A Reminder Of Today’s Big Issue.

Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People...Our campaign represents a true existential threat, like they’ve never seen before.

Then-Candidate Donald J. Trump

Needs to happen, soon.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

Please note that our menu has changed, please listen to all of the options.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. The first rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government take your guns.
5. 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. Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
9. Social Justice Warriors, ANTIFA pukes, BLM hypocrites, and other assorted varieties of Marxists can go copulate with themselves, or if insufficiently limber, may substitute a rusty wire brush suitable for cleaning the bore of a twelve or ten gauge.

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

Coin of The Day

Unless I think of something…

Obligatory PSAs/Reminders

Just one more thing, my standard Public Service Announcements. We don’t want to forget any of these!!!

How not to get your ass kicked by the police. Chris Rock in 2007

Granted an “ass kicking” isn’t the same as being shot, but both can result from the same stupid act. You may ultimately beat the rap, but you aren’t going to avoid the ride.

Remember Hong Kong!!! And remember the tens of millions who died under the “Great Helmsman” Chairman Mao.

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

For my money the Great Helmsman is Hikaru Sulu (even if the actor is a dingbat).

The Battle of Trenton

First off I have to burst some bubbles–any that have survived the past couple of weeks.

The Battle of Trenton did not happen on Christmas Day after a crossing of the partially frozen Delaware on Christmas Eve.

No, it happened the day after Christmas after a crossing begun on Christmas. (Christmas night in modern reckoning versus Christmas Eve(ning) in Biblical reckoning where days started at sunset, not midnight. I’d wager the subtle difference between “eve” and “evening” is where the confusion stems from.)

And we didn’t kill them in their beds. Although we had some surprise on our side, they had time to get out of bed and make several daring attempts to win the battle.

Nevertheless, I have no doubt that, to alter the popular meme, we would be willing to kill agents of tyranny in their beds on Christmas, if we had to.

Speaking of “had to,” the United States absolutely had to win the Battle of Trenton. It would, by most standards and under most circumstances be a very minor battle, hardly worth noting, but it is instead often listed as one of the battles that shaped not just American, but World history.

As of Christmas morning, the Continental Army was getting its ass kicked. And everyone knew it. Morale was at near rock bottom. Washington had been in retreat since the previous summer, having been kicked out of New York and been chased across New Jersey into Pennsylvania. The army was now encamped near Philadelphia, and many of the soldiers’ enlistments would end in January; they could go home, having fulfilled their obligations.

And many of them were certainly planning to go home believing the Revolution to be a lost cause, and in so doing, they would make it so.

Washington himself had yet to really prove himself as a commander, too. His time in the French and Indian War was no triumph (in fact many historians blame his blunders there for helping to trigger the world-wide Seven Year’s War, which qualified as a “world war” in Winston Churchill’s estimation). And, thus far his record in this war was less than stellar. The scorecard of actual battles was less than inspiring.

Fortunately, George Washington was capable of learning from his mistakes. (Which if you think about it, is not as common as it should be.)

And also fortunately, there’s a lot more to being a general than being able to win battles. You have to have the strategic vision, the grasp of the big picture, to know when to fight and when to cut your losses and run, to fight another day.

Earlier this year I chose to highlight the 1812 Overture and Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, and that was a perfect example. The Russian general there, Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov, who had taken command after Napoleon had seized Smolensk, understood one thing: Meeting Napoleon head-to-head would be disastrous. Napoleon was very good at winning battles. But Napoleon had, as it turned out, blundered at a strategic level in invading Russia in the first place. It would only work if he could win quickly. Kutuzov could see that his job was to ensure that Napoleon did not win quickly, to not give him the head-to-head confrontation he needed, after which the Russian winter would take care of things. Not that the Russians engaged in no combat at all; they went after Napoleon’s lengthening supply lines relentlessly, and in what was perhaps the bloodiest one day battle since Hannibal annihilated five Roman legions at Cannae in the third century BCE, bloodied Napoleon at Borodino so badly that, though Napoleon won that battle, it qualified as a Pyrrhic victory. But Kutuzov mostly retreated, trading one thing Russia had in abundance–space–for strategic advantage. They even let Napoleon have Moscow, the old traditional capital of the Russian Empire, but they made sure that it was worse than useless to him.

Kutuzov was widely criticized as a do-nothing commander. And even his sovereign, Alexander I, grandson of Catherine the Great, was in some danger of being taken out in a palace coup.

But Kutuzov was right, as it turned out.

But the War of 1812 (either one) was off in the future.

In 1776, George Washington was right to retreat when he did. He still had a force to use, instead of having been annihilated and us having Queen Elizabeth’s mug on our money today, and the Declaration of Independence being such an obscure footnote in history that one would have to do serious digging on the internet to even find the text–if anyone gave a enough of a damn to even ask what was in it.

Thus the task in December of 1776 was to leverage that tiny force. To win a victory. To show potential allies that we had the stick-to-it-iveness to see this through. For example France, much as it wanted to give England a bloody nose if not a crushed windpipe, wasn’t going to risk its own existence if it thought we would fold quickly and thus allow England to bring the troops home and use them directly against the French.

But the most important reason to win a victory is that without some kind of victory the Continental Army would effectively cease to exist on 1 January 1777. Ninety percent of those who had fought in New York earlier that year were gone. Many were deserting. Washington himself wrote, to his cousin in Virginia, “I think the game is pretty near up.”

The Army was camped at Valley Forge, near Philadelphia, about 2400 men. A detachment of the Hessian Auxiliaries that had helped chase Washington was camped across the river in Trenton. This was about 1400 men in four regiments. It looked like it was a mere matter of waiting for good fighting weather in Spring, and Washington, with his depleted army, could be taken out if he hadn’t already surrendered, and it would be over.

In fact it could happen before that; Washington expected General Howe, with yet other troops, to cross the river to finish him off, once the river completely froze over.

But what if we could pull off a sneak attack? The Hessians weren’t expecting anyone to want to fight in this brutally cold weather. But they were professionals; they’d stand and fight and clobber the amateur Continental army if there were any warning at all. But caught off guard with their figurative pants down they could perhaps be beaten, proving to the world but most importantly to our own men, that we could win.

The first part of this was “intel” or intelligence gathering. One thing that we had going for us throughout the entire war was better intel than the British, and this time was no exception. I’ll just quote Wikipedia here:

George Washington had stationed a spy named John Honeyman, posing as a Tory, in Trenton. Honeyman had served with Major General James Wolfe in Quebec at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham on September 13, 1759, and had no trouble establishing his credentials as a Tory. Honeyman was a butcher and bartender, who traded with the British and Hessians. This enabled him to gather intelligence and to convince the Hessians that the Continental Army was in such a low state of morale that they would not attack Trenton. Shortly before Christmas, he arranged to be captured by the Continental Army, who had orders to bring him to Washington unharmed. After being questioned by Washington, he was imprisoned in a hut to be tried as a Tory in the morning, but a small fire broke out nearby, enabling him to “escape”.

Wikipdia, Battle of Trenton

The actual plan of battle was to attack Trenton from three directions; the main force would cross the Delaware well north of Trenton and split into two forces commanded by Sullivan and Greene, while another force under Ewing would cross to the south, seize the bridge at Assunpink (another battle would be fought there a few months later) to cut off any Hessian retreat. Yet a third group under Cadwalader would launch a diversionary attack on a British garrison at Bordentown, to cut off any reinforcements.

This battle plan was not conceived overnight; Washington had been working this for weeks. He had ordered raids harassing the Hessians, and the Brits even got some indication he was planning something, they just didn’t know when. Colonel Rall, in command of the Hessians, was no dummy, he had asked for permission to place units strategically to thwart a move against his force, but his request was denied.

So it was Christmas night (as opposed to Christmas eve) that we struck.

Any movement would have to be done as stealthily as possible, which today means shut off all the electronics and move at night and hope the enemy doesn’t have night vision, but back then simply meant to move at night and hope no one noticed.

Because it would be dark, our forces needed a password in case they blundered into each other in the dark. The one chosen was “Victory or Death.”

Indeed.

The actual crossing of the river had mixed results. It went too slowly, in fact it didn’t end until 3AM, when the plan called for it to be done by midnight. Washington had to give up hope of a pre-dawn attack. Worse, both Cadwalader, who was supposed to attack potential British reinforcements at Bordentown, and Ewing, who was supposed to secure the Assunpink bridge, were unable to do anything on account of weather.

It looked like a mess.

Washington, however, had no choice but to press on.

I’ll quote Wikipoo again:

At 4:00 am, the soldiers began to march towards Trenton.^[32] Along the way, several civilians joined as volunteers and led as guides (such as John Mott) because of their knowledge of the terrain.^[33] After marching 1.5 miles (2.4 km) through winding roads into the wind, they reached Bear Tavern, where they turned right.^[34] The ground was slippery, but it was level, making it easier for the horses and artillery. They began to make better time.^[34] They soon reached Jacobs Creek, where, with difficulty, the Americans made it across.^[35] The two groups stayed together until they reached Birmingham, where they split apart.^[7] Soon after, they reached the house of Benjamin Moore, where the family offered food and drink to Washington.^[36] At this point, the first signs of daylight began to appear.^[36] Many of the troops did not have boots, so they were forced to wear rags around their feet. Some of the men’s feet bled, turning the snow to a dark red. Two men died on the march.^[37]

As they marched, Washington rode up and down the line, encouraging the men to continue.^[28] General Sullivan sent a courier to tell Washington that the weather was wetting his men’s gunpowder. Washington replied, “Tell General Sullivan to use the bayonet. I am resolved to take Trenton.”^[38]

About 2 miles (3 km) outside the town, the main columns reunited with the advance parties.^[39] They were startled by the sudden appearance of 50 armed men, but they were American. Led by Adam Stephen, they had not known about the plan to attack Trenton and had attacked a Hessian outpost.^[40] Washington feared the Hessians would have been put on guard, and shouted at Stephen, “You sir! You Sir, may have ruined all my plans by having them put on their guard.”^[40] Despite this, Washington ordered the advance continue to Trenton. In the event, Rall thought the first raid was the attack which Grant had warned him about, and that there would be no further action that day.^[41]

Sheer dumb luck. Rall had actually been lulled, not alerted, by the mistaken raid, imagining that was all that Washington had planned to do. But “sheer dumb luck” often turns history, in good directions as well as bad directions.

(Sheer dumb luck gives writers of alternate history novels all sorts of job opportunities. One such, who writes under the name of Harry Turtledove, has written books predicated on the assumption we lost the Revolutionary War early, and England had nevertheless learned a lesson and given us autonomy, like they would do in Canada, Australia and South Africa, and books based on the Union not finding the Confederacy’s battle plans before Antietam–wrapped around some cigars a Confederate had dropped.)

There were skirmishes at 8 AM and the element of surprise would soon be lost. Washington sent a detachment to block the road to Princeton; when it arrived it attacked a Hessian unit, and the commander of that unit, Wierderholdt, realized what was going on; this wasn’t some dinky raid. This. Was. It.

Meanwhile at Trenton we had entered the town and the Hessians were awake and forming up. Our artillery still on the other side of the river opened up to great effect, as did the few cannon that had been brought across. The Hessians tried to take the cannon, but failed; they may have been in Trenton, but they already had lost control of the town. They made a number of attempts to take it back, all failing.

In the end, the Hessians lost 22 men killed in action, one of them Rall, who had been mortally wounded. Another 89 were wounded. Including those wounded, 896 Hessians were captured.

On our side, two men had died on the march (not the combat itself), and five wounded (no deaths) in the battle, including a near fatal wound to the wound of a soldier named James Monroe. (Yes, that Monroe, whose last name is mistakenly thought to be “Doctrine,” the last president from among the Founders.)

However, we lost enough men during the subsequent days, from exhaustion, illness, and exposure, that in reality we may have lost more men than did the Hessians.

This was, nevertheless, a tactical triumph, and that is what we needed, strategically, to stay in the war, to go on to ultimately break the British in the northern United States at Saratoga, bring the French and their navy into the war, and ultimately trap the British at Yorktown.

However many died following Trenton, their deaths were certainly not in vain, and as a result no earlier Patriot deaths were, either.

And Queen Elizabeth does not appear on our money. But George Washington, head of our military effort, and Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence that Washington and his men were fighting to make stick, do.

I could spend some time drawing parallels between our situation today and this situation back then, but I’ll just point the criticality of the situation, how there would (will) be no Summer of 1777 (or election of 2024) for America without a victory now.

Postscript

It has been my custom for a number of years to deliberately fly the Betsy Ross flag overnight on this one night, December 25/26, to commemorate this event. Yes, it’s technically illegal to do so without illuminating it, and the Betsy Ross “thirteen stars in a circle” flag is probably a myth anyway, but there it is.

This year, and in this crisis, I’ve been flying Old Glory (50 stars) 24/7 with a Trump flag, and it will remain that way until this is resolved, one way or another. I’ve thus missed doing a special flag “thing” for such eminent holidays as the USMC birthday (November 10), Veteran’s Day (November 11), Pearl Harbor Day (Dec. 7), Bill of Rights Day (Dec. 15), and the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party (Dec. 16). [For this alone, Biden’s future grave deserves to be pissed on.]

But I did take down the 50 star old glory and raise Betsy Ross in its place, this time. And I got to inspect my flags in so doing. The US flag is a high quality item but is definitely fraying on the lower fly. I’ll need a new one January 21. (If Joe Biden has his way, though, I might not bother, as I’d have a strong urge to fly it upside down in distress.) The Trump flag is a cheap print, and has been disintegrating fly-hoistwards, most of the P is gone and it’s a TRUMI flag, soon to be a TRUM flag as even most of the vertical is gone.

Justice Must Be done.

Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People...Our campaign represents a true existential threat, like they’ve never seen before.

Then-Candidate Donald J. Trump

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 Mandatory Coin

Unlike last week, where I simply couldn’t think of anything, I have a topic in mind.

How did the Continental Congress pay for things?

War was expensive. The materiel wasn’t so bad, not then, especially when soldiers would live off the land. But we had to pay those soldiers, and we had no “real” money of silver or gold to speak of. England had done its best to bleed us dry long before the war happened. The idea of a colony, after all, was to send money home, not have it circulate in the colony and certainly not to have the colony send any money it made to other countries!

The Brits therefore tended not to let the colonies make their own coinage.

So we largely used Spanish money instead, with perhaps some French money in the mix (that latter bit is me speculating). This led to some monetary schizophrenia; the colonists thought in terms of shillings and pence (and very occasionally entire pounds), but much of what circulated here was Spanish reales, eight of which made a crown-sized coin that we called a dollar, from German thaler, which in turn was from Joachimstaler, which in turn was from Joachimsthal, a town with a gigantic silver deposit most conveniently coined into large coins, larger than had been seen before. (Today that town is known as Jachymov, and is in Czechia–and it played a key role in the discoveries that ultimately led to the atomic bomb–so it’s the home of both the Dollar and the Bomb.)

But there just weren’t enough dollars, nor reales, nor shillings, nor pence, to pay for the war effort; the individual states often failed to send anything to the Continental Congress.

So the Congress printed money, hoping someday to be able to redeem the notes with real money.

Thus was born the Continental Currency. And they had to resort to this a lot. To the point where it inflated, and we now have the phrase “not worth a Continental” to remember it by.

It was denominated in dollars, but often today the denominations seem odd. In 1775 we issued one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight dollar notes–as well as a twenty.

The next year we dropped the twenty dollar note in exchange for a thirty dollar note, added a half dollar note…but also a third of a dollar and two thirds of a dollar. And even a sixth of a dollar.

A sixth of a dollar? Really? That’s not even a whole number of cents! But, you see, our forebears didn’t even start dividing dollars into 100 cents until 1792. But this was still odd, because they typically thought of eighths of a dollar, single reales or “bits.”

In 1777, apparently, the inflation began to bite. The smallest denomination issues was $2, and we continued with $3, $4, $6, $7 and $8. (Apparently no $5, but all these other funky numbers.)

In 1778, the lowest denomination was $5, then $6, $7, $8, $20, $30, $40, $50 and even $60. Now if this was actual silver dollars, $60 would be huge sum of money by most people’s standards. But these weren’t, they were continentals, that weren’t worth a continental.

1779 saw the return of the $1 and $2, plus the $5, $20, $30, $35, $40, $45, $55, $60, $65, $70, and $80.

The British counterfeited these notes, in spite of the leaves depicted on them though a process that Benjamin Franklin had invented as a counterfeiting deterrent.

True connoisseurs of such notes will note there are a number of different designs, with notes from the same year often looking similar, and oftentimes the name of the printer contracted to run them off was quite prominent.

I’ll just embed a link to the full table in Wikipedia, rather than muck about with downloading the pics and re-uploading them:

(Or maybe not. I still can’t embed a link properly it seems. Try copying and pasting: https : // en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Continental_currency_banknotes without the spaces.)

Many of these referenced the “United Colonies,” some made no such reference, but all mention the “Congress,” which was the issuing authority. Many 1776 bills issued after July 4 1776 still referenced the “United Colonies.” The first bill to read “United States” was issued in 1777.

Here’s a not atypical example, 1/3 of a dollar from 1776, authorized in February of that year.

These aren’t ruinously expensive, and can be had in presentable condition for well under a thousand dollars. (I don’t know this series at all; for all I know there are denominations/dates that are extremely difficult to find and hence to pay for.)

Standard Disclaimer: These are not my notes. I never show my items, and I very often don’t have examples of the stuff I show. But the important thing for any criminally inclined reading this is to know I don’t keep the stuff I do have, at home.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

Just two more things, my standard Public Service Announcements. We don’t want to forget them!!!

How Not To Find Yourself In Contention For The Darwin Award
(Nothing to do with bearded dragons)

It has been pointed out that all of the rioting is nominally on account of criminals who resisted arrest in one form or another, and someone suggested schools ought to teach people not to resist arrest.

Granted an “ass kicking” isn’t the same as being shot, but both can result from the same stupid act. You may ultimately beat the rap, but you aren’t going to avoid the ride.

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

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

More On The Great Conjunction

NOTE: There is some confusion about this, and it’s MY fault for not explaining it well enough. Regardless of where you are, you should be out basically as soon as it gets fairly dark, and watch until Jupiter and Saturn set. There IS an instant of absolute closest approach between Jupiter and Saturn, but it matters so little I haven’t even bothered to look it up; for all I know it’s 3 AM my time and I won’t be able to see it. The important thing is for you to see Jupiter and Saturn before they set, and that will be at about the same time, LOCAL, anywhere, less than two hours after sunset.

(The reason I harped on 5 PM my time, which is conveniently the right time for me to start looking, is that the data I got from NASA is for that exact time (midnight UTC).)

You might remember this diagram from last week. It’s a diagram of our solar system on Monday, at 5 PM Mountain Time, minus Mars, Venus, Mercury and everything past Saturn, showing an apparent lineup of Jupiter and Saturn as seen from Earth.

In 3D the lineup is pretty good too, both Jupiter and Saturn are in fact slightly ‘inside’ your monitor and they will be 1/5 of the full moon’s width apart in the sky, or one tenth of a degree of arc.

Astronomers like to denote distances “up there” as seen from Earth as angles, because that way it doesn’t matter how far away something is. It’s easiest to measure those angles–that’s what we can directly observe. Distances are harder, sometimes much harder. I gave a link last time to the story of how the distance between the earth and sun were first measured using a Venus transit in the 1700s. Since we knew the ratios of the planets’ distances from the sun, expressing everything in AUs (astronomical units, where 1AU is the mean distance from the earth to the sun), that gave us the size of each planet’s orbit by simple multiplication. We could then use the “absolute” number giving the size of Earth’s orbit to measure the distance to the nearer stars, but that was extremely finicky measuring and didn’t get done until the mid 1800s. It’s as if measuring distances is a ladder; each method gives us results we can carry forward to measure the distances to things further and further away. (Of course doing this causes measurement errors to pile up, but they’re still far better than complete guesswork.)

Astronomers still use AUs routinely for talking about the sorts of distances you’d see within a star’s planetary system–even other stars’ planetary systems–because otherwise they’d be tossing around numbers with eight or nine zeros at the end of them.

OK, so, why is Earth at the top of the diagram? Was that some arbitrary choice I made?

Well, it’s arbitrary, but it’s not my choice. And it is handy having the diagram be taller than it is wide; if it hadn’t turned out that way when I plotted it from real position data, I’d have rotated the diagram.

The data from NASA, and therefore the diagram, are expressed in something called “Heliocentric Ecliptic Coordinates.” There are X, Y and Z values for Earth, Jupiter and Saturn, and I just plotted them. (It also gives velocity components in the X, Y, and Z directions.) This is a 3-D version of the “Cartesian” coordinates that, if/when you had algebra, was what you used to graph functions. Instead of squares on graph paper, imagine cubes.

The center of this big three-dimensional grid is the center of gravity of the Solar System (practically dead center in the Sun). But which way do the axes point? A choice had to be made. It didn’t cosmically matter which way we pointed the axes, but astronomers had to come up with a common convention. What’s fairly obvious and convenient is that the X-Y plane (where Z is zero) should be the plane of Earth’s orbit about the Sun, and the Z axis should probably run through the center of the sun with the positive end going out the Sun’s north pole (or close to it, just so it’s at a right angle to the XY plane). Those decisions come from the physical characteristics of Earth’s orbit around the sun. But we still haven’t defined which way the X and Y axes point, even if we know what plane they are in.

So here comes the arbitrary decision, made sometime centuries ago: The X axis runs in the direction in which, we on Earth, see the sun to be at the exact moment of the March equinox (which is “spring” for most people). So we are sighting through the sun to establish the X axis.

Which means that at that moment, Earth is at roughly X=-1.0 AU, the Sun of course is at X=0.0 AU, and it is Earth’s position at the beginning of (northern hemisphere) fall that is at X=+1.0 AU.

If you look at my diagram, at 3 o’clock on the diagram, on the circle of earth’s orbit, is where Earth is on the first day of autumn–straight to the right of the “origin” which is where x=1.0 ought to be on any self-respecting graph. At 12 o’clock is the winter solstice (+Y axis), at 9 o’clock is the spring equinox (-X), and at 6 o’clock is the summer solstice (-Y). You’ll notice I went around the “clock” counter-clockwise. That’s because almost everything in our solar system runs counter-clockwise. The planets rotate counter-clockwise, all of the major moons and planets orbit counter-clockwise, and so on, of course this is all as seen from over the north pole of the Sun, our viewpoint being somewhere along the +Z axis.

Here’s the same diagram with the X and Y axes superimposed.

[By the way, how did we decide which direction would be “clockwise”? We did pick a direction, we could have picked the other direction for clocks to run in. Why didn’t we? Well this time there is a reason. In Europe, the shadow on a sundial moves in that direction. If our civilization had started in the southern hemisphere, long odds are that we’d draw our maps with south at the top, our globes would be mounted with south at the top, and our clocks would run counter-clockwise. And the people in the northern hemisphere would have to endure all those jokes about being upside down.]

Returning to our coordinate system, the Y axis goes through the spot where the earth is at (northern hemisphere) winter solstice. Which is pretty much where we will be this Monday. That’s why Earth is straight “up” from the Sun in my diagram.

Which way is Z? It’s straight up out of your screen, right at you. So when I said Jupiter and Saturn were slightly inside your screen, it’s because they have very small negative Z values.

One way to draw directions into an out of the monitor, or a blackboard, which is how I learned it many, many years ago, is to use ⨯ for into the monitor and ⋅ or even ⊙ for out of it. This is meant to suggest an arrow with four tail feathers and a conical head, the dot is the point of the arrow (facing you, out from the monitor or chalkboard)–circled just shows you the entire arrowhead looking at you straight on. The ⨯ suggests the four tail feathers when the arrow is pointing into the monitor (or chalkboard).

One more thing about coordinate systems (if you haven’t gotten bored yet), the issue of “right handed” versus “left handed.” If you use your right hand to point, like a kid making a gun with his fingers, along the X axis, and your other fingers bend towards the Y axis, and your thumb points along the Z axis, it’s a right handed system. If you can’t get this to work with some coordinate system, try your left hand. If that works, you are using a left handed system.

These ecliptic coordinates I got from NASA are right-handed.

And it’s cool that this diagram just happened to lay out well without having to be rotated. Those of you who remember your algebra and “graphing things” should find a lot of this familiar.

OK that’s enough of that rather abstract stuff. Now I’m going to try to explain why all of “great conjunctioning” is happening in the southwestern sky after sunset.

First, imagine yourself somewhere on the line between sun and Earth, and you are facing towards the earth, with the Sun shining on your back.

Or, imagine my first diagram tilting away from you as shown, and you being transported to the big white X in the upper left. Then continue tilting until you are edge-on.

What do you see? Well, because it’s the winter Solstice, this is what you see.

Well, OK you won’t see all the labels and so forth, and especially not the big metal thing on the south pole, but the thing to notice is that the south pole is visible and the north pole is not. The earth’s axis is tilted with respect to the ecliptic (the plane we’re standing on in our little mind-experiment). It stays pointing in the same direction (almost–it moves slowly, so slowly you’ll never notice). So as it moves around its orbit, from right to left in this diagram, there are times when the north pole points away from the sun (and us) and times when it points towards the sun. This coming Monday just happens to be the day when the north pole is pointed as much away from the sun as it ever is (that’s the definition of the December solstice).

In the upper right, not very visible, is North America. The earth rotates west to east, so North America is about to go onto the far side, the dark side–it’s late in the day there. Here are some annotations and a set of axes in the lower left. Notice Z is now up, because +Y points into the picture.

Now here’s a side view. Going back to the original diagram, it’s as if we tilted it this way, instead.

But if we’re going to imagine ourselves standing on the diagram, we need to make it horizontal, like this:

So, finally, here’s a “side” view of Earth from the right.

From this vantage point, the earth is moving directly away from us in its orbit. On the first diagram, we’re somewhere to the right of earth, looking toward it.

Any horizontal line on this last picture, points at the sun. And if you can imagine some Deplorable in flyover country standing in Kansas, looking at the setting sun…well, it’s not to the west. It’s south of west. Because west is actually to the left and up in the diagram, not straight to the left, as shown below. And north is kind of tilted askew because the ground that deplorable is standing on is actually tilted away from us (imagine standing where the compass rose is).

This is why the Sun is setting to the south of west at this time of year (someone asked me about that a few days ago, I hope she’s reading this).

But what about Jupiter and Saturn? Well, let’s back up a bit. Here’s the diagram “tilting” again. Notice the diagonal dashed line (I don’t know why but my graphics software turned it into a dashed line); that’s the line to Jupiter and Saturn.

So, imagine it tilting all the way…and that diagonal line becomes a line running left from Earth to Jupiter and Saturn, but it also slopes up and out of the screen!

The horizon plane for our sunset-viewing Deplorable was tilted, some, away from us, but the sun is on that plane because it’s sunset. Jupiter and Saturn are above that plane, also in the southwest, at sunset.

Which, for our Deplorable in Kansas who’s watching the sunset, means they’re still up above the horizon.

If I have been doing my job as a writer, you’ve been following me and understand this, and you can see how in three dimensions it all hangs together now. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if many here are still confused. It’s tough to do this sort of thing even with diagrams.

But at least now you should know where to look on Monday evening!

And just to put the icing on the cake, here’s a photo I took just as it was getting dark on Wednesday, facing in the general direction of sunset. The two visible “dots” in the sky are Jupiter (brighter one) and Saturn (dimmer one, above and left of Jupiter). Even after it’s dark they will be noticeably brighter than any star, particularly in that part of the sky.

Justice Must Be done.

Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People...Our campaign represents a true existential threat, like they’ve never seen before.

Then-Candidate Donald J. Trump

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 Mandatory Coin

Hopefully I’ll think of something before 10 PM my time on Friday. If not, you’ll find yourself reading this.

Standard Disclaimer: These are not my notes. In this particular case, though, I will admit to owning examples of all three of the notes that were issued.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

Just two more things, my standard Public Service Announcements. We don’t want to forget them!!!

How Not To Find Yourself In Contention For The Darwin Award
(Nothing to do with bearded dragons)

It has been pointed out that all of the rioting is nominally on account of criminals who resisted arrest in one form or another, and someone suggested schools ought to teach people not to resist arrest.

Granted an “ass kicking” isn’t the same as being shot, but both can result from the same stupid act. You may ultimately beat the rap, but you aren’t going to avoid the ride.

China is Lower than Whale Shit

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

Remember Hong Kong!!!

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

The Great Conjunction

Instead of politics, I’m going to talk about what’s about to happen on the 21st at about 5PM.

Jupiter and Saturn, which appear in the southwestern sky shortly after sunset, will appear in our sky only 6 arc minutes apart. When they come close to each other like this, it’s called a Great Conjunction, because it’s the rarest of all possible conjunctions involving planets visible with the naked eye.

That is one fifth of the apparent width of the full moon.

It’s also about the width of six quarters, laid out side to side, at a hundred yards, or about a six inch wide object at that distance.

As of 5 PM Friday the 11th, Mountain Time, or 0000 Zulu on the 12th, they are 1.08 degrees apart in the sky, which is to say about 65 arc minutes. (60 arc minutes makes a degree).

I know this because I downloaded a bunch of sun-centered coordinates for Earth, Jupiter and Saturn from the NASA website, built a spreadsheet to do the calculations to center the coordinates on earth, then did a vector cross product of the normalized vectors and took the arcsine. (That either meant something to you…or it didn’t!) What you are about to see here in my diagrams, below, is the real stuff, with the real planetary positions, as best as I can draw it; it’s not some notional cartoon.

As of 5 PM on the 21st, Mountain Time, the separation is 0.105 degrees, which is 6.3 arc minutes.

If you look through a telescope at 5PM MST on the 21st, this is what you will see:

Yes, you will see Jupiter and Saturn in the SAME field of view, without having to shift!

Now if you’ve been watching Jupiter and Saturn since this summer, when they were essentially right on top of the Summer Milky Way Galaxy, you noticed they were close. They don’t seem much closer today, but they’re going to get a lot closer, a lot faster now.

What’s going on?

Again, going back to my NASA data dump, I can create a picture, looking down from above the Sun’s north pole, of 5 PM on the 12th. The dots representing the planets and sun are actually much too large, but the distances are to scale.

The arrows correspond to how fast (and in what direction) the planets are moving around the Sun, and they’re even scaled…the length of the shaft of the arrow is how much it will move in ten days (ignore the head of the arrow, which is sized to be bigger than the shaft for Saturn’s arrow).

Earth is “up” from the Sun in this diagram because the way the coordinate system is defined, it’s on the X axis to the right of the sun at the beginning of fall (in the northern hemisphere). A quarter of a year later, Earth has moved almost ninety degrees around its orbit, so it will be near the Y axis, “above” the Sun.

You can see that the earth is moving one way (“left” on the diagram), and Jupiter and Saturn are moving the other way (right-ish), and furthermore that Jupiter is catching up to Saturn. (Since both Jupiter and Saturn are moving in nearly-circular orbits, and Jupiter is closer to the Sun, Jupiter moves faster than Saturn, and Earth moves faster still. See Kepler’s second and third laws.) With Jupiter to the left of the Earth-Saturn line, and moving rightwards towards that line, and Earth moving to the left, dragging one end of the Earth-Saturn line with it, Jupiter’s going to find itself on that line pretty doggone quickly.

Shazam, you now have the closest conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter (by definition as seen from Earth) in about 800 years!

But you might think, doesn’t this happen every time Jupiter “laps” Saturn? Jupiter, moving around the Sun once every 12 years, will lap Saturn, moving around the sun every 28 years, every 20 years or so. And indeed there is a great conjunction just about every 20 years, sometimes even multiples in that year if the timing is such that Earth zig-zags across the Saturn-Jupiter line.

But most great conjunctions aren’t really this close as seen from Earth. The reason that’s not plain here is that these pictures do not, and cannot, tell the whole story. They’re two dimensional and the full story is three dimensional.

Although the orbits almost lie in the same plane, they do not. And that difference is critical. The diagrams are set up so that they show the Earth’s orbital plane, also called the plane of the ecliptic. Jupiter’s is tilted by 1.31 degrees, and Saturn’s is tilted 2.48 degrees. So it turns out that right now, those planets would, in fact, be slightly inside your screen if it were a 3D display. If you take the Earth’s orbit’s radius (not diameter) as “1 Astronomical Unit” then Jupiter is almost exactly 5% or 1/20th of that distance inside your screen. Saturn is 7% of that distance into your screen. You can hopefully imagine the line from Earth descending at a shallow gradient into the screen, going through Jupiter, then continuing its descent and almost crossing through Saturn, which is just a bit deeper into the screen.

Different great conjunctions occur when Jupiter and Saturn are at different spots in their orbits, and in many cases one of them will be above the plane of your computer screen while the other one is below it. What you’d see here on Earth when that happens is one of them crossing considerably to the north of the other in the sky, rather than almost–almost–right on top of each other.

That’s why this great conjunction is so special. They’re not just lined up on my diagram (as they would be every 20 years or so), they’re damn close to being lined up in three dimensions, so from Earth, you will see Jupiter almost directly in front of Saturn, and that is rare! (Though it will happen again in sixty years–today’s young adults and children will have another shot at this–but after that, wait four centuries or so.)

It’s important to note that the planets never actually get close to each other. Jupiter and Saturn are further apart than the distance from the Earth to the Sun. It’s just that sometimes they are almost on the same line of sight as seen from here.

Star of Bethlehem?

This event is being hyped as the “Star of Bethlehem.” But whatever it was that happened then, it probably wasn’t a great conjunction. Trying to nail down just what the original Star of Bethlehem actually was (assuming it isn’t completely mythical) has been an occasional pastime for nearly two thousand years. We don’t know the year, and frankly, we don’t even know the season. (There’s no actual scriptural warrant for the nativity being in late December.) The nativity is described in two of the gospels, Matthew and Luke, with the Star of Bethlehem only appearing in Matthew’s account. The time indications in the two gospels are actually years apart (Herod’s reign ended in 4 BC, Quirinius didn’t become governor of Syria until 6 AD). Even if there’s a way to reconcile that through some new historical discovery, which year would the reconciliation point to?

People seeking an astronomical event that could have been the Star of Bethlehem therefore have to search over at least a ten year range. Well there was a Great Conjunction in 7 BC (in fact they got three of them because the Earth managed to zigzag across the Jupiter-Saturn line that year), but it wasn’t close enough to be very impressive, and 7 BC was almost certainly too early anyway.

But there was a very close conjunction of Jupiter and Venus in 2 BC, near Regulus, the brightest star in Leo, on June 17. It was certainly more visually striking, because Venus is far brighter than Saturn, and the conjunction was closer than any of the three great conjunctions in 7 BC, to boot. This could be a candidate.

2002 Triple Conjunction

There was a series of conjunctions, albeit not involving Jupiter, in 2002. I remember there was quite a clustering of planets in the evening sky that year. According to Wikipedia:

Venus, Mars and Saturn appeared close together in the evening sky in early May 2002, with a conjunction of Mars and Saturn occurring on 4 May. This was followed by a conjunction of Venus and Saturn on 7 May, and another of Venus and Mars on 10 May when their angular separation was only 18 arcminutes. A series of conjunctions between the Moon and, in order, Saturn, Mars and Venus took place on 14 May, although it was not possible to observe all these in darkness from any single location on the Earth.

Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_(astronomy)

Note that Venus and Mars got to within three times the distance Jupiter and Saturn will get on the 21st. If you happen to remember that, this is going to kick its ass.

Conjunctions Involving The Sun

Oftentimes a planet will have a conjunction with the Sun, and when that happens they will generally just say, for example, “Jupiter is in conjunction” without naming the Sun. It’s assumed.

The Sun will be passing in front of Jupiter and Saturn in a couple of months, as seen from Earth; just imagine in my diagrams Earth moving further around its orbit quite quickly while Jupiter and Saturn move much more slowly, and you’ll “see” it happening.

There won’t be much to see, of course, because to see the event, you have to do so when the Sun is above the horizon, and that, of course, is daytime.

Since Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are further out from the Sun than Earth is, when we see a conjunction involving those planets and the sun, the planet is always “behind” the sun.

But what about Mercury and Venus? They can have conjunctions where they are on the other side of the sun, or conjunctions where they are between us and the sun. The former are called superior conjunctions and the latter, inferior conjunctions.

Again, because their orbits are tilted with respect to ours, they don’t pass directly behind (or in front of) the Sun that often, usually looking like they are to the south or north of the Sun at closest approach.

But every once in a while one of these planets will pass in front of the sun (which is a big broad target compared to any other planet), and that’s called a transit. Venus in particular generally has pairs of conjunctions 8 years apart…but the pairs are separated by about a century. When this happens you can, with glasses of the type you’d use to look at the sun near an eclipse, actually see a little black dot on the face of the sun, even without a telescope. This last happened in 2004 and 2012, so if you missed it you are SOL, the next occurrence is in December 2117. (And yes, I was watching in 2012.)

Venus transits are of huge historical importance; they gave us our first good way of measuring the size of Earth’s orbit and (since we already knew the proportions) hence the size of just about everything in the Solar System. (Or, equivalently: It told us how big an “astronomical unit” was in more earthly measurements; since we already knew the size of everything in the Solar System in AUs, we could now give distances in furlongs, if we wanted to, by multiplying.)

Here’s a deep dive on Venus transits (including why they are important) that I wrote at the time, and a later article including pictures I took.

Raw data

This is the position and velocity data I pulled off the NASA website. Sun is at (0, 0, 0). Distances are in AU (astronomical units), velocity is in AU/day. 1 AU by definition is 149,597,870,700 meters (92,955,807 miles, 1441 feet, 6.898- inches), it was originally defined as the semi-major axis of the Earth’s orbit, and a day is precisely 86,400 seconds (no matter how much the Earth slows down rotating). The diagrams were created at the scale of 100 pixels = 1AU, and they appear to have come across (into WordPress’s editor at least) at the proper size.

EARTH:
2459195.500000000 = A.D. 2020-Dec-12 00:00:00.0000 TDB
X = 1.622579957389862E-01 Y = 9.761221058229992E-01 Z = 5.373489375534890E-05
VX=-1.724242466206539E-02 VY= 2.883832025215380E-03 VZ= 6.987175827141265E-07

2459205.500000000 = A.D. 2020-Dec-22 00:00:00.0000 TDB
X =-1.188898588832658E-02 Y = 9.897218187033275E-01 Z = 6.029984014237024E-05
VX= 6.031051355304800E-03 VY= 4.767506691437359E-03 VZ=-1.546747270590170E-04

JUPITER:
2459195.500000000 = A.D. 2020-Dec-12 00:00:00.0000 TDB
X = 2.914228592894236E+00 Y =-4.177510430316559E+00 Z =-4.786920225992232E-02
VX= 6.095603857740477E-03 VY= 4.674926465555783E-03 VZ=-1.557747700228924E-04

2459205.500000000 = A.D. 2020-Dec-22 00:00:00.0000 TDB
X = 2.974861050901444E+00 Y =-4.130298866311659E+00 Z =-4.942153470106487E-02
VX= 6.031051355304800E-03 VY= 4.767506691437359E-03 VZ=-1.546747270590170E-04

SATURN:
2459195.500000000 = A.D. 2020-Dec-12 00:00:00.0000 TDB
X = 5.396386096136037E+00 Y =-8.396666010466467E+00 Z =-6.884059973895380E-02
VX= 4.382900563538985E-03 VY= 3.001959812133514E-03 VZ=-2.266077336665883E-04

459205.500000000 = A.D. 2020-Dec-22 00:00:00.0000 TDB
X = 5.440127588899244E+00 Y =-8.366514834723951E+00 Z =-7.110831635421563E-02
VX= 4.365303571900237E-03 VY= 3.027110022628067E-03 VZ=-2.263327688903255E-04

A Reminder Of Today’s Big Issue.

Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People...Our campaign represents a true existential threat, like they’ve never seen before.

Then-Candidate Donald J. Trump

Needs to happen, soon.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

Please note that our menu has changed, please listen to all of the options.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. The first rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government take your guns.
5. 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. Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
9. Social Justice Warriors, ANTIFA pukes, BLM hypocrites, and other assorted varieties of Marxists can go copulate with themselves, or if insufficiently limber, may substitute a rusty wire brush suitable for cleaning the bore of a twelve or ten gauge.

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

Coin of The Day

No coin today.

But I told Grandma In TX that’s she’d hit a 1000 today [Friday], and that triggered someone to talk about a grand grandma, and I remembered something.

In 1890, the US issued “Treasury Notes” or “Coin Notes” in many denominations. This and 1891 were the only years they issued paper money of this specific category, The specific use was to pay for purchasing silver bullion (which, of course, would then be made into coins). You could redeem these notes, just like silver or gold certificates, but the government could decide whether it’d be in silver or gold coin. Every denomination available today was covered, $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50, $100, and there were also $500 and $1000 notes.

The ones issued in 1890 look very different from the 1891 notes, and are called “patternback” notes, for reasons you’ll soon understand. The $50 and $500 were not issued in 1890, so the patternback notes only exist for $1-$20, $100, and $1000 denominations.

This series features a lot of Civil War flag officers on it, many of them obscure to people who are not active Civil War buffs.

Note there is a very elaborate repeating pattern inside the denomination on the reverse; that’s why it’s called a patternback. (In heraldry, sometimes there’s an elaborate repeating background pattern in a coat of arms…it’s actually, I am not making this up, called “diaper” but presumably not in front of the knight whose coat of arms it was.)

Moving along, here’s the $2, $5, $10, and $20

Now there is a thing to know about these old “large size” (the size of one of those old computer cards) notes. They get extremely rare in some cases. Notes tended to wear out quickly and rapidly get redeemed, even if only for a newer note. If someone actually set aside twenty dollars back then, trying to save the note…well, they had more money than they knew what to do with; remember that was very close to being a full ounce of gold!

That $20 in VF-20 (the number is on a scale of 1-70) will set you back at least six thousand dollars, and that’s actually relatively affordable for an old $20. A silver certificate from 1878 or 1880 is simply impossible in such a grade (my book doesn’t list anything higher than F-12), later series get down to about the same range as this patternback.

The true nosebleed territory starts with the $50 denomination. There are literally notes where there are no known survivors. Others are marked “Extremely Rare” and “One known” and the book doesn’t even try to give a price. But as there isn’t a patternback $50, we’ll move on to the stratosphere now.

The “big” denomination on this wasn’t spelled out like the others, and the pattern ended up resembling a watermelon on the two zeros, so this is known today as the watermelon note. And it will cost you a hundred…thousand…dollars in VF-20. The good news is, in EF-40 it “only” goes up to $170,000 instead of doubling or tripling like I’d usually expect. The book gives no price for higher grades.

Now I can at least see spending 6 or 8 grand on a collectible note…but a hundred thousand dollars? Thank you but no, I’d rather have a house!

Now on to the last note.

We skip over $500, since there was no patternback $500. (By the way, before we stopped printing $500 as federal reserve notes, they had McKinley on them. McKinley comes after Franklin. (And if you want to know: Grover Cleveland on the $1000, James Madison on the $5000, Salmon Chase on the $10,000 and Woodrow-be-damned Wilson on the $100,000.)

The One Thousand Dollar Patternback keeps the “melon” look of the C-note, and is called the Grand Watermelon.

My book calls these “extremely rare.” One in AU (about uncirculated, the numerical grade would be in the 50s) is the very first US note to sell for over a million dollars. There’s another variant with a small red seal overprint on the front, instead of the big brown one you see here; two are known to exist.

When a note is this rare, you don’t care about the fact that someone scribbled their name and a date (presumably 1893) on it!

So in honor of the Grand Grandma, here’s a Grand Watermelon.

And it’s 9:58 Mountain Time. Just barely made the deadline!!!

Standard disclaimer: I never show pictures of my own coins. I may or may not own coins like the ones I show. Burglars will be interested to hear that gold and silver aren’t the only heavy metals I have, and I have quite a bit of one with a heavier nucleus than either. And I keep it around a lot more than the gold and silver.

And a note to the other authors. Wikipedia URLs do paste into posts (select media style of paragraph via the plus sign, and use the option to paste in a URL). That’s how I did this Grand Watermelon picture–I noticed the option only after I had uploaded all of the pictures, having downloaded them from Wikipoo, and decided to give the alternate route a try with the Grand Watermelon. (I guess I wasted Wolf’s space.)

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

Just two more things, my standard Public Service Announcements. We don’t want to forget them!!!

How Not To Find Yourself In Contention For The Darwin Award
(Nothing to do with bearded dragons)

It has been pointed out that all of the rioting is nominally on account of criminals who resisted arrest in one form or another, and someone suggested schools ought to teach people not to resist arrest.

Chris Rock on a similar vein, in 2007

Granted an “ass kicking” isn’t the same as being shot, but both can result from the same stupid act. You may ultimately beat the rap, but you aren’t going to avoid the ride.

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!! And remember the tens of millions who died under the “Great Helmsman” Chairman Mao.

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

For my money the Great Helmsman is Hikaru Sulu (even if the actor is a dingbat).

Shitstorm Saturday!

KRAKEN RELEASED!

I start these posts by going back and grabbing the post from five weeks ago (since I currently have five different eagle banners), copying it, then editing. The old post is from before the election (October 24) and talks about Biden’s performance in the third debate.

Yes, that was fresh news only five weeks ago! And now we are in the middle of a horrific fraud mess and an almost-as-horrific refusal by lower level judges to even touch the issue. I’m not sure if the Third Circuit’s decision was proper or not given the lower court’s action (sometimes the normal rules of jurisprudence lead to perverse results), but Pennsylvania will be going to the SCOTUS for sure.

But so much has been going on, and so much has been said by people here about what is going on, that I almost feel like anything I could say would be simply superfluous.

Which isn’t going to stop me from saying something anyway.

My new pet peeve: 2024 offered as a chance for President Trump to come back, if this somehow doesn’t work out. Sometimes it’s even dangled as fruit to get him to concede for the good of the country.

The people pushing this line are either idiots, or they think we are.

Do they seriously believe…or do they just hope we are foolish enough to believe, that the cheating won’t happen in 2024 and Trump will have a fair chance to try again? On the contrary, after four years of Biden/Harris (mostly Harris methinks), the cheating will be baked into the system absolutely everywhere. There will probably be federal guidelines for elections by then, mandating the use of the new Hack-o-matic Voting Systems. (No doubt we will be reassured by the explanation that the name is in memory of Hitlary’s cough.)

But what is even worse, is that whoever runs in 2024, it almost certainly wouldn’t be Trump. He will be in jail long before then, and more than likely Epsteined. They have been calling him a criminal for over four years; once he is out of office they WILL prosecute. It will be as bogus as General Flynn but no one in the government will be allowed to care about that.

I have said it before, and I will say it again, this is for all the Chips. After this, GAME OVER. If we lose this, to such blatant fraud, 2024 won’t matter. Trump won’t matter. Politically speaking, nothing on Earth will matter. There will be no recourse within the system.

A Reminder Of Today’s Big Issue.

Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People...Our campaign represents a true existential threat, like they’ve never seen before.

Then-Candidate Donald J. Trump

Needs to happen, soon.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

Please note that our menu has changed, please listen to all of the options.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. The first rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government take your guns.
5. 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. Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
9. Social Justice Warriors, ANTIFA pukes, BLM hypocrites, and other assorted varieties of Marxists can go copulate with themselves, or if insufficiently limber, may substitute a rusty wire brush suitable for cleaning the bore of a twelve or ten gauge.

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

Coin of The Day

The Dime

“Dime” is not a nickname, like “nickel” or “penny.”

In fact, the five cent piece we call a nickel was the third US coin to get a nickname alluding to the nickel in it, and of course, there are collectors who will scold you for calling the one cent piece a “penny.”

But the dime is not such a word; it’s the real name of the coin and the denomination. Look at one, if you’ve got one, and see that the coin says “ONE DIME” on it. This has been true since 1837 so I felt pretty safe in writing the previous sentence. (A smart-aleck would have to have dug up a capped bust or draped bust dime to give me crap about it.)

Five weeks ago I quoted Section 9 of the mint act of April 2, 1792, in talking about the eagle. Continuing on from where I left off, it gives the specifications of dollar coins, half dollars, quarter dollars, and dismes.

Dismes–each to be of the value of one tenth of a dollar or unit, and to contain thirty seven grains and two sixteenths parts of a grain of pure, or forty one grains and three fifths parts of a grain of standard silver.

Act of April 2, 1792, Dection 9

The “grains” in question are the same grains you use at your reloading desk and the same grains bullets are weighed in. 1/7000th of a avoirdupois or “grocery” pound, but in this case, with silver, the troy pound, which was the original pound, is still used, and there are 5760 of the same grains in one of those.

(24 grains = a pennyweight, 20 pennyweights or 480 grains equals a troy ounce, 12 troy ounces or 240 pennyweights to the troy pound, and it is not a coincidence that there were also 240 British pennies to the British pound sterling before “decimalisation” in the early 1970s.)

37 2/16ths grains of pure silver in 41 3/5ths grains of coin metal (the remainder being copper) of course works out to that abominable 1485/1664ths fine standard we used until 1837. (Multiply both numbers by 40 to see this.)

But the most notable thing about what I quoted was the word “disme.” Not only does that make the word legal, it means we apparently don’t spell it right today! What’s with that S?

I’m not sure, to be honest, where that S came from. French? My one quick poke on the internet says disme comes from an “old” English word for “tenth” which in turn came from “old” French. I put old in quotes there, because “Old English” has a very specific meaning–the English language before 1066 and the Norman conquest, and I doubt my source meant that. (For one thing, no self-respecting Englishman from 1065 would ever borrow a word from the French, though he might be willing to borrow from Scandinavian languages.) So I think it’s better to call it an “archaic” English word for “tenth” that we probably borrowed sometime before 1500, bringing it into “Middle” English. (Shakespeare and the King James Bible, by the way, are both written in early Modern English, believe it or not, though many of the usages in the KJV were a bit archaic even in 1610; they deliberately chose to do that to make the work sound more impressive, and they succeeded. As for real Middle English, if you want a sample, read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the original and recognize that most of the vowels don’t sound the same as they did back then.)

Nor do I even know how “disme” was pronounced. A lot of people go with “deem,” and others say it was just like “dime”, either way that pesky S was silent. Otherwise it would sound like “Disney” with an M.

Did we ever issue a coin that says “Disme” on it? Sort of. In 1792 about 1500 “half dismes” were issued, and those are very controversial coins. Technically the US mint couldn’t issue silver that year because there were no people there who had raised the required $10,000 (!) bond to handle gold and silver. This should be unsurprising as this was a yuge amount of money back then. (This wasn’t solved until 1794 by amendment to the act of 1792, lowering the bond to a smaller amount, probably $5000 but my sources are unclear.)

So what was the US doing issuing silver half dames in 1792? Apparently they were done under the authority of an act passed under the Articles of Confederation. But this is being argued over presently. One side maintains those half dismes were illegal.

Also some people regard those half dismes as pattern (experimental) pieces rather than regular issue coins

There are also three known examples of full “Dismes” issued at about the same time, these are universally regarded as patterns. Another fifteen made out of copper are known as well; those are definitely patterns. (Patterns were often made out of a cheaper metal than a normal coin would be.)

Once we got past the bond issue, though, surely dismes could be issued with alacrity, though, right?

Well, they could be. But they weren’t.

The Mint was run as a public service in those days. You brought some raw silver in (or old coins from some other country, or silverware). You deposited it. A couple of weeks later you could go back and pick up silver coins, very likely made from your silver. This was done free of charge. If you wanted coins immediately, you had to pay a fee (less than one percent), because you were basically bumping yourself to the front of the line and getting someone else’s silver. But the point is, if you deposited silver, you could specify how you wanted it. (After 1795 the mint could charge a fee for dealing with below-standard gold and silver, and could refuse small deposits.)

And apparently almost no one wanted dismes. The first silver dollars were made in 1794. The first dimes were made in 1796-1797 and they had that “cormorant” Eagle on the reverse.

These coins were approximately 19mm in diameter, compare to our modern dime’s diameter of 17.9 millimeters. (Also compare this to our modern nickel’s 20.5mm diameter.) I say approximately 19mm because no two coins were exactly the same diameter, nor would they necessarily be perfectly circular, because there was no “collar” in the press. The collar (when present) surrounds the rim of the coin and prevents it from “squishing” out as the press compresses the blank silver round. Today the collar puts the reeding into the coin. Back then any reeded or lettered edge had to be put on the blank with a castaing machine, before the coin was struck. (This was true of all of our early coins, which is why early coins all tend to be wider than the same denominations from later years.)

Then in 1798, 1800-1805, and 1807 you had heraldic eagle reverses, and the 1798, 1805 and 1807 are much more common than the other years.

Then there was another design change, to the capped bust design, and dismes were issued less frequently, at least at first, in 1809, 1811, 1814, 1820-1825, and then finally with some consistency from 1827 onwards.

Starting in 1828, the mint introduced a new piece of high-tech equipment, a press that struck the coins “in collar.” At that point the dime assumed its modern 17.9 mm diameter.

But none of these dismes had the denomination spelled out. Many had no indication of denomination at all (you weighed the coins to determine what they were), others just said “10” or “10 C.” As surprising as the idea of not putting a denomination on a coin (even Russia was doing that back then) was the idea of making no dismes for five solid years (1815-1819 inclusive).

(Maybe, though we shouldn’t laugh too hard. We seem to have had problems with dime supplies recently–the Walmarts here would not let you pay with cash, or get cash back in the self service checkouts for months, apparently because they simply couldn’t find any dimes to put into the machines…and like a crappy printer that won’t print a black and white document because it’s out of magenta ink, they therefore wouldn’t even give you twenties as cash back.)

I don’t know when the disme became the dime, because the entire period from 1793-1837 left us with no coins on which we could see the word abbreviated, much less spelled out. (And half dismes/dimes are no help for the same reason.) I have found no reference to the denomination in any mint act between those two dates, which might help pin it down.

The Liberty Seated series has no less than six sub-types, the first is this one with no stars on the obverse.

Stars were added, and then more drapery was added to Liberty’s elbow. This was not done simultaneously, though, the stars were added during 1838 and the drapery during 1840, so there are “with stars no drapery” coins out there as well (I’ll spare you that one)

In 1861 the words “United States Of America” replaced the stars, and a new wreath went on the reverse:

This coin has little arrowheads on either side of the date. This was done to mark a weight change in 1873, and continued in 1874. (The weight change was early in the year, so you will see some 1873 dimes with no arrowheads. A 1873 dime made without the arrowheads in Carson City sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars a few years ago.) There was another time this was done in the 1850s, with coins from mid 1853 through the end of 1855 sporting the arrowheads as well.

After this point we went through coins I have covered already, the Barber dime (1892-1916), the mercury dime 1916-1945, and of course we all know the Roosevelt dime (1946-1964 silver, 1965-today clad crap).

Obligatory PSAs/Reminders

Just one more thing, my standard Public Service Announcements. We don’t want to forget any of these!!!

How not to get your ass kicked by the police. Chris Rock in 2007

Granted an “ass kicking” isn’t the same as being shot, but both can result from the same stupid act. You may ultimately beat the rap, but you aren’t going to avoid the ride.

Remember Hong Kong!!! And remember the tens of millions who died under the “Great Helmsman” Chairman Mao.

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

For my money the Great Helmsman is Hikaru Sulu (even if the actor is a dingbat).

Shitstorm Saturday:
The Kraken Unleashed!!

What a spectacle!

It’s Thursday evening in Colorado, Friday morning on the East Coast (you know, the place where the people think we’re just their frigging backyard live). So as I write this, I have no idea what happened on Friday. Hopefully the Kraken left some footprints around with tiny little squashed swamp dwellers in the bottom.

(Well, now the Kraken can get crackin’.)

So the hottest news in the last couple of weeks was the press conference, mainly by Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell, with a bit of YSM bashing by Jenna Ellis.

They mostly stated they had evidence, without actually showing it (which is entirely proper); though Giuliani read some affidavits from some brave people. So there is evidence. There is absolutely evidence.

And yet the YSM simply continues to assert there is none, and even Fox has shown itself to be controlled opposition, now.

Giuliani, and Powell, and Ellis all took those YSM ratfuckers to the woodshed.

There are tens of millions of people who will believe them, because they have seen nothing else.

They’re not evil, just ignorant.

I am reminded of some of the stories I heard about the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, everyone in the USSR knew the media bullshitted them a lot. They’d read Pravda (Правда) back to front to glean real information. For instance, once there was a time when an airliner had crashed while taking a bunch of Communist Party mucky-mucks home from a Party Congress. The crash was never announced (socialist planes never crashed, you see), but the obituaries in the back, suddenly a hundred prominent people, gave it away. Now the point isn’t that Soviet airliners crashed. The point is that the people over there were so used to their media bullshitting them they had developed tricks to counteract it. They also had a joke, that there is no truth in Izvestia, and no news in Pravda. Izvestia, of course, is the Russian word for News, and Pravda is the Russian word for Truth.

So they thought they had a handle on the bullshit, because they could see the over-the-top propaganda (that we once-upon-a-time would satirize).

But the far more subtle propaganda was beneath their notice. They had been taught, every day in school and every day as an adult, about how the United States was evil, poorer than they were, and everything they saw supported that. So they didn’t question it. They’d question specific news items, but they didn’t question the things that everyone knows.

Just like tens of millions of Americans don’t question what the news feeds them every night. Trump has been portrayed as a pompous buffoon, an asshole who never admits defeat, and won’t admit he lost this election. And he has been portrayed, over the last five or six years, as having those personality traits. It would never occur to these people to question it. Because everyone knows Trump is a reality TV buffoon!

So going back to the ex-Soviets. What was their response when they realized just how deep and pervasive the lying was?

Absolute fury and outrage.

What will our YSM Bubble People’s reaction be?

Keep in mind that the YSM Bubble People don’t even have the sense that the jurinalists lie to them at all. They’re not like Soviet citizens, aware of lying but not comprehending how much and about absolutely everything. They are completely ignorant of the lies.

If and when they finally see the truth, be prepared for some very serious “I’ve been betrayed” outrage. Many of us will be tempted to laugh, but I would venture to say that would be the wrong reaction ninety percent of the time (the other ten percent of the time would be those specific people we have tried, unsuccessfully, to redpill).

Of course some small number of them are truly dedicated ideologically to Leftism, and will be OK with the lying since it was “necessary.” I’m not talking about them; I’m talking about the people who would be on our side if only they had any real knowledge of the world.

We don’t know when, or even if, the YSM’s grip will ever be broken. I just know these next couple of months are one of the most likely times for it to happen. And when it does, a lot of good people are going to need comfort and reassurance. Be prepared.

But by all means piss on the dedicated Leftists when THEY are outraged because their sheeple are furious with them. If you can arrange to pee red fuming nitric acid, so much the better.

Justice Must Be done.

Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People...Our campaign represents a true existential threat, like they’ve never seen before.

Then-Candidate Donald J. Trump

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 Mandatory Coin

I’m going to step back a bit from coins.

The United States issued Continental Currency during the Revolutionary War, and issued some interest bearing notes during the War of 1812. But for the most part, we avoided government issued paper money until the Civil War.

Private banks could and did issue paper money, backed by their own financial soundness. You could, if you had a bank note from Mulligan’s Bank and Grill (h/t L. Neil Smith, who loathes the concept of paper money and not without a lot of justice), you could walk into that establishment and exchange it for silver and gold. As long as not too many people decided to do this the system worked; people confident in being able to exchange the banknote for real money at any time were happy to use the notes. Yes, there were more notes out there than there was real money at the bank; what backed the notes was the value of the assets of the bank; i.e., the loans the bank had made (money owed you is an asset, though getting your hands on it Right Now is problematic).

Of course, the further away you got from Mulligan’s Bank and Grill, the fewer people would accept the note, since they didn’t know the bank and they were too far away to just casually cash the note in. Or they’d take it at a discount, charging you eleven Mulligan bucks for a $10 item. Worse, if Mulligan went belly up, people far away from it might not know it. And if people had never heard of the bank before, who was to say it was till in business.

And even worse, there was no standardization of designs. The banknote you were being presented might not even be genuine, or it might have been raised (altered to show a higher denomination). If you are presented a ten dollar bill with a train vignette on it from Mulligan’s Bank and Grill, how likely are you to remember that Mulligan’s put the train on their one dollar bills, but not their tens?

A lot of the headaches can be alleviated with standardized designs and clearing houses that know the notes from far away and will accept them at par (providing the bank is in fact solvent).

This is one of the things the Federal Government started doing in 1862, when paper money was created, and this time it was here to stay. “National Bank Notes” were of standardized design with only the name and charter number of the bank differing, they were printed by the Federal Government, and their issuance was strictly regulated. The Federal government also issued demand notes, backed by nothing but a promise to eventually redeem them (which they eventually did do), and a host of other things.

[Of course, there are people who collect paper money. It tends, in general, to be far, far rarer than coins, because a piece of paper would wear out quickly. Large denominations ($50 and up) from the 1800s tend to be extremely rare, with deep-into-five figure pricetags the rule rather than the exception, with, in some cases, no known survivors and pictures you see in catalogs are off of specimen notes. In many cases, because the government tracked them when they were redeemed, we have upper limits on the number of notes that still exist (i.e., we know how many were never turned in), and in many cases even for fairly “common” stuff there are only a few hundred out there.]

Before I continue, I should mention something you may not know. Before 1928, US paper money was of a larger size than it is today. In fact, it was the same size as those old “computer cards” (or Hollerith Cards). Or rather, the other way around; the cards were the same size as the paper money. When Hollerith invented his cards, he made them the same size as the paper money, so the same machinery that banks used to handle the notes could be adapted to handle his cards. No dummy, he!

Another thing they began to do, in 1878, was issue silver certificates. (There were also gold certificates, identifiable by bright orange/yellow (not green) print on the back.)

Each silver certificate was essentially a receipt for silver dollars deposited in the US treasury. As such they were 100% backed by real money, unlike a bank note, that was backed by loans on the books of the bank. (Of course, by 1878 the price of silver had fallen so far that a silver dollar itself wasn’t worth a dollar intrinsically, but those, in turn, were backed by gold, which was itself by definition equivalent to dollars at a certain ratio.)

In 1878 and 1880, two different series of silver certificates were issued, of very similar design (denominations 10, 20, 50, 100, and $500). Another, quite different issue came out in 1886 (1, 2, 5, 10 and $20). This one is famous for actually showing five silver dollars on the reverse of the five dollar note.

There yet another series in 1891 with the same fronts as 1886 where possible (in 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, and $1000), and then there was another series in 1896.

This series was only issued in $1, $2 and $5 notes. And it is famous. They are called the “Educational” notes. They have the most magnificent artwork ever to appear on US paper money. And this is our destination tonight.

The notes’ artwork actually has names. This one is “History Instructing Youth.” The woman is a personification of history, and under her foot you can see the name of the work of art.

This note should endear itself to us all. It’s loaded with detail. In the background the capitol, and the then-newly-constructed Washington Monument. There is a fasces, this was about forty years before the Fascists stole the symbol and tarnished it forever. The names in the wreaths are politicians, generals, and writers, and a couple of inventors.

It’s worth right clicking and opening the picture in its own window. But in case you can’t, from lower left clockwise, they are: Longfellow, Sherman, Lincoln, Irving, Cooper. Fulton, Calhoun, Clay, Jacksonson, Adams. Jefferson, Washington, Franklin. Hamilton, Webster, Marshall, Perry, Morse. Hawthorne, Bancroft, Grant. Farragut and Emerson. A veritable who’s who of American history up to that time.

And, just to top all of that, what is History pointing to? That open book. What’s in the book? It’s the preamble and part of the first article of the United States Constitution. And–I’ve seen this with my own eyes–it is perfectly legible under a magnifying glass! How about that, a note that puts it in your face that the US Constitution was written by people who had studied history and learned many lessons from it. Which they did, so any Leftist lurker reading this wanting to argue about those men can just fuck right the hell off.

The back of the note is a pair of portraits of Martha and George Washington, not terribly interesting (usually the backs of those old notes are more interesting than the fronts, but not in this case).

The $1 is much more affordable than the $2 and the $5, you should have no trouble finding a presentable specimen for well under a thousand bucks.

[And one good thing about paper money is that the grade is mostly applied to the condition of the paper. Having been folded once is a huge penalty, for instance. But the artwork doesn’t become seriously impaired until you go all the way down to very fine or maybe even fine (12-35 on a scale of 70). You can pay BIG money for the nosebleed grades, but the design won’t look all that much better. Just avoid paper that has turned dark. Since a large part of my motivation to own coins and paper is to be able to see the designs, that means I typically collect uncirculated coins–the design is the first thing to go on a coin–but I will happily take unstained circulated notes with no significant damage to the artwork.]

OK, so here is the $2 1896 “Educational” Silver Certificate.

This one isn’t as rich in little details as the $1 note, but the message is nonetheless profound. (OK, we’re here because of politics, and this is not politics. The $1 is cooler. I understand.) It is probably about ten times rarer. It’s not hard to find the $1 at a coin show; you’ll have to walk a lot more to find a $2.

A century earlier, the Industrial Revolution was just getting underway. There were people alive in 1896 who remembered what it was like not to have railroads. And scientists and engineers had tamed steam power, making it possible to cross the continent in days, and ship goods worldwide in a timely fashion. Just a few decades earlier, in 1861, they had “cracked” electricity, learning how to turn motion into electricity (generators) and electricity into motion (motors). The effects of steam power had already proven to be profound; electricity had made communications almost instantaneous and since 1878, was expected to light the nights as never before. But electricity was just getting started; think of the profound effects computers have had on the world in the last 30 years–all dependent on electricity.

The reverse is portraits of Fulton and Morse, indeed two inventors who worked with steam and electricity. And the two who were named on the $1 note.

So finally on to the $5 note.

Being able to flip a switch and have light. A commonplace thing today. The dawn of a new age, then!

Light before that day involved outright open flame (candles, gas) or flame that was just barely protected, or rather, flame you were just barely protected from. Who can ever know how many disastrous fires were started by lanterns? Electricity was safe and cheap…and brighter. No more going blind trying to read and write at night!

Yes, electricity again.

I mentioned that scientists and engineers had “cracked” electricity in 1861-2. I’m referring of course to Maxwell who wrote equations relating electricity to magnetism, showing how magnetism could be used to create electricity, and vice versa. And then it turned out that light…plain old light…was actually an electromagnetic wave!

And chemistry turned out to be electrical interactions between atoms. Gravity doesn’t hold molecules together; it’s ridiculously weak for that task. Electrical forces do.

Those equations of Maxwell essentially govern everything that happens in your life, other than gravity. And unless you took a lot of math in college you will have no idea what they could possibly mean (I on the other hand took nine credit hours in college playing with them).

(I’m not sure why Wordpus did that to me). By the way the bold face is significant, and the fact that some things aren’t in bold face is significant, too. Oh and the X signs and dots don’t mean the same thing like you might think if you stopped after algebra.

Add to those equations a fifth one, Newton’s law of gravitation (much easier to understand), and you’ve got a handle on everything visible that happens in the universe. Except for the minor detail that these formulae don’t explain the existence of atoms other than hydrogen, and because they don’t explain that, they can’t explain why the stars shine.

In any case, I think those four equations should have shown up somewhere on that $5 bill.

So what happened? The hope was the elaborate artwork would deter counterfeiting. It actually had the opposite effect. People couldn’t drink in all that detail, so when counterfeiters didn’t supply it, few noticed. And bank tellers complained that the bills were so busy it would take an extra split second to identify the denomination, so they were hard to count.

One site claims Mrs. Grundy complained about all the scantily clad figures and that’s why the series was killed off after only a couple of years.

A $10 was in the works, but never actually issued. Apparently this is a picture of a specimen deliberately printed in the wrong color. I know nothing about it, other than its name is “Agriculture and Forestry” (along the bottom center of the design).

Standard Disclaimer: These are not my notes. In this particular case, though, I will admit to owning examples of all three of the notes that were issued.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

Just two more things, my standard Public Service Announcements. We don’t want to forget them!!!

How Not To Find Yourself In Contention For The Darwin Award
(Nothing to do with bearded dragons)

It has been pointed out that all of the rioting is nominally on account of criminals who resisted arrest in one form or another, and someone suggested schools ought to teach people not to resist arrest.

Granted an “ass kicking” isn’t the same as being shot, but both can result from the same stupid act. You may ultimately beat the rap, but you aren’t going to avoid the ride.

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Important Reminder

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

Remember Hong Kong!!!

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

Shitstorm Saturday!

Yeah, we’re definitely in a shitstorm right now, and we’re starting to respond to the other side’s opening salvos.

Assuming things go as we hope (and for the most part, expect) this will be looked upon as one of the pivotal points in history we will consider ourselves lucky to have witnessed. (On the other hand if we get a nasty surprise, it will be looked on as a pivotal point in history we wish we hadn’t seen.)

This is for ALL OF THE CHIPS. They are “all in.” We are “all in.”

If the Enemy wins, we will never, ever, ever have another chance at this without a hot civil war, and the enemy will have the full weight of the Federal Government on their side. Because we haven’t managed to drain the swamp, and they can certainly either co-opt or get rid of the few good people Trump has managed to install.

Trump having to leave office next January would be a catastrophe, and everything he has accomplished will be undone in a matter of months…if not weeks…if not days. To the applause of the minders of our culture and our educational system.

Welcome to the American Socialist State (ASS). Maybe that’s why the Dems have that as their mascot?

If Trump wins the work has just begun. The swamp MUST be drained, it must become his TOP priority. I’ll be honest, I think it should have been kicked into higher gear a long time ago, but then…I do NOT know what the Generals know, and I also don’t know what they DON’T know. Maybe by delaying, he’s pulling an Alexander I, giving Napoleon a long enough supply line to hang himself on. Seriously, I am reminded of this. Alexander was risking being deposed because the Russian army would not meet Napoleon head on. But in the end it was worth it. Napoleon didn’t just fail to conquer Russia, he himself ended up being chased all the way back to Paris and being deposed.

I wrote most those words last week, and can’t improve on them, at least not without pulling a Biden and plagiarizing someone.

[Which is what sunk Hiden’s candidacy in 1988, of course now who on the Left would care enough about things like that? Or remember Gary Hartpence a/k/a Hart, the carpetbagger nominally from Colorado who ran for President for the second time that same year, but was sunk by having an affair? It didn’t take too long for the Dems to decide that should pose no obstacle…]

On Messing With Patriots

And of course, that talk about the War of 1812 caused me to remember a certain piece of music and I posted it and analyzed it to make my point. That’s always kind of risky for me, I will form associations with a piece of music that others will not share; but in this case I was mostly in line with Chaikovskiy’s intent.

The 1812 Overture from last week was written long after the fact, in 1880, and is properly but never here referred to as the “Year 1812 Solemn Overture.”

The War of 1812 isn’t called “The War of 1812” by the Russians; it’s not even called by that phrase translated into Russian. It is, rather, “Отечественная война 1812 года” or, romanized, “Otechestvennaya voyna 1812 goda.” That’s pasted in from Wikipedia, which does a minor disservice here because they didn’t spell out the Russian for “1812,” which (from memory of Russian classes decades ago) would be something like “odin tysich vosyemsot dvyenadtsat.” (It looks a lot harder to pronounce than it actually is.) Anyhow, the entire translation of the name of the war is: “The Patriotic War of the Year 1812.”

This parallels what we are dealing with right now: We’re heading for the Patriotic war of 2020…in fact, if you count “cold wars” we’re already in it. A civil war between patriots and…er…traitors (whew, managed to restrain a profanity or six).

But hearing the phrase “Patriotic War” in a Russian connection might remind some reading this of a different war.

World War II in Russia is known as “Великая Отечественная война” Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voyna , or the “Great Patriotic War.”

This started when Hitler turned on his erstwhile ally, Stalin, in June of 1941.

(Never let anyone forget that the Soviets and Nazis were allies for nearly two years. They collaborated in carving up Poland in September 1939, and as far as the United Kingdom was concerned, the Soviet Union was the enemy, until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.)

The Soviet Union, of course, was an empire just as much as the Russian Empire was. It was run largely by Russians, and hundreds of conquered peoples were basically just so much crap on the bottom of Russian shoes–a status relieved only when those people adopted some Russian culture.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was supposedly a union of co-equal countries all striving towards a glorious communist future (but merely socialist for now). If you believe that, then I have a bridge to sell you. Russians dominated in daily life, they got the good jobs in the military, and so on, though at least in the very uppermost echelons of leadership belief in Marxism-Leninism was more important than ethnicity. In fact as of 1941 the leader of the USSR was a Georgian, not a Russian. (Georgia, by the way, is called “Sakartvelo” by its own people, who call themselves the “Kartveli.”) Stalin’s original name was Jugashvili, which ends in shvili, which is one of those endings, along with -adze and -ia, that screams “This dude is a Kartvelian!” to those who recognize it.

Stalin, of course spoke Russian, but with a very thick Kartulian (Georgian) accent.

What did he do when Hitler unexpectedly attacked him? (Yes, unexpectedly. For whatever reason, Stalin, as paranoid as he was, didn’t expect Hitler to stab him in the back before Stalin would be ready to stab Hitler in the back.)

Well at first he was too stupefied to respond, and the Soviet military, seriously weakened by Stalinist purges in the late 1930s, fell back, and fell back, and then tried something different: they fell back.

Stalin eventually came out of his shock and began to rally his slaves.

Did he do it by appealing to the great glorious quest for communism? No. He appealed to Russian patriotism! Which is why they called it the Great Patriotic War. Why not evoke images of 1812?

Imagine the irony of a guy with a thick Georgian accent appealing to Russian patriotism on the radio.

There were songs written for the Great Patriotic War, and the most famous of them was first published three days after the invasion. It’s titled Священная война Svyashchennaya Voyna “Sacred War” or страна огромная! Vstavay, strana ogromnaya, “Arise, Great (Vast) Country!” It was written by Alexander Alexandrov, the same man who wrote the Soviet national anthem.

It’s a kick-ass song, and here is a kick-ass video of it chock-full of footage from the front lines, restored and colorized. (I know the color is not original, because I have seen many of the same clips in black and white in documentaries.) It even shows von Paulus surrendering at Stalingrad!

(Note: If you go directly to youtube and try to play this, it will ask you to sign in to prove your age. Apparently you can get around that by copying/pasting the URL.)

The lyrics, as you will soon see, say not one word about socialism, but plenty of words about kicking the fascist scum the hell OUT. As such it’s worth a look despite its origin.

Here is a literal translation (think New Revised Standard Version) on the left, and a looser paraphrase (think Living Bible) on the right. The right hand column even has the same meter as the music; you could sing it if you ever have to drive Nazis out of your country.

The appeal to patriotism rather than socialist glory worked…eventually. After a few years and 25 million deaths.

If you’re like me, you have mixed feelings about the fact that the Soviet Union beat Nazi Germany in World War II. (And you’re no doubt wondering why the hell I am posting Soviet patriotic music here.) Couldn’t they both have been annihilated? Pretty please?

But that’s exactly my point. The Soviet Union was a disgusting stain on the world, it was a mammoth prison, it was a mammoth slave plantation, it was the most evil thing on Earth for decades. And yet the people there had a sense of patriotism that could be dredged up in 1941, the depth of Stalin’s rule, even after over two decades of propaganda against the notion of being patriotic to a country, rather than being international socialists.

So (now finally returning to America) when someone proposes to mess with a country that is not only worthwhile, but the greatest ever in history, what are its people going to do?

This is something the Left cannot imagine. And they will continue to not imagine it as it blows up in their ugly faces.

There’s no ambiguity here. There’s no situation where an outside observer should want both sides to lose, like there was with World War II. The Left deserves to lose, and America deserves to win. Hopefully it won’t come to a shooting war, but if it does, perhaps, given the Left’s hatred of America and our love for it, it will be known as the Patriot’s War. Will we end up with a song for this? Perhaps, perhaps not. But really, do we need another one? We already have our anthem. We have America the Beautiful. We have My Country Tis of Thee. We have God Bless America. We have God Bless the USA. We have The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

The other side cannot lay claim to any of those, because they hate America. In fact, they have nothing but their own misguided hate for America to guide them through what is about to come.

And they are about to learn what happens when they threaten something people love.

Justice Must Be done.

Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American People...Our campaign represents a true existential threat, like they’ve never seen before.

Then-Candidate Donald J. Trump

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 Mandatory Coin

I found out that the Russian Empire issued a number of coins to commemorate the War of 1812, more specifically the battle of Borodino.

In 1834, the Russians issued this ruble coin:

In 1839, a memorial was constructed at Borodino, and this ruble was issued that year (sorry about the crappy photography).

The portraits on both coins are of Alexander I, who was tsar at the time (1801-1825), rather than Nicholas I, his younger brother, who was tsar in the 1830s (1825-1855). In fact, if you want a portrait of Alexander I on a ruble, you have to get one of these coins; he did not put his own portrait on his coins while he was alive. Neither did Nicholas, nor Paul, Alexander’s father (1796-1801), nor Alexander II, Nicholas’s son (1855-1881).

(Maybe monarchs don’t have such a big ego after all–given a precedent of not putting their image on coinage, these absolute monarchs were all happy to keep it that way.)

Finally in 1912, to commemorate the centenary of the Patriotic War of 1812, we have:

I’ve had some trouble translating that inscription on the reverse. It runs something like “this glorious year has passed, but the deeds done in it will not pass” though I’ve seen very different renderings. “This glorious year has passed but the deeds done in it will not be forgotten” probably is a better rendering.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

Just two more things, my standard Public Service Announcements. We don’t want to forget them!!!

How Not To Find Yourself In Contention For The Darwin Award
(Nothing to do with bearded dragons)

It has been pointed out that all of the rioting is nominally on account of criminals who resisted arrest in one form or another, and someone suggested schools ought to teach people not to resist arrest.

Granted an “ass kicking” isn’t the same as being shot, but both can result from the same stupid act. You may ultimately beat the rap, but you aren’t going to avoid the ride.

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

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

Appendix: The lyrics in Russian

For anyone interested, here is Sacred War in Russian, with a transliteration.