“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
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Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
ischiorrhogic
adjective
of an iambic line, having spondees in the second, fourth or sixth place
in ancient prosody, noting a variety of iambic trimeter which has not only a spondee or trochee for an iambus in the sixth or last place, as in the choliamb, but a spondee in the fifth place also
Wolf’s easy alternative explanation
A kind of irregularity in old Greek poetry, which jazzes things up, but too much so, in the opinions of some.
When the variation on the sixth foot of the trimeter coexists with a spondee in the fifth place, the verse becomes still more irregular, and can, in fact, hardly be considered an Iambic verse, but is rather a combination of an iambic diameter with a trochaic monometer. Such lines are called by the grammarians Ischiorrhogic (broken-backed) : they are very rarely used by Hipponax. LINK
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
Speaker Johnson Pinging you on January 6 Tapes
Just a friendly reminder Speaker Johnson. You’re doing some good things–or at least trying in the case of the budget–but this is the most important thing out there still hanging. One initial block released with the promise of more…and?
We have American patriots being held without bail and without trial, and the tapes almost certainly contain exculpatory evidence. (And if they don’t, and we’re all just yelling in an echo chamber over here, we need to know that too. And there’s only one way to know.)
Either we have a weaponized, corrupt government or we have a lot of internet charlatans. Let’s expose whatever it is. (I’m betting it’s the corrupt weaponized government, but if I am wrong, I’d like to see proof.)
Justice Must Be Done.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Small Government?
Many times conservatives (real and fake) speak of “small government” being the goal.
This sounds good, and mostly is good, but it misses the essential point. The important thing here isn’t the size, but rather the purpose, of government. We could have a cheap, small tyranny. After all our government spends most of its revenue on payments to individuals and foreign aid, neither of which is part of the tyrannical apparatus trying to keep us locked down and censored. What parts of the government would be necessary for a tyranny? It’d be a lot smaller than what we have now. We could shrink the government and nevertheless find it more tyrannical than it is today.
No, what we want is a limited government, limited not in size, but rather in scope. Limited, that is, in what it’s allowed to do. Under current circumstances, such a government would also be much smaller, but that’s a side effect. If we were in a World War II sort of war, an existential fight against nasty dictatorships on the brink of world conquest, that would be very expensive and would require a gargantuan government, but that would be what the government should be doing. That would be a large, but still limited government, since it’d be working to protect our rights.
World War II would have been the wrong time to squawk about “small government,” but it wasn’t (and never is) a bad time to demand limited government. Today would be a better time to ask for a small government–at least the job it should be doing is small today–but it misses the essential point; we want government to not do certain things. Many of those things we don’t want it doing are expensive but many of them are quite eminently doable by a smaller government than the one we have today. Small, but still exceeding proper limits.
So be careful what you ask for. You might get it and find you asked for the wrong thing.
Political Science In Summation
It’s really just a matter of people who can’t be happy unless they control others…versus those who want to be left alone. The oldest conflict within mankind. Government is necessary, but government attracts the assholes (a highly technical term for the control freaks).
His Truth?
Again we saw an instance of “It might be true for Billy, but it’s not true for Bob” logic this week.
I hear this often, and it’s usually harmless. As when it’s describing differing circumstances, not different facts. “Housing is unaffordable” can be true for one person, but not for another who makes ten times as much.
But sometimes the speaker means it literally. Something like 2+2=4 is asserted to be true for Billy but not for Bob. (And when it’s literal, it’s usually Bob saying it.) And in that sense, it’s nonsense, dangerous nonsense. There is ONE reality, and it exists independent of our desires and our perceptions. It would go on existing if we weren’t here. We exist in it. It does not exist in our heads. It’s not a personal construct, and it isn’t a social construct. If there were no society, reality would continue to be what it is, it wouldn’t vanish…which it would have to do, if it were a social construct.
Now what can change from person to person is the perception of reality. We see that all the time. And people will, of course, act on those perceptions. They will vote for Trump (or try to) if their perception is close to mine, and vote against Trump (and certainly succeed at doing so) if their perception is distant from mine (and therefore, if I do say so, wrong). I have heard people say “perception is reality” and usually, that’s what they’re trying to say–your perception of reality is, as far as you know, an accurate representation of reality, or you’d change it.
But I really wish they’d say it differently. And sometimes, to get back to Billy and Bob, the person who says they have different truths is really saying they have different perceptions of reality–different worldviews. I can’t argue with the latter. But I sure wish they’d say it better. That way I’d know that someone who blabbers about two different truths is delusional and not worth my time, at least not until he passes kindergarten-level metaphysics on his umpteenth attempt.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
Palladium went absolutely bananas Thursday and Friday rising 96 bucks the first day and 37 bucks the second. Platinum went up a whole eight bugs then down three. (Somebody, please go wake platinum the hell up.) Silver managed to drop one cent, while gold showed a modest increase. (As such, the gold:silver ratio has gone up.)
*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.
The Moon and Flat Earth
Let us examine what we should expect to see when observing the Moon, assuming the usual flat earth model is correct.
We’ll start with this standard diagram.
It’s difficult to tie down exact distances, because the Flat Earthers have yet to come up with a map (as opposed to a diagram) complete with a scale, but apparently the Moon is claimed to be about 3000 kilometers above the plane of the Earth. There’s no official notion what the diameter of the disc is, either, but one could say that the distance from the north pole (at the center of the disc) to the outer rim (corresponding to the globe earth south pole) is 20,000 km since that is very roughly the distance on the round earth (globers have no hesitation in publishing exact figures). Alternatively since the glober circumference of the earth along the equator is ~40,000 km, we could say that that is the distance that should be measured along the circle of the equator, which means (via dividing by 2 x pi) the distance from the center to the equator is 6366.2 km. From the pole to the equator is 1/4 of the total distance across the circle, so the diameter of the entire disk is 25,465 km. (Which is actually fairly close to the globe earth circumference when that is expressed in miles, by coincidence.)
The Moon varies in declination from 28.7 S to 28.7 N, or to translate that into non-astronomese, that’s as far north or south as it gets. The Sun, by contrast, stays between 23.44 degrees S and N. (In globe earth terms, that’s the Earth’s axial tilt.) Every flat earth model I’ve seen shows the Sun going around and around on a daily basis, following a circle that grows or shrinks according to the seasons, withing these bounds on the flat earth; likely also about 3000km above the Earth. I’m going to assume the Moon behaves similarly only within the 28.7 S to 28.7 N bounds.
Here is a picture of the Moon, when it is directly over the equator, in the Flat Earth model. (Screen shot taken off a youtube video.)
The Moon is regarded by most Flat Earthers as a sphere, with some minority thinking that it, too is some sort of disk. Whichever one it is, when you look at a full moon, you see something like this:
However, it may be tilted clockwise (near moonset) or counter-clockwise (at moonrise), in other words the orientation may be different. This is lunar north pole at the top so it should be close to what you see when the moon is directly south of you, which should happen at about midnight on a full moon, provided you’re north of the moon.
And therein lies the first problem.
What if you are south of the moon at that moment? Like, for instance, living in Australia or South Africa or South America?
If the flat earth is correct, you should see a good part of the other side of the moon (if it is a sphere), since you’ll be “behind” the moon compared to the guy to its north. Not exactly behind the moon, so there will be some overlap between what the two of you see. The person south of the moon, in other words, should see some features you cannot see, and vice versa.
On the other hand, if the Moon is a disk (apparently the minority opinion in the flat earth camp), then…well, there are two sub cases. If the moon is pasted to the firmament so that it faces “down” to the Earth, than only people directly under it will see the moon as a circle; anyone else will see it as elliptical. If (on the other hand) it happens to be face-on to the viewer in the northern hemisphere, anyone not on that line of sight should see it as elliptical, and if they’re far enough away, they may even be seeing the opposite face of the disk.
Yet we’ve never seen a photograph of the back side of the Moon taken from Earth’s surface, not even a partial one. Nor have we seen pictures with the Moon distorted into an elliptical shape because the photographers are not face-on to it. Yet effects like these must happen if the Moon is as close as is claimed.
Here’s another issue. If you’re inside the circle that the Moon traces every day, you will be closest to the moon when it is directly south of you; if you’re outside of that circle, you will be closest to the moon when it is directly north of you. If you are actually very close to the moon’s latitude, it should pass by almost directly overhead, and be nearest at that time. Closer to moonrise/moon set it should be much further away.
If it’s further away, it should look smaller. Yet tracking the moon across the sky shows no change in its apparent size, no matter where you are.
Interestingly, these same issues would arise on Globe Earth, if the Moon were this close to it. If you saw the moon looking like the picture I showed, someone far away would be able to see features that you can’t, on the other side of the Moon. So the mistake here is not with the shape of the Earth, but rather, with the notion that the Moon is nearby.
All of these issues resolve if the Moon is far away, compared to our baseline (40,000 km for Flat Earth, or 13,000 km for Globe Earth). If the Moon is far enough away, two people standing 40,000 km apart will see almost exactly the same features on a spherical Moon, with the differences being seen oblique near the edges of what we see, so those differences would be hard to even tell apart.
How far away? Aristarchus of Samos who lived from 310-230 BCE (approximately) was able to do a computation, and got a value of roughly 130,000 kilometers. Others, like Hipparchus and Ptolemy, got 425,000 and 376,000 kilometers, respectively.
If numbers like these are even remotely correct–and they must be at a bare minimum, because we do not see the effects we would see (regardless of the shape of the Earth) if the Moon were closer to Earth–then there’s now a new problem.
If the Moon is that far away, two different observers on a flat Earth should see it in almost exactly the same direction, both altitude and azimuth. [Altitude: the angle above the horizon, with 0 being on the horizon and 90 being overhead. Azimuth: the compass bearing of the object. Generally 0 is considered to be due north, 90 degrees is to the east, 180 to the south, 270 to the west, and 360 is also due north.] This is because it is so far away that shifting a few thousand kilometers should make little difference, like taking two steps sideways and noting that light pole at the other end of the parking lot only seems to shift a little compared to the buildings in the distance. A 40000 km shift (from one edge to the other) against a moon 300,000 km away should lead to an angular shift of about seven and a half degrees.
Yet at the same time. different people can see the Moon low in the east, and low in the west, a difference of almost 180 degrees! OK, that one can be explained on Flat Earth. If I’m in Colorado, west is the same direction as east would be in India (check the diagram). [Also true for globe earth, in three dimensions.] But what about when the Moon is overhead for me, and low to the horizon for someone else, at the same time? There’s no way to make that work, for a distant object, on a Flat Earth. And we’ve established that the Moon must be distant.
Well, there’s only one way to solve that problem. The ground itself that you are standing on, cannot be oriented in the same direction as the ground of that other observer. To try to visualize this, it’s easiest to deal with plumb bobs; the lay of the ground (if the ground is horizontal) is perpendicular to the plumb bob. So if “horizontal’ is the same thing in two different places, the plumb bobs will be perpendicular to the same thing and thus parallel to each other. This would be the case on Flat Earth. A line of sight to a distant moon would form nearly the same angle to both plumb bobs, instead of very different angles, which is what we actually observe.
Therefore horizontal in one place, is not oriented the same as horizontal in the other place. The Earth cannot be flat. (What shape it actually is can be determined by collecting information about the orientation of the moon from various locations, all at the same time.)
As a post script, the same reasoning works for the Sun as well…though you have to have the proper equipment to see sunspots, otherwise the Sun is just a featureless sphere and you cannot tell whether two people far apart are looking at two different sides of it or not.
Oilworld
I know of a world where it rains, there are mountains, hills, streams and rivers and lakes, all under a nice thick atmosphere–thick enough you could strap on wings and fly! Not the dessicated nearly-airless rocks of the inner solar system, the roasting dry hell that is Venus, the deep-frozen (or totally volcanic) Galilean moons, the bottomless atmospheres of the gas giants.
Comparatively speaking this is nearly paradise!
Perhaps I have a second calling for writing real estate ads. Because what I haven’t told you is that this place is a frigid 93 K (-290 F)…so cold that water is a rock, a hard one, never a liquid. Those mountains are largely made of ice. The streams and rivers and lakes? Liquid methane and ethane, in some ways a lot like gasoline, but gasoline would be frozen solid here. If one could feel this stuff it would probably feel oily, not wet. The atmosphere is almost pure nitrogen; even if it weren’t at that frigid temperature you’d pass out and die breathing it. And it’s so smoggy that you’d never see the shrunken sun, nor much of anything else in the night sky.
I speak, of course, of Saturn’s moon Titan, which orbits at 1,122,870 km. (Compare to the Earth-Moon distance of 384,399 km.) Despite being almost three times further, this is still close enough to Saturn that, if you could see Saturn through the smog it would be 11 1/2 times as wide as the moon. Titan is almost precisely in Saturn’s equatorial plane, however, so the rings would be almost perfectly edge on. The orbital period is 15.95 days. Here it is, seen from an Earth-based telescope, a dot to Saturn’s upper right.
To remind people of what I said in the Moon roundup, major moons (the ones that are round) come in three sizes, large (7 of them), medium (9 of them) and small (three of them), for a total of nineteen. There are also five non-rounded minor moons about the size of those small major moons, we can call these “big” small moons, well, big small moons, or maybe medium-small.
The seven large major moons are: our own Moon, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan and Triton. Titan happens to be the second largest of the Big Ones. It’s just a bit smaller than Ganymede, and it’s thus the 10th largest object in the solar system (including the Sun); it’s larger than Mercury. This is the only large major moon that Saturn has, so Jupiter has it beat. Or does it? Saturn has four of the medium major moons (out of nine total), and two of the three small ones, for a total of seven major moons. And for the cherry on top, two of the big five unrounded moons are also here. But we’ll cover the medium and small stuff later; today we focus on Titan, which is arguably the most interesting of the large (and major) moons.
Titan was thought to be larger than Ganymede until relatively recently; it turned out that astronomers were measuring the light-impenetrable atmosphere, and that was enough to make the difference and fool astronomers for decades. An understandable error; this is the only moon with a significant atmosphere; more so than ours in many ways.
And yes, there’s more than enough air pressure to allow stable liquids to form. (The only other world like that in our solar system is the one you’re sitting on.) The atmosphere is four times as dense as ours, yet the pressure is “only” 1.45 times our atmospheric pressure. The difference being largely due to Titan’s much lower surface gravity of 13.8 percent of Earths (our Moon’s gravity is higher, actually.)
After the Pioneer and Voyager missions, we realized that there could be liquids on Titan’s surface. The Hubble Space Telescope was able to add to the speculation by detecting more strong evidence.
So we decided that the next time we sent something to Saturn, we’d take a closer look at Titan.
A much closer look. As in, actually touching it.
The Cassini probe, named after one of the two scientists who first studied Saturn in depth, brought with it the Huygens lander…named after the other of those two scientists, the one who discovered Titan. From 2004-2017 Cassini was able, in its copious spare time while studying Saturn, to map Titan with its penetrating radar, and Huygens actually landed on Titan on January 14, 2005.
Radar is needed, because this is what Titan would look like to human Mark I eyeballs, in true color, no enhancements, no false color:
The color is good old smog.
With near infrared (“near” meaning it’s infrared at frequencies close to visible light), you see this:
This feature was actually first seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1994, though Cassini got a better look starting in 2003. The dark area is apparently a dune sea! (No, no Shai Hulud. Sorry, Coothie.)
So here is a map put together in 2016, with a lot of official names for features (open in a new tab for a much more legible rendering):
It looks like a bit of a patchwork quilt because Cassini could only do sharp imaging on those occasions where it was flying by Titan; it wasn’t dedicated to studying Titan, so many areas are just shaded polygons, or just very blurry. (In fact Cassini divided its time between studying Saturn itself and 20 different moons.)
As with any map like this, you won’t get a decent notion of the two poles, so here they are. In case you haven’t gotten my subtle hints that this isn’t very good real estate (never mind the billion mile one-way commute) you can scout out properties on the original images at over 3000 pixels width.
And now what you’ve been waiting for: Huygens’ descent to Titan’s surface. This just-under-five-minute movie is a time lapse, showing you the fish-eye image sent as the probe descended. Look to the sides, though, and you will see graphics reporting time, angles to the Sun and Cassini, which sensors are seeing what at any given time, altitude information, scale information…this thing is loaded; many of you will want to watch it a couple of times.
And in case you didn’t want to watch that, here’s the contrast-enhanced picture from the surface:
(Now go back and watch the movie.) Those rocks are almost certainly water ice.
Huygens is the only probe we’ve ever landed on a body that remains entirely in the outer solar system.
OK, so on to a bit more technical content. Here’s a cutaway of Titan, somewhat hypothetical, much like the one I found for three of the Galilean satellites a few weeks ago:
And yes…another liquid water ocean deep down! But we’re not completely certain that this is the correct model; note that the diagram specifies which model it is, which it wouldn’t have to do if we were certain of it.
The atmosphere is responsible for the fact we can have liquids on Titan; here’s a diagram of its layers:
Nearer the surface, we have this cross section, reminiscent of some notional cross sections we see for Earth:
On earth we have aquifers the top of which are the water table, and a lake is basically where the water table is above the surface. But here we have…an “alkanofer”?!? What the heck is that about?
(Dragging out the organic chemistry skis. Not a soapbox, skis. As in, getting out over my…) Alkanes are a class of molecule consisting of nothing but hydrogen and carbon. Every carbon uses all four of its bonds to connect to distinct atoms. The simplest alkane is methane, with one carbon, connected to four hydrogens, CH4. The next one up is a pair of carbons, connected to each other by one bond (carbon can double or even triple bond, but those cases wouldn’t be alkanes). The other three bonds for each carbon is connected to a hydrogen, for a total of two carbons and six hydrogens, C2H6; this is ethane. You can add a third carbon to the chain, to get propane (C3H8), a fourth to get butane (C4H10)…but now there’s an additional complication. With four carbons, they could form a chain, or a T, with one carbon in the “middle” connected directly to three other carbons. Either configuration will connect to ten hydrogen atoms. The chain is butane, the T configuration is isobutane.
And if you allow rings of carbon atoms (technically molecules with rings aren’t called alkanes, but rather cycloalkanes), you can have up to six different variations, called isomers. Four of them are shown below. Though the ones with rings don’t connect to as many hydrogen atoms, in the lower left is cyclobutane and note there are only eight hydrogen atoms.
(And yes, propane has a ring form too, but the chain is the only possible three carbon alkane.)
You can go on, and the higher you go the more isomers are possible, and this number grows rapidly. Leaving out cyclo- type isomers, you have 2 isomers for 4 carbons, three isomers for 5 carbons, five for 6 carbons, nine for 7 carbons, 18 for 8 carbons, 35 and seventy five for 9 and 10 carbons, respectively…and when you get to 32 carbons, there are over 27 billion isomers…again, no rings.
One trend is that the longer the alkane, the higher its melting point. Hence we have butane which is a liquid on earth at 0 C, and at room temperature with just a little bit of pressure (like in cigarette lighters), pentane which is liquid up to 34 C, and so on. Gasoline is largely made up of alkanes and cycloalkanes with (roughly) eight or so carbon atoms in them.
At the low temperatures on Titan, only the smallest alkanes will be liquid, but that doesn’t mean bigger ones don’t exist as sand or other forms of solid matter. Imagine a world you could scrape frozen crude off the ground.
Titan should, perhaps, be thought of as “Oilworld.”
What would it be like to swim on Titan? Pretending that the cold and lack of oxygen wouldn’t kill you within seconds, these liquids aren’t very dense, so you’d sink to the bottom of the lake or pond. Your best strategy might be to leap out of the “water,” rather than try to swim.
Life?
For those speculating about life, Titan has some advantages. It certainly has plenty of carbon, and those alkanes make good feedstock for building more complex molecules (which is why, for instance there’s so much smog there). But that life would almost certainly have to exist in that subsurface ocean…and we’re not even sure that that ocean is there, yet. Anywhere else, it’s simply too cold.
On the other hand, its atmosphere resembles the atmosphere on Earth, back before cyanobacteria and plants started producing oxygen. It’s likely Titan would have something to teach us about pre-biotic chemistry.
Future Missions
In 2028 Dragonfly will launch, and in the mid 2030s it will arrive at Titan. It will be a flying drone, powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generator, i.e., the heat from a chunk of plutonium 238 (which literally glows red, it’s so hot from radioactivity). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator). This is the way we power most of our probes to the outer solar system, however Juno and Europa Clipper did (and will) use large solar arrays (they have to be large because sunlight is very weak out there). Other unfunded ideas were for a hot air balloon, a probe that would float on one of the lakes, and even a submarine drone!
Titan is going to get a lot of attention in the future, that’s for sure.
These are the released Pfizer Documents with the thousands of Side Effects that they desperately tried to have Sealed and Hidden from YOU, for 75 years. pic.twitter.com/JaICzukRBu
Child s*x trafficking is rapidly becoming one of the fastest-growing enterprises, fueled by the open border policies of the Harris-Biden administration.
Fox News even drew a chilling comparison, saying ordering trafficking victims is as easy as ordering pizza.
I frequently see many in the pro-Trump media space, saying not to be too confident, and don’t share polls/markets that show Trump winning, because it will make voters complacent and not show up to vote, etc.
I frequently see many in the pro-Trump media space, saying not to be too confident, and don’t share polls/markets that show Trump winning, because it will make voters complacent and not show up to vote, etc. I think it’s the exact opposite. Victory is contagious. People are much more willing to take part in the game, if they think they are going to win. People commonly repeat “act like we are 10 points down”. How does that motivate the fence-sitters to go to the polls? This will make people feel defeated. People want to feel like their vote matters. Like they are a part of something significant. People want to win. If anything, I’d say this recent surge in Trump popularity and positivity is creating MORE Trump voters, because the stigma around Trump is dying. People are not afraid to openly support Trump anymore. The movement is infectious. Our confidence and vibes draw people towards us, and humans are naturally inclined to default towards the group. Liking Trump is cool now. Spreading positivity does not make us complacent. I think it creates more voters, by making us look more appealing to the undecideds, and motivating the disgruntled non-voters who feel like their vote does not matter. We give them hope that this time, things could be different. I don’t care what anyone says. Trump is winning, and if you want to be part of history, you will join us and vote Trump.
I am so grateful I woke up from whatever hypnosis that was that I was under.
I apologize to conservatives, to religious people, to the mothers who were questioning the medicines and foods we gave our children. I didn’t realize how out of touch I was and how manipulated I was by…
I am so grateful I woke up from whatever hypnosis that was that I was under. I apologize to conservatives, to religious people, to the mothers who were questioning the medicines and foods we gave our children. I didn’t realize how out of touch I was and how manipulated I was by the media and culture in general. I think it’s really important for people to set aside their tribalism and admit when they were wrong. So I’ll go first. 4 years ago I thought conservatives were bad rich white corporate people who hated the poor. I hated Trump (I believed what Canadian media said about him) but I probably couldn’t tell you one single thing that he did wrong or didn’t do right. I pretended like I knew what I was talking about when it came to politics but the truth is all I cared about was not voting conservative. I had such strong opinions about it and maybe I even thought I had done my due diligence. But the truth is I would open up the political platform days before voting day and read between the liberal and NDP parties platform highlights and choose from there. I had NO IDEA and no business voting. I hated the churches and thought religious people were brainwashed. I felt superior in my spiritual practices as if I knew better than thousands of years of peaceful people gathering to worship Jesus. Meanwhile I was drinking, I was partying and filled with anxiety and depression while I did these bandaid eastern wisdom practices that temporarily fixed small problems. I thought the anti-vaxxer moms were crazy and uneducated. In 2019 I went to social justice trainings because that was the thing back then and this is where I started to wake up. Not only did it not make sense…..it so clearly made things worse. And then I woke up. Not all at once. Bit by bit. It started with the visceral feeling that the sometimes well meaning social justice trainings were manipulative and encouraging division and hatred over healing. Then the pandemic and how the media handled it. Then the illegal and corrupt actions of our government. Then the realization that these medicines were causing more hurt than harm. Then my deep dive into understanding politics, geopolitics and the world’s history. Then I met Jesus. And everything else spiralled into place after that. I didn’t just “switch teams” – I’m not on a team. I’m just very very aware of history, the inner workings of politics, how the medical system works and what I need to do to have a good life. I know what it’s like to be a good person who simply doesn’t pay attention to the world beyond the surface of what media shows. There are many of us now. Be patient with people. They can change.
Which has destroyed the lives of more Americans: Iran and Russia, or our domestic credit card companies? Dave Ramsey on the real threat we face, which is debt slavery.
(0:42) How Banks Exploit You With Debt (9:11) How Cash Changes Your Psychology (19:58) Why Our Leaders Oppress… pic.twitter.com/ogTPMACDRP
INCREDIBLE: In 2020, there were approximately 45-50K Amish registered to vote. This year around Amish reaching over 200K voter registration. pic.twitter.com/MRHhqjIOoL
Donald Trump clocked in to work a shift at a McDonald's in Pennsylvania over the weekend. It was a funny stunt that, of course, sent the left into spasms of rage. pic.twitter.com/cwQriRF8xx
I’d throw in a few Rockefellers and Rothschilds also.
Of course, this does not mean committing felonies, but standing up to the forces that want to tear this nation – and humanity apart. The very people XVII told us will be destroyed by the time this movie comes to an end are currently roaming the halls of power…supposedly. It’s a sickening sight.
The discourse on this site is to be CIVIL – no name calling, baiting, or threatening others here is allowed. Those who are so inclined may visit Wolf’s other sanctuary, the U-Tree, to slog it out. There is also a “rescue” thread there for members of the Tree to rendezvous if the main site goes kablooey. A third site has been added for site outages of longer duration.
This site is a celebration of the natural rights endowed to humans by our Creator as well as those enshrined in the Bill of Rights adopted in the founding documents of the United States of America. Within the limits of law, how we exercise these rights is part of the freedom of our discussion.
Fellow tree dweller, the late Wheatie, gave us some good reminders on the basics of civility in political discourse:
No food fights.
No running with scissors.
If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
And Auntie DePat’s requests:
If you see something has not been posted, do us all a favor, and post it. Please, do not complain that it has not been done yet.
The scroll wheel on your mouse can be your friend. As mature adults, please use it here in the same manner you would in avoiding online porn.
Thank you so much for any and all attention to such details. It is GREATLY appreciated by more than one party here.
8Let me hear what God the LORD will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his saints, to those who turn to him in their hearts. 9Surely his salvation is at hand for those who fear him, that glory may dwell in our land. 10Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other. 11Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky. 12Yea, the LORD will give what is good, and our land will yield its increase. 13Righteousness will go before him, and make his footsteps a way.
Luke 12:35-38
35“Let your loins be girded and your lamps burning, 36and be like men who are waiting for their master to come home from the marriage feast, so that they may open to him at once when he comes and knocks. 37Blessed are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes; truly, I say to you, he will gird himself and have them sit at table, and he will come and serve them. 38If he comes in the second watch, or in the third, and finds them so, blessed are those servants!
Be afraid neither of the world, nor of the future, nor of your weakness. The Lord has allowed you to live in this moment of history so that, by your faith, his name will continue to resound throughout the world. — Benedict XVI
St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray. And do thou, Prince of the Heavenly Hosts, by the power of God, cast down to Hell Satan and all his evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.
>>148156518 Amen brother. Q
As always, prayers for the fight against that which seeks to enslave us are welcome. Via con Dios.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
We’ve talked about theories of flat earth, and of gravity not existing. What about the other direction – not only gravity existing, but anti-gravity, too?
SO – the failure of “beautiful theories” led her to begin questioning them – and to wondering how beauty and math might be misleading the direction of physics.
Well – let’s couple that with journalism – how the cross-interests of journalism – the WOW – the NOW – the NO – the WHOA – and the WOO – how that might ALSO be misleading science.
Happy Birthday to my dad at 84 years, and still perking along. He’s currently working on repairing a shutter that is falling apart (rotting, and really just needs to be deep sixed) which is original to the house. He would have to have a new one custom made to replace it, and being mostly Irish….
I’ve been busy. An old friend who is an Air-Streamer was in town over the weekend, and I spent hours with her among other things. This is going to be a bit light.
Everyone who is a pragmatic critical thinker knows that China will devalue their currency to lower the impact of exports to the USA. Beijing controls the banks and they did this before. As a result, the dollar value increases and… pic.twitter.com/lQmc6icZX8
Here. Bookmark this for when Trump wins. Everyone who is a pragmatic critical thinker knows that China will devalue their currency to lower the impact of exports to the USA. Beijing controls the banks and they did this before. As a result, the dollar value increases and imports cost less. The Chinese imports then enter the USA at a lower price consistent with their cost estimate as a tariff offset. China takes in a lower price, but retains access. That’s just how it works. The importers pay the tariff with a lowered price and a higher valued dollar. Essentially statis for the time being. Then….. EU industrial products to Chinese manufacturing plants start to contract, due to China’s aggressive cost cutting initiatives. The EU gets angry about the impact to their economy. The EU then follows the same path and devalues their central bank currency; further pressuring the dollar to an upward price. Exports to the EU are now more expensive, and imports from the EU to the USA are now cheaper. Again, the EU goal is statis. Both scenarios create cheaper USA imports despite the tariffs. However, on the EU side Trump then ends the Marshal plan and executes “tariff reciprocity” against the EU. More frustration and gritted teeth by Brussels. [NOTE: Avoiding this squeeze also explains why U.K PM Starmer was all snuggly to Trump at Trump Tower a few weeks ago – he’s hedging.] Exports from the USA ultimately cost more because the dollar is stronger against EU and Asia currencies. However, a stronger dollar is an offset to BRICS leverage and allows Trump to play economic chess. Trump uses part of the tariff income to underwrite agriculture exports, but… here we have fun… if agriculture exports are impacted, domestic foodstuffs drop in price. Into this dynamic Trump turns to Mexico. We have a strong dollar, all those Western Union transfers to Mexico are more valuable. Leverage is created. The economic situation then overlays the secure border dynamic and if Mexico wants to retain trade access within the USMCA agreement, the part that no one discussed comes into play. Unbeknownst to all those except those who watched Robert Lighthizer do it, the USA has first right of refusal to any trade agreement made by Mexico or Canada. That’s correct, Trump now controls a veto on trade agreements within USMCA partnered countries. Suddenly Xi Jinping is vulnerable in Mexico if Trump nixes the EV production. Beijing is financially exposed and vulnerable. Big Panda not happy. How do we know this will happen? Good question. Answer: #1) This is what Trump did in 2017. #2) Because he said this is what he is going to do. Don’t forget to bookmark. MAGA Bitches!
We need to talk about this more, Utah, because this is exactly the kind of person who is wrecking our state. It’s not an abstraction, it’s real.
This is Gary Peacock, a millionaire transplant from California who lives in a 3.5 million dollar home in Park City.
We need to talk about this more, Utah, because this is exactly the kind of person who is wrecking our state. It’s not an abstraction, it’s real. This is Gary Peacock, a millionaire transplant from California who lives in a 3.5 million dollar home in Park City. The other day he accosted a driver, unlawfully entered his car, forcefully removed him (which is an assault,) and held him against his will while demanding the police come and ticket him. Among the things Peacock said during the exchange were “I’m riding a bike, I have more rights than you.” He also told the driver that he would have him put in jail. The only person who belongs in jail here in Gary Peacock. I guarantee you, if I had done this, I would still be sitting in a Summit County jail facing multiple felony charges. But not Gary Peacock. No, he’s a blue state millionaire. He’s the kind of person Spencer Cox wants to replace you with. Rich, entitled Californian who rides a bike. This is who Utah caters to now. Sure, he’s getting called a “male Karen” all over social media, but I think everybody is missing the larger point of what happened. This guy thinks he can come to Utah and do whatever he wants. And he’s not alone. There are thousands of Gary Peacocks that have moved to Utah since the pandemic. They sell their homes in California, buy a plot of land super cheap here, build a mansion, and drive home prices up. If it was just one Gary Peacock it wouldn’t be so bad. But it’s thousands of Gary Peacocks! This Gary Peacock just got caught! Think about what he said. “I’m riding a bike, I have more rights than you.” Really think about that! That’s how all these people feel! Not just about bikes, but about everything! And guess what, they do! They do because people like Spencer Cox and Deidre Henderson encourage them to come to Utah and do whatever they want, and to hell with the millions of Utahns who get hurt in the process. Gary Peacock ORDERED the cop to cite the driver. And guess what! The cop DID AS HE WAS TOLD! A law enforcement officer literally TOOK ORDERS FROM A CALIFORNIA MILLIONAIRE! THAT! HAPPENED! We need to be more outraged about this. These are the kinds of people who come to Utah and think they’re kings. This needs to be stopped. Open your eyes, Utah! Gary Peacock belongs in jail for what he did. And after he serves his lengthy sentence, he should be ejected from the state. But we also need to end the culture that brought him here. And that means voting out the politicians that incentivize him and his ilk from moving here in the first place.
Do you know any Trump supporters who cover their faces and wear Dockers?
I’ve done a lot of pheasant hunting. As a high schooler, I made extra $ assisting guides on pheasant hunts: getting the hunters in the field, flushing game for them to easily shoot, and making sure they are safe. And much more since those… pic.twitter.com/IlyEQ7zAAn
Bill Clinton so nervous about Trump winning his hand is shaking like he’s got the Parkinson’s. 👀 Or maybe he’s just anxious and nervous about going home to Hillary. 🤔 pic.twitter.com/v3zlzcvndJ
I’m voting Parkinson’s. That’s too close to the real thing that I’ve seen.
It seems the regime is soft rolling its election fraud plans with a concentration on Pennsylvania (also known as "The Keystone State") this time around, though I'm sure shenanigans will abound all over the game board.
The parasites are bursting not multiplying. Alcohol dehydrates cells, disrupting the cell membranes. It denatures proteins, which are crucial for survival, disrupting their function and structure, leading to cell death. It also dissolves lipids (fats) present in a parasite's…
This is a short documentary on my trip up into Chimney rock. The scandals, the check points, the damage, the people, the recovery effort. pic.twitter.com/5TR3DPNvtQ
WATCH: Pedro Rodriguez, Executive Director at "La Jornada" in Queens, NY has a complete meltdown on camera when questioned by James O’Keefe about his operation that provides a residential address to illegal immigrants who pay him.
This is easily the weirdest thing we’ve ever had the misfortune to post:
There are blinking lights in peoples’ blood.
Dr. Ana Mihalcea uses a 4000x microscope to examine the blood of vaccinated and unvaccinated people, alive and deceased, and you may not believe what she’s… pic.twitter.com/TE13XE11vO
WOW 🚨 You Do Not HATE The Kamala Harris Admin Enough
Hurricane Helene Volunteers in North Carolina, “I've seen 1 FEMA agent since I've been here — We've been reported to the authorities for domestic terrorism. We're a bunch of special operation veterans. It doesn't get any more… pic.twitter.com/yO2TzgvKRA
This video has 340k Likes. Why does it have 340k Likes? Because another potential Government land grab is taking place and the media is ignoring it
– Wouldn't it be crazy if they found 2.34 billion tons of neodymium in Wyoming? You know, a magnetic mineral which is pretty vital… pic.twitter.com/e1srnKGJSS
In the 1960s a miraculous treatment for chronic pain, traumatic injury, strokes and spinal cord paralysis was discovered that spread across America like wildfire—until the FDA buried it.
Here, 60 Minutes exposed the FDA using the same playbook they used throughout COVID-19. A🧵 pic.twitter.com/Bh0dcjNk5w
My late grandmother practically did the same thing. I brought snacks for myself and my sister, and she’s like, you’re being selfish when there was plenty of chips and dip on the table. Of course, I brought my signature guacamole….
I’d throw in a few Rockefellers and Rothschilds also.
Of course, this does not mean committing felonies, but standing up to the forces that want to tear this nation – and humanity apart. The very people XVII told us will be destroyed by the time this movie comes to an end are currently roaming the halls of power…supposedly. It’s a sickening sight.
The discourse on this site is to be CIVIL – no name calling, baiting, or threatening others here is allowed. Those who are so inclined may visit Wolf’s other sanctuary, the U-Tree, to slog it out. There is also a “rescue” thread there for members of the Tree to rendezvous if the main site goes kablooey. A third site has been added for site outages of longer duration.
This site is a celebration of the natural rights endowed to humans by our Creator as well as those enshrined in the Bill of Rights adopted in the founding documents of the United States of America. Within the limits of law, how we exercise these rights is part of the freedom of our discussion.
Fellow tree dweller, the late Wheatie, gave us some good reminders on the basics of civility in political discourse:
No food fights.
No running with scissors.
If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
And Auntie DePat’s requests:
If you see something has not been posted, do us all a favor, and post it. Please, do not complain that it has not been done yet.
The scroll wheel on your mouse can be your friend. As mature adults, please use it here in the same manner you would in avoiding online porn.
Thank you so much for any and all attention to such details. It is GREATLY appreciated by more than one party here.
The readings today will be a mish mosh as the daily reading yields Galatians, but the Feast of St. Therese yields the others.
Galatians 5:1-6
1For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. 2Now I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you. 3I testify again to every man who receives circumcision that he is bound to keep the whole law. 4You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace. 5For through the Spirit, by faith, we wait for the hope of righteousness. 6For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, but faith working through love.
Psalms 19:8-11
7The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple; 8the precepts of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the LORD is pure, enlightening the eyes; 9the fear of the LORD is clean, enduring for ever; the ordinances of the LORD are true, and righteous altogether. 10More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb.
John 15:1-8
1“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. 2Every branch of mine that bears no fruit, he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. 3You are already made clean by the word which I have spoken to you. 4Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. 5I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. 6If a man does not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned. 7If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you. 8By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be my disciples.
So many musical settings to choose from….
Be afraid neither of the world, nor of the future, nor of your weakness. The Lord has allowed you to live in this moment of history so that, by your faith, his name will continue to resound throughout the world. — Benedict XVI
St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray. And do thou, Prince of the Heavenly Hosts, by the power of God, cast down to Hell Satan and all his evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.
>>148156518 Amen brother. Q
As always, prayers for the fight against that which seeks to enslave us are welcome. Via con Dios.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
anticryptic
adjective
Best Definition
in biology, serving to conceal or fitted for concealing one organism to the disadvantage of another: as contrasted with procryptic, serving to hide an organism for its own welfare
Inferior and Less Clear or Complete Definitions
camouflaged
having protective resemblance to environment
of or pertaining to camouflage used by a predator to provide stealth, as opposed to camouflage used by prey to hide
of or relating to resemblance to surroundings that renders an animal less conspicuous to its prey
serving to conceal an animal from its prey
Shown in a picture
Unencrypted by magnification, so to speak
Crazy cat ladies – stay away, with your vegan cat food!
MUSIC!
I let this nice song hang out in a tab forever. Need some room!
Ah, Celtic Woman! Always a pleasure!
THE STUFF
Care for a piece of pi?
SO – what do we have here? A new way to calculate pi? That’s still pretty complicated?
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
January 6 Tapes Reminder
After the first release, we were supposed to get more, every week.
As far as I know it hasn’t happened.
Speaker Johnson, please follow through!
A Caution
Just remember…we might replace the RINO candidates. (Or we might not. The record is mixed even though there is more MAGA than there used to be.) But that will make no difference in the long run if the party officials, basically the Rhonna McDaniels (or however that’s spelled–I suspect it’s RINO), don’t get replaced.
State party chairs, vice chairs, secretaries and so on, and the same at county levels, have huge influence on who ultimately gets nominated, and if these party wheelhorses are RINOs, they will work tirelessly to put their own pukey people on the ballot. In fact I’d not be surprised if some of our “MAGA” candidates are in fact, RINO plants, encouraged to run by the RINO party leadership when they realized that Lyn Cheney (and her ilk) were hopelessly compromised as effective candidates. The best way for them to deal with the opposition, of course, is to run it themselves.
Running good candidates is only HALF of the battle!
Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit
…we can move on to the next one.
Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.
Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.
Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!
It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.
In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.
Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.
Justice Must Be Done.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Spot Prices
All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend). (Note: most media quotes are for the bid…the price paid by the market makers, not the ask, which is what they will sell at. I figure the ask is more relevant to people like us who wish we could afford to buy these things. In the case of gold the difference is usually about a dollar, for the PGMs the spread is much wider.)
Gold see-sawed, getting closer to 2700, almost dipping below 2600 on Wednesday and Thursday but recovered nicely on Friday, even to the point of closing up for the week, barely. Silver, however, has definitely slipped, and you would need almost two more ounces of silver this week to buy an ounce of gold, than last week. Platinum a bit down, palladium might be starting another run.
*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.
Moon Roundup
Before 1610, there was one Moon, and it wasn’t a class of objects. Actually at one time the Moon and Sun (!) were lumped in with Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn as planets. They were, after all, all objects that moved with respect to the background stars (that includes the Sun but it takes a little bit of extra work to show this since it’s rather difficult to see the stars and Sun at the same time). And planet derives from a Greek word for wanderer.
Note by the way that Earth was not considered a planet. Planets were things up there in the sky, not down here, and certainly not as “down here” as you can get, the dirt beneath your feet.
This was back in the old “Earth is the center of everything” days, but late in the 1500s some people started suggesting that perhaps it was the Sun at the center. (This was actually a revival of an ancient Greek idea.) Now this is difficult to settle with naked eye observations, but a telescope will show you that not everything goes around the Earth. Venus and Mercury exhibit phases that show they orbit the Sun. And Jupiter, of course, has those Galilean moons.
Galileo actually considered them planets at first, because, after all, they moved against the background stars, just like Jupiter did. He didn’t realize we needed a new category of thing, with the Moon being the first known member. And it took a while; for a couple of centuries the larger moons of the outer planets were called “satellite planets” instead of “moons” or just plain “satellites.”
So if you think Pluto being demoted from planet status was a kerfuffle, imagine what was going on then, when they still couldn’t figure out which buckets even existed that they could put things into (figuratively speaking of course).
Eventually anything that orbited the Sun was a planet, including Earth, and anything that orbited a planet was a satellite or moon, including “the” Moon. We know of no cases of a moon itself having a natural satellite of any significant size.
And yes, “satellite” used to be synonymous with “moon,” but then we started putting things in orbit, and we started talking about natural and artificial satellites. Some people still do so, but most people use “moon” (with a lower case M) for the natural case and just plain “satellite” for the artificial case.
[And yes, we’ve no idea how to classify Stacy Abram’s hindquarters. It’s a moon…sort of…and is of similar size to the major moons, but it’s not a heavenly body by any stretch of the imagination.]
Since those days, of course, we’ve found objects out there of all kinds of different sizes orbiting both planets and the Sun, so we had to sit down and reassess definitions again and Pluto got the boot from the “planet” clique. (And, IMHO, rightly so; the other alternative would have been to promote about half a dozen Kuiper belt objects.) There’s no minimum size, as yet, for moons, so technically any planet with a ring has countless moons: all the constituent rocks that make up the ring.
Anyhow, we’re not even halfway through the moons that are in our solar system. But I thought I’d do a quick roundup, to set up the Big Picture. Let’s start out with a picture from Wikipedia showing planets and large (or famous) moons, all to scale by size. Notably, Mercury and Mars look roughly the size of some of the bigger moons, and Pluto is outclassed by at least seven moons.
Let’s consider them in order of size. If you ignore the planets and Pluto, there seem to be seven “big ones,” and a bunch of medium sized ones.
The big ones are The Moon, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto (all orbiting Jupiter), Titan (Saturn), and Triton (Neptune). They are all 2500 km across or larger. There seems to be a big gap between Triton and any of the moons smaller than it, and when you look at masses, that is confirmed. Triton, the smallest of these seven, is more massive than all of the other moons put together. So you could actually make a list with eight entries, the eighth being “everything else that’s a moon, put together” and that would be the last item on the list.
That makes it seem like a nice, natural dividing line between “large” and “medium.”
The large moons verge on being planet sized, with Ganymede more voluminous than Mercury (though made of much lighter stuff). So much so that at least some astronomers call these seven the “satellite planets.” (I.e., things that would be planets, if only they weren’t orbiting a planet!) [As an aside I suspect we’ll be looking, again, at reclassifying things soon. And I would not be entirely unsympathetic.]
Now just eyeballing that diagram again, there are nine moons in the “medium” bracket (with S for Saturn, U for Uranus, and P for Pluto): Titania (U), Oberon (U), Rhea (S), Iapetus (S), Charon (P), Ariel (U), Umbriel (U), Dione (S), and Tethys (S). And again, it turns out that Tethys, the smallest of the nine, is bigger than all of the remaining “small” moons, put together. So, another natural dividing line, between medium and small. These medium moons are all 1000-2500 kilometers in diameter.
Up to here, moons seem to be named after mythical figures, however for some reason the moons of Uranus got named after Shakespearean characters.
So that’s sixteen medium and large size moons. Everything else is “small.”
But there’s another criterion we could use…and that’s “hydrostatic equilibrium” which when you dumb it down means “is it spherical”?
If you don’t dumb it down, there are nuances. For instance, if a moon is orbiting fairly close to a planet when it’s still largely molten, it’s going to take on an oblate shape, first because it’s rotating once per orbit, and second because the planet’s going to tend to make it egg shaped (tidal forces). If it then solidifies and its orbit gets larger, it’s technically not quite in hydrostatic equilibrium any more; because if it were liquid it would flow into a slightly different shape. Our own moon is actually an example. But in general, for classification purposes, this is a nuance that is ignored; the sucker is round or it isn’t.
[Edited to add:] A moon in hydrostatic equilibrium is considered to be a “major moon,” no matter how small it might be.
[Edited:] All of the large and medium moons are major moons. But as happens, three (maybe four) of the biggest “small” moons, those below 1000km across but greater than 250 km across, are round too and also qualify as major moons. There are two moons in the 500-1000 km range, and seven in the 250-500 km range. I’m going to call the 250-1000 km range the “medium small” range.
[Edited:] In the 500-1000 km range, we have Enceladus (S) barely making it at 504 km, and definitely a major moon. There is also Dysnomia, a satellite of the dwarf planet Eris, which is the “maybe” case. It’s 615 km across, apparently, but it’s very dark and we cannot get a read on its shape though its density appears to be low enough that we don’t expect its gravity will have crushed it into a sphere.
[Edited:] in the 250-500 km range we have Mimas (S), and Miranda (U), 400 and 470 km in diameter respectively, both major moons. And we also have five objects that are not major moons, and they are Hyperion (S), Proteus (N), Nereid (N), Vanth (satellite of dwarf planet Orcus) and Hi’iaka (satellite of dwarf planet Haumea). Proteus is actually bigger than Mimas, so there’s clearly not a hard line, above which a moon will be round (and therefore major). As I alluded to above, a low density can make a moon less massive, which can be enough that it does not “go round.”
[Edited:] So there’s your roundup. Expect to see talk of Large, Medium and Medium-small moons, as well as major moons and minor moons; “major” encompassing large and medium moons as well as three of the scores of small moons.
Saturn
History
Saturn, to the ancients, was a star-like object that took 29.5 years to make one trip around the ecliptic. Dimmer and slower than Jupiter, which was associated with the king of the gods, it got associated with the prior generation.
You see, in Greek and Roman mythology the Olympian gods were the third generation. The first was Uranus (Οὐρανός), the sky, and Gaia, the Earth. He was both her son and her husband. Their children were the titans, twelve of them: Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Tethys, and Cronus. (You will see some of those names again…in fact if you read the previous section, you already have.) Cronus (or Kronos) was the father of Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hades, Hestia, Demeter and Chiron. These are all the Greek names. The one called Kronos was known to the Romans as Saturn.
In 1610 Galileo turned that telescope towards Saturn, and saw…well, a couple of lumps one on each side of Saturn that each looked like it might be a moon a third the size of Saturn. (Let’s face it, it wasn’t a very good telescope, even if it was one of the best in the world at the time.)
A couple of years later, he looked again, and the moons were gone. He predicted that they would be back later, and indeed they showed up. And got bigger to the point where Saturn seemed oval-shaped. Christiaan Huygens finally saw this as rings in 1655, publishing his results in 1659. Huygens spotted one moon, which he named Titan. Shortly thereafter (1675) Giovanni Domenico Cassini discovered a gap in the rings, and also four more moons, Iapetus, Rhea, Tethys and Dione–all named after titans. (Dione is either another daughter of Uranus and Gaia, or the daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, depending on whose rendering of the mythology you’re reading.) In 1789 William Herschel (discoverer of Uranus) discovered two more moons, Mimas and Enceladus–these are two of the three “small” moons in our solar system that are nevertheless big enough to be round, from the previous section. Hyperion was discovered in 1848. It’s comparable to Mimas and Enceladus, but not round…far from it, as we’ll see.
Saturn ends up having seven major moons, one large, the other six medium. Add in Hyperion, and that’s eight. When I was a kid, the count was ten (with most books still saying nine). The missing two were Phoebe (1898) and..well..number ten, first spotted in 1966, was a bit confusing. It was first spotted on December 15, 1966. But then another astronomer spotted it again…but in a different place in the same orbit…on December 18, 1966. Here was a moon that appeared to be jumping around in its orbit, but it was there (well, maybe not) and it was number 10. Finally in 1978, a couple of astronomers realized what was really going on. There were two moons sharing the same orbit, Janus and Epimetheus, a situation which had been assumed to be unstable up until then. So elementary school Steve didn’t realize Saturn’s tenth moon was really the tenth and eleventh moons. Today’s count is (drumroll) one hundred and forty six, with the most recent discovery being in 2020. But I am going to save detailed discussion of the moons until next time.
Pioneer 11 flew by in 1979. Voyager 1 zipped by in 1980, and Voyager 2 followed it in 1981. What a nice little barrage, especially since the cameras on the Voyagers were so much better. After that nothing until 2004, when Cassini went into orbit around Saturn. It not only stayed there for 13 years (until we deliberately deorbited it into Saturn’s atmosphere, since it was about to die anyway), it even put a lander on Titan! The ONLY landing ever made beyond the asteroid belt.
The Planet Proper
Saturn itself orbits at an average distance of 1,434 million kilometers, nearly a billion and a half. That’s 9.58 AUs. It has an axial tilt of about 28 degrees, a bit more than Earth’s 23 degrees, so Saturn definitely has seasons, unlike Jupiter (whose axial tilt is about 2 degrees). This will turn out to be important when we finally quit fiddling around and talk about the rings.
Saturn has a magnetosphere, like Jupiter, Ganymede, and Earth. Unlike Jupiter and Earth, the Saturn “magnet” is aligned with the axis of rotation pretty well. This magnetosphere isn’t as strong as Jupiter’s, but still significant.
Measured across the equator, Saturn is as wide as 9 earths. Measured through the poles, on the other hand, it’s only 8 earths tall. That’s because it is spinning very rapidly, once in about 10 1/2 hours, and it’s fluid clear down to a solid core that’s about 16,000 km across. We were able to learn a LOT about Saturn’s interior just from monitoring its gravity’s effect on both the Cassini probe and the rings.
Saturn has a banded atmosphere much like Jupiter’s though not nearly as colorful. It doesn’t have a long-standing storm like the Great Red Spot, but from time to time white spots will appear. Great white spots tend to appear once every Saturnian year, during its northern hemisphere summer, the last one in 1990. Cassini got to see one form, stretch out along its band, and eventually dissipate, after the head of the thing caught up and passed its tail. And then in 2010, ten years early, we got another white spot.
Voyager 1 spotted something very peculiar around Saturn’s north pole. For some reason we don’t fully understand, the clouds there form a hexagon, which appears to rotate with the planet, in time with Saturn’s radio emissions.
The south pole, by contrast, shows something like a hurricane eyewall. (No word yet on whether this is where all the FEMA hurricane money goes.)
OK, with that out of the way…
The Rings
They have been called “Gravity’s Masterpiece.”
And that is an understatement.
Gravity created them, gravity maintains their structure, and gravity is slowly destroying them.
Galileo noticed change when looking at Saturn, but could not resolve the rings; his telescope was simply too small. That change is caused by Saturn’s seasons. When it’s northern hemisphere summer, the north surface of the rings is tilted toward the Sun, at autumn they are edge on, at northern winter, the south surface is tipped toward the Sun, and finally at northern spring, they are edge on again. And since, comparatively speaking, we’re quite close to the Sun, we see the same thing. Here is a twenty nine year time lapse:
The rings are thin. At the time the earth crosses through the plane of the rings, we can’t see anything, not even a thin line. It has been likened to looking at a sheet of paper edge on, but relatively speaking the sheet of paper is much too thick! The next “disapperance” is next year, right now it looks something like this:
The rings are skinny but definitely there.
The rings are themselves subdivided into seven sections, imaginitively named A, B, C, D, E, F, and G.
What we see through our telescopes are basically A, B, and C. This is typically what you’ll see…only it’s much smaller in the telescope field of view than this:
This picture (from Cassini) shows the rings from well above the plane, with Saturn itself casting a shadow on them.
Going form the outside in, there’s a medium-bright ring (A), a wide gap–the one noted by Cassini, a brighter ring (B), and a much fainter ring (C). There are other, smaller gaps as well. Where do they come from? The Cassini gap happens to be at that spot where, if something were orbiting there, it’d do so in a 2:1 resonance with Mimas. That causes enough instability to force objects into smaller or larger orbits. In other cases, small moons within the rings help clear things out.
That’s just the beginning of the crazy stuff that happens in the rings. Ripples one to two kilometers high raised by embedded moons, spokes on the B ring we can’t figure out (yet)…some scientists are spending their entire careers on this stuff!
To see the D through G rings readily, we must look at Saturn backlit…something we couldn’t do until we sent spacecraft there.
By the way, if you right click and open in new tab, between the two “gray” fuzzy rings (a narrow one and a broad one) at about 4 oclock…that dot there is Earth.
The rings appear to be made of chunks of ice, averaging about a foot across. And they’re pretty bright; they haven’t been covered with dark space dust. That leads most scientists to think that they aren’t that old…150 million years at the most. It’s possible that they weren’t there when the non-avian dinosaurs were killed 66 million years ago.
The most common thought is that a medium-sized moon got too close to Saturn somehow, perhaps thanks to perturbations from the other moons, and tidal forces (yes tidal forces again) did the rest.
Picture this: a spherical body maybe 200 kilometers across in orbit. It will orbit as if the entire mass of the moon were concentrated at the center. But a rock at the far side of the moon is 100 kilometers further away, and one at the near side is 100 kilometers closer. An object 100 km further out, in order to stay in orbit, wants to move slower than this moon is orbiting, yet that rock is being forced to move faster than that, since it’s stuck to the moon. If the moon were to suddenly disappear and leave the rock behind, it would actually go into a new, elliptical orbit, with the closest part where the rock was, sitting on the moon, and the furthest part, oh, some distance away. And so, this is what the rock “wants” to do. It actually feels a slight tug pulling at it, off the surface of the moon. If the moon is close enough to the planet, and its gravity weak enough, the rock will actually feel no net attraction to the moon, and drift off. As will its neighboring rocks. And similar things happen on the side of the moon closest to the planet, they want to go into smaller orbits and feel a net tug toward the planet and off the moon.
That’s how loose rocks might peel off, but moons are generally solid, aren’t they? Sure. But, if you think about that orbit where things on the far side will just barely want to drift away, but put the moon closer, then something deep underground at the far side would (if it weren’t buried) drift away. Now bury it again. Everything above it wants to drift away too. Those miles of stuff are effectively “hanging” wanting to fall off the moon. Enough of that, and even a solid rock will fracture. Rocks don’t do too well under tension, a fact which has had a profound effect on architecture here on Earth.
So, basically, we think a mostly-icy moon got too close and shattered. And the tidal forces have kept it from reforming. However some suggest that instead, two moons collided and this is the debris from the collision.
The rings are dying, though. The ice is slowly sublimating with help from cosmic rays, and that ice ends up in Saturn’s magnetic field and eventually forms auroras in its atmosphere. There are also other forces causing ring material to rain down onto Saturn’s equator (this was discovered by the Cassini spacecraft). The rings have 10-100 million years to live at the rate they are losing mass.
I’ll close this with another picture:
..or two, just to see the aurora…
..or three (you can see the hexagon in this one).
Obviously I could go on. But some of the coolest stuff is on the moons. So…until next time!
Davidson Cty. North Carolina Sheriff Tripp Kester.
“When they (the government) go above & beyond trying to secure our liberties & trying to take ‘em, it’s the right of the people to alter or abolishment that govt.”
Breaking: Almost 2 years later and the creeks of East Palestine are still contaminated! The federal government and the railroad want the citizens to shut up and go away while billions of your tax dollars are going overseas and being used to import illegals! This is an absolute… pic.twitter.com/EKybCP3C99
— Ben Bergquam – Real America’s Voice (RAV-TV) News (@BenBergquam) October 4, 2024
They will look it at you with a straight face and tell you that America is just an idea pic.twitter.com/FDG8CZcdRF
“The vaccines were NOT developed by Moderna-Pfizer…but by NIH. The patents are owned by NIH. They were made by military contractors. Pfizer and Moderna were paid as if they came from Pharma. They were a Military Project…”
(0:00) Elon Musk Is All in on Donald Trump (6:35) Providing Starlink to Victims of Hurricane Helene (9:22) If Trump Loses, This Is the Last Election (21:49) The Epstein and Diddy Client List (33:38) Vaccines (35:49) The Movement to Decriminalize Crime… pic.twitter.com/jNqB1ThqQz
I’d throw in a few Rockefellers and Rothschilds also.
Of course, this does not mean committing felonies, but standing up to the forces that want to tear this nation – and humanity apart. The very people XVII told us will be destroyed by the time this movie comes to an end are currently roaming the halls of power…supposedly. It’s a sickening sight.
The discourse on this site is to be CIVIL – no name calling, baiting, or threatening others here is allowed. Those who are so inclined may visit Wolf’s other sanctuary, the U-Tree, to slog it out. There is also a “rescue” thread there for members of the Tree to rendezvous if the main site goes kablooey. A third site has been added for site outages of longer duration.
This site is a celebration of the natural rights endowed to humans by our Creator as well as those enshrined in the Bill of Rights adopted in the founding documents of the United States of America. Within the limits of law, how we exercise these rights is part of the freedom of our discussion.
Fellow tree dweller, the late Wheatie, gave us some good reminders on the basics of civility in political discourse:
No food fights.
No running with scissors.
If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
And Auntie DePat’s requests:
If you see something has not been posted, do us all a favor, and post it. Please, do not complain that it has not been done yet.
The scroll wheel on your mouse can be your friend. As mature adults, please use it here in the same manner you would in avoiding online porn.
Thank you so much for any and all attention to such details. It is GREATLY appreciated by more than one party here.
38Now as they went on their way, he entered a village; and a woman named Martha received him into her house. 39And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. 40But Martha was distracted with much serving; and she went to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.” 41But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things; 42one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her.”
Be afraid neither of the world, nor of the future, nor of your weakness. The Lord has allowed you to live in this moment of history so that, by your faith, his name will continue to resound throughout the world. — Benedict XVI
St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray. And do thou, Prince of the Heavenly Hosts, by the power of God, cast down to Hell Satan and all his evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.
>>148156518 Amen brother. Q
As always, prayers for the fight against that which seeks to enslave us are welcome. Via con Dios.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
ultramontane
adjective
south of the Alps
supporting the Pope
of or relating to peoples or regions lying beyond the mountains, especially the Alps
supporting the authority of the papal court over national or diocesan authority
relating to or supporting the doctrine of papal supremacy
literally – “beyond the mountains”
Shown in a picture – sort of
All hail the Cthulhu plushie!
MUSIC!
Some interesting period music for a role-playing game related to the Lovecraft story…..
But if that’s not your bag, try this mountain music – supposedly the first ever film of Appalachian music – which was recorded on October 7, 1928 – and posted to the internet on October 7, 2021.
Here for your enjoyment on October 7, 2024.
Good stuff! And speaking of stuff…..
THE STUFF
Did you know that – in addition to the speed of light – there is a “55 mph truck speed” that protons have to deal with?
Steve prepared you for this video. Enjoy!
Hmmmmm…….
Just sayin’!
And remember…….
Until victory, have faith!
And trust the big plan, too!
And as always….
ENJOY THE SHOW
W
PS – Wishing the people of Israel peace and safety on this day of infamy.
This is going to be a disaster. I have seen, though, reports that the union members want to know why they are hearing children’s screams from the containers. Could be nothing, could be something.
The concentration of messaging on changing hearts and minds needs to happen. Otherwise, this is going to happen in a lot of states, the legislature passes a law, and the courts overturn it.
On June 4, 1963, President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy signed a Presidential decree, Executive Order 11110, which stripped the Federal Reserve Banking System of its power to loan money to the United… pic.twitter.com/G7mUyn0Xfb
— The Rubber Duck ™ (@TheRubberDuck79) July 21, 2024
This should be playing on every news channel.
Private helicopter pilots are flying in supplies to areas of eastern Tennessee that are only accessible by air. The original poster Evie Kyker/cayotecowgirl said government aid is “nowhere to be found.”
I just saw a convoy of Good Ole Boys loaded up with their shallow bottom fishing boats and trucks full of supplies to drive out and help people in affected areas. No one is paying them, their gas, or for the things they bought. This is just another example of toxic white culture.
The FDA has been the victim of a horrible rumor that 50% of their funding comes from the pharmaceutical industry.
In response they’ve released an official report of their funding to prove that actually only 47% of their funding comes from Big Pharma. pic.twitter.com/o1sQwFGBWD
🚨Just spoke to a US Military insider about the efforts for Hurricane Helene. Here's what I was told:
The 82nd Airborne Division is known as America's "Global" Response Force. They have the ability to have thousands of paratroopers anywhere in the world in 18 hours. They provide…
Some good news. This was the last airlift out of Banner Elk, The Vistas subdivision. For those worried about their loved ones. Here's some people who were rescued. pic.twitter.com/gRLgzWgLBY
One of the most underrated things about @TheBabylonBee is that they’re consistently on front lines of free speech litigation. It’s like them on one side, up against a lawyer army from the federal government, google, the State Dept’s NGO swarm, & basically the CIA on the other 😂 https://t.co/WlyztI0FlG
100,000 lbs of supplies just delivered to western NC. 22 NG Helicopters are currently in the air doing rescue and supply delivery. https://t.co/vyfknFl70L
BREAKING: Second Border Patrol Agent BLOWS WHISTLE on Border Crisis: ‘My Conscience Will Be Clean, That’s Way More Important Than My Pension’
"The cartels run the border down here,” says Aaron Veckey, a United States Border Patrol agent with 19 years of service, stepping forward… pic.twitter.com/yAlyerSJGb
Not sure I like the sound of that. Vaccine management, yes, but military?
NBC: "Do you have any faith in the federal response here?"
Resident of Asheville, NC: "No. No."
Kamala was fundraising in San Francisco this weekend and Biden was holed away at his beach house — when the going gets tough, they get going. pic.twitter.com/Mczs3VveeM
— Tired of being politically correct (@USBornNRaised) October 1, 2024
When did you know, and what did you know at the time? That is the question.
According to a Tier 2 technician at Verizon, there has been a deliberate and unauthorized shutdown of the U.S. electrical grid that specifically targeted cell towers, starting locally and expanding nationwide.
If you didn’t know what the art of the deal was, this is it. Get ready America, maybe this is the black swan no one anticipated. I certainly didn’t, not at this moment.
And anyone who believes Biden or Harris can handle this or anyone else in their administration, needs to… https://t.co/3dgPowffpB
Let’s hear it for these absolute rockstars who went on a wild goose chase for me today to buy every Starlink the Home Depot’s had, drove across the state to East TN and are now doing installs. None of them wanted a dime for helping. These guys are what makes America great. 🙏 pic.twitter.com/eD4tFE8BEN
I want you to think about something: We're almost exactly a month out from an election for POTUS.
The western half of a battleground state just got, for all intents and purposes, destroyed. POTUS has stated that no more aid to them will be forthcoming.
The longshoremen are…
— 4nt1p4tt3rn 🏴☠ Appalachistan Wolf Lodge #47 (@4nt1p4tt3rn) September 30, 2024
This is WILD.
The bears in Asheville, NC. sensed the hurricane before it hit.
The $1.98 Beauty Pageant. Ah, yes, the TV show that prompted my mother to never buy Brach’s candy again. Well, other than her dad’s favorite, the coffee candies…and starlight mints…and butterscotch.
Since Rip Taylor is trending for some reason, let's throw it back to his bit on Redd Foxx's short-lived variety series: pic.twitter.com/CD48A1mpxF
If this were me, there would be beer and glass all over the floor.
Per the boss’s instruction:
I’d throw in a few Rockefellers and Rothschilds also.
Of course, this does not mean committing felonies, but standing up to the forces that want to tear this nation – and humanity apart. The very people XVII told us will be destroyed by the time this movie comes to an end are currently roaming the halls of power…supposedly. It’s a sickening sight.
The discourse on this site is to be CIVIL – no name calling, baiting, or threatening others here is allowed. Those who are so inclined may visit Wolf’s other sanctuary, the U-Tree, to slog it out. There is also a “rescue” thread there for members of the Tree to rendezvous if the main site goes kablooey. A third site has been added for site outages of longer duration.
This site is a celebration of the natural rights endowed to humans by our Creator as well as those enshrined in the Bill of Rights adopted in the founding documents of the United States of America. Within the limits of law, how we exercise these rights is part of the freedom of our discussion.
Fellow tree dweller, the late Wheatie, gave us some good reminders on the basics of civility in political discourse:
No food fights.
No running with scissors.
If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
And Auntie DePat’s requests:
If you see something has not been posted, do us all a favor, and post it. Please, do not complain that it has not been done yet.
The scroll wheel on your mouse can be your friend. As mature adults, please use it here in the same manner you would in avoiding online porn.
Thank you so much for any and all attention to such details. It is GREATLY appreciated by more than one party here.
10“Rejoice with Jerusalem, and be glad for her, all you who love her; rejoice with her in joy, all you who mourn over her; 11that you may suck and be satisfied with her consoling breasts; that you may drink deeply with delight from the abundance of her glory.” 12For thus says the LORD: “Behold, I will extend prosperity to her like a river, and the wealth of the nations like an overflowing stream; and you shall suck, you shall be carried upon her hip, and dandled upon her knees. 13As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem. 14You shall see, and your heart shall rejoice; your bones shall flourish like the grass; and it shall be known that the hand of the LORD is with his servants, and his indignation is against his enemies.
Matthew 18:1-4
1At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” 2And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them, 3and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. 4Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
Be afraid neither of the world, nor of the future, nor of your weakness. The Lord has allowed you to live in this moment of history so that, by your faith, his name will continue to resound throughout the world. — Benedict XVI
St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray. And do thou, Prince of the Heavenly Hosts, by the power of God, cast down to Hell Satan and all his evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.
>>148156518 Amen brother. Q
As always, prayers for the fight against that which seeks to enslave us are welcome. Via con Dios.
