What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?

Our Turn

[Yes, I did this one just after the election. But it was too cathartic to just throw away.]

We’ve often seen that quote from David Plouffe: “It is not enough to simply beat Trump. He must be destroyed thoroughly. His kind must not rise again.”

This was of course a declaration of intent to annihilate not just Trump, but rather “his kind.”

You know what? I think we should flip it around. David Plouffe’s kind should be destroyed thoroughly and their kind must not rise again.

What is Plouffe’s kind? I suppose it depends on who’s talking and what they are thinking of in particular. Well, at the moment it’s me talking and I am thinking of the sort of maggot who is attracted to politics not to better his world but rather so that he can wield power over others, or line their pockets with “free” money. Often these people end up as what Ayn Rand called “pull peddlers,” receiving money in exchange for using their connections to do favors.

This type is parasitic. Utterly parasitic. And they should be destroyed thoroughly and not allowed to rise again.

The bad news is we will never eradicate them. Useless turds who can’t do anything productive will always be with us. As will the outright sociopaths.

Of course they find Trump to be their enemy. And of course they find us to be their enemy. If we won’t simply lie down and let our “betters” have their way with us, we’re a problem, we’re something to be got rid of. And of late, we haven’t lain down without a protest, as we are “supposed” to do. Dang uppity Garbage Deplorables! We don’t know our place!!!

The good news is we can provide far fewer niches for these parasites. The niches come into being when something that people formerly did of their own free will is taken over by the government; then every aspect of that activity becomes a political football.

Take for instance education. Since the government runs it, if you don’t like what’s being done, you have to form a political movement and try to work your way around the maggots embedded in the bureaucracy. If education were private, then if you didn’t like what they were doing to your child, you’d take your money and your child elsewhere. And people who didn’t even have school-age children presently would have no voice–and not have to pay money. Making it a government “thing” turned it into a political thing, and the maggots began to swarm.

So we wreck them by seriously cutting government and giving them fewer places to exist. Among all of the other benefits, the body politic would have fewer sociopaths and parasites in it.

People like Plouffe are the same type, but they are the full-on political hacks who set policy, rather than implement it. They’re just as bad if not worse; they help government grow, and steer it into serving its own ends, rather than those of the people it is supposed to be serving.

The Deep State is nothing more than a government that serves its own ends.

And we have had enough of this.

They must be destroyed thoroughly, and their kind must not rise again.

This election wasn’t the end, it was the beginning. There are millions of these malignancies in this country and we’ve just defeated two of them. Keep pushing. Now we can go after them wholesale.

It’s our turn.

Our turn.

Our turn.

OUR TURN!

You stole the 2020 election. You’ve mocked and ridiculed and put people in prison and broken people’s lives because you said this thing was stolen. This entire phony thing is getting swept out. Biden’s getting swept out. Kamala Harris is getting swept out. MSNBC is getting swept out. The Justice Department is getting swept out. The FBI is getting swept out. You people suck, okay?! And now you’re going to pay the price for trying to destroy this country.

And I’m going to tell you, we’re going to get to the bottom of where the 600,000 votes [are]. You manufactured them to steal this election from President Trump in 2020. And think what this country would be if we hadn’t gone through the last four years of your madness, okay? You don’t deserve any respect, you don’t deserve any empathy, and you don’t deserve any pity.

And if anybody gives it to you, it’s Donald J. Trump, because he’s got a big heart and he’s a good man. A good man that you’re still gonna try to put in prison on the 26th of this month. This is how much you people suck. Okay? You’ve destroyed his business thing. And he came back.

He came back in the greatest show of political courage, I think, in world history. Like, [Roman statesman] Cincinnatus coming back from the plough [returning to politics to rescue the Roman Republic]. He’s the American Cincinnatus. And what he has done is a profile in courage. We’ve had his back. But I got to tell you, he may be empathetic. He may have a kind heart. He may be a good man. But we’re not. Okay? And you deserve, as Natalie Winters says, not retribution, justice. But you deserve what we call rough Roman justice, and we’re prepared to give it to you.

Steve Bannon, on election night

OUR TURN!!

OUR TURN!!!

OUR TURN!!!

OUR TURN!!!

January 6 Tapes?

Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.

For all your high talk about your Christian moral background…you’re looking less and less like you have any kind of moral background.

If You are a Patriot and Don’t Loathe RINOs…

Let’s talk about RINOs, and why they are the lowest form of life in politics.

Many patriots have been involved with politics, often at the grassroots, for decades. We’ve fought, and fought, and fought and won the occasional illusory small victory.

Yet we can’t seem to win the war, even when we have BIG electoral wins.

I am reminded of something. The original Star Trek had an episode titled Day of the Dove. It was one of the better episodes from the third season, but any fan of the original series will tell you that’s a very low bar. Still, it seems to get some respect; at a time when there were about 700 episodes of Star Trek in its various incarnations out there, it was voted 99th best out of the top 100.

In sum, the plot is that an alien entity has arranged for 39 Enterprise crew, and 39 Klingons, to fight each other endlessly with swords and other muscle-powered weapons. The entity lives off of hostile emotions, you see and it wants a captive food source. (The other 400 or so Enterprise crew are trapped below decks and unable to help.) Each side has its emotions played and amplified by the alien entity; one Enterprise junior officer has false memories implanted of a brother who was killed by Klingons. The brother didn’t even exist.

Even people killed in a sword fight miraculously heal so they can go do it again.

The second best line of the episode is when Kang, the Klingon captain, notes that though they have won quite a number of small victories including capturing Engineering, can’t seem to actually finally defeat the Enterprise crew. He growls, “What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*”

Indeed. He may have been the bad guy, but his situation should sound familiar.

We are a majority in this country. We have a powerful political party in our corner. There is endless wrangling.

And yet,

What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?

In our case, that power is the RINOs in our midst. They specialize in caving when on the verge of victory. Think of Obamacare’s repeal failing…by one Republican vote. Think of the way we can never seem to get spending under control (and now our entire tax revenue goes to pay interest on the debt; anything the government actually does now is with borrowed money).

We have a party…that refuses to do what we want it to do, and that refusal is institutionalized. If you’ve been involved with GOP politics, but haven’t seen this, it’s because you refuse to see it. Or because you are part of the problem yourself. (If so, kindly gargle some red fuming nitric acid to clear the taste of shit out of your mouth, and let those not part of the problem alone so they can read this.)

We fight to elect people, who then take a dive when in office. But it’s not just the politicians in office, it’s the people behind the scenes, the leaders of the national, state and county branches of the party. Their job is to ensure that real patriots never get onto the general election ballot. They’re allowed a few failures…who can then become token conservatives who will somehow never manage to win (Jordan), or can be compromised outright (Lauren Boebert?).

That way it doesn’t actually matter who has a congressional majority. I remember my excitement when the GOP took the Senate in 1980. But all that did was empower a bunch of “moderate” puddles of dog vomit like…well for whatever reason forty years later the most memorable name is Pete Domenici. And a couple of dozen other “moderates” who simply had no interest in doing what grassroots people in their party–those same grassroots people who had worked so hard to elect them–wanted them to do.

Oh, they’ll put up a semblance of a fight…but never win. And they love it when we fight the Dems instead of fighting them. Just like that alien entity, whose motto surely was “Let’s you and him fight. It’ll be delicious!”

If you think about it, your entire political involvement has come to nothing because of these walking malignant tumors.

That should make you good and mad.

The twenty five who blocked Jordan, and the hundred people who took that opportunity to stab Jordan in the back in the secret ballot should make you good and mad.

I’ll close this with another example of RINO backstabbing, an infuriating one close to home.

In my county, the GOP chair is not a RINO. She got elected when the grassroots had had enough of the RINOs. Unfortunately the state organization is full of RINOs, and the ousted county RINOs have been trying to form a new “Republican Party” and get the state GOP to recognize them as the affiliate. I’m honestly amazed it hasn’t happened yet.

In other words those shitstains won’t just leave when they get booted out; they’ll try to destroy what they left behind. It’s an indication that they know we know how important that behind-the-scenes party power is.

So they must be destroyed. That’s the only way they’ll ever stop.

We cannot win until the leeches “on our side” get destroyed.

What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*

We know it. What is going to be done about it?

*NOTE: The original line was actually “What power is it that supports our battle yet starves our victory.” I had mis-remembered it as feeds. When I checked it, it sure enough was “supports” and that’s what I originally quoted. On further reflection, though, I realized my memory was actually an improvement over the reality, because feeds is a perfect contrast with starves. I changed it partway through the day this originally posted, but now (since this is a re-run) it gets rendered this way from the start.

If one must do things wrong, one should do them wrong…right.

RINOs an Endangered Species?
If Only!

According to Wikipoo, et. al., the Northern White Rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) is a critically endangered species. Apparently two females live on a wildlife preserve in Sudan, and no males are known to be alive. So basically, this species is dead as soon as the females die of old age. Presently they are watched over by armed guards 24/7.

Biologists have been trying to cross them with the other subspecies, Southern White Rhinoceroses (Rhinoceri?) without success; and some genetic analyses suggest that perhaps they aren’t two subspecies at all, but two distinct species, which would make the whole project a lot more difficult.

I should hope if the American RINO (Parasitus rectum pseudoconservativum) is ever this endangered, there will be heroic efforts not to save the species, but rather to push the remainder off a cliff. Onto punji sticks. With feces smeared on them. Failing that a good bath in red fuming nitric acid will do.

But I’m not done ranting about RINOs.

The RINOs (if they are capable of any introspection whatsoever) probably wonder why they constantly have to deal with “populist” eruptions like the Trump-led MAGA movement. That would be because the RINOs stand for absolutely nothing except for going along to get along. That allows the Left to drive the culture and politics.

I well remember 1989-1990 in my state when the RINO establishment started preaching the message that a conservative simply couldn’t win in Colorado. Never mind the fact that Reagan had won the state TWICE (in 1984 bringing in a veto-proof state house and senate with him) and GHWB had won after (falsely!) assuring everyone that a vote for him was a vote for Reagan’s third term.

This is how the RINOs function. They push, push, push the line that only a “moderate” can get elected. Stomp them when they pull that shit. Tell everyone in ear shot that that’s exactly what the Left wants you to think, and oh-by-the-way-Mister-RINO if you’re in this party selling the same message as the Left…well, whythefuckexactly are you in this party, you lying piece of rancid weasel shit?

Justice

It says “Justice” on the picture.

And I’m sure someone will post the standard joke about what the fish thinks about the situation.

But what is it?

Here’s a take, from a different context: It’s about how you do justice, not the justice that must be done to our massively corrupt government and media. You must properly identify the nature of a person, before you can do him justice.

Ayn Rand, On Justice (speaking through her character John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged):

Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.

Ayn Rand identified seven virtues, chief among them rationality. The other six, including justice, she considered subsidiary because they are essentially different aspects and applications of rationality.

—Ayn Rand Lexicon (aynrandlexicon.com)

Justice Must Be Done.

Trump, it is supposed, had some documents.

Biden and company stole the country.

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

The 2020 election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point.

This will necessarily be piecemeal, state by state, which is why I am encouraged by those states working to change their laws to alleviate the fraud both via computer and via bogus voters. If enough states do that we might end up with a working majority in Congress and that would be something Trump never really had.

Martin Luther King

When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice

President Donald Trump, 20 January 2017 (The “Dark” Inauguration Speech).

[NOTE: Yes, technically this is something I should delete since it’s not January 18th any more and it is dated, but I decided to give it one more run, because some things said here don’t depend on what’s showing on the page-a-day calendar.]

….But I’ll still say something about MLK. He was a decidedly mixed individual. As are we all. But I think he, and many others of his time, did something important and unpleasant; he (and those others) forced a recognition that even after the Civil War we were being hypocritical on the subject of equality under the law. Those people who descended from those who (shall we say) involuntarily migrated to what is now the United States were still getting the shitty end of the stick in many parts of this country, as a matter of law.

He was one hundred percent correct on that.

Unfortunately his successors have turned the point full circle and want a leg up from the law, supposedly to make up for the past mistreatment, but that can only lead to an endless round of back and forth. There are some signs that MLK himself had he not been killed (he would be turning 96 this year were he still alive), would have been right alongside the race baiters (which include some who were with him), other signs that he wouldn’t have.

But just as Thomas Jefferson penned these words, in spite of owning slaves, the words that eventually shamed us into abolishing the “peculiar institution”:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…

I’ll go with what Martin Luther King said…not all that far from where the Inauguration will take place:

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Emphasis mine. Judge people by the content of their character.

That is as it should be.

I see that at Trump rallies. His words about opening hearts to patriotism were true.

I see nothing but reverse racism on the Left. To them the world is defined by what one group does to another, some group must be on top shitting on everyone else. And it shows. There’s a false dichotomy in their thinking. Either white shits on black, or black shits on white. The way to deal with this false dichotomy, though, is not to gin up a third “group” to make it a trichotomy, or a fourth group to make it, what, a tetrachotomy? quadrichotomy? Is either of those actually a word? Gee maybe we can have a different group on top every week of the year at least until some jackass makes up a 53rd group! (Let’s leave aside the one or two day remainder you get from dividing 365(or 6) by 7. These are leftists studying critical race theory, not mathematicians.)

How about we do something different? How about we work towards a system where the law shits on NO ONE except those who violate the rights of others?

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

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

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

Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $3,320.30
Silver $33.17
Platinum $982.00
Palladium $970.00
Rhodium $5,825.00
FRNSI* 159.620-
Gold:Silver 100.099+

This week, at Friday close:

Gold $3,241.60
Silver $31.96
Platinum $971.00
Palladium $977.00
Rhodium $5,700.00
FRNSI* 155.812+
Gold:Silver 101.427-

Gold took a beating Thursday, down into the low 3200s, but it partially recovered towards the end of the day. It managed to recover another 30 cents (whoop-te-do) on Friday. Silver managed to slip against gold, and platinum is doggedly hanging onto mediocrity.

*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.

May the (Strong Nuclear) 4th be with You

A day early, but I figure it’s not too early to celebrate Star Wars Day especially with the twist I like to put on it.

Use the (Strong Nuclear) Force!

The Final Experiment

Exodus from Flat Earth

It isn’t just Jeran of Jeranism who has become normal (i.e., someone who accepts the Earth is round). Many others have done so too including Mark Sargent’s former co-host who appeared with him in the famous Flat Earth documentary many years ago.

Some of those remaining in the Flat Earth community have gone after three of the departees (including the former co-host, but not including Jeran, not this time), accusing them of having been paid off to lie about the shape of the Earth. The three are about to sue for defamation (this is discussed in the above video). One of those about to be sued is Dave Weiss a/k/a “Flat Earth Dave” a/k/a “Dirth” a/k/a “the Potato”. How that particular guy isn’t in jail already is beyond me. And there is Mark Sargent, who simply laughed (on video) at the “Cease and Desist” letter and doubled down. The third person who received the letter did back down, quietly, and his retraction is buried under twenty more-recent videos.

Back to Geology

I’ve spent a lot of time discussing radiometric dating for a simple reason: It’s something that people not actually interested in the truth do their best to try to discredit (even though a little less publicly they’ve had to admit it’s actually valid whilst trying to weasel out of it–I’ll have a lot more to say about that in a future post, so please hold your questions until then).

Thus far I’ve told the story of the discovery and recognition of units known as eons, eras, periods, epochs and ages (each one of those is a subdivision of the one before it), based largely on fossils present in rocks and the principle of superposition–new rock layers get laid down on top of older ones. Geologists could determine which ones came before which other ones, and could generally identify which unit sedimentary rocks–rocks laid down as sediment precipitated out of bodies of water–belonged to based on the fossils they contained, but it was much, much more difficult to identify igneous rocks (rocks that had solidified from a molten state, either ancient lava flows, or intrusive “dikes”) with a particular unit, because igneous rocks don’t contain fossils. If a lava flow lay on top of a sedimentary layer, we knew it was newer than that; i.e., we had a maximum age. If a sedimentary layer, in turn, lay on top of a lava flow, that established its minimum age. Dikes, similarly, had to be newer than every layer of sedimentary rock that they cut across.

Here, by the way, are a couple of pictures of dikes. The vertical column in the top picture (from Maktesh Ramon in Israel) is a dike (and it’s harder than the rocks it cuts through, which is why it literally stands out)

Or this one from near Shiprock, New Mexico. The Shiprock itself is a volcanic plug, but the ground around it cracked and magma was able to form vertical sheets in the cracks. Again, the igneous rock is harder than what it cut through, so we’re now left with vertical “walls” of it as the softer stuff has eroded away.

So now, ironically with radiometric dating established, it was easier to absolutely date igneous rocks than it was to date sedimentary rock (which as far as I can tell is effectively impossible); but relative dating was easier with the sedimentary rock.

How to get around this? Lots and lots of field work! Igneous rocks occur everywhere and we can measure their ages. That lava flow I talked about that was lying on top of a layer of sedimentary rock? Let’s say that sedimentary rock can be identified as belonging to the Aalenian age of the Middle epoch of the Jurassic Period (of the Mesozoic Era of the Phanerozoic Eon; though geologists (and many non geologists) recognize “Jurassic” and already know that last part without it being spelled out). That establishes the absolute earliest time the lava flow could have happened. We then date that lava flow and the age comes back at 154 Ma (Ma = Millions of years ago). The layer sitting on top of the lava flow is the Turonian age of the Late epoch of the Cretaceous period (of the Mesozoic Era of the Phanerozoic eon). Everything between sometime in the Aalenian and sometime in the Turonian is missing, but here’s this lava flow in its place.

(The ages that are missing in whole are the Bajocian, Bathonian, Callovian, Oxfordian, Kimmeridgian, and Tithonian in the Middle and Late Jurassic, and the Berriasian, Valanginian, Hauterivian, Berrmian, Aptian, Albian, and Cenomanian in the Early and Late Cretaceous. That’s quite a number of them. These may have been deposited and then eroded away before or after the lava flow, or never been deposited here at all, or some combination. We just know the surface layer at the time of the eruption was sometime in the Aalenian, and the first rock to be deposited on top of the lava, that is still here, is from the Turonian.)

So what have we learned? We’ve learned that the Turonian must have ended sometime after 154 Ma (we can’t say it started here because more than likely the early part of the Turonian didn’t get deposited right on top of the lava; it’d be quite a coincidence if the Turonian started just at the time deposition began). And we know that the Aalenian must have started over 154 Ma.

That doesn’t seem very helpful, because the large number of missing ages means we’ve actually got a LOT of play in those numbers. It’s possible the flow actually happened during the Aalenian, in which case the Aalenian started just over 154 Ma. Or that the flow happened during the Turonian. Or any of the 13 ages in between.

But combine this with other dating done on other igneous rocks in other parts of the world–or maybe even nearby where less rock eroded away before the eruption, and part of the Bajocian was present there when the lava flowed and solidified. Or, Imagine finding a flow where the rocks both above and below it are from the same age! Do this enough and you can eventually narrow down the dates that things happen.

And these dates can be further refined as we get more accurate lab equipment able to measure isotopic ratios more accurately; we get a more accurate result for that lava flow, say 153.8 Ma instead of 154 Ma.

When I was a kid, I had access to a kid’s book on paleontology that (probably) dated back into the late 50s. It gave the beginning of the Cambrian (hence the beginning of the Paleozoic and the Phanerozoic) as being 560 Ma. I was somewhat startled to visit a museum exhibit sometime around 2000 (I think it was Chicago, but could have been the Smithsonian), and seeing this age given as 542 Ma. And now? The latest and greatest number? 538.8 Ma. Note that the numbers are more and more precise; to the nearest ten million years, then the nearest million, and eventually down to the nearest 100,000 years. Just looking through Wikipedia, I see dates given to 100,000 year increments, except in some places where it’s whole millions of years. Whether that’s imprecision or the number really should be given as “<blah blah blah>.0 million years ago” (meaning it too is to the nearest 100,000 years) is unclear.

When you get to the Oligocene you start seeing 10,000 years precision; the Oligocene epoch (of the Paleogene period of the Cenozoic Era) ended 23.04 million years ago; in fact that happens to be the end of the Paleogene as a whole.

And we can go into the Precambrian eons, the Hadean, Archean, and Proterozoic, which have little to no fossils in them, and establish (largely arbitrary) time boundaries to them.

The Hadean ran from 4,567 Ma (based on dating things not on Earth, but believed to have formed at the same time) to 4,031 (give or take 3) Ma. The Archaean ran from that time to 2500 Ma. The Proterozoic ran from there to 538.8 Ma. In other words slightly over four billion years elapsed from the formation of the Earth, to the Cambrian, when we first start to see abundant multi-cellular, hard-shelled fossils. (That doesn’t mean there was no life before the Cambrian…in fact there most certainly was.) Before radiometric dating we could do little to distinguish these times from each other, because there were no index fossils to go by.

Within the Phanerozoic, the Paleozoic ran from 538.8 Ma to 251.9 Ma; the Mesozoic from there to 66 Ma, and the Cenozoic from there to the present. And of course you can subdivide into Cambrian, Ordovician, etc. But at this point I’m going to throw in a handy-dandy (and colorful) chart (which, alas, has slightly older numbers in it!).

Before moving on to a more staid (but more complete) graphic, there is a very subtle thing to note about this one.

The layers within the Paleozoic and Mesozoic are periods. (Cambrian, Ordovician, etc., through the Cretaceous.) For the Cenozoic, they skip the periods (Paleogene, Neogene and Quaternary) and go down one more level to the seven epochs (all ending in -cene). The lowest three of the epochs are Paleogene, the next two Neogene, and the upper two Quaternary. (And yes, they habitually put the oldest at the bottom, which might seem counter intuitive [reverse chronological order] until you realize they’re doing it the way the rocks lay down.)

This actually reflects the way paleontologists talk, at least when presenting things to the public; they’ll talk in periods before the Cenozoic, and epochs within the Cenozoic. The epoch names before the Cenozoic seem to be less imaginative (“early” or “lower”, “middle”, then “upper” or “later”) in general.

If you want more completeness (but at the cost of showing the pictures of typical fossils), the below is from 2018 and also does not have the latest and greatest age numbers. (It does show all of the ages I rambled about, above–in fact it’s how I knew what they were.) Apparently the best way to get current unit boundary ages is by visiting individual Wikipedia pages. (E.g., the Cambrian is given on Wikipedia’s “Cambrian” page as running from 538.8 +/- 0.6 Ma to 486.85 +/- 1.5 Ma.) These pages for specific periods, eras, etc., will show tables of the subdivisions of whatever unit you’re looking at.

Even here, though, there’s some eliding going on. The first three columns show eon, era, period, epoch and age (or talking about the rocks rather than the chronology: the eonthem, erathem. system, series and stage). The last column, however, adds a column to the left for “Precambrian” (which is informally the first three out of four eons/eonthems put together) and drops epochs and ages. Which makes some sense because these lowest levels aren’t defined back that far, but can be confusing (especially because of the added false level of “Precambrian” shifting the other levels to the right). Hadean, Archean, and Proterozoic are at the same level as Phanerozoic–which covers the other three columns all by itself. (As you can see, periods are not defined before the Proterozoic, and Eras are not defined in the Hadean. At the risk of channeling Sundance, we can’t be very granular that far back.)

By the way this bit about the dates changing is a feature it is not a bug. As we learn more we refine our numbers. The fact that we’re able to measure things so consistently that statistically we think we are correct to within (sometimes well within) 1 percent should be enough to assure people that these numbers are very close to the correct numbers. (I.e., yes, there’s still uncertainty…but not so much that the correct answer to “when did the Cambrian start?” could possibly be “less than six thousand years ago”. Not nearly so much. In fact 6000 years is off by a factor of nearly 100,000.)

OK, so hopefully we have enough under our belts to debunk a popular Young Earth Creationist talking point. Though this point gets pushed by the lower-quality YECs–the ones who are either the most ignorant, or are hoping you are.

This is Kent Hovind, who is one of the most infuriating people alive IMHO; between straw men, other fallacies, and his smug and condescending manner–oh and by the way he was convicted and spent years in prison for fraud…well…I’ll say no more.

OK, so he’s complaining that you date the fossils by the rocks, and the rocks by the fossils, and that’s circular reasoning.

He’d have a point except for the stuff he’s leaving out, which he must be aware of from being corrected a zillion times. (In other words, he’s lying.)

One dates a typical fossil, by noting that the stratum it is in (the rock) is of a certain unit, e.g., the Rhaetian age of the Upper Triassic Epoch. These units are identifiable by very specific index fossils (i.e., other fossils), either directly or indirectly. You then have a date range, which was established by radiometrically dating other rocks. Lots of other rocks. Fossil to rock to fossil to rock is not circular if it’s two different fossils and two different rocks.