Dear KMAG: 20250205 Open Thread & The Hidden Rulers


This is ENTIRELY SPECULATIVE. I want to say that up front. My goal is to figure out WHO our hidden rulers are. I am using a two prong attack. What is the motive, and what is hidden and how. Since as usual this has turned into a book instead of an article, I am going to split it


MOTIVE: I have noticed what I think is a thread thru history. In my last article, on Operation Gladio, I mentioned Mercantilism. Trade and bartering seems to be a uniquely human trait and it is seen through out history. It is a reason for empire building. . Usury, the practice of lending money and charging the borrower interest would be a connected motive. To make the most money on each trading trip, you would want to able to borrow money even if it is at interest, so you have the funds to invest in the maximum amount of trade goods for each trip. That just makes good sense. However I am going to save that topic for another article.


WHAT IS HIDDEN AND HOW

Unfortunately, if the truth is inconvenient to our hidden rulers they have several ways to deal with it.

The easiest is to scrub history so the truth is reduced to folklore status or less. Examples are, Mao Zedong’s efforts to erase traditional Chinese culture and historical figures who were not aligned with Maoist ideology and the current US destruction of historical statues and the re-naming of locations and products. We’re even maligning our Founding Fathers.

A second is ‘Controlled Opposition’ Mix the truth with outlandish falsehoods. For this topic, you have Clif High’s video The Satanic Khazarian Mafia NWO, Deep State, Cabal, and Their History (44 minute video at link) a retelling of the Veterans Today less fantastic tale: The Hidden History of the Incredibly Evil Khazarian Mafia

A third is to use ‘scholarly works’ to gaslight the peons while suppressing any dissenting voices. The Climate Scam is an excellent illustration of that.

A fourth, that is the slam-dunk shut up is the use of religion to make discussion and even heretical thought of competing ideas completely unthinkable.

Thus RELIGION is an excellent cover for activity that would otherwise be condemned. Religion is used to sway emotions and muddy the waters. From what I can tell this is done DELIBERATELY. We can see that playbook used today by naming the Globalist NGOs moving illegals into the USA Catholic… or Lutheran… or Baptist … or even Jewish… and using ‘It’s Charity so Shut-up at the least sign of criticism . This allows debate about whether it is actually subversive destruction of the USA via invasion to be completely shut down. So as you read this, take your religious feelings, place them in a box and lock it. Do not allow OTHERS to use your religion against you.

Oh this is good!


I went looking for the quote “If you want to know who rules over you, just look for who you are not allowed to criticize” and Brave AI tossed up this! 😂

The quote “If you want to know who rules over you, just look for who you are not allowed to criticize” is often attributed to Voltaire, but it is actually wrongly attributed. Research indicates that the quote was first said by Kevin Alfred Strom, a white supremacist and Holocaust denier, in 1993.


As I was saying religion makes a really, really good SHUT-UP! Scream Islamophobia or antisemitism and you have successfully shut down the conversation. I really do not care WHO said it, the truth of that quote is obvious. The UK’s tossing people in jail for internet comments is a case in point.


And if you want to bring in religion, remember this:

Revelation 2:9 KJV

 I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.

AND

Revelation 3:9 KJV

Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, who say they are Jews and are not, but do lie — behold, I will make them to come and worship at thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee.


The wise men of the Bible warn us of those who use religion to cloak their lies.

……

Now I want to bring up some of the history that has been buried. I also want to point out the long memory of an enemy. As our good Aubergine pointed out, the treatment of the mountain people in NC will be remembered for generations. I think we might be able to apply that to the Russians and the Khazars.

I am going to start with the US Civil War and then jump back in time where the truth is even harder to find.


Russian involvement in the US Civil War

… It is indeed true that, as things turned out, the international strategic dimension of the 1861-65 conflict was of secondary importance. However, it was an aspect that repeatedly threatened to thrust itself into the center of the war, transforming the entire nature of the conflict and indeed threatening to overturn the entire existing world system. The big issue was always a British-French attack on the United States to preserve the Confederate States of America. This is certainly how Union and Confederate leaders viewed the matter, and how some important people in London, St. Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin did as well.

The result is that today, the international dimension is consistently underestimated…

Seward, 1861: A US-UK War Would “Wrap the World in Flames”

Kenneth Bourne’s Britain and the Balance of Power in North America, 1815-1908 provides an effective antidote to such sentimental thinking in the form of a notable chapter (singled out for attention by Crook) on the British planning for war with the United States at the time of the Trent affair in December-January 1861, when Seward threatened to “wrap the world in flames” and the British lion roared in reply. [3] Two Confederate envoys, Mason and Slidell, were taken off the British merchant ship Trent by a US warship as they were sailing to plead the cause of intervention in London and Paris; the London press became hysterical with rage, and the anti-Union group in the cabinet saw their chance to start a transatlantic war. This study draws not only upon the British Admiralty archives in the Public Record Office, but also on the papers of Admiral Sir Alexander Milne in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. Bourne depicts the British predicament as their “defenceless” position in Canada, even with the help of the 10,000 additional regular infantry which Palmerston deployed in response to the crisis. (Bourne 211) A recurrent British fear was that their soldiers would desert to the American side, urged on by “crimps.” (Bourne 217). 

…. Admiralty Plans to Bombard and Burn Boston and New York

The heart of the British strategy in case of war was “overwhelming naval strength based on a few select fortresses,” especially Bermuda and Halifax (in today’s Nova Scotia). (Bourne 208) British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston dispatched a powerful squadron of eight ships of the line and thirteen frigates and corvettes under Admiral Milne to the western Atlantic, and wanted to use the Great Eastern, the largest ship in the world, as a troop transport. London even considered ways to foment secession in Maine. Bombarding and burning both Boston and New York was actively considered as a contingency; it was concluded that the reduction of Boston would be very difficult because of the channels and forts; New York was seen as more vulnerable, especially to a surprise attack. An Admiralty hydrographer saw New York City as “the true heart of [US] commerce, — the centre of …maritime resources; to strike her would be to paralyse all the limbs.” (Bourne 240)

…. The Union and Russia

The Russian-British rivalry was of course the central antagonism of European history after the Napoleonic era, and the Russian attitude towards London coincided with the traditional American resentment against the former colonial power. Benjamin Platt Thomas’s older study shows that the US-Russian convergence became decisive during the Crimean War; while Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire attacked Russia, the United States was ostentatiously friendly to the court of St. Petersburg. He depicts Russian minister to Washington Éduard de Stoeckl as a diplomat “whose sole aim was to nurture the chronic anti-British feeling in the United States.” (Thomas 111) According to Thomas, Stoeckl succeeded so well that there was even a perceptible chance that the United States might enter the Crimean War on the Russian side. The US press and public were all on the side of Russia, and hostile to the Anglo-French, to the chagrin of the erratic US President Pierce (who had been close to Admiralty agent Giuseppe Mazzini’s pro-British Young America organization) and the doughface politician James Buchanan. The latter, at that time US envoy to London, embraced the British view of the Tsar as “the Despot.” (Thomas 117) Thomas finds that “the Crimean War undoubtedly proved the wisdom of Russia’s policy of cultivating American friendship, and in fact, drew the two nations closer together.” (Thomas 120) But Thomas glosses over some of the more important US-UK frictions during this phase, which included British army recruiting in the US, and the ejection of the British ambassador as persona non grata. (Thomas 120)

Grave of Russian sailor, Nikolay Demidoff, killed in Civil War in Annapolis, MD

He wasn’t some trouble-maker who got into a silly adventure and was killed in a drunken brawl. American newspapers described his funeral as having been extremely formal, they describe his chestnut casket and a group of officers and other crew members who attended the funeral. A church service which largely impressed local Americans was also described,” said Maksim Alekseyev, the head of Russia’s memorial work department in the US.


…in general, this banknote is being portrayed as an “advertising note”. Never mind that “AMERICAN” above the image of the Russian Czar (Caesar), as well as the relative proportions of the images, could open up a huge can of worms. I do smell a rat in the official version, and offer blog members to combine our investigative efforts. Something does not add up, and may be together we could discover a hidden fact, or two.


At the point of maximum war danger between Great Britain and the United States, the London satirical publication Punch published a vicious caricature of US President Abraham Lincoln and Russian Tsar Alexander II, demonizing the two friends as bloody oppressors. [Cartoon] From Punch, October 24, 1863…

You could easily change the names to Putin and Trump.– GC


KD: I can not stress enough the importance of the lack of photographic evidence. These sketches, in my opinion, are meant to replace the actual photographs which, if used, would reveal something unwanted by the Rulers of this World.

….This story is not a secret by any means, yet my history teacher chose not to mention it. In a nutshell, “Russia’s role in the Civil War was more palpable than just expressing diplomatic support. In September 1863, a Russian fleet of six warships headed to the East coast of North America and stayed there for seven months. Based in New York, they patrolled the surrounding area. A similar thing occurred in the West coast where a fleet of six warships was based in San Francisco. This helped to prevent sudden attacks of Southern raiders on these crucial Union port cities.” Allegedly, the underlying purpose was to help dissuade Britain and France from siding with the Confederacy

The below speech authored by a historian named Webster Griffin Tarpley, paints a slightly different picture of the Russian involvement.

Historian Webster Griffin Tarpley talked about the contribution of Russian Tsar Alexander II to a northern victory in the U.S. Civil War. He said that the Imperial Russian government had issued an ultimatum to Britain and France specifying that if those powers should intervene on the side of the Confederate States of America they would immediately find themselves at war with the Russian Empire. Mr. Tarpley marked the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the Russian Baltic Fleet in New York City on September 24, 1863, and of the Russian Pacific Squadron in San Francisco on October 12, 1863. He argued that it was the presence of those fleets that provided the final deterrence. Russia was the only country to extend direct military support to the Lincoln government.

Russia will support in every way possible, and aid to the fullest extent of its power its ancient ally, the United States of America, in its struggle against treason. Under no circumstances will the Czar permit, if his efforts can prevent it, the success of the lately inaugurated rebellion against the laws, and the government of a friendly country….

How the British Caused the American Civil War

By Richard Poe

On April 1, 1861, the Civil War had not yet begun. That day, Secretary of State William Seward drafted a memorandum to Lincoln seeking action against “European intervention.”

“I would at once demand explanations from France and Spain categorically,” Seward wrote. “I would demand explanations from Great Britain and Russia… And if satisfactory explanations are not received from Spain and France, I would convene Congress and declare war against them.”

Seward’s concerns were legitimate.

Seeing America’s weakness, foreign powers had begun challenging the Monroe Doctrine, which forbade European intervention in the Americas.

Spain had annexed its former colony of Santo Domingo on March 18, pointedly increasing its Cuban garrison to 25,000 men.  France was saber-rattling over Haiti and other lost colonies.

Meanwhile, British diplomats were working hard to bring Spain, France, and Russia into a coalition strong enough to force Lincoln into recognizing the Confederacy.

These intrigues plainly violated the Monroe Doctrine. But no one cared what America thought anymore. The U.S. was falling apart.

“Our domestic dissensions are producing their natural fruit,” wrote The New York Times on March 30, 1861. “The terror of the American name is gone, and the Powers of the Old World are flocking to the feast from which the scream of our eagle had hitherto scared them. We are just beginning to suffer the penalties of being a weak and despised Power.”

When Seward wrote his memo to Lincoln, the attack on Fort Sumter was still eleven days away.  The first shot of our Civil War had not yet been fired.

Yet, the mightiest powers in Europe were already spoiling for a fight.

Britain was the Ringleader

Great Britain was the driving force behind these plots.  The British had been planning America’s downfall for years.

England made no secret of her ambitions in North America.

On January 3, 1860, the London Morning Post bluntly called for the restoration of British rule in America.

The Post was known as a mouthpiece for Lord Palmerston, Britain’s Prime Minister.  Indeed, Palmerston himself was rumored to write unsigned editorials for the paper, now and then.

Should North and South separate, said the Morning Post on January 3, 1860, the colonies of British North America (later combined into the Dominion of Canada) would then “hold the balance of power on the Continent.” Canada would find herself in a strong position to annex the quarreling fragments of the former USA.

The first target should be Portland, Maine, the Post suggested. Strategically located at the terminus of Canada’s Grand Trunk Railway, Portland harbor provided Canada with access to the Atlantic during the winter months, when every port on the St. Lawrence River was frozen.

Why leave such a vital asset in American hands?

“On military, as well as commercial grounds, it is obviously necessary,” argued the Morning Post, “that British North America should possess on the Atlantic a port open at all times of year…”

The newspaper recommended that the state of Maine should join the British Empire voluntarily, once the Union collapsed. “[T]he people of that State, with an eye to commercial profit, should offer to annex themselves to Canada,” it suggested….

Other References:

Abraham Lincoln’s “Bank War”

Was it over states’ rights? secession? slavery? tariffs? A more nuanced look at the causes of the American Civil War.

The CivilWarTariff | Mises Institute

Interesting that we are taught in school it was over slavery and yet that was just a minor issue.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

So the City of London Bankers had a MAJOR grievance with Russia and specifically the Czar, not that they did not have one before that.

The City of London, Wall Street and the Reconquest of America in the Age of Financial Capitalism

The City

In the two millennia since the Romans fortified the lowest crossing point of the River Thames, the City of London’s wealth has meant neither the Crown, nor Parliament could subordinate it. From an early stage, the City became the dominant power in foreign policy and government finance in Britain (nee England). The Ulster plantation and the Royal charters for the Levant Company and the East India Company were orchestrated by powerful City financiers. Traditionally, and to the ire of successive generations of British manufacturers, the City of London preferred international investments to investing in local industry.

The use of debt as a weapon wasn’t invented by City of London financiers, but they perfected the technique in the years preceding the Age of Financial Capitalism. At the time Europe was scrambling to halt Napoleon’s advance and were forced to borrow to finance their extra expenditure, in desperation they turned to the City. From this point, the City’s financiers had brought the rulers of Europe into debt servitude, under financial and banker management.

“The defeat of Napoleon in 1815 (the Bank of England, the City and the Rothschilds played a key role by financing the Emperor’s enemies), the expansion of the Empire and the Industrial Revolution, allowed Britain to establish its position as international hegemon with supremacy in industry, shipping and finance… [The City] preferred the more profitable opportunities offered by financing trade and foreign wars, making loans to governments and generating speculative investment opportunities. Capitalist Industrial production like agriculture before it, depended largely on regional and local sources of finance …” (Lambie, p. 341)

We can’t talk about the City of London in this period without giving special mention to the Rothschild family. Between 1808 and 1859 they developed a capital fund and intelligence service that their rivals couldn’t compete with...

The Complete History Of The ‘House Of Rothschild’

by Alexander Light of HUMANS ARE FREE

…One of Rothschild’s couriers was a man named Rothworth.  When the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo was won by the British, Rothworth took off for the Channel and was able to deliver this news to Nathan Mayer Rothschild, a full 24 hours before Wellington’s own courier…

When news came through that the British had actually won the war, the consuls went up to a level even higher than before the war ended leaving Nathan Mayer Rothschild with a return of approximately 20 to 1 on his investment.

This gave the Rothschild family complete control of the British economy, now the financial centre of the world following Napolean’s defeat, and forced England to set up a new Bank of England, which Nathan Mayer Rothschild controlled.

Interestingly, 100 years later the New York Times would run a story stating that Nathan Mayer Rothschild’s grandson had attempted to secure a court order to suppress publication of a book which had this insider trading story in it.  The Rothschild family claimed the story was untrue and libellous, but the court denied the Rothschilds request and ordered the family to pay all court costs.

Back to 1815, this is the year Nathan Mayer Rothschild makes his famous statement,

I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply.”

 something that did not go well for the Rothschilds this year was the Congress of Vienna, which started in September, 1814 and concluded in June of this year. The reason for this Congress of Vienna, was for the Rothschilds to create a form of world government, to give them complete political control over much of the civilized world.

Many of the European governments were in debt to the Rothschilds, so they figured they could use that as a bargaining tool. However the Tsar Alexander I of Russia, who had not succumbed to a Rothschild central bank, would not go along with the plan, so the Rothschild world government plan failed. [Seems Putin has followed in Tsar Alexander’s foot steps. –GC]

Enraged by this, Nathan Mayer Rothschild swore that some day he or his descendants would destroy the Tsar Alexander 1st’s  entire family and descendants. Unfortunately he was true to his word and 102 years later Rothschild funded Bolsheviks would act upon that promise….

Other References:

The Rothschilds and the Romanovs

New World Order – Eustace Mullins

Chapt 2 Rise of the Rothschild Money Network

….

However the Rothschilds do not wait a century to get revenge.


Czar Alexander II, the ruler of Russia since 1855, is killed in the streets of St. Petersburg by a bomb thrown by a member of the revolutionary “People’s Will” group. The People’s Will, organized in 1879, employed terrorism and assassination in their attempt to overthrow Russia’s czarist autocracy. They murdered officials and made several attempts on the czar’s life before finally assassinating him on March 13, 1881. — This Day In History


Part 3 – The Party of the People’s Will: Jewish terrorists of socialist conviction, 1879–1887 — Cambridge University Press


MARCH, 1881 COMMUNIST TERRORISTS FINALLY KILL ALEXANDER II 

After four previous attempts, Rothschild’s Red terrorists finally succeed in assassinating Czar Alexander II of Russia. With his son Alexander III, and grandson Nicholas watching, the Marxists hurl bombs at the Czar. Alexander’s legs are blown off and he bleeds to death. 

Due to the presence of so many Jews in the revolutionary movement, anti-Semitic violence sweeps across Russia after the Czar’s murder. These “pogroms”, though exaggerated for propaganda purposes, help to trigger a wave of Jewish immigration to the United States, England, and Germany. 

JULY 2, 1881 U.S PRESIDENT JAMES GARFIELD IS SHOT / DIES FROM WOUND INFECTION IN SEPTEMBER 

The civilized world is still reeling from the brutal murder of Czar Alexander II just a few months earlier. Now America will lose its 2nd President in 16 years to an assassin’s bullet. James Garfield is an Ohio Republican who has only been in office 4 months.

Garfield is a brilliant scholar, talented orator, and an advocate of interest-free “hard money” (gold) as a national currency. Like Napoleon, Andrew Jackson and Abe Lincoln before him, Garfield mistrusts of the international bankers. Garfield warns: 

“Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.” (1) 

Validating the Alexander Solzhenitsyn ‘Bolsheviks were not Russians’ Quote

The actual quote below is hearsay from David Duke.🙄


You must understand, the leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians. They hated Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred they tortured and slaughtered millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse. It cannot be overstated. Bolshevism committed the greatest human slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant and uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the global media is in the hands of the perpetrators. – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn


The article give more accurate quotes directly from Solzhenitsyn’s writings that substantiate the content of the above quote.

During this same general time frame you have the rise of Karl Marx

WIKI

… in Paris in 1844, Marx wrote his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and met Engels, who became his closest friend and collaborator. After moving to Brussels in 1845, they were active in the Communist League, and in 1848 they wrote The Communist Manifesto, which expresses Marx’s ideas and lays out a programme for revolution. Marx was expelled from Belgium and Germany, and in 1849 moved to London, where he wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) and Das Kapital….


Various articles that connect Marx to the Rothschilds from Karl Marx Mom’s first cousin is married Nathan Rothschild, founder of the British branch of the Rothschild banking dynasty to SxyxS says: rch 17, 2017 at 12:05 am

Marx secretary Pieper was at the same time employed the Rothschild.
When the Rothschild left Frankfurt they went to Paris(the first place Marx lived in Exile)
and London(the second exile home of Marx).


Then you have Rothschild funding the Fabian London School of Economics LINK

American Fabian, John Dewey funded by the Rockefeller’s becoming the ‘Father of US Progressive Education’.

The Rise of the Round Table Movement and the Sad Case of Canada (1864-1945)

…The Round Table movement served as the intellectual center of the international operations to regain control of the British Empire and took on several incarnations over the 20th century. The historian Carrol Quigley, of Georgetown University wrote of this cabal in his posthumously published “Anglo-American Establishment” (6):

This organization has been able to conceal its existence quite successfully, and many of its most influential members, satisfied to possess the reality rather than the appearance of power, are unknown even to close students of British history. This is the more surprising when we learn that one of the chief methods by which this Group works has been through propaganda.

It plotted the Jameson Raid of 1895; it caused the Boer War of 1899-1902; it set up and controls the Rhodes Trust; it created the Union of South Africa in 1906-1910; it established the South African periodical The State in 1908; it founded the British Empire periodical The Round Table in 1910, and this remains the mouthpiece of the Group; it has been the most powerful single influence in All Souls, Balliol, and New Colleges at Oxford for more than a generation; it has controlled The Times for more than fifty years, with the exception of the three years 1919-1922, it publicized the idea of and the name “British Commonwealth of Nations” in the period 1908-1918, it was the chief influence in Lloyd George’s war administration in 1917-1919 and dominated the British delegation to the Peace Conference of 1919; it had a great deal to do with the formation and management of the League of Nations and of the system of mandates; it founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1919 and still controls it; it was one of the chief influences on British policy toward Ireland, Palestine, and India in the period 1917-1945; it was a very important influence on the policy of appeasement of Germany during the years 1920-1940; and it controlled and still controls, to a very considerable extent, the sources and the writing of the history of British Imperial and foreign policy since the Boer War.”  (7)

To understand the pedigree of the Round Table movement as it was “officially” unveiled in 1910 as the ideological shaper of the policies and paradigm of the new “managerial class” of international imperialists dedicated to the salvation of the British Empire under an “Imperial Federation”, it would be necessary to go back a few decades prior, to 1873-74….  

The model of the Round Table involved a central coordinating body in London, with branches strategically placed throughout the Commonwealth in order to provide one vision and voice to the young and talented “upper managerial class” of the reformed British Empire. Parkin and Peacock were joined by Lord Alfred Milner, Sir Arthur Glazebrook, W.T. Stead, Arthur Balfour and Lord Nathan Rothschild as co-trustees.

Working in tandem with the eugenicists of the Fabian Society of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Balfour had founded the first International Eugenics Conference in 1912 alongside enthusiastic recruits such as young Roundtable member Winston Churchill. 

Please note the name of Round Table co-trustee Arthur Balfour, of the Balfour Agreement that set-up Israel.

Moving a bit forward in time, I document Colonel Towner’s discovery of an address in NYC in my article Operation Gladio


There is an address in NYC called 120 Broadway. It is where the Fed was, it was where FDRs first office was, the Boys Club, the Dinner Club, the Rockefellers’ office is, the Rothschilds, the banks, JP Morgan, They are ALL in this building. They orchestrate EVERYTHING out of this building. They do not have to go out side. They funded the Bolsheviks

THE KHAZAR CONVERSION TO JUDAISM Adapted from the English translation of The Kuzari by Hartwig Hirschfeld, published in 1905 by George Routledge and Sons, Ltd.

Please note the date: 1905 , eight years before the Federal Reserve act was published. I consider this a pleasant fairy tale.

WILD SPECULATION: The other string to the Khazarian bow is said to be usury. Of the three religions, only Jews were allowed to lend money at interest. To make the most money on each trading trip, being able to borrow money at interest, so you have the funds to invest in the maximum amount of trade goods, would make sense. This is especially true when starting out in business. Such a crass reason for picking Judaism, would cast doubt on the sincerity of the ‘conversion’ from Pagan so would not be make public.

However the most interesting tidbit I found in all my digging was in 1913:

** The Federal Reserve Act of 1913

** 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Federal Income Tax (1913)

** 👉1913, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was founded in Chicago by Sigmund Livingston, a Chicago attorney in 1913.

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Now I want to jump back centuries. This means the information is a lot harder to find and cannot be easily validated. I already covered the History of Khazaria back in August last year. The two most interesting and solid pieces of information I have found are:

1050 years ago Svyatoslav squads defeated the state of the KhazarsJuly 3 2015

1050 years ago, in the summer of 965, [note the specific date -GC] the great Russian prince Svyatoslav Igorevich defeated the Khazar army and took the capital of the Khazar Kaganate, Itil. The lightning strike of the Russian troops with the support of the Allied Pechenegs led to the collapse of the parasitic Khazar state. Russ committed a sacred revenge, destroying the Khazar “snake”…

Khazar threat

The fight against the parasitic state of the Khazars was the most important strategic task of Russia.👉The trade and usurious elite of Khazaria,👈 who subjugated the Khazar tribal military nobility, held in their hands all the exits from Eastern Europe to the East.

The Khazar state received huge profits by controlling transit routes.The Khazar Khaganate represented a serious military threat to Russia. Archaeologists have discovered a whole system of stone fortresses on the right bank of the Don, North Donets and Oskol. One white-stone stronghold was located at a distance of 10-20 kilometers from the other. The outposts were located on the right, western and northwestern banks of the rivers. An important role in the construction of these fortresses was played by Byzantine engineers. So, Sarkel (Belaya Vezha) on the bank of the Don was built by Byzantine engineers led by Petron Kamatir. Yes, and strengthened Itil Byzantines-Romans. The Khazar state played an important role in the military-political strategy of Constantinople, holding back Russia….

The Khazars made campaigns and raids in the Slavic-Russian lands. Arab geographer Al-Idrisi reported thatKhazar vassals regularly made raids on the Slavs, in order to steal people for sale into slavery. These were not just spontaneous raids, from time to time, but a deliberate predatory strategy on the part of the parasite state.In the Khazar state, thepower was seized by the Jews representing the caste of rakhdonites (radanity).

👉This caste of international traders controlled trade between East and West, including the Silk Road and other communications. Their influence extended all the way to China and India.👈One of their main “goods” were people. The slave clan👉worshiped the “golden calf” and measured everything in gold….👈

When I read this, I cannot help thinking of Putin quoting history to Tucker Carlson before Carlson cut him off. Note the article gives dates and names.


This article, along with the well researched maps below, goes into the History of the Khazars. The KEY for us is the pointers to “usurious elite” and “caste of international traders” This is on top of the outward conversion to Judaism for political reasons and worshiped the “golden calf” and measured everything in gold. Other articles accuse the Khazars of being pagans with very nasty habits. However when I look for a ‘neutral’ article on Pagan Khazar, all I can find is fluff about the Khazars sacrificing animals. You have to go to Azerbaijan before information on human sacrifice surfaces. LINK and LINK
Cuppa Covfefe on current Satanic rituals: LINK

Maps of the Khazar Kingdom from 300 c.e. to 1000 c.e. [c.e. = AD]


This map shows the battles the Russian author is talking about.


This maps article has a pointer to this article that I did not look at before. I find it a treasure trove of new information.

The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage (1976)

by Arthur Koestler from Koestler Website

This book traces the history of the ancient Khazar Empire, a major but almost forgotten power in Eastern Europe, which in the Dark Ages became converted to Judaism. 

Khazaria was finally wiped out by the forces of Genghis Khan, but evidence indicates that the Khazars themselves migrated to Poland and formed the cradle of Western Jewry
The Khazars’ sway extended from the Black Sea to the Caspian, from the Caucasus to the Volga, and they were instrumental in stopping the Muslim onslaught against Byzantium, the eastern jaw of the gigantic pincer movement that in the West swept across northern Africa and into Spain.

In the second part of this book, “The Heritage,” Mr. Koestler speculates about the ultimate faith of the Khazars and their impact on the racial composition and social heritage of modern Jewry.

He produces a large body of meticulously detailed research in support of a theory that sounds all the more convincing for the restraint with which it is advanced.

Yet should this theory be confirmed, the term “anti-Semitism” would become void of meaning, since, as Mr. Koestler writes, it is based,

on a misapprehension shared by both the killers and their victims. The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.”

V – EXODUS


THE evidence quoted in the previous pages indicates that — contrary to the traditional view held by nineteenth-century historians — the Khazars, after the defeat by the Russians in 965, lost their empire but retained their independence within narrower frontiers, and their Judaic faith, well into the thirteenth century. They even seem to have reverted to some extent to their erstwhile predatory habits. Baron comments:

In general, the reduced Khazar kingdom persevered. It waged a more or less effective defence against all foes until the middle of the thirteenth century, when it fell victim to the great Mongol invasion set in motion by Jenghiz Khan. Even then it resisted stubbornly until the surrender of all its neighbours. Its population was largely absorbed by the Golden Horde which had established the centre of its empire in Khazar territory. But before and after the Mongol upheaval the Khazars sent many offshoots into the unsubdued Slavonic lands, helping ultimately to build up the great Jewish centres of eastern Europe.

…The Khazar origin of the numerically and socially dominant element in the Jewish population of Hungary during the Middle Ages is thus relatively well documented. It might seem that Hungary constitutes a special case, in view of the early Magyar-Khazar connection; but in fact the Khazar influx into Hungary was merely a part of the general mass-migration from the Eurasian steppes toward the West, i.e., towards Central and Eastern Europe….

The migration toward safer pastures was a protracted, intermittent process which went on for several centuries. The Khazar exodus was part of the general picture. It had been preceded, as already mentioned, by the founding of Khazar colonies and settlements in various places in the Ukraine and southern Russia. There was a flourishing Jewish community in Kiev long before and after the Rus took the town from the Khazars.

Similar colonies existed in Perislavel and Chernigov. A Rabbi Mosheh of Kiev studied in France around 1160, and a Rabbi Abraham of Chernigov studied in 1181 in the Talmud School of London. The “Lay of Igor’s Host” mentions a famous contemporary Russian poet called Kogan — possibly a combination of Cohen (priest) and Kagan. Some time after Sarkel, which the Russians called Biela Veza, was destroyed the Khazars built a town of the same name near Chernigov….

According to the article “statistics” in the Jewish Encyclopaedia, in the sixteenth century the total Jewish population of the world amounted to about one million. This seems to indicate, as Poliak, Kutschera and others have pointed out, that during the Middle Ages the majority of those who professed the Judaic faith were Khazars. A substantial part of this majority went to Poland, Lithuania, Hungary and the Balkans, where they founded that Eastern Jewish community which in its turn became the dominant majority of world Jewry…

So much for size. But what do we know of the social structure and composition of the Khazar immigrant community? The first impression one gains is a striking similarity between certain privileged positions held by Khazar Jews in Hungary and in Poland in those early days. Both the Hungarian and Polish sources refer to Jews employed as mintmasters, administrators of the royal revenue, controllers of the salt monopoly, taxcollectors and “money-lenders” — i.e., bankers.

….the transformation of Khazar Jewry into Polish Jewry did not entail any brutal break with the past, or loss of identity. It was a gradual, organic process of change, which — as Poliak has convincingly shown — preserved some vital traditions of Khazar communal life in their new country. 

This was mainly achieved through the emergence of a social structure, or way of life, found nowhere else in the world Diaspora…

The shtetl, on the other hand, was a quite different proposition — a type of settlement which, as already said, existed only in Poland-Lithuania and nowhere else in the world. It was a self-contained country town with an exclusively or predominantly Jewish population.

The shtetl’s origins probably date back to the thirteenth century, and may represent the missing link, as it were, between the market towns of Khazaria and the Jewish settlements in Poland. The economic and social function of these semi-rural, semiurban agglomerations seems to have been similar in both countries. In Khazaria, as later in Poland, they provided a network of trading posts or market towns which mediated between the needs of the big towns and the countryside.

They had regular fairs at which sheep and cattle, alongside the goods manufactured in the towns and the products of the rural cottage industries were sold or bartered; at the same time they were the centres where artisans plied their crafts, from wheelwrights to blacksmiths, silversmiths, tailors, Kosher butchers, millers, bakers and candlestick-makers. There were also letter-writers for the illiterate, synagogues for the faithful, inns for travellers, and a heder — Hebrew for “room”, which served as a school. There were itinerant story-tellers and folk bards (some of their names, such as Velvel Zbarzher, have been preserved) travelling from shtetl to shtetl in Poland — and no doubt earlier on in Khazaria, if one is to judge by the survival of story-tellers among Oriental people to our day.

…Some particular trades became virtually a Jewish monopoly in Poland. One was dealing in timber — which reminds one that timber was the chief building material and an important export in Khazaria; another was transport. “The dense net of shtetls,” writes Poliak, “made it possible to distribute manufactured goods over the whole country by means of the superbly built Jewish type of horse cart. The preponderance of this kind of transport, especially in the east of the country, was so marked amounting to a virtual monopoly — that the Hebrew word for carter, ba‘al agalah was incorporated into the Russian language as balagula…

…After the Mongol conquest”, wrote Poliak, “when the Slav villages wandered westward, the Khazar shtetls went with them.”

The pioneers of the new settlements were probably rich Khazar traders who constantly travelled across Poland on the much frequented trade routes into Hungary. “The Magyar and Kabar migration into Hungary blazed the trail for the growing Khazar settlements in Poland: it turned Poland into a transit area between the two countries with Jewish communities.”….

….

…Mr. Koestler was an Ashkenazi Jew and took pride in his Khazar ancestry. He was also a very talented and successful writer who published over 25 novels and essays. His most successful book, Darkness at Noon, was translated in thirty-three languages.


As expected, The Thirteenth Tribe caused a stir when published in 1976, since it demolishes ancient racial and ethnic dogmas… At the height of the controversy in 1983, the lifeless bodies of Arthur Koestler and his wife were found in their London home. Despite significant inconsistencies, the police ruled their death a suicide… https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_khazar01a.htm

The Wiki article is as expected slanted in the other direction but does give some very useful tidbits. It is quite long since Koestler was very active during the World Wars and traveled a lot.

…Koestler’s mother, Adele Jeiteles, was born on 25 June 1871 into a prominent Jewish family in Prague….” [that would be adjacent to Poland. –GC]

 On 1 April 1926, he left Vienna for Palestine… In interwar Vienna he wound up as the personal secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement. Traveling in Soviet Turkmenistan as a young and ardent Communist, he ran into Langston Hughes. While reporting on the Spanish Civil War, he met W. H. Auden at a “crazy party” in Valencia before winding up in one of Franco’s prisons. In Weimar Berlin he fell into the circle of the Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg, through whom he met the leading German Communists… In the early 1930s, Koestler moved to the Soviet Union. In 1932, Koestler travelled in Turkmenistan and Central Asia… During his stay in the Soviet Union, he also lived for a time in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic,… He wrote propaganda under the direction of Willi Münzenberg, the Comintern’s chief propaganda director in the West…


So this guy was all over Europe, got rescued by the Brits twice, ended up working for the British  Ministry of Information, became a UK citizen. Lived in the USA… Given his family background as wealthy eastern European Jews and his traveling before the massive destruction of WWI, I am inclined to believe he had a decent handle on the truth.

Also Arthur Koestler’s book is consistent with the finding of this Jewish researcher at John Hopkins.


John’s Hopkins University Jewish scientist’s study that showed less than 3% of Israel’s Jews are descended from King David

Dr. Eran Elhaik, geneticist researcher at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, found that today’s “Jews” originated from Khazaria and not Israel. They are not the seed of Abraham.


From WIKI:

Eran Elhaik (born 1980) is an Israeli-American geneticist and bioinformatician, an associate professor of bioinformatics at Lund University in Sweden and Chief of Science Officer at an ancestry testing company called Ancient DNA Origins owned by Enkigen

What I find VERY interesting is both of these people who are Jews have their work attacked by Israelis.

As an example SEE: So, Who Were the Khazars? Tablet Magazine

By, Dan Shapira,

“an interdisciplinary historian and philologist at Bar-Ilan University. He is working currently on medieval and early modern Jewish minority communities, the Crimea, and the Khazars.”

Wiki on Tablet Magazine:

Tablet was founded in June 2009 by Alana Newhouse, former culture editor at The Forward, with the support of the Nextbook foundation as a redeveloped and news-focused version of the Jewish literary journal Nextbook. In the three years after its founding, New York Magazine described Tablet as a “must-read for young politically and culturally engaged Jews. Its reporting has largely focused on Jewish news and culture….

There is also this:

Section One: Rise and Fall of the Khazars

“In Khazaria, sheep, honey, and Jews exist in large quantities.”
Muqaddasi, Descriptio Imperii Moslemici (tenth century).

Chapter I: Rise

….Professor Dunlop of Columbia University, a leading authority on the history of the Khazars, has given a concise summary of this decisive yet virtually unknown episode:

“The Khazar country . . . lay across the natural line of advance of the Arabs. Within a few years of the death of Muhammad (AD 632) the armies of the Caliphate, sweeping northward through the wreckage of two empires and carrying all before them, reached the great mountain barrier of the Caucasus. This barrier once passed, the road lay open to the lands of eastern Europe. As it was, on the line of the Caucasus the Arabs met the forces of an organized military power which effectively prevented them from extending their conquests in this direction. The wars of the Arabs and the Khazars, which lasted more than a hundred years, though little known, have thus considerable historical importance. The Franks of Charles Martel on the field of Tours turned the tide of Arab invasion. At about the same time the threat to Europe in the east was hardly less acute . . . The victorious Muslims were met and held by the forces of the Khazar kingdom . . . It can . . . scarcely be doubted that but for the existence of the Khazars in the region north of the Caucasus, Byzantium, the bulwark of European civilization in the east, would have found itself outflanked by the Arabs, and the history of Christendom and Islam might well have been very different from what we know.”

It is perhaps not surprising, given these circumstances, that in 732—after a resounding Khazar victory over the Arabs—the future Emperor Constantine V married a Khazar princess. In due time their son became the Emperor Leo IV, known as Leo the Khazar.

Ironically, the last battle in the war, AD 737, ended in a Khazar defeat. But by that time the impetus of the Muslim Holy War was spent, the Caliphate was rocked by internal dissensions, and the Arab invaders retraced their steps across the Caucasus without having gained a permanent foothold in the north, whereas the Khazars became more powerful than they had previously been....

And finally back to the present.

Israel honors Egyptian spies 50 years after fiasco By Reuters

After half a century of reticence and recrimination, Israel on Wednesday honored nine Egyptian Jews recruited as agents-provocateur in what became one of the worst intelligence bungles in the country’s history.

Israel was at war with Egypt when it hatched a plan in 1954 to ruin its rapprochement with the United States and Britain by firebombing sites frequented by foreigners in Cairo and Alexandria.

Israeli hoped the attacks, which caused no casualties, would be blamed on local insurgents collapsed when the young Zionist bombers were caught and confessed at public trials. Two were hanged. The rest served jail terms and emigrated to Israel.

Embarrassed before the West, the fledgling Jewish state long denied involvement….

No it was not embarrassment, it was need for continued monetary and military support. It was also not the last time.


Israeli Six Day War: The Jewish genocide of 1,000 Egyptian POWs & attack on USS Liberty

This is from the book Body of Secrets, the history of the NSA. A big question for Americans regarding the Israeli attack on the Liberty, relates to the MOTIVE. Why? Why did the Israelis attack the Liberty?

Israel later told the US Govt that they “made a mistake”. The Jews also did this in the 1948 war when they murdered entire villages of Arabs. They just said “It was a mistake” and that’s the end of it. According to the book, the US Govt, especially the military/intelligence people did NOT buy the “mistake story” of the Jews. The evidence is totally clear, because Israeli planes came and watched the Liberty for hours and they flew past it. The Israelis knew 100% this was an American ship. Also, all survivors state that the US Flag was flying clearly on a sunny day. The Israelis knew they were attacking an American ship.

But why? Well, the real secret that the Israeli’s have kept, is that the USS Liberty was close to the coast and in view of a town called El Arish. And in El Arish, the Jews were busy murdering, Egyptian POWS. In fact, the Israeli army was doing a LOT of civilian murder that day. But the USS Libery, as a spy ship, was listening in on all radio comms and was picking up everything. And the Israelis knew it was a US spy ship. In order to hide their slaughter of the POW’s, they wanted to sink the Liberty and ensure that NOBODY SURVIVED. That is why they engaged in the brutal, hours-long attack that they did.

Here is the real secret about the USS Liberty. This is how the book describes the murder of about 1,000 Egyptians who had surrendered that day. When a soldier surrenders, you are to look after him. That is international law. Israel, in violation of international law was carrying out a genocide. This is how the book describes it. Page 201-204:

By June 8, three days after Israel launched the war, Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai had become nuisances. There was no place to house them, not enough Israelis to watch them, and few vehicles to transport them to prison camps. But there was another way to deal with them.


As the Liberty sat within eyeshot of El Arish, eavesdropping on surrounding communications, Israeli soldiers turned the town into a slaughterhouse, systematically butchering their prisoners. In the shadow of the El Arish mosque, they lined up about sixty unarmed Egyptian prisoners, hands tied behind their backs, and then opened fire with machine guns until the pale desert sand turned red. Then they forced other prisoners to bury the victims in mass graves. “I saw a line of prisoners, civilians and military,” said Abdelsalam Moussa, one of those who dug the graves, “and they opened fire at them all at once. When they were dead, they told us to bury them.” Nearby, another group of Israelis gunned down thirty more prisoners and then ordered some Bedouins to
cover them with sand.

IDF knew of Hamas’s plan to kidnap 250 before October 7 attack – report – Jerusalem Post

The IDF had precise information about Hamas’s intentions, but due to prevailing conceptions in the security establishment and possible negligence by officials, the warning signs were not acted on. By JERUSALEM POST STAFF

A newly surfaced document has revealed that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and intelligence systems had detailed knowledge of Hamas’s plan to raid Israel and kidnap 250 people weeks before the October 7 massacre.

The document, which was compiled in the Gaza Division, outlined Hamas’s intentions and was known to top intelligence officials, according to a report by Kan News.

The document, titled “Detailed End-to-End Raid Training,” was distributed on September 19, 2023, and described in detail the series of exercises conducted by Hamas’s elite units.


Colonel Towner remarked the use of para-gliders was a known Operation Gladio tactic.

Is there continuety from the Khazars to the present day bankers? I do not know but there is certainly animosity between the Russians and the Rothschilds that goes back centuries.

And so I leave you with this photo of No-Name, Lieberman and Rothschild

DEAR MAGA: Open Thread Thursday 20250130


Welcome.
Please visit this January 1st daily thread for the rules of the road,
which are few but important.


Header Image: 2024 Presidential Election Map by County

Do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

These are the kind of powerful words that motivated America’s founding fathers to create the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore,
and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. — Galatians 5:1

It is going to require a decision on our part to “stand firm” and “not submit again” before we are going to begin to take this seriously. But we have the help of God and the intensely determined support of our President, his team, and untold numbers of our fellow citizens.



We got our miracle.
America is back.
Now what?

Let us dedicate ourselves to seeking our place in the cleansing, healing, and rebuilding of this beautiful, resource-rich nation. Are we to pray? Of course. Are we to vote? Absolutely.

But we know there is much to do and not all is certain. We might find ourselves asking, “What am I to do in these amazing days of transformation?” God will guide us.


Priorities.

The Trump-Vance Administration Priorities page @ WhiteHouse.gov provides us with the eagle’s eye view of where we are going. Notice the order of these priorities. Safety of the people first! May the Lord grant us wisdom, strength, and good success.

MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN

  • President Trump will take bold action to secure our border and protect American communities.
  • This includes ending Biden’s catch-and-release policies, reinstating Remain in Mexico, building the wall, ending asylum for illegal border crossers, cracking down on criminal sanctuaries, and enhancing vetting and screening of aliens.
  • President Trump’s deportation operation will address the record border crossings of criminal aliens under the prior administration.
  • The President is suspending refugee resettlement, after communities were forced to house large and unsustainable populations of migrants, straining community safety and resources.
  • The Armed Forces, including the National Guard, will engage in border security, which is national security, and will be deployed to the border to assist existing law enforcement personnel.
  • President Trump will begin the process of designating cartels, including the dangerous Tren de Aragua, as foreign terrorist organizations and use the Alien Enemies Act to remove them.
  • The Department of Justice will seek the death penalty as the appropriate punishment for heinous crimes against humanity, including those who kill law enforcement officers and illegal migrants who maim and murder Americans.

MAKE AMERICA AFFORDABLE AND ENERGY DOMINANT AGAIN

  • The President will unleash American energy by ending Biden’s policies of climate extremism, streamlining permitting, and reviewing for rescission all regulations that impose undue burdens on energy production and use, including mining and processing of non-fuel minerals.
  • President Trump’s energy actions empower consumer choice in vehicles, showerheads, toilets, washing machines, lightbulbs and dishwashers.
  • President Trump will declare an energy emergency and use all necessary resources to build critical infrastructure.
  • President Trump’s energy policies will end leasing to massive wind farms that degrade our natural landscapes and fail to serve American energy consumers.
  • President Trump will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.
  • All agencies will take emergency measures to reduce the cost of living.
  • President Trump will announce the America First Trade Policy.
  • America will no longer be beholden to foreign organizations for our national tax policy, which punishes American businesses.

DRAIN THE SWAMP

  • The President will usher a Golden Age for America by reforming and improving the government bureaucracy to work for the American people. He will freeze bureaucrat hiring except in essential areas to end the onslaught of useless and overpaid DEI activists buried into the federal workforce. He will pause burdensome and radical regulations not yet in effect that Biden announced.
  • President Trump is announcing an unprecedented slate of executive orders for rescission.
  • President Trump is planning for improved accountability of government bureaucrats. The American people deserve the highest-quality service from people who love our country. The President will also return federal workers to work, as only 6% of employees currently work in person.
  • President Trump is taking swift action to end the weaponization of government against political rivals and ordering all document retention as required by law. President Trump is also ending the unconstitutional censorship by the federal government. No longer will government employees pick and require the erasure of entirely true speech.
  • On the President’s direction, the State Department will have an America-First foreign policy.

BRING BACK AMERICAN VALUES

  • The President will establish male and female as biological reality and protect women from radical gender ideology.
  • American landmarks will be named to appropriately honor our Nation’s history.

Trying to Keep Up.

This page @ WhiteHouse.gov/news is a great place to follow along as everything begins to unfold. Every executive order shows up instantly and they just keep coming.

So much there: Articles. Briefings & Statements. Fact Sheets. Presidential Actions. Remarks.

A big Thank You to all the team serving in this administration!
And an even bigger Thank You to our 47th President, Donald J. Trump.


Twitterati.

Very recently I finally began to read in the X.com space. The platform is suspicious of me and therefore I do not have an account. Probably due to the basic efforts I’ve made to retain some level of privacy. Oh well.

The kind people here have shown me the way to view people’s feeds by using the Nitter.Poast.org site. It’s opened up a whole new world of information. Very helpful.

I have a new favorite follow. And I recommend her to you. Nicole Shanahan. She was RFK Jr’s running mate. She’s as informed, active and feisty as they come. Nicole Shanahan‘s feed is following the Senate confirmations and a LOT more.

For fresh news on our J6 people and a lot more, Julie Kelly might be the place to visit.


Prayer.

God Bless America,
Land that I love.
Stand beside her, and guide her
Thru the night with a light from above.
From the mountains, to the prairies,
To the oceans, white with foam
God bless America, My home sweet home.


2025·01·25 WE MUST HAVE JUSTICE

With Trump now FINALLY restored to his Rightful Office, I was wondering what to name my posts. Continuing to complain that Biden didn’t win when Biden no longer effing matter any more than roadkill seen in the rearview mirror, seemed pointless. Even if it was a monument to Wheatie.

This should have been a week of joy. And indeed much good has happened, a wonderful start!

And then we found out that DePat…Susie…had taken her leave, very much before time. In fact just before she could see Trump restored to office.

DePat and I clashed loudly from time to time but I have nothing but respect for the time and effort she put in on her posts. (This is something I know about being one of the other authors.) To be sure she didn’t do much of the kind of writing she was certainly capable of, but the time it must have taken to gather all of those memes, articles and what-not is substantial. (Seriously when did she find the time?) And she would be visibly frustrated when she couldn’t throw a big pile of them together. Me, I’ll just say “no science post” and move on.

I suppose we can’t know DePat was killed by the Covid Vax in super-hyperdrive reach-out-and-kill-someone mode, though it certainly seems very likely indeed that it found DePat worn out and pounced.

That damned jab has killed hundreds of thousands if not millions…and it’s the “gift” that keeps on giving. If they never gave another slab jab from this moment forward, it would continue killing for years.

What we can know is that this was way too damned early. And for it to happen just before the inauguration she had been waiting for would strike me as incredibly “in-your-face, fuck you” injustice if I were to believe it was done by agency. (And yes, I’ve read the flip side of that viewpoint a lot here, so no need to explain it (again) on my account.)

Perhaps DePat can serve as a symbol of those it killed, even if it were to turn out that she wasn’t one of its victims.

And we should all remember her, and Wheatie, as we push forward with the fight. This is NOT over by any means.

Fight! Fight! Fight! Because JUSTICE must be served on those who foisted that shit on us. And for all the other things they have done to this country.

You failed to pay attention to this advice.
You went out of your way to do the opposite.
You chose to rub our faces in it,
imprison those who dared complain,
and even to kill our people.
Now you shall pay just a tiny fraction of the real price, Ratfuckers.

Welcome Back, 4GodandCountry

I have no idea if you enjoyed my science posts before you went on sabbatical (I do remember you were enthusiastic about my post on the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing). If so you have plenty of catchup. Largely on physics, but a few side excursions, lately a walk through the solar system and I’ve just started on geology (if I can quit slacking and put out part II).

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

RINO scum. Like Murkowski and Collins.

That’s OK. We go around ’em for now.

January 6 Tapes Reminder

OK…I’m sick and tired of reminding you to no effect, Speaker Johnson, so I’ll do the more emotionally satisfying thing and call you a cowardly, lying, fraudulent sack of diarrhetic monkey shit.

Johnson, you are a cowardly, lying, fraudulent sack of diarrhetic monkey shit!

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.)

Last Week:

Gold $2,703.00
Silver $30.41
Platinum $948.00
Palladium $975.00
Rhodium $5,000.00
FRNSI* 129.758-
Gold:Silver 88.885+

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

Gold $2,771.70
Silver $30.64
Platinum $957.00
Palladium $1,008.00
Rhodium $5,000.00
FRNSI* 133.081-
Gold:Silver 90.460+

Gold went up nicely. While it was climbing, silver struggled to keep its head above the water and finally went up 17 cents on Friday–which was most of its gain for the week. So it now takes over ninety ounces of silver to buy an ounce of gold, and that’s assuming of course you don’t have to give the moneychanger a cut.

Silver is on sale right now folks!

*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.


KMAG 20250108 Rewriting The Constitution

I mentioned in last Wednesday’s article that I fell down an interesting rabbit hole, more like a rabbit warren, when looking in my notes for info on the John Maynard Keynes link to the Fabian Society.

This is the comment in my notes that started my latest journey.

jdseanjd says:

March 6, 2014 at 6:13 am

Nicely done, Gail, very neat. The nail rapped smartly on the head 3 times. 🙂 I’ll raise you 137 years. 🙂

1st May, 1776, Rothschild commissioned a report on how to secure world domination:
Go to youtube & put in their search box : Whistleblower Head of FBI tells all from NWO 1 hr 4 mins.

Or try the ref, it might work :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do_swOstGaI [It still does work surprisingly. – GC]
Ted L. Gunderson, ex head of FBI in LA, would not shut up about what he’d learned.
He wound up poisoned with arsenic.

Is the plan coming apart?
http://www.usawatchdog.com
& scroll down to the article: US Currency Weak and About to Crash. 02/12/2014 371 comments. ( which I haven’t had time to read. Karen is ex Chief Legal Counsel for the World Bank.

Is this lady the real deal, or is she full of it? Anyone?

(She is full of it.)

Jdseanjd References U.S. Currency Weak and About to Crash—Karen Hudes.

In the comments on that article is this link from 2014, Philosophy of Metrics which looks interesting.

ABOUT

Philosophy of Metrics is the methodology of understanding the world through patterns and processes.  From the ancient philosophy of primitive man to the stock market today, there is a pattern in everything and anything.  We but need to observe and recognize the macro and micro of it all.

One of the biggest patterns is the one of ignorance.  We are subjected daily to methods of misdirection and direct obfuscation which serve to keep us blind to the realities that surround us.

Our modest intent is to lift the fog on the mysteries and allow some of these patterns to become visible, whereby we may better understand the world and our place within it.

I bring that comment up because it is the patterns and threads I am trying to follow since we now know our history as taught is bull schiff.

Back to Karen Hudes:

The video in that USA Watch Dog article is gone but I found this Utube: Karen Hudes on 1871 US Corporation, Gold, Homo Capensis, JFK Murder, Global Debt Facility & Bitcoin

I would say she is a Limited Hangout (1) given the blurb from this Utube:


In 2007 Karen warned the US Treasury Department and US Congress that the US would lose its right to appoint the President of the World Bank if the current American President of the World Bank did not play by the rules. The 66 year old Gentlemen’s Agreement that Europe would appoint the Managing Director of the IMF and US would appoint the World Bank President ended in 2010
http://www.imf.org/external/np/cm/201… Karen Hudes studied law at Yale Law School and economics at the University of Amsterdam
.

She worked in the US Export Import Bank of the US from 1980-1985 and in the Legal Department of the World Bank from 1986-2007. She established the Non Governmental Organization Committee of the International Law Section of the American Bar Association and the Committee on Multilateralism and the Accountability of International Organizations of the American Branch of the International Law Association.

1871 US Corporation??? 😜

(30) Ashton v. Cameron County Water Improvement Dist., 298 U.S. 513, 56 S.Ct. 892 (1936):

State governments and their political subdivisions can’t use bankruptcy.
NOTE: A popular argument in movement circles contends that this whole nation was placed into bankruptcy in 1930 and Roosevelt devised a plan to get judicial approval of the “bankruptcy” via the decision in the 1938 Erie Railroad case. But how can such a legal theory fly in view of the decision in this case? — LIMITS OF CONGRESSIONAL POWERS – Constitution Org

A bit from the transcript of : Karen Hudes on 1871 US Corporation, Gold, Homo Capensis, JFK Murder, Global Debt Facility & Bitcoin (2015)

5:15 to 6:40

“…at a town hall meeting I said since John F Kennedy was assassinated by the Jesuits, and we know this because Gambino when he got out of jail said that the mafia were told by the Jesuits to fire the kill shot. There was a a mafioso hidden in a sewer so as the limousine drove by that’s that’s the shot that killed John F Kennedy.

Did you know for example that we had a second constitution in 1871 after the debts for the Revolutionary War came due and we couldn’t meet those obligations?That’s when we got a second Constitution. So that the United States is incorporated as a company. The president of the United States is the chief executive officer and the Congress acts like managers of the company rather than representing the constituency. Rather than respecting our first Constitution. This is understood by a number of people. There’s a lot of documentation on this. Now people are starting to spread the world word. You’re not going to get this in your universities. You’re not going to be taught this in the schools…” 


She is spouting chaff meant to divert attention away from the CIA in my opinion. Why? I think it is because of these two whistle-blowers getting traction and because of the rise of the Tea Party Movement.

Mr. Budhoo’s Bombshell: A people’s alternative to Structural Adjustment

Summer 1995

“Today I resigned from the staff of the International Monetary Fund after over 12 years, and after 1000 days of official fund work in the field, hawking your medicine and your bag of tricks to governments and to peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa. To me, resignation is a priceless liberation, for with it I have taken the first big step to that place where I may hope to wash my hands of what in my mind’s eye is the blood of millions of poor and starving peoples. Mr. Camdessus, the blood is so much, you know, it runs in rivers. It dries up too; it cakes all over me; sometimes I feel that there is not enough soap in the whole world to cleanse me from the things that I did do in your name and in the name of your predecessors, and under your official seal. “


With those words, Davison Budhoo, a senior economist with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for more than 12 years, publicly resigned in May, 1988. A native Grenadian, Budhoo received his degree from the London School of Economics. He joined the staff of the World Bank in 1966 and later shifted to the IMF, where he was responsible for designing and implementing Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) for African, Latin American and Caribbean nations. His 100-plus page open letter to Michel Camdessus, managing director of the IMF, titled “Enough is Enough,” sent shock waves around the world, making front page headlines in many countries (but not in the US).

Budhoo was the first person to break the IMF’s code of silence regarding internal affairs by exposing extensive statistical fraud carried out by the fund in Trinidad and Tobago during 1985-1987….


The other was Confessions of an Economic Hitman – describing how as a highly paid professional, John Perkins helped the World Bank. cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then take over their economies. Also note that the finger is pointed at the USA (to generate hatred of the USA) and not the REAL culprit, the globalists.


Confessions of an Economic Hit Man:

How the U.S. Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions

“….He was an amazing man, Torrijos. And so, he died in a fiery airplane crash, which was connected to a tape recorder with explosives in it, which—I was there. I had been working with him. I knew that we economic hit men had failed. I knew the jackals were closing in on him, and the next thing, his plane exploded with a tape recorder with a bomb in it. There’s no question in my mind that it was C.I.A. sanctioned, and most—many Latin American investigators have come to the same conclusion. Of course, we never heard about that in our country.…” Democracy Now Org 2004


The IMF/World Bank uses Structural Adjustment Policies, SAPs, to open up countries to exploitation by corporations. Instead of a British Empire overtly colonizing the world — heavily criticized by a voting public — we have Corporate and Banking interests united in the covert control of whole nations in the name of profit….

Structural Adjustment Program 2000

(There have been 249 captures of this article by the Wayback!)

Structural Adjustment Policies are economic policies which countries must follow in order to qualify for new World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans and help them make debt repayments on the older debts owed to commercial banks, governments and the World Bank. Although SAPs are designed for individual countries but have common guiding principles and features which include export-led growth; privatisation and liberalisation; and the efficiency of the free market.

SAPs often result in deep cuts in programmes like education, health and social care…

By devaluing the currency and simultaneously removing price controls, the immediate effect of a SAP is.. that riots are a frequent result….

“…privatisation and liberalisation; and the efficiency of the free market...” Those are just the feel good words the Global Cabal uses to hide what they are actually doing. I will get into that in the next article.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The second rabbit hole warren from this comment, — Ted L. Gunderson, Whistleblower Head of FBI — deserves its own separate article so I will address it next week.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Rabbit hole #3

The Lord moves in mysterious ways. He even drags an agnostic such as myself, to the truth, on Sunday no less.

I remembered an article talking of the Supreme Court case that allows the bureaucracy to MAKE law. The federal Register and 30 day comment period was the fig leaf for “consent of the governed” blessed by that Supreme Court case. A few days ago I went looking for that info and all I could find was the happy horse schiff from the Federal Reserve, March 14, 1936 — March 14, 2006

On December 10, 1934, at the Supreme Court, the Assistant Attorney General of the United States had been grilled during oral arguments in the first case to reach the Court challenging the constitutionality of the centerpiece of President Roosevelt’s “New Deal” — the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). The critical constitutional issues at stake were mostly ignored that day while the Justices focused on the fact that the defendants, two Texas oil companies, had been charged with violating a provision of regulations that technically did not exist at the time the companies were charged. 
The defects in the case highlighted a fundamental problem facing a democratic government that was exploding with new agencies and new regulations. Amidst the ferment of orders and codes issuing from agencies, even individuals working at the highest levels of government found it difficult or impossible to keep track of all of them. And for the regulated public, this new body of “executive legislation” was inaccessible and virtually hidden. The next day, at the White House, 
where the great men of the New Deal [You mean Commie TRAITORS don’t you?…] had been arguing over the value of publishing a gazette containing the orders issued by Executive Branch officers, President Roosevelt laid aside his misgivings about possible misuse of the publication for propagandistic purposes and appointed a committee of the National Emergency Council to make a special study of the idea. Meanwhile, behind-the-scenes maneuvering by lawmakers and influential legal minds, including Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, culminated in the publication on December 11, 1934 of a Harvard Law Review article by, Ervin Griswold entitled “Government in Ignorance of the Law – 
A Plea for Better Publication of 👉Executive Legislation.👈” 
The arguments Griswold made for orderly publication of the official actions of the Executive Branch were underlined when the Supreme Court issued its opinion in the Panama Oil case and forced the hand of the committee studying the issue for President Roosevelt. Congress passed legislation to create the Federal Register, and the President signed it into law (Pub. L. 74-220, July 26, 1935). The Act created a lasting partnership between the National Archives and the Government Printing Office. The Archivist of the United States, acting through a Division in the National Archives, was charged with custody of and, with the Public Printer, prompt and uniform printing and distribution of public documents in a publication designated the Federal Register…


In those notes on the Fabians, I had this but not the Utube I got it from:

Min 1:00 — 3:38

On the interpretation of two main clauses of the constitution, the first is the commerce clause which delegates to congress the authority to regulate commerce among the states. The second is the necessary and proper clause which provided for the congress to have the powers that are necessary and proper for carrying into execution the other powers, the explicit powers and unfortunately those words have been given a broader interpretation than was intended by the framers.

On my website constitution.org and on my blog constitutionalism.blogspot.com

I have a number of articles that examine the problems arising from this misinterpretation and the arguments and evidence for why the clauses should not be interpreted in that way. But this evening I’m going to focus on the line of supreme court presidents that led to where we are today. There are 44 main supreme court presidents. There are many more cases than that, but most of those others cite one or more of these 44 cases. So if one were to overturn these 44 cases, and in fact you wouldn’t need to overturn all of them, if you overturned the first few the rest would fall because the later ones are based on the earlier ones. But for the sake of completeness if one were to propose amendments to the constitution to overturn these bad precedents, which are about the only way they are going to get overturned, then it would be necessary to unravel them fairly specifically. And the way to word such an amendment is not at all obvious, it requires a good deal of analysis and thought and i hope to assemble teams of experts to work out the wording. For how to do that in the meantime i have proposed my own wording if on constitution.org you will find a link to constitutional amendments…

So I tried to find the video but could not and instead I fell down a very interesting rabbit hole leading to

Jon Roland: (Civic Curriculum Vitae)

 His blogs

His videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/JonRoland1787

Gee! I think those are the Droids I was looking for! 🤗 And WOW what a treasure trove of information on the Constitution. Linked below are just two of the goodies at that website.

Abuses and Usurpations

“𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝕔𝕠𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕤𝕥 𝕚𝕤 𝕟𝕠𝕥 𝕓𝕖𝕥𝕨𝕖𝕖𝕟 𝕌𝕤 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕋𝕙𝕖𝕞, 𝕓𝕦𝕥 𝕓𝕖𝕥𝕨𝕖𝕖𝕟 𝔾𝕠𝕠𝕕 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝔼𝕧𝕚𝕝, 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕚𝕗 𝕥𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕖 𝕨𝕙𝕠 𝕨𝕠𝕦𝕝𝕕 𝕗𝕚𝕘𝕙𝕥 𝔼𝕧𝕚𝕝 𝕒𝕕𝕠𝕡𝕥 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕨𝕒𝕪𝕤 𝕠𝕗 𝔼𝕧𝕚𝕝, 𝔼𝕧𝕚𝕝 𝕨𝕚𝕟𝕤.”

Find out just what the people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. — Frederick Douglass, civil rights activist, Aug. 4, 1857

Any power that can be abused will be abused. — Tyranny Law #1

Abuse always expands to fill the limits of resistance to it. — Tyranny Law #2

If people don’t resist the abuses of others, they will have no one to resist the abuses of themselves, and tyranny will prevail. — Tyranny Law #3

Usurpations

Usurpation is the exercise of powers by an agent which have not been delegated to him by the principal. In a constitutional republic like the United States of America, acts by officials are legitimate only if they are consistent with and based on a constitution, a body of laws which are superior to all subsequent statutes and other acts of officials, which embodies all delegations of power, and which may recognize certain rights to further define the limits on the powers delegated. It is a fundamental principle that all acts of officials not derived from the delegated powers of the constitution are null and void from inception, not just from the point at which a court may find them unconstitutional. Every person who has an encounter with the acts of officials has the duty not only to obey legitimate official acts, but to help enforce them, but, when there is a conflict among acts of officials, to enforce the superior one, which, when an act of an official is in conflict with the constitution, means enforcing the constitution and not the act in conflict with it. Judges and other citizens do not decide constitutionality, but discover it, and every person who is involved with any act by an official has a nondelegatable duty to make a determination of the constitutionality of that act. This determination is called constitutional review, and, when exercised by a judge in a case, judicial review.

Since the ratification of the Constitution for the United States and each of its properly ratified amendments, there have been numerous acts by officials, including statutes, regulations, executive orders, court rulings, and ordinary decisions and actions taken while on duty and under color of law, which have been unconstitutional, and in many cases, in violation of civil rights of persons and of constitutional laws. We will try to identify some of the worst of such violations of the Constitution, and discuss how compliance with the Constitution can be restored.

Then follows over 50 links to other articles and documents.

….
His Constitution.org site also had this with 25 articles referenced:

Nondelegation and the Administrative State

The doctrine of nondelegation is explicit or implicit in all written constitutions that impose a structural separation of powers. It is usually applied in questions of constitutionally improper delegations of legislative powers to executive branch officials, but may be more broadly applied to questions of improper delegations of legislative powers to judicial officials, improper delegations of judicial powers to legislative or executive officials, improper delegations of executive powers to legislative or judicial officials, improper delegations of legislative or judicial powers to clerical subordinates within their branches, or improper delegations of legislative, judicial, or executive powers to private parties, or improper delegations of private powers to public officials. Although it is usually constitutional for executive officials to delegate executive powers to executive branch subordinates, there can also be improper delegations of powers within an executive branch.

Finally, there is the broadest application of all, the nondelegation from the people of a power to any officials in a constitution, the principle of which is set forth in the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

An example of one of the documents referenced in this article:

Reviving the Sleeping Nondelegation Doctrine — USLaw.com

Congress sometimes has a habit of passing laws with very broad mandates, then leaving it up to administrative agencies to fill in all of the policy details later.

In the 1930s, the Supreme Court blew the whistle on this practice, finding several times that Congress could not give away lawmaking powers vested in it by Article I of the Constitution. In 1935 in Schechter Poultry Company v. U.S., for example, the court struck down parts of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which essentially delegated legislative powers to administrative agencies and private parties to write rules to govern the American economy. Congress had given only the vaguest guidance as to how to do it–ensuring “fair competition.”

The principle that Congress could not delegate away its Article I lawmaking powers to administrative agencies came to be known as the “nondelegation doctrine.”

Six Decades of Dormancy

For six decades the nondelegation doctrine has pretty much been asleep. In 1980, in Industrial Union Dept AFL-CIO v. American Petroleum Institute, then-Associate Justice William H. Rehnquist summarized the three main functions of the nondelegation doctrine: it guarantees that key social policy decisions will be made by Congress, it ensures that administrative agencies get an “intelligible principle” by which to exercise their discretion, and it guarantees that courts reviewing administrative actions will have ascertainable and meaningful standards against which to judge them.

But no court has dared question a legislative enactment as a violation of the doctrine for a long time –that is, until the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rendered its decision last year in American Trucking Association v. Environmental Protection Agency. There, the court found that the EPA’s “construction of the Clean Air Act. . . in promulgating the NAAQS (National Air Ambient Quality Standards) effects an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power.” The court said that, in delegating so much power to the EPA to decide clean air rules, “it is as though Congress commanded EPA to select ‘big guys,’ and EPA announced that it would evaluate candidates based on height and weight, but revealed no cut-off point. The announcement. . .is fatally incomplete. The reasonable person responds, ‘How tall? How heavy?'” With this vivid analogy, the nondelegation doctrine sprung back to life.

Revived or Put Into Deeper Sleep?

Or did it? The problem with the D.C. Circuit’s so-called “revival” of the nondelegation doctrine is that it looks a lot more like a burial. The court’s tortured formulation of the problem makes no sense. It is not the EPA’s construction of the statute that effects an unconstitutional delegation; it is Congress’ statute itself. EPA’s construction of the statute cannot determine, much less cure, its constitutionality. Yet, having made this fundamental error, the court follows through on it by remanding the case to the EPA to come up with an “intelligible principle” that will, amazingly, somehow magically cure the statute of its unconstitutionality. But how can an agency rewrite a congressional statute to make it constitutional?….

Another interesting reference is:

LEGAL ORIGINS OF THE MODERN AMERICAN STATE   by William J. Novak1

𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝕥𝕣𝕒𝕟𝕤𝕗𝕠𝕣𝕞𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟 𝕠𝕗 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕊𝕥𝕒𝕥𝕖 𝕚𝕤 𝕒𝕝𝕤𝕠 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕥𝕣𝕒𝕟𝕤𝕗𝕠𝕣𝕞𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟 𝕠𝕗 𝕚𝕥𝕤 𝕃𝕒𝕨.
— Léon Duguit (👉 1913)

 Between 1877 and 1937 (between the formal end of Reconstruction and the formal constitutional ratification of the New Deal), the American system of governance was transformed with momentous implications for twentieth-century social and economic life. Nineteenth-century traditions of self-government and local citizenship were replaced by a modern approach to positive statecraft, individual rights, and social welfare very much with us today…. By “The Creation of the American Liberal State” I mean to suggest that the period from 1877 to 1937 was not just an “age of reform” or a “response to industrialism” or a “search for order” (Hofstadter 1955; Hays 1957; Wiebe 1967). Rather, it was an era marked by the specific and unambiguous emergence of a new regime of American governance — the modern liberal state….  the very origins of modern social-scientific inquiry in the United States were wholly coincident with and participatory in the construction of the new state-centered socio-economic policies of the progressive era… 

The Progressive Discovery that Law Obstructs Politics

It is easy amid the rapid shifts in contemporary intellectual fashion to forget the long and pervasive hold of “progressive historiography” on American thought during the first half of the twentieth century (Hofstadter 1968; Benson 1960; Horwitz 1984). From the turn-of-the-century through the late New Deal, American political and economic development was interpreted primarily through the filter of intellectual categories developed in contests over progressive reform in the early twentieth century….

The confrontation between FDR’s New Deal legislation and Supreme Court constitutional review breathed new life into the progressive critique of law. In 1938… Benjamin Twiss began his Lawyers and the Constitution: How Laissez Faire Came to the Supreme Court (1942) as a direct response to the “revolution of 1937″ and as a direct attack on the “Four Horsemen” of anti-New Deal judicial apocalypse: Justices Van Devanter, McReynolds, Sutherland, and Butler. Twiss’s story about law and the New Deal re-deployed the stock figures and simple morals of a mature progressive historiography…

𝔸𝕞𝕖𝕣𝕚𝕔𝕒𝕟 𝕡𝕣𝕠𝕘𝕣𝕖𝕤𝕤𝕚𝕧𝕖𝕤 𝕗𝕖𝕝𝕥 𝕥𝕙𝕒𝕥 𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕚𝕣 𝕝𝕖𝕘𝕚𝕤𝕝𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝕒𝕘𝕖𝕟𝕕𝕒 𝕨𝕒𝕤 𝕥𝕙𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕥𝕖𝕟𝕖𝕕 𝕓𝕪 𝕒 𝕊𝕦𝕡𝕣𝕖𝕞𝕖 ℂ𝕠𝕦𝕣𝕥 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝔸𝕞𝕖𝕣𝕚𝕔𝕒𝕟 𝕛𝕦𝕣𝕚𝕤𝕡𝕣𝕦𝕕𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕚𝕒𝕝 𝕥𝕣𝕒𝕕𝕚𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟𝕤 𝕙𝕠𝕤𝕥𝕚𝕝𝕖 𝕥𝕠 𝕣𝕖𝕘𝕦𝕝𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟, 𝕣𝕖𝕕𝕚𝕤𝕥𝕣𝕚𝕓𝕦𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟, 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕣𝕖𝕗𝕠𝕣𝕞. 𝕀𝕟 𝕣𝕖𝕤𝕡𝕠𝕟𝕤𝕖 𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕪 𝕒𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕞𝕓𝕝𝕖𝕕 𝕒𝕟 𝕦𝕟𝕡𝕣𝕖𝕔𝕖𝕕𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕕 𝕡𝕠𝕨𝕖𝕣𝕗𝕦𝕝 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕡𝕠𝕝𝕖𝕞𝕚𝕔𝕒𝕝 𝕒𝕤𝕤𝕒𝕦𝕝𝕥 𝕠𝕟 𝔸𝕞𝕖𝕣𝕚𝕔𝕒𝕟 𝕔𝕠𝕟𝕤𝕥𝕚𝕥𝕦𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟𝕒𝕝𝕚𝕤𝕞.

Behind the progressive mythology of negative laissez-faire constitutionalism lies an alternative story of law’s positive force in producing a modern state in America. And contrary to oddly influential European proclamations of the weakness and incompleteness of that state, the obvious empirical reality is that the story of the twentieth-century American state is about the creation of a most powerful geo-political entity. That entity, which has wielded staggering global influence in the twentieth century, was patently not the simple outgrowth of possessive individualism or the protection of private rights of property and contract or a governmental willingness to “leave alone.” It was the product of a continuous and energetic process of statebuilding

..the obvious empirical reality is that the story of the twentieth-century American state is about the creation of a most powerful geo-political entity… It was the product of a continuous and energetic process of statebuilding….”He leave out the tiny little fact that the USA was transformed into the British Empire’s Front Man and Cannon Fodder after the passage of the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. We have been fighting Banker Wars ever since.

“All Wars Are Bankers Wars” (45 minutes)

One of the references cited in the above article is this 1938 book:

Court over Constitution: A study of judicial review as an instrument of popular government by Edward S. Corwin 1938.

I am not about to buy the book but I did find this thanks to Yandex. Brave only had one pointer. It was to “Good Reads’ with no info. Not even a review. 🤔


In trying to find more about that book I was led to:

FEDERALIST NO. 78 AND BRUTUS’ NEGLECTED THESIS ON JUDICIAL SUPREMACY 

It is noteworthy that whenever Marbury v. Madison is discussed in works on constitutional law, text books or case books, reference is invariably made to Alexander Hamilton’s discussion of judicial review in Federalist No. 78 as an early indication that the principle was regarded as a fundamental part of the system of government set up under the Constitution. Surprisingly, these works, almost without exception, fail to refer to the Antifederalist Letters of Brutus to which this number of the Federalist Papers constitutes a response. This is a regrettable omission since No. 78 cannot be properly understood except in the context of Brutus’ charge that the Constitution provided, not only for judicial review, but for judicial supremacy….

What concerned Brutus, in the first instance, was the use to which the court would apply judicial review in the service of national consolidation and how this would threaten the independence and survival of the states. 👉The judicial power, Brutus warned, would operate to affirm and legitimate all the invasions of state power committed by the national legislature.👈 “The real effect of this system of government, will … be brought home to the feelings of the people, through the medium of the judicial power.”

….Brutus went on to point out another crucial distinction between the British and American systems of government – the ability of Parliament to severely restrict the broader impact of an unwarranted and inappropriate judicial interpretation of the constitution – a power entirely lacking to the U.S. Congress.

The supreme court then have a right, independent of the legislature, to give a construction to the constitution and every part of it, and there is no power provided in this system to correct their construction or do it away. If, therefore, the legislature pass any laws, inconsistent with the sense the judges put upon the constitution, they will declare it void; and therefore in this respect their power is superior to that of the legislature. In England the judges are not only subject to have their decisions set aside by the house of lords, for error, but in cases where they give an explanation to the laws or constitution of the country, contrary to the sense of the parliament, though the parliament will not set aside the judgment of the court, yet, they have authority, by a new law, to explain a former one, and by this means to prevent a reception of such decisions. But no such power is in the [U.S.] legislature. The judges are supreme-and no law, explanatory of the constitution, will be binding on them.

The end result was that,

(t]here is no power above them to controul any of their decisions. There is no authority that can remove them, and they cannot be controuled by the laws of the legislature. In short, they are independent of the people, of the legislature, and of every power under heaven. Men placed in this situation will generally soon feel themselves independent of heaven itself.

Thus one can understand why George Soros targets judges and state attorneys general. People who fly under the radar of most people but who wield tremendous power.

Rights, Powers and Duties

On every question of construction [of the Constitution] let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or intended against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.
— Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), letter to Judge William Johnson, (from Monticello, June 12, 1823)
If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.
— George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796
Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government.

I am going to again post the URL of another Constitutionalist, “Publius Huldah” the nom de guerre of Joanna Martin, J.D.

(1) Footnote: LINK to article about Victor Marchetti, former senior CIA official, who wrote a book exposing CIA deceptions. The CIA  remove 399 passages, nearly a fifth of the book.  That article defines ‘Limited Hangout’ thus:

2024·12·21 Joe Biden Didn’t Win (And Neither Did Kamala Harris) Daily Thread

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

This post is scheduled to go “live” at 10:01PM MST on Friday, December 20, 2024. That’s 00:01 EST on Saturday, December 21, 2024 for those of you in that benighted timezone near the Atlantic Ocean.

As of that moment, there are 30 days, 11 hours, and 59 minutes until our rightful President of the United States is restored to office.

Not that I’m counting, mind you.

January 6 Tapes Reminder

OK…I’m sick and tired of reminding you to no effect, Speaker Johnson, so I’ll do the more emotionally satisfying thing and call you a cowardly, lying, fraudulent sack of diarrhetic monkey shit.

Johnson, you are a cowardly, lying, fraudulent sack of diarrhetic monkey shit!

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.)

Last Week:

Gold $2,647.50
Silver $30.62
Platinum $934.00
Palladium $976.00
Rhodium $4,875.00
FRNSI* 127.073-
Gold:Silver 86.463+

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

Gold $2,623.40
Silver $29.58
Platinum $935.00
Palladium $948.00
Rhodium $4,850.00
FRNSI* 127.907-
Gold:Silver 88.688+

Silver down over a dollar…which sounds bad until I tell you it went up fifty cents on Friday, and is still down over a dollar. So Thursday, it really sucked. And the gold:silver ratio is getting really, really bad.

The only thing that went up is…miracle of miracles…platinum, which is still on fricking sale.

*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.

It Sucks To Be A Flat Earth Charlatan

If you are a flat earth charlatan, my just telling you you suck would be the LEAST bad aspect of your life. How can you look at yourself in the mirror?

As for everyone else (including Flat Earth true believers–i.e., the victims of the charlatans), you all likely know that The Final Experiment (TFE) happened this last week. At this point the participants are on their way home, except for Critical Think, whose flight from Punta Arenas to Santiago Chile isn’t for another day or two. Then he flies directly from Santiago to Sydney Australia…oh, wait, I forgot, that flight doesn’t exist according to Flat Earthers.

In many cases they collected terabytes of data. (“tera” is what comes after “giga” if you don’t know. “Tera” equals “trillion” (twelve zeroes) and that should be easy to remember because both start with t.) One person recorded over 24 hours of 11K video (not a time lapse, full time video) of the sun. Others took numerous sun spot shots (and they have thousands of emails from people like me waiting for them, for comparison). But it’s taking them days to get back, and now they have to deal with the holidays. So don’t expect much out of them before New Year’s. As for the documentary the one flat-earther professional is putting together, who knows how long that will take. They have all kinds of stuff, that should sink this bullshit once and for all, but won’t, because many of their followers are having cult psychology kick in. “Terabytes of evidence against my position? It must be fake. I can’t possibly just be…wrong about this.”

I’ll post a couple of videos here, some of them are repeats. This one is SciManDan, a Glober who was not part of TFE, talking about various types of copium being taken by the Flerfs:

Here’s something new I found. Lots of clips up front of the Flerfer charlatans insisting that what was seen could not possibly exist–which to me would mean that what was seen invalidates the Flat Earth. But these people move the goal posts. Once that evidence comes up, they need something else…yeah, that is what you need to disprove flat earth. (Marred by the fact that Peterson confuses Ushuaia Argentina with Punta Arenas, Chile):

And this is one I posted earlier. McToon (Glober) is letting Nathan Oakley (Flerfer Charlatan) have it with both barrels.

Wolf took exception to this, thinking McToon was over the top. I disagree. Oakley is a fraudster. This is the least of what that species of “human” deserves. They should have “CON MAN” tattooed on their foreheads.

I will, nevertheless post a Nathan Oakley response:

Precession of the Equinoxes

We’ve got a lot of prerequisites fresh in our minds, so let’s take up precession of the equinoxes, a subject that seems to come up frequently. And I’d normally not touch it with a ten foot pole or a lot of graphics. An animation would be best honestly, and I found one but I wish it showed a bit more (like relation with the Earth’s orbit).

Remember this from last week?

Since the Earth’s axis of rotation is tilted about 23.5 degrees with respect to its orbit, the celestial equator is tilted 23.5 degrees with respect to the ecliptic, as shown below.

Last Week

But then I went on to say:

But since we’re thinking in a set of coordinates that goes from the celestial equator, we think of it the other way around: we think of the ecliptic being tilted with respect to the celestial equator.

Me rambling on more, last week

Well this time we are going to think the the way the diagram shows; the ecliptic will be the basis of another coordinate system, known as…drumroll…the ecliptic coordinate system.

There are actually two ecliptic coordinate systems, one centered on the Sun (heliocentric), the other on the Earth (geocentric). Since the planets generally orbit in planes almost aligned with the Earth’s orbital plane (which is the ecliptic plane), and the Sun is the center of gravity of the solar system, the sun-centered system is very useful for talking about the solar system. Indeed, even though I didn’t mention it at all in the recent series on the planets, I have used it here–go back to the articles on the great conjunction almost exactly four years ago; I did those plots in that system.

But we’ll focus on the Earth centered (geocentric) version this time.

For both systems (as well as the equatorial system I talked about) the primary line is the one pointing towards the vernal equinox (or March equinox, or (sometimes) the “first point of Aries”). It lies in the “reference plane” of all systems. For the ecliptic system, the “poles” are simply a line perpendicular to the ecliptic plane; in the diagram above they are called the north and south ecliptic poles.

In the ecliptic system, the two coordinates are called ecliptic longitude and ecliptic latitude and both are measured in degrees; no mucking around with hours of right ascension and minutes and seconds of arc that aren’t the same kind of minutes and seconds as the other minutes and seconds.

In the heliocentric system longitude is represented by l (italic lower case L) while in the geocentric system it’s represented by Greek letter lambda, λ. Latitude is represented by b (heliocentric) or β (geocentric).

Or, if you know the distance to whatever it is you’re considering, you can go Cartesian, a grid instead of spherical coordinates:

x = r cos β cos λ
y = r cos β sin λ
z = r sin β

The x axis points towards the first point of Aries, the y axis is 90 degrees counterclockwise from it in the ecliptic plane, and z points toward the north ecliptic pole. The formula is the same for the heliocentric system (swapping b for β and l for λ) and it was the Cartesian version of the helicentric system I worked with in those old posts from four years ago. (And similar conversions can be done with equatorial coordinates.)

[Digression: Both equatorial and ecliptic coordinates are considered “right handed” coordinate systems. Why? Imagine pointing the fingers of your right hand along the x axis, then bending them to point along the y axis (or, if in spherical coordinates, curling the fingers in increasing longitude or right ascension). Raise your thumb like “thumbs up” and it points along the z axis. On a left handed system, this works for the left hand instead. I find this easier than whiddershins and diesel or whatever those words were.]

Imagine a line drawn from “Autumnal Equinox” through the Earth to “Vernal Equinox.” It’s the intersection of the celestial equatorial plane and the ecliptic plane. (Two planes that aren’t parallel and aren’t the same plane, will intersect in a line.) It just happens to be the case that Earth is tilted in such a way that this particular line represents the intersection (and is the X axis in both the equatorial and ecliptic systems).

What if it were in a different place? It’s pretty arbitrary, isn’t it? Why couldn’t it be in a different place?

It would be, if the Earth’s equator were oriented differently–meaning, also, “if the earth’s axis were pointed differently.” Oh, I suppose the Earth’s orbital plane could shift, but that’s much harder than shifting the poles.

I can say this with confidence because the Earth’s axis does indeed shift direction! It does so without changing the angle between the celestial equator and ecliptic. Over the course of some 26,000 years the line of intersection shifts through a full 360 degrees. (And unlike almost everything else…it goes clockwise.) The first point of Aries precesses and the line points to the two equinoxes, so this is precession of the equinoxes.

If you are having trouble visualizing this, well, we’re both in luck. I found a good animation.

By about 30 seconds in you can see how it works.

The effect of this is to move the first point of Aries (represented with that ♈ symbol) around the ecliptic…which means it moves through the Zodiac. The first point of Aries was actually in Aries from about 2000 BCE to 1 CE, then it was in Pisces. It’s about to leave Pisces and shift into Aquarius (“the Age of Aquarius” actually means something…but nothing magic here).

As the first point of Aries moves, the Earth’s axis draws a cone through space, scribing circles on the celestial sphere centered on the ecliptic poles.

There are two other effects of this.

First off, it mucks up both equatorial and ecliptic coordinate systems, because the x axis, the primary axis…is moving! With ecliptic coordinates, you could probably just ignore this…and say we’re going to use the x axis direction from (say) 2000 and just leave it there. Big deal. The fundamental plane doesn’t change. Even if you let the X axis change, the Z axis does not, and you can just add or subtract a correction from ecliptic longitude and be current.

But this precession of the equinoxes absolutely hoses the equatorial coordinate system, because the fundamental plane itself shifts. And we can’t just go on using an old set of axes; the point of the equatorial system is so that you can be assured that if you set a telescope to a certain declination, it will stay at that declination as the earth rotates (even if you don’t have the telescope track whatever you’re looking at). So we issue new charts every fifty years ago, epoch 1950, epoch 2000; with all star coordinates shifted. At some point we will need to switch to something newer–or perhaps they’ll just let computers do the work of listing coordinates according to where the equinoxes are right now.

The other effect is on our year. Just like we have sidereal and solar days, the first being one rotation as seen from the stars, the other being one rotation as seen from the Sun, we have sidereal and tropical years.

A sidereal year is how long it takes for Earth to return to the same spot in its orbit, as seen from far away, in the stars (a sort of “God’s Eye View” of the situation). But our calendar does not track the stars, it tracks the seasons, and the interval between two crossings of the March equinox is called the “tropical year.” We set our calendar up so that the average length of a year (in whole days) is as close to one tropical year as possible. Otherwise, our calendar shifts with respect to the seasons. (We had trouble with that while following the “every four years is a leap year” rule. The calendar would slip against the seasons about 3 days every four hundred years. So we changed the calendar to drop three leap years out of every four centuries. The old schema is called the “Julian calendar” while the new one is the “Gregorian calendar”, each named after the person who instituted the system.)

A calendar year is the interval between one equinox and the next time we’re at that equinox, not (quite) the amount of time it takes for the sun to (apparently) return to the exact same place in the sky.

Actually since a calendar year is a whole number of days, we want the average length of a calendar year to be equal to the amount of time it takes to return to the same equinox (or solstice).

Since, as seen from either the north celestial pole or the north ecliptic pole, the Earth orbits counterclockwise but the equinoxes shift slowly clockwise, the effect is that one tropical year elapses just before the Earth can finish a full orbit with respect to the stars. How much before? About 1,224.5 seconds faster, roughly 20 minutes, 24.5 seconds. You can estimate the exact amount of time it will take the equinoxes to precess by dividing the number of seconds in a sidereal year by 1,224.5 and you get 25,772 years–which invariably gets rounded to 26,000 when you see this talked about in science popularizations. And this makes sense because it happens that the rate itself does vary; it’s not always 1,224.5 seconds per sidereal year.

13,000 years or so from now, Earth will be on the other side of its orbit when springtime hits the Northern hemisphere…but even though the Earth will be on the other side of its orbit, it will still be called March 21, because the calendar tracks the seasons, not the stars.

Speaking Of Earth

Go back through my series of articles on planets, moons, comets, asteroids and the Sun, and it appears I left one thing out, something fairly high up on the list.

The sixth largest body in the solar system.

Yep. I never talked about the third round rock from the Sun, Earth.

I picked that picture because it was taken from the Galileo space probe. The one that went to Jupiter. Before it got to Jupiter, it played gravity assist pinball, getting a boost from Venus then two assists from Earth. It was the first interplanetary probe to return to Earth (though it didn’t linger).

It also took pictures of the Simpson desert in Australia and the Ross ice shelf in Antarctica (the latter is a mosaic assembled from smaller images).

It was useful to see how Galileo’s cameras would behave taking pictures of a known target.

And the Earth is well known; we’ve been stomping around on it for millennia.

So: the basics.

Earth has a radius of 6,371 kilometers. (Try to take so much as one orbital dynamics class without having that number burned into your brain by the time of the final exam.) That is an average. Through the poles, it’s 6356.752 kilometers, through the equator, it’s 6378.137 kilometers. The mean density is 5.513 grams per cubic centimeter…and that is a record for any round body in the solar system. (Metallic asteroids will be higher of course.) It even beats out Mercury which has a large (for its size) core.

Density is useful for helping to figure out what something is made of. A lot of those outer planet moons have very low densities, indicating they’re mostly ice; others have slightly higher densities, indicating they’re more rock than ice…and so on. A typical rock has a density of about 3, and ice is just below 1.

I’ve often talked about the average density of different bodies in the solar system, and you may have wondered how we could possibly know this. It’s not as if we’ve sampled Earth at all depths, much less any of the other bodies we’ve only flown by once.

It turns out we can know this, relatively easily in fact. The average density of some planet or moon is its mass, divided by its volume, so we need to know two other things to get the density. Volume is easy: once you have a radius, r, you can compute the volume of the object via (4/3)πr3. Mass is a little trickier, but we can get most of the way there if something is in orbit around the body. The orbital speed for a circular orbit is v = √(μ/R). Since we’re after the mass, let’s rearrange that a bit: v2R = μ This time R stands for the orbital radius (not the radius of the planet). That other letter, Greek mu (μ), is the gravitational parameter of the body–that’s different for every body. So if we know the distance between the satellite and its primary, and we time how long it takes to orbit (T), we can get the velocity readily (2πR/T). We can substitute into the first formula and get μ = 4π2R3/T2 And then we have this “gravitational parameter” thingie, based totally on the orbital radius and the time it takes the satellite to orbit.

(Gravitational parameter is another thing we had burned into our brains…but at least I’ve managed to forget its value since then. I just looked it up, Earth’s gravitational parameter is 3.986 x 1014 m3/s2. Except I was used to deal with kilometers per second, so I used 3.986 x 105.

But we wanted mass. Well it turns out that μ is equal to the mass of the primary, M, times the gravitational constant, G. But that’s as far as we could go for about a hundred years; we could measure μ, but we actually had no idea what G was, so we couldn’t get from μ to M. In the late 1790s Henry Cavendish was able to measure the gravitational force between known masses, so this time, he knew the mass, and could compute G. As soon as he did that, every known value of μ, be it for Earth, the Sun, Jupiter, Saturn, could be used to compute a mass. So.

Earth is being orbited by the Moon, so we could do the calculations above and arrive at the total mass of the Earth, then divide by the volume. If a body didn’t have a satellite, though, we were SOL. So we found ourselves in the situation where we knew Uranus’s mass better than we knew the mass of Venus, even though Venus is much closer. Uranus has moons, Venus does not. And of course moons themselves didn’t have anything orbiting around them, so we couldn’t determine their masses, except in the case of our Moon, which is big enough to have a noticeable effect on the Earth.

Once we could send spacecraft out there, though, we could determine masses, by watching how much their trajectories bent as they flew by. That’s a hyperbolic orbit, and the formulae for it also contain μ.

So with Earth being far denser than typical rocks, what’s inside of it? One cause of higher density might just be that rocks deep down might compress some under the weight of the rocks above them, and we now know that this is part of it. But we still need Earth to be largely made of stuff quite a bit denser than average ol’ rocks.

And so we get something like this diagram (which is not to scale, the ocean and crust are drawn much too thick):

The liquid outer core and solid inner core are believed to be composed mostly of iron, with densities ranging from 9.9 to 13.1 grams/cubic centimeter. (Iron on the surface has a density of 7.874–clearly the iron in the core is compressed.) But given that we can’t drill down even to the mantle, much less down to the core, how do we know this? We can kind of guess that the innards are iron, since iron is very common in the universe (supernovas happen when stars try to fuse iron; the supernovas end up basically barfing the iron out into space). And we get meteorites consisting of mostly iron, to reinforce that. But liquid? How much?

That one’s a bit harder than computing average density. But the answer, in one word, is “seismology.”

If you think I’m just going to leave it there…you don’t know me very welly.

Seismic waves are waves through the solid material of Earth, resulting from earthquakes, volcanoes, movements of magma underground, and even man-made explosions. There are all sorts of different kinds of seismic waves, and different ways to divvy them up.

One is surface waves vs. Body waves. Surface waves travel along the surface of Earth, while body waves travel through the whole body of earth. Surface waves will tend to get weaker in proportion to distance, while body waves will get weaker in proportion to distance squared. (There’s a good intuitive reason for this. Think about a surface wave traveling away from its source ten kilometers. The entire energy of the wave is contained along a circle 2π x 10 km in circumference. Wait for the wave to reach a 20 km distance, all of the energy is distributed along 2π x 20 km of line. Twice as much, so the wave will be half as strong. Body waves travel outwards along consistent hemispheres, not circles, and the hemisphere’s area multiplies by four when the radius doubles.)

Body waves, in turn, come in two types: P (or primary) waves, and S (or secondary) waves. These names come from the fact that the P waves move faster, so they reach seismographs first. Below is an example, the P wave hits, then the S wave.

The two types are fundamentally different. P waves are longitudinal…which means that the medium the wave is traveling through moves in the same direction the wave is moving. This is very much the way sound works; the sound wave consists of denser and less dense atmosphere and the air molecules move towards and away from the sound source to build up bands of compression and rarefaction. Below is a diagram of a longitudinal wave traveling from left to right.

I said they are much like sound waves, and in fact when a P wave reaches the surface, it will often make a noise. Travel speeds are 330 m/s in air, 1450 m/s in water and 5000 m/s in granite.

Secondary waves are transverse (like light waves).

They take roughly 1.7 times as long to cover the same distance as a P wave, and there is one other key difference: They don’t go through fluids. P waves do but they will bend. In fact both will curve when the density of the medium changes (this is another example of refraction).

So we can glean some information about what’s inside the Earth just by looking at how seismometers in different parts of the world react to strong earthquakes. S waves never show up more than 103 degrees away from the epicenter of an earthquake, beyond that, you are in the S wave “shadow”–a shadow cast by a liquid layer deep inside the Earth. P waves have a much complex shadow pattern, as seen below, caused by an abrupt bend in the wave at the core boundary. The core doesn’t stop P waves, but it does bend them sharply.

So we know we have a liquid core outer core. How do we know what it’s made of? It does cause Earth’s magnetic field so we know it’s a metal. Meteorites (which came off other bodies of the solar system) come in many different types but occasionally one will show up that is almost pure metal, and that will be roughly 90 percent iron, ten percent nickel. (In fact the meteor that created the Barringer or “Meteor” crater in Arizona was an iron-nickel type.)

So that’s the beginning of how we know what’s inside there. We get the occasional mantle rock brought up by geologic processes, too.

[It just occurred to me this is another bit of evidence for a globe shaped earth. S wave shadows exist. Plot them on a globe, and compare to the origin of the waves. Then do the same on the flat earth disc. Which of the two patterns is symmetric and simple to explain, and which is just some random-seeming curve-bounded area with no obvious physical explanation? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else bring this up.]

I’m going to leave it there.

“But Steve, you skipped over Earth in your series on the planets, and this is all we get?”

You proceed from a false premise. This isn’t part of the series on the planets and moons and other stuff in our Solar System. That series is over.

This is the first part of a new series, on geology. There will be more, lots more.

American Stories: Thanksgiving Edition – Welcome To The Golden Age

We are living long enough to witness something that does not appear to have been done before. Ever. It is time to give thanks for it.

In the history of the world it is likely that there has never been a dominating empire whose government was a representative republic of private citizens. Governments appear to have always been in authority over the people with the support of the elites and powerful – the ruling class. The people were the subjects of the government. That is not true for Americans per our founding documents. America is the beneficiary of the providence of God through the vision of our forefathers who acted against oppression and sought a better way.

Which is why oppressors have attempted to destroy us internally and externally since conception. This has led to the current awakening of the majority of American citizens after decades of deception and corruption. The first response to this awakening led to the events of November 8, 2016. It was a shot over the bow at the oppressors, traitors and seditionists. The war had begun for the soul of America.

Fast forward.

November 5, 2024

We all know what happened after Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. There is no point in rehashing it or discussing many of the things and people involved behind the scenes and in front of the cameras. There are devils and demons everywhere. Most do not even realize that is who they are. We just seem to forget at times there have been many patriots and heroes working against them. Which has led to positive changes for average citizens even with the DC instigated chaos created against President Trump during the first term.

Over the years a complete disconnect from the desires of the citizens has infected many politicians and their unelected administrative minions. That ends now. Politicians who go with business as usual will be isolated by the executive branch and We the People, then voted out of office or otherwise identified as enemies of the people. Their administrative state cronies are going out the door with them. The reason that will happen over the coming years is because We the People have seen the strings and we cannot unsee them. Citizen journalists have taken over to inform us and transparency reigns. To maintain their credibility these sources of information have to disclose the facts and evidence. They are not dependent on advertisers to cover the massive overheads and compensation of the propagandist talking heads in the fake news industry. As a result they are nimble, close to the people and operate without filters for the most part.

To be sure, MAGA will still need to vet the citizen journalists. Some can be influenced and bought like their fake counterparts. However, We the People know we should do that now and as a result will sort out the posers much more quickly and efficiently. That is a profound change from past practice.

A little alphabet letter birdie hooked many of us and sent us on a journey we will never forget.

WWG1WGA.

We the People have become emboldened by having a popular supposed felon’s back, President-Elect Trump, and staring down the enemy no matter the threats and potential costs. As a result it is time to discuss some major parts of this American reconstruction period we will be seeing now that the bigger war is trending toward a successful, “winning” conclusion.

World Cooperation

Respect oozes out of world leaders for Donald Trump and normal American people. They really don’t want to cross him, they want to make deals and find ways to work together. They know he is a man’s man. Look what is already happening worldwide and the man is still two months away from going back to the White House. They know he is not a politician. He is a pragmatic businessman icon with a true vision of what is best for America, which consequently improves all of their situations if they play their cards right. A rising tide lifts all boats. POTUS-Elect Trump understands win-win and will not go with win-lose unless it is the opponents who are losing and they are enemies of We the People.

Peace is returning. Business expansion and better living conditions are on the way. The world will become more secure, predictable…and happy.

World Economics and Politics

If you move your investments out of the stock market because Trump won you may be certifiably insane. Even his enemies are jumping on for that ride.

Multi-polarity is a real thing. The USMCA and all of his bi-lateral trade agreements with world governments from the first term have already informed you. His acceptance and acknowledgement of BRICS+ is further evidence as is his open acknowledgement and acceptance of a place for crypto. Where you will likely see a slow down in BRICS+ development plans is their move away from the dollar as the basis of the world economy. Vlad and Russia have already indicated their willingness to deal in dollars. President- Elect Trump is going to go after reestablishment of the dollar as the world’s currency with fervor. Investing in America will be cool again.

With multi-polarity we can expect North America to become a more cohesive economic system with greater cooperation from Mehico and Canada. Mehico will act tough and independent at times, but it is all bluster. They know they are toast without us as 25% of their economic production is sold into America. The cartels eventually will be the losers, nothing more than rogue bands of criminals that will be disposed through greater cooperation between agencies and military. Mehico really has no choice. The off the books dark money that funded them through the clowns and other seditionists will be drying up over time with DOGE and Bobby at HHS. Mehico is on notice as are many South and Central America nations who have opened their doors to China’s fentanyl as well as other drug and human trafficking trades.

The NWO and its Barry/Brandon Show overstepped their way into blowing Germany out of being a serious contender for world leadership through their continued support of Islamic immigration (invasion), fascism and Nazis. If Trump pulls back militarily from that country or deemphasizes NATO they will be at bankruptcy. So guess who is going to be buying energy from America and making other concessions? There is no European Union of note without a strong Germany. The Germany and EU that remains will be greatly weakened due to the stupidity and corruption of their leaders, other than the few who have been solidly in Trump’s’ camp for some time like Orban. It should spawn positive change from within the EU over time.

The Muslim Brotherhood is done as are their American promoters, Barry and Cankles, except in their own backyard. No mo money for scum buckets. The Saudis have also strongly assisted with that. Iran is already in retreat mode, cozying up even closer to Vlad, who PDT gets along with well. All of it means stability in world markets. That means there is money to be made for those with investment funds, 401(k)’s and such. With personal income tax rates on a downward trend as a percentage of income, the average working men and women are going to have opportunities to recover from Brandon’s inept criminal appointment as POTUS and improve their financial situations. Say hello to a larger, more well heeled middle class who will become prime, MAGA GOP voters. My advice is to seize on the opportunity.

As far as daily life goes expect lower energy, grocery, and household item prices compared to household incomes. Incomes overall will rise. Employers will be competing hard for sufficient quality staffing with the significant reduction of illegals, stiffer immigration procedures and the element of depop still being felt. That drives up wages and benefits for everybody. There is more money to be made in investments as well as to use with larger purchases with a lowering percentage of cash outflow compared to income, so expect housing and the automotive industry to take off again. We know the drill, we lived it for four years in Trump’s first term. Banks will be lending again because times will be good. That industry will have good profitability and they will lose their fear of bad times as regulators loosen the grips that Brandon’s economic control thugs wielded.

Which makes the propagandist diatribes against efforts to curb illegal immigration even more ridiculous than it is. America is going to need millions more workers in various trades including housing and agriculture. Well vetted worker visas will be a valuable tool to assist. That will make it even easier for our citizen hispanic population to continue their moves toward the GOP. In reality they have far more in common with the MAGA GOP than the Dems.

The difference in big picture this time around is the looming defeat of the old WEF/NWO fraudsters. They are in full retreat worldwide and threats to their existence will accelerate. Many people are hedging their bets, expecting the heavy shoe of these criminals to drop because it has happened before. I call that emotion the Battered Normie Syndrome (BNS). I am and have not been in that camp, I am too contrarian to ever give in to criminals.

In my opinion there may be setbacks, but nothing that MAGA will not overcome. The left has no bench of political candidates except in economically and culturally declining blue crapholes. There is literally nobody who can galvanize existing and create additional support on a national level. The Bob Casey loss in PA was ground shaking for them and reveals cracks in even Gov. Shapiro’s armor, who was their next star. It revealed that a growing majority of the people in the rust belt who were formerly in their camp are over them. These leftists are devoid of solid, potentially productive ideas. They only run against people and stuff using tired fear porn phrases with nothing new to add. Their tired old socialist and communist strategies are falling on more deaf ears now. More people are waking up that have traditionally always pulled a donkey tail. They are realizing as the T-shirts say, “Life is Good”, and rejecting the death advocates. They will find that life is indeed good on the right side of history. MAGA folks blew the criminals off long ago.

Conversely the GOP is deep with MAGA candidates on the federal and state office level with more in development at the local. It is not even close. As a result when the BNS folks start reaping more of the benefits it will be eye opening and stick. Some have already learned to believe nothing the propagandist media tells them. The election this month proved it. Fake polls, politician endorsements (except for Trump) and the views of condescending rich celebrities are not the influence they once were. They heard the pronouncements of the pending Harris/Dem victories and watched as the election results revealed the lies. The blue wall crumbled like a cookie because real people tossed out convention and tradition for practical help and the hope for better. The propagandist TV ratings are tubing, many people are no longer watching them and fewer folks believe what they hear.

Continued pressure on election cheating and using the courts to effect change will increase the margins of victory over time. Who does not know there are still 20+ million fraudulent leftist votes in the federal election system? Watch the totals and percentages gradually dwindle down for the criminals with more judicial screw turning for election security along with the illegals hitting the trails, roads and airways home.

Many such factors lead to my opinion that you bet bullish on America with your personal finances and through living well. Expect America to create a rising tide to lift our international business partners. This is why I posted a few years ago to reduce your debts. You needed to conserve cash for investing. You needed to go conservative in the retirement plan to be in position to be more aggressive with your investment choices today.

We have arrived at our long desired and anticipated destination.

In America there is one fundamental principle of existence in play. It is that our personal views on life itself matter. Desire abundance and life? Choose MAGA GOP. Prefer scarcity and death? Choose Dem/RINO. People’s choices with this principle reflect who they are. Believe them. Our role is to teach others who will listen and consider a better way while making disciples for MAGA. Give no quarter to those who refuse to listen or remain in the Dem/RINO camp politically. Shut them down with truth.

In The Weeds

First, if you are not knowledgeable or want a review of economic indicators, please read the summary link below. It will help.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/020215/top-ten-us-economic-indicators.asp

Now, for the nerds – I ignore the CPI index for understanding inflation. It has been rigged for decades along with many statistics quoted in the lamestream business reports. As government has become more and more politicized (corrupted), so have the statistics. Which is why they always revisit them a few months or years later and restate. These restatements are nearly always negative adjustments from what leftist leaders initially report. Fact.

Instead I focus on the personal consumption expenditures price index (PCE) from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. CPI runs higher than PCE. I focus on PCE because the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) uses it more to make recommendations to the Federal Reserve on inflation pressures, to which the Fed reacts and typically concurs. PCE is not immune to their tinkering, just less so. It gives a better picture of what consumers are actually facing. So if you want to know what to expect and why from the Fed, monitor that index and see how the Fed views it in their communications. Below is a good recent summary from the Cleveland Fed. The index is viewed in the same manner by most Fed banks.

https://www.clevelandfed.org/center-for-inflation-research/consumer-price-data

Now for the fun part, what games will Trump play with Powell and the Fed until he replaces him? We know it will lead to more honest representations of the data and approaches of the Fed, Treasury, Commerce, etc. use. It will all become real again instead of the Kabuki Theater we see now. I will not address what I believe happens to the Federal Reserve System itself long term. I believe it will take a POTUS term beyond our President-Elect for a permanent solution.

😉

Now as to the current view…

One financial analyst’s opinion is below. You will note that he is educated guessing while trying to draw comparisons and utilizing very little understanding or referencing to the absolute meat cleaver Trump is going to take to government spending through DOGE and HHS among other departments in government.

https://www.ft.com/content/49af1a6a-0817-42a1-b9e4-1455fc657ccb

I admire his willingness to guess, albeit dumbly and without the use of tea leaves in my opinion.

To illustrate: Assume your personal family situation is as a working married couple with a large mortgage, car payments and kids in school. You go into work one day and there is a letter for you or the spouse that states one of you is out of a job from a layoff, company closure, whatever. (As a side note, I hope currently unknown large numbers of federally employed administrative azzhats receive said letter in January, but I digress.) Odds are with such a large hit to your family income coming, you will be faced with choices on what expenses to cut; possibly selling a car or house in a worst case. At the same time you find other costs you can reduce or eliminate like Junior’s Ivy League college expenses, and so on. You try to muddle through it the best you can and hope to find a decent job quickly to replace the lost income until better days come.

Now substitute the term “married couple” with “America” from the above. The mortgage and car payments are the national debt service. The kids in school are the social network needs of the citizens. The layoffs and job losses are obvious; thank you China and others via the globalists and other criminals who have no regard for America and the needs of our citizens. This is a result on the imbalance in trade.

I will provide a simple, practical example here for readers who do not know. If we buy more foreign goods than we produce and sell, more dollars are held in foreign hands. The globalists and political idgits claim those dollars return to America in the form of buying our nation’s debt, (Treasuries), real estate, etc. as investments. First off, that is no longer the case. Many nations who formerly invested heavily in our debt have drastically reduced their exposure or have divested due to our exploding deficits from spend crazy politicians. China would be high on that list, the nation we spend more for imported products than any other on earth. Dollars have been going out to them without an equal amount of dollars coming in to keep us in equilibrium. Second, why would anybody think it is a good thing to bring dollars back through the issuance of debt (Treasuries) and selling our land to foreign adversaries? We have to pay interest on all that debt, which compounds the problem. That negatively affects every single American. Yet, the politicians and propagandist media tell all of us daily it is a good thing and we will be fine.

Understand, our government will never borrow its way out of debt despite their continuing best efforts. Don’t get me started on the stupidity of our politicians and administrative state in going all in with Quantitative Easing. It causes my blood pressure to escalate too high.

So if any talking heads act like the deficit of the Balance of Trade is unimportant, turn off your TV or hearing aids. Our national leadership, as do many citizens, violate a principle of life that never changes. Proverbs 22:7 says, “The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower becomes the lender’s slave.” Our nation did this willingly with the rise of globalist influence within our federal government to rebuild nations destroyed by WW II. They saw it as an opportunity to gain huge wealth and power. They used the national treasury and wealth of We the People as their personal piggybanks and still do. Which is why they have tried to ruin and kill the head of the MAGA snake in their minds, President Trump.

He has been the rightful POTUS since 2016 as all MAGA knows. We know what the globalist criminals did and they hate us for it.

With this in mind let’s go back to the married couple example. It gets worse for you and your family. You see and now comprehend that America has more than stubbed its toe by electing the wrong leaders, or worse yet, a bunch of criminals who game the system and take over. You begin to comprehend that with their co-conspirators in the Fed they create even more inflation through printing money to handle globalist desires, proxy wars and scamdemics. You see what is good for them is bad for you and your children.

Your discomfort grows. The propagandists on the evening news tell you that the national debt service and expenses are rising well beyond the nation’s ability to repay by say… 2 TRILLION dollars a year. They say Social Security and Medicare are even threatened. So the Treasury borrows even more funds from foreign mafias with strings attached that clear the way for turmoil and wars worldwide. They tell you the government simply has to pass that stop gap continuing resolution for more money printing or else, GASP!, the federal government will have to shut down except for essential services as there may be a financial apocalypse on the horizon. They begin talking about raising taxes and booting the Trump era tax cuts when they come up for renewal in 2025.

All of this is happening while you as a family simply want to earn enough money to pay the bills, eat healthy and give a future worth living to your kids.

Get the picture now? That was our reality in America until the new sheriff, who is the old sheriff, who is the only righful sheriff; rode back into town. We really were at the edge of the cliff about to fall off as a nation. It is like going from darkness to light. Which is why the Blue Wall fell. Most voters there knew they had no choice, they could not continue to support status quo even if it meant mean tweets again and the propagandists bitching all of the time. They responded in a too big to rig fashion.

The declining establishment and fake news media will continue to beat that same drum even though their masters lost. It will not matter that things are different and better. They are prostitutes and know of no other way to make a living. However, the reality is they lost and they know it. No amount of subterfuge and stalling by RINO’s and such can prevent the inevitable changes that provide a Golden Age for America and its international friends. It is coming down the tracks like a freight train.

President-Elect Trump, JD, Elon, Vivek, Bobby and many others will show you where to invest. Listen to their words and believe their actions. You do not need anybody else to help you do that. Just know that you cannot borrow your way out of debt and cutting expenses will rarely be enough to complete that task as well. Those are actions that a mature to declining nation undertakes, which is who America was before this election. To turn things around America has to return to the growth cycle. President-Elect Trump has already told you how and has already done it before. This time it needs to be institutionalized such that our enemies cannot disrupt it.

Going to growth from decline means selling off non-essential assets, shedding debt, shedding non-essential unproductive payroll, shedding meritless activities, tossing needless regulations, and so on. It takes investment capital (tariffs), an increasing commercial (preferably industrial focused) tax base and global capital investors willing to make new investments (I see you, Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick). It takes innovation and innovative people with outside the box thinking. It takes hard work as well as smart moves in the markets. It takes security agencies to reduce corporate spying and fraud to produce a more level playing field that is administered by law enforcement functions and the judiciary. Most of all it takes a federal government that serves the people and enables its citizens to succeed instead of the reverse, which is unlike what we have experienced in recent years.

A massive paradigm shift for America has occurred. Know it, act on it as applicable in your own lives.

Conclusion

I hope you have heard and seen all of that from the President-Elect and his inner circle. I know I have. I do not concern myself with second guessing his picks for the various cabinet roles. He has his reasons and if the wrong choice is made with any of them We the People will know it quickly and let him know about it. This time around he has a feel for the solid MAGA pulse, the authority to make the decisions and the apparatus to make the changes. No lawfare attempts to undermine him and supporters will succeed, just delay, so be patient. They did not succeed when he was a private citizen, they certainly will not now. The law has also changed in important areas such as with the Chevron Deference overturn. The SCOTUS has a Constitution supporting majority that will likely grow if the MAGA GOP can increase its involvement and Congressional dominance over the coming years.

I also know this approach and method works. We have followed this path for over two decades in Tennessee. We are not perfect, but we are definitely America First worthy. It came from We the People on the local ground level figuring things out, working hard, building alliances and consensus, building momentum that carried into the voting booths and the halls of our legislature and Governor’s office. Over time we gradually rooted the Dem and RINO influence and control out of our system of government. We have sustained via a super majority (75+%) in both House and Senate. We have a state Constitutionally required balanced budget as well as no personal income or estate taxes. The left tried to change them with amendments and were met with crushing defeats by the people because we have a secured election system and the Volunteer spirit in our bones. They no longer try because We the People made them pay for even attempting it – which was our “penalty” phase. Now when federal elections occur we know that at minimum over 60% of the statewide votes will be MAGA GOP. We still have a couple of RINO’s to root out, however, the only pockets of voter resistance are within blue crapholes in a couple of cities.

Our state was in the bottom third of the nation economically before We the People took over. For several years now our state has enjoyed a AAA bond rating from the agencies with a low tax burden on residents while issuing state record business license applications and strong growth in manufacturing. The government has a large rainy day fund and we offer free tuition and no fees to students attending community and technical colleges. These are all signs of a government serving the people as compared to being served.

Other than the long term leftist wacko in Memphis, Steve Cohen, all of our other eight elected officials in the House in DC are GOP to go with all key GOP state leaders. Senators Blackburn and Hagerty continue to perform well and fully support the MAGA movement with POTUS Trump’s endorsement. It should be clear to all of us that We the People simply need to trust the plan and do our parts all around the country as it is being done here and other MAGA states.

I believe in this nation of states, this republic. I believe the majority of Americans will return to a love of the Constitution along with freedom and liberty for all. That’s why I choose to ride with the America First…

Have a blessed Thanksgiving!

2024·11·16 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread (And Neither Did Kamala Harris)

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

This post is scheduled to go “live” at 10:01PM MST on Friday, November 15, 2024. That’s 00:01 EST on Saturday, November 16, 2024 for those of you in that benighted timezone near the Atlantic Ocean.

As of that moment, there are 65 days, 11 hours, and 59 minutes until our rightful President of the United States is restored to office.

Not that I’m counting, mind you.

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.)

Last Week:

Gold $2,684.50
Silver $31.35
Platinum $979.00
Palladium $1,014.00
Rhodium $5,025.00
FRNSI* 128.863-
Gold:Silver 85.630-

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

Gold $2,563.30
Silver $30.30
Platinum $947.00
Palladium $974.00
Rhodium $4,950.00
FRNSI* 123.000-
Gold:Silver 84.597+

There’s no sugar coating it…the precious metals except for platinum are taking a beating. (Platinum was already on sale anyway.) Silver at least didn’t take quite as much of a beating as gold. The FRNSI, when I calculated it, turned out to be 122.9996 which rounds up to 123.000, which is why it looks suspiciously “round” at the moment. (Like the time twenty years or so ago when I bought a bunch of random things, and the total at the cash register, including sales tax, was exactly $100.00. I told the cashier to get the machine checked.)

*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.

Neptune

We now reach the last full planet. But is it the end of the road?

History

Neptune’s discovery was a triumph of Newtonian theory.

Newton in the mid-late 1600s was pondering the forces that make the planets move, as opposed to forces we see on Earth. Apparently he saw an apple fall (it did not bonk him on the noggin), and it occurred to him that the force that made the apple fall might be the same force that makes the Moon orbit the Earth. Newton knew how far away the Moon was, he knew how much it would have to accelerate to remain in its orbit about the Earth. (If there was no acceleration, it would just go in a straight line and eventually disappear from sight from becoming too faint to see.) He also knew how far he and the apple were from the center of the Earth, and already knew how fast the apple accelerated.

He was able to determine that if the acceleration induced by gravity dropped off as the square of the distance, the number for the Moon’s distance actually matched what the Moon was doing.

Twenty years later after a lot of refining and elaboration, well…For the first time we knew that the stuff “up there” follows the same rules as the stuff “down here.” It’s not a special realm, as the ancients believed.

Newton did not discover gravity. Gravity was known to Og the caveman especially after he did a faceplant tripping over something while chasing game, nor was Og the first to notice it. What Newton did do was to show that gravity is universal, it applies everywhere not just here on Earth. And he was able to write equations that described it quite accurately.

Newton, during those 20 years, had gone on to prove that such a force would cause things to orbit other things in ellipses…which matched what we already knew; Johannes Kepler had in the early 1600s proved with meticulously collected data spanning decades and years of his own skull sweat that the orbits of the planets around the Sun (and the Moon around the Earth) were ellipses. Newton also was able to show that Kepler’s other two laws of planetary motion applied. Better, one could apply his laws to the Galilean moons (as well as Titan orbiting Saturn) and show that they, too followed Newtonian mechanics and gravity.

Over the next decades astronomers refined their data on the planets and had more and more accurate data to “plug into” their equations and predicting where planets and the Moon would be became an exact science; instead of being off by five degrees (the width of you three big fingers (not the thumb and not the pinky) held at arms length), we were much less than half a degree.

Then Uranus was discovered in 1781, and that was one more thing to track on top of the other planets, known moons of planets, and so on. (Starting in 1650, we discovered binary stars orbiting each other and could track them too.) Alexis Bouvard published tables of Uranus’s ephemerides (predictions of future predctions) in 1821.

Except there was a problem, one which became apparent over the next few decades (it takes a long time, when the planet has an 84 year orbital period or “year”). Uranus was being an ass…not behaving. It was traveling too fast for a while…then too slow.

Was Newton wrong after all? In spite of his stuff having worked so well for over a century?

Bouvard didn’t think so. He speculated that some unknown body was perturbing Uranus’s orbit, pulling on it and either making it speed up or slow down, depending on where it was in relation to Uranus. In 1843 John Couch Adams began trying to figure out where this unknown body was, and by 1845-6 had generated several predictions; he was continually refining them because his method was iterative. He’d guess, run the numbers, adjust his guess, and repeat. Then repeat again.

But Adams had competition; Urbain Le Verrier was also working on the problem. He came up with similar answers. The Astronomer Royal of England, Sir George Airy, persuaded James Challis to actually look through a telescope and try to find the planet. Challis tried through August and September 1846, and failed. (However he realized much later that he had actually seen it a couple of times in July and August 1845 (a year before his search) and not recognized it for what it was, because he had poor observing techniques and old star charts. D’oh!)

Le Verrier wasn’t going to wait on the Brits to get their act together; he wrote to Johan Gottfried Galle in Berlin, and asked him to look. Galle received the lettter on the 23rd of September, 1846. Heinrich d’Arrest, a student at the observatory, pointed out that they had just made a chart of that part of the sky recently. So all Galle had to do was point his telescope and look for something that wasn’t on the chart. That would be a moving object…a planet. Galle looked that evening with a nine inch refractor telescope (one with lenses at both ends of the tube), and found it almost immediately, less than a degree away from where Le Verrier had said it would be, and twelve degrees away from Adam’s prediction. However…the old chart could just be missing the object by mistake. Galle looked at the object over the next few days and satisfied himself that it wasn’t a mistake. It was indeed a moving object.

Another planet had been found!

Newton in trouble? No way! This was actually a triumph for Newtonian mechanics because it had been used to find a planet!

(As a footnote…Galileo saw Neptune, diagrammed its position in his notes, not once but twice when it was near Jupiter on 28 December 1612 and 27 January 1613 [both dates New Style] but didn’t realize it was a moving object. So, although interesting, it isn’t enough to give him credit for the discovery. However, “In 2009, a study suggested that Galileo was at least aware that the “star” he had observed had moved relative to fixed stars.” [From Wikipedia])

Voyager 2, 25 August 1989

This is a collection of official NASA animations depicting the sole spacecraft encounter (so far) with Neptune. These videos were made before the encounter, so Neptune’s and Triton’s appearances are just guesses. They also show the rings as arcs, because that’s what they thought back then (it turns out that they’re full rings, with some thicker sections we mistook for partial arcs).

Basic Info

For a while, it was simply called “the planet exterior to Uranus” or “Le Verrier’s Planet”. Galle suggested calling it Janus, which fortunately didn’t happen or it would be confused with the Hugh Janus of the solar system. Le Verrier said, since he had discovered it, he should be able to name it and he suggested “Neptune.” And that’s the name that ultimately “stuck.” The planet had a bluish tinge and Neptune was the Roman god of the sea (corresponding to the Greek Poseidon).

Neptune orbits the Sun in 164.8 years, almost twice as long as Uranus (84.02 years). Its average distance from the sun is 30.07 AUs (30.07 times as much as Earth’s average disance). That puts it at 4.5 billion kilometers from the Sun. That means that radio signals to and from Voyager 2 took over four hours each way!

Here it is in true color, with the Earth photoshopped in for comparison.

It’s roughly the same size as Uranus…just a bit smaller, but it is considerably denser than Uranus and notably more massive (Uranus is 14.536 times the mass of the Earth, Neptune is 17.147 times.)

Neptune rotates in 16 hours, 6 minutes; that’s its day. Its axis is tilted 28.2 degrees, a bit more than Earth’s but not ridiculous like with Uranus or Venus. The temperature is 55-72 Kelvins (-218 to -201 C) depending on how deep into the atmosphere you measure it. The latter number is measured where the atmospheric pressure is the same as Earth’s at sea level. The atmosphere consists of 80 percent hydrogen, 19 percent helium and 1.5 percent methane by volume, with traces of ethane, ammonia, water ice, and ammonium hydrosulfide. The methane gives Neptune its bluish tinge.

Innards

Deeper down the methane, ammonia and water ices become more prevalent, earning Neptune its place among the ice giants. One thing I just spotted is the speculation that at a depth of 7000km, methane might decompose with the carbon forming diamond crystals that rain downwards like hailstones; this would be true on Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus as well.

Whoops, spoiler…Rings.

You’re probably used to seeing this picture of Neptune:

But if you scroll back to the earlier picture, it’s the same picture of Neptune, just rendered in different colors. This one exaggerated the colors for contrast, and in it you can see the “Great Dark Spot” which means I can now segue to discussing the weather.

Weather

The “Great Dark Spot” is similar to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. It’s 13,000km x 6,600 km or so…which means that measured the long way it’s slightly broader than Earth! However, it wasn’t nearly as permanent as the Red Spot. By the time Hubble looked at Neptune eight years later in 1994, it was gone. But a new dark spot had appeared in Neptune’s northern hemisphere.

The white smudge is called “Scooter” because it moved more rapidly than the Great Dark Spot

Neptune has the most extreme winds in the solar system…at least, as far as we can tell. The prevailing winds on the equator are 400 m/s, dropping to a “mere” 250 m/s at the poles. In the storms the velocity can reach 600 m/s. That’s roughly 2,200 kph or 1,300 mph, well over the speed of sound. This is a stark contrast to Uranus, which had no obvious storms when Voyager 2 flew by. The concentration of methane, ethane, and acetylene at the equator is 100 times that at the poles, so it seems that at the equator the atmosphere is upwelling, bringing that stuff from down deeper where it is more common. It subsides near the poles.

Neptune, like Uranus, has a multi pole magnetic field, indicating its dynamo is probably in a relatively thin layer of the planet–much as is thought with Uranus.

Rings

Neptune has rings, but not very substantial ones. In this case it’s likely to be tiny ice particles coated with carbon-based material. And here, we came up with cool names: the most important rings are named Adams, Le Verrier, and Galle. The best way to view them is in infrared..and well guess what we just put up there that sees really, really well in infrared?

None other than the James Webb Space Telescope, of course!

Before the Voyager 2 encounter, we thought the rings were partial arcs rather than full circles; we eventually figured out those arcs were actually thicker parts of full rings.

And what a nice segue into the moons, since we can see some of them here.

Moons

You might expect the same progression of small, inner moons, nice and regular in circular orbits, then major moons (either large and planetary sized, or medium or medium-small but still round, or a mix), also in nice tidy regular orbits, then irregular satellites, that we saw with Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. Surely with a pattern like this three times running, we can expect more of the same here?

You might expect it, but that ain’t what you’re gonna get!

Neptune has 16 known moons, with a naming theme of water deities and one water critter out of Greek mythology.

First we have seven small regular satellites…in other words, inner moons. Some of them orbit among Neptune’s rings, as seen in the JWST photo above. Five of them were discovered by Voyager 2 in 1989, and of course the best photos we have of any of them are from that spacecraft, the only one ever to visit Neptune. Larissa was actually discovered in 1981, while Hippocamp was first spotted in 2013.

The largest of these is Proteus, with a diameter of 420 km. That puts it in the same size range as Mimas and Miranda, those smallest round moons, but it’s not round! It’s more like Hyperion in that regard, but unlike Hyperion, it’s not a gigantic sponge.

A craptastic picture like this is the best we can do when only Voyager 2 ever got close to it.
Proteus, 420 km or so in diameter, orbiting at 117,646 km in 1.12 (Earth) days.

It is remarkable Proteus was discovered well after Larissa (which is much smaller) and Nereid, which is also smaller and has been known for decades–we’ll get to that.

So far so good, right? Inner moons.

Next should be large, planetary-sized moons and/or medium moons, all nice and regular.

Well, we do get a large moon. But it’s not regular. Not even close!

Triton is 2,705 km (give or take about 5 km) orbiting at 352,759 km in 5.87 days. It’s in a nice circular equatorial orbit…but it’s not in Neptune’s equatorial plane; it’s inclined at 23 degrees. Well, no, actually, it’s inclined at 157 degrees. Yes, it’s retrograde.

Triton’s orbit in red, compared to a “normal” moon’s orbit in green. Note the opposite directions of motion.

What the Biden is going on here? We’ll come back to that. And we’ll hit Triton in more detail shortly. Meanwhile, I’ll point out that it was discovered weeks after Neptune itself, by the English astronomer William Lassell.

A black and white picture of Triton–it’s actually a mosaic pieced together from smaller pictures.
Triton looks a lot like a cantaloupe in places.

Next out is Nereid, discovered in 1949 by Gerard Peter Kuiper (you may recall I warned you that you’d be seeing his name again! And I wasn’t thinking about this when I said so). Nereid is 357 km across (give or take 13 km), and another non-round, but medium small moon. And now we see the suckage we have to deal with when only one spacecraft has ever spent any time at all near Neptune, and that only a few hours. Here is our absolute best picture of Nereid (out of 83 that Voyager took):

Nereid is another one of those “medium small” moons that didn’t quite become rounded. It got discovered before Proteus (which is larger) because it has a high albedo, reflecting most of the light that hit it.

And Nereid’s orbit is wacky. Its average distance from Neptune is 5,513,900 km–a huge jump up from Triton (it takes 360 days to orbit Neptune). But it’s at a relatively sane inclination of 5 degrees…very small for an irregular moon. But here’s the big surprise: the eccentricity is a whopping 0.75! That’s extremely elliptical. Its closest approach to Neptune is 1,381,500 km and its furthest distance is 9,626,500 km.

Next out is Halimede, about 62 km across, at 16,590,500 km, orbiting in 1879 days (almost five years), it’s retrograde and has an eccentricity of 0.521. It looks like it’s made out of the same stuff as Nereid, and there’s a 41 percent chance that at sometime in the past, it actually collided with Nereid. Or rather, that it broke off of Nereid (when you “run that tape backwards” that looks like a collision).

There are then two groups of three, the Sao group (inclined 36-50 degrees) and the Neso group (inclined 127-135 degrees), all of them 25-60km in diameter.

Halimede on out are clearly outer, irregular moons so here at least the usual pattern fits.

OK, we’ve got some crazy stuff going on here.

Triton

There are seven “large” or “planetary sized” moons in our Solar System (the Moon, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan and Triton) and Triton is the smallest of them. It’s the only moon in the Solar System with a diameter in the 2,000-3,000 km range. Even so, it’s larger than all of the smaller moons in the Solar System, put together.

Before Voyager 2 flew by, we knew very little about Triton; Kuiper tried to measure its diameter in 1954 (well over a century after its discovery) and got 3,800 km. Others got values anywhere from 2500 to 6000km; that last is almost half the diameter of Earth and would have made Triton the largest moon in the solar system, beating out even Ganymede. The answer turned out to be 2706 km as measured by Voyager 2 on August 25, 1989.

Triton has a density of about 2 grams per cubic centimeter, which indicates that unlike many moons of the outer solar system, it’s more rock than ice. Its surface temperature is 38 K (-235C), slightly colder than Hitlary Klinton’s lap.

In the 1990s an atmosphere was detected (by watching stars fade as Triton passed in front of them). This is a very thin atmosphere, 0.02 millibar at most (Earth’s atmosphere is close to 1013 millibars). Nonetheless, clouds were photographed by Voyager (look at the horizon)

And also in this picture, a “parting shot” at Triton from the opposite side from the Sun (backlit pictures like this one can be very useful when studying atmospheres):

Triton also has geysers, this time of nitrogen. Triton is cold enough to have nitrogen ice on it (and remember that liquid nitrogen is stereotypically very cold stuff), but below the surface it’s warmer and you can have nitrogen geysers. The black smudges are thought to be downwind of them.

And finally we have this picture of the south polar ice cap (yes, “upside down” with south at the top):

Away from the cap we see more cantaloupe terrain. This feature is unique to Triton, so far as we know, and consists mostly of dirty water ice. They might be caused by lumps of less-dense material slowly rising to the surface, or perhaps flooding from cryovulcanism.

What’s with the red color? We’ve seen this a lot and it’s time I discussed it a bit. All of these outer moons have some amount of hydrocarbons on them (especially Titan), things like methane, ethane, and so forth. There’s zero protection from ultraviolet light on any of these moons (except maybe Titan), so the UV acts on the hydrocarbons and any sulfur that’s around and produces tholins, which are pretty much random goo formed of polymers. The term tholin was coined by Carl Sagan, who wrote:

For the past decade we have been producing in our laboratory a variety of complex organic solids from mixtures of the cosmically abundant gases CH4, C2H6, NH3, H2O, HCHO, and H2S [methane, ethane, ammonia, water, formaldehyde and hydrogen sulfide, respectively–SteveInCO]. The product, synthesized by ultraviolet (UV) light or spark discharge, is a brown, sometimes sticky, residue, which has been called, because of its resistance to conventional analytical chemistry, “intractable polymer”. […] We propose, as a model-free descriptive term, ‘tholins’ (Greek Θολός, muddy; but also Θόλος, vault or dome), although we were tempted by the phrase ‘star-tar’.[3][1]

We’ve only seen 40 percent of Triton, because that’s what Voyager photographed as it sped by. The other side might very well be a gigantic billboard reading “For a Good Time Call…” with Kamala Harris’s phone number, for all we know.

Here’s a geological map of Triton, based on what we have seen.

Triton orbits closer to Neptune than the Moon does to Earth, yet it is highly inclined and retrograde. Its orbit is nearly circular, and it has become tidally locked to Neptune (as would be expected).

Earth’s moon is slowly receding from Earth at a few centimeters per year. Triton is getting closer. In fact, in about three and a half billion years, it will probably get close enough to Neptune that tidal forces will pull it apart and we’ll have an absolutely killer set of rings to admire. (Book your travel plans now!)

But why is it getting closer to Neptune, when our Moon is getting further from Earth? Let’s look at why our Moon is getting further from Earth. It’s both raising and pulling at our tidal bulges, and our tidal bulges are pulling on the moon. The bulges precede the moon (because the rotation of the Earth shoves them ahead of where they “should” be directly under the Moon), which means the moon is pulling back on them and slowing the rotation of the Earth (which is why we keep having to add leap seconds). Conversely the bulges pull the Moon forward and cause it to speed up in its orbit. Speeding up raises the orbit. The Moon slowly recedes.

The same thing happens with Neptune and Triton…except that now the tidal bulges try to pull Triton “forward” in its orbit…but Triton is moving backward in its orbit, so pulling it forward actually cancels part of the backwards motion and slows Triton down. So, slowly but surely Triton’s orbit gets smaller and smaller.

OK So What Happened That Left This Trainwreck?

Neptune’s moon system is radically different from the others. There’s simply no way Triton could have formed where it did.

Astronomers are fairly certain that Triton is actually a captured object. And when it was captured, it wreaked havoc with the rest of Neptune’s moon system. Nereid, for instance is either also a captured object, or got put into its oddball orbit by Triton during the capture–if so it’s probably the only original Neptunian regular moon that survived, though it’s not regular any more. Any other moon that Neptune had at the time is long gone.

Adding to the pile of evidence for Triton being captured: it turns out to have a very similar chemical composition to Pluto, suggesting that they formed near each other.

Another Visit?

Will we ever visit Neptune again? Obviously the next step is an orbiter. Multiple concepts, both orbiters and more flybys, have been proposed and rejected. There’s some thought of doing things under the New Frontiers program, perhaps orbiters that would spend a lot of time on Triton, but these would be launching in 2031 or 2041 and arriving in 2047 and 2056 (note the fifteen or sixteen year travel times!). I’ll be a geezer by 2056; older than my parents lived. Failing that, the Chinese might put something at Neptune by 2058. So it looks like, not in my lifetime.

Neptune, the Mystic

Gustav Holst (1874-1934) composed an orchestral suite called The Planets in 1914-1917, with movements for Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. (It’s one of the few “classical” works from the 20th century that I like.) Although he tried to evoke the mythological figures the planets are named after, I find the Neptune movement evocative of the vast distance that Neptune is, and its extreme isolation.

The slow fading out makes one think of journeying off into the stupendous void that is beyond Neptune.

The sun is 30 times further away from Neptune than it is from Earth. It’s half a degree across as seen from earth (30 minutes of arc), which means it’s one minute of arc across at Neptune. It looks the size of a quarter at 100 yards. No wonder it gives such little warmth, 1/900th of what it gives to us. And also the same tiny fraction of light. Cold and Dark, and it’s hard to imagine it getting colder and darker. Surely we are at the corner of “no” and “where.”

And yet, though we are out of planets, we are not done.

2024·10·12 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

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.)

Last Week:

Gold $2,654.30
Silver $32.26
Platinum $999.00
Palladium $1,038.00
Rhodium $5,025.00
FRNSI* 127.402-
Gold:Silver 82.278+

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

Gold $2,657.70
Silver $31.60
Platinum $995.00
Palladium $1,088.00
Rhodium $5,075.00
FRNSI* 127.566+
Gold:Silver 84.104+

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!

2024·09·07 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

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.)

Last Week:

Gold $2,504.30
Silver $28.92
Platinum $936.00
Palladium $993.00
Rhodium $4,975.00
FRNSI* 120.146-

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

Gold $2,498.20
Silver $28.04
Platinum $931.00
Palladium $933.00
Rhodium $5,050.00
FRNSI* 119.850+
Gold:Silver 89.094+

Gold dipped below 2500 on Wednesday but bounced back on Thursday, only to get beaten down again on Friday. For now it seems to be sticking to a relatively narrow trading range, straddling the $2500 mark.

Silver is getting beaten up much worse.

*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.

BTW (possibly of benefit to Barb Meier) the plus or minus sign at the end of the FRNSI and Gold:Silver is simply to indicate whether the number is actually slightly above or below what I wrote and that I rounded down or up, respectively. In this case 119.850+ means a bit above 119.850, so I had to round down. A bit more and I would have rounded up to 119.851 and written 119.851-.

A PS. Last week I gave the value of 71/387ths out to about a gazillion decimal places, but it turns out my suspicions were correct: they were garbage after a while. I ginned up a spreadsheet to do long division for as long as one likes, and 71/387ths repeats after 21 decimal places and is: 0.183 462 532 299 741 602 067 (then 183 462, etc). So what? Well take a look at the 2067 at the end. As in $20.67.

The Sun

Resuming our survey of our solar system, we take up the Sun.

It is tempting to call the Sun the 800 pound gorilla of the solar system…but this would be a bad idea because it understates the matter. Jupiter is more massive than the other planets put together, so it is the 800 lb gorilla of the solar system.

The sun is 1,048 times as massive as Jupiter, which makes it the 400 ton brachiosaurus of the solar system. (And in case you’re wondering, the Sun is 332,950 times the mass of the Earth.)

It’s also very different from every other thing in the solar system; it’s a ball of hot, ionized gas and is generating 383 septillion watts (that’s 24 zeros) of power, or that many joules per second. And it has been doing so for 4.6 billion years and will continue to do so for another 4-5 billion years at least. No other body in the solar system does that–the rest shine in our night sky because they reflect the light from the Sun.

It shines like that because its surface is at a temperature of 5,772 K…though it is much, much hotter at the center, 15.7 million K.

Or, to put it in five words, “the Sun is a star.” A star a bit above the median, but about average. It’s brighter than 85% of all stars in this galaxy (many of the ones that beat it really break the curve though), and compared to other nearby stars it’s more massive than 95% of them.

Unlike other stars that are trillions or even quadrillions of kilometers away, the Sun averages 149,597,870.7 kilometers from the Earth.

How do we know that? We bounce radar off of it. But before that…well, that’s a fascinating story having to do with transits of Venus across the face of the Sun as seen from Earth. I’ve told this story before here (yes it’s about Venus transits but tells the whole story): https://letreasonreign.wordpress.com/2012/05/13/venus-transit-6-june-2012/ but here’s a different take:

The power source is hydrogen fusion, generally through a process called the proton-proton chain. Other stars, either more massive or later-in-life than the Sun, have other power sources (all discussed here in part 22 of the big physics series: https://www.theqtree.com/2021/10/23/2021%c2%b710%c2%b723-joe-biden-didnt-win-daily-thread/).

As I mentioned before, the Sun is made of ionized gas. It’s 73.5% hydrogen, 24.8 percent helium…and remaining 1+% is basically everything else (mostly oxygen, a lot of carbon, iron, neon… This is pretty close to the composition of interstellar gas in nebulas, which is, after all, what collapsed to form the Sun in the first place.

Since the Sun is a ball of gas, it has no solid surface. But it has a diameter, given as 1,390,000 km (versus Earth’s 12,756 or so km). What’s that the diameter of, if there’s no solid surface?

What we see when we look at the Sun is a glowing sphere; below that “surface” we cannot see because ionized gas is not transparent. We call that surface the photosphere, from the Greek for light and sphere…in other words, “ball of light.”

It’s not a good idea to look at the Sun, it’s an even worse idea to look at it through a telescope. But you can cut the light down by 999,999/1,000,000ths and take some decent photographs. (However, you’ll see my photographs here instead.)

You might be wondering why I used a black and white photograph. It’s not a black and white photograph; it turns out the Sun isn’t yellow, it’s white.

If you look closely, you’ll see some dark spots; these are sunspots and we’ll get to them. For now, I’d like you to notice something else, a subtle darkening near the edges of the disc. This is known as limb darkening, and it doesn’t mean what you might think it means.

If you were looking at a ping pong ball or something similarly white, you’d see darkening near the edges; it’s that kind of shading that conveys to your eyes and brain that the ping pong ball is a sphere.

But that’s not what’s going on here; the Sun doesn’t reflect light, it generates it. Every point on the surface radiates light and heat in every direction (including back into the Sun where it is absorbed and radiated again). So a point near the edge of the disc should be sending us just as much light as a point near the center of the disc, instead it looks dimmer. It turns out this is a consequence of the light we see being emitted from anywhere within a depth of a few hundred miles below the “surface”, with the upper layers cooler than the lower ones. More discussion here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limb_darkening

If you could somehow stand on the “surface” of the Sun without being instantly vaporized, you’d weigh 27.9 times what you do on Earth. The escape velocity for a rocket would be 617.7 km/sec (versus 11.2 km/sec for Earth). I doubt a rocket could be built that would do that…it’s actually over 0.2 percent the speed of light.

We actually have a solar orbiter probe…which if you think about it, Earth itself could be thought of as such a thing. But no I mean an actual spacecraft, the Parker Solar probe, launched in 2018. It is in orbit and gets as close as 4.3 million kilometers (compare to the 150 million kilometers we average on “Spaceship Earth”). It moves as fast as 690,000 km/hr or 191 km/sec, which is 0.064% the speed of light…by far the fastest thing we’ve ever built. Its main task is to study the solar corona. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The Sun, like the Earth, is a sphere, and, like the Earth consists of concentric layers. The Sun’s core, the inner 25% by distance, is where the nuclear fusion happens. Surrounding that is the radiative zone, about twice as thick. The energy generated in the core works its way though this zone by radiation…gamma rays from the fusion eventually weakening to something that won’t kill us. It can take ten thousand years for the radiation to get through, because it bounces from nucleus to nucleus in a random walk, so the light you see now is the result of fusion that happened as we were emerging from the last ice age.

Both the core and the radiative zone rotate uniformly, but the next zone, the convective zone, does not; the parts of it near the equator rotate in less time than the areas below the poles. The primary mode of heat transfer in this layer is convection; hot material rises, carrying the heat to the surface; after cooling it sinks down again to get reheated. The boundary between the two is called the tachocline, here is were the layers actually slide past each other because of the differences in rotation rate. It’s thought that this layer creates the Sun’s magnetic field.

Above that layer is the photosphere, which is cool enough and transparent enough that the photons that make their way to it finally, are free to go…and one in a billion end up hitting Earth eight and a half minutes later–and turn night into day.

Above the photosphere is the chromosphere, which is visible briefly as a reddish flash at the very start and end of totality during a solar eclipse.

Above this is a transition region where helium becomes ionized (visible in ultraviolet light, from space), and then, finally the corona.

The corona–and for that matter everything else outside of the photosphere–is effectively invisible to us here on Earth…except during a total solar eclipse.

As seen here, in this photograph I took during the last eclipse:

If you look closely at this picture you will see pink “flames” around the disk of the Moon. They should look vermillion; alas they’re blown out in this picture. These are prominences, and are caused by the interaction of ionized (charged) gas with the Sun’s magnetic field.

The prominences are a lot more prominent (ahem) in this picture, near the bottom of the disk, and there’s also a beauty of an arch at 3 o’clock.

Prominences can be seen by telescopes with the proper filters to blot out all but the hydrogen alpha wavelength of light. Here’s a closeup taken by a competent photographer, with the correct colors:

Besides pumping out visible light and heat copiously and relentlessly for billions of years (even more persistent than the IRS), the Sun creates gigantic numbers of neutrinos from fusion. Neutrinos rarely interact with anything; the neutrinos generated in the Sun’s core leave the Sun seconds later, moving at the speed of light through everything without being affected, like Democrats and the criminal justice system. Even at this distance from the Sun, every square centimeter that’s face-on to the Sun has ten billion neutrinos pass through it every second (less of course if the surface is at an oblique angle to the sunlight).

By the way, it means this many neutrinos pass through every square centimeter of you every second. And don’t think it doesn’t happen at night…they go right on through the Earth as if it’s not there, and come up at you from the ground. The good news is if they go right through you, they do nothing at all to you. It’s when you stop one–very rare but it does happen–that you’ve actually taken a hit. This will happen to one person out of four during a normal lifetime. (At ten billion per second per square centimeter, and one chance in four of getting a hit with the rest passing through harmlessly…you can see this is a rare event.) A single hit from radiation is nothing, though; you get vastly more from other sources. (Like potassium as in bananas.)

Far more important to us is the Sun’s magnetic field. As I’ve said the Sun is largely ionized gas…which is to say it’s full of stuff with electrical charges. This stuff moves (the Sun rotates, on average once every 28 days or so), and moving electrical charges generate magnetic fields.

The Sun’s magnetic field has a role in everything from sunspots to prominences to full-on coronal mass ejections; that’s where the Sun belches and flings a bunch of plasma out into space. If one of these hits Earth, it can muck with satellites and the power grid, conceivably even causing massive blackouts. The worst of these was the Carrington event of 1859. We just barely had a grid then, of telegraph lines. Nonetheless some telegraph stations caught fire. It was possible to send messages without supplying any power to the system. The chances of another like it within the next decade (which would be catastrophic) are rated at well under 1 percent.

The magnetic field of the Sun goes through cycles, gradually increasing over the span of roughly 11 years, then flipping polarity, decreasing, and then repeating the process with the magnetic field in the opposite direction. Sunspots, prominences and CMEs all increase (or decrease) in frequency as the magnetic field increases (or decreases).

But even when the Sun is calm, there is a constant stream of charged particles from the corona, outward in all directions; this is the solar wind and it would have long since stripped our atmosphere away were it not for the fact that Earth’s magnetic field deflects almost all of it. In fact this is why Mars has almost no atmosphere: It has no magnetic field.

Many ancient cultures worshiped the Sun. They realized that without it there’d be no life. We know more about the Sun, but if anything that just makes it even more impressive than we had realized. But we don’t think it is a god any more. We just call it the 400 ton brachiosaurus of the Solar System.

Already late…I don’t feel like this ready, but as Klingons would say, today is a good day to die. Hit Publish.

2024·08·03 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

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!

Booting a RINO

I’ve spent the last couple of years pounding home the message that RINO McDaniels was a symptom of a problem…a party shot through with RINO officials. In this instance it was the hundred or so members of the RNC who gleefully voted for her again, and again, and again.

Well I got to help take one of those hundred people down, as told here: https://www.theqtree.com/2024/04/07/i-aim-to-raise-a-ruckus/. What’s even better is that oxygen thief was apparently boiling mad at how poorly she did in the vote (according to a MAGA candidate for a county office I spoke to on Tuesday night). Apparently she felt entitled to her office no matter what the rubes thing…and that attitude turns people into RINOs.

Judging from the number of comments received few noticed or cared about the post, but nonetheless I noticed a pattern: Hardly anyone who regularly puts forth “devolution” or “this is all a movie” theories (or any other variant of the idea that Trump and/or his allies are really in charge) seemed to care about it. I described successful action against the enemy and they didn’t care.

I submit that that is the desired effect of such ideas as devolution…to get people on our side not to care, not to participate, not to fight, because they believe someone else will do it for them. “Nothing can stop what is coming?” Great! I don’t have to lift a finger, just be ready to microwave some popcorn!

If any of you really are thinking like this, you might as well be controlled opposition. You’re doing exactly what the other side wants you to do, sitting on your hands waiting for deliverance by deus ex machina.

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.)

Last Week:

Gold $2,387.10
Silver $28.00
Platinum $948.00
Palladium $926.00
Rhodium $4,925.00

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

Gold $2,444.10
Silver $28.66
Platinum $966.00
Palladium $916.00
Rhodium $4,925.00

Friday morning gold was well into the 2460s which as far as I know was a record. Silver has basically gone back to sucking more than it should.

The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) stands at 117.244-. (This index is the ratio between the price of gold today, versus the value of the dollar defined as dollars per ounce when we had the gold standard, minus 1 (so that an index of 0 means the dollar is at its original value and doesn’t suck at all). I use that clumsy phrasing because the dollar was defined as a certain amount of gold, such that an ounce of gold was $20.67. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.)

In light of the above, let me add the following. From 1837 through 1933, 25.8 grains of .900 fine gold was a dollar (by definition of the dollar). Thus a one dollar gold coin should have weighed that much (and a 20 dollar coin would weigh 516 grains). This works out to 23 2/9ths grains of pure gold, the rest being “crud.” (And a 20 dollar coin had 464 4/9ths grains of pure gold in it, similarly the rest being “crud”). “Crud” of course is my highly technical term for the stuff they add to the alloy, however it could be as much as five percentage points silver before 1873 (and one percentage point after) with the rest being copper. Not truly crud, it’s not as if it was zinc or something. Who would make coins out of zinc?