“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
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.)
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.
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.
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?
In the comments on that article is this link from 2014,Philosophy of Metricswhich 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.
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 Hudesstudied law at Yale Law Schoolandeconomics at the University of Amsterdam .
She worked in theUS Export Import Bankof the US from 1980-1985 and in theLegal Department of the World Bankfrom 1986-2007. SheestablishedtheNon Governmental Organization Committee of the International Law Section of the American Bar Associationandthe Committee on Multilateralism and the Accountability of International Organizations of the American Branch of the International Law Association.
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
“…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.
“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.
“….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….
(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.
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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.
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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
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.
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:
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:
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?….
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 replacedby 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…
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:
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.
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:
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.)
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.
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
January 6 Tapes Reminder
After the first release, we were supposed to get more, every week.
As far as I know it hasn’t happened.
Speaker Johnson, please follow through!
A Caution
Just remember…we might replace the RINO candidates. (Or we might not. The record is mixed even though there is more MAGA than there used to be.) But that will make no difference in the long run if the party officials, basically the Rhonna McDaniels (or however that’s spelled–I suspect it’s RINO), don’t get replaced.
State party chairs, vice chairs, secretaries and so on, and the same at county levels, have huge influence on who ultimately gets nominated, and if these party wheelhorses are RINOs, they will work tirelessly to put their own pukey people on the ballot. In fact I’d not be surprised if some of our “MAGA” candidates are in fact, RINO plants, encouraged to run by the RINO party leadership when they realized that Lyn Cheney (and her ilk) were hopelessly compromised as effective candidates. The best way for them to deal with the opposition, of course, is to run it themselves.
Running good candidates is only HALF of the battle!
Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit
…we can move on to the next one.
Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.
Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.
Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!
It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.
In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.
Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.
Justice Must Be Done.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Spot Prices
All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend). (Note: most media quotes are for the bid…the price paid by the market makers, not the ask, which is what they will sell at. I figure the ask is more relevant to people like us who wish we could afford to buy these things. In the case of gold the difference is usually about a dollar, for the PGMs the spread is much wider.)
Gold see-sawed, getting closer to 2700, almost dipping below 2600 on Wednesday and Thursday but recovered nicely on Friday, even to the point of closing up for the week, barely. Silver, however, has definitely slipped, and you would need almost two more ounces of silver this week to buy an ounce of gold, than last week. Platinum a bit down, palladium might be starting another run.
*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.
Moon Roundup
Before 1610, there was one Moon, and it wasn’t a class of objects. Actually at one time the Moon and Sun (!) were lumped in with Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn as planets. They were, after all, all objects that moved with respect to the background stars (that includes the Sun but it takes a little bit of extra work to show this since it’s rather difficult to see the stars and Sun at the same time). And planet derives from a Greek word for wanderer.
Note by the way that Earth was not considered a planet. Planets were things up there in the sky, not down here, and certainly not as “down here” as you can get, the dirt beneath your feet.
This was back in the old “Earth is the center of everything” days, but late in the 1500s some people started suggesting that perhaps it was the Sun at the center. (This was actually a revival of an ancient Greek idea.) Now this is difficult to settle with naked eye observations, but a telescope will show you that not everything goes around the Earth. Venus and Mercury exhibit phases that show they orbit the Sun. And Jupiter, of course, has those Galilean moons.
Galileo actually considered them planets at first, because, after all, they moved against the background stars, just like Jupiter did. He didn’t realize we needed a new category of thing, with the Moon being the first known member. And it took a while; for a couple of centuries the larger moons of the outer planets were called “satellite planets” instead of “moons” or just plain “satellites.”
So if you think Pluto being demoted from planet status was a kerfuffle, imagine what was going on then, when they still couldn’t figure out which buckets even existed that they could put things into (figuratively speaking of course).
Eventually anything that orbited the Sun was a planet, including Earth, and anything that orbited a planet was a satellite or moon, including “the” Moon. We know of no cases of a moon itself having a natural satellite of any significant size.
And yes, “satellite” used to be synonymous with “moon,” but then we started putting things in orbit, and we started talking about natural and artificial satellites. Some people still do so, but most people use “moon” (with a lower case M) for the natural case and just plain “satellite” for the artificial case.
[And yes, we’ve no idea how to classify Stacy Abram’s hindquarters. It’s a moon…sort of…and is of similar size to the major moons, but it’s not a heavenly body by any stretch of the imagination.]
Since those days, of course, we’ve found objects out there of all kinds of different sizes orbiting both planets and the Sun, so we had to sit down and reassess definitions again and Pluto got the boot from the “planet” clique. (And, IMHO, rightly so; the other alternative would have been to promote about half a dozen Kuiper belt objects.) There’s no minimum size, as yet, for moons, so technically any planet with a ring has countless moons: all the constituent rocks that make up the ring.
Anyhow, we’re not even halfway through the moons that are in our solar system. But I thought I’d do a quick roundup, to set up the Big Picture. Let’s start out with a picture from Wikipedia showing planets and large (or famous) moons, all to scale by size. Notably, Mercury and Mars look roughly the size of some of the bigger moons, and Pluto is outclassed by at least seven moons.
Let’s consider them in order of size. If you ignore the planets and Pluto, there seem to be seven “big ones,” and a bunch of medium sized ones.
The big ones are The Moon, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto (all orbiting Jupiter), Titan (Saturn), and Triton (Neptune). They are all 2500 km across or larger. There seems to be a big gap between Triton and any of the moons smaller than it, and when you look at masses, that is confirmed. Triton, the smallest of these seven, is more massive than all of the other moons put together. So you could actually make a list with eight entries, the eighth being “everything else that’s a moon, put together” and that would be the last item on the list.
That makes it seem like a nice, natural dividing line between “large” and “medium.”
The large moons verge on being planet sized, with Ganymede more voluminous than Mercury (though made of much lighter stuff). So much so that at least some astronomers call these seven the “satellite planets.” (I.e., things that would be planets, if only they weren’t orbiting a planet!) [As an aside I suspect we’ll be looking, again, at reclassifying things soon. And I would not be entirely unsympathetic.]
Now just eyeballing that diagram again, there are nine moons in the “medium” bracket (with S for Saturn, U for Uranus, and P for Pluto): Titania (U), Oberon (U), Rhea (S), Iapetus (S), Charon (P), Ariel (U), Umbriel (U), Dione (S), and Tethys (S). And again, it turns out that Tethys, the smallest of the nine, is bigger than all of the remaining “small” moons, put together. So, another natural dividing line, between medium and small. These medium moons are all 1000-2500 kilometers in diameter.
Up to here, moons seem to be named after mythical figures, however for some reason the moons of Uranus got named after Shakespearean characters.
So that’s sixteen medium and large size moons. Everything else is “small.”
But there’s another criterion we could use…and that’s “hydrostatic equilibrium” which when you dumb it down means “is it spherical”?
If you don’t dumb it down, there are nuances. For instance, if a moon is orbiting fairly close to a planet when it’s still largely molten, it’s going to take on an oblate shape, first because it’s rotating once per orbit, and second because the planet’s going to tend to make it egg shaped (tidal forces). If it then solidifies and its orbit gets larger, it’s technically not quite in hydrostatic equilibrium any more; because if it were liquid it would flow into a slightly different shape. Our own moon is actually an example. But in general, for classification purposes, this is a nuance that is ignored; the sucker is round or it isn’t.
[Edited to add:] A moon in hydrostatic equilibrium is considered to be a “major moon,” no matter how small it might be.
[Edited:] All of the large and medium moons are major moons. But as happens, three (maybe four) of the biggest “small” moons, those below 1000km across but greater than 250 km across, are round too and also qualify as major moons. There are two moons in the 500-1000 km range, and seven in the 250-500 km range. I’m going to call the 250-1000 km range the “medium small” range.
[Edited:] In the 500-1000 km range, we have Enceladus (S) barely making it at 504 km, and definitely a major moon. There is also Dysnomia, a satellite of the dwarf planet Eris, which is the “maybe” case. It’s 615 km across, apparently, but it’s very dark and we cannot get a read on its shape though its density appears to be low enough that we don’t expect its gravity will have crushed it into a sphere.
[Edited:] in the 250-500 km range we have Mimas (S), and Miranda (U), 400 and 470 km in diameter respectively, both major moons. And we also have five objects that are not major moons, and they are Hyperion (S), Proteus (N), Nereid (N), Vanth (satellite of dwarf planet Orcus) and Hi’iaka (satellite of dwarf planet Haumea). Proteus is actually bigger than Mimas, so there’s clearly not a hard line, above which a moon will be round (and therefore major). As I alluded to above, a low density can make a moon less massive, which can be enough that it does not “go round.”
[Edited:] So there’s your roundup. Expect to see talk of Large, Medium and Medium-small moons, as well as major moons and minor moons; “major” encompassing large and medium moons as well as three of the scores of small moons.
Saturn
History
Saturn, to the ancients, was a star-like object that took 29.5 years to make one trip around the ecliptic. Dimmer and slower than Jupiter, which was associated with the king of the gods, it got associated with the prior generation.
You see, in Greek and Roman mythology the Olympian gods were the third generation. The first was Uranus (Οὐρανός), the sky, and Gaia, the Earth. He was both her son and her husband. Their children were the titans, twelve of them: Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Tethys, and Cronus. (You will see some of those names again…in fact if you read the previous section, you already have.) Cronus (or Kronos) was the father of Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hades, Hestia, Demeter and Chiron. These are all the Greek names. The one called Kronos was known to the Romans as Saturn.
In 1610 Galileo turned that telescope towards Saturn, and saw…well, a couple of lumps one on each side of Saturn that each looked like it might be a moon a third the size of Saturn. (Let’s face it, it wasn’t a very good telescope, even if it was one of the best in the world at the time.)
A couple of years later, he looked again, and the moons were gone. He predicted that they would be back later, and indeed they showed up. And got bigger to the point where Saturn seemed oval-shaped. Christiaan Huygens finally saw this as rings in 1655, publishing his results in 1659. Huygens spotted one moon, which he named Titan. Shortly thereafter (1675) Giovanni Domenico Cassini discovered a gap in the rings, and also four more moons, Iapetus, Rhea, Tethys and Dione–all named after titans. (Dione is either another daughter of Uranus and Gaia, or the daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, depending on whose rendering of the mythology you’re reading.) In 1789 William Herschel (discoverer of Uranus) discovered two more moons, Mimas and Enceladus–these are two of the three “small” moons in our solar system that are nevertheless big enough to be round, from the previous section. Hyperion was discovered in 1848. It’s comparable to Mimas and Enceladus, but not round…far from it, as we’ll see.
Saturn ends up having seven major moons, one large, the other six medium. Add in Hyperion, and that’s eight. When I was a kid, the count was ten (with most books still saying nine). The missing two were Phoebe (1898) and..well..number ten, first spotted in 1966, was a bit confusing. It was first spotted on December 15, 1966. But then another astronomer spotted it again…but in a different place in the same orbit…on December 18, 1966. Here was a moon that appeared to be jumping around in its orbit, but it was there (well, maybe not) and it was number 10. Finally in 1978, a couple of astronomers realized what was really going on. There were two moons sharing the same orbit, Janus and Epimetheus, a situation which had been assumed to be unstable up until then. So elementary school Steve didn’t realize Saturn’s tenth moon was really the tenth and eleventh moons. Today’s count is (drumroll) one hundred and forty six, with the most recent discovery being in 2020. But I am going to save detailed discussion of the moons until next time.
Pioneer 11 flew by in 1979. Voyager 1 zipped by in 1980, and Voyager 2 followed it in 1981. What a nice little barrage, especially since the cameras on the Voyagers were so much better. After that nothing until 2004, when Cassini went into orbit around Saturn. It not only stayed there for 13 years (until we deliberately deorbited it into Saturn’s atmosphere, since it was about to die anyway), it even put a lander on Titan! The ONLY landing ever made beyond the asteroid belt.
The Planet Proper
Saturn itself orbits at an average distance of 1,434 million kilometers, nearly a billion and a half. That’s 9.58 AUs. It has an axial tilt of about 28 degrees, a bit more than Earth’s 23 degrees, so Saturn definitely has seasons, unlike Jupiter (whose axial tilt is about 2 degrees). This will turn out to be important when we finally quit fiddling around and talk about the rings.
Saturn has a magnetosphere, like Jupiter, Ganymede, and Earth. Unlike Jupiter and Earth, the Saturn “magnet” is aligned with the axis of rotation pretty well. This magnetosphere isn’t as strong as Jupiter’s, but still significant.
Measured across the equator, Saturn is as wide as 9 earths. Measured through the poles, on the other hand, it’s only 8 earths tall. That’s because it is spinning very rapidly, once in about 10 1/2 hours, and it’s fluid clear down to a solid core that’s about 16,000 km across. We were able to learn a LOT about Saturn’s interior just from monitoring its gravity’s effect on both the Cassini probe and the rings.
Saturn has a banded atmosphere much like Jupiter’s though not nearly as colorful. It doesn’t have a long-standing storm like the Great Red Spot, but from time to time white spots will appear. Great white spots tend to appear once every Saturnian year, during its northern hemisphere summer, the last one in 1990. Cassini got to see one form, stretch out along its band, and eventually dissipate, after the head of the thing caught up and passed its tail. And then in 2010, ten years early, we got another white spot.
Voyager 1 spotted something very peculiar around Saturn’s north pole. For some reason we don’t fully understand, the clouds there form a hexagon, which appears to rotate with the planet, in time with Saturn’s radio emissions.
The south pole, by contrast, shows something like a hurricane eyewall. (No word yet on whether this is where all the FEMA hurricane money goes.)
OK, with that out of the way…
The Rings
They have been called “Gravity’s Masterpiece.”
And that is an understatement.
Gravity created them, gravity maintains their structure, and gravity is slowly destroying them.
Galileo noticed change when looking at Saturn, but could not resolve the rings; his telescope was simply too small. That change is caused by Saturn’s seasons. When it’s northern hemisphere summer, the north surface of the rings is tilted toward the Sun, at autumn they are edge on, at northern winter, the south surface is tipped toward the Sun, and finally at northern spring, they are edge on again. And since, comparatively speaking, we’re quite close to the Sun, we see the same thing. Here is a twenty nine year time lapse:
The rings are thin. At the time the earth crosses through the plane of the rings, we can’t see anything, not even a thin line. It has been likened to looking at a sheet of paper edge on, but relatively speaking the sheet of paper is much too thick! The next “disapperance” is next year, right now it looks something like this:
The rings are skinny but definitely there.
The rings are themselves subdivided into seven sections, imaginitively named A, B, C, D, E, F, and G.
What we see through our telescopes are basically A, B, and C. This is typically what you’ll see…only it’s much smaller in the telescope field of view than this:
This picture (from Cassini) shows the rings from well above the plane, with Saturn itself casting a shadow on them.
Going form the outside in, there’s a medium-bright ring (A), a wide gap–the one noted by Cassini, a brighter ring (B), and a much fainter ring (C). There are other, smaller gaps as well. Where do they come from? The Cassini gap happens to be at that spot where, if something were orbiting there, it’d do so in a 2:1 resonance with Mimas. That causes enough instability to force objects into smaller or larger orbits. In other cases, small moons within the rings help clear things out.
That’s just the beginning of the crazy stuff that happens in the rings. Ripples one to two kilometers high raised by embedded moons, spokes on the B ring we can’t figure out (yet)…some scientists are spending their entire careers on this stuff!
To see the D through G rings readily, we must look at Saturn backlit…something we couldn’t do until we sent spacecraft there.
By the way, if you right click and open in new tab, between the two “gray” fuzzy rings (a narrow one and a broad one) at about 4 oclock…that dot there is Earth.
The rings appear to be made of chunks of ice, averaging about a foot across. And they’re pretty bright; they haven’t been covered with dark space dust. That leads most scientists to think that they aren’t that old…150 million years at the most. It’s possible that they weren’t there when the non-avian dinosaurs were killed 66 million years ago.
The most common thought is that a medium-sized moon got too close to Saturn somehow, perhaps thanks to perturbations from the other moons, and tidal forces (yes tidal forces again) did the rest.
Picture this: a spherical body maybe 200 kilometers across in orbit. It will orbit as if the entire mass of the moon were concentrated at the center. But a rock at the far side of the moon is 100 kilometers further away, and one at the near side is 100 kilometers closer. An object 100 km further out, in order to stay in orbit, wants to move slower than this moon is orbiting, yet that rock is being forced to move faster than that, since it’s stuck to the moon. If the moon were to suddenly disappear and leave the rock behind, it would actually go into a new, elliptical orbit, with the closest part where the rock was, sitting on the moon, and the furthest part, oh, some distance away. And so, this is what the rock “wants” to do. It actually feels a slight tug pulling at it, off the surface of the moon. If the moon is close enough to the planet, and its gravity weak enough, the rock will actually feel no net attraction to the moon, and drift off. As will its neighboring rocks. And similar things happen on the side of the moon closest to the planet, they want to go into smaller orbits and feel a net tug toward the planet and off the moon.
That’s how loose rocks might peel off, but moons are generally solid, aren’t they? Sure. But, if you think about that orbit where things on the far side will just barely want to drift away, but put the moon closer, then something deep underground at the far side would (if it weren’t buried) drift away. Now bury it again. Everything above it wants to drift away too. Those miles of stuff are effectively “hanging” wanting to fall off the moon. Enough of that, and even a solid rock will fracture. Rocks don’t do too well under tension, a fact which has had a profound effect on architecture here on Earth.
So, basically, we think a mostly-icy moon got too close and shattered. And the tidal forces have kept it from reforming. However some suggest that instead, two moons collided and this is the debris from the collision.
The rings are dying, though. The ice is slowly sublimating with help from cosmic rays, and that ice ends up in Saturn’s magnetic field and eventually forms auroras in its atmosphere. There are also other forces causing ring material to rain down onto Saturn’s equator (this was discovered by the Cassini spacecraft). The rings have 10-100 million years to live at the rate they are losing mass.
I’ll close this with another picture:
..or two, just to see the aurora…
..or three (you can see the hexagon in this one).
Obviously I could go on. But some of the coolest stuff is on the moons. So…until next time!
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
January 6 Tapes Reminder
After the first release, we were supposed to get more, every week.
As far as I know it hasn’t happened.
Speaker Johnson, please follow through!
A Caution
Just remember…we might replace the RINO candidates. (Or we might not. The record is mixed even though there is more MAGA than there used to be.) But that will make no difference in the long run if the party officials, basically the Rhonna McDaniels (or however that’s spelled–I suspect it’s RINO), don’t get replaced.
State party chairs, vice chairs, secretaries and so on, and the same at county levels, have huge influence on who ultimately gets nominated, and if these party wheelhorses are RINOs, they will work tirelessly to put their own pukey people on the ballot. In fact I’d not be surprised if some of our “MAGA” candidates are in fact, RINO plants, encouraged to run by the RINO party leadership when they realized that Lyn Cheney (and her ilk) were hopelessly compromised as effective candidates. The best way for them to deal with the opposition, of course, is to run it themselves.
Running good candidates is only HALF of the battle!
Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit
…we can move on to the next one.
Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.
Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.
Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!
It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.
In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.
Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.
Justice Must Be Done.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Spot Prices
All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend). (Note: most media quotes are for the bid…the price paid by the market makers, not the ask, which is what they will sell at. I figure the ask is more relevant to people like us who wish we could afford to buy these things. In the case of gold the difference is usually about a dollar, for the PGMs the spread is much wider.)
Gold 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:
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.
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.)
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?
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.
Boebert. Why Am I Not Overjoyed?
First off I *am* happy she won the primary. I said years ago I wished I lived in her district. And now I do, and I didn’t even have to move.
Just as importantly, Greg Lopez won the special election to serve out the rest of Ken B*ck’s term. There was some fear that the GOP would pick one of Boebert’s opponents and thereby give that RINO (whichever one it was, it would have been a RINO) an advantage over her in the primary.
Instead, they picked a guy who had no intention of keeping the seat, and he won the special election held the same day as the primary. The damage done to the GOP majority in the house, by B*ck having resigned, is undone. And as near as I can tell, he’s MAGA, not a RINO.
OK so that’s the good news.
That’s ALL of the good news.
Everything else in my County went WRONG in the primary. EVERY LAST MOTHERFUCKING RINO won. No MAGA candidate succeeded other than Boebert. I haven’t seen Boebert’s numbers in my county but I would be stunned if she actually won here. Fortunately for her (and me), the thin sliver of my county in her district is basically a flea on the hindquarters of the dog in significance.
THAT’s why my mood is subdued. We can’t seem to kill the RINO establishment in my county, for nothing. It’s the damned petition process, where people can bypass the convention to get onto the primary ballot, then their keepers dump tons of cash into the primary campaign, Unfortunately the petition process is written into state law.
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.)
Pretty much a lot of up and down, going nowhere but putting on mileage doing so. Note that palladium has reached platinum’s level (it surged $65 on Friday, while platinum only surged $7). Note that these are ask prices. (Usually people quote the bid price, which is the price the spot market is buying at.) Palladium’s bid price is still 30 dollars lower than platinum’s.
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.)
Gold and silver (and platinum and palladium) continued to surge, until a couple of days ago. Silver touched $32 and gold reached $2,425
Then they got beaten with the ugly stick on Wednesday and Thursday
They recovered a tiny amount on Friday (platinum actually did best, going up $9) except for palladium which dropped $7 that day. Who knows, maybe platinum will remain above palladium for the foreseeable future.