Our mission, as God-fearing and God-loving patriots, is to defend this Constitutional Republic and to increase its greatness, in all good things and ways, by using our voices in free but courteous speech, by discussing the happenings of the world and coming to a profound understanding of those things, and by sharing and promulgating these Truths on both this platform and others.
Welcome. Please visit this January 1st daily thread for the rules of the road, which are few but important.
Header Image: 2024 Presidential Election Map by County
Do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. — Galatians 5:1
We got our miracle. America is back.
Let us dedicate ourselves to the cleansing, healing, and rebuilding of our beautiful nation.
God will guide us. Prayers and thanks to God for President Donald J. Trump.
Handling Gold.
Well, not really gold. But a process that is even more critical than handling precious metals, but let’s start there. The other day Steve was explaining how registered mail is handled and why precious metals dealers used registered mail due to the strict processes that are followed. The USPS handbook DM-901 covers all the details. It’s a nice document. Covers all the procedures, chain of custody, proper storage, how to document if seals are broken, etc. It’s almost like they are serious about handling registered mail.
What is more important than gold?
How about true and accurate elections that put into power those who legislate whether you get to keep your gold or not? Seems important.
Chain of Custody.
A key feature of the process of handling things of great value is called the Chain of Custody. Whether it is registered mail, election materials (ballots, equipment), or even evidence to be used in prosecuting a criminal case, unimpeachable Chain of Custody is essential.
According to experts, the only way to know if an electronic vote total has been hacked is for voters to have separately recorded their intended selections on paper and for jurisdictions to then use the paper in a manual audit or recount, the results of which can be compared to the electronic total.
But even manual audits or recounts can be “hacked” if the selections on the paper have been marked by a machine, rather than the voter’s own hand. And no matter how that paper is marked, manual audits and recounts can be gamed if the chain of custody between election night and the audit or recount has been compromised.
There are many resources for elections. One resource, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) is an independent, bipartisan commission whose mission is to help election officials improve the administration of elections and help Americans participate in the voting process. Their guidance, “Best Practices: Chain of Custody,” gives recommendations to election officials. “The chain of custody of ballots, voting equipment, and associated data is essential to ensure the election system remains trustworthy. Documentation of the chain of custody also provides evidence that all voting procedures were followed. It is a best practice for chain of custody procedures to be clearly defined in advance of every election, well documented and followed consistently throughout the entire election lifecycle or process. The key to an effective chain of custody is to have a set of procedures which are followed in practice. The procedures should be in writing with all steps documented.”
It may be important to note that I have yet to find any federal laws with guidance on the specifics of election materials chain of custody. A search of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 for the term “custody” does not yield any results. An internet search of “election laws chain-of-custody” provides guidance from various organizations (a good example here) and some links to individual Secretary of State websites. If there are federal laws, they are not easily found. Time didn’t permit for me to survey each state for specific chain of custody laws related to elections. It appears that a good number of groups that have public-facing sites with material related to the need for and the development of good practices for managing chain-of-custody.
However, when you get into actual county-by-county execution of these procedures the failures are all to common and even shocking. When regular citizens, concerned about their own local county’s handling of election materials simply asked for a copy of the chain of custody procedures in use during a specific election, the response was far from uniform. As anyone in any type of mission-critical work effort would expect, there needs to a least be: (1) a dated, documented procedure that is signed off before it is to be followed for a specific election and (2) checklists with spaces for signing off for the handling of items requiring chain of custody.
Even when a county is required by their state government to provide these prior to an election, the local elections offices sometimes could not provide these procedures when asked. One particular county office provided a non dated, unsigned document and stated that they weren’t sure which election it was for. Either they didn’t know what they were doing, they didn’t have the right person fulfilling the request, or something else. It seems like this would be posted right on their county elections office website (along with all the other elections documents!). In a number of counties that I know of, the elections office claimed there were “no records responsive to the request.” In other words, they are saying that they didn’t have the state mandated chain of custody procedures. How did they get the election certified without it? How did their Secretary of State sign off on the election without it?
Asking for public records, usually referred to as a freedom of information act (FOIA) request can be done by anyone. More recently the number of people taking it upon themselves to get involved in “citizen oversight” has grown to the point that some public officials have started complaining that all these requests are a form of harassment. Really? Why not just publicly publish all of it?
In one state it seems that a number of counties have hired the same particular law firm as “County Counsel” to advise on the handling of election matters. Unfortunately that liberal law firm seems to have been assisting counties to stone-wall access to public records. And in some cases the guidance given to the county board of supervisors was in fact unlawful. I’m not giving examples to prove my point, I’m just offering information that might be helpful to know if someone reading here is considering looking into how their elections are being handled where they live and vote.
Elections chain of custody refers to physical and electronic evidence controls for:
– who can vote – who did vote – actual ballots as marked by each voter, and – evidence transfer and storage
:
Legitimate elections require public “right to know” (freedom of information) to allow the public and the media to authenticate truth of results. Proper chain of custody safeguards are part of the larger concept of political legitimacy.
:
Incurable uncertainty
Handling election records and data must be scrupulously careful in order to demonstrate to the public that there has been no tampering or contamination.
In court cases, chain of custody violations can result in refusal to admit evidence or even throwing a case out. In elections, chain of custody violations can result in “incurable uncertainty” and court orders to redo elections.
Bev Harris discovered election theft in 2002, wrote a book on it (download it here), advocated for change, and now others have carried on her work. The problems are not new, and they have probably grown worse. But now is the time for us to make our own local governments-that oversee the execution of elections–take note that we are asking questions, seeing problems and expecting better oversight. And for those who have been running elections, just knowing that more people are looking into their work appears to have led to some unexpected early retirements. I can’t say that is an indication of guilt, but it does seem significant.
We can’t leave this to others. We can at least try and get informed on what has been found, what has been done, and what more needs to be done. What do you know about elections and chain of custody. Please post your thoughts in the comments. Thanks
We can make a difference. And we must make a difference.
If not us, who? If not now, when? There has never been a better time.
Twitterati.
General Mike Flynn (@GEnFlynn) has been talking about citizen oversight for as long as I’ve been paying attention.
Gail and PAVACA are going to love this one (link):
Prayer.
God Bless America, Land that I love. Stand beside her, and guide her Thru the night with a light from above. From the mountains, to the prairies, To the oceans, white with foam God bless America, My home sweet home.
Welcome. Please visit this January 1st daily thread for the rules of the road, which are few but important.
Header Image: 2024 Presidential Election Map by County
Do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. — Galatians 5:1
We got our miracle. America is back.
Let us dedicate ourselves to seeking our place in the cleansing, healing, and rebuilding of this beautiful, resource-rich nation. God will guide us.
Prayers and thanks to God for our 47th President, Donald J. Trump.
Remembering.
With gratitude to our own kind Wolf for reminding us of DePat’s recommended prayers for times of spiritual warfare, let us consider praying this one today.
Litany of Humility
O Jesus, meek and humble of heart, Hear me.
From the desire of being esteemed, Deliver me, O Jesus. From the desire of being loved, Deliver me, O Jesus.
From the desire of being extolled, Deliver me, O Jesus. From the desire of being honored, Deliver me, O Jesus.
From the desire of being praised, Deliver me, O Jesus. From the desire of being preferred to others, Deliver me, O Jesus.
From the desire of being consulted, Deliver me, O Jesus. From the desire of being approved, Deliver me, O Jesus.
From the fear of being humiliated, Deliver me, O Jesus. From the fear of being despised, Deliver me, O Jesus.
From the fear of suffering rebukes, Deliver me, O Jesus. From the fear of being calumniated, Deliver me, O Jesus.
From the fear of being forgotten, Deliver me, O Jesus. From the fear of being ridiculed, Deliver me, O Jesus.
From the fear of being wronged, Deliver me, O Jesus. From the fear of being suspected, Deliver me, O Jesus.
That others may be loved more than I, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it. That others may be esteemed more than I, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That, in the opinion of the world, others may increase and I may decrease, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it. That others may be chosen and I set aside, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be praised and I go unnoticed, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it. That others may be preferred to me in everything, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should, Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
Author: Rafael Cardinal Merry del Val y Zulueta
Charity
Charity is patient, is kind; charity does not envy, is not pretentious, is not puffed up, is not ambitious, is not self-seeking, is not provoked; thinks no evil, does not rejoice over wickedness, but rejoices with the truth, bears with all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (1 Cor. 13:4-7).
To have Charity is to love God above all things for Himself and be ready to renounce all created things rather than offend Him by serious sin. (Matt. 22:36-40)
Twitterati.
Our J6 P.O.W.s are always in our hearts with the fervent desire that all wrongs would be undone and each target and their families be made stronger and more whole than ever.
God Bless America, Land that I love. Stand beside her, and guide her Thru the night with a light from above. From the mountains, to the prairies, To the oceans, white with foam God bless America, My home sweet home.
I have noticed what I think is a thread throughout history. In my article, on Operation Gladio, I mentioned Mercantilism. Investopedia defines Mercantilism thus:
Mercantilism is an economic policy designed to increase a nation’s wealth through exports, which thrived in Great Britain between the 16th and 18th centuries. The country enjoyed the greatest benefits of mercantilism between 1640 and 1660 when the prevailing economic wisdom suggested that the empire’s colonies could supply raw materials and resources to the mother country and subsequently be used as export markets for the finished products.
The resulting favorable balance of trade was thought to increase national wealth and Great Britain was not alone in this line of thinking. The French, Spanish, and Portuguese competed with the British for colonies under the belief that no great nation could exist and be self-sufficient without colonial resources. Because of this heavy reliance on its colonies, Great Britain imposed restrictions on how its colonies could spend their money or distribute assets…
Key Takeaways
Mercantilism exists to increase a country’s wealth through its exports.
British economic growth was propelled by raw materials supplied by its colonies so the nation could export finished products.
Mercantilism brought about many acts against humanity, including slavery and an imbalanced system of trade.
During Great Britain’s mercantilist period, colonies faced periods of inflation and excessive taxation, which caused great distress.
Angry and frustrated American colonists revolted against the British, which led to the American Revolution and the end of mercantilism.
Although current understanding holds that Mercantilism, as an economic philosophy, is long obsolete, it was never really abandoned by the Cabal. Instead, it was just hidden.
The second useful concept is Monopsony. It is what we now see in the USA today, especially in the food industry.
A monopsony is a market condition in which there is only one buyer, the monopsonist. Like a monopoly, a monopsony also has imperfect market conditions. The difference between a monopoly and a monopsony lies in the difference between the controlling entities. An individual seller controls a monopolized market while a single buyer dominates a monopsony. Monopsonists are common in areas where they supply most or all of the region’s jobs.
Key Takeaways
A monopsony refers to a market dominated by a single buyer who has a controlling advantage that drives its consumption price levels down.
A monopsony can arise due to geographical constraints, government regulation, or unique consumer demands.
Monopsonies commonly experience low prices from wholesalers and an advantage in paid wages.
Unlike a monopoly where one seller creates upward pricing pressure, a monopsony is a market condition with only one buyer who may cause downward pricing pressure.
Trade is the voluntary exchange of goods or services between different economic actors. Since the parties are under no obligation to trade, a transaction will only occur if both parties consider it beneficial to their interests….
Trade seems to be as old as civilization itself—ancient civilizations traded with each other for goods they could not produce for themselves due to climate, natural resources, or other inhibiting factors…
Trade and bartering seems to be a uniquely human trait and it is seen through out history. It is a reason for empire building. Empires like the Roman empire or the Aztec empire were based on trade.
The Aztec economy was based on three things: agricultural goods, tribute, and trade. Aztec trade was crucially important to the empire; there could be no empire without it as many goods used by the Aztecs were not produced locally. Prized white cotton could not grow at the altitude of the Valley of Mexico and had to be imported from conquered semi-tropical regions further south, as were cacao beans, from which chocolate is made…. Pochteca were professional merchants, traveling long distances to obtain the luxury goods desired by the nobility: feathers from tropical birds, rare gems or jewelry and pottery created by other Mesoamerican cultures. The pochteca obtained anything rare and special, as well as the white cotton and cacao beans, earning them a special place in the Aztec society. They had their own capulli, laws and section of the city, even their own god, who watched over traders.
I am using the Aztecs to make the point that the critical factor in looking at the bits and pieces that I am assembling is THE MERCHANT PRINCES and not religion! As I said in last week’s article, today religion is used as a diversion to keep people from looking further. Scream Islamophobia or antisemitism and you have successfully shut down the conversation. I am also making the point that the merchant princes/bankers have a tremendous amount of power over the government.
…..
Last week I took another look at the Khazars and I want to make this additional comment about their history written by Arthur Koestler. Koestler would have access to the memories of his parents and grandparents, neighbors and even further back. From WIKI:
Koestler was born in Budapest [Very near Poland -GC] to Jewish parents Henrik and Adele Koestler (née Jeiteles). Henrik’s father, Lipót Koestler, was a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army.[7] In 1861, Lipót married Karolina Schon,👉the daughter of a prosperous timber merchant, and their son Henrik was born on 18 August 1869 in the town of Miskolc in northeastern Hungary….
I think from his mom and grandparents he would have first hand tales to substantiate what he wrote, in addition to the information he gained in his visits to Russia.
…Some particular trades became virtually a Jewish monopoly in Poland. One was dealing in timber— which reminds one that timber was the chief building material and an important export in Khazaria;another was transport. “The dense net of shtetls,” writes Poliak, “made it possible to distribute manufactured goods over the whole country by means of the superbly built Jewish type of horse cart.
[Has a lot about the history of Jews, Italians and Banking.]
…The word mammon can denote wealth or profit in the original Syriac dialect but also is the name of a Syrian deity who was the god of riches. The Mishnaic Hebrew word mamôn means money, wealth, possessions, and “that in which one trusts.”
Eventually, due to the Christian injunction against charging interest for money that is loaned to another person (usury), the entire idea of money (mammon) became a pejorative, a term that was used to describe pride, greed, gluttony, excessive materialism, and unjust worldly gain. The “worship” of money was seen as a sin, and the work of the demon of greed, Mammon. Later, money becomes synonymous with hellish intent and bondage to the physical world which leads humans into the dark realms; therefore, Christians were warned to stay away from practices of usury and the glorification of Mammon. It was a common belief that usury is the work of the devil and certainly not fit for a Christian. A Christian should be faithful with “another” and help them out of love, not for the purposes of money mongering for personal gain. The Christian is careful not to be contaminated by the “unrighteousness” of wealth and money and the lure of Mammon.
…The first “modern” bank was established in Venice with a guarantee from the State in 1157 AD and operated until 1797 acting in the interest of the Crusaders of Pope Urban the Second. This activity developed into the Bank of Venice, with an initial capital of 5,000,000 ducats. This bank was the first national bank to have been established within the boundaries of Europe.
In the middle of the 13th Century, when certain rich Italian families saw the profits that the Venetian banking families were making, groups of Italian Christians, particularly the Cahorsins and Lombards, invented “legal fictions” to get around the ban on Christian usury. One method of Christians effecting a loan with interest without calling it usury was to offer money without interest, but also require that the loan is insured against possible loss or injury, and/or delays in repayment. The Christians effecting these legal fictions became known as the Pope’s Usurers and reduced the importance of the Venetian and Italian Jews to European monarchs….
Italian and Jewish bankers… An interesting side note to keep in the back of your mind:
Did you know there were primarily two distinct mafia/mobster networks operating in the United States in the early 1900’s.
One consisted of Italian mafia families that had emigrated to America. They settled primarily in New York and Chicago and focused on trafficking liquor during prohibition, gambling, and prostitution.
The second were Jewish mobsters like Louis “Pretty” Amberg, Moses Annenberg (newspaper/media for Hearst Corp), Abe Bernstein (Purple Gang), Mickey Cohen (Los Angeles), Meyer Lansky (formed the National Crime Syndicate focusing on Cuba and Las Vegas), and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel (New York and Las Vegas). While they were into all the same crime syndicates as the Italian mobsters, they also were used by large business enterprises that needed assistance in making things happen—for example, dock workers, newspapers, bankers, etc….
The mafia and mobsters didn’t disappear after World War II; much of their activities were folded into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The prohibition era liquor networks gave way to drugs like heroin and cocaine, with the profits being used to fund covert functions of Operation Gladio, with prostitution transformed into human trafficking networks, the funds being used for covert operations as well. Lastly, in order to keep this operation protected and to provide weapons to the stay-behind-units, a weapons trafficking network was incorporated into the CIA….
And now we come to career choices. Would you rather sit at home and LEND money, money that is insured and brings interest? Or would you rather be the merchant that treks all over the world?
October 26, 2011 Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, Stefano Battiston
Abstract
The structure of the control network of transnational corporations affects global market competition and financial stability… We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player. We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic “super-entity” that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.
In contrast, we find that only 737 top holders accumulate 80% of the control over the value of all TNCs [transnational corporations ]… This means that network control is much more unequally distributed than wealth. In particular, the top ranked actors hold a control ten times bigger than what could be expected based on their wealth. (Think MUTUAL FUNDS & PENSIONS! -GC]
To hear more about how the study was conducted there was a Ted Talk. Interestingly this ted talk has also been removed but the transcript is still available HERE:
Click Show Transcript and then English. Scroll down in the window below the dead video to read.
Now, you’ve probably all heard of similar criticism coming from people who are skeptical of capitalism. But this is different. This is coming from the heart of finance. The first quote is from Jean-Claude Trichet when he was governor of the European Central Bank. The second quote is from the head of the U.K. Financial Services Authority. Are these people implying that we don’t understand the economic systems that drive our modern societies? It gets worse. “We spend billions of dollars trying to understand the origins of the universe while we still don’t understand the conditions for a stable society, a functioning economy, or peace.” [LIE MUCH? -GC]
Next time the Fake News mentions the stock market remember this.
A pair of physicists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich did a physics-based analysis of the world economy as it looked in early 2007. Stefano Battiston and James Glattfelder extracted the information from the tangled yarn that links 24,877 stocks and 106,141 shareholding entities in 48 countries, revealing what they called the “backbone” of each country’s financial market. These backbones represented the owners of 80 percent of a country’s market capital, yet consisted of remarkably few shareholders.
“You start off with these huge national networks that are really big, quite dense,” Glattfelder said. “From that you’re able to … unveil the important structure in this original big network. You then realize most of the network isn’t at all important.”
The most pared-down backbones exist in Anglo-Saxon countries,.. these same countries are considered by economists to have the most widely-held stocks in the world… But while each American company may link to many owners, Glattfelder and Battiston’s analysis found that the owners varied little from stock to stock…
(The author should not have used the word Capitalist since it is NOT capitalism.)
…..
It would seem the Cabal decided banking was the better career choice. However they obviously have a vested interest in seeing that the ‘Merchant Princes’ aka Transnational Corporations make as much money as possible since they owned them. Hence they would want as much power over governments as possible.
Originally corporations were granted charters by Royalty. As an example the East India Company was granted a charter by Queen Elizabeth I on December 31, 1600 The charter allowed it to have exclusive trading rights with the East Indies.
For an amusing retelling of the history of the British East India Company see:
“Those few who can understand the system (check book, money and credit) will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on it favors, that there will be little opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear it burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests.” – — ROTHSCHILDS BROS. OF LONDON
“Banking was conceived in iniquity, and was born in sin. The Bankers own the Earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen, they will create enough deposits, to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But if you wish to remain the slaves of Bankers, and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits.” — SIR JOSIAH STAMP, (President of the Bank of England in the 1920’s, the second richest man in Britain)
Can’t get more blunt than that!
Now that we have introduced two major methods for making money, trade & lending let’s re-introduce the CIA and the NAZIs…. AND FASCISM.
The “Third Way” is the ‘Capitalism’ that those on the left complain about. It is a nasty mix of Corporate/government governance like we see now in the USA but it is NOT capitalism, it is a form of ‘socialism’.
E. M. Smith, who is an economist by training, explained it in 2011 in
“What a corporation wants is a monopoly where they can achieve the profit maximizing price point. Not competition. No “market” with many sellers…
EPA is used to forbid all sorts of things that can be done easily and cheaply, and where the alternative is very expensive (and available from very few, or one, supplier). So, want to make your own “trash to fuel FT machine”? Well, better check out all the “regulations” on fuel refining and production … if you don’t have a few full time lawyers to fill out the paperwork and a few more to defend against the EPA suing you, it’s a no-go. And who DOES have those lawyers? AND the already established refineries? Oh yeah…
Once corporations figure out that it is cheaper and easier to get the competition banned and them mandated, than to create new products; and that they can make lots of money as the sole provider of a crappy product but not that much making good products in a competitive market; well, lets just say that the campaign contributions flow…
That would be bad enough, but the greedy bastards want it ALL. They want complete control of the entire world and everyone in it.
The current S&P 500 Index has the most top-heavy weighting the US has ever known. In 2025, the top 5 companies in America account for 33% of the S&P 500 Index weighting. For reference, in 2010, the top 5 companies accounted for 11%. In 15 years, the top 5 companies tripled in their weighting. One-third of the current weighting is in 1% of the S&P 500 companies. This means the S&P 500 doesn’t appropriately represent the US stock market. In fact, only 1% of American businesses are even publicly traded companies and a part of the stock market. The stock market doesn’t represent the economy, and the S&P 500 doesn’t properly represent the stock market.
Now that that is established, what do the five biggest companies in America all have in common, besides being megalithic in size? I believe they all have the same master, the CIA. They are all used to influence Americans and the world. They are all critical in propagandizing and controlling the world….
So lets stop here and look at the pieces of information we have.
* Trade is the life blood of empires.
* Lending money facilitates trade AND is easier and less risky especially if you are a national bank using fractional reserve banking practices.
* If you can create money out of thin air you can BUY all the corporations you want.
So, HOW do you MAXIMIZE profits and control?
Enter the World Bank, IMF and their Economic Hitmen. They are the first step. If you remember the “Confessions Of An EconomicHitman“ This is the first arrow in the quiver of our Hidden Rulers.
John Perkins: This is how Economic Hitmen (EHMs) destroy countries
…That is what we Economic Hitmen do best: we build a global empire.
We are an elite group of men and women who utilize international financial organizations to foment conditions that make other nations sub-servient to the corporatocracy running our biggest corporations, our government, and our banks. Like our counterparts in the Mafia, EHMs provide favors. These take the form of loans to develop infrastructure — electric generating plants, highways, ports, airports, or industrial parks . A condition of such loans is that engineering and construction companies from our own country must build all these projects.
In essence, most of the money never leaves the United States; it is simply transferred from banking offices in Washington to engineering offices in New York, Houston, or San Francisco.
Despite the fact that the money is returned almost immediately to corporations that are members of the corporatocracy (the creditor), the recipient country is required to pay it all back, principal plus interest. If an EHM is completely successful, the loans are so large that the debtor is forced to default on its payments after a few years. When this happens, then like the Mafia we demand our pound of flesh.
This often includes one or more of the following: control over United Nations votes, the installation of military bases, or access to precious resources such as oil or the Panama Canal. Of course, the debtor still owes us the money—and another country is added to our global empire….
[The article has an one hour video interview of Perkins.]
JOHN PERKINS: We economic hit men, during the last 30 or 40 years, have really created the world’s first truly global empire, and we’ve done this primarily through economics, and 👉the military only coming in as a last resort. Therefore, it’s been done pretty much secretly. Most of the people in the United States have no idea that we’ve created this empire and, in fact, throughout the world it’s been done very quietly, unlike old empires, where the army marched in; it was obvious. So I think the significance of the things you discussed, the fact that over 80% of the population of South America recently voted in an anti-U.S. president and what’s going on at the World Trade Organization, and also, in fact, with the transit strike here in New York, is that people are beginning to understand that the middle class and the lower classes around the world are being terribly, terribly exploited by what I call the corporatocracy, which really runs this empire…. what we’ve done — we use many techniques, but probably the most common is that we’ll go to a country that has resources that our corporations covet, like oil, and we’ll arrange a huge loan to that country from an organization like the World Bank or one of its sisters, but almost all of the money goes to the U.S. corporations, not to the country itself, corporations like Bechtel and Halliburton, General Motors, General Electric, these types of organizations, and they build huge infrastructure projects in that country: power plants, highways, ports, industrial parks, things that serve the very rich and seldom even reach the poor. In fact, the poor suffer, because the loans have to be repaid, and they’re huge loans, and the repayment of them means that the poor won’t get education, health, and other social services, and the country is left holding a huge debt, by intention. We go back, we economic hit men, to this country and say, “Look, you owe us a lot of money. You can’t repay your debts, so give us a pound of flesh. Sell our oil companies your oil real cheap or vote with us at the next U.N. vote or send troops in support of ours to some place in the world such as Iraq.” And in that way, we’ve managed to build a world empire with very few people actually knowing that we’ve done this.…
And after the World Bank is finished the IMF steps in.
“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.
The article continues.
The IMF and World Bank are separate institutions with distinct roles. While the bank makes loans for development projects, the IMF lends to governments to ease deficits and make their economies appear stable to the international market. The World Bank was created in April 1944 as a lending institution composed of member governments to help rebuild post-war economies. The IMF was created to restructure and organize the market systems of member nations by promoting international economic cooperation and trade, and by encouraging stable currencies.
The bank introduced Structural Adjustment Programs in 1980 to increase export production in debtor nations to provide cash for debt-service payment. Under “structural adjustment,” developing countries typically are required to devalue their currency; dramatically cut spending on social services, medical care and education; eliminate barriers to foreign multinationals and trade; privatize national assets; deregulate business; decrease wages; restrict credit and raise interest rates.
Due to the radical reorganization of national economies, people in “SAPed” countries often pay for their governments’ loans with extreme poverty, hunger and disease. Using figures provided by UNICEF and UNDP, the editors of the IMF-World Bank Watchdog estimated that more than six million children under the age of five have died each year since 1982 in Africa, Asia and Latin America as a result of IMF / World Bank policies.
SAPs often carry heavy ecological costs as well. The forced privatization of nationalized industries and public or communal lands often opens Third World countries to opportunistic multinational corporations resulting in degraded (or destroyed) and polluted environments. Placing the emphasis on exports rather than local needs in a time of falling world commodity prices results in exploitation and depletion of oil, minerals, forests and other natural resources….
If the leaders of a country do not cooperate with the World Bank and IMF, the CIA and its Gladio Units step in and foment unrest and if needed assassination. So while the CIA is part of the mechanism, the ENFORCERS if you will, it is not running the show as Eric Carlson thinks.
As Colonel Towner pointed out, the funding of the CIA is ‘Off Books’ Some is from the USAID, but the CIA also makes a lot of its money pushing drugs and child sex trafficking. Just in case you were wondering, in 1914, Just after the Federal Reserve Act was passed, the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act was passed. It regulated and taxed the production, importation, and distribution of opiates and coca products.
Congress passed the Food and Drug Act in 1906, which required the labeling of all ingredients in these patent medicines and cure-alls.
1914 Harrison Tax Act
By 1914, various groups wanted to ban various drugs. Congress and most Americans at the time thought that a ban of any drug was unconstitutional as our constitutional guarantee of liberty gave us the right to consume any product we wished (which is why the prohibition against alcohol required a constitutional amendment rather than merely a law). The plan was to ban drugs by making them nearly impossible to obtain. The law required that you must pay a tax on drugs. To ensure that the tax was collected, you had to get the drugs from a doctor via prescription (all prescriptions were therefore registered with the tax office which enabled the government to track which doctors were prescribing which drugs)
….
If we go back and look at the East India Company, it had its own army.
The East India Company (EIC) was first England‘s and then Britain‘s tool of colonial expansion in India and beyond. Revenue from trade and land taxes from territories it controlled allowed the EIC to build up its own private armies, collectively the largest armed force in South and South East Asia.
The EIC mixed British and Indian soldiers (sepoys), hired regular regiments of the British Army, and funded its own navy, the Bombay Marine. The vast resources of the company allowed it to eventually employ over 250,000 well-trained and well-equipped fighting men. This force expanded the EIC’s domains, seeing off competition from Indian princely states, pirates, and other European trade companies.
This time around they have naive Americans funding their army via taxes (USAID) drug, child and weapons trafficking. It is nothing new, only the faces have changed.
Opium for medicinal purposes was first manufactured in China toward the end of the 15th century. It was used to treat dysentery, cholera and other diseases. Not until the 18th century were there any accounts of opium smoking in China.
In 1729, the Chinese imperial government, alarmed at its debilitating effect, prohibited the sale of opium mixed with tobacco and banned opium-smoking houses. Selling opium for smoking “was classed with robbery and instigation to murder, and punished with banishment or death,” wrote Joshua Rowntree in “The Imperial Drug Trade,” published in London in 1905…
Britain’s East India Company would wage three wars on the people of China in order to secure the right to sell opium there….
They were the world’s first drug wars. Their sole purpose was to secure the importation of an addictive substance that provided a bountiful flow of profits.
Opium sales had risen gradually from 2,330 chests in 1788 to 4,968 chests in 1810. But once the British got a monopoly, they forced it up to 17,257 chests in 1835, worth millions of British pounds.
Britain’s governor-general of India wrote in 1830, “We are taking measures for extending the cultivation of the poppy, with a view to a large increase in the supply of opium.”….
The Chinese are now returning the favor by pushing fentanyl into the USA. At least according to the CIA controlled Mockingbird Media.🤔
Finally these are other articles I have written that describe some of the threads I am trying to pull together to determine who actually rules the world.
Welcome. Please visit this January 1st daily thread for the rules of the road, which are few but important.
Header Image: 2024 Presidential Election Map by County
The Scouring of the Shire.
Reading and reflecting on Tolkien’s final chapter in The Lord of the Rings might help us place ourselves at this time. Fandom tells us: “Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin arrive in the Shire to find that things are not as they once were when they left. The Shire is now run by Sharkey based at Bag End, who with Lotho‘s help had taken over with his band of Ruffian Men. The four hobbits collect as many allies as they can and defeat his army of Ruffians at the Battle of Bywater. The Hobbits then confront “Sharkey” and the lowly Gríma Wormtongue at Bag End, who both meet their demise.”
So, while the noble hobbits had been off saving all of Middle Earth, the “commies” had set up shop in their homeland and caused great harm that will require bravery, wisdom, and a lot of work to undo. It appears that we are somewhere around the beginning of the Battle of Bywater now.
Do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. — Galatians 5:1
We got our miracle. America is back. Now what?
Let us dedicate ourselves to seeking our place in the cleansing, healing, and rebuilding of this beautiful, resource-rich nation. God will guide us.
Thanks be to God for our 47th President, Donald J. Trump.
The Role of County Government in Elections.
Take a good look at that 2024 Election Map. See the outline of each county?
When trying to understand how to get traction locally in turning the tide for liberty, it seems to come down to the governance at the county level. And from what is being turned up with the groups I’m following, it looks a lot like there is state level and national level collusion to influence or control the governments of those 3,069 counties that are responsible for overseeing our elections. I’ll get into those details in another post.
Reading that overview from NACO, they start out by stating:
Elections in the United States are administered in a highly decentralized process through which each state shapes its own election laws
Well, mostly. The states shape their own election laws, but, as with anything else, federal laws also impose requirements on state and local governments. Maryland’s State Board of Elections gives a helpful overview of these major federal election laws here. The most recent election-related law passed by Congress is known as HAVA.
Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 This law was the U.S. Congress’ response to the 2000 Presidential election and the first time that the federal government authorized federal funds for election administration. It created the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and set minimum standards for voting systems. It also required each state to adopt uniform standards on what constitutes a vote, implement provisional voting, post certain information at polling places, maintain a statewide voter registration database, and required certain individuals to show identification before voting.
Sounds good right?
Except. There are county elections officials are not following the laws, and yet are still taking the federal money to buy their electronic voting machines. If they didn’t follow the federal laws, then taking that money anyway would be fraud, right?
Thankfully, there are Americans that have stood up and gotten to work discovering and working to address the failures of our elections officials across the nation. I’d like to highlight one citizen oversight group that has done much with an all-volunteer organization.
We want valid elections that are run in full compliance with the law.
I strongly encourage you to watch this short video of a presentation by Marley Hornik of United Sovereign Americans. She goes over the legal framework for election integrity, starting with the constitution and provides the statute citations that must be enforced if we are to have free and fair elections. She also covers what they found when they audited the voter rolls of just 20 states prior to the 2024 election. They found over 29 MILLION apparently ineligible voter registrations, 10 million votes cast by those ineligible voters, 2 million more votes cast than voters that voted, and an average 13% vote error rate. Every invalid registration is potentially a felony level violation. Their organization is litigating with states over their failure to clean up the rolls and unlawful certification of non-compliant elections. They have a good strategy for which states to sue in order to potentially cause a circuit split which could get this heard at the Supreme Court without having to sue all 50 states. Or better yet, maybe the Department of Justice will just do their job.
The United Sovereign Americans Action Plan includes (1) informing everyone of election validity law, (2) turning findings into evidence, and (3) forcing election officials to obey the law.
Unfortunately, election officials across America have displayed apathy, disdain, and disregard for the law, and the civil rights of the people they are hired to serve. This has resulted in the certification of elections that varied from the law. Some of these elections were grossly inaccurate. Whether it was incompetence or malfeasance, those who broke the law must be held accountable.
Thank God for their work. May many more Americans join them in their efforts.
God Bless America, Land that I love. Stand beside her, and guide her Thru the night with a light from above. From the mountains, to the prairies, To the oceans, white with foam God bless America, My home sweet home.
This is ENTIRELY SPECULATIVE. I want to say that up front. My goal is to figure out WHO our hidden rulers are. I am using a two prong attack. What is the motive, and what is hidden and how. Since as usual this has turned into a book instead of an article, I am going to split it
MOTIVE: I have noticed what I think is a thread thru history. In my last article, on Operation Gladio, I mentioned Mercantilism. Trade and bartering seems to be a uniquely human trait and it is seen through out history. It is a reason for empire building. . Usury, the practice of lending money and charging the borrower interest would be a connected motive. To make the most money on each trading trip, you would want to able to borrow money even if it is at interest, so you have the funds to invest in the maximum amount of trade goods for each trip. That just makes good sense. However I am going to save that topic for another article.
WHAT IS HIDDEN AND HOW
Unfortunately, if the truth is inconvenient to our hidden rulers they have several ways to deal with it.
The easiest is to scrub history so the truth is reduced to folklore status or less. Examples are, MaoZedong’s efforts to erase traditional Chinese culture and historical figures who were not aligned with Maoist ideology and the current US destruction of historical statues and the re-naming of locations and products. We’re even maligning our Founding Fathers.
A third is to use ‘scholarly works’ to gaslight the peons while suppressing any dissenting voices. The Climate Scam is an excellent illustration of that.
A fourth, that is the slam-dunk shut up is the use of religion to make discussion and even heretical thought of competing ideas completely unthinkable.
Thus RELIGION is an excellent cover for activity that would otherwise be condemned. Religion is used to sway emotions and muddy the waters. From what I can tell this is done DELIBERATELY. We can see that playbook used today by naming the Globalist NGOs moving illegals into the USA Catholic… or Lutheran… or Baptist … or even Jewish… and using ‘It’s Charity so Shut-up’ at the least sign of criticism . This allows debate about whether it is actually subversive destruction of the USA via invasion to be completely shut down. So as you read this, take your religious feelings, place them in a box and lock it. Do not allow OTHERS to use your religion against you.
Oh this is good!
I went looking for the quote “If you want to know who rules over you, just look for who you are not allowed to criticize” and Brave AI tossed up this! 😂
The quote “If you want to know who rules over you, just look for who you are not allowed to criticize” is often attributed to Voltaire, but it is actually wrongly attributed. Research indicates that the quote was first said by Kevin Alfred Strom, a white supremacist and Holocaust denier, in 1993.
As I was saying religion makes a really, really good SHUT-UP! Scream Islamophobia or antisemitism and you have successfully shut down the conversation. I really do not care WHO said it, the truth of that quote is obvious. The UK’s tossing people in jail for internet comments is a case in point.
And if you want to bring in religion, remember this:
I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.
Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, who say they are Jews and are not, but do lie — behold, I will make them to come and worship at thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee.
The wise men of the Bible warn us of those who use religion to cloak their lies.
……
Now I want to bring up some of the history that has been buried. I also want to point out the long memory of an enemy. As our good Aubergine pointed out, the treatment of the mountain people in NC will be remembered for generations. I think we might be able to apply that to the Russians and the Khazars.
I am going to start with the US Civil War and then jump back in time where the truth is even harder to find.
… It is indeed true that, as things turned out, the international strategic dimension of the 1861-65 conflict was of secondary importance. However, it was an aspect that repeatedly threatened to thrust itself into the center of the war, transforming the entire nature of the conflict and indeed threatening to overturn the entire existing world system. The big issue was always a British-French attack on the United States to preserve the Confederate States of America. This is certainly how Union and Confederate leaders viewed the matter, and how some important people in London, St. Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin did as well.
The result is that today, the international dimension is consistently underestimated…
Seward, 1861: A US-UK War Would “Wrap the World in Flames”
Kenneth Bourne’s Britain and the Balance of Power in North America, 1815-1908 provides an effective antidote to such sentimental thinking in the form of a notable chapter (singled out for attention by Crook) on the British planning for war with the United States at the time of the Trent affair in December-January 1861, when Seward threatened to “wrap the world in flames” and the British lion roared in reply. [3] Two Confederate envoys, Mason and Slidell, were taken off the British merchant ship Trent by a US warship as they were sailing to plead the cause of intervention in London and Paris; the London press became hysterical with rage, and the anti-Union group in the cabinet saw their chance to start a transatlantic war. This study draws not only upon the British Admiralty archives in the Public Record Office, but also on the papers of Admiral Sir Alexander Milne in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. Bourne depicts the British predicament as their “defenceless” position in Canada, even with the help of the 10,000 additional regular infantry which Palmerston deployed in response to the crisis. (Bourne 211) A recurrent British fear was that their soldiers would desert to the American side, urged on by “crimps.” (Bourne 217).
…. Admiralty Plans to Bombard and Burn Boston and New York
The heart of the British strategy in case of war was “overwhelming naval strength based on a few select fortresses,” especially Bermuda and Halifax (in today’s Nova Scotia). (Bourne 208) British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston dispatched a powerful squadron of eight ships of the line and thirteen frigates and corvettes under Admiral Milne to the western Atlantic, and wanted to use the Great Eastern, the largest ship in the world, as a troop transport. London even considered ways to foment secession in Maine. Bombarding and burning both Boston and New York was actively considered as a contingency; it was concluded that the reduction of Boston would be very difficult because of the channels and forts; New York was seen as more vulnerable, especially to a surprise attack. An Admiralty hydrographer saw New York City as “the true heart of [US] commerce, — the centre of …maritime resources; to strike her would be to paralyse all the limbs.” (Bourne 240)
…. The Union and Russia
The Russian-British rivalry was of course the central antagonism of European history after the Napoleonic era, and the Russian attitude towards London coincided with the traditional American resentment against the former colonial power. Benjamin Platt Thomas’s older study shows that the US-Russian convergence became decisive during the Crimean War; while Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire attacked Russia, the United States was ostentatiously friendly to the court of St. Petersburg. He depicts Russian minister to Washington Éduard de Stoeckl as a diplomat “whose sole aim was to nurture the chronic anti-British feeling in the United States.” (Thomas 111) According to Thomas, Stoeckl succeeded so well that there was even a perceptible chance that the United States might enter the Crimean War on the Russian side. The US press and public were all on the side of Russia, and hostile to the Anglo-French, to the chagrin of the erratic US President Pierce (who had been close to Admiralty agent Giuseppe Mazzini’s pro-British Young America organization) and the doughface politician James Buchanan. The latter, at that time US envoy to London, embraced the British view of the Tsar as “the Despot.” (Thomas 117) Thomas finds that “the Crimean War undoubtedly proved the wisdom of Russia’s policy of cultivating American friendship, and in fact, drew the two nations closer together.” (Thomas 120) But Thomas glosses over some of the more important US-UK frictions during this phase, which included British army recruiting in the US, and the ejection of the British ambassador as persona non grata. (Thomas 120)
Grave of Russian sailor, Nikolay Demidoff, killed in Civil War in Annapolis, MD
“He wasn’t some trouble-maker who got into a silly adventure and was killed in a drunken brawl. American newspapers described his funeral as having been extremely formal, they describe his chestnut casket and a group of officers and other crew members who attended the funeral. A church service which largely impressed local Americans was also described,” said Maksim Alekseyev, the head of Russia’s memorial work department in the US.
…in general, this banknote is being portrayed as an “advertising note”. Never mind that “AMERICAN” above the image of the Russian Czar (Caesar), as well as the relative proportions of the images, could open up a huge can of worms. I do smell a rat in the official version, and offer blog members to combine our investigative efforts. Something does not add up, and may be together we could discover a hidden fact, or two.
At the point of maximum war danger between Great Britain and the United States, the London satirical publication Punch published a vicious caricature of US President Abraham Lincoln and Russian Tsar Alexander II, demonizing the two friends as bloody oppressors. [Cartoon] From Punch, October 24, 1863…
You could easily change the names to Putin and Trump.– GC
KD: I can not stress enough the importance of the lack of photographic evidence. These sketches, in my opinion, are meant to replace the actual photographs which, if used, would reveal something unwanted by the Rulers of this World.
….This story is not a secret by any means, yet my history teacher chose not to mention it. In a nutshell, “Russia’s role in the Civil War was more palpable than just expressing diplomatic support. In September 1863, a Russian fleet of six warships headed to the East coast of North America and stayed there for seven months. Based in New York, they patrolled the surrounding area. A similar thing occurred in the West coast where a fleet of six warships was based in San Francisco. This helped to prevent sudden attacks of Southern raiders on these crucial Union port cities.” Allegedly, the underlying purpose wasto help dissuade Britain and France from siding with the Confederacy…
The below speech authored by a historian named Webster Griffin Tarpley, paints a slightly different picture of the Russian involvement.
Historian Webster Griffin Tarpley talked about the contribution of Russian Tsar Alexander II to a northern victory in the U.S. Civil War. He said that the Imperial Russian government had issued an ultimatum to Britain and France specifying that if those powers should intervene on the side of the Confederate States of America they would immediately find themselves at war with the Russian Empire. Mr. Tarpley marked the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the Russian Baltic Fleet in New York City on September 24, 1863, and of the Russian Pacific Squadron in San Francisco on October 12, 1863. He argued that it was the presence of those fleets that provided the final deterrence. Russia was the only country to extend direct military support to the Lincoln government.
Russia will support in every way possible, and aid to the fullest extent of its power its ancient ally, the United States of America, in its struggle against treason. Under no circumstances will the Czar permit, if his efforts can prevent it, the success of the lately inaugurated rebellion against the laws, and the government of a friendly country….
On April 1, 1861, the Civil War had not yet begun. That day, Secretary of State William Seward drafted a memorandum to Lincoln seeking action against “European intervention.”
“I would at once demand explanations from France and Spain categorically,” Seward wrote. “I would demand explanations from Great Britain and Russia… And if satisfactory explanations are not received from Spain and France, I would convene Congress and declare war against them.”
Seward’s concerns were legitimate.
Seeing America’s weakness, foreign powers had begun challenging the Monroe Doctrine, which forbade European intervention in the Americas.
Spain had annexed its former colony of Santo Domingo on March 18, pointedly increasing its Cuban garrison to 25,000 men. France was saber-rattling over Haiti and other lost colonies.
Meanwhile, British diplomats were working hard to bring Spain, France, and Russia into a coalition strong enough to force Lincoln into recognizing the Confederacy.
These intrigues plainly violated the Monroe Doctrine. But no one cared what America thought anymore. The U.S. was falling apart.
“Our domestic dissensions are producing their natural fruit,” wrote The New York Times on March 30, 1861. “The terror of the American name is gone, and the Powers of the Old World are flocking to the feast from which the scream of our eagle had hitherto scared them. We are just beginning to suffer the penalties of being a weak and despised Power.”
When Seward wrote his memo to Lincoln, the attack on Fort Sumter was still eleven days away. The first shot of our Civil War had not yet been fired.
Yet, the mightiest powers in Europe were already spoiling for a fight.
Britain was the Ringleader
Great Britain was the driving force behind these plots. The British had been planning America’s downfall for years.
England made no secret of her ambitions in North America.
On January 3, 1860, the London Morning Post bluntly called for the restoration of British rule in America.
The Post was known as a mouthpiece for Lord Palmerston, Britain’s Prime Minister. Indeed, Palmerston himself was rumored to write unsigned editorials for the paper, now and then.
Should North and South separate, said the Morning Post on January 3, 1860, the colonies of British North America (later combined into the Dominion of Canada) would then “hold the balance of power on the Continent.” Canada would find herself in a strong position to annex the quarreling fragments of the former USA.
The first target should be Portland, Maine, the Post suggested. Strategically located at the terminus of Canada’s Grand Trunk Railway, Portland harbor provided Canada with access to the Atlantic during the winter months, when every port on the St. Lawrence River was frozen.
Why leave such a vital asset in American hands?
“On military, as well as commercial grounds, it is obviously necessary,” argued the Morning Post, “that British North America should possess on the Atlantic a port open at all times of year…”
The newspaper recommended that the state of Maine should join the British Empire voluntarily, once the Union collapsed. “[T]he people of that State, with an eye to commercial profit, should offer to annex themselves to Canada,” it suggested….
In the two millennia since the Romans fortified the lowest crossing point of the River Thames, the City of London’s wealth has meant neither the Crown, nor Parliament could subordinate it. From an early stage, the City became the dominant power in foreign policy and government finance in Britain (nee England). The Ulster plantation and the Royal charters for the Levant Company and the East India Company were orchestrated by powerful City financiers. Traditionally, and to the ire of successive generations of British manufacturers, the City of London preferred international investments to investing in local industry.
The use of debt as a weapon wasn’t invented by City of London financiers, but they perfected the technique in the years preceding the Age of Financial Capitalism. At the time Europe was scrambling to halt Napoleon’s advance and were forced to borrow to finance their extra expenditure, in desperation they turned to the City. From this point, the City’s financiers had brought the rulers of Europe into debt servitude, under financial and banker management.
“The defeat of Napoleon in 1815 (the Bank of England, the City and the Rothschilds played a key role by financing the Emperor’s enemies), the expansion of the Empire and the Industrial Revolution, allowed Britain to establish its position as international hegemon with supremacy in industry, shipping and finance… [The City] preferred the more profitable opportunities offered by financing trade and foreign wars, making loans to governments and generating speculative investment opportunities. Capitalist Industrial production like agriculture before it, depended largely on regional and local sources of finance …” (Lambie, p. 341)
We can’t talk about the City of London in this period without giving special mention to the Rothschild family. Between 1808 and 1859 they developed a capital fund and intelligence service that their rivals couldn’t compete with...
…One of Rothschild’s couriers was a man named Rothworth. When the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo was won by the British, Rothworth took off for the Channel and was able to deliver this news to Nathan Mayer Rothschild, a full 24 hours before Wellington’s own courier…
When news came through that the British had actually won the war, the consuls went up to a level even higher than before the war ended leaving Nathan Mayer Rothschild with a return of approximately 20 to 1 on his investment.
This gave the Rothschild family complete control of the British economy, now the financial centre of the world following Napolean’s defeat, and forced England to set up a new Bank of England, which Nathan Mayer Rothschild controlled.
Interestingly, 100 years later the New York Times would run a story stating that Nathan Mayer Rothschild’s grandson had attempted to secure a court order to suppress publication of a book which had this insider trading story in it. The Rothschild family claimed the story was untrue and libellous, but the court denied the Rothschilds request and ordered the family to pay all court costs.
Back to 1815, this is the year Nathan Mayer Rothschild makes his famous statement,
“I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply.”
…something that did not go well for the Rothschilds this year was the Congress of Vienna, which started in September, 1814 and concluded in June of this year. The reason for this Congress of Vienna, was for the Rothschilds to create a form of world government, to give them complete political control over much of the civilized world.
Many of the European governments were in debt to the Rothschilds, so they figured they could use that as a bargaining tool. However the Tsar Alexander I of Russia, who had not succumbed to a Rothschild central bank, would not go along with the plan, so the Rothschild world government plan failed. [Seems Putin has followed in Tsar Alexander’s foot steps. –GC]
Enraged by this, Nathan Mayer Rothschild swore that some day he or his descendants would destroy the Tsar Alexander 1st’s entire family and descendants. Unfortunately he was true to his word and 102 years later Rothschild funded Bolsheviks would act upon that promise….
However the Rothschilds do not wait a century to get revenge.
Czar Alexander II, the ruler of Russia since 1855, is killed in the streets of St. Petersburg by a bomb thrown by a member of the revolutionary “People’s Will” group. The People’s Will, organized in 1879, employed terrorism and assassination in their attempt to overthrow Russia’s czarist autocracy. They murdered officials and made several attempts on the czar’s life before finally assassinating him on March 13, 1881. — This Day In History
After four previous attempts, Rothschild’s Red terrorists finally succeed in assassinating Czar Alexander II of Russia. With his son Alexander III, and grandson Nicholas watching, the Marxists hurl bombs at the Czar. Alexander’s legs are blown off and he bleeds to death.
Due to the presence of so many Jews in the revolutionary movement, anti-Semitic violence sweeps across Russia after the Czar’s murder. These “pogroms”, though exaggerated for propaganda purposes, help to trigger a wave of Jewish immigration to the United States, England, and Germany.
JULY 2, 1881 U.S PRESIDENT JAMES GARFIELD IS SHOT / DIES FROM WOUND INFECTION IN SEPTEMBER
The civilized world is still reeling from the brutal murder of Czar Alexander II just a few months earlier. Now America will lose its 2nd President in 16 years to an assassin’s bullet. James Garfield is an Ohio Republican who has only been in office 4 months.
Garfield is a brilliant scholar, talented orator, and an advocate of interest-free “hard money” (gold) as a national currency. Like Napoleon, Andrew Jackson and Abe Lincoln before him, Garfield mistrusts of the international bankers. Garfield warns:
“Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.”(1)
The actual quote below is hearsay from David Duke.🙄
You must understand, the leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians. They hated Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred they tortured and slaughtered millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse. It cannot be overstated. Bolshevism committed the greatest human slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant and uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the global media is in the hands of the perpetrators. – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The article give more accurate quotes directly from Solzhenitsyn’s writings that substantiate the content of the above quote.
During this same general time frame you have the rise of Karl Marx
WIKI
… in Paris in 1844, Marx wrote his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and met Engels, who became his closest friend and collaborator. After moving to Brussels in 1845, they were active in the Communist League, and in 1848 they wrote The Communist Manifesto, which expresses Marx’s ideas and lays out a programme for revolution. Marx was expelled from Belgium and Germany, and in 1849 moved to London, where he wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) and Das Kapital….
Various articles that connect Marx to the Rothschilds from Karl Marx Mom’s first cousin is married Nathan Rothschild, founder of the British branch of the Rothschild banking dynasty to SxyxS says: rch 17, 2017 at 12:05 am
Marx secretary Pieper was at the same time employed the Rothschild. When the Rothschild left Frankfurt they went to Paris(the first place Marx lived in Exile) and London(the second exile home of Marx).
Then you have Rothschild funding the Fabian London School of EconomicsLINK
American Fabian, John Dewey funded by the Rockefeller’s becoming the ‘Father of US Progressive Education’.
…The Round Table movement served as the intellectual center of the international operations to regain control of the British Empire and took on several incarnations over the 20th century. The historian Carrol Quigley, of Georgetown University wrote of this cabal in his posthumously published “Anglo-American Establishment” (6):
“This organization has been able to conceal its existence quite successfully, and many of its most influential members, satisfied to possess the reality rather than the appearance of power, are unknown even to close students of British history. This is the more surprising when we learn that one of the chief methods by which this Group works has been through propaganda.
It plotted the Jameson Raid of 1895; it caused the Boer War of 1899-1902; it set up and controls the Rhodes Trust; it created the Union of South Africa in 1906-1910; it established the South African periodical The State in 1908; it founded the British Empire periodical The Round Table in 1910, and this remains the mouthpiece of the Group; it has been the most powerful single influence in All Souls, Balliol, and New Colleges at Oxford for more than a generation; it has controlled The Times for more than fifty years, with the exception of the three years 1919-1922, it publicized the idea of and the name “British Commonwealth of Nations” in the period 1908-1918, it was the chief influence in Lloyd George’s war administration in 1917-1919 and dominated the British delegation to the Peace Conference of 1919; it had a great deal to do with the formation and management of the League of Nations and of the system of mandates; it founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1919 and still controls it; it was one of the chief influences on British policy toward Ireland, Palestine, and India in the period 1917-1945; it was a very important influence on the policy of appeasement of Germany during the years 1920-1940; and it controlled and still controls, to a very considerable extent, the sources and the writing of the history of British Imperial and foreign policy since the Boer War.” (7)
To understand the pedigree of the Round Table movement as it was “officially” unveiled in 1910 as the ideological shaper of the policies and paradigm of the new “managerial class” of international imperialists dedicated to the salvation of the British Empire under an “Imperial Federation”, it would be necessary to go back a few decades prior, to 1873-74….
The model of the Round Table involved a central coordinating body in London, with branches strategically placed throughout the Commonwealth in order to provide one vision and voice to the young and talented “upper managerial class” of the reformed British Empire. Parkin and Peacock were joined by Lord Alfred Milner, Sir Arthur Glazebrook, W.T. Stead, Arthur Balfour and Lord Nathan Rothschild as co-trustees.
Working in tandem with the eugenicists of the Fabian Society of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Balfour had founded the first International Eugenics Conference in 1912 alongside enthusiastic recruits such as young Roundtable member Winston Churchill.
Please note the name of Round Table co-trustee Arthur Balfour, of the Balfour Agreement that set-up Israel.
Moving a bit forward in time, I document Colonel Towner’s discovery of an address in NYC in my articleOperation Gladio
There is an address in NYC called 120 Broadway. It is where the Fed was, it was where FDRs first office was, the Boys Club, the Dinner Club, the Rockefellers’ office is, the Rothschilds, the banks, JP Morgan, They are ALL in this building. They orchestrate EVERYTHING out of this building. They do not have to go out side. They funded the Bolsheviks
THE KHAZAR CONVERSION TO JUDAISMAdapted from the English translation of The Kuzari by Hartwig Hirschfeld, published in 1905 by George Routledge and Sons, Ltd.
Please note the date: 1905 , eight years before the Federal Reserve act was published. I consider this a pleasant fairy tale.
WILD SPECULATION: The other string to the Khazarian bow is said to be usury. Of the three religions, only Jews were allowed to lend money at interest. To make the most money on each trading trip, being able to borrow money at interest, so you have the funds to invest in the maximum amount of trade goods, would make sense. This is especially true when starting out in business. Such a crass reason for picking Judaism, would cast doubt on the sincerity of the ‘conversion’ from Pagan so would not be make public.
However the most interesting tidbit I found in all my digging was in 1913:
** 👉1913, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was founded in Chicago by Sigmund Livingston, a Chicago attorney in 1913.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Now I want to jump back centuries. This means the information is a lot harder to find and cannot be easily validated. I already covered the History of Khazaria back in August last year. The two most interesting and solid pieces of information I have found are:
1050 years ago, in the summer of 965, [note the specific date -GC] the great Russian prince Svyatoslav Igorevich defeated the Khazar army and took the capital of the Khazar Kaganate, Itil. The lightning strike of the Russian troops with the support of the Allied Pechenegs led to the collapse of the parasitic Khazar state. Russ committed a sacred revenge, destroying the Khazar “snake”…
Khazar threat
The fight against the parasitic state of the Khazars was the most important strategic task of Russia.👉The trade and usurious elite of Khazaria,👈 who subjugated the Khazar tribal military nobility, held in their hands all the exits from Eastern Europe to the East.
The Khazar state received huge profits by controlling transit routes.The Khazar Khaganate represented a serious military threat to Russia. Archaeologists have discovered a whole system of stone fortresses on the right bank of the Don, North Donets and Oskol. One white-stone stronghold was located at a distance of 10-20 kilometers from the other. The outposts were located on the right, western and northwestern banks of the rivers. An important role in the construction of these fortresses was played by Byzantine engineers. So, Sarkel (Belaya Vezha) on the bank of the Don was built by Byzantine engineers led by Petron Kamatir. Yes, and strengthened Itil Byzantines-Romans. The Khazar state played an important role in the military-political strategy of Constantinople, holding back Russia….
The Khazars made campaigns and raids in the Slavic-Russian lands. Arab geographer Al-Idrisi reported thatKhazar vassals regularly made raids on the Slavs, in order to steal people for sale into slavery. These were not just spontaneous raids, from time to time, but a deliberate predatory strategy on the part of the parasite state.In the Khazar state, thepower was seized by the Jews representing the caste of rakhdonites (radanity).
👉This caste of international traders controlled trade between East and West, including the Silk Road and other communications. Their influence extended all the way to China and India.👈One of their main “goods” were people. The slave clan👉worshiped the “golden calf” and measured everything in gold….👈
When I read this, I cannot help thinking of Putin quoting history to Tucker Carlson before Carlson cut him off. Note the article gives dates and names.
This article, along with the well researched maps below, goes into the History of the Khazars. The KEY for us is the pointers to “usurious elite” and “caste of international traders” This is on top of the outward conversion to Judaism for political reasons and “worshiped the “golden calf” and measured everything in gold.“ Other articles accuse the Khazars of being pagans with very nasty habits. However when I look for a ‘neutral’ article on Pagan Khazar, all I can find is fluff about the Khazars sacrificing animals. You have to go to Azerbaijan before information on human sacrifice surfaces. LINK and LINK Cuppa Covfefe on current Satanic rituals:LINK
This book traces the history of the ancient Khazar Empire, a major but almost forgotten power in Eastern Europe, which in the Dark Ages became converted to Judaism.
Khazaria was finally wiped out by the forces of Genghis Khan, but evidence indicates that the Khazars themselves migrated to Poland and formed the cradle of Western Jewry… The Khazars’ sway extended from the Black Sea to the Caspian, from the Caucasus to the Volga, and they were instrumental in stopping the Muslim onslaught against Byzantium, the eastern jaw of the gigantic pincer movement that in the West swept across northern Africa and into Spain.
In the second part of this book, “The Heritage,” Mr. Koestler speculates about the ultimate faith of the Khazars and their impact on the racial composition and social heritage of modern Jewry.
He produces a large body of meticulously detailed research in support of a theory that sounds all the more convincing for the restraint with which it is advanced.
Yet should this theory be confirmed, the term “anti-Semitism” would become void of meaning, since, as Mr. Koestler writes, it is based,
“on a misapprehension shared by both the killers and their victims. The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.”
THE evidence quoted in the previous pages indicates that — contrary to the traditional view held by nineteenth-century historians — the Khazars, after the defeat by the Russians in 965, lost their empire but retained their independence within narrower frontiers, and their Judaic faith, well into the thirteenth century. They even seem to have reverted to some extent to their erstwhile predatory habits. Baron comments:
In general, the reduced Khazar kingdom persevered. It waged a more or less effective defence against all foes until the middle of the thirteenth century, when it fell victim to the great Mongol invasion set in motion by Jenghiz Khan. Even then it resisted stubbornly until the surrender of all its neighbours. Its population was largely absorbed by the Golden Horde which had established the centre of its empire in Khazar territory. But before and after the Mongol upheaval the Khazars sent many offshoots into the unsubdued Slavonic lands, helping ultimately to build up the great Jewish centres of eastern Europe.
…The Khazar origin of the numerically and socially dominant element in the Jewish population of Hungary during the Middle Ages is thus relatively well documented. It might seem that Hungary constitutes a special case, in view of the early Magyar-Khazar connection; but in fact the Khazar influx into Hungary was merely a part of the general mass-migration from the Eurasian steppes toward the West, i.e., towards Central and Eastern Europe….
The migration toward safer pastures was a protracted, intermittent process which went on for several centuries. The Khazar exodus was part of the general picture. It had been preceded, as already mentioned, by the founding of Khazar colonies and settlements in various places in the Ukraine and southern Russia. There was a flourishing Jewish community in Kiev long before and after the Rus took the town from the Khazars.
Similar colonies existed in Perislavel and Chernigov. A Rabbi Mosheh of Kiev studied in France around 1160, and a Rabbi Abraham of Chernigov studied in 1181 in the Talmud School of London. The “Lay of Igor’s Host” mentions a famous contemporary Russian poet called Kogan — possibly a combination of Cohen (priest) and Kagan. Some time after Sarkel, which the Russians called Biela Veza, was destroyed the Khazars built a town of the same name near Chernigov….
According to the article “statistics” in the Jewish Encyclopaedia, in the sixteenth century the total Jewish population of the world amounted to about one million. This seems to indicate, as Poliak, Kutschera and others have pointed out, that during the Middle Ages the majority of those who professed the Judaic faith were Khazars. A substantial part of this majority went to Poland, Lithuania, Hungary and the Balkans, where they founded that Eastern Jewish community which in its turn became the dominant majority of world Jewry…
So much for size. But what do we know of the social structure and composition of the Khazar immigrant community? The first impression one gains is a striking similarity between certain privileged positions held by Khazar Jews in Hungary and in Poland in those early days. Both the Hungarian and Polish sources refer to Jews employed as mintmasters, administrators of the royal revenue, controllers of the salt monopoly, taxcollectors and “money-lenders” — i.e., bankers.
….the transformation of Khazar Jewry into Polish Jewry did not entail any brutal break with the past, or loss of identity. It was a gradual, organic process of change, which — as Poliak has convincingly shown — preserved some vital traditions of Khazar communal life in their new country.
This was mainly achieved through the emergence of a social structure, or way of life, found nowhere else in the world Diaspora…
The shtetl, on the other hand, was a quite different proposition — a type of settlement which, as already said, existed only in Poland-Lithuania and nowhere else in the world. It was a self-contained country town with an exclusively or predominantly Jewish population.
The shtetl’s origins probably date back to the thirteenth century, and may represent the missing link, as it were, between the market towns of Khazaria and the Jewish settlements in Poland. The economic and social function of these semi-rural, semiurban agglomerations seems to have been similar in both countries. In Khazaria, as later in Poland, they provided a network of trading posts or market towns which mediated between the needs of the big towns and the countryside.
They had regular fairs at which sheep and cattle, alongside the goods manufactured in the towns and the products of the rural cottage industries were sold or bartered; at the same time they were the centres where artisans plied their crafts, from wheelwrights to blacksmiths, silversmiths, tailors, Kosher butchers, millers, bakers and candlestick-makers. There were also letter-writers for the illiterate, synagogues for the faithful, inns for travellers, and a heder — Hebrew for “room”, which served as a school. There were itinerant story-tellers and folk bards (some of their names, such as Velvel Zbarzher, have been preserved) travelling from shtetl to shtetl in Poland — and no doubt earlier on in Khazaria, if one is to judge by the survival of story-tellers among Oriental people to our day.
…Some particular trades became virtually a Jewish monopoly in Poland. One was dealing in timber — which reminds one that timber was the chief building material and an important export in Khazaria; another was transport. “The dense net of shtetls,” writes Poliak, “made it possible to distribute manufactured goods over the whole country by means of the superbly built Jewish type of horse cart. The preponderance of this kind of transport, especially in the east of the country, was so marked amounting to a virtual monopoly — that the Hebrew word for carter, ba‘al agalah was incorporated into the Russian language as balagula…
…After the Mongol conquest”, wrote Poliak, “when the Slav villages wandered westward, the Khazar shtetls went with them.”
The pioneers of the new settlements were probably rich Khazar traders who constantly travelled across Poland on the much frequented trade routes into Hungary. “The Magyar and Kabar migration into Hungary blazed the trail for the growing Khazar settlements in Poland: it turned Poland into a transit area between the two countries with Jewish communities.”….
….
…Mr. Koestler was an Ashkenazi Jew and took pride in his Khazar ancestry. He was also a very talented and successful writer who published over 25 novels and essays. His most successful book, Darkness at Noon, was translated in thirty-three languages.
As expected, The Thirteenth Tribe caused a stir when published in 1976, since it demolishes ancient racial and ethnic dogmas… At the height of the controversy in 1983, the lifeless bodies of Arthur Koestler and his wife were found in their London home. Despite significant inconsistencies, the police ruled their death a suicide… https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_khazar01a.htm
The Wiki article is as expected slanted in the other direction but does give some very useful tidbits. It is quite long since Koestler was very active during the World Wars and traveled a lot.
…Koestler’s mother, Adele Jeiteles, was born on 25 June 1871 into a prominent Jewish family in Prague….” [that would be adjacent to Poland. –GC] …
On 1 April 1926, he left Vienna for Palestine… In interwar Vienna he wound up as the personal secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement. Traveling in Soviet Turkmenistan as a young and ardent Communist, he ran into Langston Hughes. While reporting on the Spanish Civil War, he met W. H. Auden at a “crazy party” in Valencia before winding up in one of Franco’s prisons. In Weimar Berlin he fell into the circle of the Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg, through whom he met the leading German Communists… In the early 1930s, Koestler moved to the Soviet Union. In 1932, Koestler travelled in Turkmenistan and Central Asia… During his stay in the Soviet Union, he also lived for a time in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic,… He wrote propaganda under the direction of Willi Münzenberg, the Comintern’s chief propaganda director in the West…
So this guy was all over Europe, got rescued by the Brits twice, ended up working for the British Ministry of Information, became a UK citizen. Lived in the USA… Given his family background as wealthy eastern European Jews and his traveling before the massive destruction of WWI, I am inclined to believe he had a decent handle on the truth.
Also Arthur Koestler’s book is consistent with the finding of this Jewish researcher at John Hopkins.
…Dr. Eran Elhaik, geneticist researcher at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, found that today’s “Jews” originated from Khazaria and not Israel. They are not the seed of Abraham.
From WIKI:
Eran Elhaik (born 1980) is an Israeli-American geneticist and bioinformatician, an associate professor of bioinformatics at Lund University in Sweden and Chief of Science Officer at an ancestry testing company called Ancient DNA Origins owned by Enkigen
What I find VERY interesting is both of these people who are Jews have their work attacked by Israelis.
“an interdisciplinary historian and philologist at Bar-Ilan University. He is working currently on medieval and early modern Jewish minority communities, the Crimea, and the Khazars.”
Wiki on Tablet Magazine:
Tablet was founded in June 2009 by Alana Newhouse, former culture editor at The Forward, with the support of the Nextbook foundation as a redeveloped and news-focused version of the Jewish literary journalNextbook.In the three years after its founding, New York Magazine described Tablet as a “must-read for young politically and culturally engaged Jews. Its reporting has largely focused on Jewish news and culture….
“In Khazaria, sheep, honey, and Jews exist in large quantities.” Muqaddasi, Descriptio Imperii Moslemici (tenth century).
Chapter I: Rise
….Professor Dunlop of Columbia University, a leading authority on the history of the Khazars, has given a concise summary of this decisive yet virtually unknown episode:
“The Khazar country . . . lay across the natural line of advance of the Arabs. Within a few years of the death of Muhammad (AD 632) the armies of the Caliphate, sweeping northward through the wreckage of two empires and carrying all before them, reached the great mountain barrier of the Caucasus. This barrier once passed, the road lay open to the lands of eastern Europe. As it was, on the line of the Caucasus the Arabs met the forces of an organized military power which effectively prevented them from extending their conquests in this direction. The wars of the Arabs and the Khazars, which lasted more than a hundred years, though little known, have thus considerable historical importance. The Franks of Charles Martel on the field of Tours turned the tide of Arab invasion. At about the same time the threat to Europe in the east was hardly less acute . . . The victorious Muslims were met and held by the forces of the Khazar kingdom . . . It can . . . scarcely be doubted that but for the existence of the Khazars in the region north of the Caucasus, Byzantium, the bulwark of European civilization in the east, would have found itself outflanked by the Arabs, and the history of Christendom and Islam might well have been very different from what we know.”
It is perhaps not surprising, given these circumstances, that in 732—after a resounding Khazar victory over the Arabs—the future Emperor Constantine V married a Khazar princess. In due time their son became the Emperor Leo IV, known as Leo the Khazar.
Ironically, the last battle in the war, AD 737, ended in a Khazar defeat. But by that time the impetus of the Muslim Holy War was spent, the Caliphate was rocked by internal dissensions, and the Arab invaders retraced their steps across the Caucasus without having gained a permanent foothold in the north, whereas the Khazars became more powerful than they had previously been....
After half a century of reticence and recrimination, Israel on Wednesday honored nine Egyptian Jews recruited as agents-provocateur in what became one of the worst intelligence bungles in the country’s history.
Israel was at war with Egypt when it hatched a plan in 1954 to ruin its rapprochement with the United States and Britain by firebombing sites frequented by foreigners in Cairo and Alexandria.
Israeli hoped the attacks, which caused no casualties, would be blamed on local insurgents collapsed when the young Zionist bombers were caught and confessed at public trials. Two were hanged. The rest served jail terms and emigrated to Israel.
Embarrassed before the West, the fledgling Jewish state long denied involvement….
No it was not embarrassment, it was need for continued monetary and military support. It was also not the last time.
This is from the book Body of Secrets, the history of the NSA. A big question for Americans regarding the Israeli attack on the Liberty, relates to the MOTIVE. Why? Why did the Israelis attack the Liberty?
Israel later told the US Govt that they “made a mistake”. The Jews also did this in the 1948 war when they murdered entire villages of Arabs. They just said “It was a mistake” and that’s the end of it. According to the book, the US Govt, especially the military/intelligence people did NOT buy the “mistake story” of the Jews. The evidence is totally clear, because Israeli planes came and watched the Liberty for hours and they flew past it. The Israelis knew 100% this was an American ship. Also, all survivors state that the US Flag was flying clearly on a sunny day. The Israelis knew they were attacking an American ship.
But why? Well, the real secret that the Israeli’s have kept, is that the USS Liberty was close to the coast and in view of a town called El Arish. And in El Arish, the Jews were busy murdering, Egyptian POWS. In fact, the Israeli army was doing a LOT of civilian murder that day. But the USS Libery, as a spy ship, was listening in on all radio comms and was picking up everything. And the Israelis knew it was a US spy ship. In order to hide their slaughter of the POW’s, they wanted to sink the Liberty and ensure that NOBODY SURVIVED. That is why they engaged in the brutal, hours-long attack that they did.
Here is the real secret about the USS Liberty. This is how the book describes the murder of about 1,000 Egyptians who had surrendered that day. When a soldier surrenders, you are to look after him. That is international law. Israel, in violation of international law was carrying out a genocide. This is how the book describes it. Page 201-204:
By June 8, three days after Israel launched the war, Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai had become nuisances. There was no place to house them, not enough Israelis to watch them, and few vehicles to transport them to prison camps. But there was another way to deal with them.
As the Liberty sat within eyeshot of El Arish, eavesdropping on surrounding communications, Israeli soldiers turned the town into a slaughterhouse, systematically butchering their prisoners. In the shadow of the El Arish mosque, they lined up about sixty unarmed Egyptian prisoners, hands tied behind their backs, and then opened fire with machine guns until the pale desert sand turned red. Then they forced other prisoners to bury the victims in mass graves. “I saw a line of prisoners, civilians and military,” said Abdelsalam Moussa, one of those who dug the graves, “and they opened fire at them all at once. When they were dead, they told us to bury them.” Nearby, another group of Israelis gunned down thirty more prisoners and then ordered some Bedouins to cover them with sand.
The IDF had precise information about Hamas’s intentions, but due to prevailing conceptions in the security establishment and possible negligence by officials, the warning signs were not acted on. By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
A newly surfaced document has revealed that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and intelligence systems had detailed knowledge of Hamas’s plan to raid Israel and kidnap 250 people weeks before the October 7 massacre.
The document, which was compiled in the Gaza Division, outlined Hamas’s intentions and was known to top intelligence officials, according to a report by Kan News.
The document, titled “Detailed End-to-End Raid Training,” was distributed on September 19, 2023, and described in detail the series of exercises conducted by Hamas’s elite units.
Colonel Towner remarked the use of para-gliders was a known Operation Gladio tactic.
Is there continuety from the Khazars to the present day bankers? I do not know but there is certainly animosity between the Russians and the Rothschilds that goes back centuries.
And so I leave you with this photo of No-Name, Lieberman and Rothschild
Welcome. Please visit this January 1st daily thread for the rules of the road, which are few but important.
Header Image: 2024 Presidential Election Map by County
Do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
These are the kind of powerful words that motivated America’s founding fathers to create the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. — Galatians 5:1
It is going to require a decision on our part to “stand firm” and “not submit again” before we are going to begin to take this seriously. But we have the help of God and the intensely determined support of our President, his team, and untold numbers of our fellow citizens.
We got our miracle. America is back. Now what?
Let us dedicate ourselves to seeking our place in the cleansing, healing, and rebuilding of this beautiful, resource-rich nation. Are we to pray? Of course. Are we to vote? Absolutely.
But we know there is much to do and not all is certain. We might find ourselves asking, “What am I to do in these amazing days of transformation?” God will guide us.
Priorities.
The Trump-Vance Administration Priorities page @ WhiteHouse.gov provides us with the eagle’s eye view of where we are going. Notice the order of these priorities. Safety of the people first! May the Lord grant us wisdom, strength, and good success.
MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN
President Trump will take bold action to secure our border and protect American communities.
This includes ending Biden’s catch-and-release policies, reinstating Remain in Mexico, building the wall, ending asylum for illegal border crossers, cracking down on criminal sanctuaries, and enhancing vetting and screening of aliens.
President Trump’s deportation operation will address the record border crossings of criminal aliens under the prior administration.
The President is suspending refugee resettlement, after communities were forced to house large and unsustainable populations of migrants, straining community safety and resources.
The Armed Forces, including the National Guard, will engage in border security, which is national security, and will be deployed to the border to assist existing law enforcement personnel.
President Trump will begin the process of designating cartels, including the dangerous Tren de Aragua, as foreign terrorist organizations and use the Alien Enemies Act to remove them.
The Department of Justice will seek the death penalty as the appropriate punishment for heinous crimes against humanity, including those who kill law enforcement officers and illegal migrants who maim and murder Americans.
MAKE AMERICA AFFORDABLE AND ENERGY DOMINANT AGAIN
The President will unleash American energy by ending Biden’s policies of climate extremism, streamlining permitting, and reviewing for rescission all regulations that impose undue burdens on energy production and use, including mining and processing of non-fuel minerals.
President Trump’s energy actions empower consumer choice in vehicles, showerheads, toilets, washing machines, lightbulbs and dishwashers.
President Trump will declare an energy emergency and use all necessary resources to build critical infrastructure.
President Trump’s energy policies will end leasing to massive wind farms that degrade our natural landscapes and fail to serve American energy consumers.
President Trump will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.
All agencies will take emergency measures to reduce the cost of living.
President Trump will announce the America First Trade Policy.
America will no longer be beholden to foreign organizations for our national tax policy, which punishes American businesses.
DRAIN THE SWAMP
The President will usher a Golden Age for America by reforming and improving the government bureaucracy to work for the American people. He will freeze bureaucrat hiring except in essential areas to end the onslaught of useless and overpaid DEI activists buried into the federal workforce. He will pause burdensome and radical regulations not yet in effect that Biden announced.
President Trump is announcing an unprecedented slate of executive orders for rescission.
President Trump is planning for improved accountability of government bureaucrats. The American people deserve the highest-quality service from people who love our country. The President will also return federal workers to work, as only 6% of employees currently work in person.
President Trump is taking swift action to end the weaponization of government against political rivals and ordering all document retention as required by law. President Trump is also ending the unconstitutional censorship by the federal government. No longer will government employees pick and require the erasure of entirely true speech.
On the President’s direction, the State Department will have an America-First foreign policy.
BRING BACK AMERICAN VALUES
The President will establish male and female as biological reality and protect women from radical gender ideology.
American landmarks will be named to appropriately honor our Nation’s history.
Trying to Keep Up.
This page @ WhiteHouse.gov/news is a great place to follow along as everything begins to unfold. Every executive order shows up instantly and they just keep coming.
So much there: Articles. Briefings & Statements. Fact Sheets. Presidential Actions. Remarks.
A big Thank You to all the team serving in this administration! And an even bigger Thank You to our 47th President, Donald J. Trump.
Twitterati.
Very recently I finally began to read in the X.com space. The platform is suspicious of me and therefore I do not have an account. Probably due to the basic efforts I’ve made to retain some level of privacy. Oh well.
The kind people here have shown me the way to view people’s feeds by using the Nitter.Poast.org site. It’s opened up a whole new world of information. Very helpful.
I have a new favorite follow. And I recommend her to you. Nicole Shanahan. She was RFK Jr’s running mate. She’s as informed, active and feisty as they come. Nicole Shanahan‘s feed is following the Senate confirmations and a LOT more.
For fresh news on our J6 people and a lot more, Julie Kelly might be the place to visit.
Prayer.
God Bless America, Land that I love. Stand beside her, and guide her Thru the night with a light from above. From the mountains, to the prairies, To the oceans, white with foam God bless America, My home sweet home.
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.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
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.
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.
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