“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
wallflower
noun, adjective
a color which is yellowish red
an attribute of being colored yellowish red
a light purple color marketed by Sherwin-Williams
a genus of flowering plants, Erysimum, in the family Brassicaceae (mustards)
a shy, unassuming person
Used in a sentence
Whether wallflower is yellow-to-red or purple seems to depend upon the circumstances.
Shown in a picture
Shown in a different picture
But wait! Some wallflowers show the other wallflower!
MUSIC!
Wallflowers. Just can’t get away from them!
But wait! There’s moar!
THE STUFF
So what do you think about going to Mars? I can tell you, the crowd at Trump’s inauguration was incredibly enthusiastic. I was cheering BIG TIME. But let’s look at it more critically – both sides of the question. We’ve learned from Trump – always cover the downside. Listen to the critics, and think about what they say.
Welcome. Please visit this January 1st daily thread for the rules of the road, which are few but important.
2024 Presidential Election Map by County. Let us Never Forget: our VOTES gave the Trump Administration a Mandate to FIX IT ALL.
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.
Federal Crimes
We pretty much already knew that the elections were not being run lawfully. Marly Hornik of United Sovereign Americans knows the law. Let’s take a look.
1/ SECURING LIBERTY IN AMERICA Marly Hornik, co-founded the national election validity organization, United Sovereign Americans, with cyber and election security subject matter expert Harry Haury. Her presentation warning fellow Americans of the constitutional and legal disaster of our elections, made at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach on March 3, 2025, is contained in this thread:
2/ The current election process nationwide is an uncontrolled, unmonitored catastrophe that is producing false returns. The last bastion of freedom on Earth is at risk of being destroyed forever, as early as 2026. Under President Trump’s decisive leadership, we see the proof that our own government has been selling out our kids’ future by stealing trillions of dollars per year from the American people, making us pay for their often-twisted agenda. Nowhere have officials betrayed us as badly as in our elections, nationwide.
3/ USA is the first organization to measure election misconduct as defined under criminal law, to deeply study Supreme Court precedent, and document the scale of defined election fraud nationwide. After years of law enforcement meetings, official reports, legislative hearings, criminal referrals and staggering trial-ready evidence, massive election fraud is still being illegally certified as accurate. Asking whether election officials are bad people is irrelevant—their job is to prevent fraud, and they are legally required to prove it to us. That’s what we pay them for. Twenty-one Chief Election Officials have been fully briefed, nine have been sued, and every last one has proven disloyal to the sovereign they serve—the American people—and disloyal to the contract we made with our government, the United States Constitution.
4/ USA has tracked tens of millions of individual felonies. We were the first to discover and document the algorithms and central vote manipulation. We filed our detailed data with states, the FBI, Homeland Security, and the DOJ under the previous administration, and filed nine federal lawsuits demanding that election commissions follow the law. And what did we prove? Every last federalized state election official believes they are the sovereign, and they are the one who chooses our representatives. Every last one. They are perfectly content to continue violating our Constitution down to the root.
5/ Our founders were masters of philosophy. They said the job of a government is to protect the gift of life. Our government guarantees individual sovereignty, within the boundaries of a social contract. To fix our election problems, we must work inside this structure, or we will damage our gift in anger and undisciplined haste.
6/ The first sentence says we secure the blessing of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. The second sentence says all power to make laws is vested in Congress. The third sentence says that the people of the several states shall choose those lawmakers. Period. They work for us. If valid elections were not the key to securing liberty, the Constitution would be written in a different order.
7/ And that is why election officials who ignore and break federal law are prosecuted as criminals. When they register false voters, accept and count illegal ballots, certify false tallies, and destroy or hide records, they sacrifice our future in their arrogance, and they can land in federal prison. The job of an election official is to act in honor for our country. It’s not for the weak.
8/ A voter registration record cannot contain false or invalid information. If a record is not 100% legitimate, it is suspicious. Before it can be added to the official list of voters, it must be scrutinized according to strict legal process.
9/ USA audited the official state records of the certified 2022 midterms, in 21 states. We found 29 million material errors in the official lists of voters. Voters registered before they were born, registered after voting in federal elections, voters named asterisk, voters with no name at all, or blank addresses. Garbage data. How did they get this bad?
10/ Now let me show you what we found in California’s infamous 2024 election: 9.5 million times, the control process failed at registration. This is not clerical error, this is criminal. When the voter rolls are broken, it is criminal election fraud. You can’t “clean” them. They cannot be trusted, nor used to secure a world power against enemies, foreign and domestic.
11/ In New York, the control process broke 5.8 million times. Elections secure the law; if elections have no law, we have no law.
12/ Here are the sickening facts regarding California’s actual vote in 2024. The only legal way for these voters to vote was via provisional ballot. Did California accept 5.5 million provisional ballots in 2024, and adjudicate each one according to the law? That’s one in every three voters who voted. How can they not know who one third of their voters are?
13/ They can’t. California broke the third sentence of the Constitution, and illegally certified 52 members for the United States House of Representatives, plus Adam Schiff. We need to stop maligning voters we disagree with, and start putting criminals in jail.
14/ New York illegally certified 26 members of the House of Representatives, and Senator Gillibrand. Who are each of these people working for? We’re not saying none of them were chosen by the people. The problem is no one knows. Why are we accepting that for our loved ones and our country? Is that the life you were created for? The theft of legitimate representation is a heinous crime.
15/ We took it one step further. USA studied the identity of the voters ourselves. Our attorneys hired a private investigator. Searching in three unique commercial law-enforcement tools, used to find people precisely in space and time, we could not find 993,000 voters in California’s midterm. Nearly a million voters who don’t exist had their votes counted. Nearly half a million voters who don’t exist had their votes counted in Pennsylvania. You’re looking at 8.5 million illegal votes. No one bothered to verify them. Our country is under attack. We put people in jail for a handful of fake ballots, yet these crimes have so far gone unpunished.
16/ USA is strongly in favor of voter ID. It will make the election officials’ job much easier, which protects them and protects America. But as you can see here, it will not fix the entire process of an election. There are numerous control points within the election system under direct attack. They must all be secured and only USA knows how to do it, mostly using current law.
The first step in a legal process is to follow critical national security infrastructure law, FISMA, and implement the Risk Management Framework. The entire system must be subject to rigorous threat testing, exactly as it is going to be used. Risk-limiting audits conducted by election officials are a fraud on the people. The voting system is a digital border of our country that must be continually monitored for dynamic, evolving attacks. We are securing the multi-trillion-dollar economy of the dominant world power, and our great-grandchildren’s inalienable rights.
Next, we must train all election personnel in threat assessment and process control, at every polling site. Then we can begin registration of verified, qualified voters. Nothing else can pass through the control point. USA found 29 million instances where this control broke. This means the states have no idea who is in their voter rolls. After that is voter ID at the polls, here. If you want to get rid of mail-in ballots, a great idea, that’s here. But every mail-in ballot goes through this judging table, and if it fails, the ballot is supposed to be thrown out. That control point broke in Pennsylvania in 2020, and Arizona 2022, among many others. If we get rid of the machines, that’s here. Scanning errors must be scrutinized here, chain of custody here, and if aggregate error exceeds the legal limit, the election fails here.
If we made it this far, we can start reporting to the media. But every single record from every county and polling site must now be reviewed by the Chief Election Official. When they certify a mixed state and federal election, this one clerk, of whom there are only fifty in the whole country, attests that the state and federal governments are both legitimate and duly authorized republican governments. They better be certain, because they can be held personally responsible when they commit perjury.
USA is in complete agreement with President Trump. We love the President’s idea of a constitutional amendment for a national election holiday, using manual voting systems. But after years of meticulous research done out of devotion to country, while countless undisciplined screamers have profited off USA data and discoveries, acting like suspicion and opinion are equal to hard evidence, we still lack the votes. We need strategy, not theatrics. To pass an amendment, we have to have a valid election in 2026. We can’t pass it with imposters living in our House and Senate.
17/ In 1868, ten states were barred from voting on the fourteenth amendment. Three states were denied Electoral College votes. Why? Because they betrayed the union. They went rogue, and Congress refused to recognize their delegates. Congress called them “territories of the United States,” and ignored their governments until they complied with the Union.
18/ Illinois, New York, California, Pennsylvania and Michigan are rogue states. No one in those governments knows if their congressional representatives are legitimate. I don’t know, you don’t know, and neither do they. Certifying elections for Congress with millions of fictitious voters and votes is an act of defiance against the United States Constitution, and USA has gathered the proof, from the states’ own official records, that this is exactly what happened.
19/ In these Supreme Court decisions, election officials went to federal prison. Read the prosecution guidelines. False voters, false votes and false tallies are all defined federal election fraud since 1873. Election officials are not allowed to take their orders from the Brennan Center; they must follow the law.
20/ The United States Department of Justice under Attorney General Bondi must immediately open a criminal investigation of this digital invasion, prosecute those responsible, and compel the states to follow legal process in 2026. Our right to legitimate congressional representation was stolen in 2022 & 2024. We cannot repeat this and have the rule of law. But we don’t just need to investigate blue states. This problem is in Ohio and Florida, it’s in Georgia and Texas. We have lost control of our elections everywhere and it’s a crime against our country. We must enforce the law—or the defense of inalienable rights on Earth may end. Today, we remind the DOJ that we gave them the proof starting in 2021. We look forward to Attorney General Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Bove making great strides to fix this disaster. United Sovereign Americans is standing by to assist in every way we can.
21/ We are already working with states and congress members loyal to our country to upgrade our election security laws to the current reality. We are taking the offensive against the denial of our civil rights with personal lawsuits against the most egregious actors in the country. unite4freedom.com/
22/ We are offering an election validity training conference this April in St Louis, Missouri. Will you join us in securing legitimate representative government in 2026, and beyond? No one is above the law. Those who have declared war on our liberty, our children, and our families, will be held accountable. No one is allowed to usurp and destroy the blessing of liberty in America. https://unite4freedom.com/securing-2026-the-usa-solution-april-2025-conference/
We can’t leave this to others. We can get informed on what has been found, what is being done about it, and what more needs to be done.
We can make a difference. And we must make a difference.
May God bless and guide you as you pray and take action for our nation.
Twitterati, etc.
@DataRepublican isn’t just working to open up our ability to see into the public data in a meaningful way as some kind of a job or hobby. For her, it’s about all those who have served and suffered in wars for our nation. And her work is making waves with the thieves who are robbing our country blind. So they sent the dox-dogs after her. Looks like she has had to leave her home and is in an undisclosed location under the protection of the Cajun Navy.
God bless her, and her family as they pay the price for doing a good work.
Who is paying the foot soldiers that do the hits (doxxing)?
@DataRepublican’s Awesome Tool for New Testament Text Confirmation
But, those attacks won’t stop this courageous, brilliant, and compassionate woman. Now that her name is known, what does she do? She shares her Christian faith and access to an amazing tool she has created. Jennica (@DataRepublican) says about her work:
This website is an aggregated cross-reference between the early Church fathers (up to the Nicaea Council of 325 A.D.) in Ante-Nicene Fathers as originally hosted by Christian Classics Ethereal Library, inspired by the e-Catena. I have mirrored the legacy website here, as it contains structural hyperlinks and formatting that are not present in the current edition. The intent of this website is to visualize the evolution of the NT canon’s popularity.
The authors/groupings of the translated works in each volume are as follows (note that volume 9 is missing). You can drill down by volume or jump directly to a NT book.
ANF-02: The Pastor of Hermas, Tatian, Theophilus of Antioch, Writings of Athenagoras, Clement of Alexandria
ANF-03: Tertullian
ANF-04: Tertullian, Minucius Felix, Origen
ANF-05: Hippolytus, Cyprian, Caius, Novatian
ANF-06: Gregory Thaumaturgus, Dionysius, Julius Africanus, Anatolius and Minor Writers, Alexander of Cappadocia, Theognostus of Alexandria, Pierius of Alexandria, Theonas of Alexandria, Phileas, Pamphilus, Malchion, Archelaus, Alexander, Peter, Bishop of Alexandria, Alexander, Methodius, Arnobius
ANF-07: Lactantius, Venantius, Asterius Urbanus, Victorinus, Dionysius, Apostolic Teaching and Constitutions, Clement, Nicene Council, Early Liturgies
ANF-08: The Twelve Patriarchs, Theodotus, Clement of Rome, Pseudo-Clementine Literature, Apocrypha of the New Testament, The Decretals, Memoirs of Edessa, Ancient Syriac Documents, Remains of the Second and Third Centuries
ANF-10: Works Connected with the Gospels, Apocalypses and Romances, The Epistles of Clement, Origen
Color gradients are based on the percentage of times a particular author or set of writings referenced a book of the New Testament. This helps establish the relative influence of specific NT books with the author(s). [link to view table]
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.
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
OK, this is interesting – a mixture of Jefferson Airplane, epic music, and Matrix visuals.
Which led me to another…..
Which led me back to the original. Which seems very strange now.
THE STUFF
Why is AI being used to create fake stories about Elon Musk?
I find this sort of fake story to be much more annoying that AI country music.
OK – let’s wash that away with some reality – the study of “perfect” numbers! (I may have played this topic before, but whatever – let’s play it again!)
Six is a pretty cool number – but 28? And 496? And (2^82,589,933 – 1)?
Welcome. Please visit this January 1st daily thread for the rules of the road, which are few but important.
2024 Presidential Election Map by County. Let us Never Forget: our VOTES gave the Trump Administration a Mandate to FIX IT ALL.
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.
Can We Watch?
The ability to watch the process of an election–from beginning to end–MUST be intentionally designed into the process. Otherwise, it’s just as prone to sleight-of-hand as a magician’s trick.
As Bev Harris (BlackBoxVoting.org) explained, we want to validate who can vote, who did vote, what each voter marked on each ballot, and how all elections materials are tracked and secured.
Provision for observers at each stage of the process is part of what gives legitimacy to our elections.
Election Observers, the Theory.
In theory, at every step of the process, open and transparent access for observers from each interested party should be expected and provided for. Not just when it’s convenient for the elections officials and their staff.
Any resistance to making provision for observers MUST be considered as suspicious at best, possibly a sign of guilt, and always an indication of maladministration of the election process.
You may remember poll workers taping up sheets of cardboard to block the view of the poll during the 2020 elections. I’ve heard reports of similar behavior in other places since then. Didn’t some group have a way to send on the spot reports to them when these types of things were happening during the 2024 election?
Voter Rolls.
If voter rolls are not freely visible to every citizen, if there is not an audit trail for how rolls change over time, if list maintenance procedures are not transparent, then there is room for hidden fraud. You might just want to check what level of access and transparency your state provides for your voter rolls.
“Maintaining an accurate voter registration list is essential to protecting election integrity. Keeping voter registration lists up to date is a continual process that includes adding new eligible voters, updating voter registration information when a voter moves and removing ineligible voters. The process of adding, updating and removing voters is referred to as list maintenance.” — Election Assistance Commission
As mundane as keeping a list up to date would seem, apparently even a lowly voter roll can aid and abet rigging an election. Or elections. Lots of elections.
Voters in New York State are identified by two identification numbers. This study has discovered strong evidence that both numbers have been algorithmically manipulated to produce steganographically concealed record attribute information. One of the several algorithms discovered has been solved. It first utilizes a mechanism nearly identical to the simple ‘Caesar Cipher’ to change the order of a group of ID numbers. Then, it interlaces them the way a deck of cards is arranged to create a ‘stacked deck’. The algorithmic modifications create hidden structure within voter ID numbers. The structure can be used to covertly tag fraudulent records for later use.
Election Observers, state-by-state.
The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) provides a brief, “Policies for Election Observers.” You can find just about everything you would want to know about your own state’s policies at this link.
Political parties, candidates, citizen groups and independent organizations may deploy observers or watchers to witness election processes in the U.S. Generally, the purpose for these observers is to provide a layer of protection or transparency and to learn from and improve processes, which vary considerably by state. This webpage covers relevant laws and practices for multiple types of election observers nationwide.
In reviewing this brief, I didn’t see anything about allowing observers or insight into mail-in ballot drop boxes, or handling by the USPS. Seems like a problem. As President Trump reminds us all the time, mail-in ballots are “not good.”
Recent Changes to State Laws.
I found the list of recent legislative actions regarding election observers to be an interesting way to get a sampler of what states are focused on these days. Here they are:
Modifications to who can be an election observer of any kind:
South Dakota HB 1182 (2024) allows members of the public to observe voting and counting processes at polling places and requires that polling places be arranged so that poll watchers can see and hear what is going on.
North Dakota SB 2292 (2023) clarifies that any individual beside a candidate on the ballot may be an election observer if they inform the election inspector of their intent to serve.
Louisiana SB 74 (2022) clarifies that those who require assistance with voting may serve as poll watchers.
Oklahoma HB 3321 (2022) requires poll watchers to serve in person and not via electronic devices.
Utah HB 387 (2022) Permits preregistered voters (those who are under 18 years old) to serve as poll watchers, permits poll watchers to observe the ballot curing process and requires ballot adjudication in larger cities to be projected on a screen large enough to be viewed by watchers.
Arizona SB 1835 (2021) requires poll watchers to be registered voters in the state.
Texas SB 1 (2021) requires a training program for poll watchers and requires watchers to present a certificate of completion when reporting for observation. The law adds to the list of processes that poll watchers can observe all activities relating to closing a polling place, ballot signature verification, ballot curing and voter assistance efforts. SB 1 also requires poll watchers to take an oath, establishes a penalty for election officials who knowingly refuse to accept a valid certificate for observation, permits election officials to call law enforcement for the removal of a poll watcher who is in violation of the law, and establishes legal remedies for watchers who believe they were unlawfully prevented from observing election processes.
Nebraska LB 1055 (2020) established the role of a poll watcher as either a registered voter of the state or an individual representing a state-based, national or international election monitoring organization. The bill went into effect after the November 2020 elections.
New York AB 1525 (2019) permitted any political committee supporting or proposing a ballot proposal to have watchers in any general, special, town or village election and any party committee and any candidate on the ballot to have three watchers for each election district in a primary election.
Utah SB 94 (2018) consolidated multiple terms for poll watcher (voting poll watchers, counting poll watchers and inspecting poll watchers) to the generic term “poll watcher” and permitted poll watchers to observe various aspects of the process.
Arkansas HB 2138 (2017) prohibited a member of the state or county board of election commissioners from serving as a poll watcher.
California AB 2021 (2016) clarified that international election observers may have uniform and nondiscriminatory access to all stages of the election process that are open to the public.
Tennessee SB 1945 (2016) prohibited the appointment of a candidate’s spouse to serve as an election observer.
Montana HB 529 (2015) prohibited a candidate from serving as a poll watcher.
New York AB 5075 (2014) prohibited candidates for public office in a given election from acting as poll watchers.
Alaska HB 104 (2013) required that poll watchers be U.S. citizens.
Modifications to the process of becoming an observer:
Arkansas HB 1457 (2023) establishes a poll watcher bill of rights, requires poll watchers to be qualified electors of the state and receive training before an election.
New Mexico SB 180 (2023) requires poll watchers to attend training before accepting appointment.
Nebraska LB 1055 (2020) established an accreditation process for observers. The bill went into effect after the November 2020 elections.
Arizona SB 1054 (2019) increased the amount of time before an election for nonpartisan observers to apply to observe at a counting center. Only three persons or groups may observe activities at the counting center and are chosen by lot from those who apply.
Louisiana HB 563 (2019) required that a list of watchers be filed with the clerk of the court in each parish where a candidate will have watchers if the office is in more than one parish.
New Mexico HB 407 (2019) amended the definition of watchers to include an election-related organization or any group of three candidates for election in a statewide election and outlines which aspects of the process may be observed.
Mississippi HB 467 (2017) added a credentialing process and code of conduct for partisan poll watchers.
Virginia HB 1333 (2015) specified that the state or district chairman may designate authorized representatives of political parties if the county or city chairman is unavailable to do so.
Wisconsin AB 202 (2014) required all authorized observers to sign in at the polling place and provided for observation areas of not less than 3 feet or more than 8 feet from the voter check-in table.
Arkansas HB 1551 (2013) required the state board of elections to certify at least one state election monitor for each congressional district, and HB 1551 (2013) required training for certified state election monitors.
Texas SB 160 (2013) required election officials to provide poll watchers with identification to be displayed by the watcher at the polling place.
Modifications to which aspects of the election process may be observed:
Colorado SB 276 (2023) establishes poll watcher guidelines for primary and special elections and prohibits poll watchers from taking photos and recording inside the election office or polling place.
Montana SB 93 (2021) permits poll watchers to observe at mail ballot deposit locations (drop boxes).
Texas HB 1128 (2021) clarifies that poll watchers may be present in polling places, at meetings of early voting ballot boards and in central counting stations.
Arkansas SB 488 (2021) allows poll watchers to inspect voter statements and ballots during an election, even though these documents are protected under the state’s public records law.
Florida SB 90 (2021) requires poll watchers to wear identification badges while observing and allows each political party and each candidate to have one watcher with viewing access to ballot signature verification.
Hawaii HB 1248 (2019) enacted mail voting across all counties for all elections and included a section allowing poll watchers to be present at voter service centers.
Maryland SB 5 (2015) permitted authorized partisan and nonpartisan observers, and any others who wish to be present, to observe the canvass process.
Virginia HB 319/SB 537 (2012) specified that partisan observers may be close enough to the voter check-in table to be able to hear what is being said, but that observation shall not violate the secret vote or otherwise interfere with the election.
Our Turn.
We can’t leave this to others. We can at least try and get informed on what has been found, what has been done about it, and what more needs to be done.
We can make a difference. And we must make a difference.
If you care about building a lasting and resilient nation, consider yourself on the job. What would be the 5 bullet points in your status report for this week?
Twitterati, etc.
Andrew Paquette (mentioned above) is a refreshingly creative mind to engage with. His latest substack, “X marks the spot,” about trying to get to X, then Grok, might be an interesting read for those of us still trying to get in the gate. One of the replies also gives more ideas for what to try when wanting to open the door into their walled garden.
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.
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
yoni
noun
symbol representing female genitals
a stylized representation of a vulva worshiped as a symbol of a goddess, in particular the Hindu goddess Shakti.
the symbol under which Shakti, or the personification of the female power in nature, is worshiped
The female sexual organs, or a symbol of them, especially as an object of veneration within certain types of Hinduism, Buddhism, and other cultures
concept applicable to female vaginal treatments, exercises, massages, and other focuses
As I have said, I don’t back down on ANY word that comes next in my list of “needful words” that don’t get enough usage. HOWEVER…..
Used in a sentence
I’m not going to show all the things I’ve read regarding yoni. I encourage interested readers to explore on their own. And as for pictures…..
Used in a picture
No. Just no. And the good pictures include symbolic representation of the male counterpart, too. Yikes. Interesting, but…..
MUSIC!
LOL! OK – I am simply not going to promote “yoni” music – this is classified as “women’s health” in my world, and even the less “anatomically technical” music videos are likely to be a bit too pagan and new-age for this site.
On the other hand, being only a bit new-age and globalist (“world music”), Greek instrumental and electronic artist Yanni is somebody my father enjoyed during his sunset years, and Yanni’s music brings back good memories of my mother and father enjoying their retirement, so here you go. Twenty of Yanni’s greatest hits.
https://youtu.be/MKaDLtMkn5I
THE STUFF
Flying insects the size of a hawk or an eagle?
OK – this video is actually some interesting science wrapped in click-bait advertising and bad AI narration. The critters aren’t all THAT bad – although they seem pretty nasty by today’s standards.
Bottom line – kinda happy all these bugs got smaller.
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.
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
voile
noun
a soft, fine, sheer fabric
a light, plain-weave, sheer fabric of cotton, rayon, silk, or wool used especially for making dresses and curtains
a light, translucent cotton fabric used for making curtains and dresses
a light, semitransparent fabric
Used in a sentence
Like many lightweight fabrics, voile cloth is ideal for spring and summer outfits.
More about voile
The term comes from the French word meaning ‘veil’. When made of 100% cotton or cotton and linen blended together, it allows the air to pass through, providing comfort even on the most scorching day. Due to its fine texture, voile fabric can also be used to line garments.
What are the key features of high quality voile?
Plain, tight weave
Silky soft finish
Light drape
No stretch
Slightly transparent (lining is optional)
Crisp and sometimes wiry
Stiff but flexible
Voile fabric is versatile, which means it is great both for apparel and home décor. You’ll often find voile in craft projects such as pillowcases, cushions, doilies, doll’s dresses and more. This gauzy material is also one of the favourites when it comes to creating lightweight curtains. It filters the sunlight and floods any room with natural light.
Shown in a picture
Discussed in a video
MUSIC!
A search on “voile” brought back “Voilà” – so enjoy this song, even though you likely have seen this performance before.
THE STUFF
Dating methods.
The basics. Including limitations.
No, we’re not talking about Brylcream and hot cars – chocolates and roses – BMOC / “wingman” – websites, matchmakers, singles groups – or any of the other methods of “dating success”! Although YES, those do work!
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.
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
These gals still rock! More HEART – from less than a year ago.
THE STUFF
Many may find the following discussion of thyroid treatment boring, but endocrine pharmacology is still a bit of a mystery to science. I found this “laid-back” conversation between two health hippie MAHA types to be really enjoyable, as they go down many rabbit holes.
This lady is a pharmacist who worked as a case consultant figuring out why people were having medical conflicts and side-effects. Her insights into polypharmacy (people taking too many drugs) are quite interesting.
The guy is a veteran of every medical fad on earth – so what he has distilled his health approach down to is also fascinating. Enjoy!
So if you sat through all of that, and still have confidence in alternative medicine, then you are SOLID as an explorer of difficult terrain, and my hat is off to you!
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
First Things First
Today sees two memorial services for “Sam”: Susan P Sampson (Deplorable Patriot) at 10 AM CST (at St. Roch Roman Catholic Church in St. Louis) and Sam, PAVACA’s brother at 2PM EST (Peeples Valley Baptist Church in Cartersville, Georgia).
RIP
We carry on the fight, in memory of the fallen.
Do We Still Need the Kang (Mis)Quote?
I’m still using the quote about winning the battles but losing the war. It seems like this doesn’t make sense right now given that we seem to be going from triumph to triumph.
On the contrary. This is the exception that proves the rule. The quote isn’t just a lament, it’s to point out why we can never seem to win.
You see, the RINOs cannot interfere and that is why, just for once, we are actually winning. And that is just one more piece of evidence (for the willfully blind) as to what I have been saying with that quote.
It stays.
Speaker Johnson Pinging you on January 6 Tapes
Just a friendly reminder Speaker Johnson. You’re doing some good things–or at least trying in the case of the budget–but this is the most important thing out there still hanging. One initial block released with the promise of more…and?
We have American patriots being held without bail and without trial, and the tapes almost certainly contain exculpatory evidence. (And if they don’t, and we’re all just yelling in an echo chamber over here, we need to know that too. And there’s only one way to know.)
Either we have a weaponized, corrupt government or we have a lot of internet charlatans. Let’s expose whatever it is. (I’m betting it’s the corrupt weaponized government, but if I am wrong, I’d like to see proof.)
Justice Must Be Done.
The 2020 election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Yes this is still true in spite of 2024. Fraud must be rooted out of our system and that hasn’t changed just because the fraud wasn’t enough to stop Trump winning a second term. Fraud WILL be ramped up as soon as we stop paying attention.
Otherwise, everything ends again in 2028. Or perhaps earlier if Trump is saddled with a Left/RINO congress in 2026, via fraud.
Small Government?
Many times conservatives (real and fake) speak of “small government” being the goal.
This sounds good, and mostly is good, but it misses the essential point. The important thing here isn’t the size, but rather the purpose, of government. We could have a cheap, small tyranny. After all our government spends most of its revenue on payments to individuals and foreign aid, neither of which is part of the tyrannical apparatus trying to keep us locked down and censored. What parts of the government would be necessary for a tyranny? It’d be a lot smaller than what we have now. We could shrink the government and nevertheless find it more tyrannical than it is today.
No, what we want is a limited government, limited not in size, but rather in scope. Limited, that is, in what it’s allowed to do. Under current circumstances, such a government would also be much smaller, but that’s a side effect. If we were in a World War II sort of war, an existential fight against nasty dictatorships on the brink of world conquest, that would be very expensive and would require a gargantuan government, but that would be what the government should be doing. That would be a large, but still limited government, since it’d be working to protect our rights.
World War II would have been the wrong time to squawk about “small government,” but it wasn’t (and never is) a bad time to demand limited government. Today would be a better time to ask for a small government–at least the job it should be doing is small today–but it misses the essential point; we want government to not do certain things. Many of those things we don’t want it doing are expensive but many of them are quite eminently doable by a smaller government than the one we have today. Small, but still exceeding proper limits.
So be careful what you ask for. You might get it and find you asked for the wrong thing.
Political Science In Summation
It’s really just a matter of people who can’t be happy unless they control others…versus those who want to be left alone. The oldest conflict within mankind. Government is necessary, but government attracts the assholes (a highly technical term for the control freaks).
His Truth?
Again we saw an instance of “It might be true for Billy, but it’s not true for Bob” logic this week.
I hear this often, and it’s usually harmless. As when it’s describing differing circumstances, not different facts. “Housing is unaffordable” can be true for one person, but not for another who makes ten times as much.
But sometimes the speaker means it literally. Something like 2+2=4 is asserted to be true for Billy but not for Bob. (And when it’s literal, it’s usually Bob saying it.) And in that sense, it’s nonsense, dangerous nonsense. There is ONE reality, and it exists independent of our desires and our perceptions. It would go on existing if we weren’t here. We exist in it. It does not exist in our heads. It’s not a personal construct, and it isn’t a social construct. If there were no society, reality would continue to be what it is, it wouldn’t vanish…which it would have to do, if it were a social construct.
Now what can change from person to person is the perception of reality. We see that all the time. And people will, of course, act on those perceptions. They will vote for Trump (or try to) if their perception is close to mine, and vote against Trump (and certainly succeed at doing so) if their perception is distant from mine (and therefore, if I do say so, wrong). I have heard people say “perception is reality” and usually, that’s what they’re trying to say–your perception of reality is, as far as you know, an accurate representation of reality, or you’d change it.
But I really wish they’d say it differently. And sometimes, to get back to Billy and Bob, the person who says they have different truths is really saying they have different perceptions of reality–different worldviews. I can’t argue with the latter. But I sure wish they’d say it better. That way I’d know that someone who blabbers about two different truths is delusional and not worth my time, at least not until he passes kindergarten-level metaphysics on his umpteenth attempt.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
Gold got into the 2870s range Wednesday, dropped then recovered some on Friday. Silver, of course succeeds in going down even on days when gold went up–down 40+cents on, Friday: a day when gold went up.
*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.
A Bit More Geology
I’ve talked about stratigraphy quite a lot in this series so far, and plan to move on to very different aspects of geology for a while…but I’m going to start by a review or summing up or practical application.
Here’s a diagram Valerie brought to the comments last week, as referenced by a YEC site which then went on to disparage it.
This is a cross section of the Grand Canyon, which is everybody’s favorite illustration of stratigraphy in action.
On the right are the attributions to different systems (periods) including the “Precambrian” which isn’t really a period (it’s the bucket they put the first three entire eons into sometimes). If you remember the names from last time (and I would be surprised if you did), there’s some missing names here.
Digression on how I remember them:
I’ve heard names like Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, etc., enough to recognize them; but I could never remember the order they appear. I could remember Cambrian being the first Paleozoic period and the Permian being the last one, but Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous (here divvied up into Mississippian and Pennsylvanian, as is often done in America), I could never remember. Until I looked at the initials: COS is of course the Colorado Springs airport code and living near there that’s easy for me to remember: Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian. I could force myself to remember the Carboniferous is right before the Permian, which leaves (by elimination) the Devonian as the fourth period right after the Silurian.
I have no difficulty with the Mesozoic because I grew up with a dinosaur nut as a kid; I got exposed to this a lot. Triassic (lame), Jurassic (cool dinosuars), Creataceous (really cool dinosaurs).
The Cenozoic is both easier and harder. Easier because Paleogene obviously comes before Neogene (Paleo = old, Neo = new), so you can list off Paleogene and Neogene (and then just remember Quaternary–note not Quarternary), but harder because this one usually gets subdivided all the way down to epochs, one level further, even in children’s books! I didn’t talk about that at all last time except mentioning that in passing, but those all have names ending in -cene and I can’t ever remember them. (I’ll write them out here just for grins: Paleocene, Eocene and Oligocene (subdivisions of the Paleogene) and Miocene and Pliocene in the Neogene. The Quaternary gets broken down into the Pleistocene and Holocene–the Holocene is everything since the last ice age. Seven of these epochs and they rhyme and I can’t remember their ordering for nuthin.
Anyhow returning to the diagram, the entire Ordovician and Silurian, plus who knows how much late Cambrian and early Devonian, is completely missing from the sequence shown. And nothing after the Permian. In fact for all we know from looking at the diagram the last part of the Permian is missing too. What gives?
I’ve talked a lot about rock layers being laid down, and you might have got the impression this happens all the time everywhere, but that’s not true. In many cases nothing gets laid down for millions of years (imagine, for instance, a desert, or mountains, or the land under an icecap or glacier). And in many cases, something already laid down gets removed by erosion. Here what we see is a nice thick Cambrian layer followed immediately by a thin Devonian layer.
For all we know, there may have once been more Cambrian rock here, then some amount of Ordovician rock, then some Silurian rock…and then deposition stopped, and a bunch of stuff got eroded away until resuming near the end of the Devonian.
Or maybe none of that ever got laid down; deposition stopped right where we see it, then resumed late in the Devonian. We can’t tell–not from this diagram at least–we just know those layers aren’t there now.
(If you dig deeper you can learn a bit more. The Muav Limestone is the top Cambrian layer shown, and you can look that up in Wikipedia (and then chase down the sources if you really want to be thorough). In addition to describing the limestone as fine-grained and gray, it goes on to describe the extent of the formation. It turns out the Muav Limestone was laid down in the mid-to-late Cambrian, not at the very end (dates are given), and extends into Utah, Nevada and California…and it is of different thicknesses in different areas. In most places what lies on top of it is Mississippian rock, but in some areas (like the Grand Canyon) where it’s a bit thinner there’s Devonian rock there. Now you can reconstruct a bit what happened: The Muav was laid down. Then parts of it were eroded and there was a Devonian deposit, which probably got planed off by erosion but it lived on in places where the Muav was lower and it filled in deeper areas.
[When I think about the sheer amount of field work it takes to map these things, I am staggered. Geologists basically have to go everywhere to do this to this level of detail.]
The dividing line is labeled as a “disconformity.” It turns out that a disconformity is a specific type of unconformity. And an unconformity is any sort of gap in the stratigraphic sequence, which indicates a gap in deposition of sediment.
I can’t say it better than Wikipoo does so I’ll just quote it: “The rocks above an unconformity are younger than the rocks beneath (unless the sequence has been overturned). An unconformity represents time during which no sediments were preserved in a region or were subsequently eroded before the next deposition. The local record for that time interval is missing and geologists must use other clues to discover that part of the geologic history of that area. The interval of geologic time not represented is called a hiatus. It is a kind of relative dating.”
It’s called a “disconformity” when the unconformity is between parallel layers of sedimentary rock…as is the case here.
It is called a “nonconformity” when the upper layer is sedimentary and what is below is igneous or metamorphic rock, presumably partially eroded away before the sediments were deposited.
Also showing up in that diagram is an “angular unconformity” where the rocks below the unconformity are angled. There are parallel layers there but the layers are at a steep tilt. This usually happens because after the layers were deposited there was a mountain building episode that tilted the landscape. Then part was eroded away and the overlying sediment was deposited.
And of course at the very top, nothing above the Kaibab limestone, which (I went and looked) is early-to-mid Permian, so the late Permian either was never deposited here, or was and has been eroded away. But one shouldn’t judge such things from one location. Before we start looking elsewhere though, I’m going to paste in a different diagram of the Grand Canyon layers, one from the National Park Service:
Some occasional bluffs appear on top of the Kaibab that are of the “Moenkopi” formation.
But let’s look further afield, and if we do so we’ll be rewarded. Because the Kaibab is under many additional layers in Zion National Park. That nails it down; the Kaibab was once under a lot more rock than it is today. Here are the layers that appear above it in Zion:
The Dakota formation spreads all over the Intermountain Western United States and further, it is seen in Kansas as well as the Dakotas. (And I can guess what I am going to find when I go look: YUP, it’s Cretaceous; the last period/system of the Mesozoic. (And the Dakota formation is mid-Cretaceous at that, not late Cretaceous). That’s because there was an “inland sea” called the Western Interior Seaway in the Western United States until then, and I’ve known about that since childhood. Yes, a shallow arm of the ocean where there are now highlands and even mountains.)
From Ellis County, Kansas (which is Western Kansas on or near I-70) we have this imprint fossil of a leaf; the rock contains significant iron. Apparently when this leaf got buried, the area was boggy sand near deciduous (leafy) trees. Other nearby areas have fossilized mollusc shells so there was also a beach near here at one point in time.
(You may have noticed a lot of those Zion Park formation names are quite redolent of the Southwest: Kaibab, Moenkopi, Chinle, Moenave, Keyenta, and Navajo. All were discovered on the Colorado Plateau, largely by watching the rock layers fly by as Wile E. Coyote fell thousands of feet whilst trying to get away from the anvil that was his traveling companion. Really, really, he should never have looked down.)
So what forces erode rocks? Or (by the way) the soil before it becomes a rock?
Many different things. But number one is:
Erosion by Water
And there are many ways for water to do this. Rainfall and surface runoff are what I (sometimes) see where I live, far away from the World Sump known as the ocean, so I’ll cover that one first.
The mere act of a raindrop hitting the ground can sometimes eject particles of soil. But much more dramatic erosion results from runoff; it can go downslope as sheet erosion, form rills, or even create gullies. Rills and gullies are qualitatively the same, but a rill is small enough that you can (if you are farming the land) fill it in just through normal tilling the soil.
Continuous water flow occurs in rivers and streams. Given time they can wear down rocks; rocks in the bed of a stream eventually become smoothed down into pebbles. Streams can not be fed by rainfall but also snow melt and springs.
Entire mountain ranges can, and will, be removed by these processes though it takes millions of years. Streams will first cut narrow, v-shaped canyons; as time progresses and the mountains erode away the channels will get more of a U profile, and eventually the stream ends up moving slowly through a broad river valley. Or one can often see such a progression following a stream downhill today. (Geologists even talk of “young” streams (the ones cutting narrow valleys) versus “mature” streams, with more rounded beds, and then finally “old age”, which are more like:
A stream in a wide flood plain, moving slowly, will eventually start to meander (look at a map of the lower Mississippi to see this in action today). The stream can cut across the meanders especially during a flood, and leave behind oxbow lakes as seen in this picture of the Nowitna River in Alaska.
Water flowing in a stream will pick up more “stuff” the faster it is flowing; when it’s a flash flood it can remove boulders. Slower moving streams will pick sand up off their beds and move it downstream. Fine Silt can stay suspended even along slow-moving nearly-flat rivers.
Of course it’s easiest for streams to pick up loose material like sand than to actually grind down rock, but the latter does happen…assisted some by the loose stuff the stream is carrying. (It is a mistake to compare a gully cut through soil to a canyon cut through rock and assume they are both being cut at the same rate.)
Where does it all go? Downstream of course, and the sediment carried off can be deposited a couple of different ways.
One is the “alluvial fan” where water can emerge from a narrow canyon into a larger valley. The water will spread out and slow down; These are plainly visible in the Basin and Range province of Nevada and California; here is an overhead picture of one in Death Valley:
And from ground level, also in Death Valley (but I don’t know if it’s the same one):
Alluvial fans can be many square kilometers in size and tend to have gentle slopes up to where the stream emerges from its canyon (and nothing says the stream has to run full time; it certainly doesn’t do so here). The deposited stuff tends to be coarser nearer the source, which makes sense: as the water exiting the canyon fans out, it slows down, as it slows down the bigger stuff will be deposited first, closest to where the water exited the canyon.
Alluvial fans have even been seen on Mars, an indication that water used to flow there. They also appear on Titan, but this isn’t due to water flow but rather liquid methane and ethane. As you might expect given the examples I’ve shown, these tend to show up in mountainous, arid places, though by no means must the place be as arid as Death Valley. Buried alluvial fans underlie Denver, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles and often contain groundwater. They also underlie the Ganges valley in India, being fed from the Himalayas. And of course ancient fans often end up becoming sedimentary rock and end up in the geologic column.
River deltas are another obvious destination. The Mississippi delta deposit is tens of thousands of feet thick; it’s so heavy it pushes the bedrock down into the Earth. But in less extreme cases, smaller streams dump sediment into ponds, swamps and oceans…and these could eventually end up becoming rocks in the geologic column.
Below is the mouth of the Amazon river, in Brazil. This river is titanic; it may not be the longest in the world (the other possibility being the Nile) but no other river can hold a candle to it in terms of volume–in fact its total discharge is greater than the next seven rivers on that list, combined. It is mostly in Brazil, but even way upstream where it enters Brazil, it’s carrying more water than any other river on Earth.
But most relevantly here, notice the water is tan–that’s silt, being washed out into the ocean to settle as sediment and eventually show up in a geologic column. (What the geologist who studies it (if any) will look like is another question entirely.)
Those white things on the picture are clouds, which should give you an idea of the sheer scale of the picture.
Streams can empty out into a bog or swamp, too…to say nothing of lakes and endorheic basins. That last sounds truly awful, but that’s any inland basin with no outlet to the ocean. Probably the most famous example of such a thing to Americans is the Great Salt lake, but there are many others in North America, and Eurasia has vast endorheic basins. The map below shows endorheic basins in dark gray (as well as divides separating flows between various oceans).
These tend to be in desert regions; with more water erosion will eventually cut a channel or lower the rims of the basins. This can often happen from outside of the basin, as streams flowing away from it slowly wear down the ridges separating the basin from the outside.
Endorheic lakes have no outflow, so what happens to the water in them? Evaporation. The lake will grow until the evaporation on the surface cancels out the water flowing into the lake. Of course, the rivers flowing into the lake don’t have a constant flow, meaning that the lake can–and does–vary in size. This can be an issue with the Great Salt Lake, which has often flooded during El Nino seasons which tend to dump a lot of rain in the Western US. But when the levels are low there is a lot of evaporite, mostly salt, left behind. This happens at many such lakes including the Dead Sea between Israel and Jordan, and there are many dry lake beds in the Basin and Range Province centered on Nevada but including parts of Utah, California, and Oregon. (Why is this area called the basin and range province? It has mountain ranges…and it’s an endorheic basin.)
I feel as if I haven’t covered this adequately, but I’m simply out of time.
