23 days, 11 hours, 59 minutes until our Once and Future President, the Rightful President of the United States, is restored to his proper office.

Not that I’m counting, mind you.

[Assumes 0001 publication time. Wordpiss will be wordpiss and it’s unlikely to happen at that time.]

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

Speaker Johnson: A Reminder.

And MTG is there to help make it stick.

January 6 tapes. A good start…but then nothing.

Were you just hoping we’d be distracted by the first set and not notice?

Are you THAT kind of “Republican”?

Are you Kevin McCarthy lite?

What are you waiting for?

I have a personal interest in this issue.

And if you aren’t…what the hell is wrong with you?

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 (i.e., paper) Prices

Last week:

Gold $2,623.40
Silver $29.58
Platinum $935.00
Palladium $948.00
Rhodium $4,850.00
FRNSI* 127.907– (Correction: 125.907-
Gold:Silver 88.688+

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, Kitco “ask” prices. Markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $2,621.30
Silver $29.45
Platinum $930.00
Palladium $939.00
Rhodium $4,850.00
FRNSI* 125.805+
Gold:Silver 89.008+

Not a whole lot of movement this week, but enough to push gold:silver over 89! It continues to suck to be heavy on silver and light on gold. Unless, of course, you think this is a buying opportunity for the white metal.

*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.

More Fallout from the Final Experiment

Flerfs seem to fall into two distinct camps lately: 1) Those who claim the whole thing is faked, and: 2) Those who claim that they can shoehorn what happened into the Flat Earth model somehow.

First one first: As more and more footage is being uploaded the claims some make that TFE videos were shot in a soundstage somewhere are looking more and more ridiculous. Aircraft landing, rides on snowmobiles or other vehicles to and from the Union Glacier camp to Midway (the area they did most of their experiments at) show this is no sound stage. Another claim, that the sun was somehow fake: The sun was real by the testimony of even the Flerfs who were there. Jeran burned holes through paper with a magnifying glass, which counters the notion that it’s some sort of sun simulator (never mind the fact that no simulator is going to light up miles of terrain like that).

Second, we’re seeing two main lines of attack. One is that someone named Steven Alonzo allegedly used the flat earth model to predict the sorts of things that Will Duffy asked about, matching Globe Earth predictions. The problem is he used globe based mathematical models to do so! (The sincerest form of flattery being imitation.) Alonzo has allegedly founded a “Flat Earth University” where he lives in Belize.

@2:43 (meaning 2 hours and 43 minutes):

The other is a new flat earth model by someone named Hanvey who has added yet more layers to the “firmament” in order to try to get reflected suns to behave the way seen. So far his videos haven’t impressed anyone except some Flerfers. However, it’s supposedly a work in progress.

Flerfs are counting on these guys to rescue them.

McToon (“Where are the guns, Nathan?!?!”) is going to be able to demolish both, or so he promises. He’s waiting to see which way the Flerfs (those who don’t wake the hell up) jump; to Alonzo or Hanvey.

Also in that video shortly after the bit about Alonzo (at about 2:46:15), is the story of the presentation they gave to the staff of Union Glacier Camp about the Final Experiment. Flerfer Austin Witsit spoke and was seen by the full time meteorologist at Union Glacier. That meteorologist was pissed at Witsit’s condescending attitude and eventually just left. McToon makes a very trenchant point here, which is that if the meteorologist is wrong, people die. If Witsit is wrong, he’s just a lying turd on the internet and his followers won’t die from it. Witsit can be wrong and suffer no consequences because he has no responsibility. The meteorologist can’t be wrong.

2:48:05: “That’s always the thing. They can spout their nonsense because they have zero responsibility. You have responsibilities, you don’t get to be wrong, and continue to be wrong, right? You’re done. You’re done. That’s how it works.”

But someday, someone will die from this crap, just as surely as DEI hires have caused lives to be risked or even lost.

Some Go-Backs

Regarding my article from five weeks ago, where I discussed trans-Neptunian objects (as well as Centaurs) as a class before diving in and looking at the ones that qualify as dwarf planets the following week. I really didn’t tie things together, and I saw something that made it clear.

The TNOs or Kuiper Belt Objects plus “Scattered Disk Objects” orbit just outside the orbit of Neptune. Why not closer? Because Neptune or some other object would eventually get too close to them, and change their orbit–possibly flinging them out of the solar system just like it did with Voyager 2; otherwise putting it into a smaller orbit. And why aren’t they further away? They seem to get as close as they can without Neptune mucking them up, no closer…but they exist right up to that line. Well, go back in time. Maybe there were plenty of these sorts of objects at varying distances…and once Neptune came on the scene, it took care of all of the ones too close to the Sun. In other words, it’s not a coincidence that the Kuiper Belt’s inner boundary is near Neptune’s orbit, rather Neptune caused the boundary to be where it is.

So what happens when Neptune manages to perturb one of these objects? It either gets a speed boost and goodbye…or loses energy and drops into an orbit closer to the Sun. Well…those are the Centaurs! And a Centaur will eventually interact with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, or maybe go for a second round with Neptune. And at that point, it could either be flung out, or become a short term comet.

So now I’ve tied TNOs, Centaurs, and comets together in a way that takes a bunch of different conceptual “buckets” of things and relates them to each other.

(I’m not sure whether to add this to the article from five weeks ago…or to the one on comets…or both.)

Another thing I saw was someone throwing a bunch of solar-system objects (none of them moons) into a table, stripping the names off and considering things like: number of moons, orbit shape (eccentricity), orbit tilt (inclinations), distance from the sun, mass, size, and composition (gas, rocky, rocks with ice, ice with rocks). Of course this looks like a mess, but then he plotted one against another to find trends. For instance eccentric orbits tended to correlate with high inclinations. That’s kind of interesting (unlike most of the ones he showed at first). It got very interesting when he plotted size (diameter) against distance from the Sun. At that point, he got four distinct clumps. Not only that, but those four lumps tended to have the same compositions! So: the largest objects tend to be medium-far from the sun, and they’re all gaseous. The next larger group is closest to the sun and tends to be rocky. Then there’s a distant group–the most distant–of objects that are ice with some rock. Finally the smallest group, farther then the rocky groups, but closer than the gaseous group, that are rock and some ice. The four groups tend to have more things in common within the group: The gaseous objects tend to have more moons. The groups that are rock-ice mixes tend to have those elliptical, inclined orbits.

Of course, he cheated. He put the largest bodies in each of the four groups into the table to begin with. But he insists that even after he adds more and more objects, the groupings persist.

The implication is that the solar system has four different kinds of objects (aside from however you want to handle moons). In the order I described them: Gas giants, terrestrial planets, trans-Neptunian objects, and the asteroids. Now this doesn’t account for “round” versus “lumpy.” Everything except gas giants can be small enough to be lumpy.

Could this illuminate the path to classifying objects in the solar system? No one is satisfied by the current state of affairs, that’s for sure. One thing that has to be accounted for that isn’t, here, is the moons.

Geology

Geology has, until recently, been the study of Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and how they change over time. In the last few decades, it has become extended to cover the other objects of the solar system, even though the word comes from the Greek γῆ (gê) ‘earth’ (in particular) and λoγία (-logia) ‘study of, discourse’. This is because much of what we have learned down here has served as a basis for studying what is up there, despite a myriad of fascinating differences. (Perhaps it would have been more useful for me to write this before doing the rest of the solar system.)

Geology is a gigantic subject, and since even today it has to do mostly with that ball of rock we stand on every day, it tends to have a ton of practical applications, everything from telling us where to dig or drill to get the good stuff, to advising us where to put buildings, to watching out for hazards like volcanoes and earthquakes. There are a lot of sub-specialties including mineralogy (the study of the actual mineral constituents of rocks), seismology, vulcanology, glaciology, speleology (caves), and so on.

In general outline, one goes from studying minerals, to rocks (composed of mixes of minerals), “unlithified material”–the sorts of things that end up on top of bedrock, like gravel and soil, but also magma (liquid material under the surface of the earth). And then there’s the whole earth, including tectonic plates, the structure of the earth (which I touched on last time).

And then there are landforms like mountains, streams, sand dunes, glaciers, hogbacks, alluvial fans (i.e., the deposits that form near the mouths of streams), and on and on.

A gigantic field with a lot of places where one can do a deep dive.

And to be honest, NOT something I have strong knowledge of. I’ll be learning a lot in doing this series. In the past I’ve had to look up details but at least I had a broad mental outline from which to proceed. With geology, though I know some things, the outline is much sketchier. I’m trying very hard not to get out ahead of my skis here.

It’s best for all of us if I start at the beginning. But before I do that, there are a couple of absolutely basic concepts I have to explain.

Rock Types and the Rock Cycle

Rocks come in three basic types.

The first is “igneous” rocks like granite and basalt. These are rocks that formed directly from cooling magma (and magma is the term for lava that is still underground). This can happen either deep underground as the magma cools (e.g., granite) or above ground when the magma spills out onto the surface during an eruption (e.g., basalt). You can tell how quickly the magma/lava cooled by the size of the crystals–big crystals mean it cooled slowly, so basalt, being the result of an eruption, tends to have smaller crystals than granite, which is formed deep underground and thus tends to cool slowly.

The second is “sedimentary” rocks, examples being shale, limestone and sandstone. These are rocks that form when other rocks erode, are carried elsewhere by water (usually) or wind (sometimes), and are deposited elsewhere as sediment, silt, sand…and then something other than heat or pressure happens to transform it into rock. Perhaps water with a lot of dissolved minerals flows through and the minerals out of solution, acting as cement.

Finally, there is metamorphic rock. This is rock that used to be one of the other two types, but was subject to heat and pressure–not enough to melt it, which would result in igneous rocks–but enough to make it change in structure. Marble is metamorphosed limestone, and slate is metamorphosed shale. Schists can form from either sedimentary or igneous rocks.

There are numerous ways rocks of one type can become rocks of another type, and the full picture is known as the “rock cycle.” A lot of geology’s “big picture” is encapsulated right here.

All three types can erode and form sediment (even sedimentary rock can go through it all again). Metamorphic rock can “cook” too long and go molten and become magma which can only become igneous rock. And so on.

OK, so maybe now some of the things I will have to refer to in the history will make more sense. I had to do this, because geology started when people started looking at rocks.

Early History of Geology

The ancient Greeks wrote some works on stones, in particular Theophrastus (372-287 BCE), and Aristotle, who made many observations on the slow rate of geological change. And then Pliny the Elder (who seems to have written on just about everything) wrote on minerals and metals. He died in the eruption of Vesuvius, 79 CE, a fitting way to go for a geologist…which was only one of his many interests. But Aristotle gets additional credit here because he tried to be strictly evidence-based when he said that geological change was slow. During the middle ages, the mantle was taken up by people in the Islamic world, with Ibn Sina (Avicenna in translation) proposing explanations for mountain formation, earthquakes and other topics. Also in China Shen Kuo (1031-1095) came up with a hypothesis of land formation based on observation of fossil shells in a mountain hundreds of miles from the ocean. He inferred that land was formed by the erosion of mountains and the deposition of silt–in other words, the creation of sedimentary rocks.

The first person considered a truly scientific geologist, however, was Georgius Agricola (1495-1555). He wrote De Natura Fossilium in 1546. This was the first systematic attempt to classify minerals, rocks and sediments since Pliny. He also wrote De Re Metallica (published 1556), which focused more on mineralogy, ores, and mining (and was considered authoritative for almost two centuries afterwards). The two books together made geology a scientific subject for the first time.

Nicholas Steno (1638-1686) gets the credit for some key laws of geology that underlie stratigraphy (roughly the study of rock layers). These are so important that it’s worth hitting the pause button and talking about them. They are:

Steno’s Laws of Stratigraphy

The law of superposition. In undeformed stratigraphic sequences, the oldest layers or strata will be on the bottom, with progressively newer deposits stacked upon it. This can be a bit tricky to apply as sometimes the layers are later flipped over at least 90 degrees, putting the newer layers on top. But there are ways to tell this has happened. Below is an example from Svalbard, Norway of layers of sediment–which eventually hardened into rock–with the oldest layers at the bottom.

The successive layering of rocks like this is known as stratification, and when the information is gathered from all over the world and assembled into a whole, it’s called “the geologic column.”

The principle of original horizontality. Layers of sediment are originally deposited horizontally (not at a slant) under the action of gravity.

Here is an example from the Colorado Plateau (this part of the plateau is actually in Utah). Layers are horizontal.

We now know that in special cases sand (for instance) can be deposited at a slope of up to fifteen degrees, particularly in sand dunes.

Getting ahead of ourselves, these layers were deposited in the Permian through Jurassic times. They show up in widely separated areas. Which brings us to:

The principle of lateral continuity. This states that layers of sediment initially extend laterally in all directions (but not forever). Based on this, rocks that are otherwise similar but are now separated by a valley or something else caused by erosion, were originally “connected.”

In the picture above those layers are seen in Capitol Reef national park and the Canyonlands national park. The different layers are named, from top to bottom: The Navajo Sandstone, layerd red Kayenta formation, red Wingate sandstone which forms cliffs, the sloped purplish portion is Chinle formation, the lighter red stuff further down is Moenkopi formation, and the white layer at the very bottom is the Cutler Formation. This picture isn’t from either of those two parks, rather it’s from Glen Canyon. The point being that these same layers can be identified and named even though they appear in differing places, separated by canyons that were cut through them after they were deposited.

You might get the impression that stratigraphy is purely about sedimentary rock, but lava flows can spill out over sedimentary layers, harden into (usually) basalt, and then be overlain later on by more sediment. This is going to turn out to be very useful, in fact. Also, sometimes igneous rock manages to penetrate through a vertical crack in sedimentary layers. When we see that it’s called a “dike” and it’s obviously newer than any of the layers it cuts through.

Another thing that make things a bit tricky is that a bunch of strata can be deposited, then whatever body of water lays there might disappear for whatever reason, and already-deposited layers can be eroded away. Much later, sediments can start depositing again, but now there’s a time gap at least as long as the dry spell. This is called an “unconformity.” Sometimes it’s obvious because the land tilts during the dry spell; you end up with non-parallel layers when that happens.

Sedimentary rock tends to form very extensive layers, called “formations.” This is different from popular usage where a “formation” might be a distinctive outcropping of exposed rock, like for instance these:

(Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs). The big double-humped rock on the left is popularly called a “rock formation” but is actually part of at least two different formations in the geologic sense (and I am unable to find their names), as you can tell by the different colors. And this is an instance where the rock layers have been tipped on their sides, in this case by the events that formed the Rocky Mountains.

Geology Gets Going

OK so returning at last to the historical narrative, we are now in the 17th century and things started to take off here.

The Christian world at this time was starting to notice that different translations of the Bible could be significantly different, but the one thing they all agreed on was that the Noachian deluge had formed the world’s geology and geography. So the quest was on: prove with scientific evidence that the Great Flood had in fact occurred!

Yes: Many of these early geologists were what we would today call “Young Earth Creationists.”

So what happened when they went and looked?

In the early 1600s many people began to notice fossils…but there were arguments over what they were. Some thought they were legitimate preserved forms of actual creatures, and others thought they were somehow something that just happened as rocks formed, “sports of nature,” funny rocks that happened to look like things. As crazy as this sounds today, no one had any concept of how a dead animal or plant could somehow be transformed into a rock of the same size and shape. Robert Hooke (1635-1703), Steno, and John Ray (1627-1705) did much of the work to explain how this could happen.

One important thing is to note that fossils appeared only in sedimentary rocks, or possibly (if we were lucky) were still identifiable in metamorphic rocks that were originally sedimentary. Another is that fossils are usually formed from hard body parts, bones, shells, and exoskeletons. You’ll find fossils of clams, but not of jellyfish–not unless you’re extremely lucky. And this means that for those creatures who have their hard body parts on the inside (like vertebrates) it’s uncommon to get any impression of the skin. We are getting better at detecting such things even when they’re extremely subtle.

Hooke, Steno, and Ray rejected the notion that all fossils resulted from the Great Flood. In their minds there were too many of them, scattered throughout the geologic column all over the world, for it to have happened all within one year.

But others disagreed, and we had a school of thought in geology called “Diluvialism,” where the Great Flood is considered responsible for (at least) the fossils. This was a real hypothesis, being investigated by many responsible geologists, and was taken quite seriously for a number of decades.

During the late 1600s and early 1700s, diluvialism and a young Earth was most geologists’ starting point. It isn’t any more. What changed?

Diluvialists collected a lot of fossils, but they were “small stuff.” Dinosaur and mammal fossils had not yet been noticed–that would start rolling in the early-to-mid 1800s. In looking for fossils, mid 1700s geologists like Giovanni Arduino (1714-1795), Johann Gottlob Lehmann (1719-1767) and many others started noticing things about the rocks that contained them. Namely mountain building, volcanism (meaning igneous rocks), deposition (sedimentary rocks), etc. There were so many different kinds of processes they simply couldn’t have been all due to some single uniform process like the Great Flood. So, many reasoned, the recent stuff was due to the Great Flood, but other items in deeper, older strata were perhaps created from nothing or were products of the chaos that God put order to in Genesis.

Enter Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), who eventually became hugely influential. He saw the huge array of things that those prior geologists had found, and decided to do some experiments. Buffon reasoned that the Earth as a whole was once hot (and is known to still be hot on the inside) so he heated spheres of minerals and recorded how long it would take for them to cool off. Extrapolating from this he determined that Earth was roughly seventy five thousand years old. He wrote that up in 1778, and the Sorbonne forced him to retract the claim.

James Hutton (1726-1797) was coming to a similar conclusion. He was a doctor by training but had become more and more interested in geology. He eventually wrote a book “Theory of The Earth” in 1788. He argued that nothing “special” had to be invoked to explain the Earth, just the same processes we see around us today, erosion and deposition. This was known as uniformitarianism, He also was the first to recognize metamorphic rocks as a distinct group.

However other geologists held out for catastrophism, brief catastrophic episodes, and not necessarily only the Great Flood; and they had good arguments for this. I’ll say more later.

By the end of the 1700s, due to these and many other lines of investigation, geologists were coming to accept that the Earth was far older than one would think, based on an absolutely literal reading of Genesis. They had to be dragged to this conclusion by the weight of what they were seeing. They didn’t want it to be true. They were Christians…and believed the Bible could not be wrong. They had to conclude that they were misinterpreting Genesis.

So now we had a couple of competing theories as to what was going on throughout this extended time. We already had the notions of uniformitarianism and catastrophism, which refer to the rates of changes, but what about the nature of the changes? We had the neptunists led by John Walerk, Johan Gottshalk Wallerius and Abraham Werner who thought all of the geographic strata–including igneous rocks! had formed from an ocean that had covered the entire Earth (sort of like a slow Flood).

The other competing theory was Plutonism, whose main proponent was Hutton. Here the Earth was formed through the gradual solidification of a molten mass (which was also what Buffon believed), volcanic processes were king. Hutton was convinced that the Earth was “immeasurably” old. (Which was certainly true…he couldn’t measure it!)

The truth of course is that both water and volcanism are important. “And” logic definitely applies. And this turns out to be true of uniformitarianism vs. catastrophism, too. Both happen. Remember Eugene Shoemaker and his asteroid and comet impacts? And remember the really bad day a lot of dinosaurs had ‘way back when.

As time went on, more and more evidence piled up. The Earth is old. We didn’t know how old, precisely, but figures in the range of a few thousand years rapidly became untenable. The evidence has only gotten much, much more weighty and our ability to date things much more precise, since then.

I’ve elided much in this account and I should be a bit more specific because I know some people simply won’t believe what I just wrote. So here’s just one avenue of investigation, out of many.

Mount Etna, on Sicily, overlooks the city of Catania, and it is the largest volcano in Europe. Furthermore, it’s always simmering, and erupts often enough, and usually mildly enough, that to the locals it’s just another aspect of the weather.

Scottish geologist Charles Lyell (1797-1875) visited Etna in the early-to-mid 1800s and realized he could estimate how long it had taken to build up to its present size. He was able to determine the size of the mountain, from the lowest lava layers which rest on limestone (which has fossils in it). He also knew that Etna erupts regularly, and that we had records of those eruptions clear back to Roman times.

Etna is about 3km high, and circular, with a radius of 25 km, so it roughly forms a cone, and the volume is approximately 2000 cubic kilometers. Going through the records, the average lava flow was about 0.02 cubic kilometers though there had been a larger eruption in 1669. On average, eruptions have been happening at a rate of 5 per century. So since Roman times (2000 years ago), we’ve seen a total of 2 cubic kilometers come out of Etna. If the rate of the last two thousand years is typical, then Etna is two million years old.

Of course, there’s an assumption there that the rate has held constant for two million years. But based on the distribution of the smaller cones on the slopes of Mt. Etna, and the fact that we can distinguish different lava flows, it looks pretty steady. If it were ever (say) a hundred times more active than it is now, we’d see fewer and bigger lava flows further down into the volcano. It probably has varied some, but not by nearly enough to make the difference between 2 million years and six thousand years. Consider: 99.9 percent of the lava happened over two thousand years ago; for 6,000 years to be the maximum age of Etna, that 99.9 percent would have to have happened within a span of 4,000 years–in other words five hundred times as fast on average, as the 2000 years we have historical records for. We’d know if Etna’s activity had changed that much, the volcano would look very different below the surface than it actually does.

[Modern dating methods apparently show an age for Etna of 500,000 years or so. Lyell was off by a factor of four, which isn’t bad given what he had to work with.]

There’s more to this particular sub-plot…but it will have to wait until I lay some more groundwork.

In particular, the next thing to talk about is the geologic time scale.

Final Thoughts

In the meantime, I’m going to drag out my soap box.

Today, Young Earth Creationists like to complain that no one will take them seriously when it comes to the age of the Earth, because the mainstream geologists have a “presupposition” that the Earth is old. They have to fight against a “mainstream” that is just predisposed against them. And no one will give them a chance.

What is a “presupposition,” anyway? Well, to start with let’s just say it’s basically walking through the door into nature’s classroom–a figure of speech meaning going out into the world and examining it–thinking you already know the answer to the question you want to (pretend to) ask.

Recall, though, that in the 1700s geology must have looked like a present-day Young Earth Creationist’s idea of paradise. The mainstream geologists thought just like they do, that the Earth was 6000 years old.

The geologists from the 1700s had a presupposition too, one that said the Earth is 6000 years old (give or take). I don’t fault them for it. They had nothing else to go on. It fell to them to find something. So what happened when these people and their presupposition went “through the door” and into nature’s classroom, went out into the field, got dirty and sweaty climbing hills and mountains, crossing ravines, wading in streams so they could look at rocks, take copious notes, making as many drawings, and finally, lugging samples?

These people realized their presupposition was wrong. The weight of the evidence was simply too great to bear. I alluded to Mount Etna, but that’s only a minuscule fraction of a percent of what has come to light both before it and after. It simply made no sense to people who had actually been there and done that with their eyes open and their brains engaged, to cling to a young Earth age.

They were good scientists. They didn’t let their preconceived notions force them to ignore what they saw. They didn’t behave like today’s Flat Earthers, cramming their fingers into their ears, squeezing their eyes shut and saying “Nuh-uh! I know it’s flat, anything else must be fake.”

And this was only the beginning. It’s now two centuries later, and the weight of now centuries of unearthed (literally) evidence points in the same direction.

Is someone aware of all of this holding onto a “presupposition” when they refuse to take seriously those that are ignorant (often willfully so) of that evidence?

Or is it the other way around? Is it the Young Earth Creationists who are the ones with the presupposition? Are they projecting? I maintain that the answer is yes. And today, I can fault them for it, because we have more than enough info to counter the presupposition. It’s worse than that though: The YECs from two centuries ago were willing to abandon their presupposition in the face of the evidence; the modern YECs will do their damnedest to come up with scenarios ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous to torture the data to make it somehow conform to the presupposition. They desperately cling to it in a way the prior YECs did not. And it is, right now, pushing many of them to a breaking point, as much of a breaking point as The Final Experiment is for the flerfs.

I’ve just made some strong statements in that paragraph, but I will be backing them up over the next few posts.

For those of you who haven’t just rage quit, see you next week.

37 days, 11 hours, 59 minutes until the Once And Future President, Donald John Trump, is restored to the office that was Rightfully his the last four years.

Not that I’m counting, mind you.

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

Our Turn

[Yes, I did this one five weeks ago. But it was too cathartic to just throw away.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we have had enough of this.

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

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

It’s our turn.

Our turn.

Our turn.

OUR TURN!

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

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

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

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

Steve Bannon, on election night

OUR TURN!!

OUR TURN!!!

OUR TURN!!!

OUR TURN!!!

January 6 Tapes?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That should make you good and mad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RINOs an Endangered Species?
If Only!

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

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

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

But I’m not done ranting about RINOs.

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

Given the results of our most recent elections, the Left will now push harder, and the RINOs will now turn even squishier than they were before.

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

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

Justice

It says “Justice” on the picture.

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

But what is it?

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

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

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

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

—Ayn Rand Lexicon (aynrandlexicon.com)

Justice Must Be Done.

Trump, it is supposed, had some documents.

Biden and company stole the country.

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

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system. (This doesn’t necessarily include deposing Joe and Hoe and putting Trump where he belongs, but it would certainly be a lot easier to fix our broken electoral system with the right people in charge.)

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2024 or 2026 is pointless 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 in the system is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

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

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

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

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

Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $2,634.20
Silver $31.11
Platinum $936.00
Palladium $982.00
Rhodium $4,850.00
FRNSI* 126.429+
Gold:Silver 84.674-

This week, at Friday close:

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

Gold blooped up over 2700 on Wednesday then got beaten with the ugly stick the last two days, but still ended up a bit up for the week. Silver, however, didn’t end up for the week. Platinum continues to be on 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.

The Final Experiment Begins

I wrote this first bit on Tuesday. Then realized my mistake. Rather than try to edit it, I think I’ll just tack on the next bit, written on Wednesday, and leave both parts in, plus what I come up with Thursday and Friday. It might give you some insight into what I choose to call a “thought process.”

My First Take [Written Tuesday, to be read Saturday]

It starts today. After a few days’ travel the four Flat Earthers, four Globers, and Will Duffy (who put the whole thing together) have now arrived at nearly 80 degrees South latitude, where they will enjoy several days of uninterrupted daylight.

Assuming, of course that globe earth is true. I’d normally not have to put that caveat in but under present circumstances, it’s necessary.

I contacted Will Duffy and will be taking photographs of the Sun over the next few days to bolster the data set. People all around the globe will be doing this.

Duffy dropped a video on Tuesday the 10th, mentioning someone that dang near everyone forgot. Including me, though as I watched the video I did guess what it was before he said it.

The video starts with a recap. Before the Final Experiment was announced, the Big Name Flat Earthers were adamant that there was no 24 hour sun in Antarctica. Once the Final Experiment was announced, they scurried like cockroaches when you flick the lights on, coming up with crazy rationales…followed by more crazy rationales.

Oh, the participants (including the Flat Earthers, who are really paid off shills) secretly went to the NORTH six months ago and filmed the sun there. Whoops–that won’t work, because the Sun would be traveling in the wrong direction. No problem, the film will be run backwards. Except that one of the Flat Earthers plans to wear a body cam. Run THAT backwards and people will be walking backwards. That string of Grade-A Stupid was their second resort; it came about after the first suggestion–that they’d be going north right now was instantly shot down on the grounds that you have 24 hour darkness in the Arctic right now.

[It’s funny that they’re changing their position on what a 24 hour sun means before they see the results. It’s almost as if they knew all along that the Final Experiment would show a 24 hour sun and were lying six months ago, and for years before that, when they said there was no 24 hour sun in Antarctica, but willing to stake their whole line of bullshit on it because they figured no one would actually offer to send them on a $31K trip to see for themselves.

Yeah, almost as if. In fact, these people are duplicitous cunts.]

There is not only a twenty four hour sun according to the Globe model…there is going to be a 24 hour moon! And, at least up to six months ago, Flat Earthers would have considered this impossible too. But! No one has ever videoed it, at least nothing can be found on YouTube.

(Contrary to grifter flerfer assertions, there are plenty of 24 hour Antarctic sun videos on YouTube, and not just the one that had an edit in it that was readily acknowledged and explained by the uploader…once someone actually bothered to ask him instead of leaping to conclusions about his motives. Of course the flerfers will say ALL of these have been doctored but when you demand evidence for that they change the subject.)

On the 14th the moon will be full. It should be visible in daylight, opposite the sun. If the Sun is to the north, the moon should be visible to the south. If the sun is to the west, the Moon should be visible to the East.

By the 19th the moon will be a waxing gibbous (as seen from the northern hemisphere, the right hand crescent is dark; it should be the left hand side as seen in Antarctica because the observer is upside down with respect to what we’re accustomed to (we in the Northern Hemisphere I think). At that point it will follow the Sun around the sky, trailing it by a bit less than 120 degrees. (If the sun is directly in front of you (“twelve o’clock”) the moon will be at about four o’clock. Both will move right to left [not left to right as in the Northern hemisphere].)

For those who need a quick refresher on terms like “twelve o’clock” and “four o’clock” as directions:

A nice timelapse from the 17th onward should show a visible change in the moon’s phase over the span of 24 or better yet 48 hours. Let’s see what Will Duffy comes up with.

Flat Earthers: What are you going to do if there’s not only a 24 hour Sun, but also a 24 hour Moon? Are you going to create a brand new set of outrageous theories and ridiculous excuses for the Moon, like you did for the Sun? Or will you just do the right thing, and finally acknowledge that we live on a globe?

I am throwing down the gauntlet, right here, right now. If we return from Antarctica with videos of both a twenty four hour sun, and a twenty four hour moon, this debate is over. Done. Finished. This is The Final Experiment.

Will Duffy of The Final Experiment, in the video linked above

But this is actually WRONG! [Written Wednesday]

In fact, I realized on Wednesday that the Moon will not be visible at all from Antarctica at this time of year! (And I am by no means the only person to realize this. Plenty of comments for the video, in fact, are from people who spotted this. They checked online. I, on the other hand realized from first principles there would be a problem.)

What!?!

[At this point, I wrote what eventually became the science part of this post. You can go read it, or not…but what follows might not make sense without it.]

OK, let’s step back a bit, and get back to the Final Experiment, applying what we’ve learned.

The reason there’s a twenty four hour sun near the June solstice in the Arctic or near the December solstice in the Antarctic, is because the sun’s declination is extreme enough that it never sets in these locations. If you look at that last diagram, right now the Sun is near the left hand side, almost where that sun is drawn onto the far side of the sphere. Look carefully, it shines onto the south pole, albeit at an oblique angle. Earth rotates, but no matter what, the south pole is lit as long as the sun stays near there. That’s the current situation in Antarctica.

“Okay, Steve, but we dove down this rabbit hole because you got cranky about the twenty four hour moon. So what about the moon?”

The moon will be full on the 14th. Which means that on that day, it is on the opposite side of the celestial sphere from the sun. That way the Sun lights up the same side we are looking at, because the Sun is behind us as we face the Moon.

Is the Moon exactly opposite of the Sun on the celestial sphere? No. It usually is not exactly opposite on a full moon. But when it is, we get a lunar eclipse, because the Moon is actually traveling through the Earth’s shadow.

We need to know a bit more about the Moon’s orbit. Wikipedia says the inclination of the Moon’s orbit is 5.145 degrees relative to the ecliptic. (Oh, goody, just for once the data is in the most convenient form!) The plane of the Moon’s orbit intersects the ecliptic just like the celestial equator does, somewhere. In fact that intersection line moves a lot. But we don’t need to know where. We just need to know that the moon is never more than 5.145 degrees away from the ecliptic.

Now since we’re conservatives and old school, we go to a table and look something up. the declination of the Sun on December 14th:

https://www.starpath.com/blog_files/Table%20of%20the%20Declination%20of%20the%20Sun.pdf

The table says 23 degrees, 11 minutes south. Or almost exactly 23.2 degrees south. That’s the declination of that point of the ecliptic.

The opposite point on the ecliptic…near where the Moon will be, since it’s full on that date, is at 23.2 degrees north declination. The Moon is not more than 5.145 degrees off of this. I’m going to round that to 5.1, and say the Moon will have a declination of between 28.3 and 18.1 North.

So if I duck-duck-go that, there’s another table of lunar declination and it turns out that on the 14th the moon will be anywhere from 25 1/4 degrees to 27 1/4 degrees north declination. Later on the 16th its declination will be almost 26 1/2 degrees north.

That’s close to where the right hand Sun is in that diagram above. THAT Sun always shines on the north pole as the Earth rotates, never on the south pole.

In other words, if the moon is at that point (and it will be), it won’t be visible from the south pole, or anywhere within 25 degrees of the south pole. It will be below the horizon, all of the time. They will never see the moon at all.

If Will Duffy is expecting to take a video of a twenty four hour moon while he’s down there, he’s going to be sorely disappointed.

Is Will Duffy a chimp who didn’t think to check on this? Well, let’s think about this very carefully.

The moon not being visible in Antarctica for days is also a prediction of the Globe Earth. The flat Earth would never make a prediction like this, for exactly the same reason it won’t predict either 24 hours of sun or 24 hours of darkness in Antarctica. So if you are in Antarctica and don’t see the moon “over there” away from the Sun, like I described above, and never see it for days on end, the Globe model is in fact successful. Furthermore, any sight of the Moon would be evidence against the Globe Earth.

But note I not only said “you,” I emphasized it. Because there’s an important epistemic point here. If you don’t go to Antarctica, but someone else goes and says he didn’t see the moon, do you trust him? If he shows you pictures of a sky with no moon in it, how do you know he didn’t just face the wrong way deliberately when taking the picture, to avoid photographing the moon that was actually there? Oh, a really hard-core fisheye would photograph the whole sky…and immediately be condemned by the flerfers as NASA photoshop. (And you’d want a filter over it, one that wouldn’t let the moon through, because you don’t want the Sun–which will also be there–to burn a hole in your camera’s sensor.) The point is, someone who went to Antarctica can’t prove to you that he didn’t see the Moon. [He can prove to you that he saw the Sun, by producing photos with the Sun in them, but a photo with no Moon in it can happen even if there’s a Moon up.]

And the big-name flerfers who aren’t going to Antarctica A) won’t accept anything a glober says and B) won’t accept the testimony of the flerfers who went. [They’ll believe it because based on their recent behavior, they know the globe is true. They won’t accept it, though because that would be them admitting they are grifting pieces of shit.] Remember, now the flerfers in Antarctica are all “shills” just for having the intellectual integrity to go and look!

So how do you prove the Moon is behaving in accordance with glober predictions?

You have someone in the Arctic make the movie of the 24 hour moon. Because the moon will be 24 hours as far south as 63 1/2 degrees north latitude. In other words, Fairbanks will be able to see it for a few days. Prudhoe Bay will have no trouble seeing it the full length of time. People in Northern Scandinavia and Russia will have no trouble. There are plenty of people “up” there (I’ve even seen YouTube channels by some of them, talking about the round the clock darkness). And a pro photographer with the right equipment should be able to get “up” there, too.

And I believe this is what Will Duffy is doing.

He talked about a 24 hour moon happening at this time. He talked about a 24 hour moon happening in Antarctica (without being specific as to when). He never quite says he will see the 24 hour moon on this trip.

“But, he says he’s going to make a video!”

No, he says he will hopefully procure a video of the 24 hour moon. Elsewhere he says obtain. Not take it. Procure it, obtain it, do not necessarily mean he makes it himself.

Alternatively, he had someone film a 24 hour moon, six months ago, during Antarctic night.

I don’t think he’s a chimp who forgot to look it up. His phrasing is too careful. He knows.

I do think, though, that an Arctic 24 hour Moon won’t be helpful; if Flat Earth can predict a 24 hour Sun during north hemisphere summer time, it should have no problem with 24 hour Moons in the Arctic. What Flat Earth has a harder time explaining is why 24 hour full Moons only occur in the Arctic around December. What forces the Moon to be at its farthest north when the Sun is at its farthest south? They’re running around in two separate race tracks over the disc in that model.

OK, so let’s think about this, some. Imagine being at the south pole, just before sunrise. Early September. You have 24 hour pre-dawn twilight. The moon could well be above the horizon when it is at first or third quarter (a “half moon”) and it would be up for 24 hours. That would be another cool way to get a 24 hour moon video. And that could have happened just this last September. That would be a 24 hour moon in Antarctica, filmed under conditions short of completely brutal.

So I’m waiting to see what Will has up his sleeve.

Thursday Writings

A slight clue dropped on Thursday…Duffy dropped another video acknowledging the difficulty, and agreeing that he never actually said he expected to see a 24 hour moon this coming week.

It doesn’t tell us how he’s planning to do it. Some commenters speculate he’s simply planning to stay for an extra week until the moon rises. That would be cool, but I think he want some witnesses, preferably at least one flat Earther, to stay with him.

More Goodies

Jeranism, one of the flat Earthers going to Antarctica, was near the southern tip of South America this last week, preparing to fly to Union Glacier. He made this video in the middle of the night, twilight directly to the south. This is in perfect accord with the globe model, where at that latitude (56 degrees south, if memory serves) the sun is just twelve degrees or so below the horizon at that point in the circle. The flat Earth model does not allow for this, so he has already seen enough evidence that he should give it up. I heard elsewhere he had noted the sunrise and sunset being to the southeast and southwest, also in perfect accord with the globe (as I will explain in the “science” section).

Astronomical Coordinate Systems

This is a bit of a quick and incomplete lesson on celestial coordinates. This is a working tool of astronomy that often gets glossed over in popularizations and certainly in “science journalism.” But there are millions of amateur astronomers who know this stuff really well.

In order to look at something, you have to know where to look, and in order to report a discovery (and amateur astronomers often make discoveries, e.g., of comets), you have to be able to tell others where to look.

Astronomers in some ways operate in a two dimensional realm. If you specify a direction without a distance, you know where to look, since everyone is pretty much at the same location, Earth. (This direction can change slightly when it’s the Moon we are talking about–this is how the ancient Greeks figured out how far away it is. Everything else is so far away, the difference across the 13,000 km diameter of the Earth is insignificant.)

Astronomers have this concept of a “celestial sphere” for visualization purposes. It’s not a literal hard surface, but they conceive of it as being centered on the observer, with a very large, perhaps even infinite, radius. You are on the inside of the sphere, looking outward. The surface is two dimensional, and astronomical coordinates specify points on that sphere with two numbers. (In the deep sense that’s what “two dimensional” means).

How do those coordinates work? There are multiple schemes used. There are two major different systems; they work totally differently and each have their strengths and weaknesses. Astronomers (particularly amateur astronomers) think in either or both systems depending on context. There are two other commonly used ones as well, one of them quite useful for working in the solar system (so I should have covered it a few months ago, right?), the other more useful for discussing the Milky Way galaxy. I’m not going to discuss them here.

Let’s take up the conceptually easy one first.

Local Horizontal Coordinates

Imagine yourself standing on a flat plane, the horizon plane. It’s basically an extension of the horizon out to infinity.

The celestial sphere is centered on you. How do you specify locations on it? First, you measure along the horizon an angle from north, clockwise. This is called the azimuth. North is 0, east is 90, south is 180, west is 270, then back around to north which is sometimes called 360 as well as 0.

Then you measure up from the horizon, another angle. This is called the altitude (or more often in my experience, the elevation, but this diagram says altitude).

The zenith is directly overhead. Azimuth can be anything, elevation is 90 degrees. One more important line is the “celestial meridian,” the line running from due south to the zenith, and then down to due north. This doesn’t seem to mean much at this point but it will turn out to be very useful.

This system is also used a lot in aviation, it’s ideal, for instance, for specifying the direction of an airplane seen by a radar. Also, those numbers at the ends of runways actually are a reference to azimuth; an runway with (say) 15 painted at the end runs in the 150 degrees azimuth direction. That’s the direction you need to point your plane to land on that runway (assuming you want to stay on that runway after touching down, that is). The one difference is here they determine which way north is with a compass, rather than off of true north. And, yes, at the other end of the runway the number is 33, because if you’re landing there, you’re flying in the opposite direction, which will differ by 18 (= 180 degrees).

Artillery is another application. Once they’ve computed the exact direction you need to fire the gun (based on a number of things including curvature of the earth) it’s easy to tell someone to point the gun at azimuth 267 elevation 39. (Actually I think they are more precise than that.) Also surveying; it’s relatively easy to measure the direction of a mountain, then how far it sticks up above the horizontal plane.

Some telescopes have mounts that swivel around a vertical axis, then allow you to tilt the telescope up; this is called an “azimuthal” mount (or more commonly, an “alt azimuth” mount) because it naturally follows this coordinate system.

An alt-azimuth mount is used for a lot of very large amateur telescopes; the other alternative (which will be discussed in due course) is much more expensive and impractical for large telescopes.

But there’s an even more specialized case. There’s a thing called a “transit telescope.” It does not swivel horizontally at all. It can only move in elevation. And it’s fixed so that its azimuth is either 180 or 0. In other words it can point only along the celestial meridian. Here is an example:

It doesn’t seem like such a thing would be very useful, but in fact it’s very useful. I’ll explain in due course.

The local horizontal coordinate system, by the way, works quite naturally for flat Earthers as well. In fact it’s in some ways more natural for them, because everyone on Earth is believed by flat Earthers to have the same horizon plane. On a spherical earth, every point on the globe has its own unique version of this system (though it’s very hard to tell the difference for distances less than a few miles). The ancient flat earth model had the celestial sphere at a great distance (effectively infinity) so this was a natural for them (the earth was flat and finite, and the stars were fixed to a literal sphere that would rotate around the earth, with stars actually going under the earth after they set). The modern flat earth model conceives of the sky as being a big physical dome only a few thousand miles away, so it makes some difference where you are on earth, describing the location of some star. You could be directly under it, but someone a few thousand miles away will see the star as not being overhead. The orientation of the system is the same for both people but their centers will be offset enough to make a difference.

So LHC is easy…but it has a major drawback. As the Earth rotates west-to-east, the sky appears to rotate east-to-west, and the stars will move along arcs that do not conveniently follow either the elevation or azimuth axes of such mounts. Literally from one second to the next, the stars change coordinates!

[A geek inside joke: LHC is a “left handed” coordinate system, unlike most, and people often claim that LHC really stands for “left handed coordinates.”]

Celestial Coordinates

It would be handy to have a system where the stars do not change coordinates. That way you can look up a star’s location. You then have to do some math to figure out, based on your location and the time, where the star should be in your local horizontal coordinates, but at least you can (in principle) do the math and know where to look. (Nowadays there are web pages and apps to do that for you.) But there’s a very important point here. The formulae to do this were derived based on a full celestial sphere (not a flat earther dome) and they require your location specified on a globe. If the Earth were flat, and the stars on a small dome, these formulae would not work because they’d be based on nonsense.

But they do work. Perfectly. You can predict sunrise and sunset times and azimuths decades in advance. You have to correct for refraction which is worse near the horizon, but then these formulas are dead-nuts on, without fail. The celestial sphere and spherical earth models work, and they work because the models are in accord with reality. Flat earth provides you no mathematical method whatsoever to even attempt to do these computations…much less a method that would actually give you the right fooking answer every time, in every place.

With that rant out of the way, I have to do an aside: There’s a caveat about what I am about to describe. Absolutely nothing in the sky is truly stationary. But there are fast motions (the Earth’s rotation, the Earth’s orbiting the Sun, the motion of the Moon and planets) that you can readily observe, and others that take decades to become apparent, and even then perhaps only with very sensitive instruments. We will ignore everything but the fast motions. I’m going to skip right past precession of the equinoxes and proper motions of the stars and perturbations to the Earth’s orbital plane. They’re there, but too small to make any difference in the short term, and people usually teach them after they teach the “simple” case I am presenting here. OK, finally we can move on.

I alluded to there being four major systems. The other three are all designed so that star, galaxy and nebula coordinates don’t change (at least not over the span of decades). They are the equatorial, ecliptic, and galactic coordinates. We are going to talk about equatorial coordinates here. How do they work? They are actually defined by analogy with the Earth. With the Earth, we specify two numbers and they identify a unique point on the Earth’s surface. (The fact that the Earth isn’t quite spherical introduces a lot of complications that only matter when you’re trying to be really, surveyor-grade precise…ugly, ugly math; I’ve had to deal with it.)

Similarly we can specify two numbers, and identify a specific location on the celestial sphere, and we even have analogues to the equator and poles.

On Earth, we have latitude and longitude. Latitude essentially [not quite because it’s an ellipsoid] measures distance away from the equator, in degrees along the Earth’s curved surface, or in other words, how far north or south the point is. Longitude measures an angle east or west from some meridian line (a line which runs from the north pole to the south pole, intersecting the equator at a ninety degree angle). The choice of meridian line is arbitrary; we’ve settled on using the one that runs through the observatory at Greenwich, England.

We can do something similar to latitude and longitude on the celestial sphere. It turns out that since the Earth rotates, we can extend that axis of rotation (which goes from the north pole through the center of the earth to the south pole) out to infinity; the points where it touches the celestial sphere are the north and south celestial poles. The poles are stationary [aside from the caveat above].

Similarly you can think of a plane that goes through the equator of the Earth and the center of the Earth. You can extend that out to infinity, and where it crosses the celestial sphere, that is the celestial equator.

You can measure an angle from the celestial equator north or south to some object out in space (a planet, star, nebula or galaxy). However, we don’t call it a latitude, we call it a declination.

The constellation of Orion actually straddles the celestial equator. If you are in the northern hemisphere, the right hand star of the three on Orion’s belt, Mintaka, is nearly dead-on the celestial equator; it’s 0.3 degrees south declination. (If you’re in the southern hemisphere, Orion looks “upside down” compared to what we see in the US, and Mintaka will be the leftmost star in Orion’s belt. If you’re still confused, it’s the first of the three to rise or set.)

The stars are stationary [besides the caveat]. On the other hand, the planets–indeed any object within the solar system–move visibly.

The Earth orbits the Sun. That causes the Sun to appear to move against the celestial sphere. The Earth’s orbit is a plane. The intersection of that plane and the celestial sphere is yet another circle, called the ecliptic.

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.

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.

The other planets’ orbits are in almost the same plane as our orbit. So what we see from Earth is that the other planets stick pretty close to the ecliptic. From the outside, looking in, looking at the solar system edge on, they stay almost in the same plane, sometimes a bit above and a bit below:

So when we draw the celestial sphere, we can draw the ecliptic on it. This line is the line the Sun appears to move along in the course of a year. The constellations this line goes through are the zodiac. Sort of. It actually goes through Ophiuchus as well as the “astrology sign” twelve, between Scorpius and Sagittarius, but no one is an Ophiuchus. (Actually since Ophiuchus is the “Serpent Bearer” Steve Irwin could have qualified. Unfortunately he was born at the wrong time of year.)

There are four key points on the ecliptic. Two of them are where the ecliptic intersects the celestial equator, they are the equinoxes, one the vernal equinox and the other the autumnal equinox. As the sun (appears to) move(s) along the ecliptic (counter clockwise in the diagram above) over the course of a year, it will cross from south of the celestial equator to being north of it at the vernal equinox, then from north to south at the autumnal equinox. The other two points are unlabeled on the diagram; those are the ones where the sun is furthest north or south from the celestial equator, these are the solstices. The December solstice is near the left edge of the diagram, the June solstice is near the right edge.

The solstices are where the Sun is at its minimum and maximum declination, respectively. (Stop and think about that, until it’s clear.) This is why the Sun is low in the sky at noon in December, and much higher at noon in June (or vice versa for southern hemisphere folks).

Those four points define the beginnings of the seasons. For example the center of the Sun’s disc will cross the vernal equinox at 3:01 PM Mountain Daylight Time [you guys in the Eastern time zone can do the conversion for a change instead of making us people in flyover country do it] on March 20th, 2025. That is the beginning of northern hemisphere spring. More immediately and relevantly, at 2:20 AM Mountain Standard Time on December 21 (a week from today), Winter begins; the Sun is, at that moment, at its lowest declination, or (another way of saying the same thing) its greatest southern declination. It’s pretty close to that declination right now.

I haven’t yet talked much about the celestial sphere equivalent of longitude, and deliberately so; I needed to discuss the ecliptic first. Because it turns out the vernal equinox is the “reference longitude” on the celestial sphere. It’s the zero line.

Only we don’t call it longitude, we call it “right ascension.” And traditionally, we don’t measure it in degrees, we measure it in hours, 24 to the circle–fifteen degrees make up one hour. And in minutes, 60 to the hour, and seconds, 60 to the minute. (Unfortunately degrees are divided up into 60 minutes and the minutes are devided into 60 seconds, so now we have two different kinds of “minutes.” A minute of right ascension is four minutes of the 360 degree circle.

(Sometimes right ascension is measured in degrees, that’s probably going to become the standard someday.)

Why is it called right ascension? I don’t know. This is a puzzler, because as seen from the Earth the numbers go up to the left, as you face south. (We are “outside” the sphere in the next diagram, in a sort of “God’s Eye View,” so they go up to the right. Maybe God named it right ascension.)

So here’s that first “celestial sphere” diagram, with the declination and right ascension lines and ecliptic, and solstices, and equinoxes, drawn onto it. The really bright “Sun” is at the Vernal Equinox. The one farthest to the right as you look at the diagram is the June solstice, the one on the far side of the globe is the Autumnal equinox, and all the way over on the left, is the December solstice.

Here is a map, plotted as if declination and right ascension were planar coordinates, of the sky, with the official boundaries between constellations noted. Note that the ecliptic is a sort of “roller coaster” track. The sun moves right to left along it over the course of a year.

[Side note: Notice, by the way that the Sun is actually in Pisces at the vernal Equinox…not just about to enter Aries, as the zodiacal signs’ association with calendar dates would imply. That is a result of the procession of the equinoxes having been able to act for a couple of thousand years since astrology was invented. In fact, we will eventually reach a point where the Sun will be just leaving Aquarius at the vernal equinox. That is what “the Age of Aquarius” means.]

So why on Earth is right ascension done in hours? To answer that, we need a bit of history. Before there were atomic clocks, how did we determine the time, and do so with some degree of precision?

Remember that transit telescope? You use one of those. You then watch for a specific star to cross the center of the telescope; when it does that it crosses your celestial meridian. You look up the right ascension of that star…and read off hours, minutes and seconds. That’s what time it is.

Well…not really. More work must be done. What you have is the sidereal time; the time with respect to the stars. (At this moment, you set a special sidereal clock to that time; if it’s accurate you don’t need to set it again for a while. Note though that a sidereal clock seems to run fast; it goes through one “day” in 23 hours, 56 minutes, and some number of seconds I’m too lazy to look up.) You have to do a bit of computation still. Sidereal time only matches your local solar time if the Sun happens to be at 12h right ascension. So you get to do some subtraction, where the sun is versus where that star is, and NOW you have your local solar time. Then you gotta correct for the fact that the Earth’s orbit is elliptical which means the sun’s motion along the ecliptic speeds up and slows down, to get your mean solar time (that involved looking something up in a table that someone else calculated, saving you the skull sweat). THEN you have to correct for the fact that you’re not in your time zone’s central meridian. That’s a simple addition or subtraction. And then…add a gratuitous fricking hour if you’re on daylight saving time.

THIS is why people used to call the observatory to get the precise time.

Mintaka, that belt star in Orion, is at 5h 32m right ascension. So, if it’s on the meridian right now, exactly south or north of you, the sidereal time is 5h 32m. Note though someone to the west or east of you is not seeing the star cross at the same time you are. You are your own personal time zone when it’s sidereal time!

Or think about it a different way. On the first day of (northern hemisphere) spring, the Sun is at RA 0h. When it crosses the meridian (i.e., at solar noon where you are), the sidereal time is 0h, which is sidereal midnight! Half a year later, the first day of fall, the Sun is on the other side of the sky, and it crosses your meridian at 12h sidereal time. Which means that at that time of year the Earth is facing the opposite direction (with respect to the stars) at noon, than it was on the first day of Spring. Sidereal time is actually a measure of which way the Earth is facing, with respect to the stars, not the sun. Solar time is a measure of which way the Earth is facing, with respect to the Sun. (If you find that confusing, you’re not alone. One of the Flerfer talking points is designed to exploit that confusion.)

Telescopes (and cameras) can be mounted on an equatorial mount.

There are two ways for this to pivot, one around the bar with the weights on it, for declination, and the other at 90 degrees to this, through the part that shows as diagonal lower left to upper right. That part of the mount should be set up parallel to the Earth’s axis of rotation, that way pivoting on that will change the right ascension the telescope is pointing at. This one has a cap at lower left, because there’s actually a small telescope inside the mount. You use that small telescope to ensure that you’ve pointed that axis directly at the north celestial pole; then you’re good to go. That axis is often motorized, too, so it will cause the telescope to turn as the sky turns. This is advantageous for long-exposure photography through the scope. That’s the advantage of this kind of mount, and the advantage of this coordinate system; as the earth rotates, a telescope can stay pointed at the same place simply by rotating through right ascension. There are other designs, too, like a fork mount:

The fork pivots around the black dot at its bottom for right ascension, declination is managed by the two joints joining the telescope to the fork. For extremely heavy telescopes you get an English or Yoke mount:

And finally the horseshoe mount, used by Palomar. If the telescope is actually pointing through the horseshoe, it’s looking very near the north celestial pole.

So here we are; we understand the celestial sphere, we understand the ecliptic, we understand how they tie together to define the seasons. As one last parting shot here, I’ll point out that the celestial poles are necessarily on the celestial meridian.

How do you as an observer standing somewhere on planet Earth, fit in? I’m showing a whole sphere of stars, but at any given time we can only see half of that sphere; the nighttime sky is half of the celestial sphere.

Remember these diagrams are for illustration purposes only. The real situation is the sphere should be drawn very large (oh, say a mile across) and the Earth should look like a pinhead. Even that isn’t enough, but it’s a lot closer.

What do you, standing in some particular spot, actually see? How does the equatorial celestial system relate to your local horizontal coordinates? I’m going to assume the northern hemisphere (as the people who draw the diagrams usually do), and so here’s the usual diagram.

There’s the viewer, standing somewhere in North America. It’s oriented so that he is standing vertically, which gives quite a tilt to the equatorial celestial sphere. Projected onto the celestial sphere is the viewer’s horizon.

In this diagram we are pretending the Earth is not moving, but rather that the sky is; an object on the equator appears to move clockwise, as you’re facing south. Turn around and face north, and the celestial sphere appears to be rotating counter clockwise around the pole. That pole is almost at the north star, Polaris.

The pole is above the horizon by a certain angle. What is that angle?

That turns out to be easy. If you were standing at the north pole latitude 90 degrees North, the celestial pole would be directly overhead, which is to say, 90 degrees above the horizon. If you happened to be on the equator, latitude 0, though, the north celestial pole would be sitting due north, on the horizon, i.e., 0 degrees above the horizon.

So in essence the altitude above the horizon of the celestial pole, is equal to the north latitude of the observer. This is true in the southern hemisphere as well, almost; the altitude of the south celestial pole is equal to the south latitude of the observer. Notice that the stars will appear to circle the south celestial pole in the clockwise direction (this is probably easiest to see if you imagine the paths around the opposite pole marked in the middle diagram below).

This is why the globe earth model predicts that the stars will appear to spin clockwise in the Southern hemisphere. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter where you are standing (Africa, Australia, South America); you will the SAME stars rotating about the same pole. This is impossible on the flat Earth, since people facing south are facing in completely different directions on the disc world. The stars cannot simultaneously be circling around a point due south to all viewers, when the direction “due south” is different for every viewer.

One more thing: Notice in the right hand diagram, that some stars will never set; the ones fairly close to the celestial pole run in circles that are small enough they don’t dip below the horizon. In fact, it’s those stars within a certain angle of the pole, and that angle is also the same as your latitude. Conversely facing south, there are stars that will never rise above the horizon, again a circle of stars centered on the south celestial pole, and being within “your latitude” degrees of the south celestial pole.

When at the North pole, you can see every thing in the north celestial hemisphere, all of the time, but can never, ever see anything in the south celestial hemisphere.

And this applies not just to the stars but to the Sun. During the six months the Sun is in the northern celestial hemisphere, it too can be seen all of the time; the north pole therefore has six continuous months of daylight. Once the Sun goes into the south celestial hemisphere, you get six months of night. Similarly, the south pole has six months of daylight when the Sun is in the south celestial hemisphere, and six months of darkness otherwise.

For places on Earth near to, but not at the pole, there is some period of time less than six months long during which the Sun’s declination is high enough that the Sun does not set, and you have a twenty four hour sun. At Union Glacier, the site of the Final Experiment, the latitude is 79.75 degrees south so any time the sun’s declination is 10.25 degrees south (or further south than that) Union Glacier has 24 hour sun.

When on the equator, absolutely everything will be visible for half of the sidereal day, but if it’s something close to either pole, it won’t get that high in the sky. The celestial poles themselves will be sitting right on the horizon.

Here’s one more diagram showing, for three different declinations, an object’s apparent path across the sky, for someone at 35 degrees north latitude.

The object is the sun, at the two solstices (declination +/- 23.5 degrees) and on the equinoxes (declination 0).

When the sun is at a high declination, it rises in the northeast, climbs high in the sky, is at its highest as it crosses the meridian directly south of the observer, then sets in the northwest. When the sun is at equinox, it rises directly due east, climbs somewhat high in the sky, culminating at the meridian, then sets precisely to the observer’s west. Finally when the sun is at a low declination, it rises in the southeast, doesn’t get too far up in the sky, but does reach a maximum at the meridian, and then sets in the southwest. Note that different fractions of the total sun path are below the horizon. Most of the Dec. 21 path is below the horizon, which is why the daytime is so short in winter. Conversely the summer path is mostly above the horizon, which makes for long summer days. The sun is covering the same ascension angle in the same time, it’s just that more of the total arc is above the horizon in the summer, and less in the winter.

In the southern hemisphere imagine all of those sun paths leaning the other way, with the south celestial pole above the horizon. Now the December 21 path is the one that has most of its length above the horizon. The sun rises in the southeast, swings around to a high spot north of the observer (and, of course, on the meridian), then sets in the southwest. This is another concrete prediction of the Globe Earth; the flat earth has the sun circling around a point well north of the observer, so the sun should start in the northeast, come closest north of the observer, then set in the northwest. At no time in the Flat Earth model is the Sun ever to the south of the observer, certainly not at sunrise and sunset (provided the observer is further south than 23.5 degrees south latitude).

So here we are. This is how celestial coordinates work. And they do work.

I found this whole kerfuffle about the 24 hour moon to be a “teachable moment.” That’s a Leftist mislabeling of “perfect moment to try to indoctrinate people” but I actually mean “teachable moment.” Flerfers reading this will, I hope, accept it as possibly the first coherent/comprehensive explanation of the topic they’ve ever read (assuming it is coherent), then they can decide for themselves whether it makes sense (though I hope they take into their accounting that it works and can predict, e.g., sunrise and sunset with perfect accuracy).

This one ran a bit overlong but I hope it was illuminating.