EDIT: 22:54 MT. Well let’s just say the top item didn’t age well…except perhaps for the deserved insults to Speaker Dungsmear.

I can only hope McCarthy keeps his promises.

Giving Our “Love” To A Certain RINO POS

Sundance of Banhammer Central, addressing Kevin “Dungsmear” McCarthy:

(See, this is how you do it, Sundance. Don’t drone on for ten thousand words, half of which are selected [and many of those misused] solely for their two-dollar value.)

More seriously, have you ever seen a more blatant example of how the Republican Party simply does not care about what its voters want? (Except of course to figure out what positions they need to mindlessly parrot when doing town halls and campaigning.)

Most of the base loathes McCarthy, and all but twenty of the Republicans in the House of Representatives insist on voting for him for Speaker of the House, again and again, exemplifying the definition of insanity.

For those twenty standing their ground, you are heroes. For the rest…you’re RINO scum (or you’re acting like it so if, deep down, you aren’t I can’t tell and neither can any other actual American, so quit acting before we decide to terminate your careers). Lauren Boebert is not my representative…on paper. That honor is dishonorably discharged by Ken Buck. In spirit, however, Lauren IS my representative.

[Note: Now there are six holdouts. Five of whom say NO WAY to McCarthy. The others, I hope, got some very good concessions that will neuter the RINO to some extent. And of course two hours before this posts, they will try again, so (other than my note to Sundance) this may all be moot by the time it posts.]

[11:45 PM ET: Dungsmear lost again, but the House remains in session. Apparently Gaetz is being pressured to switch from “present” to “Dungsmear.” Ongoing…]

Now the most likely outcome is that McCarthy does indeed pick up that gavel, after having made a deal. Hopefully one that renders him powerless to interfere with a MAGA agenda.

RINOs an Endangered Species?
If Only!

(Well this is the perfect time for this to come up in the rotation!)

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?

In Defense of Ranked Choice Voting

One of the biggest obstacles to direly-needed change is RINOs, and one of the weapons in their arsenal is the “Wasted Vote” argument.

Periodically a third party has arisen, trying to hold RINOs to account by putting pressure on them from outside of the party, since doing so from the inside has historically done very little good. But, even if you find a third party candidate who perfectly reflects your views, you’re likely to vote for the RINO anyway. Why? Because if you don’t, the Democrat might win, and that would be even worse. So if you vote for that third party (that few will vote for), you’re throwing your vote away and increasing the likelihood of the Democrat winning. (It’s half as much a gain for the Democrat, as actually voting for the Democrat would be. Not as much, but half as much. Because although you denied the R your vote, you did not flip your vote to the Democrat.)

The Republican Party Establishment knows you don’t love them. But they know you hate the Democrats worse, and they use that to continue to herd you into supporting them. With gritted teeth but your vote counts the same whether you cast it enthusiastically, or only because it’s probably a felony to piss on the voting apparatus.

But what if you could vote for that third party without increasing the changes of the Dem walking away with the prize?

This is what ranked choice voting, or instant runoff voting, can do provided it is properly implemented. (And this includes the votes, and only genuine votes, being counted honestly, of course. However, I’m going to compare it to what we have today, and pretend that is honestly done too. RCV can’t work if it’s not honestly administered, just like our current system isn’t working because it isn’t honestly administered.)

The idea behind RCV is to vote by expressing your order of preference. You could vote for the Patriot Party, then for the Rino Party as your second choice (and ignore the Democrat, the Green, the Overt Socialist Party, etc.)

What does this do? It nullifies the wasted vote argument. Your vote will be counted for the Patriot party, first, then instead of it being “wasted” when the Patriot Party loses, it ends up going to the RINO. Actually, it’s just barely possible that the Patriot Party would actually beat the RINO, if people weren’t all individually afraid to vote for it. (It’s just like the famous “Prisoner’s Dilemma” where your fear of other peoples’ actions prevents you from doing the optimal thing. As long as Job Lowe is afraid to vote Patriot because he’s afraid you’ll vote RINO, you’ll have to vote RINO because Job Lowe will.)

So on the whole I like RCV. It gives you a no-risk way to vote against the RINO scum, and in favor of someone who deserves your vote.

The problem is, as done here in the US, it comes packaged with a “jungle primary.” A bunch of candidates get to put their name out there, and the top four (or so) candidates get onto the “main” ballot. This gives party establishments their way around the threat of a good third party bumping them off. Because they know that few people bother with primaries, and third parties don’t have the resources to run in a primary…so they throw two or three establishment hacks into the primary and they will probably beat the third party. The result is the RINOs end up with two of the four slots in the general election, and the Dems get the other two. Now there’s suddenly no third party candidate on the ballot at all.

If we were to combine RCV with the present system where each party could nominate exactly one candidate to appear on the November ballot, or at the very least, ensure minor parties could get onto the ballot with at least one candidate regardless of the primary, we would be getting somewhere, but the establishment is smarter than we like to give them credit for. They will support the jungle primary + RCV “solution” rather than the more appropriate one-candidate-per-party + RCV solution.

It’s not RCV, it’s the primary structure grafted onto it.

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 2022 or 2024 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 $1,825.50
Silver $24.08
Platinum $1,079.00
Palladium $1,869.00
Rhodium $12,900.00

This week, 3 PM MT on Friday, markets closed for the weekend

Gold $1,866.70
Silver $23.92
Platinum $1,100.00
Palladium $1,889.00
Rhodium $13,250.00

Everything other than silver is UP. Gold might actually exceed palladium soon at this rate. (I still remember when gold was $300-400 and palladium was $80 or so. Then palladium spiked overnight to $120 when cold fusion was announced by Pons and Fleischman.)

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

To conclude: My standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!

Remember Hong Kong!!!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

Some Cause for Celebration

Sunday is the New Year.

The new congress starts on January 3.

Lynn Cheney, that rhinoceros cunt, will be out of office on that day.

So there’s that at least.

News Flash

Today, it is still the case that Joe Biden didn’t Win.

I realize that to some readers, this might be a shock; surely at some point things must change and Biden will have actually won.

But the past cannot actually be changed.

It will always and forever be the case that Joe Biden didn’t win.

And if you, Leftist Lurker, want to dismiss it as dead white cis-male logic…well, you can call it what you want, but then please just go fuck off. No one here buys that bullshit–logic is logic and facts are facts regardless of skin color–and if you gave it a moment’s rational thought, you wouldn’t either. Of course your worthless education never included being able to actually reason–or detect problems with false reasoning–so I don’t imagine you’ll actually wake up as opposed to being woke.

As Ayn Rand would sometimes point out: Yes, you are free to evade reality. What you cannot do is evade the consequences of evading reality. Or to put it concretely: You can ignore the Mack truck bearing down on you as you play in the middle of the street, you won’t be able to ignore the consequences of ignoring the Mack truck.

And Ayn Rand also pointed out that existence (i.e., the sum total of everything that exists) precedes consciousness–our consciousnesses are a part of existence, not outside of it–therefore reality cannot be a “social construct” as so many of you fucked-up-in-the-head people seem to think.

So much for Leftist douchebag lurkers. For the rest of you, the regular readers and those lurkers who understand such things: I continue to carry the banner once also carried by Wheatie. His Fraudulency didn’t win.

Let’s Go, Brandon!!

Hey China!

Or rather, “Hey Chinese Communist Party and your entire array of servitors, ass-wipers, and fellators!”

You’re not even worth my time this week. When you decide to act like civilized people, maybe I’ll give you a lesson or two in how non-barbarians behave.

Hey BiteMe!
(Or, Whoever Has Their Hand Rammed Up That Putrefying Meat Puppet’s Ass)

[Language warning]

You and yours have caused a lot of injury. Literal injury with your war on people who don’t want to take an untested vaccine. When people die in an emergency room because a hospital won’t admit them because they haven’t had their clot shot, that’s a crime.

I’m going to address here the insult on top of the injury, because I am among the insulted. I still have my health but apparently you want me to live under the 8th Street Bridge (which actually isn’t on 8th Street, but whatever, that’s what the I-25 overpass over Cimarron is called), so maybe if you have your way that won’t be true for long. Dreadful time of year to become homeless.

No, you’re just trying to make me unemployed, because I won’t take your fucking shots.

Well, that threat is NOT going to work. I. Won’t. Take. Your. Fucking. Shots.

And it looks like enough people agree, that you’re having to back down, you worthless asswipe.

You’re LOSING.

You LOSER.

You Chinese-bought ratfucking traitor.

I would love to see you die an agonizing, humiliating death. (This isn’t a threat, because I am not threatening to cause that death. I am just announcing my intention to party if it happens.) It would be just recompense for the way you’re killing America…and millions of Americans.

His Fraudulency

Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, we haven’t heard much from the person who should have been declared the victor, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

(I’d like to add, I find it entirely plausible, even likely, that His Fraudulency is also His Figureheadedness. (Apparently that wasn’t a word; it got a red underline. Well it is now.) Where I differ with the hopium addicts is on the subject of who is really in charge. It ain’t anyone we like.)

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

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.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

Gold $1,799.50
Silver $23.82
Platinum $1,033.00
Palladium $1,832.00
Rhodium $12,750.00

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $1,825.50
Silver $24.08
Platinum $1,079.00
Palladium $1,869.00
Rhodium $12,900.00

The classic precious metals (gold and silver) moving up as one would expect in inflationary times. It looks like gold is forcing its way upward now though beware of “pump and dump.”

PGMs are showing upward movement too, enough that palladium’s lead over gold has actually grown (from $32.50 to $47 per troy ounce).

The New Year

It’s actually surprising that through the last couple of thousand years of the Julian, and then the Gregorian calendars, one key factor has changed a lot, while others haven’t changed much or at all.

Our calendar goes back to the Romans, and was a hot mess until Julius Caesar reformed it in 45 BCE. Years were only vaguely aligned with the seasons, and priests would occasionally insert extra months as a sort of “leap month” measure. However that was very politicized. If they liked someone who was in office, they were liable to insert a month even when it wasn’t called for.

[And let’s not go into how the days were counted within a month, which makes me wonder how Romans could both keep track of it and remember to breathe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar if you really want to know.]

46 BCE was the “Year of Confusion” as Julius Caesar decreed three extra months (!) to bring things back in synchrony; but 45 BCE, the first year of the actual reform, is recognizably our calendar.

Going back a bit, well before Caesar’s day, the year had ten months and then some indefinite time for winter, two months (January and February) were eventually added to cover winter. (This is why Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November and December all had “number” names that are now two off from where we think they ought to be. And oh, yeah, Quintilis was renamed July and Sextilis August, after Julius and Augustus Caesar. Later emperors attempted to rename the other months, but in all cases their successors eventually undid the change.)

[What about March, April, May and June? Their names derive from Mars, Aphrodite (Apru), Maia (one of the Pleiades and the mother of Hermes), and Juno.]

What hasn’t changed at all? The week. We haven’t ever, once, broken that seven day pattern; it’s actually the one major feature we didn’t get from the Romans, but rather from Judea. (The Romans had a nine-day cycle, an eight day week followed by a day of religious festivals and markets. This of course is long gone.) Constantine brought the week into the Roman calendar by making Sunday (any Sunday) a holiday.

The months haven’t changed since Augustus Caesar. Julius, after fixing the lengths of the months, had decreed a leap year every four years; this was misunderstood and applied every three years. Augustus corrected that mistake by skipping a few leap years and clarifying, “every four years,” and fixed the lengths of the months in their current form.

The minor change since then has been the matter of leap years. As stated the Julian rule was that every fourth year be a leap year; over the centuries, however, the calendar date accumulated “extra” days such that the 21st of March started falling later and later in the year, relative to the spring equinox, and so the new rule instituted by Pope Gregory in 1582 was that three of those dates in every 400 years would be dropped. This resulted in an average 97 leap years every four hundred years. The Reformation had already happened, so large parts of Northern Europe didn’t adopt this change until the 1700s (England, and hence the future United States, in particular waited until 1752); and of course the Eastern Orthodox countries waited even longer than that. Russia, for instance, did not switch until 1918. Even today many Orthodox congregations continue to use the Julian calendar. (By the rules of that church, they can stay as they are, but once they decide to change, they must stick with it.)

This change has almost no impact on our daily lives. We today here at QTree can simply pretend the Julian rule is in place, because the last “skipped” leap year was 1900 and the next one won’t be until 2100. None of us were alive back then, few reading this will be alive in 2100. [Now watch this article get resurrected and be read by billions sometime around 2096, just so they can laugh at that previous sentence. “Gee, that SteveInCO was such a short-sighted dingbat…” Honestly, guys, I’ve written better, go dredge some of those up instead.]

That’s the minor change I alluded to. (And yes, technically it affects the length of some months.)

The major thing that has changed, often and quirkily, in the last two thousand years, is the day the year starts. Yes, without changing the names of the dates, New Years day gets shifted around the year, falling on different dates.

You saw a hint of this already. The Roman calendar started with March and ended with what would eventually become February…at least for some period of time. Once January was instituted, it started then…Janus was the god of beginnings.

At various times, and in various places since the Romans, people have celebrated the new year on March 1, March 25, September 1st, and December 25th…and some started on Easter, which could literally be any date from late March to late April. England, in fact, used March 25 until 1752, when they switched to the Gregorian calendar.

This is hard to imagine today. But imagine that the day after March 24, 2022 was March 25, 2023. (What a pain in the butt for software! And imagine what full-year wall calendars would look like.)

George Washington, born in February, would, if birth certificates had been a thing, have had his marked February 11, 1731. Thanks to these two changes that happened in 1752, that same day would be denoted February 22, 1732.

Well, technically we’re not supposed to retroactively renumber dates just because we adjusted the calendar. And we’re also not supposed to go back to before a calendar was instituted and give dates in the “proleptic” calendar either, but we do it often. (Washington himself celebrated his birthday on February 22 after the change.) In England and the United States, sometimes a date will be labeled “O.S.” (“Old Style”) to indicate it’s the Julian calendar (and March 25 year start) in use; and (less commonly) N.S. for the Gregorian Calendar; this is done in the Wikipedia article on George Washington. And we certainly regard his birth year as having been 1732, even though on the date of his birth everyone was writing 1731 on their checks. (The Washington Quarter, for instance, originally commemorated his 200th birthday…in 1932.)

Many Eastern Orthodox countries used 1 September as the start of the year–and of course that would have been by the Julian calendar. Russia switched their New Year’s date in 1700 (but they retained the Julian calendar). September 1 would actually make a very limited amount of sense. I remember as a kid watching some commentary on the news suggesting we move New Year’s day to September 1, since a lot of things we do on an annual basis (school years, the NFL season, etc) start then. However, even if this were still true (school, at least where I live, and the NFL start earlier now), it wouldn’t be worth the bother, honestly. Imagine how it would bork up our statistics having one eight month year in there in that sequence of 12 month years. (The US government fiscal year used to start in July…then we had one 15 month fiscal year as we transitioned to having it start in October, and people complaining about federal spending have been having to explain that one ever since. And even with that change those jackasses couldn’t get a budget passed in time, and have now given up on even that.)

If we were starting from scratch, I’d personally push for either the winter solstice or the spring equinox to start the year…and the appropriate month would start on that same date as well. (No split months, thank you!) The 25th of December or March are close to these times but not right on, and I’ve never figured out for sure why there’s a four or five day difference between those historical New Year’s Days and the astronomical events. But we’re not starting from scratch; we have the calendar we have and January 1 works as well as any day.

Besides, the New Year hangovers subside just in time to celebrate Lynn Cheney’s celluloid-covered ass getting booted out of Congress. Buh-bye…Bitch.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

The Real Fascist is His Fraudulency Joe Biden*

*Or whoever has his hand rammed up that meat puppet’s ass.

Brandon (which I will use as a term for whoever is the power behind the Porcelain Throne) has thrown down the gauntlet…but in a way where most of America will never see it. The networks didn’t carry his tirade. CNN air brushed it (or whatever you call editing the red background) for its five viewers (who aren’t trapped in airports).

Luckily for me I live in Colorado, and therefore, despite my best efforts, I probably didn’t vote for Donald Trump.

Of course, for this purpose who I actually did try to vote for will be essential, and they undoubtedly know.

Come and get us, asswipes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h6ZZ28QtX4

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Small Government?

Many times conservatives (real and fake) speak of “small government” being the goal.

This sounds good, and mostly is good, but it misses the essential point. The important thing here isn’t the size, but rather the purpose, of government. We could have a cheap, small tyranny. After all our government spends most of its revenue on payments to individuals and foreign aid, neither of which is part of the tyrannical apparatus trying to keep us locked down and censored. What parts of the government would be necessary for a tyranny? It’d be a lot smaller than what we have now. We could shrink the government and nevertheless find it more tyrannical than it is today.

No, what we want is a limited government, limited not in size, but rather in scope. Limited, that is, in what it’s allowed to do. Under current circumstances, such a government would also be much smaller, but that’s a side effect. If we were in a World War II sort of war, an existential fight against nasty dictatorships on the brink of world conquest, that would be very expensive and would require a gargantuan government, but that would be what the government should be doing. That would be a large, but still limited government, since it’d be working to protect our rights.

World War II would have been the wrong time to squawk about “small government,” but it wasn’t (and never is) a bad time to demand limited government. Today would be a better time to ask for a small government–at least the job it should be doing is small today–but it misses the essential point; we want government to not do certain things. Many of those things we don’t want it doing are expensive but many of them are quite eminently doable by a smaller government than the one we have today. Small, but still exceeding proper limits.

So be careful what you ask for. You might get it and find you asked for the wrong thing.

Political Science In Summation

It’s really just a matter of people who can’t be happy unless they control others…versus those who want to be left alone. The oldest conflict within mankind. Government is necessary, but government attracts the assholes (a highly technical term for the control freaks).

A Few Things We Cannot Blame on His Fraudulency

I am pretty sure Joe Biden had nothing whatsoever to do with the 30 Years War that ran from 1618-1648 and probably killed about a third of the people then living in what is now Germany.

Nor did he cause the collapse of either Roman empire (Western, 476 CE, Eastern 1453 CE). Nor the ignominious failure of most of the Crusades. Nor the collapse of Bronze Age civilization around 1200 BCE (including the collapse of the Minoans and the blowup of Santorini).

However, my utter lack of ability to imagine how he could possibly be responsible for these things is not a valid argument against them, so I await correction if appropriate.

His Truth?

Again we saw an instance of “It might be true for Billy, but it’s not true for Bob” logic this week.

I hear this often, and it’s usually harmless. As when it’s describing differing circumstances, not different facts. “Housing is unaffordable” can be true for one person, but not for another who makes ten times as much.

But sometimes the speaker means it literally. Something like 2+2=4 is asserted to be true for Billy but not for Bob. (And when it’s literal, it’s usually Bob saying it.) And in that sense, it’s nonsense, dangerous nonsense. There is ONE reality, and it exists independent of our desires and our perceptions. It would go on existing if we weren’t here. We exist in it. It does not exist in our heads. It’s not a personal construct, and it isn’t a social construct. If there were no society, reality would continue to be what it is, it wouldn’t vanish…which it would have to do, if it were a social construct.

Now what can change from person to person is the perception of reality. We see that all the time. And people will, of course, act on those perceptions. They will vote for Trump (or try to) if their perception is close to mine, and vote against Trump (and certainly succeed at doing so) if their perception is distant from mine (and therefore, if I do say so, wrong). I have heard people say “perception is reality” and usually, that’s what they’re trying to say–your perception of reality is, as far as you know, an accurate representation of reality, or you’d change it.

But I really wish they’d say it differently. And sometimes, to get back to Billy and Bob, the person who says they have different truths is really saying they have different perceptions of reality–different worldviews. I can’t argue with the latter. But I sure wish they’d say it better. That way I’d know that someone who blabbers about two different truths is delusional and not worth my time, at least not until he passes kindergarten-level metaphysics on his umpteenth attempt.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

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

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

(Paper) Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $1,794.00
Silver $23.31
Platinum $999.00
Palladium $1,780.00
Rhodium $12,800.00

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

Gold $1,799.50
Silver $23.82
Platinum $1,033.00
Palladium $1,832.00
Rhodium $12,750.00

Gold was well over $1800 earlier this week, and looked to be solidifying its position there, so of course it had to be shoved back down. (Uppity PMs!) It might at some point in the very near future, become more valuable than palladium. (Which still seems absurdly overpriced to me; I can remember when it was less than midway between silver and gold.)

Qubes OS In Some More Detail

A few months ago I mentioned Qubes OS. (https://www.qubes-os.org/. The intro page covers a lot of what I’m saying in someone else’s much more carefully crafted words; I could probably do as well if I wanted to spend weeks writing instead of two days: https://www.qubes-os.org/intro/ .)

Qubes bills itself as a “Reasonably Secure Operating System.” Yes, that doesn’t sound super duper confident, but security, be it physical or in cyberspace, is inherently imperfect. Your adversary…be it some shitbag who wants your credit card number or to hit you with a ransomware attack, some other shitbag in a fancy building with a cute logo that wants to saturate you with inane “targeted” advertising so he needs to know how many squares of toilet paper you use, or a Deep State actor who’s unhappy because you understand what kinds of shitbags are running this country (I guess “shitbag” is the common denominator) gets a say in how good your security is–by doing his best to make sure it’s not good enough.

What Qubes helps you do is to implement some fairly basic principles of security, that most computers are absolutely miserable at doing. (So miserable, one would think it was deliberately bad in some cases…I am looking at YOU, Micro$haft.)

The main benefit to Qubes is compartmentalization. If you want to both a) do online banking (which means you have a glowing red target painted on your hindquarters) and b) go to some of the, shall we say, dodgier areas of the internet (and no, that’s not necessarily porn sites), then what you’re begging for is to have some guy who’s giving you that stuff for “free” decide he wants payment with your bank account, and he will try to collect without your knowledge or consent. Even sites that aren’t trying to be dodgy might have ads on them that mask a hacker trying to get into your system. And sometimes they do that by tricking you into clicking on a link. Yes, we can be our own worst enemy.

What’s the best way to ensure the scumbag doesn’t get your online banking password? Or your credit card number? By not having it be on that computer in the first place! That way he can’t rape you online and you can’t accidentally help him rape you online.

Cthulhu has often mentioned that he has multiple different physical computers, each having a specific purpose. (I have visions of a house cluttered with little Raspberry Pis everywhere; sit on the couch and the cushion is lumpy because there’s a computer under the cushions, right next to the 68 cents in change he lost two weeks ago.)

You can go that far, but then there will be times you do have to move data from one machine to another and that’s a solid pain the ass. I know this because I was doing something similar.

Compartmentalizing with Virtual Machines

The second best (and sometimes arguably better anyway) method to go is with virtual machines. That’s a setup where there are two (or more) software systems on the same physical computer that are both like “brains in a vat”. Each one sees itself as a computer; they’re really two or more different programs running on the same computer. Of course there’s a system running on the box that really is in control, and it’s providing little “bubbles” for the virtual machines to live in. So you can have one virtual machine that you use, say, to visit here, and a totally different one to use to do online banking. Each is unaware of the other’s existence. And–most importantly–many of these virtual machines can be running at the same time. (It’s expensive; you need a fairly powerful processor and lots of RAM memory to do it.)

What you can’t do, however is keep the “controlling” system from knowing what’s going on. It’s the controller, it has to know something about the other machines just to do its job.

Qubes uses virtual machines for everything, and I mean everything.

There are at least two ways to “do” virtual machines.

One is to install a virtual machine application on an otherwise normal system, called the “host” system. The host actually has direct contact with your hardware–keyboard, mouse, monitors, network connections, usb thumb drives, sound card…et-nearly-endless-cetera. The virtual machine app runs inside that operating system, and it creates and manages the virtual machines, letting you start them and stop them, and arranging for limited communications between them. It also lets those machines “talk” to your computer hardware, though it may do some sleight of hand in there…for example, you open a window with Virtual Machine A in it, and the controller tricks Virtual Machine A into thinking that window is your entire video driver. If that window is 1200×800 pixels, Virtual Machine A thinks you have one 1200×800 pixel monitor. Another window has Virtual Machine B in it, and that system thinks that other window is the monitor. This is the method used by Oracle VirtualBox, and that is the software I used to use.

The problem with this is you still have a regular machine that can be readily hacked because it’s directly connected to the internet, and the virtual machine app depends on it. In other words, the controlling system, a big bloated OS with lots of ways to be attacked, is directly exposed, and once a hacker has it, it’s game over.

The other method of doing virtual machines is to run the virtual machine controller directly on your hardware. And since it does nothing but fire up virtual machines and connect hardware to different machines, it’s a bit harder to attack. Also it can be expressly designed to manage your hardware without actually connecting to it (and giving hackers a possible doorway into it). It’s the difference between plugging something else in, versus sticking your own fingers into the electrical socket.

Qubes chose the latter method, using something called the Xen Hypervisor. When your system boots, it boots directly into Xen Hypervisor, not Micro$haft Windows, not Linux, not MacOS, not Android.

Xen Hypervisors starts up a special virtual machine called dom0 (domain zero). This will be the controller. But the controller doesn’t necessarily have primary access to your hardware. It does not get access to your network cards, for instance, so it is isolated from the hackers. It also usually doesn’t get access to your USB ports but an exception is made if you have a USB keyboard or mouse. (Some older machines still have the special PS-1 plug for those.) Having USB be separated is a good thing, because USB is used for a lot of sneaky attacks like the thumbdrive “accidentally” dropped in a parking lot that is full of malware for the first careless geek who says, “Hmm, I wonder what’s on this?” (Cthulhu explained below that the USB protocol allows a device to ‘set your system up’ without asking permission, and that’s why USB is so noxious from a security standpoint.)

Dom0 is used to start and stop other virtual machines, and is also used as an intermediary for those situations where one VM must talk to another.

(And those situations do arise. Another aspect of the way Qubes does things is that NO such communication happens without your specific approval. Want to move a file? You can do it, but you will be prompted to select which VM it’s going to and press OK. If that prompt ever shows up out of the blue (and not because you wanted it to), then alarm bells should ring in your skull and you should definitely hit cancel, not OK. This popup will show up if you’re using GUI menus to copy the file, or if you do it from the command line. (Command line versions of commands usually don’t show on the GUI so hackers love them.) A similar process happens with copy-and-paste, which, between VMs, is a four step process, not a two step one.)

In addition to dom0 you have a VM whose sole job it is to manage your network; that one is called sys-net. It is given direct access to your network card(s). And another one which implements a firewall, sys-firewall. Your system connects sys-firewall to sys-net, then it connects whatever VM(s) you use to talk to the internet, to sys-firewall. The actual firewall rules are on that last VM, so you can create one for online banking that only lets you connect to the bank website, and another one that’s more wide open for surfing the web.

And yes, you as the user are free to create as many VMs as you want. When you first install Qubes it comes with VMs named “Work,” “Personal” and “Vault.” This gives you a way to keep your job separate from your personal stuff, right off the bat. But let’s say you have five or six clients–you can create a separate VM for each of them! No risk of sending the wrong thing to the wrong client. Or maybe you’re writing software and have two totally different projects in different languages going on…split them up!

Vault is “special” because it has no network connections at all. It’s a place to store passwords. Those get VM-to-VM copied and pasted into the VM that’s on the network. So a hacker who’s gotten control of that VM can only get that password; they don’t get your list of passwords (which is not only not on that VM, but is kept in an encrypted database anyway).

You can also choose what runs on the virtual machines. Dom0 will run Fedora Linux (no choice there), but your VMs can run Debian Linux (similar to Ubuntu), Windows 7, 10, or 11. Or something called whonix, which is set up to let you browse the web anonymously, through VPNs that can literally pop up all over the world. It’s really hard for black hats to trace. There are other third-party supported versions of Linux out there, too; even though they are third party the Qubes site has links to them.

[And yes, you can safely run Windows 7…provided you never hook it up to the internet. And you don’t have to. (But this does mean you can’t use it for surfing the internet.) There’s even a third party Windows XP setup out there. And you can safely run Windows 10 and 11…safely in a different sense, in that you can keep them from phoning home and telling Asshole Gates what you are doing, by never connecting them to the network.]

At this level there’s one other feature; you can color-code your VMs. They will open up in windows with different colored frames as another visual cue that they are different VMs. However, there are exactly eight colors, and it’s easy to end up with more than eight VMs (I have a couple of dozen). Generally dom0 and the system VMs and templates (I’ll explain “template” in a moment) are black, with user-type qubes (the ones you actually do things on) being red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple or gray. Different people have different color codings.

OK, so keeping things separated from one another helps in case you do get hacked, but what does it do to help keep you from getting hacked in the first place?

To be honest, not much more than any other system. In fact, they assume you will get hacked. But it can help you remove the hack quickly, which is nearly as good. Consider, someone sends you an infected attachment in e-mail. If you open your attachments in a different VM, then when you open that infected attachment, you can simply throw away the VM it infected. In fact, you should do this whether or not you think the attachment might be infected, just in case. Since you were never planning to use that VM for anything else ever again anyway, you’ve lost nothing by throwing it away…except an infected system.

Digging deeper into Virtual Machines.

I mentioned “templates” before, and now I’m going to explain that. Qubes does VMs a bit differently from most systems.

Have you ever wondered, in exasperation, why the heck the part of your computer that contains the operating system can’t just be made read only so viruses can’t infect it? Well, you can get close to that with Qubes. It has a way of separating the operating system and applications areas from your personal files.

There are two main types of VMs in Qubes…TemplateVMs and AppVms. (That last name is not the best name they could have come up with; it can be a bit misleading as you’ll see soon.)

A TemplateVM is for installing software on. Installing only. You do that the standard way for Linux with apt or dnf commands. To do this, you have to log in to that VM, but you don’t do anything on the Template. The template in other words is a “clean” install of your applications onto a clean install of the operating system. Yes, there’s a “home” area for user accounts and you just used it while you were installing stuff, but you didn’t change anything there…and if you did it won’t matter anyway. NEVER connect a TemplateVM to sys-firewall or sys-net, even if you’re putting a browser on it. (The installation process follows some other route I frankly don’t understand, to get the software off the internet to install it–probably one with lots of intermediaries.)

When you create an AppVM, you must base it on a TemplateVM. (Interestingly, later on you can change it, but that can sort of pull the rug out from under you.) So let’s say you created a template with Brave Browser on it, :brave-template.” You can create an AppVM and name it “theqtree” and base it on brave-template.

When you start theqtree, you have a virtual machine with Brave installed on it. (But before you do that, connect it to sys-firewall.) You can save bookmarks, download files, set up Brave how you like it, and that will all be remembered from one startup of theqtree to another. BUT if you visit a web page that tries to install malware in the system area, that malware will not be there the next time you start theqtree. (That is not immunity from malware installed in your user area, though.)

How does that work? Well when you start theqtree, you get your user area, like it was when you shut theqtree down last time. But for a program area, you get a copy of the one from the template. And this copy does not get saved when you shut theqtree down. So something that gets installed there, or even changes to a system configuration file, will go away when you shut theqtree down. But the files you downloaded (to your Downloads folder) are in your user area, so they are not lost. Your bookmarks and so on are also there. And likely, it will even remember your open tabs. (It’s easy to forget this and make a deliberate change to the system/apps area, and lose the change when you shut down.)

So that’s one quick way to recover from a virus…shut it down and restart it. If the virus is in the system area, it’s gone.

It’s possible to base multiple AppVMs on one template, so you can create a different AppVM, using the same Brave template. So you can keep your online banking and your conspiracy theories separate!

BUT if something gets into your user area instead of your system area, you’re stuck with it, until you throw away the AppVM.

(By the way, the VMs I mentioned before, sys-net, sys-firewall, work, vault, personal…are all AppVMs. As distributed, they are all based on the same template, which will either be a vanilla install of debian or fedora linux, with a lot of different apps preinstalled. That means that firefox, which is installed by default, exists in your vault VM, uselessly since from there it can’t connect to the internet; sys-net, conversely, has no need for keepass (a password manager), but every VM has it. There are ways to fix this, but they’re for more advanced users.)

I think we’re finally ready for a picture…I’d have showed it earlier, but too much of it was unexplained before now.

Disposable Virtual Machines

Now there’s another level of complication that can help with ANY malware infection, even one in your user area. Notice that in the diagram above that AppVM 3 is labeled “disposable VM.” What does that mean?

A disposable VM is one that self-destructs as soon as you close it. It’s based on a template, too, but the template is an AppVM, not a templateVM. (This causes a lot of confusion.) Basically the disposable makes copies of the AppVM’s user area, and the system area of the template VM the AppVM is based off of, and those disappear when it shuts down, just like the system area of the AppVM closes when you shut down the AppVM.

A disposable is really handy for looking at attachments sent with an E-mail, too. If it’s some dodgy thing Pgroup sent you, and it infects your disposable, so what? The infection is sterilized the instant you close the window on the disposable.

The advantage to having the disposable be based on an AppVM is that you can (for example) get Brave set up just the way you like it in an AppVM, but not actually visit any sites. Then set up the AppVM to act as a disposable template, and whenever you go to a site you don’t trust, use a disposable. When the disposable opens, you have a fresh copy of Brave (but set up how you like it); you go to that dodgy site pgroup.com, then close the browser window and POOF!!! that machine no longer exists.

There are two slightly different flavors of disposables, named disposables and ones that aren’t named. A named disposable has to be explicitly shut down, the other ones will get a random number name like disp37 or disp7734, and they tend to pop up when you’re looking at an email attachment or the like. That attachment will open in say LibreOffice (which can read Micro$haft Word files), but when you close the LibreOffice window, the VM shuts down. But if you were to open a named disposable, such as LibreOffice-Disposable, you have to remember to shut it down afterwards. (I came up with a trick to avoid that, by the way.) Otherwise, they’re the same: they both go POOF when they shut down–it’s just that one of them makes sure you don’t forget to shut it down. I make heavy use of both kinds.

So why did I decide to write this now? Well, I have actually customized the hell out of my install and it’s finally looking like I want it to–which as it turns out is not a whole lot like that diagram (there’s a lot of stuff I’m doing which I didn’t even mention). So this is by way of celebrating that.

A Case Study: The Great Notifier Kerfuffle

But also because I was reminded about all of this when, last week, we had that big kerfuffle over the way Wordpus broke the notifier. And I found myself really appreciating Qubes when Wolf and I were trying to debug my broken notifier.

I have a template that has nothing but an absolutely bone-stock Firefox ESR install on it. I didn’t have any AppVMs based on it, it was what I call an “intermediate” template. Because I often create templates by cloning other templates, then adding more stuff to the clone. In this case I cloned the bone-stock firefox and, then on the new template, I customized the heck out of FIrefox. (Firefox has ways to customize it in the installation/system area, which is how companies with 60,000 employees can set up FIrefox the same annoying way for all of their employees and even block them from customizing it themselves–they have a customized Firefox installation package with all of the options preset they way they want to inflict on you. I actually set up Firefox that way, myself, so the customizations are actually in my cloned template, not in my user area. Most software does not work that way.)

I was using an AppVM based on the customized template, to browse QTree that day. Why an AppVM? So it would keep the cookies that tell wordpress and QTree that I am logged in. Yes, I risk getting infected and keeping the infection, but when QTree logs me out anyway like it does every few days–I just destroy the AppVM and make a new one. That’s the same sanitizing effect as closing a disposable. All of my settings are actually on the template because of that funky way Firefox works, so all I have to do is open the new AppVM (which automatically goes to Qtree on its one open tab), log in, and I’m back where I started.

But when my notifier went south, I thought maybe some of my customizations were causing the problem. So, rather than try to undo them, I just created an AppVM based off the bone-stock firefox template. (That takes about 30 seconds. I could have made that into a disposable template, but when debugging it’s sometimes handy not having settings disappear.) I could now visit QTree with an absolutely clean install of Firefox–so clean it opens up the welcome to Firefox tab and the stupid privacy tab–and no worries about my having done something in Firefox to cause the problem. “Try this, Steve.” “No change.” “How about this?” [after blowing away the appvm and creating a new one–like a brand spanking new computer] “No change here either.” It was as if I was reinstalling Firefox, over and over. But I could keep doing it every two or three minutes, all night.

Later on when we figured out all I had to do was log into Wordpus instead of QTree, I could go back to my customized Firefox and try it there, to be sure that that wasn’t the only issue. (AND logic–one of my custom settings could have been hurting me AND I was logging in the wrong way.) I could do this, without having to recreate my settings–by going back to using that VM. I then went back and created a fresh AppVM on that template and made sure it would work that way. So once that worked, I knew the solution would work on a fresh copy of my customized Firefox. At that point, I could consider the problem solved, and I knew the ONLY thing that was wrong before was the login. I didn’t have to change anything else.

Now imagine having to undo all the things Wolf and I tried but didn’t work! Then having to manually reset all of those settings to go back to my “personal” Firefox! No need, when I was working in Qubes, because “delete VM” was doing it for me.

Some caveats and cautions

Although you can create Windows VMs on Qubes, you will have to learn some Linux to use it (if you don’t already know it). At the very basic level, it’s not much to learn. (It has a GUI so you don’t need to learn how to copy files on the command line, or rename them or move them. In fact you can actually use a totally different gui if you don’t like the one it has. The default is called xfce, which is the one that Xubuntu uses so I was very used to it.) If you want to do some more advanced things, though, you’ll have to learn more Linux. I did do some very advanced things, and I know a lot more about Linux than I used to. (Although I wasn’t a complete noob before, I still don’t consider myself any kind of expert even now.)

And if you can’t, no matter how hard you try, keep straight in your head the difference between a TemplateVM and an AppVM, and how you have to make an AppVM into a disposable template to make disposable templates…you’re going to have a tough time of it. (Everyone is going to forget once or twice while learning, of course–that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about chronically “not getting it.” Or just being the scatterbrained type.)

Another issue is that Qubes OS can be very fussy about the computer it runs on. I wouldn’t do anything you can’t undo installing it…just in case it won’t install and you have to go back to what you had before. (I.e., don’t blow away what’s on the hard drive in your computer installing Qubes…install to a fresh hard drive or SSD, or at least one that’s got crap on it you don’t care about.) Installation for me was a nightmare–QubesOS literally could not interact with my hard drives, including the one I wanted to install it on–but I finally got it to a state where it was running off a thumbdrive and I was able to decide, “Yes I want to do this…so now I have to buy another computer it will work on.”

Whatever machine you decide to use should have a fast CPU on it and at least 32 Gb of RAM in it, and 64 Gb would be much better. And a 256 Gb SSD would be good too (SSDs are faster than regular hard drives), especially if you can get one of those mvne types that plugs directly into your motherboard. I’ve seen people struggle successfully with smaller machines, but if you can possibly afford an appropriate box (or already have one) then you’ll be happier.

(Cthulhu, I have no idea how well it works on Raspberry Pi machines.)

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

Joining The Herd Of Lemmings

I’ve had cause to consider a few things. Maybe we’re going about it the wrong way, and we need to ditch Trump

Yeah, NO

Trump all the way! Why? Because being hated by the people who hate him is a sign of impeccable character, that’s why.

The haters can go fuck themselves with rusty twelve gauge bore brushes. I’d prefer ten gauge but that’s kind of scarce, so…I’m willing to compromise.

The RINO’s Dilemma

The RINOs who who have burrowed in and taken over most GOP organizations, from the state down to local organizations, have quite a dilemma on their hands, and most of them have their heads too far up their asses to realize it.

OK, I’m not talking about the liberal in a Republican area, who knows they’re in the wrong party, but is there because it’s the only game in their town; they hope to capture a nomination someday, at which point they’re guaranteed to be elected…otherwise, they never will be. These people are a hazard in any heavily conservative area.

No, I’m talking about the guys who are a little bit conservative and want to do some good by going into politics, and they’re in a closely matched area, closely enough that they can join the party they are most aligned with and still have a chance. They think the Democrats…particularly the ones who end up running for office…are nuts.

They don’t think much better of the Deplorable types, either. A bunch of bumpkins whose hearts are in the right place, mostly…OK a bit extreme. But they think Deplorables can’t understand that first you have to get elected, then work within the system to change things…a slow process. They genuinely want many of the things Deplorables want…just not as much. The government is spending too much. Or they need to spend money on highways instead of welfare for illegal immigrants. But they want to work within the system to get these things done.

Or maybe they think things are pretty close to ideal right now, and they want to nail it in place.

The problem is, that means they don’t stand for anything in particular. And it shows. They’re about as unappetizing to the electorate as a puddle of dog vomit. The folks in the middle, who they think they are appealing to because they themselves are not extreme, would honestly prefer a clear-spoken radical to someone who qualifies everything they say to the point where they sound like they don’t believe anything at all.

The problem these “Mild RINOs” have, is they just can’t see that. And the reason they just can’t see that, is their entire sense of self-worth is tied up in not seeing that. In their minds, they’ve worked tirelessly for their party, to keep those crazy Democrats out…only to have to constantly fight with a small number of crazy Republicans–who are only liabilities if they end up as candidates. They’ve fought the good fight, and if they can just find the right candidate, someone with some charisma, they might stop the crazies…without being too beholden to the OTHER crazies. In the meantime it’s not working. What’s a responsible guy in politics to do?

They simply cannot understand that the Republicans can’t succeed as the party of nothing in particular. Not really in the past, and certainly not today when people are starting to realize that no matter what they do in the voting booth, the country is still about to fly off a precipice. If they did see it, they’d suddenly have two choices: Go away and let the GOP succeed, or stay and fight. But “go away” isn’t really an option, because what’s the point of having a party now owned by the crazies, win?

Well, they have a dilemma…and WE, therefore have a problem. And we would have that problem even IF they realized that they had a problem…that they were the problem.

No one ever thinks they are the bad guy. Even Epstein probably thought he was the good guy. Right up to the moment where he didn’t kill himself.

So if you ever wonder why these unappetizing dufuses cling on even when their fingernails are being left behind…that’s why. They don’t understand no one wants them, and can’t imagine that no one should want them. And oftentimes their greatest pride is in all the hard work they’ve done for the party. They’re not going to give that up; it’d be psychological suicide.

If you’ve worked with these people, there’s a good chance you like them and consider some of them your friends. But even if so…we’re going to have to give them a good, hard shove. Because America is more important than those milquetoasts’ egos.

Justice Must Be Done

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

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 $1,798.90
Silver $23.56
Platinum $1,034.00
Palladium $2,026.00
Rhodium $13,350.00

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

Gold $1,794.00
Silver $23.31
Platinum $999.00
Palladium $1,780.00
Rhodium $12,800.00

Gold and silver are stable. The platinum group metals, though, are taking a beating. I don’t think I’ve seen rhodium this low in a long, long time, and palladium is actually less than gold!

I take that as a sign the economy is circling the drain…those PGMs are industrial metals in the main, platinum a bit less so, but then it also took less of a beating than the other two.

Fuck Joe B*d*n

Due to complaints about foul language, I’ve censored the most objectionable word in the title of this section.

B*d*n, you don’t even get ONE scoop of ice cream today.

(Please post this somewhere permanent, as it will continue to be true; the SOB will never deserve a scoop.)

Fusion

There has been a fair amount of attention paid to the recent breakthrough in nuclear fusion. So it’s time for a bit of a review about nuclear fusion.

But there are some preliminaries…rather basic ones from a physicist’s point of view, not so from the point of view of many others.

Power vs. Energy

First off, the difference between power and energy. The physicist defines energy as the capacity to do work…and then defines work as motion against an opposing force. (Note: this is quite a bit different from the daily life definition; for example if you simply carry a 94 pound bag of cement across a level field, to a physicist you’re not doing work–okay, lifting the bag is work, but setting it down again cancels that out. To your muscles, you sure as heck are doing work.)

Energy is measured in joules in the SI (“metric system”); and lifting an apple a meter is about a joule of work. So is lifting two apples half a meter apiece. It’s work because you’re moving the apples upward against the force caused by the pull of gravity.

Power is not the same thing as energy. It’s actually how fast you expend energy. If you lift that apple one meter in one second, then pick up another apple and lift it up before two seconds (total) have elapsed, then pick up a third apple in the third second and so on, you’re using a joule of energy every second…and a joule of energy every second is a watt. Yes, that’s the same “watt” as you use for light bulbs; a 100W light bulb uses a hundred joules ever second. Watts are not actually a measure of brightness, but we’re used to a hundred watt bulb putting out a certain amount of light, so we tend to think of it that way. So much so that the compact fluorescent “spiral” bulbs and LEDs are marketed in watt-equivalents…they tell you that this particular bulb here puts out the same amount of light as a 100 watt bulb. (I get the impression that in Europe this is considerably overstated, but it seems closer to true here in the US.) The CF or LED bulb itself, however, uses a lot less than 100 watts of actual energy to produce that light, largely because an incandescent bulb literally generates more (waste) heat than light. (Note, if you look closer at the package you’ll probably also see “lumens” listed; that’s actually the measure of how much light the thing puts out. IIRC 1600 lumens is what an incandescent 100W bulb puts out, so that’s another way to compare.)

Another measure of power is the horsepower, which is not a metric unit. Now we tend to think of horsepower as being something mechanical like power tools and car engines, and then we think of watts as representing something electrical, but the fact is the two things measure the same actual thing: the rate of usage of energy. So you can convert between them: one horsepower equals 746 watts. (If you think about it this makes sense: your power drill generates a certain amount of horsepower…by using electrical energy at a certain rate. So they must be equivalent at a fundamental level.)

OK with that high school physics class level stuff reviewed, we’re ready to move on.

The Actors and Acts

The story of fusion has two main actors. They are the proton and the neutron. They are the two things you will find in an atomic nucleus. Supporting actors are the electron and neutrino, but you can (for the most part) ignore them in this context.

Protons and neutrons are about the same mass…the neutron is just a little bit more massive. But they are small. It takes roughly 600 sextillion protons (or neutrons) to weigh just one gram. (600 sextillion = 600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.) In terms of actual size, protons and neutrons are 0.84 femtometers in radius–1.68 femtometers across, and that’s 0.000 000 000 000 001 680 meters. Tiny little buggers!

Everything these actors do is according to one of four fundamental forces. The one you’re most familiar with as a force is gravity. The next one is electromagnetism, which manifests itself most plainly as magnets sticking to iron or steel, static electric “zaps” and your sheets sticking together after a run through the dryer. But it also is tied with light…and chemistry. Basically, in your daily life everything that happens that isn’t because of gravity is because of electromagnetism. Well, until you dig down to the nuclear level, which we are actually going to do today. The remaining two forces then come into play and are imaginatively named the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. The strong nuclear force is the main player for fusion, but the other three all have a role.

The strong nuclear force is directly manifested between quarks…what are quarks? That proton and neutron are themselves made of quarks, and the strong force keeps the quarks glued together. Without it, no protons, no neutrons…nothing we know today could possibly exist. There’s also a residual side-effect of the strong force, which holds protons and neutrons to each other.

The weak force is the only one that can turn one type of quark into another; we see it as radioactive decay. At the level we’re interested in today, because it can change one type of quark to another, and protons and neutrons are made up of quarks, it can turn protons into neutrons, and neutrons into protons. That’s going to be important.

Comparing these: Gravity is extremely weak. A nuclear physicist simply never cares about it, because compared to the others its effect is very small. But that doesn’t mean it won’t be important to us today; it plays a critical role in fusion that happens in nature. Gravity may be weak, but it is always an attractive force and its range is infinite. It weakens with distance but never drops to zero. Because of this it’s sort of like the tortoise that raced the hare–it wins in the end.

Electromagnetism for our purposes today can be thought of as electrical charges, those come in two types…opposite each other, and one kind was labeled “positive” and the other “negative” because there’s a pretty good analogy between electrical charge and positive and negative numbers. It’s much stronger than gravity…think about how an itty bitty magnet can pull on a nail harder than the great, big Earth…but because there are equal amounts of positive and negative charges out there, they tend to cancel each other out at distances…so even though in theory the force goes out forever just like gravity does, it’s effectively self-canceling at distances.

The Strong nuclear force is the strongest of the bunch…it had better be. But it is very, very short range…it’s good for about one femtometer, which is slightly greater than the radius of a proton or neutron, so it can bind one proton or neutron to the next, but fades to zero after that. It’s generally attractive, but it works like velcro. A proton or neutron has to be practically in physical contact with a neutron or another proton before the force takes effect.

The weak nuclear force is a bit weaker than electromagnetism and its range is much less than the size of a proton or neutron; about 1/1000th of the range of the strong force. What it does therefore happens entirely inside these particles, but as I said before, it’s critical nonetheless.

In our normal every day lives, protons, neutrons and electrons form atoms. The atom has a very tiny nucleus, where protons and neutrons “live”, and are surrounded by electrons essentially orbiting the nucleus. The protons have a positive electric charge, one “unit” each (the unit is a small number of coulombs, and I’m not going to define the coulomb…just think of it as +1 electric charge). The electrons have a negative charge, -1. So the electrons will be attracted to the protons, and vice versa, and will want to stick together. Those electrons will interact with the electrons of other atoms…that’s chemistry. And that’s why electromagnetism is behind chemistry.

But the protons in the nucleus (if it has more than one in it) should be repelling each other. In fact they do. Even though +1 unit is a very, very small amount of electrical charge, the protons are so close together that you could actually feel the force pushing them apart. The reason they stick together is the strong nuclear force.

Focusing on Nucleons

Protons and neutrons both seem to have the same size and mass…very close but not quite the same. The neutron is slightly heavier. In fact, since both of them live in nuclei and are so similar, they are sometimes lumped together and called “nucleons.” They are both subject to the strong nuclear force. The key difference is the proton has that +1 electric charge. The neutron has no net charge at all. (The quarks inside a neutron do, but you have to get really close to the neutron to see any effect from them.)

It’s the number of protons in a nucleus that determines which element it is a nucleus of. If it has six protons, it’s a carbon nucleus. The number of neutrons doesn’t matter for this at all. But add a proton, and you have nitrogen (7). If one of the neutrons ups and changes to a proton, it’s now nitrogen. And this does happen to carbon-14.

Wait! I just said carbon was 6, but then I talked about carbon-14. Well, I said the number of neutrons doesn’t matter for that, but it does matter for other things, Carbon-14 has six protons and eight neutrons in its nucleus, for a total number of nucleons of 14. These differing nucleon counts, that are nevertheless the same element because the proton count is the same, are called isotopes. Carbon-14 happens to be unstable; the weak nuclear force will eventually change one of the quarks in one of the neutrons, making that neutron into a proton, and now you have nitrogen 14.

Isotopes usually don’t make much difference to chemists (usually), but they’re overwhelmingly important in nuclear physics.

For nuclear fusion, specifically, we’re concerned with five different isotopes of nuclei.

The basic hydrogen nucleus is dead simple…it’s just one proton, no neutrons. Hydrogen-1. When you consider it as a complete atom (including the electron), nuclear physicists call this “protium” to distinguish it from…

The heavy hydrogen nucleus, which has the one mandatory proton, but also contains a neutron. Because there’s two nucleons in this thing, it got a special name, from deutero (two), and it’s a deuteron. When thought of as a whole atom (including electrons), it’s deuterium.

That’s actually pretty tidy: proton is to protium as deuteron is to deuterium.

Usually two different isotopes of the same element are almost identical chemically. Any slight difference is due to the different weights, a heavier isotope will react a bit more slugglishly than a lighter one. In the case of hydrogen, though, the weight difference is double and that has a noticeable effect on chemistry, so chemists actually do have to care about this difference. It can even effect water made from those atoms. If you’ve ever heard of heavy water, that’s just water made from deuterium instead of protium.

Of all the hydrogen out there, 156 atoms of every million are actually deuterium, not protium. So in every day life you can just ignore deuterium. But in fusion, the distinction is a big deal.

Both protium and deuterium are stable–they don’t decay radioactively into something else. But that’s not true of our next isotope, tritium, which is a hydrogen isotope with two neutrons. (And true to our scheme, the nucleus is sometimes called a triton.) On average after about 12 years, one of those neutrons will flip to a proton (just like with carbon-14) and you get:

A helium atom, with two protons (by definition of helium) and one neutron. This is helium 3 and on earth it is extremely rare. (It is less rare in stars.) There’s no “special” name for helium-3; you have to call it helium-3. It’s stable.

And the last of our five isotopes is helium-4, two protons, two neutrons. Almost all helium on earth is helium-4, and it came from the radioactive decay of very large nuclei. But in the stars, the story is very different. Helium 4 is not only stable, it’s extremely stable. So much so that every hydrogen nucleus out there aspires to become part of a helium-4 nucleus.

However, if you’re disappointed at the lack of pictures of helium-3 and helium-4 nuclei, well, I’ll make that up to you below.

Finally: Nuclear Fusion

So now, finally, I can tell you what nuclear fusion is. Nuclear fusion is the process of combining two atomic nuclei together to make a larger atomic nucleus; when the nuclei are small (for nuclei) doing this releases energy. A lot of energy. That’s generic, it could describe any two nuclei becoming some third nucleus.

But what almost everyone means, specifically, when they say “nuclear fusion” is the process of combining four hydrogen-1 nuclei into one helium-4 nucleus.

In our universe this is a very common process. It powers most stars, including our sun. Some stars have run out of hydrogen and are fusing helium into heavier things. We’re going to ignore that and focus on the stars still burning hydrogen; astronomers call those “main sequence” stars and stars spend most of their lifetimes as “main sequence” stars. Our sun has been a main sequence star for about four and a half billion years, and it will probably remain a main sequence star for another five billion years.

What does it take to fuse nuclei? It isn’t easy. Remember that protons repel each other quite strongly electrically, unless you’re within strong nuclear force range. I compared the strong nuclear force to velcro. Well the electrical part of the repulsion is called the “coulomb barrier” and it’s like trying to force two magnets together when it’s both north or south poles and the magnets are repelling each other. So think: very strong magnets, with velcro on them. If you can manage to force them together, they’ll stick. If you can manage to force them together.

This applies to any nuclei, but here we’re interested in the simple case, two bare protons that some guy is trying to get to stick together. The best strategy is to fire one at high speed towards the other. The repulsion, hopefully, won’t be able to slow the incoming proton enough and it will get close enough for the strong nuclear “velcro” to engage.

And how do you do that, wholesale? You heat hydrogen gas up. A lot. Temperature, after all, is just the average kinetic energy of the atoms in a substance; the higher the temperature, the faster the atoms are moving. At only a few thousand degrees, the electrons are bumped off the atoms, and they become bare nuclei–in the case of protium, they’re just bare protons. This is actually considered a fourth phase of matter. We have solid, liquid, gas, and this: plasma. Now you just have to make it so hot, they slam into each other in spite of the huge electrical force pushing them apart. We’re talking millions of degrees here.

Natural Fusion in Stars

This is how a star functions. A star spends its whole life fighting the force of gravity. It’s a big ball of gas, and gravity is trying to compress it under its own weight. Gas is compressible, so gravity can do this. Up to a point. As the gas compresses, its temperature goes up, as the temperature goes up the pressure increases, so the star reaches a point where the heat on the inside balances the gravity on the outside and its size stabilizes.

That won’t work for long, of course, because the star will eventually cool off and the pressure drops, so gravity can begin to shrink it again. Without any new energy inside the star, it will just keep collapsing.

But fusion actually provides that energy. If a star starts “burning” its hydrogen by fusing it to helium, the energy released can balance the energy lost from the star trying to cool off, and it’s stable.

A star doesn’t have to fuse a lot of hydrogen all at once–fusion supplies a lot of energy. So even a little bit of fusion is enough to keep the sun from collapsing…and it can nurse its fuel supply and not run out for billions of years. A larger star, on the other hand has more gravity trying to crush it, and needs more fusion to counteract it. But there’s a built-in control valve: The more pressure and temperature, the more fusion. So the large star just gets hotter on the inside until the amount of fusion going on counterbalances gravity. It ends up having to rip through its fuel a lot faster than a small star, but it does do so as long as it can. In the meantime it’s a negative feedback system, so it’s stable. If something were to cause the star to generate excess heat in the core, it would just expand a bit until things were back in balance again, similarly if the star were to shrink for some unknown reason: the extra heat generated would make it expand again.

Very stable, and it’s a good thing because we are utterly dependent on it being stable. (Our sun varies some, but it doesn’t go way out of bounds.)

The interior of a star consists of about 75 percent hydrogen…protium, not deuterium, and 25 percent helium-4 by weight. (That’s what the universe originally consisted of. Everything else has been made since the universe begin, and is just a trace.) And the electrons have been stripped off these atoms and will have very little effect on what’s going on. So the interior of a star is bare protons and bare helium-4 nuclei, for the most part.

Fusion inside a star usually follows the route I’m about to describe, which is called the proton-proton chain. 1) Two protons get fused together. 2) The resulting two proton combo, called a diproton, is extremely unstable, and will just fall apart again–unless one of those protons happens to turn into a neutron at that exact time. The result is a deuteron. 3) Another proton gets added to the deuteron to make helium 3. 4) two helium 3 nuclei get smashed together. The result is helium-4, and two extra protons, that can then go off and try to repeat the process.

And a lot of energy is generated. In fact, for every helium-4 nucleus made, 26.73 million electron volts of energy are generated. What the heck is an electron volt? It’s a unit of energy, sized to be convenient to nuclear physicists. (This is not a rabbit hole we want to dive down; I covered it in my physics series.) Converting it to joules, we get 0.0000000000042768 joules.

Now that sounds like a millionth of a mouse fart. But remember, there are 600 sextillion protons in one gram of hydrogen gas. That’s enough to make 150 sextillion helium 4 atoms, so if we were to fuse all of the hydrogen in a gram of hydrogen, we’d have 641 billion joules of energy come out.

One kilowatt hour from your electric company is a thousand watts for one hour, or 3,600 seconds; power times time = energy so that’s 3,600,000 joules. So this one gram of hydrogen has produced 178,200 kilowatt hours of energy…that’s many many years of your electrical usage…again, from one gram of hydrogen! Which is less than half a cubic foot of the stuff. Or, it’s the amount of hydrogen in nine grams of water, which is roughly two teaspoons.

Two teaspoons of water, producing 178,200 kilowatthours of energy! Do you begin to understand why we are trying so hard to do this?

The Fly in the Ointment

There is a big problem though. That first reaction, getting two protons to get together into a deuteron…is almost impossible even at the center of the sun. Almost impossible. Even bouncing around at that temperature, and under that pressure, on average a proton will have to wait nine billion years for it to happen. Why is this so slow? Because it relies on the weak nuclear force to happen…that proton must turn into a neutron at exactly the right time, otherwise, effectively you just get protons bounding off each other, since the diproton falls apart immediately. And the weak force isn’t just weak, it’s slow.

The good news is once we do that the other steps are quick, because they only require the strong force…but we still have to get that first step out of the way.

(The other good news is that because it’s so slow, our sun lasts a long time rather than ripping through the fuel like it was gasoline-soaked pine needles dropped on a roaring fire.)

If we were to recreate the core of the sun in a fusion reactor, and put a bunch of hydrogen-1 in, it would take a long, long, long time to burn that hydrogen, and so our power output would be minimal. We’d get halfway through in 9 billion years, which means for every gram of hydrogen, we’d get 89,100 kilowatthours out…over the span of 9 billion years. Doing the math the power coming out of that plant is 314 femtowatts per gram of fuel. Or 0.000000000000314 watts.

OK, so that’s useless.

In bigger stars the temperatures and pressures are higher, so it won’t take as long under those circumstances. And maybe we could duplicate those conditions, and burn the hydrogen faster, but honestly even duplicating stars that burn fuel a thousand times faster than the sun, we’re getting nowhere. 314 picowatts/gram is still useless.

(You, sitting there reading this digesting your bacon breakfast, generate more power just maintaining your body temperature, than does an equivalent-mass part of the sun’s core. Yes, the sun’s core is hotter, but that’s pre-existing heat energy. In terms of new energy bacon works better than the sun’s core, per unit mass. But the sun’s core is so much bigger that it can power everything on Earth and the other planets with one billionth of the output and throw away the rest, sending it radiating out into the universe.) [edit: inserted this paragraph]

No, what we need to do is skip that first step entirely. In our reactors here on earth we need to start with deuterium. And helium 3. And even tritium. Then we will get most (but not all) of the energy out, but it’s well worth it, because we get it quickly enough–i.e., with high enough power–to be useful. [edit: rephrased this paragraph for clarity…as if any of this were clear.]

Our hydrogen bombs actually do this, rather than trying to fuse protium. And so do our fusion experiments. The good news is the step we skipped over only produces about 3 million (out of the 27 million) electron volts, so we will get nearly as much energy out starting from deuterium as we would have by starting with protium.

We also throw tritium into the mix, which means this is a slightly different sequence than the sun uses, because the last step in the sun is combining two helium-3s to make a helium-4 and two protons. But helium-3 is rare, and tritium actually requires a lower temperature to “ignite,” so we combine tritons and deuterons in ways that just don’t happen much inside the sun. But the end result is the same: helium-4 and energy.

But this is still hard to do. And that’s why we’ve been building big-ass labs with big-ass reactors trying to do it.

How We’re Doing It

There are two major approaches we’re following to try to get fusion to work. The first is the “Tokamak.” The idea is to ionize the deuterium and tritium, and put it inside a magnetic bottle so we can heat it up. (Nothing made of matter can be made into a container that will survive these temperatures.) We had problems with magnetic bottles leaking out the ends, so we started making them donut shaped, so they’d have no ends to leak out of. And so the tokamak–an acronym formed from the Russian for “Toroidal chamber with magnetic coils”–was born. (тороидальная камера с магнитными катушками: tokamak) [an alternate reading is “toroidal chamber with axial magnetic field: тороидальная камера с аксиальным магнитным полем.] (Luckily, t, o, k, a, and m look the same in Russian as they do in English.)

This is essentially the same idea as is being used by ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) in southern France. It is expected to be finished by 2025 and will be ten times the size of any previous tokamak…and who cares because we are accomplishing what it was intended to accomplish already using the other major method.

Inertial confinement is to put a small amount of deuterium and tritium gas in a certain place and instead of trying to restrain it with magnetic fields, simply heat it up so suddenly it doesn’t have a chance to escape before reaching ignition temperatures. This is what the National Ignition Facility in California does. It uses small hollow pellets called hohlraums filled with fusion fuel, a few milligrams apiece, and blasts them with super powerful lasers. The energy is delivered so suddenly the gas heats up before it has a chance to dissipate. Even the shell of the pellet participates by collapsing inward under the pressure from the lasers, increasing the pressure.

The goal of both methods is to get out of the fusion reaction more energy than it took to cause the reaction. If we can do that, we’re generating energy. Otherwise, we’re consuming it.

This latest report concerns the fact that, for the first time ever, more energy came out of the fusion than was delivered to the fuel by the lasers. 3.15 megajoules came out, with 2.05 megajoules going in, roughly a 50 percent gain. Up until now it has always been a loss; the best was only a 30 percent loss. (3.6 megajoules = 1 kilowatthour.) We’ve achieved what’s known as scientific breakeven.

The problem is those lasers are horrifically inefficient; it takes about 400 megajoules to produce those beams for one firing of the system. So if you look at the whole system, we’re using 400 MJ to generate 3 MJ…and that’s not a good deal. We’re still nowhere near overall breakeven. We need better lasers, or perhaps more energy coming out of the pellet.

So maybe ITER still has a chance.

We’ve got a long way to go, but at least, for the first time we’ve got the second half doing its job, producing energy. Without that, it doesn’t matter if the lasers don’t waste a single billionth of a joule, the system will never produce power. Now half of it does.

So it’s still going to be a while before you can run your house or car off of Mr. Fusion.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

The Twitter Files

The big deal right now is the Twitter Files, which from what I’ve seen, seem on the verge of confirming what we already strongly suspected. I’ve only seen 36 parts of the thread; the picture being painted so far is some guy near (but not at) the top making a bad decision and no one in the company having the guts to challenge it. (Note that there is, so far, no real evidence of malicious intent, but plenty of evidence that a decision might have been made due to political bias–i.e., because the decision maker was a leftist, it might not even have occurred to him how badly he was favoring his own side. Not all biased acts are taken with the realization they are biased; that’s why they’re called “biases.”) We don’t know yet who, or what organization, specifically requested the Hunter Biden stuff be suppressed.

There’s more to come.

The biggest part of this is that enough of the Left, and normies, are on Twitter that there’s a decent chance millions of people who have no idea Hunter Biden had anything to do with laptops, will see this.

As Drudge used to put it: developing…

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 2022 or 2024 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 $1,752.20
Silver $21.05
Platinum $988.00
Palladium $2,020.00
Rhodium $14,150.00

This week, 3 PM MT on Friday, markets closed for the weekend

Gold $1,798.30
Silver $23.19
Platinum $1,023.00
Palladium $1,974.00
Rhodium $14,100.00

Rhodium going nowhere, palladium actually down. But remember those metals are used industrially. Them not going up while everything else is, should worry people. Those people, that is, who haven’t already figured out our economy is being fed down the toilet deliberately.

Percentage wise, silver is the big winner, by far. (That’s OK, I’ve got lots of it.)

Platinum has broken a thousand bucks, and gold is close to 1800.00. Indeed it closed above that mark on Thursday.

Apropos of Nothing

Apparently the US Soccer Team got through the first round of the World Cup. This is where the 32 teams are divided into eight groups of four, and each team plays all of the other teams in the group (total, six games). 3 points awarded for a win, 1 for a draw, zero for a loss. The top two teams in each group advance to a more conventional “bracket” of sixteen teams–you lose, you’re done. The United States was the second team in Group B, so it gets to play the first team in Group A. (As near as I can tell the groups are set up by random draw with some restrictions to try to make the members not all from the same multinational league.)

The first of those games is tomorrow at 8AM Mountain Time, and it’s the one between the United States and the Netherlands.

Also Apropos of Nothing

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/05/08/treasure-hunter-gold-shipwreck/9663123002/?gnt-cfr=1

The previous is a USA Today story (yeah, I know), but it’s regarding the team that found the SS Central America. It’s behind a subscription wall but it looks like the video will play even without one.

The Central America sank in 1857. It was one of the vessels that carried people from the East Coast to Panama, where the passengers could then cross the skinny part of North America and take another ship to California. Or vice versa. The transcontinental railroad was still twelve years in the future, but the Gold Rush had been going on for eight years.

People went in both directions. Gold came west-to-east. The Central America encountered a hurricane in September 1857 and went down in well over a thousand feet of water. Of her 578 passengers, 425 perished. In terms of lives lost, this was one of the largest US disasters up to that point.

The ship was under the command of Commander William Lewis Herndon, veteran of the Mexican-American War and explorer of the Amazon Valley. He went down with his ship. There is a statue of him at Annapolis; I recall hearing that was the only peacetime hero so honored. And he was a national hero; the last national hero before the Civil War. (His daughter later married Chester Alan Arthur–yes, that Chester Alan Arthur. And, Herndon, Virginia, is named for him.

There were 13,600 kilograms (!) of gold on board–13.6 metric tons. That was about 8 million dollars worth back then, and roughly 750 million dollars today. (It should be noted that this is well under a cubic yard of gold.)

The loss of the gold actually triggered an economic crisis. All money back then, even highly leveraged/fractional reserve bank notes, was ultimately based on gold; a bunch of money had literally disappeared.

But in 1988 Thompson’s group sent down an ROV (basically a drone), and over the next couple of decades a lot of that gold has been recovered, as well as artifacts, such as photographs, clothing, guns, brass items, and on and on. Much of that will be auctioned off this weekend (according to the story).

Just for instance, there is this Daguerrotype found in the wreck, nicknamed the Mona Lisa of the Depths.

I’ve actually seen this picture in person since it and many other artifacts was exhibited at the last American Numismatic Association convention. I got to talk to Bob Evans, who is the chief scientist of the team that recovered everything; and he is the man in the video in the linked story (where I saw it earlier today, it was not behind a paywall).

Much of the recovered gold was in bricks–several hundred ounces, much larger than the standard 400 oz bars you see in the movies–but much had been minted into coins in San Francisco.

US gold coinage issued before 1866 does not have the motto “In God We Trust.” (And the $2 1/2 quarter eagle never did.) Otherwise, the Liberty Head designs used in 1857 were used from 1840 or so through 1907 (a remarkably long run for a design in those days). But if you’re on a middle class budget with some disposable income, and you collect coins, you can’t collect gold by date. But you might want one gold coin with the motto and one without the motto. The problem is the $5, $10 and $20 without the motto are scare at best, and very challenging to find in uncirculated condition. It’s not that they didn’t make many, but that they got used. People weren’t about to set ten or twenty whole dollars aside back then, that was real money. If they actually got their hands on one of these, they ended up using it.

Except for the 1857-S double eagle. Those are relatively available in uncirculated condition, and that’s because hundreds of them were “saved” at the bottom of the ocean, in alkaline water.

The above image is a coin graded MS-66 (which is a pretty high grade on the 1-70 scale used for coins) and is worth roughly $30,000. Many of the other dates simply do not exist in this grade, so as I said, relatively available. (The best ones are in MS67+.) I do own one of these, but in a lesser grade that was quite a bit less expensive (however the absolute lowest a double eagle, even a dog-butt-common one in low grade, will cost today is about $2K mostly on account of the gold content).

It isn’t quite true that gold coins don’t react; here’s another one of a different color (in MS67). I find this color more appealing, to be honest.

Why Mars Sucks

Of all of the other planets in the Solar System, Mars is by far the most Earthlike. Yet it’s dry, has a thin atmosphere (0.6% of our sea-level air pressure) almost entirely made of carbon dioxide, and frigid, mostly colder than Antarctica, averaging -80 F or -60 C. Also, the surface gets blasted with solar radiation…not at a huge rate, but you wouldn’t want to deal with it long term.

Not the best real estate, but with a lot of equipment, we could possibly make a go of it, growing food in pressurized habitats. Oxygen is available, carbon is available, hydrogen is available too if you dig; there appears to be plenty of buried ice there. Contrast with the Moon, where ice can be found in some few places, but which is otherwise just a big freaking rock. Rocks contain plenty of oxygen (though it would take a lot of energy to extract it), but that’s about it for native resources for sustaining life.

Yes, Mars could be settled at great effort and at great expense, and the colonists could never, ever go outside without a pressure suit, and even then they probably won’t want to spend all of their time out there. Antarctica is benign by comparison: you won’t get radiation sickness and you can breathe. Even the Himalayas are vastly better than Mars (and people don’t live high up in them, but down in the relatively lower elevations well under 20,000 feet).

Yet we know Mars once had liquid surface water…which implies a much more congenial temperature and an atmosphere which a much higher pressure. Depending on what it was made of (probably not oxygen!), you might have been able to live there with nothing more than an oxygen mask.

If it was so much more livable then, why does it suck so much now?

The atmosphere went away.

The old atmosphere was thick enough to keep the planet warm. Yes, that means “greenhouse effect.” (It’s real; Earth would be a frozen iceball without it.) The current atmosphere isn’t thick enough to keep water from boiling away, but then the water is likely to freeze first because it’s so dang cold. But then it will sublimate–turning directly from solid to water vapor.

The atmosphere also does little to stop cosmic rays and solar particles from hitting the surface, too. Much of that crap is blocked by our atmosphere.

Well, okay…but why, then, did the atmosphere go away? We know there used to be one, why isn’t it there any more?

That’s a combination of Mars’ low surface gravity and its lack of a magnetic field.

The surface gravity means that atmospheric molecules, which are zipping around at varying speeds (but with an average speed directly related to the mass of the molecules and the temperature), will sometimes be travelling faster than Mars’ escape velocity; if that happens to a molecule in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, it might leave Mars for good. Since the average speed depends on temperature it’s only a matter of time before some molecule in the upper atmosphere, rebounding from a collision with another one, busts the escape velocity and goes away. Or think of it this way: Mars is a gravity trap for gas molecules, but it leaks because the gravity isn’t strong enough.

(Even here on Earth, which much more surface gravity, we lose some water this way–it’s a lighter molecule than oxygen or carbon dioxide, thus will travel faster on average at the same temperature.)

What’s left is the heaviest atmospheric molecule of them all…wait for it…carbon dioxide.

I said it was partially due to the surface gravity; the other factor is the solar wind. This is a constant stream of charged particles blasting out of the Sun; it’s part of the radiation load people on the surface of Mars (or the Moon) would have to endure. There are also cosmic rays, very high-energy particles that were blasted out of supernovae or…well I don’t think they know everything yet about where they come from. But: same story, they hit the Martian surface.

They would hit us here on earth, too, but with the exception of some cosmic rays, they’re almost entirely blocked.

On Mars this radiation isn’t blocked, and eventually, over tens or even hundreds of millions of years, strips the atmosphere away, hitting atmospheric molecules and giving them a big boost in speed, accelerating the process I just described.

This shouldn’t be confused with coronal mass ejections. The solar wind is always there; a CME can be thought of as a gust…a big gust.

What blocks the solar wind here, and why isn’t it happening at Mars?

What blocks it here is Earth’s magnetic field. The charged particles get deflected as they move through the magnetic field.

Mars has no magnetic field. Your compass would be useless for direction-finding. So without a magnetic field, Mars loses its atmosphere…and sucks.

But we’re going to keep digging. Why does Earth have a magnetic field? Why doesn’t Mars have one?

The Earth’s magnetic field is generated by our liquid iron outer core; eddy currents in all that molten iron generate a magnetic field.

Mars doesn’t have a liquid iron core.

Why not? Because it’s colder inside, and Mars is colder inside because it cooled off more rapidly than Earth after it was formed. And Mars cooled off more rapidly for one simple reason: It’s considerably smaller than Earth.

So, in the end, the reason Mars sucks is, it’s too small.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

To conclude: My standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!