“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
Joe 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.
Physics?
Part 1 was last week. I intended to do Part 2 this week, but both of my drafts are an utter mess. I’m going to keep plugging away at it, though, so hopefully next week.
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.
(Be advised that if you want to go buy some gold, you will have to pay at least $200 over these spot prices. They represent “paper” gold, not “physical” gold, a lump you can hold in your hand. Incidentally, if you do have a lump of some size, doesn’t it give you a nice warm feeling to heft it?)
Of these, palladium continues its steady climb. In fact, on Thursday it had closed at $3012, above three thousand dollars for at least the second time in the last week.
I did, long, long ago, buy some palladium, not a huge amount. (But I can drop it on my foot. I won’t hurt if I do so, because, like I said, not a huge amount.) I even told the guy I was buying it because it had gone over 900 bucks earlier (which at the time was higher than gold had ever been), maybe it would do so again. He scoffed, and explained that was due to a temporary supply interruption from Russia, unlikely to ever happen again. But now, it’s worth well over ten times what I paid for it. In fairness, I had to hold onto it for over 20 years for it to finally do what I wanted it to do, so this isn’t the short of thing that is a “short term” play.
I knew someone who, about the same time, wanted to find a way to get into rhodium, but back then there was no such thing as a rhodium one ounce bar. I don’t know if he managed to find a way to do it, but if he did, he has done very, very well, even if it took a couple of decades for it to finally move.
Obligatory PSAs and Reminders
China is Lower than Whale Shit
Remember Hong Kong!!!
Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”
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 !!!
It’s Friday and thank goodness for it. Welcome back to Wolf’s Pub, the best place in town to find intelligent talk, stellar wit and wisdom, and amazing camaraderie all in one cozy accommodation.
We’ll have some liquid courage in a bit, but let’s get to brass tacks. It’s going to take courage to overcome the globalists/communists. There is no shrinking from the task of speaking up, speaking out, and standing firm against their lies and machinations. And let’s not forget the obsequious and disgusting RINOs and other assorted tools who GO ALONG TO GET ALONG. Spit. Spit. Spit.
The sociopaths don’t think like normal people. They will kill us and feel justified in doing it simply because we don’t go along with their pogrom…I mean program. Incidentally, Wolf has a fabulous Wuhan Virus/Abortion Jab post, so I won’t say anything beyond this:
That is prescription Ivermectin at 1%. It is used to treat the Rosacea form of acne. In the USA it costs $600 for 1.67 oz of Ivermectin to topically treat acne (around $50 if you have good insurance). You could head down to the local feed store and buy Ivermectin paste to treat worms in your horse and buy it for $5 for 1.87% and a quarter pound of paste.
They aren’t like us
Big Pharma has been withholding effective treatments from us for a long time and charging the citizens of the USA ungodly amounts of money for cheap meds. The truth will come out. God have mercy on the professional criminals who have imposed their ungodly rule upon us.
They LIE TO US ROUTINELY and feel justified in it. THEY DON’T THINK LIKE WE DO. These are moral zombies. You can’t reason with them. Emerald Star gets it:
House Rules
The drill: We disagree, sometimes vociferously. Fireworks are cool. But we don’t lose our cool. If MAGA Mom and I can make nice, then everyone can make nice. 😊
If you need to kvetch, head over to the Utree, where a free-for-all is allowed. Otherwise, review the Rules, and give the bouncers nothing to do but bourbon shots when the boss ain’t looking.
Standing Up to Totalitarianism
Thank goodness prudence was not at the forefront of parents’ thinking in Vail, Arizona. Whenever people stand up against the totalitarian instinct that has taken over our government, they are WINNING. The Vail, Arizona parents who stood up to the school board are a great example. In yesterday morning’s War Room, Steve Bannon interviewed one of the parents who said that their movement started with two parents, then it went to five and then hundreds showed up at a school board meeting. Watch here, or HERE:
Yesterday, President Trump told us to keep the faith and have courage. Watch here. Or (maybe, Wolf’s fingers crossed) here:
It’s more than obvious by now that our government is NOT being run by (s)elected representatives. It is being run by Big Pharma, Big Tech, assorted globalists and communists within the bureaucracy, and the CCP among other foreign influences. The RINOs are potent examples of the sellout of our nation.
Who Needs a Drink Now?
Yep. We’re going to celebrate family and family culture with Ouzo today. Opa!
Piggybacking on Absinthe from last week, Ouzo is another liquor that has its own culture and ritual, and that also utilizes anise, a licorice-flavored herb. Ouzo and Absinthe are often compared.
Here’s a nice little introduction to Ouzo, which is really quite young (19th century) but has achieved epic fame in Greek culture and abroad. Ouzo is made from must, or the leavings from winemaking, which is basically the skins and stems of grapes. Add anise and several other herbs, and there it is. Here’s a short and lovely video on how Ouzo is made:
Here’s some additional history and information about Ouzo:
And just because we love to watch Greeks dance, Dance 2019:
Out of Slavery
“Courage is the rarest of all the good traits. There are far more kind and honest people than there are courageous people.”
Dennis Prager
I have been reading Dennis Prager’s commentary Exodus: God, Slavery, and Freedom. Prager’s Rational Bible takes Scripture and makes it applicable and relevant for our times in a unique way.
He gives a great perspective on why God chose Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt:
“Moses fights evil. He is instinctively intolerant of suffering and injustice…Moses…was not raised among them [Israelites]. That made him far more worldly than people who were raised as slaves…Moses does not have a slave mentality. Unlike his fellow Hebrews, who were so demoralized that they could only cry out…Moses does not share their demoralization and does not merely cry out; he takes action.” (P. 24., Exodus, Slavery, and Freedom.)
Prager says, further, when discussing the God-fearing midwives who helped save Hebrew babies (Exodus 1:17),
“There is another important moral aspect to fear of God. People fear those who are more powerful than they are. Therefore, the only way not to fear powerful people is to fear God…It was the midwives’ fear of God that liberated them from fear of the Egyptian tyrant. This point is often overlooked: Fear of God is a liberating emotion, freeing one from a disabling fear of evil, powerful people.”
Dennis Prager
When I read that, a bright light went on in my head. Megawatt.
God-fearing people are the ultimate target of the Biden crew and other globalists/communists because they know such people are able to defeat evil. They may say God-fearing people are “white supremacists” or “Deplorables”, but what they really mean to attack are the People of God.
For every martyr that a totalitarian regime makes, a hundred spring up in their place. We won’t give up. We will win. We are winning.
“The secret to happiness is freedom…And the secret to freedom is courage.” Thucydides
So, some links for your reading pleasure, as we plot and plan to stand up to evil…and overcome:
This Sanctuary Sunday Open Thread, with full respect to those who worship God on the Sabbath, is a place to reaffirm our worship of our Creator, our Father, our King Eternal.
It is also a place to read, post and discuss news that is worth knowing and sharing. Please post links to any news stories that you use as sources or quote from.
In the QTree, we’re a friendly and civil lot. We encourage free speech and the open exchange and civil discussion of different ideas. Topics aren’t constrained, and sound logic is highly encouraged, all built on a solid foundation of truth and established facts.
We have a policy of mutual respect, shown by civility. Civility encourages discussions, promotes objectivity and rational thought in discourse, and camaraderie in the participants – characteristics we strive toward in our Q Tree community.
Please show respect and consideration for our fellow QTreepers. Before hitting the “post” button, please proofread your post and make sure you’re addressing the issue only, and not trying to confront the poster. Keep to the topic – avoid “you” and “your”. Here in The Q Tree, personal attacks, name calling, ridicule, insults, baiting and other conduct for which a penalty flag would be thrown are VERBOTEN.
In The Q Tree, we’re compatriots, sitting around the campfire, roasting hot dogs, making s’mores and discussing, agreeing, and disagreeing about whatever interests us. This board will remain a home for those who seek respectful conversations.
Between a fourth and a third of the Bible is prophecy. So it’s clear that prophecy is important to God. But why is prophecy important to Him? And why should it be important to us?
Prophecy reveals who and what God is – prophecy reveals God’s greatness and power—power such that He is able to reveal the future. In Isaiah 42, He connects His creative power with His ability to reveal the future long before it comes to pass:
“This is what God the Lord says—the Creator of the heavens, who stretches them out, who spreads out the earth with all that springs from it, who gives breath to its people, and life to those who walk on it: ‘. . . I am the Lord; that is my name! I will not yield my glory to another or my praise to idols. See, the former things have taken place, and new things I declare; before they spring into being I announce them to you'” (Isaiah 42:5, Isaiah 42:8-9)
No one or nothing can compare to God in his might and majesty. No other can speak and bring galaxies, stars and worlds into existence! No other can create living beings from nothing! And no other can declare what will happen before it takes place!
Prophecy reveals that God exists and that the Bible is His revealed Word.
Critics sidestep the plain evidence that God exists and that the Bible is His revealed word and offer all kinds of convoluted reasoning to explain it away. But God offers this challenge to any who would doubt Him:
“This is what the Lord says—Israel’s King and Redeemer, the Lord Almighty: I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God. Who then is like me? Let him proclaim it. Let him declare and lay out before me what has happened since I established my ancient people, and what is yet to come—yes, let him foretell what will come . . . Did I not proclaim this and foretell it long ago? You are my witnesses. Is there any God besides me?” (Isaiah 44:6-8, NIV).
History itself is a witness that God foretold many events hundreds and thousands of years before they happened, then brought them to pass exactly as He said. God put it in writing well ahead of time where it can be easily disproven if it doesn’t come to pass. Yet time and time again, what He has written has taken place just as He foretold!
The Bible is unlike any other religious “holy book” in many respects, but one enormous difference is that the Bible alone contains hundreds of prophecies that have been fulfilled just as they were recorded years ahead of time—and with hundreds more waiting to be fulfilled.
Prophecy shows that God is in ultimate control.
Not only can God reveal the future well ahead of time, but He can also bring to pass what He has foretold. In Isaiah 46:9-10 He declares plainly that no one or no thing can remotely approach His power, using prophecy as an example:
“Remember the former things, those of long ago; I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me. I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come” (NIV). He ends this statement saying, “My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please” (NIV).
Clearly, only God can do this.
The biblical prophet Daniel, who served under the rulers of Babylon and the Medo-Persian Empire, said that God “removes kings and raises up kings” and “reveals deep and secret things” (Daniel 2:21-22). Daniel had no doubts when it came to this great truth about God. Daniel was a senior royal advisor to the court of Babylon with a front-row seat to God removing, restoring and replacing kings—and even striking down a mighty empire when it came time to move on to the next great phase of Bible prophecy.
God is in complete and ultimate control, raising up and striking down kings and empires according to His plan and to fulfill His purpose!
Prophecy reveals the consequences of obedience and disobedience.
A theme found again and again in Bible prophecy is that choices and actions have consequences. Paul summarized this very well in Galatians 6:7: “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.”
Two long chapters of the Bible—Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28—spell this out clearly. They describe in considerable detail what happens when a nation chooses to obey and honor God and what results when a nation turns its back and disobeys Him.
“Now it shall come to pass,” begins Deuteronomy 28:1-2, “if you diligently obey the voice of the Lord your God, to observe carefully all His commandments which I command you today, that the Lord your God will set you high above all nations of the earth. And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, because you obey the voice of the Lord your God . . .”
The chapter goes on to describe blessings of agricultural and other material abundance, good health, national respect and prestige, victory in conflict, divine protection, good weather, national wealth and more.
“But it shall come to pass,” the chapter’s warning begins Deuteronomy 28:15, “if you do not obey the voice of the Lord your God, to observe carefully all His commandments and His statutes which I command you today, that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you . . .”
The curses that follow are the opposite of the blessings just listed—agricultural and material decline, “rebuke in all that you set your hand to do,” diseases, drought, military defeat, mental illness and confusion, oppression by foreigners and invaders, natural disasters and more.
“Because you did not serve the Lord your God with joy and gladness of heart, for the abundance of everything, therefore you shall serve your enemies,” God declares (Deuteronomy 28:47-48). The warning continues with graphic and sobering details of what happens when civilization and moral standards begin to completely break down, leading to utter depravity.
The ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah failed to heed these warnings, and they stand as an example to nations such as the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and others who’ve been greatly blessed by God but now increasingly deny Him and trample His laws and Word underfoot. Their fate is likewise spelled out in prophecy if they refuse to turn from that treacherous path!
Prophecy reveals God’s will—that He wants all to receive His gift of salvation.
Much of Bible prophecy is grim and at times frightening. God wants us to understand the painful consequences that will follow from choosing the wrong way and the blessings that come from obeying Him.
God doesn’t want any of us to suffer. In Ezekiel, He says: “Say to them: ‘As I live,’ says the Lord God, ‘I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn, turn from your evil ways! For why should you die, O house of Israel?'” (Ezekiel 33:11).
The prophecies of the Bible almost always end with hope and good news. This is because, as Paul told Timothy, God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4).
And Bible prophecy reveals how that wonderful truth will play out!
Prophecy reveals God’s plan for humanity.
Bible prophecy reveals that God is working out an incredible plan for us, a plan for how He will bring us to salvation and eternal life in His divine family.
“I will be a Father to you, and you shall be My sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty” (2 Corinthians 6:18).
“Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. And everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure” (1 John 3:2-3).
God’s promise is that as His divine children, we will be like the glorified Jesus Christ!
“Blessed and holy is he who has part in the first resurrection. Over such the second death has no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with Him a thousand years” (Revelation 20:6).
Few realize this truth, but God’s plan for us is to serve Him as priests and to reign with Jesus Christ when He establishes the Kingdom of God on earth!
Prophecy should motivate us to repent and turn to God.
Jeremiah (25:4-5) summarizes the message of God’s prophets to His people: “The Lord has sent to you all His servants the prophets . . . They said, ‘Repent now everyone of his evil way and his evil doings . . .'”
Peter (2 Peter 3:9) tells us: “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance”.
God says: “The instant I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, to pull down, and to destroy it, if that nation against whom I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I thought to bring upon it.” (Jeremiah 18:7-8)
God sent Jonah to warn the Ninevites of their judgment and impending doom for their wickedness. The Ninevites believed God and repented. As a result, “God relented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and He did not do it” (Jonah 3:10).
The message of every prophet of the Bible is that if we turn our life around, listen to God and heed His warnings and change, we can avoid the terrible times prophesied to come on our world.
All prophecy is ultimately a message of hope. We have God’s assurance that He is in perfect control, that He is a God of love (1 John 4:8, 1 John 4:16), that His desire is for us to turn to Him in heartfelt repentance and turn our lives over to Him. If and when we do so, He promises to bless and care for us, intent on fulfilling His purpose for us.
He tells us what we must do in Isaiah 55:6-7: “Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, and He will have mercy on him; and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon.”
God shows us in His Word His vital purposes for prophecy. More than anything, He gives us prophecy to help us understand who and what He is and how much we need Him.
God is in Control . . . and His Grace is Sufficient, so . . . Keep Looking Up
Hopefully, every Sunday, we can find something here that will build us up a little . . . give us a smile . . . and add some joy or peace, very much needed in all our lives.
“This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn nor weep.” . . . “Go your way, eat the fat, drink the sweet, and send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared; for this day is holy to our Lord. Do not sorrow, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
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.
Unfortunately, when looking at the prices only on Friday, you lose some things. It looks like gold has barely moved, but the fact of the matter is, it almost blooped up above $1800 earlier in the week. A far cry from the situation just a few weeks ago when it would drop below $1700 and then popped back up again, two or three times.
To really get a feel for what is going on, you should look at a chart.
The price is moving up and down, but the overall trend is down, imagine a series of sawtooths (sawteeth?). And if you look at the recent rise, it’s still consistent with just being an upward movement in the overall down trend; you can sort of eyeball a straight line through all those peaks, sloping down and to the right, and the price of gold hasn’t broken through that line, not yet it hasn’t. A trader would likely expect it to reverse and drop again.
Palladium on the other hand, is in a slow upward trend, again as seen in a graph for the past year:
Note that it has gone from below $10,000 to almost $30,000 just since last June. Also note at the far right the price is moving up and down, but the height of the oscillations is decreasing. This may be what the technical traders call a “flag,” if so when it reaches its “point” the commodity often breaks out, either up or down, in a big way.
And it probably shows the most stark behavior. Dead flat for months, then suddenly it starts climbing, and climbing, and climbing! That line almost looks like the profile of the Grand Canyon, in fact, complete with the vertical faces and then lines sloping upward to the next vertical face.
Mass (Part I of a Long Series)
Introduction
Having run out of precious metals to babble about, I’m going to change tacks. If you’ve been here a while, you might remember two postings I did on stars. These were independent posts, having nothing to do with politics (poly = many, ticks = blood sucking bugs) and at least some people enjoyed them. I wanted to go to the opposite end of the scale and talk about a certain sub-atomic particle, but then I realized that the best way to do that would be a very, very, very long post. (And yes, it’s a subatomic particle, but it has a lot to do with stars.) A huge part of it would be explaining where physics stood in 1895, and how four discoveries in the next four years basically overturned things, and eventually led to that subatomic particle, the real star (ahem) of the whole series.
So I decided to break this story up into pieces. And this is the first of those pieces.
And here is the caveat: I will be explaining, at first, what the scientific consensus was in 1895. So much of what I have to say is out of date, and I know it…but going past it would be a spoiler. So I’d appreciate not being “corrected” in the comments when I say things like “mass is conserved.” I know that that isn’t considered true any more, but the point is in 1895 we didn’t know that. I will get there in due time. (On the other hand, if I do misrepresent the state of understanding as it was in 1895, I do want to know it.)
Also, to avoid getting bogged down in Spockian numbers specified to nine decimal places, I’m going to round a lot of things off. I use 9.8, below, for a number that’s actually closer to 9.80665, for instance, similarly for the number 32.
OK so without further ado, mass.
What Mass Is, and Isn’t
Mass is not the same thing as weight, at least not when scientists are using the terms.
But the distinction between mass and weight didn’t become clear until Isaac Newton came along. He tried to imagine what objects would behave like if there were no gravity, and no friction. And he realized that an object under those circumstances would stay at rest unless a force acted on it, or, if were already moving, would continue to move in the same direction at the same speed, unless a force acted on it. It has inertia. But that doesn’t match what we actually see. You let go of an object that’s not on the ground, it falls (or if it’s a balloon, it might rise). An object that’s moving on a flat surface slows down and stops.
But the reason why we see things fall faster and faster, is that gravity exerts a force on them, a downward force, and the reason things moving horizontally slow down is friction, and that, too is a force.
For clarity, we have to ignore friction. Imagine these objects are wet ice on a hockey rink–or cars sliding on ice (yikes!). Or air hockey pucks. There’s still some friction in all of these cases, but not a whole lot. You can imagine, after watching these sorts of things, what it would be like with no friction.
Largely building upon what Galileo discovered (when he wasn’t looking through a telescope), Newton essentially defined the concept of inertia. It’s basically the resistance of an object to being shoved. And mass is essentially a measure of that. If object A is twice as massive as object B, it’s twice as hard to shove around and get the same effect. You need to exert twice as much force.
On the other hand, if you stick with the same object, and apply twice as much force, it reacts twice as much.
You can state this a little more precisely as, acceleration, a, is proportional to the force, F, and inversely proportional to the mass, m. You can increase or decrease any of the three items, decrease or increase one of the other two, and you will see the third item increase or decrease exactly in proportion.
Or to be even more concise, you can write the following:
a ∝ F/m.
That little Jesus fish like thing means “is proportional to” and basically, it means that if you double one side, you double the other side, but they’re not equal.
You can rearrange to get:
F ∝ ma.
And this is the form you usually see this in, it’s Newton’s second law of motion. Well almost. There’s something we can do to get rid of that Jesus fishy thing and replace it with an equals sign. More on that shortly.
Mass is considered to be the ultimate measure of “how much matter” is in an object. Twice as much matter, will have twice as much inertia. And some object, say one of the big weights off of a weightlifting set, will have the same inertia even on the moon.
But the weight of the objects will change on the Moon, because weight is actually force. And the Moon’s gravity will pull on the same objects, with less force than on Earth.
The kilogram is actually a unit of mass. A chunk of metal massing a kilogram (think of it as a one kilogram gold bar if that will put a smile on your face) will still mass a kilogram on the moon, pick it up and swing it around, you will feel the same tugs as you would feel on earth, because now you are playing with its inertia, which doesn’t change–it will take the same force to keep the bar from flying out of your hand as it did on Earth.
But pounds are (usually) a unit of force. That kilogram of gold will weigh about 2.2 pounds here on Earth. That means that the earth’s gravity pulls on it with that amount of force. But take it to the moon, and it weighs about 5.9 ounces, that’s how much force the moon exerts on that one kilogram mass.
[Or–let’s be frank here–for me, and for most of you, it weighs exactly zero both on Earth and the Moon because your kilogram bar of gold doesn’t exist at all except in your dreams. Oh, OK, never mind, forget I said this and return to smiling.]
The one force we can’t get away from in our daily is gravity, and as such in the English system a lot of things are defined with respect to the amount of gravity Earth has. But when you’re doing engineering you have to deal with a lot of forces–the force exerted by a pile driver, the thrust of a jet engine, and so on. So you need a unit of force and a unit of mass, so you can figure out how much your masses will respond to your forces, or alternatively, how much force you’ll have to exert to make that mass move the way you want it to.
The metric system, which starts with unit of mass, has to derive a unit of force, and the English system which starts with a unit of force, has to derive a unit of mass. Metric invented a unit of force called the Newton–the amount of force needed to accelerate a kilogram, one meter per second, for every second it’s applied, and yes, it’s named after Sir Isaac. And the English system retro-invented the slug–it’s the amount of mass that, when acted upon by one pound of force, will accelerate one foot per second, every second.
Once you’ve defined your units, you can change that proportionality constant to an equals sign. But you may need a fudge factor, which I will call k. F = kma. (And yes, Biden can kma.) In metric, as long as you stick to meters, kilograms, and meters per second squared, the fudge factor is 1. The Newton was deliberately defined that way. And in the English system, as long as you stick to feet, slugs, and feet per second squared, the fudge factor is also 1. 1 will disappear if it’s in an algebraic multiplication, so now we’re dealing with
F = ma
Drop a kilogram of gold–it will accelerate at 9.8 meters per second per second, a = 9.8, and m is one. Plug it into the formula above. That means it’s being acted on by a force of 9.8 newtons.
Galileo showed that heaver objects fall at exactly the same rate as lighter ones (once you account for air resistance, which is a force and partially cancels out gravity). So a two kilogram mass of gold, falling at the same rate, which we call g, gives you F = 2 x 9.8 = 19.6 Newtons.
Switch to the English system now. Drop a pound of something else–bananas, say–it will accelerate at 32 feet per second, every second. (That’s the English equivalent of 9.8 meters per second per second…we’re just using a different measuring stick.) But this time we have a weight, not a mass, F, and we have a and are looking for m, so we need to do a bit of beginner’s algebra and come up with:
m = F/a
But this time F is 1 pound, and a is 32 feet per second squared. So our mass is 1/32. And indeed, if our answer is supposed to be in slugs, that’s the right answer. A slug, as it turns out, weighs 32 pounds here on earth, and 1/32 of a slug weighs one pound.
Engineers find it so useful to have a unit of mass, the ones working in the English system (poor sods) actually invented a “pound mass,” the mass of something that weighs a pound here on earth. But when they use the “pound mass” in their formulas they have to put a fudge factor of 32 in. With mass in pound mass, the formula becomes
m = 32 F/a
Or rearranging to the usual form
F = ma / 32
A pound mass will respond to a force 32 times as much as a slug would to the same force, as you can see when you solve for the acceleration (response), a = 32 Fm. Failure to properly account for this has doomed more than one rocket. Metric is cleaner, a kilogram is mass, and only mass.
I got my STEM education entirely in metric, that’s what I’m comfortable with, that’s what I’m going to use from here on out.
OK, so mass and weight are different. How do you measure them? If they are different things, you need different methods to measure them.
A force can be measured with a spring. Your typical bathroom scale, or your kitchen scale, will have a spring inside; the amount the spring is compressed by the stuff you put on the scale is a measure of the force exerted on the spring. Drag your kilogram of gold to the moon and bring your scale with it, it will push on the spring less and therefore weigh less.
A mass is best measured by a balance scale. Your doctor’s scale, for instance, is a balance scale. Take it to the moon, and if it read 100 kg on earth, it will read 100 kg on the moon.
But it’s probably marked off in pounds. If you weighed a hundred pounds on earth…that scale will read 100 pounds on the moon. It’s actually measuring your mass but is calibrated in pounds actually pounds mass. So it only looks like it’s measuring your weight.
A kilogram (mass) weighs 2.2 pounds on earth, the object that exerts a force of 2.2 pounds on earth, has a mass of one kilogram. That 2.2 will change on every different planet, however, since most of us never leave earth, we simply think of a kilogram as equaling or being the same as 2.2 pounds, when it really isn’t. It isn’t the same thing, any more than a gallon is the same as 8.33 pounds. (It weighs that much if it’s water and we’re on earth, but that doesn’t make a gallon the same thing as 8.33 pounds in any fundamental sense.)
With me still? I hope so.
Conservation of Mass
OK, I’ve shown you Newton’s Second Law by way of introducing you to the distinction between weight and mass. It’s called a “Law” not because some politician decreed it, but because the universe works this way.
F = ma
Always.
And when you have to use a fudge factor, the fudge factor is a constant. It’s a constant 1 in the case of metric and English slugs.
One could ask what would happen if the fudge factor were to change, and the answer is a bit surprising. Since the Newton is defined as being the force necessary to accelerate a kilogram at one meter per second per second, if it suddenly, tomorrow, took twice as much force to do that, the Newton would simply get twice as big.
Since it’s awkward having your units of measure change (for exactly the same reason that inflation sucks), the fact that scientists set things up that way should be evidence enough that they are sure the fudge factor never changes.
How do we know that? It is an induction, not a deduction. It has always been true, we assume it’s just the way the universe works, until we find an exception, and believe me, people are always looking for the exception. And also for just outright blatant violation of the rule; such as objects suddenly and inexplicably changing their velocity. That would be an a without an F, or perhaps the m taking a vacation and reducing to almost nothing momentarily.
Our whole view of the universe wouldn’t make sense if Newton’s second law weren’t true. Car collisions on icy roads, air hockey…if someone made an animated movie where this rule were blatantly violated, it would look fake to us. Of course if the movie were almost spot on, with maybe the fudge factor changing by 1 percent at random, we’d have a hard time seeing it, but this has been measured in laboratories, and it’s always true. And the fudge factor doesn’t change.
One other thing turns out to be true, at least as of 1895. Mass never disappears into nothing, and it never appears from nowhere, either.
Sure, the mass of an object can change. It could decrease. But that mass always goes somewhere else, it never gets destroyed. Or similarly, if the mass of an object increases, that mass came from somewhere else.
This is one of those realizations that turned science into a form of bookkeeping. The books have to balance, the mass in has to equal the mass out.
Set a two kilogram log on fire. Weigh the ashes afterwards, they mass out to maybe 600 grams. Did the other 1400 grams just disappear? Nope. It can’t, it’s not allowed to. So that tells the scientists they didn’t account for something. In this case, they didn’t capture and weigh the smoke and the carbon dioxide given off by the burning log (whilst upsetting leftists). So if you add that in, are you okay?
Nope, because now the mass after is more than the mass before. That’s not allowed either; you can go back to the bench and re-run the experiment.
This time, count not just the wood, but also the oxygen used to burn the wood.
Once you do that, your mass before matches your mass after. Life is good.
The books balance.
And this was another thing that (as of 1895) was considered to be always true. Every time it had been tested, it was true. And a test isn’t just an explicit lab exercise like I just described, but literally everything done in a lab implicitly follows this rule.
In this case simple arithmetic is enough to do the bookkeeping. And nothing of negative mass has ever been seen, so you will see addition and subtraction, but never a negative result. Real accountants would find this dead easy. The trick, of course, is to account for everything, and measure carefully.
Gravity
There is one other thing about mass, though, that was (and still is) an important feature of the universe. And that is gravitation. I’ve mostly talked about gravity as something that exerts a force on a mass, so far, but I’ve not mentioned yet that mass actually exerts gravity. Every mass, exerts a force on every other mass. If you double the mass of the object, it exerts twice as much force. If you double the distance between the objects, however, you divide the force by 4. This is the square of the distance, and you’re dividing by it, so it’s called an inverse square relation. But one more thing. If you double the mass of the other object, the force you exert on it doubles too, and it responds with the same acceleration.
You are exerting a tiny gravitational force on the Andromeda galaxy. And vice versa. In fact, it’s the same amount of force in both directions.
The law of gravitation was also first noted by Sir Isaac Newton.
You can write this law as follows, at least as a first cut.
F = m1m2 / d 2
Multiply your masses together, divide by the square of the distances, and you get F.
Except, no you can’t. Meters, kilograms, seconds, and Newtons go together with F=ma, but they don’t go together in this equation. Two masses 1 kilogram each, at one meter’s distance? That equation says the force should be one Newton. It’s not. It’s a lot less. You need to plug in a fudge factor, and this one is named G. The law of gravitation properly reads
F = Gm1m2 / d 2
And G is a very small number, because in Newton’s day you couldn’t even measure what F was. Without being able to measure F, we couldn’t figure out what G was. And for any scenario where we could measure F, we either couldn’t measure one of the masses, or d, or both. Either way, G was unmeasurable.
But even without that, Newton could see the law was good, because he could check the responses of things to earth’s gravity. An apple, and the moon.
To start this out, in fact, let’s assume we want to measure the acceleration, not the force. Both sides of the equation above are a force, dividing by the mass of one of the objects, the one we want to watch, gives:
a = Gm2 / d 2
And you can substitute mass of the earth, me, for m2. So the acceleration of, say, an apple dropped, is:
a = Gme / d 2
And if you’re standing on the surface of the earth, d is the radius of the earth. (You can treat the earth as if its entire mass were at the center, so long as it’s radially symmetrical (which it almost is). That’s one of many things Newton proved. He had to invent calculus to do that.)
In this particular case, we knew a, and we knew d, but we knew neither G or me. But we knew what their product had to be! This is called the earth’s gravitational parameter, and is usually written μe. (Greek letter mu, usually pronounced as “mew” in English, though logically it should be “moo.”) This is very handy, in fact, it’s so handy that even today people who work with orbital motion just use gravitational parameters; it saves them the bother of multiplying the same numbers over and over again.
a = μe / d 2
Newton had pretty good information on how far away the moon was. He could compute how much it was accelerating as it orbits the earth (always downward, as if it were on a string being whirled around the earth), and his equation and the data matched. The moon responded to Earth’s gravitation exactly the same way as the apple did. This was the first time we had ever shown that something “up there” follows the same physical laws as something“down here.” And that’s why it’s called the universal law of gravitation.
So Newton knew the earth’s gravitational parameter, and the distance to the moon was known before his time. But what about the rest of the solar system? Well, life was rough for astronomers working out the solar system back then. Because we didn’t know the actual distance between the sun and any of the planets, nor between other planets and their moons. We did know the relative distances; we knew, for instance that Jupiter’s distance to the sun was 5.2 times that of Earth’s. Kepler had figured that out in the late 1500s. We could also see that the inverse square law worked: The acceleration Jupiter experienced was about 1/27th that of earth, though we couldn’t tell what it was because we didn’t know the scale. Newton, in fact, showed mathematically that any inverse square force will cause things to orbit in ellipses, thereby vindicating and strengthening Kepler, and using Kepler as evidence that an inverse square law was involved.
Measuring the Solar System, Massing the Earth
So astronomers didn’t know the gravitational parameter of the sun, much less G and the mass of the sun. And they didn’t know d, in this context the distance from anything to the sun, much less the earth-sun difference (but they named it: It’s an astronomical unit, and is still called that to this day). But if they could figure out what d was for Earth, they’d know it for everything else in the solar system, because we knew the proportions. And if they knew d, they could figure out the Sun’s gravitational parameter, because you can figure out the acceleration directly from d and the length of the year.
Astronomers got the first intimations of d when we were able to triangulate on Venus as it crossed between earth and the Sun, in 1761 and 1769. We could plot its motion and position on the sun’s disk from multiple places on earth, see how different it was, and determine how far away it was, just like when you move your head from side to side, a near object will move against the horizon more than a distant one will. If you measure that apparent shift, and know how much you moved your head, you can compute how far away it is. Multiple parties went to different places on earth, just to measure these transits, the more measurements the better. It was one of the first major examples of international scientific cooperation.
Similarly we now had a good number for the distance to Venus, and because we knew the proportions of the solar system, we instantly had the distance from earth to the sun. We therefore knew a, and…now we had the gravitational parameter of the sun, because it was equal to a times d 2.
The gravitational parameter of the sun is 333,000 times the amount of the gravitational parameter of the earth. Since both numbers are G times the mass, you can see that the sun’s mass, whatever it is, must be 333,000 times that of Earth. Whatever that is. We still didn’t know.
But even better. We now knew the exact distance to Jupiter. And we could therefore watch how far the moons of Jupiter got from it in the night sky, do a quick calculation and get their orbit sizes…and now we could figure out the gravitational parameter of Jupiter! It is 317.8 times that of the earth, so its mass is also 317.8 times ours (again, whatever that is). Saturn has moons, and we could do the same thing for it. Mars has moons too, but they hadn’t been discovered yet.
Then in 1781 the planet Uranus was discovered. And in 1787, two moons were discovered. Shazaam! We knew how many earth masses Uranus was, and six years earlier we hadn’t even known Uranus existed. And we eventually figured it out for Mars, when we finally did discover its moons a century later.
But Venus and Mercury don’t have moons, and we could only make educated guess at their masses…until the 1960s and 1970s when we sent probes to them and could see how they interacted with those planets.
One last piece of the puzzle. Henry Cavendish (1731–1810) was actually able to measure the force of gravity between two heavy lead balls in his laboratory in 1798. This was painstaking work, but he now had a situation where he knew every term in the law of gravity except for G; he had the force, the distance, and the masses. So from that he was able to compute the value of G, and (in metric) it is: 6.67 x 10-11.
Now that we had that number, we could go back to every gravitational parameter we knew, divide by G and get the masses.
Now we knew the mass of the Earth. It’s 5.972×1024 kilograms. And everything else proportionately.
We did this, but we did not have to go “out there” and weigh anything.
Problems with the Law of Gravitation?
The law of gravitation worked really, really well. We never saw anything inconsistent with it…well, almost!
When we tracked Uranus in its orbit about the sun, it was clear it was not following the law, not quite. Was something wrong with the law of gravitation? The law was so useful everywhere else, and I mean everywhere else, that it would make no sense for it to be broken here, so instead of assuming the law was broken, we figured that there was something unknown out there, pulling on Uranus. It was complicated work, but Le Verrier in France and John Couch Adams in England both did the calculations in 1845, and when they told Galle, another astronomer, one who used a telescope rather than being a theorist, where to look…well, Galle found the planet Neptune almost immediately.
Far from it being a problem for the theory of gravitation, the discrepancy with Uranus’ orbital motion turned into a triumph, for the theory of gravity had been used to discover a planet, and had predicted it so well that it took someone who knew where to look less than an hour to find it.
That gives you a really strong feeling that this is the truth!
But I mentioned two problems. What was the other one?
The other was the orbit of Mercury. It’s an elliptical orbit, and if Mercury and the Sun were alone in the universe, that ellipse would never, ever move. But it does move, the long axis shifts 574 arc seconds every century. And of course Mercury and the Sun aren’t alone in the universe. So what we should be able to see is that the planets–and the sun’s slight oblateness–explain Mercury’s orbit precessing.
But when you add up all those effects, there’s still a discrepancy. They don’t add up. There’s still 43 arcsecond per century left over. And this bothered scientists.
But really, this probably isn’t a problem. We know what the answer has to be. There’s an unknown planet pulling on Mercury, one so close to the sun we just couldn’t see it in all the glare. The same Le Verrier that predicted Neptune predicted this planet. We even gave it a name, Vulcan; a perfect name because he was the Roman god of the forge and it gets hot near forges and near the Sun. But despite what you may have heard, scientists usually want to square things away, they want to see that planet, then they’ll be confident they know why Mercury is misbehaving.
But Vulcan was never found, and in 1895, it remained an open question. They expected to find it, they just hadn’t, yet. In truth, it really would be hard to see something like that; it can only be done during solar eclipses.
Conclusion
Well, this turned out to be pretty long. And maybe hard to follow (I hope not). But as I wrote it I realized how much “hung off” the concept of mass, and the law of gravitation, and how much we were able to learn about the solar system and our own Earth, each bit of knowledge building on the prior, with theory used as a framework. And you saw some limitations…we could only estimate the mass of bodies with no moons. This wasn’t even where I wanted to go with this, but it was too good to pass up. (Next week we continue towards our final destination.)
But hopefully you saw some notion of how science is supposed to function. It’s full of humans with their own foibles, of course, but in the end the truth does out. It’s nice when you can use a theory to predict something unexpected; it gives you a very warm fuzzy sense that the theory is correct. But at the same time, there are implicit assumptions; that the generalizations we see will continue to hold true. Sometimes we discover otherwise, and have to adjust; usually when that happens it turns out that the generalization was true under certain circumstances and is still useful, under those circumstances, but that you have to scrap it under others. (At the risk of a spoiler, you’ll see that Newtonian gravity is one of those cases.)
And in so many cases, if we seem to see far, it is because we stand on the shoulders of giants, the men who preceded us, and they stand on the shoulders of the men who preceded them. None of this could happen if we weren’t willing to use information gathered by others and build on it, and in turn that’s a testament to the power of being able to write things down so that knowledge outlives us.
Obligatory PSAs and Reminders
China is Lower than Whale Shit
Remember Hong Kong!!!
Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”
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 !!!
Welcome back to Wolf’s Pub. It’s La Fée Verte Friday (aka Green Fairy Friday) here and we shall get to our magical drink soon. First, let us reiterate that Joe Biden did not win the 2020 presidential election. He’s an utter fraud, as are the monsters who installed him in the White House. May the Green Witch overtake them and put them where the sun doesn’t shine.
Wednesday was Earth Day. Duly noted. Eye roll to the max. Let’s put it this way: there is green, and then there is Green. Let us discern.
While world ‘leaders’ attempt to keep the dying Covid-19 scam (aka the Wuhan Virus) going, they are linking it with Climate Change and the Green New Deal. The Great Reset continues apace, although the sparkplugs aren’t firing as cleanly as the globalists and their communist lackeys would wish.
That Greenie False Prophet at the Vatican is sponsoring a New Age globalist health conference in early May. Here’s his super short speech at Joe Biden’s “Leaders Summit on Climate” yesterday, and the image below is for next month’s “Global Health Care Initiative.”
If you have any doubts about this religio-communist pretender, they should be dispelled here, where we see that God Himself is portrayed as wearing a glove, supposedly to prevent either infecting or being infected by Adam, and vice versa. What a disgusting, blasphemous act.
Archbishop Vigano speaks out. Here’s more about “Exploring the Mind, Body & Soul. How Innovation and Novel Delivery Systems Improve Human Health” conference on May 6-8th. A few of the speakers:
“Truth Over Fear summit is a three-day online gathering of 40+ frontline doctors, scientists, attorneys, researchers, and journalists, who will share invaluable and eye-opening insights into the truth behind the headlines, Covid-19, the rushed vaccine, and the Great Reset.
Big Tech does not want you to hear this information and is working hard to censor us. Most of our presenters have been silenced. In fact, the same day we published this summit, YouTube terminated our account and we are now shadow banned everywhere.”
You can sign up for free at the link. Limited time to do so. The speakers are stellar. Here’s a few:
Dr. Judy Mikovits, PhD
Arch. Carlo Maria Viganò
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr
Dr. Lee Merritt
Dr. Reiner Fuellmich
Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg
Alex Newman
Vladimir Zev Zelenko, M.D
Vera Sharav
Peter A. McCullough, MD
Senator Scott Jensen, M.D
Dr. Pierre Kory
Little Greta-the-greenhearted Thunberg (thanks Cuppa Covfefe!!) was spouting some nonsense the other day about animal diseases being linked with climate change and so on, completely ignoring that real scientists are experimenting with viruses in labs for gain-of-function use against humans, but whatever.
She’s got a new special on PBS. The propaganda is so easy to spot now and so very tiresome:
Well, let’s get to our drink special today. ABSINTHE. Oh, the humanity! This “beautiful madness” (from a poem by Peggy Amond) was known as the Green Fairy by many artists and writers of the Belle Époque.
“Absinthe began in France in 1789, initially as a healing potion. It was used to purify water and as an antiseptic. Absinthe gained in popularity during the Franco-Algerian war where many French soldiers had developed a taste for the high alcoholic “medicine.” and it became more and more popular. Because of its greenish tint, it became known as La Fée Verte (The Green Fairy). This is why French Absinthe is among the most popular.
As a result, by the end of the 19th century, absinthe was the favored cocktail of Paris and famous people were drawn to absinthe, like Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Edgar Allan Poe, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Lord Byron, to name a few.
The popularity of absinthe wasn’t limited to Europe, as it soon found its way to the United States and in particular New Orleans, because of its large French population. Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde all enjoyed drinking absinthe at The Old Absinthe House on Bourbon Street. The Old Absinthe House is still there, by the way.”
Want to buy one of these? A traditional Absinthe fountain!
Here’s an article: The Five Biggest Absinthe Myths that gives a little info on its supposed hallucinogenic properties and the infamous way of serving it with a flaming sugar cube.
Be well warned that drinking Absinthe straight is a recipe for epic drunkenness. I had a bottle disappear from the house one night when my kids were at “that age.” Finally connected with my daughter the next morning after she and a friend had awoken from an Absinthe stupor.
I think she was sick for two whole days afterward. Has never had it since. I can laugh now. NOW.
Outlawing Absinthe: Gov’t thought it subversive
Watch the fun vid below about Absinthe. Around the two-minute mark your host tells how TPTB were not happy that the working man would gather around drinking Absinthe and talk politics. That and the winemakers in France were unhappy that Absinthe was cutting into their profits:
For a lovely and magical explanation of Absinthe’s attraction, watch this Swiss video that shows a second-generation distiller of Absinthe:
And here’s a last one. Basically a six-minute ad for a particular distillery, it is beautiful and dramatic:
“And the name of the star is called Wormwood. And the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.”
And here from the Prophet Amos (Chapter 5:6-8):
“Seek ye the Lord, and live: lest the house of Joseph be burnt with fire, and it shall devour, and there shall be none to quench Bethel.
You that turn judgment into wormwood, and forsake justice in the land,
Seek him that maketh Arcturus, and Orion, and that turneth darkness into morning, and that changeth day into night: that calleth the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The Lord is his name.”
So much to ponder there…
There was a 2017 docudrama from Netflix (yuck) that is named Wormwood, and tells the story of Frank Olsen, who may have been an MK-ultra victim.
The Russian word ‘Chernobyl’ means Wormwood, btw.
House Rules
Keep it civil. Absinthe is purportedly an aphrodisiac and gets your inner muse going, so I don’t think we’ll have a problem with incivility. However, go here for Wolf’s rules before you hoist a Wolf Shot, and we’ll all do fine.
If you need to make a date with the Green Witch, head over to the Utree. Or, if we get separated from here, head over there to meet up. And lookee here, we’ve got a forum just about up and running.
The Green New Deal is the color of money
Well, now that we have our green drinks in hand, let’s get back to Climate Change, aka as the continuing saga of sick globalists and their communist henchmen as they try to take over the world and turn it into some type of dystopian nightmare.
We must have the obligatory mention of Arch Villain Bill Gates, who is buying up farmland like there’s a fire sale somewhere.
“The report highlights one of these so-called technical ‘solutions’ through the example of synthetic food, which aims to replace animal products with highly processed ingredients, usually through synthetic biology. Billionaires are heavily investing in this growing market: Gates alone has spent $50 million in leading company Impossible Foods and actively finances several others.
Fake food is advertised as a solution to climate change and environmental degradation, but in reality, fake food has a carbon footprint seven times larger than less-processed plant proteins. Cell-based meat also emits more GHG than some animal products and recent research even suggests that over the long-term, its environmental impact could be higher than that of livestock. Far from ending climate change or world hunger, fake food still relies on an industrial agricultural model, based on monocultures, toxic pesticides and GMOs, that is destroying our ecosystems and threatening our health.
“We’re about 16 months into this GSM, with 32 more years to go. Already 2019 and 2020 saw record low numbers of sunspots. We’ve had lower than expected crop harvests due to unseasonable rains both years. The April 2021 USDA World Agricultural Product report has articles detailing Taiwan’s expected 20% decrease in rice production this year over last, Cuba’s rice production 15% below its five-year average, Argentina’s corn, Australia’s cotton, Malaysia’s palm oil — all down, all due primarily to the weather. There are some expected bumper crops, all based on expanded acreage.”
The Greening of Communism
The White House Resident of the United States has jumped in with both feet to destroying the economy and jobs of our nation with a plan:
“The U.S. emissions cuts are expected to come from power plants, automobiles, and other sectors across the economy. Sector-specific goals will be laid out later this year.
The new U.S. target nearly doubles former President Barack Obama’s pledge of an emissions cut of 26%-28% below 2005 levels by 2025,” according to a Reuters article.
AOC and Sen. Markey have introduced some type of bait-and-switch bill to take our money and pretend to provide good jobs. There’s some social justice stuff wrapped up in it, so we all know it is another shot at taking from the barely-haves and giving to the have-nots. The rich elites will laugh all the way to the bank. It’s the Civilian Climate Corps, doncha know. Channeling FDR…
It’s one small step for us. Start small and step out boldly. Small farms, and even small gardens are going to save the world from starvation. Big government in cahoots with Big Ag has given us Fake Food System Models to scare and threaten us, take our money and steal our health.
Just like the fake numbers we get from just about every institution today, do read the above article to see how hoodwinked we’ve been. It’s just sickening.
In World War II there were Victory Gardens everywhere. People grew their own vegetables and fruits so that farm production could feed the troops. We can do this. Garden science has come a long way. Urban farming is a large and growing movement.
Gardeners in suburbia have turned their grass into raised beds. You would be amazed at how much food you can grow over a year in a small plot. Container gardening has blossomed, too. Even in apartments, you can grow all kinds of crops on a balcony. Gardening year-round in cold climates has also come a long way.
Here’s a great video about a family in California who grow annually 6,000 pounds of food on 1/20th of an acre. They even have chickens and little goats.
Here’s their website. They are teaching others the way to food freedom.
Four Season Farm with Eliot Coleman (great for year-round gardening in cold climates)
Charles Dowding and No Dig Gardening (great Youtube Channel)
The Plummery in Australia (a lot of good advice for new gardeners):
Here is a balcony garden in Germany. Lovely:
There is a giant mountain of books, videos, blogs, podcasts and even local gardening clubs that can help us toward food freedom. Hmmm…Food Freedom. Sounds like a great forum topic.
At any rate, the way to beat the Giants is to be small. Lots and lots and lots of small gardens producing big. Seek out and support local food producers, many of whom live hand-to-mouth raising produce, meat, eggs and other products in a Good Steward way.
The more we can grow, make and produce, the less we have to rely on the Giants. We can defeat the globalists and their communist henchmen one garden plot at a time.
This Sanctuary Sunday Open Thread, with full respect to those who worship God on the Sabbath, is a place to reaffirm our worship of our Creator, our Father, our King Eternal.
It is also a place to read, post and discuss news that is worth knowing and sharing. Please post links to any news stories that you use as sources or quote from.
In the QTree, we’re a friendly and civil lot. We encourage free speech and the open exchange and civil discussion of different ideas. Topics aren’t constrained, and sound logic is highly encouraged, all built on a solid foundation of truth and established facts.
We have a policy of mutual respect, shown by civility. Civility encourages discussions, promotes objectivity and rational thought in discourse, and camaraderie in the participants – characteristics we strive toward in our Q Tree community.
Please show respect and consideration for our fellow QTreepers. Before hitting the “post” button, please proofread your post and make sure you’re addressing the issue only, and not trying to confront the poster. Keep to the topic – avoid “you” and “your”. Here in The Q Tree, personal attacks, name calling, ridicule, insults, baiting and other conduct for which a penalty flag would be thrown are VERBOTEN.
In The Q Tree, we’re compatriots, sitting around the campfire, roasting hot dogs, making s’mores and discussing, agreeing, and disagreeing about whatever interests us. This board will remain a home for those who seek respectful conversations.
Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He explained to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself. (Luke 24:27) Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms. (Luke 24:44)
Bible Prophecy
Of the several ways Bible prophecies can be classified, classification as “Direct”, “Indirect”, or “Type” (typical or example) is one of the ways.
A Direct Messianic prophecy identifies the subject of the prophecy as the Messiah (there are more than 20 names for the Messiah in the Old Testament) and then makes a statement about the Messiah. For example – the promise in Micah 5:2 that Messiah would be born in Bethlehem.
An Indirect Messianic prophecy doesn’t identify the Messiah as the subject, but is recognized as a Messianic prophecy after its fulfillment. For example – the statement in Hosea 11:1 that Jesus would be brought out of Egypt and back to the land of Israel (Matthew 2:14-15).
A Type Messianic prophecy is an event as an example, as a prophecy that has no direct reference to the future, but illustrates the concept or actions of the Messiah. For example – the Messiah who was to come was portrayed as the bronze serpent, which was lifted up on a pole (Numbers 21:19; John 3:14), and as the Passover lamb (Exodus 12; John 1:29; 1 Corinthians 5:7; 1 Peter 1:19).
Messianic Prophecies
The following are 47 of the more straight forward Old Testament prophesies about the coming Messiah. The probability that one person could satisfy all these are absolutely minuscule, but, then, here we are . . .
47 Old Testament Prophecies About Jesus as Messiah
Whether direct, indirect or type prophecies, all were literally fulfilled in the life of Jesus. And, as we look at other prophecies in God’s Word, that perhaps cover other topics and perhaps use highly symbolic prophetic imagery, like Daniel and Revelation, we can expect that they also will be literally fulfilled in a real-life manner.
If you decide to dive deep into Edersheim’s list of 456 Old Testament passages which were considered Messianic by the Rabbis before the time of Christ, you’ll quickly find that in many, many cases, what a Rabbi, over 2,000 years ago, considered a prophecy pertaining to the Messiah is totally incomprehensible to you with no conceivable connection to the Messiah. Many of those ancient Rabbis excelled at reading obscure meanings into passages that don’t appear to be supported by word meanings or context to us.
Prophets – Then and Now
Speaking in the name of God was, and should be, very serious business. God said, “But if any prophet presumes to speak anything in my name that I have not commanded him to speak, or speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet must die.” (Deuteronomy 18:20) I suspect that a fair number of preachers claiming on TV or in YouTube videos that God spoke to them and they are relaying the message to us, will be justly compensated for their deception sometime in the future. “And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many.”(Matthew 24:11)
There are no magic words or phrases or processes that will enable us to dash through God’s plan for our lives, or to super-charge us to a wild success in Christian growth. If you are presented with such a concept, that should be a clear warning to be sure that you’re following God’s Word and not someone’s self-serving schemes.
The Solution
But, what we can be assured of is that if we stick to what’s in God’s Word with natural, normal meanings in context, we have the guidance of the Holy Spirit to find the intended meaning. The Gospel and the tenets of spiritual growth were written to be understood and acted upon by us common people.
Our answers lie in God’s Word since “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:17-17)
. . . for every good work. What good works would that be? Well, maybe these . . . For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:10)
Look to the LORD and his strength with humility, and seek his face always in prayer.
Complete and thoroughly equipped
. . . the goals for our lifelong Christian growth toward maturity!
On this day and every day –
God is in Control . . . and His Grace is Sufficient, so . . . Keep Looking Up
Hopefully, every Sunday, we can find something here that will build us up a little . . . give us a smile . . . and add some joy or peace, very much needed in all our lives.
“This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn nor weep.” . . . “Go your way, eat the fat, drink the sweet, and send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared; for this day is holy to our Lord. Do not sorrow, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
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
All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend).
SIlver and platinum have been pretty steady. Palladium continues steadily climbing. Rhodium continues to bounce around like a yo yo. Iridium (not shown) has moved from $6000 to $6250. And gold is actually doing fairly well, breaking out of its range on the up-side.
I will have more to say about the gold market below.
Gold
Gold is the last precious metal on our list of nine.
To summarize/review, the precious metals are numbers 44-47 in the table below (ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, and silver), followed by the group right below them, 75-79 (rhenium, osmium, iridium, platinum, and gold).
It’s a nice tight group. Why isn’t 43 (technetium) on the list? Well, largely because technetium basically doesn’t exist. It’s naturally radioactive with a two million year half life. That means however much you’ve got right now, half of it will be gone in two million years. And since it has been 4500 million years since the earth formed, it has been 2250 half lives. If the entire world had been made of solid technetium when it started, that would have been 6 x 1024 kilograms of Tc. And since ten half lives is enough to reduce the amount to 1/1024 {a number which we should name after Fauxcahontas) of what it was before–which we’ll round to 1/1000th, it would only take eighty half lives to be left with six kilograms of technetium. From the weight of the earth down to six kilograms in 160 million years; you can probably guess how much is left after the remaining 2,170 remaining half lives: zero, zilch, nada, nichevo, nichts. The last atom would likely be gone after only about another 200 million years. (99 grams of Tc-99 consists of 6 x 1023 atoms of the stuff, that’s 1/60th of the 6 kilograms. You’ll notice how similar that number is to the number of kilograms the earth masses…so basically, just repeat the same time interval as before and it’s down to a handful of atoms, shortly after that, it’s all gone.)
We can make technetium ourselves (and a vanishingly small amount exists from uranium atoms fissioning in nature, but these aren’t left over from the formation of the earth). When you pile enough of it together to be visible…it’s a gray metal, just like all of its neighbors. I imagine if it weren’t radioactive, it’d be a useful alloy metal, perhaps a bit pricey, like silver. Or maybe not; I’m basing that last bit on the fact that rhenium (75) is a precious metal, and that’s because rhenium has no natural ores. But if technetium were around, it might have ores and rhenium could piggyback on it, just like hafnium (72) piggybacks on zirconium (40). So who knows?
But the larger point is, for a metal to be a precious metal, it first has to actually exist. So technetium, though it looks like it should be part of the precious metal “block” of the periodic table…isn’t. In both senses of that word.
But back to gold (79).
Gold has been known for thousands of years. Perhaps longer. And that’s because it sometimes shows up as a nugget. It didn’t have to be smelted to be discovered, unlike (say) iron, which never shows up as a native element on earth, though sometimes our ancestors got a free sample from a meteorite.
So our distant ancestors might well have found gold before they discovered any other metal. [Of the ones that had to come out of ores, copper is probably easiest to obtain. Besides being rarely (but not quite never) found native, some of its ores will release the copper if you heat them over an ordinary fire.]
Ancient Egypt used plenty of gold. In fact it was more common there than silver was; as near as we can tell, three ounces of gold were required to buy one ounce of silver in Ancient Egypt, oh say 2000 BCE. No, that’s not a typo. Egypt simply didn’t have much silver in it, and they didn’t know it was more common elsewhere. Certainly they figured that out as civilization spread throughout the Mediterranean and Near East and they learned more about the rest of the world.
Gold is heavy (dense)–it was the densest thing known back then, far more so than lead. Lead weighs almost twelve times its volume in water. Gold weighs 19.3 times its volume in water. But gold looks fantastic and lead is…meh. About the only thing you can do with lead is use it for weights. Even its use as bullets is primarily due to its weight–it has good momentum–followed by its relative softness and ease of melting and casting.
But gold can be used for jewelry, and was. Not only that, it would never tarnish nor rust nor corrode. Gold coins that have been on the bottom of the ocean for centuries still shine. So it became a symbol for purity and incorruptibility, unlike most politicians. Even modern chemistry has found few things that attack it. (This is largely true of the other precious metals as well, but they are Johnny-come-latelies in our minds. Gold got there first.)
So gold began to be prized in its own right.
Gold and silver are the only two of the nine precious metals whose main use is simply to be. They’re not valuable because of some industrial application, like the PGMs and rhenium are. They’re valuable because they are gold and silver, and their main use is to be formed into blocks and kept on a shelf somewhere.
Even back in the day when men were men and money was money, when gold was used as coins, the point of the coin was to be a certain amount of gold.
Although gold is used in jewelry, most gold today is in the form of 400 ounce bars that sit in bank vaults. I think I linked this video once before; I’m going to do it again.
The sole use of all that gold is to sit in that vault and be gold.
It has been estimated that all of the gold ever mined could fit in a cube 20 meters on a side. That’s 8000 cubic meters of gold, and each cubic meter is 19.3 tonnes. Given how vague the actual number is, we might as well round that to 20 tonnes per cubic meter, and declare that 160,000 tonnes of gold have been mined throughout all history.
A “tonne”, with the extra n and silent e, is a metric ton of 1000 kilograms, very roughly 2200 pounds. 160,000 tonnes sounds like a lot, but this is gold, which doesn’t take up very much room per tonne. it would barely fill three Olympic swimming pools.
Here’s another video. It’s mostly on the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Federal Reserve System, but there’s a good bit in the middle about gold, and how it is traded.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTYBp8AazN8
(In fact, National Geographic has done a number of different documentaries on gold, some focusing on the lengths we go to in order to mine it, others focusing on King Tut’s treasure, and so on.)
Gold, is of course, very widely traded. It’s probably traded more than any other commodity, at least in dollar terms. And those trades are how the “spot” price I quote comes into being.
Here’s another documentary, looking more at this aspect of gold:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqjhdpQIWTs
The spot price is sometimes derisively referred to as the price of “paper gold.”
“Paper gold?” Well, yes. You’re trading paper ostensibly tied to gold in the futures market. If you want to go buy an actual ounce of gold today, and walk away from the purchase with an actual bit of heavy yellow stuff, you will pay (on Apmex.com, as of Thursday April 15 at 8:30 PM Mountain TIme…”as low as” $1,949.29 per ounce, for an American gold eagle, a randomly chosen year.
Nearly two hundred dollars more. (And if you want just one ounce it will cost you twenty dollars more. You have to buy a hundred at a time to get the $1,949.29 price. Actually, that’s not a bad small-buyer premium; it’s usually much higher.)
You can check with your local coin shop, and more than likely they will want a little bit more. This is the real price of gold, though perhaps one should average it with the price a bullion dealer is willing to pay. Unfortunately Apmex doesn’t post their “buy” price, and neither does Kitco, they want you to call and request an offer. But I strongly suspect they aren’t paying much less than this. If so, then it’s rather unusual but you can actually sell your gold for more than spot right now.
I did find one place that would sell you a 100 gram bar (a bit over three ounces) at a rate about a hundred dollars an ounce lower than that. (And they will also buy it at that price. The catch is, you can’t sell their gold back to them in less than seven days, so you assume the risk the market will move against you.) https://www.bullionstar.com/buy/product/gold-bullionstar-100g
Why is there such a big disconnect between the “paper” price and the physical price?
“Conspiracy theories” abound, and I find them more plausible than most such theories. Most state that the price is being held artificially low. (I even attended a presentation in 2012 given by a man from GATA (Gold Anti Trust Action Committee, https://www.gata.org, and he said the “real” price should be about five thousand dollars. No doubt that man would say something even higher today.
But there are rumors galore that something really interesting is happening right now. To understand this I need to give a short, oversimplified precis of how the futures markets work.
Let’s say I promise to sell you an ounce of gold for $2000 in July. And you accept that promise. We sign a contract. I don’t even have to have an ounce of gold right now. But I had better have one by the time July rolls around or you take me to court. But I have an alternative! A couple of weeks later, someone else, call him Bob, might post an offer to sell me gold in July, at some price, and I can accept it. Now I don’t need the gold, because Bob will sell it to me just in the nick of time. If that contract was, say, for him to sell me an ounce of gold at $1980, then I just became the man in the middle, taking $2000 from you in July and pocketing $20, and giving Bob $1980. In fact, because all of these are contracts in July, the brokerage house that is keeping track of all these things can make it simple. They can simply give me $20 today, arrange for you to give them $2000 in July and to pay Bob $1980. And they’ll arrange for Bob’s ounce of gold to go to you on delivery day. I’m no longer involved, and never actually touched that ounce of gold, but I made a profit on it.
If gold had gone up instead, I would have lost money. But sometimes when the market goes badly, the best thing to do is take the loss and get out.
Notice that for me to make money, someone else has to lose it. I made $20, but you are going to pay $2000 in July for an ounce of gold that’s only worth $1980.
And if someone manages to manipulate the price the way they like it, someone else just got robbed. Wealth is not created in this kind of market; it’s transferred from a loser to a winner.
That’s basically the futures market. People are buying and selling pork bellies, silver, wheat, eggs, aluminum, or gold at some future date. And the vast majority of them are doing what I was doing…trading the contracts not because I actually care about the product, but just to hopefully make money when the price moves the right way. In fact, because all of the trades happen on a floor, with a broker doing the actual trade, you have no idea you bought your gold from Bob, or who I am. That’s kept track of by the commodity exchange.
In reality gold is traded in contracts for a hundred ounces (on some exchanges) or a kilogram (~32 ounces) on other exchanges. And sometimes there are so many contracts out there that the aggregate total of the contracts is bigger than many countries’ bank vault holdings. But most of this goes up in a puff of smoke about a month before delivery date as people make the opposite contract, cancel out the physical purchases, and pocket their profit (or take their beating). That chain I described from you to me to Bob is likely much shorter than the chains that develop in the futures market.
Some few people do actually buy a gold contract…and actually want the gold.
And this is what has been going on. The value of the contracts is in the mid $1700s per ounce right now. (Even though it’s a 100 ounce contract, the price is quoted per ounce.) Some people, wanting to buy gold and saying $1950 is bullshit when the spot price is about $200 less, are actually going into the futures market, buying a contract at $1750, and saying, “for delivery” which means “Oh and by the way I really do want the gold.”
Over the last couple of years, people have done this perhaps five to ten times as much as usual.
And what do they get? Do they get the gold?
No. At least, not immediately. They get a piece of paper saying that somewhere in a vault in New York or perhaps Delaware, there’s 100 ounces of gold with their name on it. And if they sell the gold via a contract, they are selling the piece of paper.
Which would have its advantages. You don’t have to worry about keeping it in your house and hoping no burglar ever finds it. Or putting it in a safe deposit box and hoping we don’t have a repeat of FDR’s gold heist.
But how do you know that brick of gold actually exists and isn’t the same block of gold some other poor dumb bastard is holding the paper for? In other words, does that piece of paper have a specific piece of gold allocated to it, and no one else?
You can order that vault to actually send you your gold, comma dammit. But they’ll make it painful. It take a lot of work to get this done, and pay who knows how much for shipping. Personally, rather than trust them to ship it to me when I suspect they’d rather pretend to lose it and give me paper money instead, I’d say, “Let me come pick it up.” (For an item worth almost $200,000 I’d make the road trip.) But they probably have rules against that.
There are signs of desperation in the brokerages. People are now being told their contract is good for a 1/4 ownership share in a 400 ounce bar. Which basically makes it impossible for you to actually lay hands on your gold. But at least if they can bring in a bunch of those bars, the paper actually means something.
Apparently last year, over 100 tonnes of gold had to be delivered. I don’t know whether it got physically delivered or people just wanted the receipts, but apparently someone was watching and they had to make sure those receipts were actually covered. Over 100 tonnes. That’s more gold than many major countries have in their central banks’ vaults!
If the commodity exchanges don’t have it in those vaults in Delaware and New York, they have to go get some. Last year about this time, apparently this did happen. They scrambled, but were able to cover it. And no doubt someone had to pay big bucks for gold right now. A lot of people are suspicious that a lot of gold isn’t where it claimed to be, and maybe it’s true. In some cases, a central bank might have leased its gold to someone who then turned around and sold it as jewelry. Meaning the gold is on your earlobes instead of in some vault somewhere, and they won’t be able to get it back. And who knows how many central banks leased their gold to cover this panic?
This sort of thing is apparently continuing to go on. Perhaps that is why you, you little person, you Deplorable proletarian, can’t buy one lousy ounce at the spot price.
If this trend continues, we might actually run out of physical gold; a lot of vaults presumed full will have to be opened and found empty, and futures markets might implode very scandalously. Gold might find its true price, which would make GATA very happy. As well as anyone who has the physical stuff, either in numismatic gold coins or current bullion bars and coins. If you’re holding a piece of paper, on the other hand, then you will be screwed. If you’re lucky some central bank might make “money” out of thin air to pay you for the gold you never actually owned but thought you did.
Or this could be a conspiracy theory in the bad sense of someone just making shit up and marketing it.
But if you think all of this is true, well: Don’t be that person holding a piece of paper. Get actual gold. And suck up the $200 premium over the price of “paper gold” if you have to.
I’ve got some links, some a bit older than others. I am not quite sure what to make of the combined set….are they having trouble now, or not? A lot talks about last year, when they apparently had to scramble to cover over 100 tonnes of deliveries…but they succeeded. Or at least it looks that way. Did someone just hang onto 100 tonnes of paper gold?
Here’s a website that describes the delivery process as it shows that over a hundred tonnes of gold was purchased through the commodities markets about a year ago:
I can’t quite figure out when this next one was actually written. The charts at the top say yesterday (April 16, 2021). But a lot of the text seems to be suggesting 2017.
https://www.brrcc.org/comex-gold-delivery/
And OMG, here’s SGT report (who ever heard of them?), from back in September.
As one final note, silver is also, similarly, unrealistically priced on the spot (paper) market, an indication that similar things may be happening there. The American Numismatic Association’s magazine, The Numismatist, ran an article this month (or perhaps last month) by one of their frequent contributors asking if there was some way we could derive a real “spot” price for silver that has nothing to do with the paper commodities market. I’m sure he’d say the same thing about gold if asked.
If you invest in precious metals, remember: Physical over Paper. Get your hands on the actual stuff. If you can’t drop it on your foot, don’t bother.
And Joe Biden didn’t win.
Obligatory PSAs and Reminders
China is Lower than Whale Shit
Remember Hong Kong!!!
Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”
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 !!!
Welcome to Wolf’s Pub, where Wokeness comes to die! Let us get out the sharp knives of intellect and just plain common sense, and stab it to death. Then we can sit back and enjoy a drink.
First, a fantastic Heritage Foundation Panel that gives the foundation of Wokeness and its genesis in Marxism. Give it your time, if you can. Very informative. Know your enemy, right?
Here’s the situation as we know it:
JOE BIDEN DIDN’T WIN.
He cheated his way into the White House and is not the real President.
Donald Trump is our President. Let us drink to President Donald John Trump with a glass of tea.
The bartenders happen to have made a batch of Backyard Iced Tea, and glasses of it are being passed out this moment at the bar. There are numerous recipes for it, but this one beckoned them:
Here’s a recipe for Backyard Sweet Tea, and here’s a recipe for making perfect iced tea (several ways with lots of additions if you want).
Wreck the Reset
The bottom line is the election of Donald Trump in 2016 (and 2020) messed with the Great Reset (is that not the most banal slogan you’ve ever heard?), the Green New Deal (another winner), and other assorted Cabal plans in a BIG WAY. So much so that they have been forced into showing us their stinking rotten underbelly…basically a small group of power-crazed wannabe gods. Small group being the operative words.
Their plans are doomed to fail. How many times in history does this have to happen before the megalomaniacs figure out that centralization of power is a losing proposition? The natural world is not organically organized in such a way. It will never be organized in such a way (“…until He comes whose right it is…”.)
Hence man, who is a part of nature, will never be permanently organized in such a way, either. There will always be clans, tribes, cities, nations and neighborhoods. No matter what techno ghetto they put us in; no matter what economic stranglehold they throttle us with; no matter what medical controls they put on us; and no matter what centralized political system they impose on us, it will fail.
People have a way of overcoming the machinations of tyrants. History is on our side. I am speaking of that pivotal moment in History when the Son of God overcame the world.
Their Black Swan event will be a thing to behold, I have no doubt.
The Cabal fancies themselves to be higher beings who are destined to reign over a greatly-reduced population of peons who serve their every whim, and who can be used in any way they please. I’ve read they greatly desire to attain physical immortality. Oh, I think the Second Death may have them no matter how long they cling to biological life.
These crazies concocted a web of plans to implement their desires: The Great Reset, the Green New Deal (see Dark, Cold Years are Coming, So You’d Better Get Ready), Agenda 21, Critical Race Theory, Marxist groups like BLM, the Covid Plandemic, and so on. But they have been flushed out in the open, and I suspect this exposure was part of a plan all along.
House Rules
One of the articles below uses this image:
This! Stay united, my friends! We can disagree, but we must remain united. We can put aside our differences and fight to win against our common enemy. Go here for Wolf’s rules. And if you feel the need to brawl, the bouncers will personally conduct you to the Utree, where we can all meet in case of need, too.
UNITE AND CONQUER.
Let us keep our skin thick and our heart fleshy, and we shall dwell together in unity.
WE HAVE IT ALL
The truth about the Wuhan Virus—that it did indeed originate in the lab in Wuhan, and that it appears to have Gain of Function (human engineering), is now hitting the mainstream media (AKA Fake News). They can’t deny it any longer.
Dr. Fauci is tap dancing his way to infamy. One can see the cracks in the Big Lie about the Wuhan-Fauci Virus. A recent interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes was just precious. “The sun is beginning to set on Dr. Saint Tony Fauci,” according to Steve Bannon.
“As to whether SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered, it is here where Dr. Fauci enters this dangerous picture: In 2017, without sufficient warning to the Trump White House, Dr, Fauci and his NIH colleague Dr. Francis Collins re-authorized the use of so-called gain-of-function research inside China’s Wuhan Lab.
Gain-of-function is a genetic engineering tool that improves the ability of a virus to cause disease. In pushing for gain-of-function, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins unilaterally overturned a 2014 decision by the Obama White House to restrict such experiments because of their inherent dangers.
In fact, SARS-CoV-2 exhibits several highly unusual functional characteristics that suggest the virus has been genetically engineered. For example, unlike SARS-CoV-1 and most other viruses, SARS-CoV-2 is characterized by a high degree of “asymptomatic spread.” This makes the virus far more contagious — and therefore far more deadly.
The high degree of asymmetric spread — along with the rapid and deadly mutations of the virus we are now observing — suggest the possibility of a weaponized virus. Here, the U.S. State Department has revealed that the Wuhan Lab has engaged in research on behalf of the People’s Liberation Army since 2017 — the same year Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins approved gain-of-function research in Wuhan.
The last piece of this “Fauci as the Father of the Pandemic” puzzle is this: Dr. Fauci’s NIH funneled American taxpayer dollars — some $7 million — into the Wuhan Lab through a shadowy figure named Peter Dasak. Mr. Dasak, himself, bragged about genetically engineering viruses at the Wuhan Lab prior to the pandemic.”
LINKS GALORE
Excuse my wordiness and excess of links today, but so much seemed important. Pick and choose!
“Even Amazon’s internal documents exposed that the company rates their stores using a “diversity index,” and determined the threat of unionization is “higher” at stores with “lower diversity.” This is what the WOKE movement is all about — DIVIDE & CONQUER! Julius Caesar was able to conquer Gaul despite being outnumbered more than 10 to 1 because the Gauls never united until it was too late. Even in the final battle during September 52 BC, Julius Caesar sealed his fate as a legendary military commander at the Battle of Alesia where his army of 50,000 Romans defeated 200,000 Gauls in what is now modern-day Burgundy, France. The Celtic tribes were never united. Caesar defeated the Belgae tribes as well as the Helvetia. Had they all united, Caesar surely would not have conquered Europe. Hence, keep your opponents divided and you will win. This is the entire object of the woke movement — divide and created hatred between the groups.”
Here’s a piece of pure propaganda from the Houston Chronicle. Those redneck Trump voters just won’t get in line for the pricks. Of course the article needed numerous writers to author it. Good Lord, I’m so embarrassed for my former profession.
Do read the above. I thought I would pull a quote out of it, but every paragraph has something important to say. Wait until you get to the eugenics part…
Here is a doctor’s website that has information about Gain of Function with the Wuhan/Fauci Virus. Fleming Method.
“Then there is woke “science,” most visible these days in the arenas of response to the Covid-19 virus and of climate change. Here the principles are a little different. In woke “science” there is no falsifiable hypothesis. In place of that, we have the official orthodox consensus view. The official orthodox consensus view has been arrived at by all the smartest people, because it just seems like it must be right. The official orthodox consensus view must not be contradicted, particularly by the little people like you. Based on the official orthodox consensus view, those in power can take away all your freedom (Covid) and/or transform the entire economy (climate). After all, it’s the “science.”
“It’s highly destructive to “teach” Americans to assume that their coworkers and neighbors harbor racial biases. These studies finding “biases” are the product of pandering and wishful thinking by researchers who understand that studies “confirming” the narrative will lead to fame and increased funding. These flawed studies and the propaganda that grows out of them stoke mistrust and tribalism. Academia has become a noxious echo chamber.
Ironically, the continued reliance on flawed studies shows exactly the opposite of what these researchers wish to prove: America is not a racist country.”
“Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, one of America’s most prominent teaching hospitals, plans on offering “preferential care based on race” and “race explicit interventions” as part of its new “antiracist agenda for medicine.” Such a program uses a “reparations framework” to allocate medical resources…
How ironic that the vision of the Mass General Brigham health system is dedication to delivering medical care that is, among other things, “equitable.” Nothing promotes equity like a racist concept of “preferential care based on race.”
CULTURAL APPROPRIATION? NOPE. IT’S ONLY BAD IF WHITE PEOPLE HAVE BLONDE HAIR.
Here’s several provocative articles from Taki’s Magazine, which is delightfully NOT PC:
We all know why Wal-Mart, aka China-Mart, is fence-riding between its manufacturing operations in Communist China and American consumers. The multi-nationals are really all in with the CCP because the CCP uses obscenely cheap laborers (as in slave cheap) in its factories to produce products to fill their monopolistic stores. They make money off the backs of enslaved people.
That is the stark truth.
US Wal-Mart workers are kings and princes compared to Chinese workers and Wal-Mart would rather fill its stores with cheap crap from Chinese workers than pay US workers to make quality items or buy quality made goods from the USA.
Ever notice how they make a pretense of having items made in the USA? They put those in the aisles or on the endcaps, but they are few and far between.
It is very difficult to avoid shopping at Wal-Mart. Not only did they kill off the mom-and-pops years ago, but they are often the only game around for small towns and people of few means.
That Zoom call the other day, in which 100 woke corporations discussed opposing election reform, shows how deeply hypocritical these companies are. They don’t give a rat’s ass about slave workers in China, or even about the working poor here. They are all about the bottom line: making a buck no matter who it exploits.
Fair elections would put people in office who are not in the pockets of huge corporations, and would make laws to advance the good of Americans, not the CCP or amoral corporations.
Speaking of China’s manufacturing hegemony, have you heard about Equity for Africa? Imagine investing in business ventures with the countries of Africa! Imagine what kind of competition that would make for China’s manufacturing dominance?
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo kicked off the Equity for Africa Summit at Liberty University a few days ago. From his keynote speech:
“The faith-based forum is assembling major government, business, and faith leaders from America and Africa to share visions of making Africa a more prosperous, secure, and flourishing continent. (Go to the event website to watch the livestream and view panel discussions and participants.)
“Every African, and indeed every human, wants the same basic things,” Pompeo said in his address from Liberty University’s campus on Tuesday night.
“They want freedom and the ability to take care of their families, and they all understand that there’s very little that is more noble than the dignity that comes with a job and opportunity to work and to deliver on behalf of their families and community. And Africans who get the opportunity to do so are obviously better, and their nation more prosperous and secure.”
Last, but not least, here is Democrat Naomi Wolf with a MUST WATCH 15-minute video about the deadly danger of vaccine passports. This is a video that you can send to all your liberal friends. It is a red pill with a pink tint…easy on the Woke Among Us. Naomi was also on War Room Pandemic Wednesday and you can see that here.
Naomi is extremely concerned, even to the point of fright. Those of us who are Christians and other like-minded courageous friends, must not succumb to fear. We will overcome. Praise God and pass the Backyard Iced Tea. Amen!
This Sanctuary Sunday Open Thread, with full respect to those who worship God on the Sabbath, is a place to reaffirm our worship of our Creator, our Father, our King Eternal.
It is also a place to read, post and discuss news that is worth knowing and sharing. Please post links to any news stories that you use as sources or quote from.
In the QTree, we’re a friendly and civil lot. We encourage free speech and the open exchange and civil discussion of different ideas. Topics aren’t constrained, and sound logic is highly encouraged, all built on a solid foundation of truth and established facts.
We have a policy of mutual respect, shown by civility. Civility encourages discussions, promotes objectivity and rational thought in discourse, and camaraderie in the participants – characteristics we strive toward in our Q Tree community.
Please show respect and consideration for our fellow QTreepers. Before hitting the “post” button, please proofread your post and make sure you’re addressing the issue only, and not trying to confront the poster. Keep to the topic – avoid “you” and “your”. Here in The Q Tree, personal attacks, name calling, ridicule, insults, baiting and other conduct for which a penalty flag would be thrown are VERBOTEN.
In The Q Tree, we’re compatriots, sitting around the campfire, roasting hot dogs, making s’mores and discussing, agreeing, and disagreeing about whatever interests us. This board will remain a home for those who seek respectful conversations.
Two disciples (Cleopas and one unnamed) of Jesus were walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus (about 8 miles NW) on the day that Jesus rose from the dead. As they traveled, a man joined them—the resurrected Jesus, although they did not recognize Him. The man asked, “What is this conversation that you are holding with each other as you walk?” (Luke 24:17).
The two disciples were surprised that the man had not heard of the recent events that had Jerusalem in turmoil. They proceeded to tell the stranger of Jesus’ crucifixion and the report of His empty tomb. Jesus responded, “‘How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?’ And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.” (Luke 24:25-27).
So, as they walked, Jesus taught what the Old Testament had predicted about Himself. When they arrived in Emmaus that evening, the two disciples stopped to eat, and they asked Jesus to join them. He did, and as He broke the bread and blessed the meal, “their eyes were opened” (verse 31), and they recognized Him. Jesus then vanished.
Their response? Luke reports, “They got up and returned at once to Jerusalem. There they found the Eleven and those with them, assembled together and saying, ‘It is true! The Lord has risen’” (verses 33-34).
On the road to Emmaus, Jesus gave a lesson on the prophecies of the Old Testament which were fulfilled in His death and resurrection, making connections from Scripture to the events they had recently experienced.
The disciples’ reaction to Jesus’ lesson was one of deep conviction of the truth of what He was teaching. “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked?” they ask each other (verse 32). Their physical eyes were blinded to the identity of Jesus, but their eyes of faith were being opened as Jesus opened the Scriptures to them.
Following this account, Jesus appears to His other disciples, removing all doubt that He was alive. Jesus had promised that He would show Himself to those who love Him (John 14:21), and this is exactly what He does on the road to Emmaus.
The story of the disciples on the Emmaus Road is important for several reasons. It provides an emphasis on the Old Testament prophecies related to Jesus, evidence regarding an additional appearance of Jesus, and a connection regarding the many eyewitnesses of the resurrected Jesus.
Luke 24 is often seen as a model of the journey that Jesus makes with many of us today, as He opens our eyes, points us to the Word, and reveals Himself along life’s walk as the resurrected Savior and Lord.
“the Holy Scriptures, . . . are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.” 2 Timothy 3:15-17
*https://www.gotquestions.org/road-to-Emmaus.html
One aspect of the Road to Emmaus account stands out to me as a central part of this incident, Luke 24:27: “And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He explained to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.”
Alfred Edersheim (1825 – 1889) was a preeminent Biblical scholar who counted 456 Old Testament passages which are considered Messianic by the Rabbis before the time of Christ. These 456 contain the passages in the Old Testament applied to the Messiah or to Messianic times in the most ancient Jewish writings. They are distributed as 75 from The Pentateuch, 243 from The Prophets, and 138 from The Writings, and supported by more than 558 separate quotations from Rabbinic writings.
According to Arnold Fruchtenbaum, a modern day noted Biblical scholar, there are about 200 to 400 (depending on who’s counting) Old Testament Messianic prophesies.
Many things in the Old Testament about the coming of the Messiah were not fully explained, and some predictions seem, but only seem, to contradict themselves. Some of the Jewish rabbis even thought there would be two Messiahs: Messiah ben Joseph, a humble, suffering Messiah and Messiah ben David, a conquering, reigning Messiah. No one thought the same Messiah would come twice, once to suffer and die, and once to reign.
At the time of Jesus, the expectation was for a Messiah who would rescue Israel from foreign domination. He would conquer and rule. When Jesus didn’t declare Himself as King and start to raise an army to restore Israel, many that followed Him departed.
Jesus as conquering King restoring Israel? That didn’t happen 2,000 years ago, but . . .
It’s all in God’s Word for those that have eyes to see, ears to hear and an open mind to understand.
More on Messianic prophesies . . . next week.
On this day and every day –
God is in Control . . . and His Grace is Sufficient, so . . . Keep Looking Up
Hopefully, every Sunday, we can find something here that will build us up a little . . . give us a smile . . . and add some joy or peace, very much needed in all our lives.
“This day is holy to the Lord your God; do not mourn nor weep.” . . . “Go your way, eat the fat, drink the sweet, and send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared; for this day is holy to our Lord. Do not sorrow, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
Another week, another deluge of BS from the White House and from the Controlled Opposition. Not much has really happened, so with that noted, on we go.
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
All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend).
Gold has tested the $1760 level during the past week, apparently it’s trying to stage a rally.
Palladium
Two more precious metals to go.
This time, it’s palladium.
It, along with rhodium, are the two metals Wollaston discovered closely associated with platinum, shortly into the 19th century. Indeed, since it sits directly above platinum in the periodic table, it’s basically platinum’s little brother.
There’s one unusual property of palladium that attracts a ridiculous amount of attention: It absorbs up to 900 times its volume of hydrogen. It can even be used as a hyrdogen filter if it’s heated: The hydrogen will diffuse through it, other gases mixed in with the hydrogen will not.
People seem to imagine that this would make palladium a great way of storing hydrogen. But consider: It absorbs 900 times its volume of hydrogen, not 900 times its weight, or even half its weight. That’s basically equivalent to putting hydrogen in a very strong tank. But the tank is cheaper (and lighter) than the palladium would be. However, there is one last little quirk about this I’ll get to later.
Palladium, back in the days I first started noticing things, was sort of midway between silver and gold. Silver was perhaps five to ten dollars an ounce. Gold was $300. Palladium was $80.
A few years later, palladium spiked to $900 bucks an ounce…for maybe a year, then dropped back down to very roughly the $200 level. I thought about buying some, thinking it could spike to $900 again, and people basically laughed–it was a very special set of circumstances that had caused that spike.
Well palladium has been doing very well now, pushing towards three thousand dollars an ounce, higher than gold or platinum have ever been, and in fact its price rise preceded the rhodium/iridium madness we’re seeing now.
You can find palladium in solid form; back when it was 80 or 120 bucks I did buy an ounce in the mid 1980s…and it got burglarized away, not very long after that little event I alluded to. It had just shot up to $180/ounce overnight. Back then a precious metal wasn’t listed if you couldn’t buy a pretty little bar of it.
OK, what was the little event? The apparent discovery of cold fusion. In 1989, Pons and Flieschmann claimed that they had gotten hydrogen–deuterium, the stable heavier isotope of it in fact–to fuse at room temperature. How did they do it? They performed electrolysis on heavy water, using a palladium electrode.
Electrolysis is the process where one passes a current through water, and causes the water molecule to split up into its component hydrogen and oxygen atoms. When this is done to heavy water, the hydrogen, of course is actually the deuterium isotope–still hydrogen, but the nucleus contains a neutron as well as the proton, and it’s much easier to get it to undergo nuclear fusion.
So here’s hydrogen being released right next to palladium, right? And palladium is a hydrogen sponge, right? So basically the hydrogen is effectively very compressed, one of the things you’d need to do to it to get it to fuse.
Pons and Fleischmann claimed to have measured more heat being generated than could possibly have come from anything other than fusion, as well as fusion by products. Other scientists, however, failed to replicate their results.
It’s nonetheless an odd thing, because some people claim they do get unusual amounts of heat out of similar apparatuses (apparati?).
My gut feel–and it’s worth exactly what you are paying for it–is that something a little odd is going on here, but that it’s probably not fusion. Some people are still playing with this, but nothing definitive seems to have come out of it. It’s just barely an open question still, in my mind, though I am largely skeptical.
Which is a damn shame, because fusion would solve the energy crisis. It would avert the next ten energy crises. It is what makes the stars shine, and they can shine for billions or even trillions of years. If they were made out of coal that was being burned, instead of hydrogen being fused, they’d only last a few thousand years. Which tells you how very, very, energy dense fusion is.
Other than the usual catalyst uses, palladium is part of the alloy we know as “white gold.” Which must, therefore be more expensive than the regular yellowish-orange gold. Its melting point is actually under three thousand degrees Fahrenheit, no doubt a bit of a change after all of those metals that need to be melted by lightning bolts. It’s a bit lower than platinum’s melting point, and that was managed by the lime block furnace back in the mid 1800s.
Here’s a picture of a credit suisse palladium bar. This was pretty much the first form it came in for investing.
Credit Suisse now makes the PAMP bar, with a bit of artwork on the bar:
The Soviet Union made coins out of palladium back in the 1980s (when it was cheap), and the United States makes a one ounce eagle.
That eagle coin is given a face value of 25 dollars (and is worth a hundred times that!). The obverse is a blown-up version of the “Mercury” (Winged Cap Liberty) dime, while the eagle on the reverse strongly resembles the one on the Walking Liberty half. Instead of his head facing forward, the eagle’s head is bent downwards, grasping what looks like an olive branch.
As you can see the metal is just another silvery-white metal. When not frosty and lustrous it tends to look like stainless steel.
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!!!
If anyone ends up in the cell right next to him, tell him I said “hi.”
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 !!!
