Language Warning

In the next piece I had to discuss a particular topic. Unfortunately, I couldn’t discuss it without naming it. Therefore I apologize in advance for having to do so, and apologize to anyone offended by the sight of the name.

RINO McDaniel

As you no doubt know, RINO McDaniel got re-elected to RNC Chair Friday. I hope no one has already managed in the intervening time to suppress that memory; if so I apologize for the PTSD trigger.

RINO McDaniel isn’t the problem.

Let me be crystal clear on this, RINO McDaniel is a lower-than-whale-shit, piss guzzling ratfucking shit eating traitorous rancid syphillitic cunt. Her worth as a human being is substantially less than zero, any oxygen sucked into her lungs is wasted, and it would be, no matter what job she had.

I fear I haven’t been clear enough, but that will have to suffice.

But she is not the problem…or rather, she would not be a problem were it not for others. She’d still be as I have described, but we wouldn’t know who she is and would not care, because she could do no damage. She’d just be anonymous human refuse.

No, the real problem is the fact that a majority of the 168 top GOP people voted for her. And now that has happened five times so they cannot claim they didn’t know what she was.

In spite of the fact that under her “leadership” the party has deliberately sabotaged the will of its base, has deliberately refused to challenge blatant election fraud, had gone out of its way to ensure certain candidates do not get nominated, has diverted donor money to namby-pamby candidates who have all the electoral appeal of a puddle of dog vomit…and in general has done nothing whatsoever to help fix the problems that plague America.

However that last is to be expected; I cannot expect anyone who IS the problem to help FIX the problem.

RINO McDaniel would be powerless without an entire party leadership of the same mind as her. They want this dismal performance; they want to ignore the party base.

If she were to drop dead this instant, it would solve nothing as someone just like her would be elected by those same pustulous people.

According to Charlie Kirk, about 55 people voted against her, 10-12 wanted something different but were too chickenshit to do the right thing, and roughly 100 people voted for her enthusiastically, and even had the unmitigated gall to complain to Kirk about US. Fuck ’em. Rusty 12 gauge bore brushes would be too good for these arrogant pricks and cunts.

Every single one of those hundred is just as bad as she is. In other words, they are all worse than I described at the beginning of this piece. And no doubt those people in turn have people who supported them to be state party chairs and whateveritis they call the other two people from each state and territory who were voting.

It’s time to face up to the fact that the Republican party is effectively owned by the shit-eating RINOs. We’ve got more work to do, a lot more work, to make the GOP an instrument for the restoration of the United States of America. And that’s in addition to cleaning up our elections.

There’s no point in cleaning up elections just to elect ratfucking RINOs.

OK, hopefully now you will have some inkling of my true attitude towards RINOs. Sorry that words were inadequate to give you the full picture.

The Real Fascist is His Fraudulency Joe Biden*

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

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

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

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

Come and get us, asswipes!

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

Justice Must Be Done.

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

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

Small Government?

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

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

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

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

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

Political Science In Summation

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

A Few Things We Cannot Blame on His Fraudulency

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

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

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

His Truth?

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

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

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

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

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

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

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

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

(Paper) Spot Prices

Kitco “Ask” prices. Last week:

Gold $1,812.50
Silver $20.86
Platinum $919.00
Palladium $1,490.00
Rhodium $11,100.00

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

Gold $1,857.50
Silver $21.35
Platinum $989.00
Palladium $1,512.00
Rhodium $10,850.00

And now, they’re going up. One could make a lot of money in this market, simply by buying low and selling high, but the trick that’s hard to learn (I never did!) is timing.

Three Bodies

So far with the occasional exception everything I’ve discussed has been “straight” Newtonian two body astrodynamics. Aside from perturbations due to irregular shapes, under these circumstances an orbit is unchanging. If something is in an elliptical orbit with such-and-such a semi-major axis (size) and eccentricity (shape) at some inclination, some longitude of the ascending node, and some argument of perigee (all discussed in the first few parts of this series), then it will stay that way, forever.

What I didn’t mention is the sixth element, which defines where on the ellipse the object is. That can be stated as some time it was at periapsis, or how long since a reference time (the epoch) it has been since it was at periapsis (“time since periapsis passage”)

Once you know that number plus the others, you can literally calculate where the satellite is at any given time…an hour from now, a billion years from now, a billion years ago (if it has been in that orbit for that long). If the epoch is midnight, 1 January 2000, and the satellite is in an orbit whose period is three hours, and at the epoch the satellite was at apoapsis, then, well that’s half an orbit, so time since periapsis passage is 1.5 hours, even for some date a billion years in the future it’s easy…in this case, because the satellite orbits exactly eight times in a day, its position at midnight any day is the same. It’s at apoapsis. (If it’s not this tidy, you can divide number of days since epoch by the orbital period…and keep the remainder.) Now there is a complicated way to turn any arbitrary time since the satellite was last at apoapsis into a position in the elliptical orbit. but the point is, it’s “closed form” and you can readily compute it for any time without being concerned with all the intervening times between epoch and that time.

Fairly routine.

Put in a third body, and all this tidiness goes right out the window. Given three bodies, in certain locations traveling at certain speeds in certain directions at some time, there is no formula to tell you where the three bodies will be…not even thirty seconds later!

There are some extremely special cases…imagine five bodies spaced equally far apart, marking the vertices of a giant pentagon in the sky. If they’re all moving in exactly the right way, you’ll simply see them all going in circles and the five points of the pentagon will simply rotate around the center of the pentagon. You can calculate positions by computing how many revolutions have occurred since your reference time. (But that has to be set up deliberately.) And there are others too.

But generally speaking…no formula.

Now given that this is the real-life case, how on (or off) Earth do we handle this?

There’s no formula to describe, say, the solar system with the sun, eight planets, and innumerable asteroids, Kuiper Belt objects, comets and so forth, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be computed (in practice they only bother with the more prominent objects).

Consider: Start with your three objects in certain positions traveling in certain directions at certain speeds.

You can compute, at that instant, the forces acting on each object, because of the other two (or more, if there are more) objects. That’s a simple matter of computing the force between the first object and each one of the other objects with Newton’s law of gravitation, then adding them up. You can turn that into accelerations, and then you can apply those accelerations to the initial positions and velocities…for a very small period of time.

It’s straightforward to compute where the objects will be after that very short period of time, and how fast they will be traveling. But now positions and speeds have shifted slightly. You have new positions and velocities. So do it again: compute new forces, and apply them to the newer situation. Compute the new situation, and repeat. Again, and again and again, until you get to the time you’re interested in trying to predict. In a way, it’s a bit like a stop-motion claymation animation.

This is called numerical integration because you’re doing computations and successively accumulating the results.

There is of course a problem: Your steps won’t be entirely accurate, because you’re assuming things don’t change during your interval. But in fact the positions, velocities and forces change continuously, not step by step. So your first computation will be a little bit off; the second one starts with a situation that’s slightly wrong, so the result of it will be a little bit more wrong because it too introduces new errors, and so on.

You can try to alleviate this by making your intervals shorter and shorter, but every time you halve the interval, you double the amount of steps you need to compute. But you can make the interval as small as you need to, to get the accuracy you want.

There are also some other tricks to make it more accurate, one called the trapezoid rule and one called the Simpson rule (and there are others); unfortunately those terms only make sense if you’re using numerical integration to approximate the area under a curve; but they apply to this much more complicated six-dimensional problem as well. (If interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_integration. If not interested, there is still information there to read.)

Which should bring up a question in your mind. I just got through telling you we can’t compute the exact answer, so, given that numerical integration gives you an approximation, how can you tell how close the approximation is?

There are two methods. One is you experiment with decreasing step sizes. When it gets to the point where the answer doesn’t change much even if you divide the step size by (say) ten, your step size is probably so small the accumulated errors are insignificant.

Or you can apply numerical integration to a two body problem, one you know the answer to, run it for the same length of time, and cut the step size until the error is acceptable. Then you’ll have a good notion what step size will work..

I actually had to write a numerical integrator for orbital mechanics once, and I “calibrated” it by setting it to work computing a circular orbit for one period. So I just kept decreasing the step size until the spacecraft “returned” to a position less than a millimeter off from its starting point. That was good enough to attack the short-duration three body problem I was really interested in.

But as you probably noticed…you need a computer to do this.

NASA had to do this sort of thing in the 1960s when computer time was very, very expensive (and the computers were slow), so they really didn’t want to mess with it until they knew it was worthwhile. So checking out a planned probe to (say) the moon, which involved three bodies, earth, moon, and probe (and maybe–OK, definitely–include the sun too), you would want to be fairly sure what your approximate answer would be before you got started; you’d be doing this computation to get the exact answer, once you know from the approximation that the mission is possible given the rockets you have available.

So that means there had to be methods to do an approximate plan, at least one to let you know whether the mission was feasible; methods that might take a day or two with a slide rule (still cheaper than a computer back then) but not use a computer. And those methods do exist.

And that’s for a future post. But in the meantime I can leave you with some eye candy. The numerical integration method is not limited to three, or a dozen, or even a million bodies, provided you have the computing power to do it.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is actually traveling toward M 31, the Andromeda galaxy (or it toward us, depending on how you look at it), and in about 5 billion years they will collide. (to give you an idea of scale, the two galaxies are each roughly 100,000 light years across and they are about 2 million light years apart, so right now you can set two quarters about 20 inches apart and get a reasonably to-scale diagram of the situation,) It’s not really a big deal. The stars within a galaxy are so far apart compared to their sizes, that there might not be any collisions between the individual stars. But what will happen is that under the influence of the other galaxy’s gravity, stars will be sent flying out of their galaxy and then what is left over will coalesce into “milkdromeda.” Hundreds of billions of stars are involved. To analyze this astronomers can put a hundred thousand or a million representative stars in each galaxy (perhaps a bit more into Andromeda because it’s larger than the Milky Way) and…run the sim, for several billion years of simulation time. This is a lot of computer time, even today, but there are supercomputers that can “crunch” the numbers.

In this video, the Milky Way is on the left, and Andromeda is on the right. I’ve seen ones with longer run times, and what happens is the two “cores” eventually coalesce into one core…and about 50 percent of the stars remain to be part of the new galaxy.

Of course we will never be able to verify the accuracy of that (by the time it happens, this column will have been forgotten for 4,999,999,999.99 years), but we can find other pairs of galaxies in the process of colliding right now, and you’ll see similar looking things, like below:

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

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

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

China is in the White House

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

Joe Biden is Asshoe

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

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

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