Some Cause for Celebration

Sunday is the New Year.

The new congress starts on January 3.

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

So there’s that at least.

News Flash

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

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

But the past cannot actually be changed.

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s Go, Brandon!!

Hey China!

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

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

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

[Language warning]

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

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

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

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

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

You’re LOSING.

You LOSER.

You Chinese-bought ratfucking traitor.

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

His Fraudulency

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

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

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

Justice Must Be Done.

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

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

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

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

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

Spot Prices.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

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

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

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

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

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

The New Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

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

China is in the White House

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

Joe Biden is Asshoe

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

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

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