2025·03·15 We Will Have Justice Daily Thread

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

Do We Still Need the Kang (Mis)Quote?

I’m still using the quote about winning the battles but losing the war. It seems like this doesn’t make sense right now given that we seem to be going from triumph to triumph.

On the contrary. This is the exception that proves the rule. The quote isn’t just a lament, it’s to point out why we can never seem to win.

You see, the RINOs cannot interfere and that is why, just for once, we are actually winning. And that is just one more piece of evidence (for the willfully blind) as to what I have been saying with that quote.

It stays.

Speaker Johnson
Pinging you on January 6 Tapes

Just a friendly reminder Speaker Johnson. You’re doing some good things–or at least trying in the case of the budget–but this is the most important thing out there still hanging. One initial block released with the promise of more…and?

We have American patriots being held without bail and without trial, and the tapes almost certainly contain exculpatory evidence. (And if they don’t, and we’re all just yelling in an echo chamber over here, we need to know that too. And there’s only one way to know.)

Either we have a weaponized, corrupt government or we have a lot of internet charlatans. Let’s expose whatever it is. (I’m betting it’s the corrupt weaponized government, but if I am wrong, I’d like to see proof.)

Justice Must Be Done.

The 2020 election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Yes this is still true in spite of 2024. Fraud must be rooted out of our system and that hasn’t changed just because the fraud wasn’t enough to stop Trump winning a second term. Fraud WILL be ramped up as soon as we stop paying attention.

Otherwise, everything ends again in 2028. Or perhaps earlier if Trump is saddled with a Left/RINO congress in 2026, via fraud.

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).

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 Q Tree Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Political 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 $2,911.50
Silver $32.60
Platinum $974.00
Palladium $934.00
Rhodium $6,000.00
FRNSI* 139.844-
Gold:Silver 89.310-

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

Gold $2,985.50
Silver $33.87
Platinum $1004.00
Palladium $988.00
Rhodium $5,700.00
FRNSI* 143.424-
Gold:Silver 88.146-

Gold blooped up over the 3000 dollar mark briefly Friday, but retreated a bit and closed at the level shown above (it actually closed a bit higher than that on Thursday). So of course the FRNSI is at an all-time weekly high. Silver did very well this last week; long overdue; gold is now worth over an ounce less silver than last week. Platinum shows some signs of life. Maybe it is only mostly dead.

*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.

The Ides of March

Yes, our calendar is a direct descendant of the Roman calendar, particularly after Julius Caesar’s reforms.

That doesn’t mean we’d have any idea WTF we were looking at when looking at a Roman Calendar. They didn’t lay out months in tidy little rectangles like we do, with days numbered from 1-31. (Or 30, or 28 or fairly rarely 29.)

Nope they did something totally wacky, at least from our point of view.

The Kalends was the first day of the month. The Nones was the ninth day before the Ides. The Ides were, in turn the 15th day of full months (months of 31 days), or the 13th day of hollow months (months of 30 days) [Before Julius and Augustus Caesar, February had 30 days.] After some reforms months could have four different lengths and even the 31 day months were handled two different ways.

Counting through the days of the month, the 1st was “on the Kalends”. the 2nd was “the day after the Kalends” OR it could be called (in March, May, July and October–MMJO) the “Sixth day before the Nones” and for every other month the “Fourth day before the Nones”. Then count down each subsequent day until on the 7th (MMJO) or 5th (all others), was “On the Nones.” But beware because the “Third day before the Nones” was followed by “the day before the Nones” (there was no “second day before the Nones). The next day (8th or 6th) was “The day after the Nones.” OR that day could be called the 8th day before the Ides. Then the 7th, 6th, 5th, 4th, 3rd days before the Nones…and then skipping over “the second day before the Ides” to “the day before the Ides.” Then the Ides…which was on the 15th (MMJO) or 13th (all other months).

Then it gets tricky. For MMJO, the day after the Ides (the 16th) could be called “The day after the ides” or “the 17th day before the Kalends” Note, though that (for example) March 16 was called “the 14th day before the Kalends of April.” So April was being named…even though it was really still March! For January, August, and December, the “day after the Ides” (the 14th) was also “the 19th day before the Kalends”. For April, June, September, and November (all 30 days at the time), the “Day after the Ides” (the 14th) was “the 18th day before the Kalends”. For February (28 or 29 days) the “Day after the Ides” (the 14th) was either the 16th or 17th day before the Kalends of March”.

You would then count down to the second-to-last-day of the month and that would be the 3rd day of the Kalends, and the last day would be “the day before the kalends.”

Of course they did this in Latin, not English, so for example, they’d say “ante diem tertium decimum Kalendas” (the 13th day before the Kalends) and write it down as “a.d. XIII Kal.” since who wants to write all that out?

The day after Kalends, Nones, or Ides were considered “black” days and unlucky. (Though they were off one day for Julius Caesar.)

[Note before the Julian reforms, there were no thirty day months; there were MMJO (31 days), February (28 days) and everything else (29 days) and they followed the rules for MMJO, 28 day Februaries, and the 29 day February, respectively). When the caesars made January, August and December into 31 day months, they actually left the Ides in the same place relative to the Kalends (i.e., on what we call the 13th of the month) rather than moving the Ides to the 15th, to avoid messing up festival days.]

Somehow, they were able to use this insanely complex system and still have enough brainpower left to conquer the entire Mediterranean world.

And NO I don’t have this memorized, I had to look it up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar. Otherwise I’d not have the brainpower left to butcher the topic of geology.

A Deeper Dive on Isotopes

Last time I described the atomic nucleus as it came to be known during the early 20th century, and I discussed radioactivity. I touched on isotopes a bit; time for a deeper dive.

As chemists worked to measure atomic weights for all known elements (painstaking and unglamorous work; the ones doing this are the unsung heroes of chemistry) it became apparent that most elements had atomic weights that were almost an integer multiple of the element with the lightest atomic weight: hydrogen (for example, taking hydrogen as 1 (not the currently used value!), helium comes in at 3.971, very close to 4. But there were a few oddballs, too, elements with a not-very-close multiple, like (and now I’ll use the current values, with hydrogen at 1.008, not 1.000) boron (10.81), neon (20.18), chlorine (35.45). Just eyeballing the list it looks like about a quarter of all elements are “off” like this.

It wasn’t until people started ionizing elements and sending the ions through a magnetic field to see how much their trajectories bent that we started to understand this. This was first done by J. J. Thomson (who had discovered the electron, and loved to play with magnets and charged particles) in 1912 with neon gas. Neon is atomic number 10, ten protons, and as I mentioned its atomic weight is 20.18. Thomson discovered that neon is actually mixture of two different things, one with an atomic weight of 20, another with an atomic weight of 22. The signal was weaker for 22, so he figured it neon was mostly the atomic-weight-twenty stuff.

These were both undeniably neon; there was no way to separate them chemically because they both behaved the same (which is to say, being totally unwilling to engage in chemical reactions; neon is a noble gas). They just weighed different. Thomson however had been brought up believing that atomic weight was an inherent property of an element, so he thought of it as two separate gases. We don’t think this any more. They’re both neon. And we now know there’s a very small amount of neon atoms with a mass of 21.

As more and more of these experiments happened, it became clear; if an element’s atomic weight was far off from an integer, it was a mix of these “isotopes.” Aston (who formulated the “whole number rule” for isotopic masses) showed in 1920 that chlorine’s 35.45 atomic weight was due to being a mixture of atoms with mass 35 and mass 37 units.

When talking about just the nucleus of an atom, we often use the term nuclide instead of isotope (which is the whole atom). It’s not a hard and fast rule but chemists will tend to use “isotope” and nuclear physicists including those researching fusion will be a bit more likely to say “nuclide.”

Again, the chemical behavior is nearly identical. In principle a heavier isotope should be slightly slower to react than an lighter one, but the practical difference is nil except in one case. Thus when it matters (and it usually doesn’t), chemists and physicists will write something like neon-20 or neon-22. When they can do so they will follow the formal convention: 20Ne or 22Ne. I am able to do that here (writing the post) but not in comments; but it’s such a pain to do so (wordpiss), that I will stick with writing either neon-20 or Ne-20.

And by the way, for our purposes here, it does matter. Quite a lot.

The one exception regarding chemical differences is the case of hydrogen, which usually has mass number of 1, but some few atoms have a mass number of 2. If you concentrate the mass-2 stuff, and use it to make water, you have heavy water, which even though it’s technically hydrogen monoxide just like tap water is, will kill you. (It also melts at 4 degrees Celsius so it’s possible to put a heavy water ice cube in a glass of water at 1 degree Celsius and it won’t melt. It will sink to the bottom, too, which is even weirder.) In fact for hydrogen and hydrogen alone, there are “special” names for the heavier isotopes; hydrogen-2 is called deuterium and (in this context) hydrogen-1 is called protium. There is also hydrogen-3, which is radioactive and is called tritium.

Once the neutron was discovered by James Chadwick in 1932, we got some clarity as to what was going on. Neutrons, it turns out are very slightly more massive than protons, We now know that neon-20, neon-21 and neon-22 all contain ten protons (neon has ten protons, by definition), but they contain 10, 11, and 12 neutrons, respectively, the total of the two numbers 10+10, 10+11, 10+12 gives you the mass number.

So what happens when you do this sort of analysis on other elements as found in nature? Fluorine (#9) has one isotope, F-19. Tin (#50) has no less than ten isotopes: Sn-112, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, and 124. The natural proportion for each of these ranges from 0.34 percent to 33 percent.

It is possible to create isotopes in the lab. So long as the number of neutrons isn’t too high or low, you’ll get a nucleus that hangs together for a while, perhaps even permanently. Otherwise the excess neutrons will “drip” off (fail to stick even momentarily) or if there are too few neutrons, a proton will “drip” off.

Between these bounds, the isotope will be intensely radioactive, less intensely radioactive, even less intensely radioactive, dang near stable, or actually stable. (Those are not “official” terms by the way.) And if you include all those made-in-a-lab-and-very-unstable isotopes the isotope counts go way up. Tritium is one of them for instance, and tin actually has isotopes ranging from 99 through 140.

Why do we need to make those highly radioactive isotopes in a lab? Because if there were any on earth originally, they have long since decayed away and none are left.

[If you poke around on wikipedia you may see references to something being “observationally stable.” That means an isotope that they believe on theoretical grounds is almost stable but it’s so close to stable they haven’t caught it decaying yet. In other words “we think this ought to be very very mildly radioactive–so mild we haven’t detected it yet so maybe it’s really stable after all.” Three of the ten tin isotopes I mentioned are “observationally stable”]

Because we are able to produce almost-arbitrary nuclides in the lab, we have pretty complete tables of nuclides–both a table with columns and a bunch of numbers in them, like you see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_tin, or nice graphical ones like this:

You can click on this to make it larger, but even there you can’t see what’s written in the boxes. Here is a link to a version that is 17,800 pixels across: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/NuclideMap.svg

Going across the bottom, you have the number of neutrons, going up you have the number of protons, as shown in this excerpt from the very lower left corner. Note that the same isotope number for different elements lie on a diagonal. (They also threw in a bare neutron, mass number 1, element zero.)

The colors indicate how the isotopes decay; black is a stable isotope. Blue is a β+ (positron) decay (or capturing an electron), orange is losing a proton (technically it’s “dripping” the proton), deep purple is dripping a neutron, yellow is alpha decay (note that 8Be alpha decays–and what’s left over is a helium nucleus, which is itself an alpha particle; so really it just splits in two). Green (visible at the other end of the chart) is spontaneous fission where a nucleus splits into two or more large pieces. Finally the pink or light purple squares like 3H are β– (ordinary beta decay).

If you paid attention last time, you should be able to figure out what the isotope will turn into. For example 10Be undergoes beta decay, so it goes up one in charge (it now has 5 protons) but stays the same mass. It becomes boron-10, which is stable.

This chart also indicates half life. And I will more than likely be pasting in other pieces of it in future posts.

OK, so we have this list of all possible isotopes (and ones that arguably shouldn’t be considered isotopes because they “drip” when you try to create them). What do we see when we look “out there” on Earth? This is, after all, supposedly a series on geology, right?

The isotopes we see fall into three broad categories.

Stable isotopes. Every single stable isotope is found on Earth. Every last one.

Long lived isotopes. Isotopes over a certain half-life (which I will discuss below) will be found on Earth too. Again, every last one. (And by the way some of those half lives exceed present day estimates of the age of the earth by millions or even billions of times. And “observationally stable” isotopes, if they turn out to be radioactive, will have even longer half lives.)

Short lived isotopes. Some of the known short-lived isotopes can be found in nature. Here’s the thing though. In all of these cases, we can identify a natural process that is creating those isotopes, even at the present moment. For example, carbon-14 with a half life of about 5,760 years is being produced in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays impacting nitrogen-14 nuclei. Uranium-234 has a half life of 245,500 years, and is created by uranium-238 decay (U-238 becomes thorium-234 due to an alpha decay, then Th-234 becomes protactinium-234 via beta decay, then Pa-234 becomes U-234 after another beta decay). All of those intermediate products, of course, we also detect in nature (and they have very short half lives of days or hours) so they fall into this category too. But, very important: We do not have any short lived isotopes we cannot account for this way.

This actually paints a picture: We have a situation where we have primordial isotopes–ones that apparently were always here on Earth, and the others, that weren’t. Since anything that could be a primordial nuclide based on being stable or having a long half life, is here, there’s no reason to suppose that some other nuclide that is now not found in nature wasn’t actually once here–only to have decayed completely away. Which means the Earth would have to be old enough for them to be gone by now.

OK, so what’s the dividing line between short lived and long lived isotopes? Somewhere between 100 and 700 million years.

I found this table: https://sites.astro.caltech.edu/~dperley/public/isotopetable.html which bills itself as all radio isotopes with half lives over 1000 years. I am going to excerpt everything between 1 million and one trillion years, below:

Selenium-79
Iron-60
Beryllium-10
Zircon-93
Curium-247
Gadolinium-150
Neptunium-237
Cesium-135
Technetium-97
Dysprosium-154
Bismuth-210m
Manganese-53
Technetium-98
Palladium-107
Hafnium-182
Lead-205
Curium-247
Iodine-129
Uranium-236
Niobium-92
Plutonium-244
Samarium-146
Uranium-236
Uranium-235
Potassium-40
Uranium-238
Rubidium-87
Thorium-232
Lutetium-176
Rhenium-187
Lanthanum-138
Samarium-147
Platinum-190

1,130,000
1,500,000
1,510,000
1,530,000
1,560,000
1,790,000
2,144,000
2,300,000
2,600,000
3,000,000
3,040,000
3,740,000
4,200,000
6,500,000
9,000,000
15,300,000
15,600,000
17,000,000
23,420,000
34,700,000
80,800,000
103,000,000
234,200,000
703,800,000
1,280,000,000
4,468,000,000
4,750,000,000
14,100,000,000
37,800,000,000
43,500,000,000
105,000,000,000
106,000,000,000
650,000,000,000

Uranium-236 is listed twice (I just noticed). The 234,200,000 figure should not be there, so I crossed it out.

We cannot find plutonium-244 in nature. We’ve tried, some claim to have found it, but it’s inconclusive. Likewise with samarium-146. But we have no trouble finding uranium-235…and were even able to send Hiroshima, Japan a care package of the stuff on August 6 of 1945, the first nuclear bomb to be detonated in anger.

As it happens, samarium-146, if any were present on our Earth 4.5 billion years ago, would have gone through over 40 half lives, which is to say less than a trillionth of it would be left today. Uranium-235 (which we know was here) has gone through six half lives, so over one percent of it is still left.

In other words, this situation is consistent with Earth being 4.5 billion or so years old, as dated by other methods. If there were significant amounts of Pu-244 or Sm-146 around, the Earth would have to be considerably younger than this (though it could still be in the billions of years) for that to make sense.

All told, there are 251 stable nuclides, and 35 long-lived primordial nuclides.

As it happens many of the primordial nuclides can be of use in radiometric dating. We’ll dive into that next time. It’s now 10:16 PM here and I’m sure people are getting antsy.

Health Friday 3.14.2025 Open Thread: Heart Issues After COVID-19 “Vaccination”: And About the Virus Itself

The above free image of heart shapes is courtesy of iStock and Google Images.

Health Friday is a series devoted to information about Big Pharma, vaccines, general health, and associated topics. As today’s post speaks about the disaster of COVID-19 (the COVID-19 virus itself, and the COVID-19 “vaccines”), Yours Truly dedicates it to the memory of all persons, of whatever age or location, who have passed away from the negative effects of these lab-created bioweapons.

There are Important Wolf Moon Notifications; the Rules of our late, good Wheatie; and, certain caveats from Yours Truly, of which readers should be aware. They are linked here. NOTE: Yours Truly has checked today’s offering for any AI-generated content. To the best of my knowledge and belief, there is none. Also: if readers wish to post anything in the discussion thread for today’s offering that is AI-generated, they must cite their source.

Today’s post may be regarded as a “narrow-focus” offering, one of a “mini-series.” This first “narrow-focus” offering regards the inducement of cardiac issues after COVID-19 “vaccination”; and, the potential for cardiac issues also induced from an infection of the COVID-19 virus itself. Yours Truly begins here: https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/new-study-fatal-malignant-cardiac, “NEW STUDY — Fatal Malignant Cardiac Tumors Following COVID-19 mRNA Injection”, by Nicolas Hulscher, MPH, 6 March 2025. The paper that is cited in the article is here: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehjcr/ytaf009, “Heart-breaking tumours: a case series of malignant pericardial effusion”, Abdur Rahman Mirza, et al., 18 January 2025. The paper is also found here: https://academic.oup.com/ehjcr/article/9/3/ytaf009/7960074. Below are screenshots of the Introduction of the paper; followed by a screenshot of the graphic of the paper that traces the “journey of pericarditis”:

And, the final portion of the Discussion section of the paper:

Note the mention of “diagnostic bias” regarding whether or not a cardiac issue presents after the patient has been COVID-19 “vaccinated.” In Yours Truly’s opinion, the young physician who is the lead author of the cited paper has likely not studied how the COVID-19 “vaccines” affect the heart (for example, this article: https://doctors4covidethics.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/causality-article.pdf, “Vascular and organ damage induced by mRNA vaccines: irrefutable proof of causality”, Michael Palmer, MD, and Sucharit Bhakdi, MD); has likely not read the BNT162b2 5.3.6 Postmarketing Experience report that Pfizer-BioNTech gave to the FDA in April 2021 (https://phmpt.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/5.3.6-postmarketing-experience.pdf); and, has likely not read any of the posts that Dr. Peter A. McCullough, MD, has on his website (https://www.thefocalpoints.com/.) One suspects that many other physicians have not read these items, either.

Turning to the Hulscher article on The Focal Points blog, cited above: It is known that the COVID-19 “vaccines” can, and do, cause pericarditis, a type of inflammation involving the heart (please refer to the BNT162b2 Postmarketing Experience report cited above, page 36 of the report, in the Appendix 1. List of Adverse Events of Special Interest section of said report.) The Cleveland Clinic has an article on pericarditis, found here: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17353-pericarditis. Below is a screenshot from the Cleveland Clinic article:

It is also known that the COVID-19 “vaccines” can, and do, cause myocarditis (another type of cardiac inflammation.) Both pericarditis and myocarditis can, and do, cause permanent damage to the heart. Both pericarditis and myocarditis can ultimately result in the death of the patient. However, the COVID-19 “vaccines” contain BOTH the ingredients of the original Wuhan Hu1 virus (SARS-CoV-2 virus, aka COVID-19 virus), AND lab “enhancements” (dangerous lipid nanoparticles; N1-methylpseudouridine; “loose DNA” from the manufacturing process; a piece of the SV40 African Green Monkey cancer promoter gene code) — that make the COVID-19 “vaccines” much more dangerous and/or deadly to the cardiac system of the “vaccinated” person. There is more new information on this situation (thank you to Valerie Curren): https://slaynews.com/news/epidemiologist-new-data-linking-covid-vaccines-global-heart-death-surge/, by Frank Bergman, 1 March 2025. The paper linked in the article is found here: https://doi.org/10.4330/wjc.v17.12.1039909, “Risk stratification for future cardiac arrest after COVID-19 vaccination”, Peter A. McCullough, MD, and Nicolas Hulscher, MPH, 26 February 2025. Below are two screenshots from the paper: the Abstract; and, the McCullough Protocol for spike protein detoxification:

Note the clear statement that cardiac issues can appear years after the person is COVID-19 “vaccinated.”

And, the McCullough Protocol:

Yours Truly finds it ** interesting ** that the above paper was given a “Grade C” for “scientific quality” by the paper’s reviewers, none of whom are identified except by their initials.

**** However, malignant pericardial effusion is a form of cardiac cancer. It is not an inflammation. Below is a screenshot from the National Cancer Institute definition of this condition (https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-terms/def/malignant-pericardial-effusion):

Malignant pericardial effusion is the subject of the Mirza, et al., paper cited above in today’s post.

**** On the other hand, the COVID-19 virus itself can cause cardiac issues in persons who contract an infection of said virus. The following paper is from July 2020, well before any COVID-19 “vaccines” was granted an Emergency Use Authorization in any country: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41569-020-0413-9, “COVID-19 and cardiovascular disease: from basic mechanisms to clinical perspectives”, Masataka Nishiga, et al., 20 July 2020. This paper is a good source of information regarding how the COVID-19 virus itself works; and, how this virus can affect the cardiovascular system. A screenshot of the Abstract of the paper is below:

Another paper, also from 2020, well before any COVID-19 “vaccine” was granted an EUA, regards how the COVID-19 virus itself can affect the cardiovascular system: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7095524/, “COVID-19 and the cardiovascular system”, Yi-Tong Ma, et al., 5 March 2020. Yours Truly finds it ** interesting ** that the authors of this paper are affiliated with either the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or to medical facilities linked to the People’s Liberation Army (all CCP.) Below is a screenshot from the Background section of the paper:

The following article has more information on the ACE2 receptors in the human body: https://www.cas.org/resources/cas-insights/ace2-covid-19-target, “ACE2: Targeting a potentially important receptor in disease pathogensis”, by Angela Zhou, 15 December 2022. Below is a screenshot from this article:

The point here is that BOTH the COVID-19 virus itself (aka SARS-CoV-2), AND the COVID-19 “vaccines” (since these injectables contain SARS-CoV-2), target and attack the ACE2 receptor cells in the human body.

Yours Truly will again emphasize that the COVID-19 virus itself, AND the COVID-19 “vaccines”, were BOTH designed to cause as much damage to the human body as possible. They are BOTH lab-created bioweapons. The COVID-19 virus is not “just another type of virus.” The COVID-19 “vaccines” were designed to be capable of “shedding” elements of these injectables onto other persons (whether those persons are “vaccinated”, or not.) What is of utmost importance is that all people, “vaccinated” or not, must be doing all that is possible to have, and to maintain, the highest degree of personal health. The COVID-19 “vaccines” must be removed from use worldwide — now.

THERE. MUST. BE. JUSTICE.

Peace, Good Energy, Respect: PAVACA

DEAR MAGA: Open Thread 20250313 & Rogue States

Welcome.
Please visit this January 1st daily thread for the rules of the road,
which are few but important.

2024 Presidential Election Map by County. (an uncertain credit)
Let us Never Forget: our VOTES gave the Trump Administration a Mandate to FIX IT ALL.

Do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore,
and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. — Galatians 5:1

We got our miracle.
America is back.

Let us dedicate ourselves to the cleansing, healing, and rebuilding of our beautiful nation.

God will guide us.
Prayers & thanks to God for President Donald J. Trump.

Rogue States.

Picking up from last week’s presentation, United Sovereign Americans (USA) states that they have the evidence for declaring 5 states as having “gone rogue,” as being out of compliance with the U.S. Constitution, as provably illegitimate:

18/ Illinois, New York, California, Pennsylvania and Michigan are rogue states. No one in those governments knows if their congressional representatives are legitimate. I don’t know, you don’t know, and neither do they. Certifying elections for Congress with millions of fictitious voters and votes is an act of defiance against the United States Constitution, and USA has gathered the proof, from the states’ own official records, that this is exactly what happened. – @UnitedSAmerican

Not only is all of the above true, but there are many other ways in which many of the states are failed. Bankrupt. Corrupt. And worse. The levels of dissatisfaction of the people in all of the states are sky high.

Secessionists.

credit: screen capture from video, “West Virginia: the Road to Statehood“

At this point in the conversation, it’s important to note that any discussions of states leaving the Union will need to overcome this ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. “Texas v. White, 74 U.S. 700 (1868)” which is summarized here:

The secession of the Southern states in 1861 sparked the Civil War. The Confederacy was defeated on the battlefield rather than in the courts. However, subsequent legal issues created by attempts at independence led the courts to express an opinion on the legality of secession. In Texas v. White, a dispute over a bond sale by the Confederate States, the Supreme Court ruled in 1869 that Texas’ secession had not been legal. According to the majority opinion, entry into the Union formed “an indissoluble relation”; it was “final,” “perpetual,” and left “no place for reconsideration or revocation, except through revolution or through the consent of the States.”

As of this writing there are groups in Texas, California, Louisiana, Alaska, and New Hampshire that have as their stated goal to get their state to secede from the Union. However, it seems, without armed conflict, the only path for success involves a Constitutional amendment (which would require getting approval by two-thirds of both houses of Congress and being ratified by 38 states). This doesn’t seem very likely.

A New State.

What does the U.S. Constitution say about creating a new state? Article IV Section 3 of the United States Constitution says: “New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.”

Reading this in the context of those groups wanting to form a new state from territory currently part of another state it would require: (1) consent of the old state, (2) consent of the new state, and (3) consent of Congress.

The history of the creation of West Virginia’s statehood should be instructive (ref: National Archives, WVencyclopedia.org). I’m going to try and create the “Cliff Notes” version of the difficult and contentious history of the creation of the new state of West Virginia.*

  1. Virginia joins confederacy, seceding from Union.
  2. Western part of Virginia doesn’t agree with leaving the Union, but there is no longer a legitimate old state government to get consent from.
  3. Western Virginia deliberates and develops a “reorganized” government of Virginia made up of representatives from non-secessionist areas in the state of Virginia (from June of 1861 to May of 1862).
  4. On May 13, 1862, the state legislature of the reorganized government approves the formation of the new state from the non-secessionist areas of Virginia and a government of the new state of West Virginia is formed. (This new state of West Virginia obviously “consents” to the formation of the new state.)
  5. An application for admission to the Union is then made to Congress. On July 14, 1862, the US Congress adopts a statehood bill for West Virginia, which includes the condition of gradually freeing all blacks under the age of 21 on July 4, 1863. 
  6. President Lincoln signs the enabling act on December 31, 1862. 
  7. The revised constitution for West Virginia, which meets the demand for gradual emancipation, is adopted on March 26, 1863. 
  8. On April 20, 1863, President Lincoln issues a proclamation admitting West Virginia to the Union at the end of 60 days, on June 20, 1863.
  • *Please respond in the comments if there are errors in the above summary, I make no claims to know much at all of what I am writing about here.
  • Dear Wolf and kind readers: some of the above was built from text given to me from Brave AI’s summarizer. I have now gone to the referenced sources to check Brave’s work and updated the text where necessary for clarity and to give credit to sources.

Separatist Movements.

Will Trump will sew a 51st star on our flag?

Time will not permit going into much detail on the various separatist movements active today (for creating new states or redrawing of state lines), but a pretty detailed article “Splitsville: separatist movements are gaining steam in blue states” written by Dave Seminara (published in “The Spectator” in January of this year) covers some of it (reprint here). Dave muddies up some of the details, but it’s still a great place to start reading. From the article:

According to Grant Dahl, co-host of the Secession Speakeasy podcast, there are separatist … movements in Oregon, Illinois, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Louisiana, California, Washington, Minnesota, New York and Pennsylvania.

The goals aren’t the same in each place — and some movements are far more serious than others. Dozens of counties in Illinois and Oregon, for example, have already voted in favor of some form of separation from their current states.

Apparently there are also movements in Michigan and Maryland, which are not in Dahl’s list.

Interesting Times.

Our Turn.

We can’t leave this to others. We can get informed on what has been found, what is being done about it, and what more needs to be done.

We can make a difference.
And we must make a difference.

May God bless and guide you
as you pray and take action for our nation.

Twitterati, etc.

And now for something completely different. @BretWeinstein might be an outlier in terms of your usual “trapline” on X (to borrow a term from another denizen of our tree, MarieUrsula), but he brings good insights to the table from time to time.

Prayer.

God Bless America,
Land that I love.
Stand beside her, and guide her
Thru the night with a light from above.
From the mountains, to the prairies,
To the oceans, white with foam
God bless America, My home sweet home.

KMAG 20250312 Daily Thread and GLADIO, BANKSTERS & MERCANTILISTS

Before I get into the meat of this controversial subject, I want to cover a bit of background. …. The three topics are, Oligarchs, Propaganda, and Astroturf Terrorism. Since those three are critical to understanding our current situation, I am going to make this a stand alone article.

OLIGARCHS


This author has a very good definition which applies nicely to the Banksters and Mercantilists. He is correct, together they form the oligarchs who are intent on controlling the world.


The Parasite Class

An oligarch is someone who has amassed immense wealth and converted it into political and social authority…

The question is how does one become an oligarch? The suggestion is that some achieve oligarch status due to their shrewd business acumen. Many people are astute in business but that alone is not enough to rise to the oligarchy.👉In order to be an oligarch you have to be accepted by the other oligarchs. If oligarchs oppose you, your business will probably be crushed, or at least severely restricted, and access to political authority or social influence will be stifled…👈

PROPAGANDA


“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”
William J. Casey, CIA Director.

This quote was originally spoken by Casey sometime in early February of 1981, at a meeting in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing of the White House, at which the White House policy analyst Barbara Honegger was present (who was then acting as Assistant to the chief domestic policy adviser to the President). She then relayed it to her Godmother, the Senior White House Correspondent Sarah McClendon, who made the quote public without naming the original source, through the Radio host Mae Brussel. — LINK


The primary tool that the Cabal (oligarchs) use against us is propaganda. This is why the EU and WEF are pushing so hard to clamp down on the truth and to get censorship re-installed in the USA and around the world.

10 ways the EU is fighting disinformation | by European Commission

Countering online disinformation is one of the biggest challenges democracies face today.

The European Union is listening to the concerns raised and taking serious action to counter the phenomenon. Here are 10 things the EU is doing to tackle disinformation: …The EU has a dedicated team, whose job it is to identify examples of disinformation targeting the EU and its citizens….


Top European Union Official Sends Letter to Elon Musk – DEMAND X Owner Elon Musk CENSOR President Donald Trump During Upcoming Interview Tonight

…The letter was sent by Thierry Breton and was dated August 12, 2024.

Thierry Breton is a French business executive, politician, writer and the current Commissioner for Internal Market of the European Union. In the letter, Thierry warns Elon Musk, “You have the legal obligation to ensure X’s compliance with EU law and in particular the DSA in the EU.”

Since when do Americans have to comply with EU law?

And what right does the EU have to censor OUR political candidates?


The Clear and Present Danger of Disinformation World Economic Forum Jan 2023

Speakers: Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, Vera Jourová, Jeanne Bourgault, Brian Stelter

Description:

How can the public, regulators and social media companies better collaborate to tackle disinformation, as information pollution spreads at unprecedented speed and scale?


Disinformation is a rising tide. Here’s how to address it


Disinformation is a growing crisis. Governments, business and individuals can help stem the tide

World Economic Forum’s Prioritizes “Disinformation” Over Economic and Global Stability Threats

WEF’s Global Risks Report 2025 downplays economic threats while pushing disinformation fears to justify tighter control and global governance.


And then there was the absolutely CLASSIC LIE of  British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to President Trump and VP Vance.


We’ve had free speaks for a very very long time in the United Kingdom and it will last for a very very long time.
– Starmer


Starmer gets the Trump stink eye.

Paul Joseph Watson showcasing Starmer’s lie. (9minutes) H/T Kea


In the USA, once the Central Bank was in place in 1913 the Cabal took over the media.

“In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, ship building and powder interests and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press in the United States. LINK

Obama took it a step further.

Obama repealed this 1948 act so he could flood our media with endless propaganda


…Obama might have slithered out of the White House without a flashy “legacy” tag, but he sure did leave a mess. It’s as if he was the Dems and Deep State’s MVP, playing a long game we’re still trying to wrap our heads around. He wasn’t just about making policy changes; he was on a mission to infiltrate every corner of our sacred institutions and flip them inside out for his—and their—advantage. Just look what he did by weaponizing the intel community, churches, health care, and so much more… back in 2013, he made a move to ditch the Smith-Mundt Act, basically rolling out the red carpet for propaganda in our national media. This wasn’t just a small change; it was a game changer for how stories are told and sold to us to this day…

Limited Hangouts

This is an absolutely critical concept because it is used to derail the curious.

Valerie Curren brought up Patriot Victory 2024 @GetTheFacts2025

https://xcancel.com/GetTheFacts2025

Every patriot should be reading “Destroying America: The CIA’s Quest to Control the Government.”

Official documents state CIA officers are “detailed by the CIA” to be Secret Service agents…

About link:

https://www.thethinkingconservative.com/destroying-america-the-cias-quest-to-control-the-government/


Paperback sample link. Want to know what happened to California? CIA put LSD in the food of Americans from 1953 to 1963… DARN! Amazon will not allow me to link to the page with the sample so you will have to look at the samples for the kindle version and the paperback. (They are different.)


After reading that, I realized that it was very similar to Willing Accomplices: How KGB Covert Influence Agents Created Political Correctness and Destroyed America by former?? CIA Agent Kent Clizbe. Kent connected with me via Tony Heller’s site and gave me a free PDF of his draft over ten years ago. He even gave me his phone number! 🤔

In both cases our focus is directed towards the communists and NOT the Brits Fabian Society. Colonel Towner mentions the CIA uses the communists as their ‘Boogeyman’ in order to justify their regime change coups. The coups are NOT about ‘democracy’ but about helping the Transnational corporations, her ‘International Syndicate,’ acquire raw materials and cheap labor.

Whether these men know it or not they are purveyors of the type of propaganda called a ‘Limited Hang-out’

Piercing the Veil of Limited Hangouts: Know How to Spot Controlled Opposition

The best weapon you can have in the Second American Revolution is the ability to think clearly and critically. The Deep State has been working hard to keep Americans from real truth–from the inside job of 9-11, to the human trafficking and blackmail operations that keep our elected officials in tow, to the U.S. Patent Office theft of hundreds of patents from social media to free energy. What many people do not know is that it is legal to propagandize and terrorize Americans thanks to the NDAA…

One area of propaganda that you may not be aware of is something called controlled opposition, also known as limited or partial hangouts.

Wikipedia defines these as:

A limited hangout or partial hangout is, according to former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Victor Marchetti, “spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”…


False Flags are Legal Propaganda

This article originally appeared on State of the Nation as False Flags are Legal Propaganda by the Department of Defense on January 18, 2016.

….This question would go through our minds every time we would see a new false flag event plastered all over the media. Like many of you, we would think, “It has to be real, otherwise the government and participants would be engaging in treason.” But the narrative and the evidence never seem to match up.

…It even seemed that the “official story” that was “fed” to the news agencies was filled with holes on purpose. When 450 responders showed up in San Bernardino, including FEMA, ATF, Homeland Security, FBI, DoD, and all local agencies, within 14 minutes and had their lawn chairs and coolers set up while most of them walked around aimlessly with no worries in the world, we couldn’t take it anymore. We had always known that “false flags” usually precede severe military action and we couldn’t really imagine military action within US domestic borders since the military is not empowered to act against its own citizens.

Therefore, we decided to WAKE UP and study the false flag phenomena. Don’t presume to think this is just another conspiracy theory article. What you will read will chill you to the bone. We know this is a long article, but while you were sleeping much has been done to destroy your country. You need to see the immense work that is being done behind your back…


Astroturf Terrorism


‘Strategy of Tension’
It is important to understand this concept. The world we live in today operates on a strategy of tension. Most people do not know enough history to realize that if you look at a world map of 1910 and you look at a world map of 1950 there are a lot of ‘made-up countries’ that did not exist in 1910.
— Colonel Towner

Colonel Towner goes on to say that after WWII when the maps of Europe and the Middle East were redrawn, incompatible groups were placed together in one country. This guaranteed conflicts within a country could easily be ignited.


9/28/2008 — Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis

….The Cloward-Piven Strategy of Orchestrated Crisis

In an earlier post, I noted the liberal record of unmitigated legislative disasters, the latest of which is now being played out in the financial markets before our eyes. Before the 1994 Republican takeover, Democrats had sixty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress – with substantial majorities most of the time. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?

Why?

One of two things must be true. Either the Democrats are unfathomable idiots, who ignorantly pursue ever more destructive policies despite decades of contrary evidence, or they understand the consequences of their actions and relentlessly carry on anyway because they somehow benefit….

I have already introduced Colonel Towner and Operation Gladio to the Qtree in other articles, this is another author who documents how Operation Gladio was revealed:

Operation Gladio – Hard Evidence of Government Sponsored False Flag Terrorism.

By Ian Davis.

Operation Gladio was formally revealed in 1990 by the Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in an official statement to the Italian parliament. By then, Gladio had already been exposed in the courts and elsewhere, but Andreotti’s ‘official’ revelations widely exposed the unpalatable reality. Italian investigations, into the ‘Years of Lead‘, revealed NATO’s hand in a series of terrorist atrocities that had taken place in Italy throughout the 1950s to the 1980s. These included bombings, assassinations, kidnappings and mass shootings by terrorist organisations. There is no doubt that elements within the NATO deep state were routinely using false flag terrorism to control and manipulate public opinion and shape policy.

This is not the speculation of ‘looney conspiracy theorists,’ it is proven, well documented historical fact…

Following the end of WWII, both the U.S. and British intelligence agencies…

The co-option of Nazi technological and scientific expertise was enabled through Operation Paperclip. Top Nazi scientists, intelligence operatives, engineers and military strategists were either protected from prosecution or resettled in the U.S. and elsewhere. Authorised by President Truman in 1946, who stipulated that no committed National Socialists should be co-opted, the secret operation nonetheless supported many fervent Nazis….

Valierie pointed to this Book: “Destroying America: The CIA’s Quest to Control the Government.”

DESTROYING AMERICA: The CIA’s Quest to Control the Government – Book Review

Meticulously sourced and rife with documentation from beginning to end, DESTROYING AMERICA details the CIA’s quest to control the government and shows how one Presidential Administration after another supported the egregious corruption in the CIA and government. It shows how Members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, are intricately involved in CIA corruption.

CIA officers and CIA “assets” have been targeted for the Presidency in Presidential races from 1964 to 2016, and there have been CIA officers in Congress since the earlyi950s.

Over the years, CIA officers in Congress have risen through the ranks to become some of the most powerful and influential members of Congress. They have ranged across the political spectrum from the far left to the far right…


An interesting side note based on information that Colonel Towner brought up. Obama’s mother worked for USAID. The CIA funded foreign students that they radicalized and used as part of their Werewolf Units in their home countries. Now think of Barack Obama, Sr. and Lolo Soetoro. BOTH were subversives. SEE: 2010

The Story of Obama: All in the Company

DEAR MAGA: Open Thread 20250311 ❀ Tuesday Placeholder ❀ Hidden Colors, Rainbows and MAPs

We continue to mourn the untimely passing of our beloved compatriot DePat, known in real life as Susie Sampson, and also as author Patricia Holden.

Until we have a dedicated author for the Tuesday daily open thread, I will be posting “placeholders” like this one, which may or may not be spiced up with additional content.

Gudthots will take DePat’s old Thursday daily open thread.

Please notify me in advance if you would like to post anything in lieu of the Tuesday placeholder. We welcome all content – the topic doesn’t matter.

W

Hidden Colors, Rainbows and MAPs

Follow The Dichroic Rabbit – From the Roman Empire, through Cabal Kingmakers, to Ukrainian Bio Labs and Beyond

This is going to be a weird, if not wild post. And I’m bringing a friend!

In some ways it’s very “Gail” – in other ways it’s very “Valerie”. It’s also very “Steve” and a bit “para59r”. But I will try to keep it as WOLFM00N as possible, whatever that means.

Valerie said THIS on Thursday, March 6, 2025:

My response explains this very post and it’s odd title:

I will try to get through this quickly.

This cup Valerie is asking about, is well-described on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycurgus_Cup

By Chappsnet – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=142942126

The most magnificent of all ancient #Roman ‘cage cups’ is the 4th c. CE Lycurgus Cup, made of dichroic glass. In normal light, the glass appears milky green, when backlit, it glows a ruby red. The effect was achieved by adding silver and gold nanoparticles to the glass.

By Brit_Mus_13sept10_brooches_etc_044.jpg: Johnbodderivative work: Johnbod (talk) – Brit_Mus_13sept10_brooches_etc_044.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11549754

When viewed in reflected light, as in this flash photograph, the cup’s dichroic glass is green in colour, whereas when viewed in transmitted light, the glass appears red.

Dichroism – literally “two colors” – can come from a variety of physical phenomena.

LINK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichroism

The first time I ever saw this, during high school, it was also red-green dichroism – from chlorophyll. Yes – a simple suspension of chlorophyll in aqueous alcohol looks vivid green, until a flashlight is shown directly into it, in which case it glows RED from fluorescence of the chlorophyll.

Many phenomena will give rise to dichroism, which can be of many different kinds and degrees. All that is needed is for there to be a change in the spectrum of light leaving an object, which somehow depends on the specifics of the illumination of the object. “Di-” is used loosely, in that dichroism can include two or more – and includes “tri-“, “quatra-“, and even “poly-“.

Even more confusing, dichroism can refer to different lights being shined ONTO something together.

Steve has mentioned circular polarization of light. This can be used to investigate stereochemistry (the “handedness” of molecules) using a phenomenon/technique called circular dichroism. A.k.a. CD.

LINK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_dichroism

To be almost too brief, CD is this. An equal mix of right-handed and left-handed light (thus dichroic) will notice the difference between right-handed and left-handed molecules, as well as the difference of either of these from unhanded molecules. CD can thus tell you about the handedness of a sample.

Note that an actual human heart is “handed”, but an idealized one is not.

So – “dichroism” is used two ways – for both (1) two (or more) kinds of light leaving an object, and (2) a sort of reverse scenario, in which two kinds of light impinge upon an object simultaneously. Wikipedia states it like this:

In optics, a dichroic material is either one which causes visible light to be split up into distinct beams of different wavelengths (colours) (not to be confused with dispersion), or one in which light rays having different polarizations are absorbed by different amounts.[1]

So now let’s answer, very specifically, Valerie’s original question: how does the Lycurgus Cup work? Well, I found a great answer. I don’t regard this as “settled science” – but this is very likely close to the truth.

LINK: https://everything.explained.today/Lycurgus_Cup/

Here is the relevant part.

The dichroic effect is achieved by making the glass with tiny proportions of nanoparticles of gold and silver dispersed in colloidal form throughout the glass material. The process used remains unclear, and it is likely that it was not well understood or controlled by the makers, and was probably discovered by accidental “contamination” with minutely ground gold and silver dust. The glass-makers may not even have known that gold was involved, as the quantities involved are so tiny; they may have come from a small proportion of gold in any silver added (most Roman silver contains small proportions of gold), or from traces of gold or gold leaf left by accident in the workshop, as residue on tools, or from other work. The very few other surviving fragments of Roman dichroic glass vary considerably in their two colours.[7]

The glass

It is estimated that to a conventionally composed Roman glass flux 330 parts per million of silver and 40 of gold were added: “These particles were precipitated as colloids and form a silver-gold alloy. When viewed in reflected light the minute metallic particles are just coarse enough to reflect enough of the light without eliminating the transmission. In transmitted light the fine particles scatter the blue end of the spectrum more effectively than the red end, resulting in red transmission, and this is the colour observed. Since it is impossible that the Roman artisans managed to add these incredibly low levels of silver and gold to the volume of the glass used to make the vessel deliberately, the levels were probably added at higher levels to a larger volume of glass-melt, and increasingly diluted by adding more glass.”[8] The particles are only about 70 nanometers across,[9] and embedded in the glass, so they cannot be seen by optical microscopy, and a transmission electron microscope is needed instead.[10] At this size they approach the size of the wavelengths of visible light, and a surface plasmon resonance effect takes place.[11]

TL;DR – the highly dilute metal nanoparticles interact with visible light, scattering blue and transmitting red. The result is greenish reflection and reddish transmission.

One other thing.

Although I can’t get into the details, my early learning about dichroisim is connected to my knowledge of “occultish things in academic science”. Thus, I was immediately calling for backup by Suspicious Cat as soon as I knew we were talking about dichroic glass.

Suspicious Cat - TheseTruths.jpg
Suspicious Cat – TheseTruths.jpg

The fact that the artistic subject of the Lycurgus Cup is mythology about what Aubergine refers to as “the old gods” is just a hint of the attraction this stuff holds for the more idolatrous humans.

Check out the cup’s recent history. COUGH, COUGH, COUGH.

The early history of the cup is unknown, and it is first mentioned in print in 1845, when a French writer said he had seen it “some years ago, in the hands of M. Dubois”.[41] This is probably shortly before it was acquired by the Rothschild family.[42] Certainly Lionel de Rothschild owned it by 1857, when the touring Gustav Friedrich Waagen saw it in his collection and described it as “barbaric and debased”.[43] In 1862 Lionel lent it to an exhibition at what is now the Victoria and Albert Museum, after which it virtually fell from scholarly view until 1950. In 1958, Victor, Lord Rothschild sold it to the British Museum for £20,000, £2,000 of which was donated by the Art Fund (then the NACF).[44]

The cup forms part of the museum’s Department of Prehistory and Europe rather than the Greece and Rome Department, and was previously on display, lit from behind, in Room 50. In 2015 it was on display with the new display of the Rothschild donation of the Waddesdon Bequest in Room 2A, with a changing internal lighting source that shows the colour change very effectively, though only one side of the cup can be seen. By October 2015 it was back in the re-opened Room 41.

While Room 41, where it was then displayed, was closed for refurbishment, from November 2012 to August 2013 it was on display with other British Museum pieces at The Art Institute of Chicago‘s Jaharis Galleries of Greek, Roman and Byzantine Art,[45] where it was very effectively displayed in a free-standing case, lit from above with changing light so that the colour change was clearly visible.[46][47] It is considered able to travel to important exhibitions and in 2008 was exhibited in “Reflecting Antiquity, Modern Glass Inspired by Ancient Rome” at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, in 2003 at the Hayward Gallery in London in “‘Saved! 100 Years of the National Art Collections Fund”, and in 1987 in “Glass of the Caesars” in the British Museum, Cologne, Milan, and Rome.[48]

Oh, this fascination with dichroism doesn’t just start or end with the Roths.

Consider scarab beetles, many of which show dichroism due to nanostructural layering in their shell materials. Here is the rainbow scarab:

Interestingly, there is good evidence that such beetles, in which increasing color has to be balanced with decreases in structural strength, have undergone evolution of their shells primarily for color, rather than strength.

LINK: https://news.vt.edu/articles/2021/06/eng-research-beetle-shell-062021.html

And then I read this on Wikipedia.

The corporate headquarters of Amazon.com in Seattle, Washington, incorporates dichroic glass into the exterior of its high-rise building, reflecting light into various colors that depend on the time of day.[9]

The Museum at Prairiefire in Overland Park, Kansas,[10] which opened in May 2014, is devoted primarily to natural history. It borrows displays from larger museums and hosts at least two major traveling exhibits per year. Its striking glass exterior was designed to reference the intentional prairie fires[11] that were an integral part of farming life in Kansas. The glass is dichroic, which means that its color changes with the light of the day. The museum is itself a work of art.[12]

OK – let’s take a look at these.

Amazon first.

The dichroic glass is basically one tower in one building in a huge complex located in Arlington, VA, located conveniently close to CIA and Babylon On The Potomac. This is the SECOND headquarters campus of Amazon, after the first in Seattle.

The 22-story Jasper tower (left) features an iridescent, color-changing coating and the 22-story Merlin tower (right) is designed with metal fins and a color-shifting pearlescent coating. Photo by Jim Cunningham.

LINK: https://www.glassmagazine.com/news/vitro-glass-helps-amazon-meet-its-daylighting-goals

NOW – allow this video to inform you about the whole complex.

Have I seen that helical building before? I could swear I have! And I’m not talking about the POOP EMOJI!

LINK: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tower+of+babel&t=brave&iax=images&ia=images

OK, enough fun with the Bezos Site Number Two.

Let’s look at this other thing.

The Museum at Prairiefire?

Nice dichroic glass they’ve got all over the place, in a kind of mock stained-glass way.

Notice the “optical illusion” windows, suggesting a third dimension that is not there. The symbol of Meta (Zuckerberg, Facebook) does a similar thing. See if you can visualize in your head, how the weird symbol makes more sense in 3 dimensions.

Prairiefire appears to be the name of a development district in the Eastern Kansas suburb of Overland Park, including a park, a wetlands, a shopping center, and the aforementioned museum.

ANYWAY…..

Surely they wouldn’t refer to themselves as “The MAP” – right? Because that would be…….

https://visitthemap.org

OK. But surely they wouldn’t advertise any connection to the company that built biolabs in Ukraine, connected to pedophile Hunter Biden and his USAID-partnered (yes, read the link) company Metabiota or whatever – I mean…..

OK, yeah, but surely they wouldn’t throw all this stuff together with “let’s attract kids with dinosaurs” and…..

OK, but they DEFINITELY don’t have a huge focus on a preschool program for…..

LOOK! Just because you wander near any of this “naturalist/materialist-interesting” stuff, and you kick it over, and a bunch of things that sure look like creepy-crawlies run out in all directions, doesn’t mean we need to be suspicious – right? RIGHT?

OK. I am just gonna be blunt. This operation in Kansas may be perfectly innocent – as pure as the driven snow. And with my love for natural history, I am bound to think it’s a wonderful place. I have always loved dinosaur museums for kids. But my grandkids ain’t goin’ inside this place (or even outside) unless I am sitting IN THAT CLASSROOM watching every dang second of every dang minute of every dang day. Because if this place ain’t CATNIP FOR PEDOS, I don’t know what is.

SIGH.

And with that, I yield the floor to my fellow QTreepers. Have a great Tuesday!

W

Don’t visit the map! Buy the globe!

Dear KMAG: 20250310 Trump Won Three Times ❀ Open Topic

Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.

AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.

This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).

And yes, it’s Monday…again.

But we WILL get through it!

We will always remember Wheatie,

Pray for Trump,

Yet have fun,

and HOLD ON when things get crazy!

We will follow the RULES of civility that Wheatie left for us:

Wheatie’s Rules:

  1. No food fights.
  2. No running with scissors.
  3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.

And while we engage in vigorous free speech, we will remember Wheatie’s advice on civility, non-violence, and site unity:

“We’re on the same side here so let’s not engage in friendly fire.”

“Let’s not give the odious Internet Censors a reason to shut down this precious haven that Wolf has created for us.”

If this site gets shut down, please remember various ways to get back in touch with the rest of the gang:

Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.

Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.

We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.

Joe Biden didn’t win.

And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.

Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:

wallflower

noun, adjective

  • a color which is yellowish red
  • an attribute of being colored yellowish red
  • a light purple color marketed by Sherwin-Williams
  • a genus of flowering plants, Erysimum, in the family Brassicaceae (mustards)
  • a shy, unassuming person

Used in a sentence

Whether wallflower is yellow-to-red or purple seems to depend upon the circumstances.

Shown in a picture

Shown in a different picture

But wait! Some wallflowers show the other wallflower!

MUSIC!

Wallflowers. Just can’t get away from them!

But wait! There’s moar!

THE STUFF

So what do you think about going to Mars? I can tell you, the crowd at Trump’s inauguration was incredibly enthusiastic. I was cheering BIG TIME. But let’s look at it more critically – both sides of the question. We’ve learned from Trump – always cover the downside. Listen to the critics, and think about what they say.

Still enthusiastic about Mars? I am! Ask me why!

Just sayin’!

And remember…….

Until victory, have faith!

And trust the big plan, too!

And as always….

ENJOY THE SHOW

W

American Stories: When in the Course of human events – Part 9

Since I brought up the subject of Shays’ Rebellion in Part 8, we might as well dig into the subject briefly. Most of us were never educated in school about the truth that not all of our citizens got along after defeating the British. Everything did not just become hunky dory within our nation’s boundaries. At times, the independent and contrary nature of some could not be appeased or led into compromise easily. Shays’ Rebellion is one of those situations that was brought on by real injustice. It dealt with the unequal and unfair administration of the law within the citizenry. The law and economic system themselves were still in development. As a result ethical issues that had gone unresolved caused great tension. It was clear that there was still a lot of pent up anger and bitterness that carried over from British oppression due to the presence of the loyalists still living and controlling governments and businesses within the borders. It led to violence and angry confrontations at times.

In other words, people being people.

Shays’ Rebellion

Rather than repeat the words of others, I have provided two good links. I urge you to read them and the third link further down in the body.

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/shays-rebellion

https://www.thoughtco.com/shays-rebellion-causes-effects-4158282

As things generally work, we can now go back and see that without the rebellion, there may never have been the compromise and reconciliation that followed. Lessons learned in central national governance and the states paying back accrued war debts led to the termination of the Articles of Confederation instead of amending same within the same Convention that later produced the U. S. Constitution.

Whether this last point was a wise path to follow or not from my viewpoint will be addressed in a future part. But as a spoiler, quickly throwing the baby out with the bathwater may not have been the best of ideas. However, the Federalists were hellbent on getting it done the way it eventually did.

Many American citizens, primarily farmers, lost their property and assets unfairly in deference to those who had the upper hand – the merchants, bankers and wealthy who had the support of government leaders and many politicians. The truth is that few states had the capacity to pay wages that were past due to members of the Continental military during the war. The new federal government did not have the coin either. Yes, it is factually correct to state that the new federal and state governments of that day welched on their legal responsibilities to pay war participants what they were due. In Massachusetts (Taxachusetts) this led to many losing their farms and assets to debtors who were supported by the government and judiciary. To get a feel for how the fighters were to be compensated read the summary link below.

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/soldier-pay-american-revolution

Note that Washington and Morris paid a lot of the wages during the war out of their own wealth at one critical point. Many of the wealthy founding fathers did likewise.

The situation in Massachusetts was the stuff that the Crown and Parliament would do that the same people in authority on the winning side of the war and this rebellion had fought against. That is the ugly truth that is glossed over frequently by historians and certainly our federal government in its records and archives.

It sucked big time.

Walk in the shoes of the common man for a time. You are a simple farmer in that patriot inspired era and region. You risk your life, family, property, community – everything – to a belief that the colonies should seek independence from their oppressors who taxed everything that moved and treated colonists as their lessers. You endure great hardship, lose friends and family, and have your home destroyed by the vengeful Brits. Adding to the misery you never receive the full wages the state and your colonial government promise to pay for your voluntary service to your country; while newer recruits later in the war receive a larger bounty than you did to sign up.

But you let it all go because you now live in a free country that is not taxed to death. You really have no way to take on the authorities to receive your back pay anyway.

You soon learn that you have been put on the clock to pay merchant debts as well as accrued colony/state taxes from the past war debts are still due. While working hard in your return to private life and trying to make a living on your farm, the politicians are busy passing laws to tax you at high rates to pay back state war related debts as well as other commercial debts to the wealthy merchants. This eventually causes the loss of your property because you have no funds to pay as well as dealing with the ensuing family hardships. Adding more injury to the insult, not only do you lose your farm to foreclosure, but you are sent to a filthy, dungeon like debtors prison for failure to pay.

You might become more than a little angry over it all as we would. Pizzed may be a better word.

The war debts and bills the merchants and governments owed to others were real. But so was the back pay that was owed to the military members who actually fought the war and enabled those merchants to stay alive and in business. Pensions for widows and disabled veterans were given by the new government and it was the right thing to do. Not paying all the other men who actually fought the war what they were due was a huge violation of trust.

You become aware that the state government had the ability all along to forge a compromise to provide relief to you and the people as well as assist the merchants by amending the terms of the debt repayment. All they had to do was print more money, pay you the wages from the war and reduce the onerous taxes. This would have temporarily increased inflation as we know, which the merchants fought against – caring only for themselves and not for the people that saved their bacon. I guess the mafia types the government borrowed the war expenditures from did not agree to this compromise. They created a situation that allowed the wealthy predators to bottom feed on the foreclosed properties of their lessers. Their former British oppressors would be proud (and were) of their exploits since many were Brit loyalists, still owing their allegiance to the Crown that had been defeated.

We would understand it this way today: Who needs a destructive wildfire when you can just use excessive war debt and taxes to accomplish the same evil results? It is a parallel path with what Clinton/Soetoro/Biden had America following before MAGA and America First saved the day. Create a debt quagmire through war and other means that cannot be repaid that causes misery and huge wealth transfers to the already wealthy and dictators. A tale as old as world history.

Never forget that truth, fellow patriots.

Back to the story. In response to the highly volatile conditions and unrest the state government did nothing of substance to assist and permitted the destruction of their own citizens and former war fighters. They revealed who they were. Most Democrats of today would be very proud of them.

However, back in those days it led to Shays’ Rebellion and other conflicts in the new nation. In these days it led to J6 and November 5, 2024. If there is anything we have learned as America First MAGA movement participants it is that things are not as they have been represented by those with nefarious agendas.

As we learn from the linked and other accounts, the vast majority of rebel participants received amnesty or were pardoned to restore order. Which was an obvious acknowledgement by those in authority that the participants had valid reasons to do what they did. The Governor (Bowdoin) and Lt. Governor (Lincoln) who failed the people were tossed out of office. The new legislature cut the taxes and placed a moratorium on debts. This led to better economic conditions and lessening of unrest.

Knowing this, does it help explain why the vote was so close to approve the Constitution after the Massachusetts Compromise was reached?

What should have happened immediately after the war ended, finally happened after the common man rose up once again against their new oppressors. Those actions brought an end to this unfortunate chapter in American history.

However, lemons were turned into lemonade when Shays’ Rebellion and other significant rebellious events happened throughout the former colonies who had become states. People with various interests and beliefs realized they needed to reunite together to help the young republic succeed. Resolving the conflicts and seeing the need to create more unity led to this revered leader coming out of retirement as the new U. S. Constitution was enacted.

Our thanks go to Daniel Shays and others who fought for what was right and good for the common man just as our appreciation does for the America First MAGA patriots of today. Time to discuss more signers.

Richard Stockton

This son of Quaker and wealthy landowner, John Stockton, was born in 1730 in the Princeton, NJ area. Richard Stockton attended Samuel Finley’s Nottingham Academy and went on to graduate from the College of New Jersey (now Princeton U) at the age of 18. He began the study of law under noted attorney, David Ogden, and was admitted to the bar in 1754. He was highly respected in the profession. He married his wife, Annis Boudinot, a noted poet and the sister of Elias Boudinot, a well known statesman of the colony. They had six children together. One of his daughters, Julia, later married Declaration signer Benjamin Rush. Through the years, Stockton became a close friend of George Washington. He was physically tall, considered handsome and very well spoken within society. When touring England, Scotland and Ireland in 1766, he was invited to attend events with the King and Queen, who were impressed with his high character and abilities.

He toured Scotland and was invited to visit with the noblemen and society. During those times he and his future son-in-law Rush, who was a medical student in Scotland at the time, met with Rev. John Witherspoon to try to convince him to become the President of the College of New Jersey, a position he had previously declined. He subsequently agreed and came to the colonies to lead the school. Ten years later, Witherspoon stood with Stockton and Rush as they all signed the Declaration of Independence.

Back in the colonies Stockton had little interest in politics and government for many years.  Per Wiki he once wrote, “The public is generally unthankful, and I never will become a Servant of it, till I am convinced that by neglecting my own affairs I am doing more acceptable Service to God and Man.”

In 1768 he was appointed to the royal executive council of New Jersey and later to the Supreme Court. As the independence movement continued to gain momentum, in 1774 he drafted a plan for self rule of the colonies while still owing allegiance to the Crown. It was rejected and Stockton faced a choice he had to make. He chose the colonies and independence. He was deeply moved by the arguments of John Adams when it came time to approve the document and sign it. Rather than holding offices offered to him back in NJ, he chose to remain active and a member of Congress. He was sent along with fellow signer, George Clymer, to inspect the northern Continental Army for its needs. They reported back to John Hancock of the dire need for nearly everything. He went on to actively solicit basic clothing and shoes that were severely needed for the warfighters, some of whom were barelegged and barefoot.

He learned of the British invasion of NJ and quickly went home to move his family about thirty miles away. However, he was still captured and treated horribly. He stayed locked in leg irons without sufficient clothing and food in the dreaded New York City’s Provost Prison where 12,000 men died as well as on nearby prison ships. After George Washington became aware, he protested his treatment to British Gen. Howe. Stockton was given a parole as long as he did not participate in the war and was released. He was too sick to participate anyway. He was severely malnourished and near death from which he never fully recovered. When he arrived back at his home, he found it had been plundered and nearly destroyed by Gen. Cornwallis and his men who had stayed in the home during the war. He survived only through the personal assistance of family and friends. Over time he became strong enough to return to work some in his law practice and taught a couple of students. However, he died in 1781 before being able to experience the end of the war and our nation’s independence. Even his death was excruciatingly painful as he had developed a lip cancer that grew into his throat before he passed.

Stockton’s wife, Annis, continued in correspondence for the rest of her life with their friend, George Washington, including writing a poem about Cornwallis’ surrender to Washington. An excerpt of Washington’s letter of appreciation stated, “…This address, from a person of your refined taste and elegance of expression, affords a pleasure beyond my powers of utterance, and I have only to lament that the hero of your pastoral is not more deserving of your pen; but the circumstance shall be placed among the happiest events of my life. I have the honor to be, madam you’re most obedient and respectful servant, G. Washington.” 

The respect for the greatness and commitment of Richard Stockton was exhibited by a statue of him being placed in Statuary Hall in the Capitol Building in Washington, DC. He was one of only six signers so honored. His home of Morven became the New Jersey Governor’s Mansion from 1954-1981. His eldest son went on to become a NJ senator and four generations of Stockton’s served in Congress.

Again, a man of wealth and high position in society who could have avoided the personal destruction that he lived through by simply staying uninvolved, gave his all for America and freedom for all of his countrymen and all of us who have followed. He deserved far better than he received. He was the definition of an American Patriot.

James Smith

James Smith was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1719. He and his Presbyterian faith based family immigrated from there when he was ten years old and lived in the Cheshire County, PA. His father became a successful farmer. He was informally educated by local clergy, then educated more at Philadelphia Academy (Penn), and later apprenticed in law under his brother, George. He was admitted to the PA bar at the age of 26. He moved with his brother to the more frontier area of Cumberland County and spent his time surveying. After about five years he moved back to the more populated city of York to practice law full time.

At the age of 41 he married Eleanor Armor and they had five children. With his surveying experience, he was highly recognized in the area for his work with property transfers in his law practice. He invested into a local iron foundry that failed and cost him greatly financially.

As the independence movement expanded, Smith became an advocate. He attended the 1774 provincial assembly and offered a paper on the considerations of the relationship between the Colonies and Great Britain. He recommended boycotting British goods, which he believed would force British merchants to pressure their government to reduce taxes and oppression in the colonies. Later that year he organized a local militia and was chosen its Captain. With the British continuing their oppressive activities, the unit quickly grew to battalion size. The men wanted him to be the Commander, but he declined due to his age (55), preferring a younger man take the role. Even so, most accounts had him serving in action during the war.

He was elected as a delegate to the state convention in 1775 and said the following, “…if the British administration should determine by force to effect a submission to the late arbitrary acts of the British parliament, in such a situation, we hold it our indispensable duty to resist such force, and at every hazard to defend the rights and liberties of America.”

Bold. Very bold.

Smith was considered to have similar beliefs concerning independence as both Adams, Sherman, both Morris, Rush, Floyd, Lee and Patrick Henry. After agreeing to the Declaration’s contents and signing, he returned to York with a copy to read to citizens in the town square. He continued to serve in the Congress and state until 1778. He was elected Brigadier General of the state militia in 1781 and resumed his law practice as the war ended. He worked in the practice until retiring at age 81. He passed away in 1806 at the age of 86. His wife passed away in 1818.

James Smith was another in a long list of devoted American patriot Declaration signers that gave his full commitment, voice and actions to the cause of liberty and freedom.

Thomas Nelson, Jr.

Born in Yorktown, VA in 1738, Thomas Nelson, Jr. was born into Virginia aristocracy and privately educated in England. He graduated from Christ’s College at Cambridge. His parents were William Nelson, a former governor of the state and Elizabeth Carter Burwell, daughter of former acting governor of the state, Robert “King” Carter and the widow of Nathaniel Burwell. He was the grandson of Thomas “Scotch Tom” Nelson who immigrated from England and became a successful businessman and politician.

He returned from England and assisted his father in operating their plantations, which utilized slave labor. He married Lucy Grymes Burwell and helped manage the estates left to her sons with the death of her first husband.

It was soon after his return that he was elected as a representative to the House of Burgesses in 1761 at age 23. He served 6 terms, learning the political ropes. As the state moved more toward independence he was elected to a number of their state conventions preceding the war. He played a role in the development of the state’s Constitution as well as serving in the Continental Congress and signing the Declaration of Independence. He was later forced to take time away to recover from an illness in 1778-1779, only to be elected to return there and in state roles in the years that followed. He was one of the thirteen committee members who drafted the Articles of Confederation. He was known to spend large sums of money as well as make loans for the military to have sufficient ammunition and supplies. He gave so much he had very little when he passed away a decade later.

Nelson was a brigadier general of the lower VA militia and later followed Thomas Jefferson as governor of the state. He was in action in the final siege ofYorktown led by General Washington and his troops in combination with General Lafayette and the French army combatants. It is in this battle that Nelson’s legend was solidified.

Neither the American or French army would fire upon Nelson’s home, the Nelson House, where General Cornwallis had his headquarters. This angered Nelson. He publicly offered five guineas (each had a quarter ounce of gold) to the first war fighter to fire a cannon and hit his home. That was enough to get it done. The NPS has placed two cannonballs in the walls where the home was hit. I assume Nelson paid as he stated he would.

That story is all sorts of patriot awesome! He was a real American badazz!

Unfortunately, in 1781 Nelson’s health took a negative turn that forced him to resign as Governor and was succeeded by fellow signer Benjamin Harrison. His health continued to deteriorate over the next four years. He never recovered from the effects of being in the field and fighting the war. He passed away at age 50 in 1789. Nelson County in VA and in KY were named in his honor. His wife, Lucy, passed away at age 87 in 1830. The couple had eleven children together in addition to the son from Lucy’s first marriage.

Thomas Nelson, Jr. died too soon to receive the full benefits of his work in helping to deliver America its independence. However, he will never be forgotten for his leadership and commitment as a great American patriot.

Conclusion

This has been a story of three extraordinary Declaration signers with three very different experiences and conclusions to their lives. They did it for God, country and family. That was the reward. Their wealth and standing in society were cast aside.

Yet, for every Declaration signer there were thousands of common citizens doing their parts against all odds as well. You will not find their busts, statutes, paintings or honors in places of prominence in American institutions and museums. They just did what they needed to do and returned to their lives and families as unsung American patriot heroes.

There is also the truth that not everything went well or fairly for the participants and early citizens of America.

As they say, freedom isn’t free. However, it is well worth the cost to pursue.

Dear MAGA: 20250309 Open Topic

This Rejoice & Praise God 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’s 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 your opinion addresses the issue only, and does not confront or denigrate 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.

Please also consider the Guidelines for posting and discussion printed here: 
https://www.theqtree.com/2019/01/01/dear-maga-open-topic-20190101/

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.”

Elect Angels

When God created the angels, they were all good just like the rest of creation (Genesis 1:31). Angels were holy and faithfully devoted to the Lord, but this changed when Satan rebelled against God (Isaiah 14:12–15; Ezekiel 28:16). Many angels followed Satan’s rebellion and thus became “fallen” angels, or demons (Matthew 25:41; Revelation 12:3–4). In contrast, the angels who remained faithful to the Lord are known as “holy angels” or “elect angels” (Mark 8:38; 1 Timothy 5:21).

The Greek word for “elect” found in 1 Timothy 5:21 refers to being chosen or picked. This would indicate that God chose some angels not to fall with Satan. The same word in the verse, eklekton, is used elsewhere for Christians who are elected and chosen by God in salvation (Romans 8:33; Titus 1:1). The word suggests that the elect angels, like elect people, were chosen by God and cannot lose their elect position. None of the elect angels will rebel against God or lose their chosen status, just as Christians cannot lose their salvation as God’s elect children (John 10:28; Romans 8:38–39). Secure in their standing before the Lord, elect angels cannot sin or go against the commands of God but will remain faithful to the Lord forever.

Of course, the fact that the holy angels are “elect” does not imply they are “saved” in the same way that Christians are. Both angels and Christians are chosen and elected by the Lord, but only humans can experience the new birth, forgiveness, and other aspects of salvation. The elect angels cannot experience forgiveness, since they have never sinned. Furthermore, Jesus died for humanity, not for angels. He took on human flesh and came to save mankind from their sins; His sacrifice was not to save the fallen angels (Hebrews 2:16). Angels “long to look into these things,” and are fascinated by the fact that the Son of God laid down His life to save humans (1 Peter 1:12). In this way, the election of angels is different from the election of Christians.

In addition to calling them “chosen” or “elect” angels, Scripture also designates them as good and “holy angels” (Mark 8:38). Worshipping and serving God are the main purposes of the elect angels (Revelation 7:11). Like Christians, elect angels are servants of God who seek to bring Him glory (Revelation 22:9). God uses the elect angels to carry out His will and to provide ministry to believers (Hebrews 1:14). Throughout history, elect angels have been a part of God’s plan in delivering messages (Daniel 8:16; 9:21; Luke 1:19, 26), carrying out judgment (Genesis 19:13; Psalm 78:49; Revelation 14:17–20), and providing encouragement to God’s people (Acts 27:23).

The elect angels have the special purpose of serving God and doing as He commands. The elect angels minister to believers today, and they will also play a major part in the events of the end times. The power and position of the elect angels are awe-inspiring, but the Bible teaches that Jesus’ followers are more blessed than even they, since believers “have been made complete in Christ, who is the head over every ruler and authority” (Colossians 2:10, BSB).
xhttps://www.gotquestions.org/elect-angels.html

2025·03·08 We Will Have Justice Daily Thread

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

Speaker Johnson: A Reminder.

And MTG is there to help make it stick.

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

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

Are you THAT kind of “Republican”?

Are you Kevin McCarthy lite?

What are you waiting for?

I have a personal interest in this issue.

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

Fun Quote

(HT Aubergine)

This is amazing. This is glorious. Summon a surgeon – it’s been a little over a week and you’re supposed to call the doctor after just four hours.

From Kurt Schlichter, who can certainly write a good rant (https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2025/01/30/trumps-winning-streak-is-totally-discombobulating-the-democrats-n2651308)

Yep, Kurt has noticed that lots of people are getting twanging schadenböners.

And you do not have to be male to get this kind of böner.

Hat tip to Scott (I think–if it wasn’t Scott it was 4GodAndCountry) for this video, which implies a LOT of schadenböners in our future.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

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

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

Spot (i.e., paper) Prices

Last week:

Gold $2,858.10
Silver $31.20
Platinum $953.00
Palladium $945.00
Rhodium $5,100.00
FRNSI* 137.261-
Gold:Silver 91.606-

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

Gold $2,911.50
Silver $32.60
Platinum $974.00
Palladium $934.00
Rhodium $6,000.00
FRNSI* 139.844-
Gold:Silver 89.310-

Palladium is below platinum again…but look at rhodium, which has gone up nine hundred bucks!

The people who bloviate on this sort of thing for a living (if this is all I did I’d starve to death) claim the precious metals are “consolidating” with gold in the 2910-2920 range while the stock indices go down. At least silver is up relative to gold!

*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.

Latest Flerfer Goofiness

OK unlike last week I’m going to try to supply some actual content. (Last week was nonstop busy.)

Our friend Fkatzoid is back. Watch him duck and weave when he’s asked where the south pole is (at 16:45).

Will Duffy is trying to make the point that whether you head south from Africa, South America, or New Zealand, you end up at the same place when you get to the south pole. According to the Gleasons’s Map, however, the South Pole isn’t a point, it’s a circle approximately 60,000 miles in circumference, so that shouldn’t happen. Either Fkatzoid is an even bigger idiot than he showed himself to be last time, or he’s trying very hard to evade having this pointed out to his audience.

Later on at about 2:31:45…apparently Lisbeth (who went to Antarctica) is on the verge of joining Mark Sargent’s channel; MC Toon begs her not to ruin her life doing so.

Just a few minutes later, you see someone named JK trying to find a video proving that people who try to go to Antarctica will be intercepted by any of a number of different navies and turned back as soon as they sail across 60 S latitude. He claims there are many of these videos; he eventually finds the one Will Duffy expected–taken in the Bass Strait between Tasmania and mainland Australia, nowhere near Antarctica. Listen to McToon’s rant at 2:45:22.

Here’s another debate with Duffy destroying someone I’ve never heard of named Nathan Thompson. (Not to be confused with Nathan “where are the guns” Oakley.)

Two Birds…One Stone

OK this one is going to seem like geology…then physics…then back to geology. It’s a good illustration of how all of human knowledge about the natural world is interconnected. Sometimes great progress is made when people in two different fields get together; sometimes a new discipline even is formed–recent work has done much to highlight the effects of living organisms on the geology of the Earth…yes, our rocks would be different if there were no life on earth (and there’d be no geologists to notice, of course).

An Extremely Inadequate Intro to Mineralogy

Let’s take a very brief and incomplete (and likely incompetent, as I am out over my skis here) look at mineralogy.

I’ve talked about rocks a lot but not so much about what they’re made of. If you look closely–perhaps it will take a microscope–at an igneous rock (one that cooled from the molten state) you’ll see it’s made up of a bunch of different kinds of crystals. Crystals form when a chemical compound comes out of solution and the individual molecules line up in a regular array.

Some rocks are just one big crystal. Others are multiple crystals of the same thing.

The compounds that make the crystals are minerals (and one of their characteristics is how the crystals are shaped).

What are those compounds? Let’s set the stage a bit. If you take the outer layer of the Earth, the Earth’s crust, and analyze a completely average piece of it…it’s 46.1 percent oxygen by weight. Oxygen! There is much, much, much more oxygen beneath your feet than above your head in the air. Oxygen is also the third most abundant element in the universe as a whole–after hydrogen and helium.

Coming in second at 28.2 percent is silicon. Then aluminum at 8.23%, iron at 5.63%, calcium at 4.15%, sodium at 2.36%, magnesium at 2.33% potassium at 2.09%, titanium at 0.565%…and everything else is at 1/7th of a percent or less. At the bottom end you have rhenium at 7/10ths of one part per billion. (However two gases, krypton and xenon, also show up at even lower percentages, and a bunch of transient radioactive elements are lower still than that.)

The ones at the top of the list don’t ever show up in pure elemental or “native” form; they’re pretty reactive. Minerals will be largely (but very luckily for us, not completely) formed of these elements.

The elements in general are divided into groups according to the “Goldschmidt Classification.” The groups are “lithophile” (rock loving), “Siderophile” (iron loving), “chalcophile” (bronze loving), and “atmophile” (atmosphere loving). The group an element is in is a huge determiner of its fate. Lithophile and chalcophile elements both appear predominantly near the Earth’s surface, in the crust; with the chalcophile elements often combining with sulfur. Siderophile elements largely sank, with almost all of the iron, towards the Earth’s core.

(There is a very slick wikipedia graphic for this, a periodic table colored by Goldschmidt classification…but it’s actually a table rather than an image and I was unsuccessful in getting it copied over here. Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldschmidt_classification )

There are officially 6,118 mineral species known to man today. Minerals must be naturally occurring and forming by natural or geological processes, must be a solid substance (with the exception of native mercury). Water and carbon dioxide are not minerals even when they show up embedded in rocks, but water ice in glaciers is a mineral. A mineral must have a well defined crystal structure. (This ends up excluding things like obsidian which don’t have a crystal structure.) And the chemical composition must be well defined. However, that could include mixtures of similar compounds; sometimes one element will substitute for another of similar size and chemistry to one extent or another.

There are a number of different ways minerals can be classified, based on hardness, color, crystalline structure, cleavage (i.e. which planes it will split on most cleanly), specific gravity (galena, a lead ore, is very dense, for instance–over seven times that of water whereas the typical rock is in the 2.5-3.5 range)…and by chemistry. But this is far from straightforward, since nothing is pure. For instance a mineral whose structure is largely silicon will often have an aluminum atom substituted for the silicon; sometimes this is a regular substitution, making a distinct chemical series.

Minerals fall into a number of different groups; the most common by far is silicates; these are minerals formed by different arrangements of the [SiO4]4- tetrahedron, one silicon atom surrounded by four oxygen atoms.

This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, after all oxygen and silicon make up most of rocks. There are a simply staggering number of ways to combine these tetrahedra at the corners (where an oxygen atom will end being shared by two tetrahedra); chains, rings, lattices…just for instance:

The most basic of these is quartz, consisting of nothing but silicon and oxygen. Since each oxygen atom is shared by two silicon atoms, the formula ends up being SiO2.

Quartz, when absolutely pure, is clear as glass. Different impurities will give it colors, smoky quartz and amethyst being examples, but there are many more.

And in some cases other elements are interspersed with the tetrahedra, or sometimes the silicon is partially replaced by other elements. This can alter the structure as well as the composition.

The most common of the silicates are a grouping called the feldspars, where Al3+ substitutes for the Si4+, but this creates a charge imbalance that requires other elements added in as cations. You end up with [AlSi3O8]– or [Al2Si2O8]2-. In other cases silicates can form in sheets, like mica.

If you haven’t realized this by now, it turns out that silicates are bewilderingly complex. For a deep dive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicate_mineral.

In other groups we have native elements. For example gold, silver, and copper appear in native form as nuggets. There are also platinum nuggets. But also there are diamonds and graphite, both forms of native carbon. Sulfur also appears near volcanic vents. And in many cases the nuggets aren’t pure but are alloys, but still a lump of metal, rather than a “rock.”

Next we have sulfides, compounds of metals and sulfur, famously iron pyrite (fools gold), red cinnabar (a mercury ore). Sometimes tellurium, arsenic, or selenium will substitute for some or even all of the sulfur.

Oxides are metals combined with oxygen, such as hematite (iron), bauxites (aluminum), magnetite (iron again).

Halides are those where a halogen (fluorine, chlorine, bromine, iodine) is the main anion; table salt is the most common example, with chlorine combined with sodium.

Carbonate minerals have a carbonate [CO3]2- group in them. They will react with acids; so field geologists will often have a small vial of acid to test for them. The most common is calcium carbonate…also known as calcite, the main component of limestone. This is weakly soluble in water, leading to the formation of cave systems.

There are sulfates (distinct from sulfides mentioned above) with the sulfate anion, [SO4]2-, combined with something else.

The last common group is the phosphates, with a [PO4]3- unit, combined with something else. These minerals are what our bones and teeth are made out of.

It’s a gigantic mess, honestly; and it gets more and more complicated when it turns out that a mineral can be a mixture of, say, two different sulfates mixed together; the formula ends up including a bracket with two or three different atoms specified because they are intermixed in some proportion.

I have not even scratched the surface of this topic (and those familiar with hardness testing will see the pun). I may not have said anything wrong in this section, but even if we’re that fortunate, I’m sure a real mineralogist would find much to complain about, important things left out, inconsistent “depth” of the dives I took, and so on. I know I said next to nothing about crystal structure and I may try to rectify that some day.

Back to the Historical Narrative

OK so back to the story: By the mid 1800s geology had made huge strides to systematize the variety of rocks and landscapes we see here on Earth. Geologists had even developed the ability to describe what had happened in the past in some arbitrarily picked location. Glaciers, lakes, oceans, desert…all had left telltale signs in the rock. They saw a world of mostly slow change…but with the occasional disasters, local in scope not worldwide.

They had even realized the Earth must be far older than previously thought; the events they could read in the rocks simply could not have happened fast enough to fit within a few thousand years of time.

Impressive work. There were obviously a lot of unsolved problems (like how it could be possible that former sea floor bottom ended up high in the Alps), but still a lot learned.

Physics and astronomy (closely associated with each other) were pretty much the most successful and advanced branches of scientific knowledge. Were astronomers and physicists at least somewhat impressed with what geologists had come up with?

Perhaps but in one key respect the answer was probably more like, “You gotta be shitting me.”

You see the physicists and astronomers of the mid 1800s couldn’t possibly see how the Sun could be old; if the Sun weren’t old neither could the Earth be old. There was simply no way to power the sun for those lengths of time. However the geologic evidence was simply overwhelming.

Beyond suspecting that geologists were smoking something that was distinctly not a mineral (and vice versa from the geologists’ point of view), there was little that could be done. Tons of hard evidence (i.e., rocks) vs. quite well established kinetics and thermal physics. Neither of them could be shaken.

So what was the cause of this disconnect?

In 1862, William Thomson (1st Baron Kelvin…after whom the Kelvin scale is named), published calculations that assumed the Earth had started out completely molten, then computed how long it would take to cool to what we see today. His answer was 20 – 400 million years. OK, that seems a bit low to geologists, but not horrifically so. (He did not account for convection inside the Earth, which would increase the number…nor for other factors he simply couldn’t have imagined, which I’ll get to.)

The big problem was that he also computed how long the sun could have been shining at its present brightness, if it derived all of its energy from gravitational contraction. And that answer was 20 million years. It agreed with his Earth calculation at the low end so that made sense–Thomson probably reasoned that the Earth therefore had to be 20 million years old, but geologists (and biologists) simply couldn’t believe the Earth was that young. Other physicists (Hermann von Helmholz and Simon Newcomb) got similar values of 22 and 18 million years, respectively.

Other possible sources of solar energy were combustion and impacting comets and asteroids. The first was ridiculous. If the entire Sun, huge as it is, were a burning pile of coal, it would be gone within a couple of thousand years at the rate it would have to be burning to be as luminous as it is. This is not even long enough to carry us from the Great Pyramid to Julius Caesar, much less to today. Asteroid impacts sounds more promising, until one realizes there’d have to be so many of them that surely Earth would be catching a lot more of them than we actually are getting. And it was only good enough for a few hundred thousand years. The other flaw was that the sun would be increasing with size as more matter accumulated in it, and that imposed a strict time limit too…after a certain amount of time the Sun would simply be bigger than we see it.

Another tack taken by physicists and astronomers was to use the moon. George H. Darwin (son of Charles “the” Darwin) was an astronomer, figured out that if the Earth and Moon had split apart while still molten, tidal forces would have created our current situation with a 24 hour day after 56 million years. This may not look like it to you, but given the sorts of approximations that both Darwin’s and Kelvin’s calculations enailed, that’s actually close enough to Kelvin’s number that it appeared that both of them were likely on the right track. (When two totally different methods of computation give similar answers, that’s a powerful argument that the actual answer is pretty close to the ones we computed.) Yet another tack, computing how long it took for the oceans to accumulate the salt they contain, based on erosion of rocks, gave an answer of 80-100 million years for the age of the oceans.

When you see an apparent contradiction like this, something is missing from your mental picture. Or perhaps you have a wrong premise. Because an actual contradiction cannot exist.

And, as it turned out, one mineral, when it was discovered, turned out to be the beginning of the path not just to resolving this, but fulfilling another thing that was on the geologists’ wish list–one they never thought they’d get. Like the kid who doesn’t bother asking Santa for the really expensive toy for Christmas…but Santa read his mind and he gets it.

The mineral is an oxide, one called pitchblende. This was first described in 1772 by F. E. Brueckmann. In 1789 M. Klaproth worked with this stuff and discovered the element uranium.

[Uranium oxide has been in mosaic glass from Roman times; clearly they’d found some of the ore and experimented to see what it would do to color glass. However, we don’t have written records of the Romans recognizing it as a distinct material.]

Here’s some nice big crystals of pitchblende:

Uranium was nothing special, just another of a bunch of metals being discovered around this time. Along with such other favorites as cobalt, nickel, manganese, tungsten, niobium, tantalum, and chromium. Curiously, pitchblende also includes some lead, without fail. No such thing as “pure” uranium oxide pitchblende. That seems kind of weird because lead and uranium are chemically quite different.

Flawed analyses led to uranium’s atomic weight being calculated at 156 or so; later on the mistake was realized and the atomic weight was corrected to 238, far above anything else known at the time. Kind of interesting to geeks; no one else cared.

In 1895 this changed. And so did the world.

Henri Becquerel was trying to see if uranium salts, known to fluoresce in visible light, also fluoresced in X ray frequences. (X Rays had been discovered the year before by Röntgen.) [As a reminder, fluorescent things will glow in bright colors for a while after being exposed to ultraviolet light. This can actually be used to identify some minerals. Becquerel wanted to see if they also emitted X-rays alongside the visible light.] He’d expose the compounds to sunlight, then set them next to wrapped photographic plates. If the plates fogged, he would conclude the uranium compounds were giving off X-rays after being “charged” by the sun. Then he had days of cloudy weather, so he put the uranium salts and wrapped plates in a drawer while he awaited sunny days. Ultimately he decided, what the Hell, and developed the plates without exposing the uranium salts to sunlight, and found that they had fogged anyway. Well this was new!! Further experimentation established that uranium emitted strong radiation, all the time, no matter what.

Even more experimentation established that the uranium was turning into lead as it did this. Which is why pitchblende always has some lead in it, even though lead is very different from uranium, chemically.

This led to our current picture of the structure of an atom–which up to then had not been proven to exist. (The final piece of proof was supplied by Albert Einstein in 1905, the Annus Mirabilis)

That is a very long story. Detailed here (9 – End of Classical Physics (Rays & Radiation)):

2021·06·26 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

And here (13 – Ernest Rutherford):

2021·08·07 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

And here (17 – Nuclear Physics Finds a Hammer):

2021·09·04 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

And here (19 – Antimatter):

2021·09·18 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

And here (20 – The Little Neutral One (Neutrinos)):

2021·10·02 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

One key thing to note is that this new “radioactivity” was extremely energy intense, far more so than burning coal, and now we had a hints of a power source that would allow the sun to shine for hundreds of millions–even BILLIONS–of years.

And this is indeed the case, as described here (22 – Powering Stars):

2021·10·23 Joe Biden Didn’t Win Daily Thread

And the world was never the same, because this ultimately led to nuclear weapons.

But for our purposes here, the main effect is that now there was no more contradiction about how old the Earth might be. The Sun could indeed be old enough for an old Earth.

And Now We Can Measure It

Surprise! We also now had a way to measure the age of some rocks, to put actual numbers on things.

To explain this adequately (given the fact that there are charlatans out there who try to fling mud on this, and some of you believe them), I’m going to try to do a Science For Senators review of radioactivity and nuclei. It’s a bit densely packed since I’m not telling a story here. (The story was in all those posts above.)

Matter is made up of atoms, very roughly a hundred picometers (a picometer is a trillionth of a meter) across. Most of this volume is taken up by electrons (which have a negative electrical charge) that are bound to a positively charged nucleus (plural, nuclei). The nucleus contains almost all of the mass of the atom yet occupies a space only a few femtometers (a femtometer is a quadrillionth of a meter across); roughly 1/10,000th the diameter of the atom as a whole.

The nucleus, in turn consists of protons–positively charged particles–and neutrons–neutrally charged particles. Other than the charge, these two particles are very similar to each other–the neutron is just a bit more massive–and they’re collectively referred to as nucleons. (Neutrons are blue, protons red in the diagram below…but they don’t actually have color and they’re not actually shaped like little hard spheres, so the diagram is notional.)

As it turns out the number of protons in a nucleus (the “atomic number”) determines what chemical element it is. One proton: hydrogen. Six: carbon. Eight: oxygen. Twenty-six: iron. Forty-seven: silver. Seventy-nine: gold. Eighty-two: lead. Ninety-two: uranium. (Plus all of the other numbers in between of course.) In order to balance out, an atom will have the same number of electrons as protons, at least until it starts sharing or even giving or taking electrons with, to, or from other atoms–which is what chemistry is all about.

The number of neutrons, on the other hand can vary, even within an element. Just for instance, most uranium nuclei have 146 neutrons in them, but some have only 143. This has very little effect on the chemistry, but it is possible to very painstakingly sort these out. The two different types of uranium are described by their mass numbers, the total number of nucleons. 92+146=238, and 92+143=235; uranium-238 and uranium-235, respectively. These different-weight forms of the same element are called isotopes.

As it turns out radioactivity, when it happens, happens to nuclei. There are two main kinds of radioactivity that matter for our purposes here, alpha decay and beta decay.

Alpha decay is when a large nucleus basically pukes up a helium nucleus (containing two protons and two neutrons–mass number of 4). Since the nucleus gives up two protons in doing this, it changes to another element; this should therefore happen five times as uranium turns to lead, changing the atomic number from 92 to 82. Except that that’s not actually right; it turns out to be eight times. That’s because uranium-238 is becoming lead-206; that’s a difference of 32 mass units and eight alpha decays does that.

The reason the atomic number changes by ten rather than 16 (two per alpha decay) is that there is also beta decay. In this kind of radioactive decay, a neutron turns into a proton, ejecting an electron (which flies off into the distance, so you can basically forget about it) and a neutrino (which flies off away forever, so you can really forget about it). The effect is to leave the mass number unchanged…but it increases the atomic number by one (we have one more proton than we used to). To make up the discrepancy noted above, uranium, in turning to lead, must undergo six beta decays.

Technically speaking what I just described is negative beta decay, because it spits out a negatively charged particle. The reason why one might to be anal about this is that there’s actually a different kind of beta decay that may come into play, though…and that’s positive beta decay, where a proton spits out an anti-electron (“positron”–yes, this is antimatter) and turns into a neutron (the exact opposite change from the first kind of beta decay). This causes the nucleus to go down one in atomic number, again without changing the mass number.

Uranium and thorium (atomic number 90) undergo alpha decay, as do a lot of the things they turn into on the way to becoming lead (as do many of the intermediate elements in between and on the way). A lot of the intermediate products undergo beta decay. That’s all stuff at the high end of the periodic table, though.

It turns out that a lot of much lighter elements…ones we thing of as stable…are at least partially made up of isotopes that do one or the other form of beta decay (there are dozens of examples). Even potassium has a long-lived isotope (potassium-40 or 40K) that decays, in fact it can decay two different ways: negative beta decay or “electron capture” where a proton absorbs an electron. The first turns it into calcium-40, the second turns it into argon-40.

Our atmosphere is about one percent argon, and that argon is almost all argon-40. The sun’s argon–which presumably came from the nebula that condensed to form the solar system–is almost all argon-36, which leads to the conclusion that none of the Earth’s original argon is still around, and all of the argon in the atmosphere is actually from the decay of potassium-40.

There is just one thing I haven’t mentioned yet. Alpha and beta decay occur at constant rates. The rate is different for each nucleus, but constant for that nucleus. (All sorts of attempts have been made in laboratories to change the rate…with one oddball exception, absolutely nothing happened.) It’s a proportional thing; over some period of time, half of the atoms of some radioactive isotope will decay. You’re then left with a sample half the size of your original sample…and half of that will be gone after you wait the same period of time again. And so on. This period of time is known as the half life, because half of the atoms are gone after that period of time.

Of the things I’ve touched on, here are their half lives: Uranium-235: 703.8 million years. Potassium-40: 1251 million years. Uranium-238: 4458 million years. And Thorium-232: 14,050 million years.

And now maybe you can see how this might be useful to geologists. Find a rock with some uranium, thorium, or potassium in it. (Potassium most likely; it’s common compared to the others.) Then determine how much “daughter” product is in the rock. It helps if the daughter product is such it wouldn’t have been in the rock when it solidified. E.g., a zircon crystal, which might pick up uranium impurities as it crystalizes, but will positively reject lead atoms. Any lead in the zircon crystal can only have come from uranium decay. Count atoms (yes, you might have to literally count atoms) to determine how much daughter product there is, versus parent isotope. Figure out how much decay has taken place and compare to the half life.

You now know the age of the crystal. Not the relative age, the absolute age, of the crystal.

But there are a lot of details with this (including the fact that dating sedimentary rock is dicey), and I will cover some of them next time. These details, when fully considered only serve to make these methods rock solid.

Notice

I have a complex project coming up IRL, and I absolutely have to reallocate my “spare” time. This will mean less laughing at online flerfs, but it also means science posts will be infrequent and/or unpredictable.

Health Friday 3.7.2025 Open Thread: The COVID-19 Information File, Part Two: The Virus Itself and the “Vaccines”

The above image of a vintage Rolodex is courtesy of CSA Images via Google Images.

Health Friday is a series devoted to information about Big Pharma, vaccines, general health, and associated topics. As today’s post speaks to the disaster of COVID-19 (the COVID-19 virus itself, and the COVID-19 “vaccines”), Yours Truly dedicates it to the memory of all persons, of whatever age or location, who have passed away from the negative effects of these lab-created bioweapons.

There are Important Wolf Moon Notifications; the Rules of our late, good Wheatie; and, certain caveats from Yours Truly, of which readers should be aware. They are linked here.

Today’s post is an “expanded edition” of the COVID-19 “Vaccines” Information File, Part One, found here: https://www.theqtree.com/2024/11/01/health-friday-open-thread-11-1-2024-the-covid-19-vaccines-information-file-part-one/. There are more items in the evolving information base about the lab-created bioweapons of the COVID-19 virus itself, and on the COVID-19 “vaccines.”

And now, Part Two of the COVID-19 Information File:

BOOKS: One: Cancer Care, Second Edition. By Dr. Paul E. Marik, MD, FCCM, FCCP (Dr. Marik is a co-founder of the FLCCC Alliance). This book is found on https://www.amazon.com/.

Two: The Doctors Book of Home Remedies, by the editors of Prevention Health Magazine Books, 1990 edition. This book is available online as used copies.

WEBSITE NAME CHANGES:

The FLCCC Alliance (formerly https://covid19criticalcare.com, also called FLCCC Alliance) is now Independent Medical Alliance: https://imahealth.org/.

Dr. Peter McCullough’s website (formerly https://petermcculloughmd@substack.com) is now https://www.thefocalpoints.com/.

COVID-19 VIRUS and COVID-19 “VACCINES” DETOX / MITIGATION PROTOCOLS:

https://imahealth.org/ (Independent Medical Alliance, formerly FLCCC); https://americasfrontlinedoctors.org/ (AFLDS); https://www.mercola.com/ (Dr. Joseph Mercola, MD; must sign up to access); https://www.americaoutloud.com/ (Dr. Peter McCullough, MD’s, Wellness Company site.) Note: this is not an exhaustive list, and does not include herbal medicine, naturopathic medicine, homeopathic medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine, or other allopathic / osteopathic websites.

THE YALE “LISTEN” STUDY PAPER:

Yours Truly has written on the main discussion thread several times regarding this groundbreaking paper (the “Iwasaki et al. paper”) about COVID-19 “vaccine”-induced injuries presenting as long as 709 days after “vaccination.” Here is Steve Kirsch’s take on the paper: https://kirschsubstack.com/p/covid-vaccine-injury-study-published, “COVID vaccine injury study published on preprint server because the mainstream medical journals refused to publish it”, 19 February 2025. HOWEVER, Yours Truly has found that the original preprint paper has already been reissued in a “new” preprint version. The original version is found here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.18.25322379v1, “Immunological and Antigenic Signatures Associated with Chronic Illnesses after COVID-19 Vaccination”, Akiko Iwasaki, et al., dated 18 February 2025. The “new” preprint version is found here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.18.25322379v2.full, same title, Akiko Iwasaki, et al., dated 25 February 2025. Meanwhile, Dr. Pierre Kory, MD, has written a blog post regarding how the LISTEN study may be used as legal support for persons with COVID-19 “vaccine”-induced issues in lawsuits: https://pierrekorymedicalmusings.com/p/new-study-provides-legal-support, “New Study Provides Legal Support For The Vaccine Injured”, 21 February 2025. Dr. Kory has coined the term, “Post Covid Vaccination Syndrome”, or PVS, to describe the conditions and issues that COVID-19 “vaccinated” patients in his practice present.

MORE INFORMATION ON HOW THE COVID-19 “VACCINES” INCREASE THE IgG4 “TOLERATE BUT NEVER CLEAR” IMMUNE SYSTEM CELLS IN THE “VACCINATED” PERSON’S BODY:

Dr. Jessica Rose, PhD, (https://jessicar.substack.com/) has just published a paper in the Public Health Policy Journal on her new research. The paper is found here: https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/breakthrough-infection-signal-in-vaers-corroborates-igg4-increased-susceptibility-to-sars-cov-2/, 1 March 2025. The paper has the same title as the website URL. The paper has been reviewed by Dr. James Lyons-Weiler, PhD here: https://publichealthpolicyjournal.com/clear-dose-response-signal-of-risk-of-exposure-to-covid-19-mrna-found-in-vaers-data/, 1 March 2025. The review has the same title as the website URL. Below is are two screenshots from Dr. Rose’s article. (NOTE: Dr. Rose uses the term “BTI” to mean “Breakthrough SARS-CoV-2 Infections.”)

And, from Dr. Lyons-Weiler’s review of Dr. Rose’s article:

A MIDWESTERN DOCTOR’S TAKE ON WHY THE FDA RUSHED THE COVID-19 “VACCINES” THROUGH THE PROCESS TO GET THEM AUTHORIZED FOR USE:

A Midwestern Doctor (https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/) has written an article regarding the “Why” behind the actions of the FDA: https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/why-did-the-fda-greenlight-the-covid. “Why Did The FDA Greenlight The COVID Vaccines?”, 2 March 2025.

SASHA LATYPOVA ON WHY THE COVID-19 “VACCINES” ARE REALLY GENE THERAPY SHOTS:

Ms. Latypova wrote the following article in response to a reader’s question: https://sashalatypova.substack.com/p/are-covid-vaccines-gene-therapies, 28 February 2025. Below are several screenshots from this article:

The first screenshot is Ms. Latypova’s statement:

The following screenshot is from the 2015 FDA guidance document on gene therapies:

The following screenshots are via FOIA information that Judicial Watch sued the FDA for and won regarding the Pfizer-BioNTech “flagship” modRNA COVID-19 “vaccine”, BNT162b2:

COVID-19 BTI (Bioweapon Toxin Injections, aka the “vaccines”) AND ORAL COVID-19 “VACCINE” NEWS:

One: The European Commission has just approved the use of the self-amplifying RNA (saRNA) COVID-19 “vaccine”, KOSTAIVE, for use in the European Union / Scandinavia. Please see: https://defender.substack.com/p/europe-approval-self-amplifying-covid-mrna-vaccine-no-long-term-safety-data, “Inhumane, Reckless: Critics Weigh in on Europe’s Approval of Self-Amplifying COVID mRNA Vaccines”, by Suzanne Burdick, PhD, 23 February 2025. KOSTAIVE is the brand name of the injectable called ARCT-154, by Arcturus Therapeutics. This product was approved in Japan in November 2024 and is in use there. Below are two screenshots from the Defender article:

Please re-read the sentence above from Dr. Jablonowski regarding how an saRNA COVID-19 “vaccine” is “like being vaccinated every day for the rest of your life.” (Italics mine)

The Epar “package insert” information on KOSTAIVE is found here: https://www.ema.europra.eu/en/documents/product-information/kostaive-epar-product-information_en.pdf. Below are two screenshots from this document;

Note the last sentence — a total lie.

The MSDS Safety Sheet for the lipid nanoparticle ATX-126 is here: https://www.dcchemicals.com/msds/MSDS_DC57046.html. Below is a screenshot from this document:

AND NOW, REGARDING THE COVID-19 VIRUS ITSELF:

One of the blogs that Yours Truly reads regularly is that of Walter M Chesnut: https://wmcresearch.substack.com/. Mr. Chesnut has been performing solid research into the mechanisms of the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) virus itself for over 3 years. While it is not known for absolute certainty the actual ingredients of the lab-created bioweapon called the SARS-CoV-2 virus, Mr. Chesnut continues to find possible pieces of this puzzle. Here are two recent such blog articles of his. The first: https://wmcresearch.substack.com/p/turbocancers-a-secondary-manifestation, “Turbocancers: A Secondary Manifestation of the Extracellular Matrix (ECM)?” The second: https://wmcresearch.substack.com/p/the-spike-protein-and-iib3-understanding, “The Spike Protein and [alpha]IIb[beta]3: Understanding the Fibrous Clots from an Integrin-Mediated Perspective”, 24 February 2025. A screenshot from this article is below:

The point here is that the COVID-19 virus itself it NOT “just another virus.” It is a lab-created bioweapon that, in and of itself, can damage the infected person’s body. Combined with the “enhanced” ingredients found in the COVID-19 “vaccines” (lipid nanoparticles and N1-methylpseudouridine), this “foundational” bioweapon virus becomes extremely dangerous or even deadly. (NOTE: Yours Truly apologizes for the [alpha] and the [beta] in the title of the Chesnut article cited above. She is still in the WP “learning curve.”)

FLASH! UPDATE 6 MARCH: REGARDING THE “DISCOVERY” OF THE “NEW” BAT CORONAVIRUS, HKU5-CoV-2:

One: Dr. Peter McCullough discusses the situation here: https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/new-wuhan-coronavirus-2025-measles, 6 March 2025. A screenshot from the post is below:

This “new” bat coronavirus was supposedly “discovered” by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The first question this raises is: How many OTHER bat (or other) coronaviruses are in the “storage vaults” of the WIV to be “discovered” at some point? There is speculation all over the internet regarding HKU5-CoV-2 and if / when, it could infect humans. This “new” coronavirus apparently can use the same types of entry methods into the human body that SARS-CoV-2 and MERS do.

Two: But wait, there’s more! Another question is raised: What did / does, Pfizer-BioNTech know about HKU5-CoV-2? Because this company has been Phase 1 testing an “experimental” modRNA “Pandemic Influenza vaccine” since December 2023. The study is NCT06179446 (https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT06179446), begun on 13 December 2023 and scheduled to finish the Phase 1 clinical trial on 26 August 2025. This “experimental” modRNA prophylactic “Pandemic Influenza vaccine” is called pdmFlu. The Pfizer-BioNTech product identifier number is PF-07985819, and the Study Identifier number is C5561001. According to the “Researcher View” of the Clinical Trials entry, as many as eight different formulas and/or dosage amounts will be given to the study participants (there are 160 registered study participants.) NCT06179446 has two separate “control groups”: One “control group” will receive injections of a “licensed influenza vaccine”; the other “control group” will receive a placebo.

The Consent Form issued by Pfizer-BioNTech that the study participants in C5561001 must sign is here: https://www.pfizerclinicaltrials.com/sites/default/files/2023-12/C5661001_Main_ICDv21NOV2023.pdf.

WHAT DID / DOES, PFIZER-BIONTECH KNOW ABOUT HKU5-CoV-2?

Three: And, by the way — RALPH BARIC has been experimenting with HKU5-CoV-2 SINCE AT LEAST 2014, funded by the NIH. One of his papers is here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.articles/PMC7022341/, “Trypsin Treatment Unlocks Barrier for Zoonotic Bat Coronavirus Infection”, Ralph S. Baric, et al., 14 February 2020.

WHAT DOES / DID RALPH BARIC KNOW ABOUT HKU5-CoV-2?

PAGING ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.

THERE. MUST. BE. JUSTICE.

Peace, Good Energy, Respect: PAVACA