Dear MAGA: 20250209 Open Topic ❀ Wolf Placeholder

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.”

Wolf Pub

The Unexpected

Wolf here.

I have no idea where Carl is tonight, and I most certainly hope that nothing bad has happened to him or his loved ones, which might explain why he didn’t drop off a post today. Hopefully he just forgot to drop off his usual post here – perhaps “mis-remembering” that he already did so.

No matter what, pray for Carl! In fact, pray for Carl any time you think to do it, because it’s good to do so. We should always be praying for Carl.

Back to the issue at hand.

Normally I wait as long as needed for a new post to go up, before I worry about it, although technically our rule is that something needs to be up by NOON, or I’ll put up a placeholder.

HOWEVER, I sort of feel like giving Carl a break, AND like giving you a substitute sermon.

I regard myself as the sexton of this church – the groundskeeper – the handyman. But I’m also, by design, the one person allowed to tithe to the church, as a kind of security measure.

AND – in emergencies, the “executive assistant pastor”. So here goes. A VERY short sermon.


We have to be “ready for The Lord” at all times. If you’re a Christian, that means you need to be “ready for Jesus” – so to speak. We don’t know what might happen, but THE END can come like a thief in the night.

Some of us have gone on, slowly and with a lot of warning, like Patrick Henry Censored.

Others suddenly and without warning, like Deplorable Patriot.

Others without warning, but without word, and in some level of mystery, like Wheatietoo.

One of the real advantages of faith in God, is that we are OK with whatever happens. We’re ready. I know that I’m ready, because only a couple of years ago, I told my wife goodbye – fully ready to go to Jesus – only to be returned to this world in the next moments, as my bleeding stopped, and my vital signs reversed.

Being ready doesn’t mean being resigned to die, or giving up on life. It means being ready for whatever God wants for us – whether that is to go on here, or to go on somewhere else.

We have seen how President Trump was returned to us – a quarter inch from death. I fully believe that President Trump is right – God spared him with a purpose, and I pray that we align ourselves in support of God’s purpose for President Trump – to make America great in all the ways that a loving God would intend.

I believe that President Trump was READY. His readiness isn’t all that saved him – but he was ready to go to God – or to survive, and to carry on with God’s will for him.

So I ask all of you – take a few moments and strengthen your resolve to be ready, whatever happens. Trust in God – trust that He wants what is BEST for you – not necessarily what is easiest – but that He is compassionate and merciful, and – as Christ assures us, His yoke is easy and light!

God Bless, take care, and have a wonderful week!

W

PS – Carl’s open is up!

https://www.theqtree.com/2025/02/09/dear-maga-20250209-open-topic/

2025·02·08 We Will Have Justice Daily Thread

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

First Things First

Today sees two memorial services for “Sam”: Susan P Sampson (Deplorable Patriot) at 10 AM CST (at St. Roch Roman Catholic Church in St. Louis) and Sam, PAVACA’s brother at 2PM EST (Peeples Valley Baptist Church in Cartersville, Georgia).

RIP

We carry on the fight, in memory of the fallen.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

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

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

(Paper) Spot Prices

Kitco “Ask” prices. Last week:

Gold $2,801.20
Silver $31.27
Platinum $989.00
Palladium $1,036.00
Rhodium $5,000.00
FRNSI* 134.508+
Gold:Silver 89.581+

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, markets have closed for the weekend. (This time, apparently, markets closed at 12:45, not 3PM.)

Gold $2,861.10
Silver $31.89
Platinum $984.00
Palladium $990.00
Rhodium $5,025.00
FRNSI* 137.406-
Gold:Silver 89.718-

Gold got into the 2870s range Wednesday, dropped then recovered some on Friday. Silver, of course succeeds in going down even on days when gold went up–down 40+cents on, Friday: a day when gold went up.

*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.

A Bit More Geology

I’ve talked about stratigraphy quite a lot in this series so far, and plan to move on to very different aspects of geology for a while…but I’m going to start by a review or summing up or practical application.

Here’s a diagram Valerie brought to the comments last week, as referenced by a YEC site which then went on to disparage it.

This is a cross section of the Grand Canyon, which is everybody’s favorite illustration of stratigraphy in action.

On the right are the attributions to different systems (periods) including the “Precambrian” which isn’t really a period (it’s the bucket they put the first three entire eons into sometimes). If you remember the names from last time (and I would be surprised if you did), there’s some missing names here.

Digression on how I remember them:

  • I’ve heard names like Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, etc., enough to recognize them; but I could never remember the order they appear. I could remember Cambrian being the first Paleozoic period and the Permian being the last one, but Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous (here divvied up into Mississippian and Pennsylvanian, as is often done in America), I could never remember. Until I looked at the initials: COS is of course the Colorado Springs airport code and living near there that’s easy for me to remember: Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian. I could force myself to remember the Carboniferous is right before the Permian, which leaves (by elimination) the Devonian as the fourth period right after the Silurian.
  • I have no difficulty with the Mesozoic because I grew up with a dinosaur nut as a kid; I got exposed to this a lot. Triassic (lame), Jurassic (cool dinosuars), Creataceous (really cool dinosaurs).
  • The Cenozoic is both easier and harder. Easier because Paleogene obviously comes before Neogene (Paleo = old, Neo = new), so you can list off Paleogene and Neogene (and then just remember Quaternary–note not Quarternary), but harder because this one usually gets subdivided all the way down to epochs, one level further, even in children’s books! I didn’t talk about that at all last time except mentioning that in passing, but those all have names ending in -cene and I can’t ever remember them. (I’ll write them out here just for grins: Paleocene, Eocene and Oligocene (subdivisions of the Paleogene) and Miocene and Pliocene in the Neogene. The Quaternary gets broken down into the Pleistocene and Holocene–the Holocene is everything since the last ice age. Seven of these epochs and they rhyme and I can’t remember their ordering for nuthin.

Anyhow returning to the diagram, the entire Ordovician and Silurian, plus who knows how much late Cambrian and early Devonian, is completely missing from the sequence shown. And nothing after the Permian. In fact for all we know from looking at the diagram the last part of the Permian is missing too. What gives?

I’ve talked a lot about rock layers being laid down, and you might have got the impression this happens all the time everywhere, but that’s not true. In many cases nothing gets laid down for millions of years (imagine, for instance, a desert, or mountains, or the land under an icecap or glacier). And in many cases, something already laid down gets removed by erosion. Here what we see is a nice thick Cambrian layer followed immediately by a thin Devonian layer.

For all we know, there may have once been more Cambrian rock here, then some amount of Ordovician rock, then some Silurian rock…and then deposition stopped, and a bunch of stuff got eroded away until resuming near the end of the Devonian.

Or maybe none of that ever got laid down; deposition stopped right where we see it, then resumed late in the Devonian. We can’t tell–not from this diagram at least–we just know those layers aren’t there now.

(If you dig deeper you can learn a bit more. The Muav Limestone is the top Cambrian layer shown, and you can look that up in Wikipedia (and then chase down the sources if you really want to be thorough). In addition to describing the limestone as fine-grained and gray, it goes on to describe the extent of the formation. It turns out the Muav Limestone was laid down in the mid-to-late Cambrian, not at the very end (dates are given), and extends into Utah, Nevada and California…and it is of different thicknesses in different areas. In most places what lies on top of it is Mississippian rock, but in some areas (like the Grand Canyon) where it’s a bit thinner there’s Devonian rock there. Now you can reconstruct a bit what happened: The Muav was laid down. Then parts of it were eroded and there was a Devonian deposit, which probably got planed off by erosion but it lived on in places where the Muav was lower and it filled in deeper areas.

[When I think about the sheer amount of field work it takes to map these things, I am staggered. Geologists basically have to go everywhere to do this to this level of detail.]

The dividing line is labeled as a “disconformity.” It turns out that a disconformity is a specific type of unconformity. And an unconformity is any sort of gap in the stratigraphic sequence, which indicates a gap in deposition of sediment.

I can’t say it better than Wikipoo does so I’ll just quote it: “The rocks above an unconformity are younger than the rocks beneath (unless the sequence has been overturned). An unconformity represents time during which no sediments were preserved in a region or were subsequently eroded before the next deposition. The local record for that time interval is missing and geologists must use other clues to discover that part of the geologic history of that area. The interval of geologic time not represented is called a hiatus. It is a kind of relative dating.”

It’s called a “disconformity” when the unconformity is between parallel layers of sedimentary rock…as is the case here.

It is called a “nonconformity” when the upper layer is sedimentary and what is below is igneous or metamorphic rock, presumably partially eroded away before the sediments were deposited.

Also showing up in that diagram is an “angular unconformity” where the rocks below the unconformity are angled. There are parallel layers there but the layers are at a steep tilt. This usually happens because after the layers were deposited there was a mountain building episode that tilted the landscape. Then part was eroded away and the overlying sediment was deposited.

And of course at the very top, nothing above the Kaibab limestone, which (I went and looked) is early-to-mid Permian, so the late Permian either was never deposited here, or was and has been eroded away. But one shouldn’t judge such things from one location. Before we start looking elsewhere though, I’m going to paste in a different diagram of the Grand Canyon layers, one from the National Park Service:

Some occasional bluffs appear on top of the Kaibab that are of the “Moenkopi” formation.

But let’s look further afield, and if we do so we’ll be rewarded. Because the Kaibab is under many additional layers in Zion National Park. That nails it down; the Kaibab was once under a lot more rock than it is today. Here are the layers that appear above it in Zion:

The Dakota formation spreads all over the Intermountain Western United States and further, it is seen in Kansas as well as the Dakotas. (And I can guess what I am going to find when I go look: YUP, it’s Cretaceous; the last period/system of the Mesozoic. (And the Dakota formation is mid-Cretaceous at that, not late Cretaceous). That’s because there was an “inland sea” called the Western Interior Seaway in the Western United States until then, and I’ve known about that since childhood. Yes, a shallow arm of the ocean where there are now highlands and even mountains.)

From Ellis County, Kansas (which is Western Kansas on or near I-70) we have this imprint fossil of a leaf; the rock contains significant iron. Apparently when this leaf got buried, the area was boggy sand near deciduous (leafy) trees. Other nearby areas have fossilized mollusc shells so there was also a beach near here at one point in time.

(You may have noticed a lot of those Zion Park formation names are quite redolent of the Southwest: Kaibab, Moenkopi, Chinle, Moenave, Keyenta, and Navajo. All were discovered on the Colorado Plateau, largely by watching the rock layers fly by as Wile E. Coyote fell thousands of feet whilst trying to get away from the anvil that was his traveling companion. Really, really, he should never have looked down.)

So what forces erode rocks? Or (by the way) the soil before it becomes a rock?

Many different things. But number one is:

Erosion by Water

And there are many ways for water to do this. Rainfall and surface runoff are what I (sometimes) see where I live, far away from the World Sump known as the ocean, so I’ll cover that one first.

The mere act of a raindrop hitting the ground can sometimes eject particles of soil. But much more dramatic erosion results from runoff; it can go downslope as sheet erosion, form rills, or even create gullies. Rills and gullies are qualitatively the same, but a rill is small enough that you can (if you are farming the land) fill it in just through normal tilling the soil.

Continuous water flow occurs in rivers and streams. Given time they can wear down rocks; rocks in the bed of a stream eventually become smoothed down into pebbles. Streams can not be fed by rainfall but also snow melt and springs.

Entire mountain ranges can, and will, be removed by these processes though it takes millions of years. Streams will first cut narrow, v-shaped canyons; as time progresses and the mountains erode away the channels will get more of a U profile, and eventually the stream ends up moving slowly through a broad river valley. Or one can often see such a progression following a stream downhill today. (Geologists even talk of “young” streams (the ones cutting narrow valleys) versus “mature” streams, with more rounded beds, and then finally “old age”, which are more like:

A stream in a wide flood plain, moving slowly, will eventually start to meander (look at a map of the lower Mississippi to see this in action today). The stream can cut across the meanders especially during a flood, and leave behind oxbow lakes as seen in this picture of the Nowitna River in Alaska.

Water flowing in a stream will pick up more “stuff” the faster it is flowing; when it’s a flash flood it can remove boulders. Slower moving streams will pick sand up off their beds and move it downstream. Fine Silt can stay suspended even along slow-moving nearly-flat rivers.

Of course it’s easiest for streams to pick up loose material like sand than to actually grind down rock, but the latter does happen…assisted some by the loose stuff the stream is carrying. (It is a mistake to compare a gully cut through soil to a canyon cut through rock and assume they are both being cut at the same rate.)

Where does it all go? Downstream of course, and the sediment carried off can be deposited a couple of different ways.

One is the “alluvial fan” where water can emerge from a narrow canyon into a larger valley. The water will spread out and slow down; These are plainly visible in the Basin and Range province of Nevada and California; here is an overhead picture of one in Death Valley:

And from ground level, also in Death Valley (but I don’t know if it’s the same one):

Alluvial fans can be many square kilometers in size and tend to have gentle slopes up to where the stream emerges from its canyon (and nothing says the stream has to run full time; it certainly doesn’t do so here). The deposited stuff tends to be coarser nearer the source, which makes sense: as the water exiting the canyon fans out, it slows down, as it slows down the bigger stuff will be deposited first, closest to where the water exited the canyon.

Alluvial fans have even been seen on Mars, an indication that water used to flow there. They also appear on Titan, but this isn’t due to water flow but rather liquid methane and ethane. As you might expect given the examples I’ve shown, these tend to show up in mountainous, arid places, though by no means must the place be as arid as Death Valley. Buried alluvial fans underlie Denver, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles and often contain groundwater. They also underlie the Ganges valley in India, being fed from the Himalayas. And of course ancient fans often end up becoming sedimentary rock and end up in the geologic column.

River deltas are another obvious destination. The Mississippi delta deposit is tens of thousands of feet thick; it’s so heavy it pushes the bedrock down into the Earth. But in less extreme cases, smaller streams dump sediment into ponds, swamps and oceans…and these could eventually end up becoming rocks in the geologic column.

Below is the mouth of the Amazon river, in Brazil. This river is titanic; it may not be the longest in the world (the other possibility being the Nile) but no other river can hold a candle to it in terms of volume–in fact its total discharge is greater than the next seven rivers on that list, combined. It is mostly in Brazil, but even way upstream where it enters Brazil, it’s carrying more water than any other river on Earth.

But most relevantly here, notice the water is tan–that’s silt, being washed out into the ocean to settle as sediment and eventually show up in a geologic column. (What the geologist who studies it (if any) will look like is another question entirely.)

Those white things on the picture are clouds, which should give you an idea of the sheer scale of the picture.

Streams can empty out into a bog or swamp, too…to say nothing of lakes and endorheic basins. That last sounds truly awful, but that’s any inland basin with no outlet to the ocean. Probably the most famous example of such a thing to Americans is the Great Salt lake, but there are many others in North America, and Eurasia has vast endorheic basins. The map below shows endorheic basins in dark gray (as well as divides separating flows between various oceans).

These tend to be in desert regions; with more water erosion will eventually cut a channel or lower the rims of the basins. This can often happen from outside of the basin, as streams flowing away from it slowly wear down the ridges separating the basin from the outside.

Endorheic lakes have no outflow, so what happens to the water in them? Evaporation. The lake will grow until the evaporation on the surface cancels out the water flowing into the lake. Of course, the rivers flowing into the lake don’t have a constant flow, meaning that the lake can–and does–vary in size. This can be an issue with the Great Salt Lake, which has often flooded during El Nino seasons which tend to dump a lot of rain in the Western US. But when the levels are low there is a lot of evaporite, mostly salt, left behind. This happens at many such lakes including the Dead Sea between Israel and Jordan, and there are many dry lake beds in the Basin and Range Province centered on Nevada but including parts of Utah, California, and Oregon. (Why is this area called the basin and range province? It has mountain ranges…and it’s an endorheic basin.)

I feel as if I haven’t covered this adequately, but I’m simply out of time.

Health Friday Open Thread 2.7.2025: Lack of True “Informed Consent” and the COVID-19 “Vaccines”

The above vintage image of vaccine vials and vaccine syringes is courtesy of Shutterstock and Google Images.

Health Friday is a series devoted to Big Pharma, vaccines, general health, and associated topics. As today’s post speaks to the disaster of the COVID-19 BTI (Bioweapon Toxin Injections, aka the “vaccines”), Yours Truly dedicates it to the memory of all persons, or whatever age or location, who have passed away from the negative effects (direct or indirect) of the the COVID-19 “vaccines”, no matter whether the deceased were COVID-19 “vaccinated” or not.

A special note for today’s post: Of your charity, please pray for the repose of the soul of our good DePat (Deplorable Patriot), Susan P. Sampson. Her Funeral Mass is to be held tomorrow, Saturday 8 February, at the St. Roch Roman Catholic Church in St. Louis, Missouri, at 10AM Central Standard Time. Of your charity, please pray for the repose of the soul of Yours Truly’s “fully vaccinated and boosted” brother, Sam. His Memorial Service is to be held tomorrow, Saturday 8 February, at the Peeples Valley Baptist Church in Cartersville, Georgia, at 2PM Eastern Standard Time. Thank you.

Requiem aeterna dona eis, Domine; et Lux Perpetua luceat eis. Requiescant in pace. Amen.

However, the discussion is not limited to what is presented today: It is an Open Thread.

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 begins here: https://bailiwicknews.substack.com/p/labeling-deceits-and-omissions-and, “Labeling deceits and omissions, and fake informed consent for vaccines and other legalized biological and chemical weapons.”, by Katherine Watt, 29 January 2025. In this post, Ms. Watt describes the lack of transparency and honesty in several areas of these topics, among them: One, in the labeling of the modRNA COVID-19 “vaccines”; and, Two, in the lack of detailed informed consent documents for people who want to take (or are “mandated” to take) injections of the COVID-19 modRNA “vaccines.” Ms. Watt traces this trail of lies and deceit back at least 1902. Below are some screenshots from her article related to the COVID-19 “vaccines”:

Ms. Watt makes it clear that “our betters” do NOT want the people who took / who continue to take, the COVID-19 “vaccines” to really know what is in the “modRNA” of the injections.

There is another issue regarding the lack of true informed consent regarding the COVID-19 “vaccines” — the fact that the FDA has made it virtually impossible for COVID-19 “vaccinated” people who become “vaccine”-injured, acquire an illness after being “vaccinated”, or even die from the negative effects of these bioweapon injectables, to be able to sue the “vaccines” manufacturers, those who administer these “vaccines”, entities who “require” or “mandate” the taking of these ‘vaccines”, or agencies of the Federal government who push these “vaccines.” The FDA has done this by making BOTH the Emergency Use Authorization AND “full approval” applicable to the COVID-19 “vaccines” in use, thereby “insulating” the above entities and persons from liability.

For example: the “2024-2025 COVID-19 Vaccine” by Pfizer-BioNTech and by Moderna. The FDA issued the following on 22 August 2024: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-and-authorizes-updated-mrna-covid-19-vaccines-better-protect-against-currently, “FDA Approves and Authorizes Updated mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines to Better Protect Against Currently Circulating Variants”. Below are screenshots from this announcement:

Next screenshot:

Followed by:

Finally:

The FDA approved the use of COMIRNATY (Pfizer-BioNTech) in people OVER 11 YEARS OF AGE. The FDA also authorized the use of “Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine (2024-2025 Formula” to be used in people FROM 6 MONTHS THROUGH 11 YEARS OF AGE. Also — notice that the COMIRNATY approval was granted to the GERMAN partner of PfizerUSA (BioNTech Manufacturing GmbH); and that the “Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine (2024-2025 Formula” authorization was granted to Pfizer Inc.

But wait, there’s more! Under the “magic” of legalese and bureaucratic obfuscation, here are the links to the websites that the FDA and Xavier Becerra (then-head of HHS) used to perform the “sleight of hand” to grant EXEMPTION FROM LIABILITY to the makers of the “2024-2025 Formula COVID-19 Vaccines” for BOTH the “approved” AND the “authorized” formulations of these injectables. It’s all under the PREP Act:

One: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/12/11/2024-29108/12th-amendment-to-declaration-under-the-public-readiness-and-emergency-preparedness-act-for-medical. “12th Amendment to the Declaration Under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act for Medical Countermeasures Against COVID-19”, 11 December 2024.

Two: https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-legal-regulatory-and-policy-framework/emergency-use-authorization.

Regarding a current “Informed Consent” document for the general public, Yours Truly found the following from a search that began here: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/vis/index.html, which eventually (via being “redirected” from other CDC websites that are now shut down with the “The page you are looking for doesn’t exist”-type error messages) led to this: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/current-vis/covid-19.htmlCDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/vis/vis-statements/covid-19.html. It turns out that the “Informed Consent” handouts for patients / caregivers appear to be basically a “Pablum” version of government and/or “vaccine” manufacturer misinformation, disinformation, and downright lies, about the COVID-19 BTI (Bioweapon Toxin Injections, aka the “vaccines”) that the patient is going to have injected into their body (or that parents / guardians are going to have injected into the body of a minor child.)

Let’s look at some screenshots of this FDA-issued Fact Sheet for recipients and caregivers for the EUA-granted “Pfizer-BioNTech 2024-2025 Formula COVID-19 Vaccine” for children 6 months of age to 11 years of age, as an example. The FDA document is found here: https://www.fda.gov/media/167212/download.

Screenshot One:

The COVID-19 pandemic Public Health Emergency declaration in the United States was ended on 11 May 2023: https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/end-of-phe.html. There is no “currently a pandemic of COVID-19”, per the CDC itself.

Screenshot Two:

The COVID-19 “vaccines” do not “prevent” an infection of COVID-19. In fact, COVID-19 “vaccinated” persons have a much higher chance of coming down with COVID-19. Please see: https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/breaking-sixth-study-confirms-negative, “BREAKING — Sixth Study Confirms Negative Efficacy of COVID-19 mRNA Injections”, by Nicolas Hulscher, MPH, 4 February 2025. The only items, in Yours Truly’s opinion, in the screenshot above that might prompt a medical professional to stop and question whether or not the child should take a COVID-19 “vaccine” would be: an allergy to PEG-2000DMG (one of the lipid nanoparticles in the “vaccine”) or to any of the ingredients of the “vaccine”; a history of myocarditis and/or pericarditis; or has a bleeding disorder. On the other hand, in fact, pregnant women are “encouraged” to take a COVID-19 “vaccine”; and, that immunocompromised persons are “permitted” to take an “extra dose” of a COVID-19 “vaccine.”

Screenshot Three:

So much important information and disclosures regarding the ACTUAL “safety record” of the COVID-19 “vaccines” (for example, the data at https://www.openvaers.com/covid-data); the ACTUAL “clinical trials” data that, for example, Pfizer-BioNTech gave to the FDA regarding the serious Adverse Events reports on BNT162b2; and other items, are missing. The OpenVAERS link takes one to the “Red Boxes” Adverse Events reports and statistics for the COVID-19 “vaccines.” Recall that VAERS receives fewer than 10% of reports of Adverse Events.

How many parents / guardians would go through with having their child (children) COVID-19 “vaccinated” if they knew, for example, that the ingredients and mechanisms of these bioweapon toxin injections change the DNA in their body? Please see: https://doctors4covidethics.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/causality-article.pdf, Slide 14.

Screenshot Four:

Which, again, mention nothing of the ACTUAL data as reported at OpenVAERS. Instead, there appears to be a strong effort to minimize the ACTUAL potential for serious Adverse Events to occur after taking a COVID-19 “vaccine.”

Yours Truly was able to find a “Consent Document” for persons over age 18 to read and to sign prior to taking a COVID-19 “vaccine”: https://www.gannon.edu/media/gannon-university/content-assets/documents/health-center/GannonUniversity-ScreeningAndConsentForCovid-19Vaccine.pdf. But, even here, there is no presentation of the ACTUAL data from, for example, OpenVAERS regarding serious Adverse Events reports about the COVID-19 “vaccines.” How many persons over age 18 would take a COVID-19 “vaccine” if they were told in advance that these bioweapon toxin injections cross the Blood-Brain Barrier and can induce multiple types of neurological damage? Below are images of the “Consent Document”:

Please also see: https://www.theqtree.com/2024/10/18/health-friday-10-18-2024-special-edition-neurological-effects-of-the-covid-19-vaccines-physical-and-psychological/.

How many persons would take a “2024-2025 Formula COVID-19 Vaccine”, or have such a “vaccine” injected into their child (children), under ANY circumstances, if they knew in advance that these bioweapon toxin injections were either ONLY “tested” on lab mice; or, were “approved” and/or “authorized” based on “manufacturing and nonclinical data”? For this last is exactly what happened with the “2024-2025 Formula COVID-19 Vaccines.” Please refer back to the FDA announcement of 22 August 2024 further up in this post. Here is the salient portion of this announcement as it regards this “2024-2025 Formula”:

THERE. MUST. BE. JUSTICE.

Peace, Good Energy, Respect: PAVACA

DEAR MAGA: Open Thread 20250206 & the Scouring of the Shire


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


Header Image: 2024 Presidential Election Map by County

The Scouring of the Shire.

Reading and reflecting on Tolkien’s final chapter in The Lord of the Rings might help us place ourselves at this time. Fandom tells us: “Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin arrive in the Shire to find that things are not as they once were when they left. The Shire is now run by Sharkey based at Bag End, who with Lotho‘s help had taken over with his band of Ruffian Men. The four hobbits collect as many allies as they can and defeat his army of Ruffians at the Battle of Bywater. The Hobbits then confront “Sharkey” and the lowly Gríma Wormtongue at Bag End, who both meet their demise.”

So, while the noble hobbits had been off saving all of Middle Earth, the “commies” had set up shop in their homeland and caused great harm that will require bravery, wisdom, and a lot of work to undo. It appears that we are somewhere around the beginning of the Battle of Bywater now.

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.
Now what?

Let us dedicate ourselves to seeking our place in the cleansing, healing, and rebuilding of this beautiful, resource-rich nation. God will guide us.

Thanks be to God for our 47th President, Donald J. Trump.


The Role of County Government in Elections.

Take a good look at that 2024 Election Map. See the outline of each county?


How Does This Work?

Let’s take a look at what the National Association of Counties (NACO) has to say

When trying to understand how to get traction locally in turning the tide for liberty, it seems to come down to the governance at the county level. And from what is being turned up with the groups I’m following, it looks a lot like there is state level and national level collusion to influence or control the governments of those 3,069 counties that are responsible for overseeing our elections. I’ll get into those details in another post.

Reading that overview from NACO, they start out by stating:

Elections in the United States are administered in a highly decentralized process through which each state shapes its own election laws

Well, mostly. The states shape their own election laws, but, as with anything else, federal laws also impose requirements on state and local governments. Maryland’s State Board of Elections gives a helpful overview of these major federal election laws here. The most recent election-related law passed by Congress is known as HAVA.

  • Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002
    This law was the U.S. Congress’ response to the 2000 Presidential election and the first time that the federal government authorized federal funds for election administration. It created the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and set minimum standards for voting systems. It also required each state to adopt uniform standards on what constitutes a vote, implement provisional voting, post certain information at polling places, maintain a statewide voter registration database, and required certain individuals to show identification before voting.

Sounds good right?

Except. There are county elections officials are not following the laws, and yet are still taking the federal money to buy their electronic voting machines. If they didn’t follow the federal laws, then taking that money anyway would be fraud, right?

Thankfully, there are Americans that have stood up and gotten to work discovering and working to address the failures of our elections officials across the nation. I’d like to highlight one citizen oversight group that has done much with an all-volunteer organization.

We want valid elections that are run in full compliance with the law.

I strongly encourage you to watch this short video of a presentation by Marley Hornik of United Sovereign Americans. She goes over the legal framework for election integrity, starting with the constitution and provides the statute citations that must be enforced if we are to have free and fair elections. She also covers what they found when they audited the voter rolls of just 20 states prior to the 2024 election. They found over 29 MILLION apparently ineligible voter registrations, 10 million votes cast by those ineligible voters, 2 million more votes cast than voters that voted, and an average 13% vote error rate. Every invalid registration is potentially a felony level violation. Their organization is litigating with states over their failure to clean up the rolls and unlawful certification of non-compliant elections. They have a good strategy for which states to sue in order to potentially cause a circuit split which could get this heard at the Supreme Court without having to sue all 50 states. Or better yet, maybe the Department of Justice will just do their job.

Presentation by Marley Hornik of United Sovereign Americans
On the Status of our Nation’s Elections (for video click here)

The United Sovereign Americans Action Plan includes (1) informing everyone of election validity law, (2) turning findings into evidence, and (3) forcing election officials to obey the law.

Unfortunately, election officials across America have displayed apathy, disdain, and disregard for the law, and the civil rights of the people they are hired to serve. This has resulted in the certification of elections that varied from the law. Some of these elections were grossly inaccurate. Whether it was incompetence or malfeasance, those who broke the law must be held accountable.

Thank God for their work. May many more Americans join them in their efforts.


Twitterati.

Follow Scott Pressler for inspirational feet-on-the-ground reports and calls to action. He is showing us how it’s done. Also, check out Scott Presler’s Early Vote Action twitter account.


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.


Dear KMAG: 20250205 Open Thread & The Hidden Rulers


This is ENTIRELY SPECULATIVE. I want to say that up front. My goal is to figure out WHO our hidden rulers are. I am using a two prong attack. What is the motive, and what is hidden and how. Since as usual this has turned into a book instead of an article, I am going to split it


MOTIVE: I have noticed what I think is a thread thru history. In my last article, on Operation Gladio, I mentioned Mercantilism. Trade and bartering seems to be a uniquely human trait and it is seen through out history. It is a reason for empire building. . Usury, the practice of lending money and charging the borrower interest would be a connected motive. To make the most money on each trading trip, you would want to able to borrow money even if it is at interest, so you have the funds to invest in the maximum amount of trade goods for each trip. That just makes good sense. However I am going to save that topic for another article.


WHAT IS HIDDEN AND HOW

Unfortunately, if the truth is inconvenient to our hidden rulers they have several ways to deal with it.

The easiest is to scrub history so the truth is reduced to folklore status or less. Examples are, Mao Zedong’s efforts to erase traditional Chinese culture and historical figures who were not aligned with Maoist ideology and the current US destruction of historical statues and the re-naming of locations and products. We’re even maligning our Founding Fathers.

A second is ‘Controlled Opposition’ Mix the truth with outlandish falsehoods. For this topic, you have Clif High’s video The Satanic Khazarian Mafia NWO, Deep State, Cabal, and Their History (44 minute video at link) a retelling of the Veterans Today less fantastic tale: The Hidden History of the Incredibly Evil Khazarian Mafia

A third is to use ‘scholarly works’ to gaslight the peons while suppressing any dissenting voices. The Climate Scam is an excellent illustration of that.

A fourth, that is the slam-dunk shut up is the use of religion to make discussion and even heretical thought of competing ideas completely unthinkable.

Thus RELIGION is an excellent cover for activity that would otherwise be condemned. Religion is used to sway emotions and muddy the waters. From what I can tell this is done DELIBERATELY. We can see that playbook used today by naming the Globalist NGOs moving illegals into the USA Catholic… or Lutheran… or Baptist … or even Jewish… and using ‘It’s Charity so Shut-up at the least sign of criticism . This allows debate about whether it is actually subversive destruction of the USA via invasion to be completely shut down. So as you read this, take your religious feelings, place them in a box and lock it. Do not allow OTHERS to use your religion against you.

Oh this is good!


I went looking for the quote “If you want to know who rules over you, just look for who you are not allowed to criticize” and Brave AI tossed up this! 😂

The quote “If you want to know who rules over you, just look for who you are not allowed to criticize” is often attributed to Voltaire, but it is actually wrongly attributed. Research indicates that the quote was first said by Kevin Alfred Strom, a white supremacist and Holocaust denier, in 1993.


As I was saying religion makes a really, really good SHUT-UP! Scream Islamophobia or antisemitism and you have successfully shut down the conversation. I really do not care WHO said it, the truth of that quote is obvious. The UK’s tossing people in jail for internet comments is a case in point.


And if you want to bring in religion, remember this:

Revelation 2:9 KJV

 I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.

AND

Revelation 3:9 KJV

Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, who say they are Jews and are not, but do lie — behold, I will make them to come and worship at thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee.


The wise men of the Bible warn us of those who use religion to cloak their lies.

……

Now I want to bring up some of the history that has been buried. I also want to point out the long memory of an enemy. As our good Aubergine pointed out, the treatment of the mountain people in NC will be remembered for generations. I think we might be able to apply that to the Russians and the Khazars.

I am going to start with the US Civil War and then jump back in time where the truth is even harder to find.


Russian involvement in the US Civil War

… It is indeed true that, as things turned out, the international strategic dimension of the 1861-65 conflict was of secondary importance. However, it was an aspect that repeatedly threatened to thrust itself into the center of the war, transforming the entire nature of the conflict and indeed threatening to overturn the entire existing world system. The big issue was always a British-French attack on the United States to preserve the Confederate States of America. This is certainly how Union and Confederate leaders viewed the matter, and how some important people in London, St. Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin did as well.

The result is that today, the international dimension is consistently underestimated…

Seward, 1861: A US-UK War Would “Wrap the World in Flames”

Kenneth Bourne’s Britain and the Balance of Power in North America, 1815-1908 provides an effective antidote to such sentimental thinking in the form of a notable chapter (singled out for attention by Crook) on the British planning for war with the United States at the time of the Trent affair in December-January 1861, when Seward threatened to “wrap the world in flames” and the British lion roared in reply. [3] Two Confederate envoys, Mason and Slidell, were taken off the British merchant ship Trent by a US warship as they were sailing to plead the cause of intervention in London and Paris; the London press became hysterical with rage, and the anti-Union group in the cabinet saw their chance to start a transatlantic war. This study draws not only upon the British Admiralty archives in the Public Record Office, but also on the papers of Admiral Sir Alexander Milne in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. Bourne depicts the British predicament as their “defenceless” position in Canada, even with the help of the 10,000 additional regular infantry which Palmerston deployed in response to the crisis. (Bourne 211) A recurrent British fear was that their soldiers would desert to the American side, urged on by “crimps.” (Bourne 217). 

…. Admiralty Plans to Bombard and Burn Boston and New York

The heart of the British strategy in case of war was “overwhelming naval strength based on a few select fortresses,” especially Bermuda and Halifax (in today’s Nova Scotia). (Bourne 208) British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston dispatched a powerful squadron of eight ships of the line and thirteen frigates and corvettes under Admiral Milne to the western Atlantic, and wanted to use the Great Eastern, the largest ship in the world, as a troop transport. London even considered ways to foment secession in Maine. Bombarding and burning both Boston and New York was actively considered as a contingency; it was concluded that the reduction of Boston would be very difficult because of the channels and forts; New York was seen as more vulnerable, especially to a surprise attack. An Admiralty hydrographer saw New York City as “the true heart of [US] commerce, — the centre of …maritime resources; to strike her would be to paralyse all the limbs.” (Bourne 240)

…. The Union and Russia

The Russian-British rivalry was of course the central antagonism of European history after the Napoleonic era, and the Russian attitude towards London coincided with the traditional American resentment against the former colonial power. Benjamin Platt Thomas’s older study shows that the US-Russian convergence became decisive during the Crimean War; while Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire attacked Russia, the United States was ostentatiously friendly to the court of St. Petersburg. He depicts Russian minister to Washington Éduard de Stoeckl as a diplomat “whose sole aim was to nurture the chronic anti-British feeling in the United States.” (Thomas 111) According to Thomas, Stoeckl succeeded so well that there was even a perceptible chance that the United States might enter the Crimean War on the Russian side. The US press and public were all on the side of Russia, and hostile to the Anglo-French, to the chagrin of the erratic US President Pierce (who had been close to Admiralty agent Giuseppe Mazzini’s pro-British Young America organization) and the doughface politician James Buchanan. The latter, at that time US envoy to London, embraced the British view of the Tsar as “the Despot.” (Thomas 117) Thomas finds that “the Crimean War undoubtedly proved the wisdom of Russia’s policy of cultivating American friendship, and in fact, drew the two nations closer together.” (Thomas 120) But Thomas glosses over some of the more important US-UK frictions during this phase, which included British army recruiting in the US, and the ejection of the British ambassador as persona non grata. (Thomas 120)

Grave of Russian sailor, Nikolay Demidoff, killed in Civil War in Annapolis, MD

He wasn’t some trouble-maker who got into a silly adventure and was killed in a drunken brawl. American newspapers described his funeral as having been extremely formal, they describe his chestnut casket and a group of officers and other crew members who attended the funeral. A church service which largely impressed local Americans was also described,” said Maksim Alekseyev, the head of Russia’s memorial work department in the US.


…in general, this banknote is being portrayed as an “advertising note”. Never mind that “AMERICAN” above the image of the Russian Czar (Caesar), as well as the relative proportions of the images, could open up a huge can of worms. I do smell a rat in the official version, and offer blog members to combine our investigative efforts. Something does not add up, and may be together we could discover a hidden fact, or two.


At the point of maximum war danger between Great Britain and the United States, the London satirical publication Punch published a vicious caricature of US President Abraham Lincoln and Russian Tsar Alexander II, demonizing the two friends as bloody oppressors. [Cartoon] From Punch, October 24, 1863…

You could easily change the names to Putin and Trump.– GC


KD: I can not stress enough the importance of the lack of photographic evidence. These sketches, in my opinion, are meant to replace the actual photographs which, if used, would reveal something unwanted by the Rulers of this World.

….This story is not a secret by any means, yet my history teacher chose not to mention it. In a nutshell, “Russia’s role in the Civil War was more palpable than just expressing diplomatic support. In September 1863, a Russian fleet of six warships headed to the East coast of North America and stayed there for seven months. Based in New York, they patrolled the surrounding area. A similar thing occurred in the West coast where a fleet of six warships was based in San Francisco. This helped to prevent sudden attacks of Southern raiders on these crucial Union port cities.” Allegedly, the underlying purpose was to help dissuade Britain and France from siding with the Confederacy

The below speech authored by a historian named Webster Griffin Tarpley, paints a slightly different picture of the Russian involvement.

Historian Webster Griffin Tarpley talked about the contribution of Russian Tsar Alexander II to a northern victory in the U.S. Civil War. He said that the Imperial Russian government had issued an ultimatum to Britain and France specifying that if those powers should intervene on the side of the Confederate States of America they would immediately find themselves at war with the Russian Empire. Mr. Tarpley marked the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the Russian Baltic Fleet in New York City on September 24, 1863, and of the Russian Pacific Squadron in San Francisco on October 12, 1863. He argued that it was the presence of those fleets that provided the final deterrence. Russia was the only country to extend direct military support to the Lincoln government.

Russia will support in every way possible, and aid to the fullest extent of its power its ancient ally, the United States of America, in its struggle against treason. Under no circumstances will the Czar permit, if his efforts can prevent it, the success of the lately inaugurated rebellion against the laws, and the government of a friendly country….

How the British Caused the American Civil War

By Richard Poe

On April 1, 1861, the Civil War had not yet begun. That day, Secretary of State William Seward drafted a memorandum to Lincoln seeking action against “European intervention.”

“I would at once demand explanations from France and Spain categorically,” Seward wrote. “I would demand explanations from Great Britain and Russia… And if satisfactory explanations are not received from Spain and France, I would convene Congress and declare war against them.”

Seward’s concerns were legitimate.

Seeing America’s weakness, foreign powers had begun challenging the Monroe Doctrine, which forbade European intervention in the Americas.

Spain had annexed its former colony of Santo Domingo on March 18, pointedly increasing its Cuban garrison to 25,000 men.  France was saber-rattling over Haiti and other lost colonies.

Meanwhile, British diplomats were working hard to bring Spain, France, and Russia into a coalition strong enough to force Lincoln into recognizing the Confederacy.

These intrigues plainly violated the Monroe Doctrine. But no one cared what America thought anymore. The U.S. was falling apart.

“Our domestic dissensions are producing their natural fruit,” wrote The New York Times on March 30, 1861. “The terror of the American name is gone, and the Powers of the Old World are flocking to the feast from which the scream of our eagle had hitherto scared them. We are just beginning to suffer the penalties of being a weak and despised Power.”

When Seward wrote his memo to Lincoln, the attack on Fort Sumter was still eleven days away.  The first shot of our Civil War had not yet been fired.

Yet, the mightiest powers in Europe were already spoiling for a fight.

Britain was the Ringleader

Great Britain was the driving force behind these plots.  The British had been planning America’s downfall for years.

England made no secret of her ambitions in North America.

On January 3, 1860, the London Morning Post bluntly called for the restoration of British rule in America.

The Post was known as a mouthpiece for Lord Palmerston, Britain’s Prime Minister.  Indeed, Palmerston himself was rumored to write unsigned editorials for the paper, now and then.

Should North and South separate, said the Morning Post on January 3, 1860, the colonies of British North America (later combined into the Dominion of Canada) would then “hold the balance of power on the Continent.” Canada would find herself in a strong position to annex the quarreling fragments of the former USA.

The first target should be Portland, Maine, the Post suggested. Strategically located at the terminus of Canada’s Grand Trunk Railway, Portland harbor provided Canada with access to the Atlantic during the winter months, when every port on the St. Lawrence River was frozen.

Why leave such a vital asset in American hands?

“On military, as well as commercial grounds, it is obviously necessary,” argued the Morning Post, “that British North America should possess on the Atlantic a port open at all times of year…”

The newspaper recommended that the state of Maine should join the British Empire voluntarily, once the Union collapsed. “[T]he people of that State, with an eye to commercial profit, should offer to annex themselves to Canada,” it suggested….

Other References:

Abraham Lincoln’s “Bank War”

Was it over states’ rights? secession? slavery? tariffs? A more nuanced look at the causes of the American Civil War.

The CivilWarTariff | Mises Institute

Interesting that we are taught in school it was over slavery and yet that was just a minor issue.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

So the City of London Bankers had a MAJOR grievance with Russia and specifically the Czar, not that they did not have one before that.

The City of London, Wall Street and the Reconquest of America in the Age of Financial Capitalism

The City

In the two millennia since the Romans fortified the lowest crossing point of the River Thames, the City of London’s wealth has meant neither the Crown, nor Parliament could subordinate it. From an early stage, the City became the dominant power in foreign policy and government finance in Britain (nee England). The Ulster plantation and the Royal charters for the Levant Company and the East India Company were orchestrated by powerful City financiers. Traditionally, and to the ire of successive generations of British manufacturers, the City of London preferred international investments to investing in local industry.

The use of debt as a weapon wasn’t invented by City of London financiers, but they perfected the technique in the years preceding the Age of Financial Capitalism. At the time Europe was scrambling to halt Napoleon’s advance and were forced to borrow to finance their extra expenditure, in desperation they turned to the City. From this point, the City’s financiers had brought the rulers of Europe into debt servitude, under financial and banker management.

“The defeat of Napoleon in 1815 (the Bank of England, the City and the Rothschilds played a key role by financing the Emperor’s enemies), the expansion of the Empire and the Industrial Revolution, allowed Britain to establish its position as international hegemon with supremacy in industry, shipping and finance… [The City] preferred the more profitable opportunities offered by financing trade and foreign wars, making loans to governments and generating speculative investment opportunities. Capitalist Industrial production like agriculture before it, depended largely on regional and local sources of finance …” (Lambie, p. 341)

We can’t talk about the City of London in this period without giving special mention to the Rothschild family. Between 1808 and 1859 they developed a capital fund and intelligence service that their rivals couldn’t compete with...

The Complete History Of The ‘House Of Rothschild’

by Alexander Light of HUMANS ARE FREE

…One of Rothschild’s couriers was a man named Rothworth.  When the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo was won by the British, Rothworth took off for the Channel and was able to deliver this news to Nathan Mayer Rothschild, a full 24 hours before Wellington’s own courier…

When news came through that the British had actually won the war, the consuls went up to a level even higher than before the war ended leaving Nathan Mayer Rothschild with a return of approximately 20 to 1 on his investment.

This gave the Rothschild family complete control of the British economy, now the financial centre of the world following Napolean’s defeat, and forced England to set up a new Bank of England, which Nathan Mayer Rothschild controlled.

Interestingly, 100 years later the New York Times would run a story stating that Nathan Mayer Rothschild’s grandson had attempted to secure a court order to suppress publication of a book which had this insider trading story in it.  The Rothschild family claimed the story was untrue and libellous, but the court denied the Rothschilds request and ordered the family to pay all court costs.

Back to 1815, this is the year Nathan Mayer Rothschild makes his famous statement,

I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply.”

 something that did not go well for the Rothschilds this year was the Congress of Vienna, which started in September, 1814 and concluded in June of this year. The reason for this Congress of Vienna, was for the Rothschilds to create a form of world government, to give them complete political control over much of the civilized world.

Many of the European governments were in debt to the Rothschilds, so they figured they could use that as a bargaining tool. However the Tsar Alexander I of Russia, who had not succumbed to a Rothschild central bank, would not go along with the plan, so the Rothschild world government plan failed. [Seems Putin has followed in Tsar Alexander’s foot steps. –GC]

Enraged by this, Nathan Mayer Rothschild swore that some day he or his descendants would destroy the Tsar Alexander 1st’s  entire family and descendants. Unfortunately he was true to his word and 102 years later Rothschild funded Bolsheviks would act upon that promise….

Other References:

The Rothschilds and the Romanovs

New World Order – Eustace Mullins

Chapt 2 Rise of the Rothschild Money Network

….

However the Rothschilds do not wait a century to get revenge.


Czar Alexander II, the ruler of Russia since 1855, is killed in the streets of St. Petersburg by a bomb thrown by a member of the revolutionary “People’s Will” group. The People’s Will, organized in 1879, employed terrorism and assassination in their attempt to overthrow Russia’s czarist autocracy. They murdered officials and made several attempts on the czar’s life before finally assassinating him on March 13, 1881. — This Day In History


Part 3 – The Party of the People’s Will: Jewish terrorists of socialist conviction, 1879–1887 — Cambridge University Press


MARCH, 1881 COMMUNIST TERRORISTS FINALLY KILL ALEXANDER II 

After four previous attempts, Rothschild’s Red terrorists finally succeed in assassinating Czar Alexander II of Russia. With his son Alexander III, and grandson Nicholas watching, the Marxists hurl bombs at the Czar. Alexander’s legs are blown off and he bleeds to death. 

Due to the presence of so many Jews in the revolutionary movement, anti-Semitic violence sweeps across Russia after the Czar’s murder. These “pogroms”, though exaggerated for propaganda purposes, help to trigger a wave of Jewish immigration to the United States, England, and Germany. 

JULY 2, 1881 U.S PRESIDENT JAMES GARFIELD IS SHOT / DIES FROM WOUND INFECTION IN SEPTEMBER 

The civilized world is still reeling from the brutal murder of Czar Alexander II just a few months earlier. Now America will lose its 2nd President in 16 years to an assassin’s bullet. James Garfield is an Ohio Republican who has only been in office 4 months.

Garfield is a brilliant scholar, talented orator, and an advocate of interest-free “hard money” (gold) as a national currency. Like Napoleon, Andrew Jackson and Abe Lincoln before him, Garfield mistrusts of the international bankers. Garfield warns: 

“Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.” (1) 

Validating the Alexander Solzhenitsyn ‘Bolsheviks were not Russians’ Quote

The actual quote below is hearsay from David Duke.🙄


You must understand, the leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians. They hated Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred they tortured and slaughtered millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse. It cannot be overstated. Bolshevism committed the greatest human slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant and uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the global media is in the hands of the perpetrators. – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn


The article give more accurate quotes directly from Solzhenitsyn’s writings that substantiate the content of the above quote.

During this same general time frame you have the rise of Karl Marx

WIKI

… in Paris in 1844, Marx wrote his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and met Engels, who became his closest friend and collaborator. After moving to Brussels in 1845, they were active in the Communist League, and in 1848 they wrote The Communist Manifesto, which expresses Marx’s ideas and lays out a programme for revolution. Marx was expelled from Belgium and Germany, and in 1849 moved to London, where he wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) and Das Kapital….


Various articles that connect Marx to the Rothschilds from Karl Marx Mom’s first cousin is married Nathan Rothschild, founder of the British branch of the Rothschild banking dynasty to SxyxS says: rch 17, 2017 at 12:05 am

Marx secretary Pieper was at the same time employed the Rothschild.
When the Rothschild left Frankfurt they went to Paris(the first place Marx lived in Exile)
and London(the second exile home of Marx).


Then you have Rothschild funding the Fabian London School of Economics LINK

American Fabian, John Dewey funded by the Rockefeller’s becoming the ‘Father of US Progressive Education’.

The Rise of the Round Table Movement and the Sad Case of Canada (1864-1945)

…The Round Table movement served as the intellectual center of the international operations to regain control of the British Empire and took on several incarnations over the 20th century. The historian Carrol Quigley, of Georgetown University wrote of this cabal in his posthumously published “Anglo-American Establishment” (6):

This organization has been able to conceal its existence quite successfully, and many of its most influential members, satisfied to possess the reality rather than the appearance of power, are unknown even to close students of British history. This is the more surprising when we learn that one of the chief methods by which this Group works has been through propaganda.

It plotted the Jameson Raid of 1895; it caused the Boer War of 1899-1902; it set up and controls the Rhodes Trust; it created the Union of South Africa in 1906-1910; it established the South African periodical The State in 1908; it founded the British Empire periodical The Round Table in 1910, and this remains the mouthpiece of the Group; it has been the most powerful single influence in All Souls, Balliol, and New Colleges at Oxford for more than a generation; it has controlled The Times for more than fifty years, with the exception of the three years 1919-1922, it publicized the idea of and the name “British Commonwealth of Nations” in the period 1908-1918, it was the chief influence in Lloyd George’s war administration in 1917-1919 and dominated the British delegation to the Peace Conference of 1919; it had a great deal to do with the formation and management of the League of Nations and of the system of mandates; it founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1919 and still controls it; it was one of the chief influences on British policy toward Ireland, Palestine, and India in the period 1917-1945; it was a very important influence on the policy of appeasement of Germany during the years 1920-1940; and it controlled and still controls, to a very considerable extent, the sources and the writing of the history of British Imperial and foreign policy since the Boer War.”  (7)

To understand the pedigree of the Round Table movement as it was “officially” unveiled in 1910 as the ideological shaper of the policies and paradigm of the new “managerial class” of international imperialists dedicated to the salvation of the British Empire under an “Imperial Federation”, it would be necessary to go back a few decades prior, to 1873-74….  

The model of the Round Table involved a central coordinating body in London, with branches strategically placed throughout the Commonwealth in order to provide one vision and voice to the young and talented “upper managerial class” of the reformed British Empire. Parkin and Peacock were joined by Lord Alfred Milner, Sir Arthur Glazebrook, W.T. Stead, Arthur Balfour and Lord Nathan Rothschild as co-trustees.

Working in tandem with the eugenicists of the Fabian Society of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Balfour had founded the first International Eugenics Conference in 1912 alongside enthusiastic recruits such as young Roundtable member Winston Churchill. 

Please note the name of Round Table co-trustee Arthur Balfour, of the Balfour Agreement that set-up Israel.

Moving a bit forward in time, I document Colonel Towner’s discovery of an address in NYC in my article Operation Gladio


There is an address in NYC called 120 Broadway. It is where the Fed was, it was where FDRs first office was, the Boys Club, the Dinner Club, the Rockefellers’ office is, the Rothschilds, the banks, JP Morgan, They are ALL in this building. They orchestrate EVERYTHING out of this building. They do not have to go out side. They funded the Bolsheviks

THE KHAZAR CONVERSION TO JUDAISM Adapted from the English translation of The Kuzari by Hartwig Hirschfeld, published in 1905 by George Routledge and Sons, Ltd.

Please note the date: 1905 , eight years before the Federal Reserve act was published. I consider this a pleasant fairy tale.

WILD SPECULATION: The other string to the Khazarian bow is said to be usury. Of the three religions, only Jews were allowed to lend money at interest. To make the most money on each trading trip, being able to borrow money at interest, so you have the funds to invest in the maximum amount of trade goods, would make sense. This is especially true when starting out in business. Such a crass reason for picking Judaism, would cast doubt on the sincerity of the ‘conversion’ from Pagan so would not be make public.

However the most interesting tidbit I found in all my digging was in 1913:

** The Federal Reserve Act of 1913

** 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Federal Income Tax (1913)

** 👉1913, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was founded in Chicago by Sigmund Livingston, a Chicago attorney in 1913.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Now I want to jump back centuries. This means the information is a lot harder to find and cannot be easily validated. I already covered the History of Khazaria back in August last year. The two most interesting and solid pieces of information I have found are:

1050 years ago Svyatoslav squads defeated the state of the KhazarsJuly 3 2015

1050 years ago, in the summer of 965, [note the specific date -GC] the great Russian prince Svyatoslav Igorevich defeated the Khazar army and took the capital of the Khazar Kaganate, Itil. The lightning strike of the Russian troops with the support of the Allied Pechenegs led to the collapse of the parasitic Khazar state. Russ committed a sacred revenge, destroying the Khazar “snake”…

Khazar threat

The fight against the parasitic state of the Khazars was the most important strategic task of Russia.👉The trade and usurious elite of Khazaria,👈 who subjugated the Khazar tribal military nobility, held in their hands all the exits from Eastern Europe to the East.

The Khazar state received huge profits by controlling transit routes.The Khazar Khaganate represented a serious military threat to Russia. Archaeologists have discovered a whole system of stone fortresses on the right bank of the Don, North Donets and Oskol. One white-stone stronghold was located at a distance of 10-20 kilometers from the other. The outposts were located on the right, western and northwestern banks of the rivers. An important role in the construction of these fortresses was played by Byzantine engineers. So, Sarkel (Belaya Vezha) on the bank of the Don was built by Byzantine engineers led by Petron Kamatir. Yes, and strengthened Itil Byzantines-Romans. The Khazar state played an important role in the military-political strategy of Constantinople, holding back Russia….

The Khazars made campaigns and raids in the Slavic-Russian lands. Arab geographer Al-Idrisi reported thatKhazar vassals regularly made raids on the Slavs, in order to steal people for sale into slavery. These were not just spontaneous raids, from time to time, but a deliberate predatory strategy on the part of the parasite state.In the Khazar state, thepower was seized by the Jews representing the caste of rakhdonites (radanity).

👉This caste of international traders controlled trade between East and West, including the Silk Road and other communications. Their influence extended all the way to China and India.👈One of their main “goods” were people. The slave clan👉worshiped the “golden calf” and measured everything in gold….👈

When I read this, I cannot help thinking of Putin quoting history to Tucker Carlson before Carlson cut him off. Note the article gives dates and names.


This article, along with the well researched maps below, goes into the History of the Khazars. The KEY for us is the pointers to “usurious elite” and “caste of international traders” This is on top of the outward conversion to Judaism for political reasons and worshiped the “golden calf” and measured everything in gold. Other articles accuse the Khazars of being pagans with very nasty habits. However when I look for a ‘neutral’ article on Pagan Khazar, all I can find is fluff about the Khazars sacrificing animals. You have to go to Azerbaijan before information on human sacrifice surfaces. LINK and LINK
Cuppa Covfefe on current Satanic rituals: LINK

Maps of the Khazar Kingdom from 300 c.e. to 1000 c.e. [c.e. = AD]


This map shows the battles the Russian author is talking about.


This maps article has a pointer to this article that I did not look at before. I find it a treasure trove of new information.

The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage (1976)

by Arthur Koestler from Koestler Website

This book traces the history of the ancient Khazar Empire, a major but almost forgotten power in Eastern Europe, which in the Dark Ages became converted to Judaism. 

Khazaria was finally wiped out by the forces of Genghis Khan, but evidence indicates that the Khazars themselves migrated to Poland and formed the cradle of Western Jewry
The Khazars’ sway extended from the Black Sea to the Caspian, from the Caucasus to the Volga, and they were instrumental in stopping the Muslim onslaught against Byzantium, the eastern jaw of the gigantic pincer movement that in the West swept across northern Africa and into Spain.

In the second part of this book, “The Heritage,” Mr. Koestler speculates about the ultimate faith of the Khazars and their impact on the racial composition and social heritage of modern Jewry.

He produces a large body of meticulously detailed research in support of a theory that sounds all the more convincing for the restraint with which it is advanced.

Yet should this theory be confirmed, the term “anti-Semitism” would become void of meaning, since, as Mr. Koestler writes, it is based,

on a misapprehension shared by both the killers and their victims. The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.”

V – EXODUS


THE evidence quoted in the previous pages indicates that — contrary to the traditional view held by nineteenth-century historians — the Khazars, after the defeat by the Russians in 965, lost their empire but retained their independence within narrower frontiers, and their Judaic faith, well into the thirteenth century. They even seem to have reverted to some extent to their erstwhile predatory habits. Baron comments:

In general, the reduced Khazar kingdom persevered. It waged a more or less effective defence against all foes until the middle of the thirteenth century, when it fell victim to the great Mongol invasion set in motion by Jenghiz Khan. Even then it resisted stubbornly until the surrender of all its neighbours. Its population was largely absorbed by the Golden Horde which had established the centre of its empire in Khazar territory. But before and after the Mongol upheaval the Khazars sent many offshoots into the unsubdued Slavonic lands, helping ultimately to build up the great Jewish centres of eastern Europe.

…The Khazar origin of the numerically and socially dominant element in the Jewish population of Hungary during the Middle Ages is thus relatively well documented. It might seem that Hungary constitutes a special case, in view of the early Magyar-Khazar connection; but in fact the Khazar influx into Hungary was merely a part of the general mass-migration from the Eurasian steppes toward the West, i.e., towards Central and Eastern Europe….

The migration toward safer pastures was a protracted, intermittent process which went on for several centuries. The Khazar exodus was part of the general picture. It had been preceded, as already mentioned, by the founding of Khazar colonies and settlements in various places in the Ukraine and southern Russia. There was a flourishing Jewish community in Kiev long before and after the Rus took the town from the Khazars.

Similar colonies existed in Perislavel and Chernigov. A Rabbi Mosheh of Kiev studied in France around 1160, and a Rabbi Abraham of Chernigov studied in 1181 in the Talmud School of London. The “Lay of Igor’s Host” mentions a famous contemporary Russian poet called Kogan — possibly a combination of Cohen (priest) and Kagan. Some time after Sarkel, which the Russians called Biela Veza, was destroyed the Khazars built a town of the same name near Chernigov….

According to the article “statistics” in the Jewish Encyclopaedia, in the sixteenth century the total Jewish population of the world amounted to about one million. This seems to indicate, as Poliak, Kutschera and others have pointed out, that during the Middle Ages the majority of those who professed the Judaic faith were Khazars. A substantial part of this majority went to Poland, Lithuania, Hungary and the Balkans, where they founded that Eastern Jewish community which in its turn became the dominant majority of world Jewry…

So much for size. But what do we know of the social structure and composition of the Khazar immigrant community? The first impression one gains is a striking similarity between certain privileged positions held by Khazar Jews in Hungary and in Poland in those early days. Both the Hungarian and Polish sources refer to Jews employed as mintmasters, administrators of the royal revenue, controllers of the salt monopoly, taxcollectors and “money-lenders” — i.e., bankers.

….the transformation of Khazar Jewry into Polish Jewry did not entail any brutal break with the past, or loss of identity. It was a gradual, organic process of change, which — as Poliak has convincingly shown — preserved some vital traditions of Khazar communal life in their new country. 

This was mainly achieved through the emergence of a social structure, or way of life, found nowhere else in the world Diaspora…

The shtetl, on the other hand, was a quite different proposition — a type of settlement which, as already said, existed only in Poland-Lithuania and nowhere else in the world. It was a self-contained country town with an exclusively or predominantly Jewish population.

The shtetl’s origins probably date back to the thirteenth century, and may represent the missing link, as it were, between the market towns of Khazaria and the Jewish settlements in Poland. The economic and social function of these semi-rural, semiurban agglomerations seems to have been similar in both countries. In Khazaria, as later in Poland, they provided a network of trading posts or market towns which mediated between the needs of the big towns and the countryside.

They had regular fairs at which sheep and cattle, alongside the goods manufactured in the towns and the products of the rural cottage industries were sold or bartered; at the same time they were the centres where artisans plied their crafts, from wheelwrights to blacksmiths, silversmiths, tailors, Kosher butchers, millers, bakers and candlestick-makers. There were also letter-writers for the illiterate, synagogues for the faithful, inns for travellers, and a heder — Hebrew for “room”, which served as a school. There were itinerant story-tellers and folk bards (some of their names, such as Velvel Zbarzher, have been preserved) travelling from shtetl to shtetl in Poland — and no doubt earlier on in Khazaria, if one is to judge by the survival of story-tellers among Oriental people to our day.

…Some particular trades became virtually a Jewish monopoly in Poland. One was dealing in timber — which reminds one that timber was the chief building material and an important export in Khazaria; another was transport. “The dense net of shtetls,” writes Poliak, “made it possible to distribute manufactured goods over the whole country by means of the superbly built Jewish type of horse cart. The preponderance of this kind of transport, especially in the east of the country, was so marked amounting to a virtual monopoly — that the Hebrew word for carter, ba‘al agalah was incorporated into the Russian language as balagula…

…After the Mongol conquest”, wrote Poliak, “when the Slav villages wandered westward, the Khazar shtetls went with them.”

The pioneers of the new settlements were probably rich Khazar traders who constantly travelled across Poland on the much frequented trade routes into Hungary. “The Magyar and Kabar migration into Hungary blazed the trail for the growing Khazar settlements in Poland: it turned Poland into a transit area between the two countries with Jewish communities.”….

….

…Mr. Koestler was an Ashkenazi Jew and took pride in his Khazar ancestry. He was also a very talented and successful writer who published over 25 novels and essays. His most successful book, Darkness at Noon, was translated in thirty-three languages.


As expected, The Thirteenth Tribe caused a stir when published in 1976, since it demolishes ancient racial and ethnic dogmas… At the height of the controversy in 1983, the lifeless bodies of Arthur Koestler and his wife were found in their London home. Despite significant inconsistencies, the police ruled their death a suicide… https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_khazar01a.htm

The Wiki article is as expected slanted in the other direction but does give some very useful tidbits. It is quite long since Koestler was very active during the World Wars and traveled a lot.

…Koestler’s mother, Adele Jeiteles, was born on 25 June 1871 into a prominent Jewish family in Prague….” [that would be adjacent to Poland. –GC]

 On 1 April 1926, he left Vienna for Palestine… In interwar Vienna he wound up as the personal secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement. Traveling in Soviet Turkmenistan as a young and ardent Communist, he ran into Langston Hughes. While reporting on the Spanish Civil War, he met W. H. Auden at a “crazy party” in Valencia before winding up in one of Franco’s prisons. In Weimar Berlin he fell into the circle of the Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg, through whom he met the leading German Communists… In the early 1930s, Koestler moved to the Soviet Union. In 1932, Koestler travelled in Turkmenistan and Central Asia… During his stay in the Soviet Union, he also lived for a time in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic,… He wrote propaganda under the direction of Willi Münzenberg, the Comintern’s chief propaganda director in the West…


So this guy was all over Europe, got rescued by the Brits twice, ended up working for the British  Ministry of Information, became a UK citizen. Lived in the USA… Given his family background as wealthy eastern European Jews and his traveling before the massive destruction of WWI, I am inclined to believe he had a decent handle on the truth.

Also Arthur Koestler’s book is consistent with the finding of this Jewish researcher at John Hopkins.


John’s Hopkins University Jewish scientist’s study that showed less than 3% of Israel’s Jews are descended from King David

Dr. Eran Elhaik, geneticist researcher at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, found that today’s “Jews” originated from Khazaria and not Israel. They are not the seed of Abraham.


From WIKI:

Eran Elhaik (born 1980) is an Israeli-American geneticist and bioinformatician, an associate professor of bioinformatics at Lund University in Sweden and Chief of Science Officer at an ancestry testing company called Ancient DNA Origins owned by Enkigen

What I find VERY interesting is both of these people who are Jews have their work attacked by Israelis.

As an example SEE: So, Who Were the Khazars? Tablet Magazine

By, Dan Shapira,

“an interdisciplinary historian and philologist at Bar-Ilan University. He is working currently on medieval and early modern Jewish minority communities, the Crimea, and the Khazars.”

Wiki on Tablet Magazine:

Tablet was founded in June 2009 by Alana Newhouse, former culture editor at The Forward, with the support of the Nextbook foundation as a redeveloped and news-focused version of the Jewish literary journal Nextbook. In the three years after its founding, New York Magazine described Tablet as a “must-read for young politically and culturally engaged Jews. Its reporting has largely focused on Jewish news and culture….

There is also this:

Section One: Rise and Fall of the Khazars

“In Khazaria, sheep, honey, and Jews exist in large quantities.”
Muqaddasi, Descriptio Imperii Moslemici (tenth century).

Chapter I: Rise

….Professor Dunlop of Columbia University, a leading authority on the history of the Khazars, has given a concise summary of this decisive yet virtually unknown episode:

“The Khazar country . . . lay across the natural line of advance of the Arabs. Within a few years of the death of Muhammad (AD 632) the armies of the Caliphate, sweeping northward through the wreckage of two empires and carrying all before them, reached the great mountain barrier of the Caucasus. This barrier once passed, the road lay open to the lands of eastern Europe. As it was, on the line of the Caucasus the Arabs met the forces of an organized military power which effectively prevented them from extending their conquests in this direction. The wars of the Arabs and the Khazars, which lasted more than a hundred years, though little known, have thus considerable historical importance. The Franks of Charles Martel on the field of Tours turned the tide of Arab invasion. At about the same time the threat to Europe in the east was hardly less acute . . . The victorious Muslims were met and held by the forces of the Khazar kingdom . . . It can . . . scarcely be doubted that but for the existence of the Khazars in the region north of the Caucasus, Byzantium, the bulwark of European civilization in the east, would have found itself outflanked by the Arabs, and the history of Christendom and Islam might well have been very different from what we know.”

It is perhaps not surprising, given these circumstances, that in 732—after a resounding Khazar victory over the Arabs—the future Emperor Constantine V married a Khazar princess. In due time their son became the Emperor Leo IV, known as Leo the Khazar.

Ironically, the last battle in the war, AD 737, ended in a Khazar defeat. But by that time the impetus of the Muslim Holy War was spent, the Caliphate was rocked by internal dissensions, and the Arab invaders retraced their steps across the Caucasus without having gained a permanent foothold in the north, whereas the Khazars became more powerful than they had previously been....

And finally back to the present.

Israel honors Egyptian spies 50 years after fiasco By Reuters

After half a century of reticence and recrimination, Israel on Wednesday honored nine Egyptian Jews recruited as agents-provocateur in what became one of the worst intelligence bungles in the country’s history.

Israel was at war with Egypt when it hatched a plan in 1954 to ruin its rapprochement with the United States and Britain by firebombing sites frequented by foreigners in Cairo and Alexandria.

Israeli hoped the attacks, which caused no casualties, would be blamed on local insurgents collapsed when the young Zionist bombers were caught and confessed at public trials. Two were hanged. The rest served jail terms and emigrated to Israel.

Embarrassed before the West, the fledgling Jewish state long denied involvement….

No it was not embarrassment, it was need for continued monetary and military support. It was also not the last time.


Israeli Six Day War: The Jewish genocide of 1,000 Egyptian POWs & attack on USS Liberty

This is from the book Body of Secrets, the history of the NSA. A big question for Americans regarding the Israeli attack on the Liberty, relates to the MOTIVE. Why? Why did the Israelis attack the Liberty?

Israel later told the US Govt that they “made a mistake”. The Jews also did this in the 1948 war when they murdered entire villages of Arabs. They just said “It was a mistake” and that’s the end of it. According to the book, the US Govt, especially the military/intelligence people did NOT buy the “mistake story” of the Jews. The evidence is totally clear, because Israeli planes came and watched the Liberty for hours and they flew past it. The Israelis knew 100% this was an American ship. Also, all survivors state that the US Flag was flying clearly on a sunny day. The Israelis knew they were attacking an American ship.

But why? Well, the real secret that the Israeli’s have kept, is that the USS Liberty was close to the coast and in view of a town called El Arish. And in El Arish, the Jews were busy murdering, Egyptian POWS. In fact, the Israeli army was doing a LOT of civilian murder that day. But the USS Libery, as a spy ship, was listening in on all radio comms and was picking up everything. And the Israelis knew it was a US spy ship. In order to hide their slaughter of the POW’s, they wanted to sink the Liberty and ensure that NOBODY SURVIVED. That is why they engaged in the brutal, hours-long attack that they did.

Here is the real secret about the USS Liberty. This is how the book describes the murder of about 1,000 Egyptians who had surrendered that day. When a soldier surrenders, you are to look after him. That is international law. Israel, in violation of international law was carrying out a genocide. This is how the book describes it. Page 201-204:

By June 8, three days after Israel launched the war, Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai had become nuisances. There was no place to house them, not enough Israelis to watch them, and few vehicles to transport them to prison camps. But there was another way to deal with them.


As the Liberty sat within eyeshot of El Arish, eavesdropping on surrounding communications, Israeli soldiers turned the town into a slaughterhouse, systematically butchering their prisoners. In the shadow of the El Arish mosque, they lined up about sixty unarmed Egyptian prisoners, hands tied behind their backs, and then opened fire with machine guns until the pale desert sand turned red. Then they forced other prisoners to bury the victims in mass graves. “I saw a line of prisoners, civilians and military,” said Abdelsalam Moussa, one of those who dug the graves, “and they opened fire at them all at once. When they were dead, they told us to bury them.” Nearby, another group of Israelis gunned down thirty more prisoners and then ordered some Bedouins to
cover them with sand.

IDF knew of Hamas’s plan to kidnap 250 before October 7 attack – report – Jerusalem Post

The IDF had precise information about Hamas’s intentions, but due to prevailing conceptions in the security establishment and possible negligence by officials, the warning signs were not acted on. By JERUSALEM POST STAFF

A newly surfaced document has revealed that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and intelligence systems had detailed knowledge of Hamas’s plan to raid Israel and kidnap 250 people weeks before the October 7 massacre.

The document, which was compiled in the Gaza Division, outlined Hamas’s intentions and was known to top intelligence officials, according to a report by Kan News.

The document, titled “Detailed End-to-End Raid Training,” was distributed on September 19, 2023, and described in detail the series of exercises conducted by Hamas’s elite units.


Colonel Towner remarked the use of para-gliders was a known Operation Gladio tactic.

Is there continuety from the Khazars to the present day bankers? I do not know but there is certainly animosity between the Russians and the Rothschilds that goes back centuries.

And so I leave you with this photo of No-Name, Lieberman and Rothschild

DEAR MAGA: Open Thread 20250204 ❀ Tuesday Placeholder ❀ Thank You, American Air Travel

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


Addendum: Some Details

First of all, the boilerplate.

By reference, I call to incorporate the rules spoken of in any of Deplorable Patriot’s recent posts, such as her final one.


With that settled, I reiterate……

A call for weekly open-thread authors on Tuesday.

Your submissions only need to be scheduled at 12:01 AM on Tuesday.

The titles need to include the following:

DEAR MAGA: Open Thread YYYYMMDD ❀ [whatever you want after that]

There is no commitment to do this every week. But if you want to do a Tuesday post, just let me know in advance.

We do have a very thin guideline post of basics in the sidebar, shown here:

Looking forward to somebody picking up DePat’s Tuesday sword.

angel sword 2021-08-08 10-46-04.png

Addendum: An Open Letter In Praise of the American Air Travel Industry

This is just a quick message of THANKS to some people who are sadly undergoing a lot of scrutiny and criticism right now, and who surely could use an “attaboy” and some “kudos”.

You see, sometimes – including recently – I have had to deal with “foreign” airlines of various kinds.

Foreign airlines can actually be quite excellent. Some of them are charming. Some of them are extremely enjoyable to fly on. Some of them are very attentive, and can really help make a trip overseas quite memorable. There are several foreign airlines that I love for different reasons.

HOWEVER.

If you deal with foreign airlines long enough, you are bound to run into their dark and highly inefficient sides. They will sometimes do stuff that just boggles the mind.

In particular, their technology is usually just problematic. Or to be fully honest, it sucks. Big-time sucks.

  • websites will crash
  • websites will drop your session and forget you were ever there
  • representatives will put you on hold and lose your call
  • the company will forget to bill you
  • flights will simply disappear from itineraries
  • picking seats will cause itineraries to malfunction
  • calls to customer service will cause itineraries to vanish
  • confirmation numbers will vanish
  • the same data will have to be “saved” over and over again – and then gets lost anyway

I recently had to deal with an airline that was absolutely no problem the last two times, during the last several years – but THIS TIME – OMG – what an absolute disaster. Dozens of hours arranging things – lost. KAPOOF! Gone. Vanished. So call customer service. Get it all fixed. Everything done. Waiting for the bill. No bill.

And then it all just disappears again.

Just an absolute waste of my time.

SO – because I was short on time – I decided to try something different. I attempted to re-book the trip using an American airline company.

The experience was just overwhelmingly positive. I managed to get almost the entire itinerary of foreign flights that we had before – but this time, everything went perfectly, and we were done in minutes, not hours. No tech errors AT ALL. Billed immediately. All the minor things we needed – DONE.

The websites functioned perfectly. All the international bullshit – DONE.

After all the CRAP we had put up with, it was a PLEASURE dealing with American airline tech – which could sell us foreign flights better than the foreigners could sell them to us.

So I just want to say THANK YOU to the American air travel industry for restoring my faith in air travel. Y’all done good!

W


Dear KMAG: 20250203 Trump Won Three Times ❀ Open Topic


This is our President.

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 – but not for long!

Daily outrage and epic phuckery still 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 – even after we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.


Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:

ombrophobia

noun

  • fear of rain
  • not to be confused with ombrophobe, which can mean either a person who suffers from ombrophobia, or a plant or other organism with a low tolerance for rain. Ombrophobe is similar to xerophile, but not identical.

Used in a sentence

Ombrophobia often originates from a traumatic experience involving rain.

Shown in a picture – OK – not really shown, but yeah

As the name of a video by a Burmese hip-hop artist, OASIX


MUSIC!

As opposed to AI country, here’s some actual US rock!

OK – let’s go back even further…..

Now forward in time again – 1978…..


THE STUFF

I’ll be blunt. The mathematics of WGTTs is messing up Newtonian physics, and the usual suspect troublemakers, Einstein and Schroedinger, are laughing!

Don’t try this at home, at work, or at school.


In more amazing “lotta winning” news…..

Jack Poso
JackPosobiec

BREAKING: Darren Beattie appointed to Senior State Department office

From thepostmillennial.com

132.3K Views……

Darren Beattie broke more important J6 stories than almost anybody. He and Julie Kelly grabbed the J6 narrative out of the hands of the left, and beat the Biden administration into defeat with it.

JUST SAYIN’!!!


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 5

Saratoga. Everything hinged on Saratoga. From history.com we have the following:

British strategy in 1777 involved two main prongs of attack aimed at separating New England (where the rebellion enjoyed the most popular support) from the other colonies. To that end, General John Burgoyne’s army marched south from Canada toward a planned meeting with Howe’s forces on the Hudson River. Burgoyne’s men dealt a devastating loss to the Americans in July by retaking Fort Ticonderoga, while Howe decided to move his troops southward from New York to confront Washington’s army near the Chesapeake Bay. The British defeated the Americans at Brandywine Creek, Pennsylvannia on September 11 and entered Philadelphia on September 25. Washington rebounded to strike Germantown in early October before withdrawing to winter quarters near Valley Forge.

Howe’s move had left Burgoyne’s army exposed near Saratoga, New York, and the British suffered the consequences of this on September 19, when an American force under General Horatio Gates defeated them at Freeman’s Farm in the first Battle of Saratoga. After suffering another defeat on October 7 at Bemis Heights (the Second Battle of Saratoga), Burgoyne surrendered his remaining forces on October 17. The American victory at Saratoga would prove to be a turning point of the American Revolution, as it prompted France (which had been secretly aiding the rebels since 1776) to enter the war openly on the American side, though it would not formally declare war on Great Britain until June 1778. The American Revolution, which had begun as a civil conflict between Britain and its colonies, had become a world war.

At one time, France actually had a spine. The colonists rejected their oppressors and earned the assistance of the long time British enemies, France. What is not remembered often is that Spain entered the conflict as an ally of France. America owed Spain a debt of gratitude for what they did to assist. They provided critical supplies and funding. They were in their own conflict with the British and saw it as an opportunity to further weaken their enemy so that that could retake Menorca, which was successful a few years later.

Win-win-win for the colonies, France and Spain. An enemy of my enemy is my friend.

But let’s take a closer look at General Horatio Gates in the fall of 1777, the reported hero General who changed everything for the colonies. From mountvernon.com:

“When British troops under the command of Major General John Burgoyne invaded New York in 1777, Gates’ army defeated Burgoyne twice, on September 19, 1777 and October 7, 1777. Gates’ troops forced Burgoyne to surrender his 5,700 man army near Saratoga on October 17, 1777. This victory, a major turning point of the American Revolution, convinced France to form an alliance with the Americans against Great Britain in 1778.

Tensions between Gates and General George Washington grew immediately following Saratoga, after Gates informed Congress directly of his victory rather than informing his Commander-in-Chief. Washington was further angered that Gates did not promptly return troops sent to help Gates during the New York campaign. General Washington was also convinced that Gates played a role in the Conway Cabal in late 1777, which was a supposed plot to remove Washington from command and replace him with Gates. In November 1777, Gates became president of the Board of War and technically became Washington’s superior. Bickering continued between the two men as Gates drew up plans for an invasion of Canada without consulting Washington.

Wait… what? There was dissent in the highest ranks during the Revolutionary War? Somebody got the big head after battle victories? Somebody decided to posture for personal career gain like our political and military idgits do today? Tell me it isn’t so! What is this about a “Conway Cabal” being involved? Enjoy reading the backbiting of some of our founding fathers in the link below. Be sure and click on the second page prompt at the bottom left of the first page.

https://www.ushistory.org/march/other/cabal.htm

As if Benedict Arnold was not enough, Gen. Gates played politics and showed his pompous azz in the middle of our fight for independence. But in the ultimate “what goes around comes around” result, the following explains what happened next. Unfortunately it came with a heavy cost of lives for the colonists.

“In the spring of 1778, Gates returned to field command in the north, controlling troops in New York and Massachusetts. Gates took command of the Southern Army in South Carolina in July 1780 to meet the British army that had invaded that state earlier in the year. Abandoning the cautious strategy he employed against Burgoyne in 1777, Gates marched his army toward the British troops in Camden, South Carolina, despite the fact that his men were running low on supplies. This action led to the Battle of Camden on August 16, 1780, which was one of the largest American defeats of the war. As the American troops retreated, Gates left the battlefield and abandoned his army, riding nearly 200 miles in three days. Accused of cowardice, his reputation was ruined. Gates was removed from command in October 1780.

Congress briefly reinstated Gates into the army in the summer of 1782, but after uneventful service he left for the final time in 1783. In 1790 Gates sold his Virginia plantation, freed his slaves, and bought an estate in New York called “Rose Hill Farm.” He ended his career serving one term in the New York legislature from 1800-1801. Gates died on April 10, 1806.”

Proverbs 16:18 – Pride goes before destruction, And a haughty spirit before a fall. We have seen this scripture proven true countless times over the years. We should always heed these wise words.

Time for more signers. Let ‘s go with one of the players in the Conway Cabal debacle.

Benjamin Rush

The most celebrated physician in America post Revolutionary War was Benjamin Rush. He was born in Byberry, PA in 1745. He was born to merchant John Rush and Susana Hall, the middle of seven children. His father died when he was six and he was sent with a brother to live with an aunt and uncle two years later so they could receive an education. He studied under Dr. Samuel Finley at the West Nottingham Academy. Not long after that he graduated at age 14 with a BA degree from the College of New Jersey, which became Princeton later. For the next five years he apprenticed under Dr. John Redman in Philadelphia before accepting an opportunity to study at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland for three years, where he earned an M. D. degree. While there he became fluent in French, Italian and Spanish. He returned to America in 1769 and opened a medical practice while also teaching chemistry at the University of Philadelphia (UPenn – there it is again). Later in life he published the first American textbook on chemistry.

Rush joined the Sons of Liberty soon after his return from Scotland. He was so respected that Thomas Paine consulted him about content in his Common Sense book. He represented PA when he signed the Declaration. In a letter to John Adams he recalled the signing in a similar manner as fellow signer William Elery. Per Wiki, he wrote the following,

He described it as a scene of “pensive and awful silence”. Rush said the delegates were called up, one after another, and then filed forward somberly to subscribe to what each thought was their ensuing death warrant. He related that the “gloom of the morning” was briefly interrupted when the rotund Benjamin Harrison of Virginia said to a diminutive Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, at the signing table, “I shall have a great advantage over you, Mr. Gerry, when we are all hung for what we are now doing. From the size and weight of my body I shall die in a few minutes and be with the Angels, but from the lightness of your body you will dance in the air an hour or two before you are dead.” According to Rush, Harrison’s remark “procured a transient smile, but it was soon succeeded by the Solemnity with which the whole business was conducted.”

He served in the Continental Congress as well as in the war in the field with the Philadelphia militia. He laid the foundation for battlefield treatments of the Continental Army during this time. For a period he served as Surgeon General in the Continental Army’s Middle Department until the lack of medical supplies and underreporting of casualties by officials caused him to make the ill fated Conway related comments, after which Washington asked him to resign. He regretted what he said greatly. Per Wiki, in another letter to John Adams in 1812 he stated, “He [Washington] was the highly favored instrument whose patriotism and name contributed greatly to the establishment of the independence of the United States.” Rush also successfully pleaded with Washington’s biographers Justice Bushrod Washington and Chief Justice John Marshall to delete his association with those stinging words.

Benjamin Rush accomplished an incredible amount in his life in the post revolutionary period. Perhaps the greatest was facilitating the reconciliation of two of the great founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. He had lifelong friendships with both as well as other signers.

A biographical summary is linked below and you will probably be as amazed by his accomplishments as I was.

https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/benjamin-rush

On a personal level Benjamin Rush was a devoted Christian. He believed (as I do) that the United States of America was the work of God: “I do not believe that the Constitution was the offspring of inspiration, but I am as perfectly satisfied that the Union of the United States in its form and adoption is as much the work of a Divine Providence as any of the miracles recorded in the Old and New Testament”. In 1798, after the Constitution’s adoption, Rush declared: “The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in Religion.” He had involvement in several denominations through the years and assisted Richard Allen in the formation of the AME Church at one point.

He had married Julia Stockton in 1776. The couple had thirteen children, nine survived past one year. One son, Richard, went on to become part of the administrations of the presidencies of James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincey Adams, Andrew Jackson, James Polk and Zachary Taylor. Benjamin Rush died of Typhus Fever in 1813 at age 68. Julia, 14 years his junior, lived until 1848. Both remained faithful to the Lord and their country throughout their lives.

Benjamin Rush was an incredible American Patriot who left a legacy that continues to this day.

Joseph Hewes

Born in 1730 in Princeton, NJ to Society of Friends (Quaker) parents. He also graduated from the College of New Jersey (Princeton). He left the area soon after and joined a family member’s mercantile business in Philadelphia. He attended Quaker meetings while there and apprenticed in the business. He learned of business opportunities in the port town of Edenton in North Carolina, so he moved and formed a company with Charles Blount there that succeeded for a time. However, the death of his fiancee soured him on life as well as the business, which was dissolved. He recovered and partnered with a local attorney, Robert Smith. His business ventures began to flourish. He owned many properties, warehouses and became involved with shipping at the port; owning multiple ships, sloops and brigs. He created a rope walk to be used between ships as well developing and selling rope and related products to the shipping industry.

Over the years he became a justice of the peace and later was elected into the NC Assembly. He remained active as a Quaker and at one point was believed to have joined the Anglican church. Many historians report he believed as a deist.

He became more and more involved in the independence movement. He joined the NC Committee of Correspondence and represented the state in the Continental Congress. He actively supported the Suffolk Reserves, which called for a termination of trade with Great Britain in 1774. He was sold out to the causes of the colonists and independence. Ultimately this led to his signing of the Declaration.

For a month afterwards he visited his mother back in Princeton, NJ. The gravity of the situation had begun to weigh on him. Per Wiki, “Hewes wrote “I had the weight of North Carolina on my shoulders within a day or two of three months. The service was too severe. I have sat some days from Six in the morning till five, and sometimes Six in the afternoon without eating or drinking. My health is bad, such close attention made it worse. …Duty, inclination and self preservation call on me now to make a little excursion in the County to see my mother. This is a duty which I have not allowed myself to perform during almost nine months that I have been here.” Towards the end of September Hewes returned to Edenton for rest and recuperation.

Hewes fully realized what was to come from the Declaration. He assisted in training the NC militia and began preparing ships for Naval use. In truth, some of this work had been done well before the signing of the Declaration as he saw the course the colonists were on would lead to war. He was appointed to a marine committee that began outfitting of privately owned ships with guns. He even leased one of his brigs to the marine committee in the Continental Congress with the committee providing him insurance for potential loss.

In the late 1770’s his health began to suffer as he dealt with continuous head aches. He served in the Continental Congress until mid 1779 despite a group of fellow marine committee members objecting to the money he made while providing marine services to the country. He returned to office with the NC Assembly and continued to represent the state in the Continental Congress. He returned home from the Congress in October 1779 due to his health. He passed away a month later at 49 years of age.

Joseph Hewes never married. The earlier loss of his future wife was too much for him to overcome. As a result he had no children. Her loss had led him to throw all of his efforts into his business ventures and service to our country in the Revolutionary War period. He was a self made man of great wealth who remained committed to the cause of independence unto his death. In his honor and in a demonstration of respect, members of Congress wore crape on their left arms for one month after his death.

Joseph Hewes was a true, devoted American Patriot.

William Williams

Born in Lebanon, CT in 1731, William Williams was one of ten children of Congregationalist Church minister, Solomon Williams and wife, Mary Porter Williams. He studied both law and theology at Harvard and graduated in 1751 as well as studying the ministry with his father. Four years later he served in a local militia in the French and Indian War. He returned and opened a store in Lebanon. He never owned slaves as he felt it was morally wrong.

At nearly 40 years old he married Mary Trumbull who was about 15 years younger. She was the daughter of CT Royal Governor Jonathon Trumbull. Trumbull went on to serve as the second Speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives. William and Mary went on have three children together. He took the job of town clerk, a position he held for 44 years.

Williams spent over two decades as a representative in the CT House of Representatives. He was elected Speaker in four of those years. He was strongly for independence as he was a member of the Sons of Liberty, on the Committee for Correspondence as well as the Council for Safety. At one time he anonymously had a satirical letter published in the local newspaper that confronted the King and his actions. He became an even more fierce opponent to the Crown after the Coercive Acts of 1774. He was elected to replace Oliver Wolcott as a representative from CT in the Continental Congress one week after the Declaration was formally announced, so he did not get to vote. However, he arrived in time to be a signer. Following this act he resigned his militia commission as a Colonel to serve in the Congress. He also served as a county judge for 28 years beginning in 1776.

Williams refused to sign the Constitution. He was opposed because Article VI banned religious tests for government officials. As a devout Christian and Congregationalist Deacon he felt it was a necessary requirement. He lived a life of dignity with a humble attitude and consistency that he felt was necessary for government officials. He lived his entire life as an example for Christ and for America. During the war, he closed his business, gave generously of his time and contributed much of his wealth for the cause. He regularly opened his home for military members to stay and rest.

In his latter days Williams read, meditated and prayed. He passed away at age 80. The day of his death, August 2, was exactly 35 years to the day from the date he signed the Declaration. His wife, Mary, passed away 20 years later.

William Williams was the epitome of a Christian servant leader and American Patriot.

Conclusion

As we wind our way through the Declaration signers, we come across stories such as these with Gates, Conway, Washington and Rush that remind us that nothing in life happens in a linear progression of goodness. Sometimes it all comes across as a soap opera. Yet, somehow the hand of God always has appeared at the right time to steer us in a direction that restores our destiny. Indeed, we are going through such a resurgence of the American spirit today.

It is interesting to me that an active faith in God, in a higher power, always seems to be the catalyst that drives the renewal.

In this story we have two devout Christians and a probable deist from different states who were working on the same team as patriots and signers of the Declaration of Independence. They gave their all for America, just as American First MAGA is doing today.

May God continue to bless America.

Dear MAGA: 20250202 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.”

A Good King

Josiah was the king of Judah from approximately 640 to 609 B.C. His reign in Jerusalem is discussed in 2 Kings 22–23 and 2 Chronicles 34–35. Josiah was a godly king and known as one of the world’s youngest kings; he began his reign at age 8 after his father was assassinated. A highlight of Josiah’s reign was his rediscovery of the Law of the Lord.

Second Kings 22:2 introduces Josiah by saying, “And he did what was right in the eyes of the LORD and walked in all the way of David his father, and he did not turn aside to the right or to the left.” In the eighteenth year of his reign, he raised money to repair the temple, and during the repairs the high priest Hilkiah found the Book of the Law. When Shapan the secretary read it to Josiah, the king tore his clothes, a sign of mourning and repentance (2 Kings 22:10–11).

King Josiah called for a time of national repentance. The Law was read to the people of the land, and a covenant made between the people and the Lord: “The king stood by the pillar and made a covenant before the LORD, to walk after the LORD and to keep his commandments and his testimonies and his statutes with all his heart and all his soul, to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this book. And all the people joined in the covenant” (2 Kings 23:3).

Many reforms followed. The temple was cleansed from all objects of pagan worship, and the idolatrous high places in the land were demolished. Josiah restored the observance of the Passover (2 Kings 23:2–23) and removed mediums and witches from the land.

Second Kings 23:25 records, “Before him there was no king like him, who turned to the LORD with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the Law of Moses, nor did any like him arise after him.” God’s wrath would later come upon Judah due to the evil King Manasseh had done (2 Kings 23:25), but the judgment was delayed because of Josiah’s godly life and leadership (2 Kings 22:20).

Much can be learned from Josiah’s life that is positive.

Josiah shows the influence a person can have from a very young age. Even children have enormous potential to live for God and to have great impact.

Josiah lived a life fully committed and obedient to God and was blessed for it.

Josiah properly responded to God’s Word. By the time he became king, the Scriptures had long been neglected, and Josiah’s heart was smitten by the failure of his people to honor God’s Word. Josiah had Scripture read to the people and made a commitment to live by it.

“‘Because your heart was responsive and you humbled yourself before the Lord when you heard what I have spoken . . . I also have heard you,’ declares the Lord” (2 Kings 22:19).


A promise God made to the Children of Israel which, reasonably, could also be applied to God’s Children: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.”


May it be so with us.

2025·02·01 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.

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 $2,771.70
Silver $30.64
Platinum $957.00
Palladium $1,008.00
Rhodium $5,000.00
FRNSI* 133.081-
Gold:Silver 90.460+

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

Gold $2,801.20
Silver $31.27
Platinum $989.00
Palladium $1,036.00
Rhodium $5,000.00
FRNSI* 134.508+
Gold:Silver 89.581+

Gold zig-zagged across the 2,800 mark (which is record territory) on Friday. Since most people quote bid, not ask, and the bid for gold is 2799.20 you might hear that it closed just short of $2,800 on Friday. (I quote ask, because that’s the buyer’s price and you should be buying, right?) Gold was even above 2,810 at least once on Friday.

Of course this means that the FRNSI is at an all-time high.

Silver, on the other hand, actually dropped on Friday but still up nicely for the week as a whole. At least the gold/silver ratio has dropped a bit.

*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.

It is a CULT

Admittedly, the channel I am about to point you to–a brand new one–has one big Dufus Factor involved and that is the silly mask the guy wears for some reason having to do with his other gaming channel.

But when talking about Flat Earth he is spot-on. (And I’ve seen serious content delivered by people in sillier costumes–e.g., dinosaurs.) And…hallellujah! Except for two interviews his videos are short! Anyhow, his comparison of Flat Earth and cults seems spot on.

Nathan Oakley (as in “where are the GUNS, Nathan?!?!?”) tried to respond but of course was selective. As Oakley is credibly alleged to be a child abuser I won’t give him a link (you can surely find it if you want), but the response to his response is here.

CyberWaffle also has a response to the claims that The Final Experiment was done in a studio. Apparently he has some experience with the movie industry.

(In a later video he says he got the cost wrong…it should be 26 billion dollars.)

There seem to be four distinct responses to the Final Experiment from Flat Earthers (based on the interview with MC Toon).

  1. Some maintain it doesn’t matter. “We never made a claim.” Well you still have to be able to explain what was seen.
  2. Some retroactively claim that they were able to predict a 24 hour sun (this is revisionism (i.e., bare faced lying); there are plenty of videos of big-name Flerfers saying they would like to go to Antarctica during Austral summer, see the sun set, and thus prove the globe wrong–they didn’t erase them fast enough). But now they’re claiming that the Sun they saw was a reflection off the dome. (Decisively disproven by sunspot photos.)
  3. One pastor claims the Sun was actually Satan.
  4. But the most common claim is that it was faked; apparently “Flat Earth Dave [Weiss]” (who originally stood up against claims of “greenscreen”) has been brought back into line.

The problem is, they took plenty of videos not yet released to show it wasn’t a fake. Claims it was in a 360 degree surround studio are exploded by a drone flight to about a mile AGL (above ground level), a video that has been released. No studio could be that tall; that’s much taller than any building we have ever built.

MC Toon points out that anyone can go, but clearly the great expense (the Final Experiment cost $31K per participant) is a barrier. He has a standing offer to anyone who thinks it was fake. He will put $100,000 in escrow; they can do the same. Then they go together. Whoever’s right about the Sun gets the money. If they get turned away at gun point the Flerfer gets the money. None of them are confident enough in their position to have taken him up on it. (If they were that confident but poor, they could borrow the money for the trip and the 100K fully confident that they will have $200K afterwards to pay off the $131K loan with. Though perhaps a bank will laugh in their face when they make the application and explain why they are going.)

The Final Experiment team tried to anticipate every possible way that Flerfs could deny they had done what they did. As CyberWaffle put it: “That’s the only really bizarre thing about this trip to Antarctica, where the whole purpose of the trip to Antarctica, the whole time….no one’s ever done an expedition on the pure purpose to have to prove that they did the expedition.”

Here’s an Interview with MC “Where are the GUNS Nathan” Toon. Pay especial attention from 50:36 on and then at 58:00 (though if you have time the whole thing is worth watching).

Another; his most recent (unless he releases one between now (Thursday) and Saturday). This one lays out the best why I harp on this. Flat Earth isn’t just wrong, which is bad enough, it is harmful to the people who believe it. As often as not they lose their friends and even alienate their families.

But here’s a final one, from a totally different source. This one makes a larger philosophical point, and is an interesting exposition on the subject of “respecting one’s elders.”

[Edit to add: This last video’s conclusion could be taken as implying that we should, for instance believe the medical establishment. Maybe he actually does mean that. But I’ll go so far as to say that sometimes the experts disagree with each other and we do have experts on our side in this case. And the “establishment” has plenty of motivation to warp its judgement. That’s quite a different situation than disagreeing with your mechanic.]

CyberWaffle sometimes talks disparagingly of “conspiracy theories” and, in the way he understands the term, he is right to do so. The classic conspiracy theory is impossible to argue with, not because it is true, but because the holder of the theory is primed to dismiss any contrary evidence as faked or a lie, as part of the cover up.

The sorts of things we discuss here are (almost entirely) not like that. We bring a lot here, and so far as I know, if someone were to actually bring contradictory evidence the response here would not be to shove fingers in ears, shake our heads and say “nuh-uh!”

On the other hand, if you ever get to that point of wanting to simply dismiss any counter-evidence as fake, then you’re in danger of disconnecting from reality–in the unlikely event that you haven’t already done so.

That’s a very bad place to be. As Ayn Rand once said (and I’m paraphrasing), one is free to evade reality, but one cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.

And sometimes the consequences may be fatal.

More On Geology
The Geologic Timescale

The same Kurt Schlichter article I quoted at the top since Aubergine couldn’t resist calling out the schadenböner reference, has this line (earlier in the same paragraph):

We have more energy than the freshly unleashed Permian Basin.

What is this “Permian Basin”? As it happens there are two of them, one centered on the North Sea in Europe (remember a lot of oil comes from offshore rigs in the North Sea), and the other is the one in West Texas and southeast New Mexico.

If you type “Permian Basin” into Wikipedia, you go to a page that tells you this, and you can then select the one you’re interested in. It also mentions that neither of them are in Perm Krai.

What on Earth is “Perm Krai”? Perm Krai does not have a link (but should). A “krai” (край, plural края́) turns out to be “one of the types of federal subjects of modern Russia, and was a type of geographical administrative division in the Russian Empire and the Russian SFSR.” A krai was traditionally a far out, peripheral frontier area (in fact it’s etymologically related to the word “Ukraine”), while an oblast was a bit more central. In today’s Russian Federation there’s no functional difference between a krai and an oblast; a subdivision of Russia is one or the other based on tradition. (Russia also has other kinds of subdivisions: republics, cities of federal significance, an autonomous oblast, and autonomous okrugs. All have equal status as constituent entities of the Russian Federation according to Article 5 of the Constitution of Russia.)

So here’s a map–which unfortunately lost its labeling on the way over from Wikipoo:

In green are “Republics” which have a little more autonomy (the biggest one is Sakha, better known as Yakutsk to Risk players, and is the largest territorial subdivision in the world). Orange are krais, yellow are oblasts, red are the two federal cities (Moscow and St. Petersburg; Sevastapol in Crimea is also a federal city but most nations do not recognize Russian ownership of that or the four Ukrainian oblasts recently annexed from Ukraine [in cross-hatch at the left side of the map]). The one autonomous oblast in in purple, four autonomous okrugs in blue.

Getting back to our subject, Perm Krai is here, tucked up against the Ural Mountains on the west side. (The Ural Mountains form the traditional border between Europe and Asia, since they aren’t really separate continents. The eastern border of Perm Krai is part of that dividing line.)

Perm has its own coat of arms (just like every “Federal Subject” does):

Despite being deep inside Russia, Perm Krai has a significant population of ethnic minorities; some are not ones you’re likely to have heard of, though: Tatars and Ukrainians, Komi-Permyaks, and Bashkirs. Bashkirs are actually Turkic, but the Komi-Permyaks…well, they’re “Uralic” meaning their closest well-known relatives are the Finns and Hungarians. Its largest city is named…Perm (it gave its name to the Krai), with just a bit over a million people. The total population is roughly 2.5 million, down from 3 million when the Soviet Union collapsed.

OK…so that was (maybe) interesting and even has a tiny bit to do with current events, but…why on Earth is an energy-rich place in Texas and New Mexico named for this place?

SO glad you asked!

The Geologic Timescale Today

I struggled with this topic a bit. Trying to just talk about it historically is hard, because a lot of what I am reading assumes you know what we know today. And a lot of this topic is naming conventions and historic holdovers, but a lot is not. If I were to try to trace this from the beginning without some context, it would get a bit confusing. which is unsatisfactory. So I’m going to briefly outline the modern picture, then jump back and try (and likely fail) to explain how we got here. That might be more confusing, but I aim to excel.

The geologic timescale as we know it today is our best effort to order the different rocks we find around the Earth, by time; and since this is science things need to be classified in buckets so that we can see patterns that will help illuminate what is going on.

This is a vast topic so it gets subdivided. In fact it gets sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-subdivided; there are six “levels” of subdividedness (if that wasn’t a word before, it is now); generically referred to as “units.” Except that there are two different names for the levels. When considering the rocks themselves, they are “chronostratigraphic units,” when talking about the times, they are “geochronologic units.” However when we get to looking at specific ones, they have the same names. Thus “Permian” refers to both a chronostratigraphic unit and a geochronologic unit.

The entire history of the Earth is first subdivided into eons (geochronologic, time) which are each equivalent to eonothems (chronostratigraphic; rock layers). There are four of these according to the standard scheme. In order, newest to oldest (newest is always at the top, because it mimics the principle of superposition, they are:

  • Phanerozoic (the current eon/eonthem)
  • Proterozoic
  • Archean
  • Hadean (starts with the formation of the Earth)

As you might imagine, the older, the less well understood. Thus, the Hadean is not further subdivided; we have almost nothing to work from with this one. The other three eons are subdivided into eras (geochronologic; time) or erathems (chronostratigraphic; actual rock layers). There are ten defined eras, from oldest to newest these are: The Eoarchean, Paleoarchean, Mesoarchean, Neoarchean, Paleoproterozoic, Mesoproterozoic, Neoproterozoic, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic. As you likely guessed, the first four are subdivision of the Archean, the next three of the Proterozoic, and the final three by elimination are subdivisions of the Phanerozoic; we are living in the Cenozoic era, with rocks being laid down now part of the Cenozoic erathem. To summarize:

  • Phanerozoic (the current eon/eonthem)
    • Cenozoic (the current era/erathem)
    • Mesozoic
    • Paleozoic
  • Proterozoic
    • Neoproterozoic
    • Mesoproterozoic
    • Paleoproterozoic
  • Archean
    • Neoarchean
    • Mesoarchean
    • Paleoarchean
    • Eoarchean
  • Hadean (starts with the formation of the Earth)

The eras that are part of the Proterozoic and Phanerozoic (the Archean and certainly the Hadean are not subdivided to this level) are further subdivided into periods (geochronologically, time) equivalent to systems (chronostratigraphic, rock layers); there are 22 of these. You may recognize some of these names, but the ones from the Proterozoic eon/eonthem are new. I won’t be mentioning these much; the last two, however are the Cryogenian and Ediacaran. Once you get into the Phanerozoic, though, the Paleozoic is subdivided (oldest to newest) into the Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous (which is a special case, there are two sub-periods of it called the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian), and Permian, and I will be talking about these. (In particular if I don’t discuss the Permian after that intro, someone will probably put a price on my head.) The Mesozoic is subdivided into the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. (If you have never heard of the Jurassic, you’ve been living under a rock. Maybe even one that formed in the Jurassic.) The Cenozoic is subdivided into the Paleogene, Neogene and Quaternary periods (or systems). [Note: the Cenozoic was reorganized in 2008 [edit]. Before then used to be a period called the “Tertiary” instead of the Paleogene and Neogene.] We are living in the Quaternary period; rocks laid down now are part of the Quaternary system.

  • Phanerozoic (the current eon/eonthem)
    • Cenozoic (the current era/erathem)
      • Quaternary
      • Neogene
      • Paleogene
    • Mesozoic
      • Cretaceous
      • Jurrasic
      • Triassic
    • Paleozoic
      • Permian
      • Carboniferous (Mississippian + Pennsylvanian)
      • Devonian
      • Silurian
      • Orodivician
      • Cambrian
  • Proterozoic
    • Neoproterozoic
      • Ediacaran
      • Cryogenian
      • Tonian
    • Mesoproterozoic
      • 3 periods
    • Paleoproterozoic
      • 4 periods
  • Archean
    • Neoarchean
    • Mesoarchean
    • Paleoarchean
    • Eoarchean
  • Hadean (starts with the formation of the Earth)

That’s three levels, and that’s as deep as I am likely to get. However, you should remember there are finer gradations, the epoch/series, the subepoch/subseries, and the age/stage (giving the “time” name first, then the “rock” name second). These exist because there’s really no situation where a single distinct rock layer covers an entire period.

I’m certainly not expecting you to remember these last three levels. I certainly won’t. But please be aware that they are there. The systems (hence periods) were often originally built up by combining series (epochs).

(However, even popular treatments will break the Cenozoic down one more level than this down to the epoch level, and all of those have names ending in -cene. None, fortunately were named after the Russian river Ob.)

In some cases which smaller units got grouped into which larger units is arbitrary, but in other cases it’s anything but. There are clear, obvious dividing lines between the Paleozoic and Mesozoic, as well as between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic; as we will see there was a mass extinction event at both of those dividing lines. Other, lesser mass extinctions turn out to be boundaries between periods/systems.

One more thing to add: For historic reasons, the first three entire eons put together are sometimes informally called “the Precambrian,” almost as if they were only as important as a mere period (two levels below them in the schema). This is largely due to the fact that until recently we knew next to nothing about those three eons and had a hard time distinguishing them from each other in any case. It was just some indefinitely long time.

The whole schema as it exists today (and with some text about proposed changes) is laid out in painstaking detail here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale, broken down all the way to Ages where such subdividing has been done.

Which brings us to the question of how we tell these apart from each other (and why those methods failed, at first, with the Precambrian). And so now I will switch to the historical perspective. So tuck all of that away in the back of your minds, wipe the mental slate temporarily, and…here we go.

Historical Development

Back to the late 18th and early 19th century, where we start to see the development of the geologic timescale. Between mining and the coal industry that was firing up to support the Industrial Revolution, geologists started to realize the fossils could tell us a few things. Similar fossils would appear at the same places in a bottom-to-top sequence and they could often be used to establish that the rocks were of a specific age. William Smith could distinguish otherwise-similar formations (i.e, rocks of the same color and texture) based on what fossils appeared in them. Putting things together people like Georges Cuvier and Alexandre Brogniart realized you could set up a complete sequence of rocks, oldest to youngest, based on index fossils. Index fossils are fossils that were widely distributed (hence could be seen in large parts of the globe) and existed briefly, so they’d be confined to one stratum.

When they published in 1811, we saw the birth of modern stratigraphy. We started to see what today we consider the systems/periods within the Phanerozoic.

(Cuvier, by the way, used the sequence to argue for catastrophism. This means multiple disasters–not just one, that caused many of the different abrupt boundaries in the geologic column. And you know what…he wasn’t completely wrong, though it took some time for this to be recognized.)

Note that not every kind of fossil is an index fossil. A good candidate for an index fossil will be something that lived in the oceans (hence was probably nearly global) and doesn’t appear across a long span of time. The narrower the time, the more precisely you can date a formation.

Because fossils were used to distinguish epochs and periods from each other, we really could only get anything useful from a certain time onwards. Before that time the rocks apparently had no fossils in them (we know now this is not quite true). After that time…we have fossils.

This was a very iterative process, with people noting strata and their relationships slowly and a big picture emerging at last. In many cases the epochs were noted first and combined into the periods later; with some re-groupings along the way. So here’s what we ended up with, listed from oldest to youngest, and not by any means in the order they were discovered or got their final names.

English geologists were particularly prolific, identifying the following periods (from oldest to youngest): the Cambrian (from Cambria, meaning Wales), in 1835; the Ordivician (from a Celtic tribe) in 1879; the Silurian (another Celtic tribe) in the early 1830s; the Devonian (named after Devon, England) also in the 1830s, and the Carboniferous (named after the coal) in 1811. Anything older than the Cambrian at the time appeared to have no fossils in it, and as mentioned earlier just got called the “Precambrian”. These periods are abbreviated, respectively, Ꞓ, O, S, D, and C.

In North America, the Carboniferous period was initially treated as two periods, the Mississippian (older) and Pennsylvanian (younger)…so America does make its way into the schema. This kind of monkeywrenched the scheme when one group of geologists talked about the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian and the other talked of the Carboniferous. The compromise eventually arrived at is to consider this period, and only this period, as consisting of sub-periods by those names. Other periods don’t have sub-periods but go directly to being divided into epochs.

(That wasn’t the only dispute by any means. As you might have noticed, the Ordovician was first named much later than the others, and was created by reorganizing what we had before, as a way to settle a different argument altogether.)

England certainly has newer rocks than the Carboniferous, but for whatever reason other countries beat England to the punch as far as identifying and naming more recent periods.

The very next period, the Permian (P), was found in the Ural mountains of Russia and added to the scheme in 1841–and this is how the Permian basin of Texas got its name. It turns out to consist of rocks from the same period. (Famous fossils from the Permian include a lot of corals [an entire reef nows form the Gaudalupe mountains in West Texas] and Dimetrodon, the sail-back lizards, which contrary to popular belief were not dinosaurs.)

(As for how a coral reef ended up way out in West Texas at elevations up to 8751 feet…well, that’s for a future post.)

The next one after that was the Triassic (T), first noted in Southern Germany. This was in turn composed of three rock layers (hence the “tri” in the name). It got that name in 1834, however it had been noted earlier than that.

In the Jura mountains of France and Switzerland, we found the Jurassic (J). This was a markedly earlier discovery from 1795.

The Cretaceous was first identified in the Paris basin in 1822 and the name comes from the extensive beds of chalk (calcium carbonate from the shells of microscopic sea organisms). Its abbreviation is K, not C, from German Kreide, chalk.

Next was the Tertiary. Those rocks are quite new (as such things are measured); it brings us almost to the present day. This name actually goes back to the middle 1700s and Arduino, who divided geologic time into primitive, secondary, and tertiary periods based on what he saw in Northern Italy, so the Tertiary was essentially discovered in Northern Italy. For a time, this period was identified has having been laid down during the Flood.

The Tertiary is now considered obsolete and has been broken up into two periods, the Paleogene (Pg) and Neogene (N). I know that the Tertiary used to be abbreviated T, but that means the Triassic must have had a different abbreviation back then. This relatively recent rearrangement was very controversial and part of the dispute was what to do about the very next (and latest) period…

The Quaternary, which was named such because it followed the Tertiary. It was first identified by Arduino in 1759 (by contrast with the Tertiary) and very nearly didn’t survive the recent reorganization of the Tertiary; it almost got folded into the Neogene. This is the latest period/system.

These periods were (and still are) grouped into three Eras, with the Cambrian through Permian making up the Paleozoic (“old life”) era, the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous making up the Mesozoic (“middle life”) era, and the Tertiary and Quaternary making up the Cenozoic (“new life”) era.

Anything before the Cambrian got lumped together as the “Precambrian.” There were no index fossils in those rocks (at least we didn’t think so at the time), so although we could look at the rocks at one location and do relative dating on them, we couldn’t correlate the Precambrian rock layers in one location with those in another location far away.

Eventually we would overcome this and build up the much more refined timescale we have today, but for a long time the Precambrian was an difficult-to-chart wasteland of geologic time.

Geologists worked on and after two centuries of development, we have today’s schema.

As a reminder, today the Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras are in turn grouped together into the “Phanerozoic Eon” and we’ve been able to subdivide the Precambrian into three full eons with some subdividing into eras and periods.

I’m going to jump ahead a bit, and talk about the Precambrian fossils that we have more recently discovered. But first, I have to bring up a basic point.

What are fossils, and what causes them?

A fossil is any preserved remains, impression or trace of past life. Usually these are preserved in rocks, but preservation in amber (a la Jurassic Park) also happens.

We actually have to distinguish different kinds of fossils. Sometimes all we have are “trace fossils.” I always found this name misleading (I’m used to other meanings of the word “trace”), but here it means such things as footprints, tracks, burrows (without any remains of the burrower), and so on…indirect evidence of the critter. Another category of fossil that goes into this bucket is “copralites.” And these are fossilized dung. (Who would have guessed that wokester brain matter existed back then?)

In many cases we have nothing more than trace fossils to identify something, or rather to identify that something existed. We can learn a few things from them, such as that the critter liked to burrow in the sediment at the bottom of a shallow sea and was of a certain size, but we won’t learn a lot.

Sometimes we have external molds. An organism is buried, decomposes, dissolves and is gone…but the void it left in the sediment is preserved as the sediment turns to rock. Sometimes sediments fill an organism’s interior and we end up with an internal mold or endocast.

Sometimes we get an impression of the creature. This can be very interesting since we might learn about skin texture. Skins usually don’t fossilize.

There are microfossils, things you need a microscope to examine. These often are of the critters themselves.

But the “classic” fossil like the skeleton you’ve seen in museums is when a buried organism’s tissues are slowly replaced by minerals coming out of solution. This is much more likely to happen if the organism is buried underwater right after it dies and as you might imagine, that’s far more common for sea life (which is already underwater) than land life.

This turns out to be a big subject, and I am going to take the easy way out and punt you over to Wikipedia if you want to know more. (Note that on occasion a fossil is made out of iron pyrite (fool’s gold)!)

It’s much, much easier to fossilize if you have hard body parts. Skeletons, exoskeletons, shells, etc., because the other stuff is likely to decompose or otherwise be consumed by animals even when buried. The reason why “fossils show up” only in the Cambrian and later is because that’s when hard body parts first show up. (Why not earlier? My speculation: This is when predators first showed up, and critters suddenly needed body armor.)

But we do have some fossils from before the Precambrian, after all.

For instance, fossilized bacterial mats called stromatolites going clear back into the Archean, and not just the late Archean either. (These mats still exist in certain isolated places today–the situation has to be just right, however, or they get eaten before the mats can really form. Shark Bay in Western Australia is one of these places–it’s so important for that reason that UNESCO made it a World Heritage Site.) Those things that look like lumpy brown rocks are alive.

And a number of soft bodied creatures did manage to get impressions preserved in the rocks from immediately before the Cambrian; this led to the recognition, for the first time in 120 years, of a new period, the Ediacaran, named after the Ediacara Hills of South Australia, at the tail end of the Neoproterozoic era. Interestingly, many of these fossils were first noticed in England by schoolchildren, and the paleontologists around them, knowing the local surface rocks were Precambrian, dismissed their stories until one of them went with the kids and looked. These organisms look like nothing around today (unlike the Cambrian ones), and they are collectively called the “Ediacaran biota” though they only appear in the more recent part of the Ediacaran system. Here is an artist’s impression (very speculative)

And here are some pictures of the actual fossils, first charnia:

And dickinsonia.

Before that we have fossils of algae. Such as stromatolites.

Fossils versus Index Fossils

I’m going to make one more thing clear. I’ve noted that the periods were defined by index fossils..in fact in many cases the fossils actually identify epochs and ages within the periods. Completely distinct rocks in widely separated locations can be identified as being from the same epoch or age based on the index fossils they contain. The narrower the time span, the better. Not every fossil is an index fossil. Sometimes the geographic range is too small (the creature wasn’t wide spread enough) and sometimes that particular species was around for far too long.

But those non-index fossils are still confined to a certain time range, even if it’s a broad one.

Take trilobites, an entire class of creatures. (Mammals are a class. Insects are a class. Trilobites were that big a grouping.) There isn’t a single trilobite alive today. All of them lived from the middle of the Cambrian to the end of the Permian. The fossils were found in those systems so they date to those periods. (In fact the abrupt disappearance of the trilobites is one of the reasons the Permian–and the entire Paleozoic Era–is regarded as ending right then.)

We’ve identified, from fossils, 22,000 distinct species of trilobites spread out over the entire Paleozoic. There were surely many, many more. Some got to be 28 inches long. Some were scavengers, some were predators, some were filter feeders. They were an incredibly diverse and successful class. I can’t find anything to say for sure (I’m running out of time), but I would be surprised if at least some specific species of trilobites weren’t index fossils.

But you never find a trilobite after the Permian system. Never. They died out at the end of the Permian in a mass extinction, among the victims of the biggest one of all time. You can’t tell what period a generic trilobite is (though if you can identify the specific species, you have a better shot at it), but if your rock has a trilobite fossil in it, it’s Paleozoic, not Mesozoic or Cenozoic. And certainly not Precambrian.

Similarly, dinosaurs lived at characteristic times. Tyrannosaurs, for instance, are from the very end of the Cretaceous. Allosaurus and stegosaurus (and closely related species) are Jurassic. You never see these creatures outside of those ranges.

And not just for these examples, but for every species we have fossils of. This sort of precise and consistent location within the geologic column is very, very hard to explain if someone wants to claim that the entire column was laid down all at once. And this is what Young Earth Creationists claim…the whole thing was laid down in one year by the Great Flood.

But if a single flood event laid down the entire geologic column with the fossils all being things that drowned in the Flood, why would you not find drowned trilobites and tyrannosaurs and brachiosaurus and apatosaurus and pelycosaurs and ambulocetus and archaeopteryx and anomalocaris and eurypterids and camerata and ammonites and I could go on and on and on, but especially fossilized fish and gigantic Mesozoic marine reptiles of various extinct species (which could surely have held out longer) throughout the entire geological column if the whole thing happened within one year, or at least with lots of overlap? Instead we see things strictly segregated by layers. Even if you want to appeal to objects forming layers by density a) the brachiosaur bones would be in the Precambrian not the Cretaceous–in other words things didn’t sort by density and b) even if we grant for the sake of argument that they did, we’d see at least SOME cases of things not falling as far as they should because some piece of debris got in the way. Enough that we couldn’t ignore them. But we don’t. They’re segregated too perfectly by era, period and epoch. The segregation is so good because something would have to be thousands of years out of its time at the very least to end up in the wrong layer (and how would that happen? Time travel?), not just “it needed to fall for just a few more seconds to the right layer but something else blocked it.”

I’m sorry but the “all due to Noah’s Flood” claim is absurd. And this is just one line of argumentation that that is so.

Is there plenty of evidence of flooding in the geological record? Oh, yes, yes indeed, but there is no indication that it was a single event, or that any of the multitude of episodes were global. We can do relative dating on these things, after all.

(So Georges Cuvier, who as far as I can tell, believed in global catastrophes, was wrong. Or was he? Stay tuned.)

Not a Single Number?

You may have noticed that I have not given any numbers here. When were these periods? Just for instance, what’s the timespan of the Jurassic period? From when to when?

We didn’t know back then. We could look at index fossils and say that this rock from Russia was the same age as this other rock from Texas (even though from totally different formations). We could say that that rock was older than this other rock, and newer than yet a third rock. This is called relative dating. But other than crude order-of-magnitude estimates like was done with Etna, we could not do any sort of absolute dating where we could assign an actual number to the age of the rock. We could say “millions of years” or “more millions of years.” And by the way, there’s a symbol for that: Ma means “million years ago,” so 66 Ma means 66 million years ago.

How we got to absolute dating is a future topic (I might cover some other things before that). I know something about the modern methods. I have no idea (yet) how precise they were able to get before the modern methods were available, and I hope I can find out. (I may even have to walk back some of what I said in the prior paragraph if I’ve underestimated the cleverness of 19th and early 20th century paleontologists and geologists.) This is a learning experience for me too.