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

January 6 Tapes?

Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.

For all your high talk about your Christian moral background…you’re looking less and less like you have any kind of moral background.

If You are a Patriot and Don’t Loathe RINOs…

Let’s talk about RINOs, and why they are the lowest form of life in politics.

Many patriots have been involved with politics, often at the grassroots, for decades. We’ve fought, and fought, and fought and won the occasional illusory small victory.

Yet we can’t seem to win the war, even when we have BIG electoral wins.

I am reminded of something. The original Star Trek had an episode titled Day of the Dove. It was one of the better episodes from the third season, but any fan of the original series will tell you that’s a very low bar. Still, it seems to get some respect; at a time when there were about 700 episodes of Star Trek in its various incarnations out there, it was voted 99th best out of the top 100.

In sum, the plot is that an alien entity has arranged for 39 Enterprise crew, and 39 Klingons, to fight each other endlessly with swords and other muscle-powered weapons. The entity lives off of hostile emotions, you see and it wants a captive food source. (The other 400 or so Enterprise crew are trapped below decks and unable to help.) Each side has its emotions played and amplified by the alien entity; one Enterprise junior officer has false memories implanted of a brother who was killed by Klingons. The brother didn’t even exist.

Even people killed in a sword fight miraculously heal so they can go do it again.

The second best line of the episode is when Kang, the Klingon captain, notes that though they have won quite a number of small victories including capturing Engineering, can’t seem to actually finally defeat the Enterprise crew. He growls, “What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*”

Indeed. He may have been the bad guy, but his situation should sound familiar.

We are a majority in this country. We have a powerful political party in our corner. There is endless wrangling.

And yet,

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

In our case, that power is the RINOs in our midst. They specialize in caving when on the verge of victory. Think of Obamacare’s repeal failing…by one Republican vote. Think of the way we can never seem to get spending under control (and now our entire tax revenue goes to pay interest on the debt; anything the government actually does now is with borrowed money).

We have a party…that refuses to do what we want it to do, and that refusal is institutionalized. If you’ve been involved with GOP politics, but haven’t seen this, it’s because you refuse to see it. Or because you are part of the problem yourself. (If so, kindly gargle some red fuming nitric acid to clear the taste of shit out of your mouth, and let those not part of the problem alone so they can read this.)

We fight to elect people, who then take a dive when in office. But it’s not just the politicians in office, it’s the people behind the scenes, the leaders of the national, state and county branches of the party. Their job is to ensure that real patriots never get onto the general election ballot. They’re allowed a few failures…who can then become token conservatives who will somehow never manage to win (Jordan), or can be compromised outright (Loren Boebert).

That way it doesn’t actually matter who has a congressional majority. I remember my excitement when the GOP took the Senate in 1980. But all that did was empower a bunch of “moderate” puddles of dog vomit like…well for whatever reason forty years later the most memorable name is Pete Domenici. And a couple of dozen other “moderates” who simply had no interest in doing what grassroots people in their party–those same grassroots people who had worked so hard to elect them–wanted them to do.

Oh, they’ll put up a semblance of a fight…but never win. And they love it when we fight the Dems instead of fighting them. Just like that alien entity, whose motto surely was “Let’s you and him fight. It’ll be delicious!”

If you think about it, your entire political involvement has come to nothing because of these walking malignant tumors.

That should make you good and mad.

The twenty five who blocked Jordan, and the hundred people who took that opportunity to stab Jordan in the back in the secret ballot should make you good and mad.

I’ll close this with another example of RINO backstabbing, an infuriating one close to home.

In my county, the GOP chair is not a RINO. She got elected when the grassroots had had enough of the RINOs. Unfortunately the state organization is full of RINOs, and the ousted county RINOs have been trying to form a new “Republican Party” and get the state GOP to recognize them as the affiliate. I’m honestly amazed it hasn’t happened yet.

In other words those shitstains won’t just leave when they get booted out; they’ll try to destroy what they left behind. It’s an indication that they know we know how important that behind-the-scenes party power is.

So they must be destroyed. That’s the only way they’ll ever stop.

We cannot win until the leeches “on our side” get destroyed.

What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*

We know it. What is going to be done about it?

*NOTE: The original line was actually “What power is it that supports our battle yet starves our victory.” I had mis-remembered it as feeds. When I checked it, it sure enough was “supports” and that’s what I originally quoted. On further reflection, though, I realized my memory was actually an improvement over the reality, because feeds is a perfect contrast with starves. I changed it partway through the day this originally posted, but now (since this is a re-run) it gets rendered this way from the start.

If one must do things wrong, one should do them wrong…right.

RINOs an Endangered Species?
If Only!

According to Wikipoo, et. al., the Northern White Rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) is a critically endangered species. Apparently two females live on a wildlife preserve in Sudan, and no males are known to be alive. So basically, this species is dead as soon as the females die of old age. Presently they are watched over by armed guards 24/7.

Biologists have been trying to cross them with the other subspecies, Southern White Rhinoceroses (Rhinoceri?) without success; and some genetic analyses suggest that perhaps they aren’t two subspecies at all, but two distinct species, which would make the whole project a lot more difficult.

I should hope if the American RINO (Parasitus rectum pseudoconservativum) is ever this endangered, there will be heroic efforts not to save the species, but rather to push the remainder off a cliff. Onto punji sticks. With feces smeared on them. Failing that a good bath in red fuming nitric acid will do.

But I’m not done ranting about RINOs.

The RINOs (if they are capable of any introspection whatsoever) probably wonder why they constantly have to deal with “populist” eruptions like the Trump-led MAGA movement. That would be because the so-called populists stand for absolutely nothing except for going along to get along. That allows the Left to drive the culture and politics.

Given the results of our most recent elections, the Left will now push harder, and the RINOs will now turn even squishier than they were before.

I well remember 1989-1990 in my state when the RINO establishment started preaching the message that a conservative simply couldn’t win in Colorado. Never mind the fact that Reagan had won the state TWICE (in 1984 bringing in a veto-proof state house and senate with him) and GHWB had won after (falsely!) assuring everyone that a vote for him was a vote for Reagan’s third term.

This is how the RINOs function. They push, push, push the line that only a “moderate” can get elected. Stomp them when they pull that shit. Tell everyone in ear shot that that’s exactly what the Left wants you to think, and oh-by-the-way-Mister-RINO if you’re in this party selling the same message as the Left…well, whythefuckexactly are you in this party, you lying piece of rancid weasel shit?

In Defense of Ranked Choice Voting

One of the biggest obstacles to direly-needed change is RINOs, and one of the weapons in their arsenal is the “Wasted Vote” argument.

Periodically a third party has arisen, trying to hold RINOs to account by putting pressure on them from outside of the party, since doing so from the inside has historically done very little good. But, even if you find a third party candidate who perfectly reflects your views, you’re likely to vote for the RINO anyway. Why? Because if you don’t, the Democrat might win, and that would be even worse. So if you vote for that third party (that few will vote for), you’re throwing your vote away and increasing the likelihood of the Democrat winning. (It’s half as much a gain for the Democrat, as actually voting for the Democrat would be. Not as much, but half as much. Because although you denied the R your vote, you did not flip your vote to the Democrat.)

The Republican Party Establishment knows you don’t love them. But they know you hate the Democrats worse, and they use that to continue to herd you into supporting them. With gritted teeth you cast your vote, but your vote counts the same whether you cast it enthusiastically. And the other alternative, pissing on the voting apparatus to express your actual feelings, is probably a felony.

But what if you could vote for that third party without increasing the chances of the Dem walking away with the prize?

This is what ranked choice voting, or instant runoff voting, can do provided it is properly implemented. (And this includes the votes, and only genuine votes, being counted honestly, of course. However, I’m going to compare it to what we have today, and pretend that is honestly done too. RCV can’t work if it’s not honestly administered, just like our current system isn’t working because it isn’t honestly administered.)

The idea behind RCV is to vote by expressing your order of preference. You could vote for the Patriot Party, then for the RINO Party as your second choice (and ignore the Democrat, the Green, the Overt Socialist Schmuckmonkey Party, etc).

What does this do? It nullifies the wasted vote argument. Your vote will be counted for the Patriot party, first, then instead of it being “wasted” when the Patriot Party loses, it ends up going to the RINO. Actually, it’s just barely possible that the Patriot Party would actually beat the RINO, if people weren’t all individually afraid to vote for it.

It’s just like the famous “Prisoner’s Dilemma” where your fear of other peoples’ actions prevents you from doing the optimal thing–and vice-versa. As long as Job Lowe is afraid to vote Patriot because he’s afraid you’ll vote RINO, you’ll have to vote RINO because you fear that Job Lowe will, because he fears you will.

So on the whole I like RCV. It gives you a no-risk way to vote against the RINO scum, and in favor of someone who deserves your vote.

The problem is, as done here in the US, it comes packaged with a “jungle primary.” A bunch of candidates get to put their name out there, and the top four (or so) candidates get onto the “main” ballot. This gives party establishments their way around the threat of a good third party bumping them off. Because they know that few people bother with primaries, and third parties don’t have the resources to run in a primary…so they throw two or three establishment hacks into the primary and they will probably beat the third party. The result is the RINOs end up with two of the four slots in the general election, and the Dems get the other two. Now there’s suddenly no third party candidate on the ballot at all.

If we were to combine RCV with the present system where each party could nominate exactly one candidate to appear on the November ballot, or at the very least, ensure minor parties could get onto the ballot with at least one candidate regardless of the primary, we would be getting somewhere, but the establishment is smarter than we like to give them credit for. They will support the jungle primary + RCV “solution” rather than the more appropriate one-candidate-per-party + RCV solution.

It’s not RCV that is the problem, it’s the primary structure grafted onto it.

Justice

It says “Justice” on the picture.

And I’m sure someone will post the standard joke about what the fish thinks about the situation.

But what is it?

Here’s a take, from a different context: It’s about how you do justice, not the justice that must be done to our massively corrupt government and media. You must properly identify the nature of a person, before you can do him justice.

Ayn Rand, On Justice (speaking through her character John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged):

Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.

Ayn Rand identified seven virtues, chief among them rationality. The other six, including justice, she considered subsidiary because they are essentially different aspects and applications of rationality.

—Ayn Rand Lexicon (aynrandlexicon.com)

Justice Must Be Done.

Trump, it is supposed, had some documents.

Biden and company stole the country.

I’m sure enough of this that I put my money where my mouth is.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system. (This doesn’t necessarily include deposing Joe and Hoe and putting Trump where he belongs, but it would certainly be a lot easier to fix our broken electoral system with the right people in charge.)

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2024 or 2026 is pointless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud in the system is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

This will necessarily be piecemeal, state by state, which is why I am encouraged by those states working to change their laws to alleviate the fraud both via computer and via bogus voters. If enough states do that we might end up with a working majority in Congress and that would be something Trump never really had.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

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

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

Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $2,053.80
Silver $24.29
Platinum $984.00
Palladium $1,230.00
Rhodium $4,950.00

This week, at Friday close:

Gold $2,063.20
Silver $23.88
Platinum $998.00
Palladium $1,126.00
Rhodium $4,950.00

Gold up a bit. Palladium took a $34 hit on friday, and is down over a hundred bucks after its recent climb up to last Friday’s price. Platinum took a $16 hit on Friday but still closed a bit up for the week. Gold only went down $3 on Friday. Silver down a bit this week.

This is as good a time as any to point out an interesting factoid. When we were on the gold standard (and could actually use gold coins), an ounce of gold was $20.67. No, it wasn’t worth $20.67, it was $20.67. Even if a double eagle (a bit less than a troy ounce of gold, plus copper mixed in so it would be a bit harder) were left unstruck (just a featureless disk) or wasn’t even in the form of a disk, it was $20. The government stamping it was just letting you know that it really was the requisite amount of gold.

Note that today’s gold price is 2,063.20 (that’s ask, bid is 2,062.20). Of course that’s the “paper” price; you’ll get charged more at the coin shop (one online place is charging $2166 per ounce…more than $100 over the paper price). That’s very close to the “magic number” of $2067 per troy ounce…the price at which the dollar is worth 1/100th what it was when it was tied to gold.

(Note: The dollar was supposedly still tied to gold at $35/ounce after FDR confiscated the heavy yellow stuff from the citizens, but only foreign governments could make the exchange. Which meant that if you were suspicious that maybe paper dollars were being inflated, you couldn’t cover your bets by trading them for gold money. And even just having to deal with foreign governments that we could strongarm, we still had to shut that loophole down under Nixon.)

The Hugh Janus of the Solar System

Getting the Obligatory Jokes Out of the Way

The planet is called “Uranus.” And it is the butt (so to speak) of many jokes on account of that name. Astronomers avoid the “your anus” pronunciation in favor of “YER-in-us” but that sounds like “urinous” which is just about as bad. Best to sidestep the whole thing and stop pronouncing the U with a “y” in front of it. The Greeks (who invented the god Ouranus) didn’t. So: Call it OO-rahn-us and the bad jokes go away forever.

Of course we dodged a bigger bullet than the one we took. It was on 13 March, 1781 before someone finally noticed that that one particular very faint dot in the night sky (it is barely visible to the naked eye…provided you’re far away from city lights) was not a star.

I’m not kidding about it being visible to the naked eye. Hipparchus may have put it in his star catalog in 128 BCE; it was definitely seen by John Flamsteed in 1690, who marked it in his star catalog as “34 Tauri.” (We still use “Flamsteed numbers” today.)

That person was William Herschel, and noticing that it wasn’t a pinpoint of light in his telescope, he thought at first that he had found a comet. Other astronomers were suspicious that it was something else, some daring to suggest it might be a planet. After a couple of years, Herschel finally accepted that he had found a hitherto-unknown planet. And this was an extraordinary claim…every hitherto-known planet, after all, had been known since ancient times. It had probably never even occurred to anyone that there might be more of them. Herschel actually became a celebrity for this discovery; King George III offered him a £200 annual stipend provided he was willing to move to Windsor castle.

So what to name this new planet?

Herschel wanted to name it Georgium Sidum, “George’s Star.” After King George. Yes, that King George. (This was between the Battle of Yorktown (September 28, 1781) and the Treaty of Paris–we were technically still in the Revolutionary War.)

Can you imagine the hilarity? The list today would be Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, George, Neptune…Especially after it turned out that “George” rolled around on its side (I’ll explain that shortly).

But seriously, can you imagine naming a planet after that asshole?

So instead, we named it after everyone’s asshole.

An early triumph of rule by the people: we elevated the common man above mere monarchs.

OK so what is this thing?

It turns out that Uranus averages 19.2 AU from the Sun…which is to say, it “lives” 19.2 times as far away from the Sun as the Earth, and thus gets just a bit over 1/369th of the sunlight we do.

Its radius is 25,559 km (versus 6,378 for Earth). So it’s intermediate in size between Earth and Jupiter. The mass is 14.536 times that of Earth…not really intermediate between us and Jupiter (at 318 earth masses); it’s closer to us even on a logarithmic scale. The surface escape velocity is 21 km/sec (versus our 11 km/sec). It rotates once (relative to the Sun) in 17 hours, 23 minutes, and 14 seconds, versus 24 hours for Earth. It takes roughly 84 years to make one trip around the Sun.

Probably Uranus’s most distinctive feature is its axial tilt. You can look at this one of two ways: Either the pole is tilted 82.23 degrees relative to its orbit, and the planet rotates backwards, or it’s tilted 97.77 degrees relative to its orbit, and the planet rotates forwards (or “prograde”). Wikipedia prefers the former way of looking at it, I (and many real astronomers) prefer the latter. (If you look at it the way Wikipedia does, you’re defining the north pole of the planet as the one “above” its orbit, but then the sun rises in the west. Looking at it my way the sun rises in the east–that’s the definition of east–and the north pole is to your left as you face sunrise, again by definition.

Either way, this means that the planet is basically lying on its side, and so that’s where the joke about George rolling around on his side would have come from.

On Earth, our seasons are caused by our roughly 23 degree axial tilt. On one side of our orbit, the northern hemisphere is tipped toward the sun, leading to longer days and warmer temperatures, on the other side, we have shorter days and lower temperatures with the sun lower in the sky at high noon. (And in the southern hemisphere, the situation is reversed, they have winter while we have summer, and vice versa.)

With Uranus at one point in its orbit the north pole points almost directly at the Sun…so almost the entire northern hemisphere has sunlight, all day, continuously, while the southern hemisphere has night…continuously. Only a thin band near the equator has a regular day/night cycle, and in this band the Sun barely pops up over the horizon–then sweeps about 180 degrees around the sky, trimming the non-existent treetops, before it goes back down again.

This is very different from our situation on Earth; with the polar regions getting more sunlight on average than the equatorial regions…and just to make it more different, the seasons are each 21 years long!

Uranus’s appearance from a backyard telescope is as a pale green dot; its basically about the same color as rusted copper (which some people insist looks blue to them). To my eye it’s more green than blue.

Herschel himself discovered two of Uranus’s moons (though one should think that any anus comes with exactly one moon…er, never mind); three more were discovered before space flight for the 5 moons I learned about as a kid. The total is now 27.

Uranus was discovered to be surrounded by a ring system in 1977. It was found not by direct observation, but by observing Uranus pass in front of a star. We were hoping to learn something about Uranus’ atmosphere by watching the light spectrum of the star, which we did, but the surprise was seeing the star wink out five times both before and after the passage; the two patterns matched and the conclusion was that there were very faint rings around Uranus. (I’ll pause while more guffawing at tasteless jokes happens here.)

OK one more to get out of the way. There are trace amounts of hydrogen sulfide in Uranus’s atmosphere. Hydrogen sulfide (H₂S) is the major reason why rotten eggs smell so bad. So yes, Uranus stinks. (Hopefully you didn’t need an astronomer to tell you that.)

In general, Uranus, along with Neptune, is considered an “ice giant” planet. Not because it has a lot of frozen ice in it, but because it’s fairly rich in the sorts of compounds that make ices, like water, methane, and ammonia, relative to Jupiter and Saturn. Or to look at it in the most sensible way, it has much less hydrogen and helium than the two big boys have.

Recent Observations/Discoveries

We’ve only ever visited it once with robot probes, and that was Voyager II in 1986. Here’s a natural color image:

This picture was taken by Voyager II as it approached Uranus, and admittedly is not terribly exciting (it’s just the picture used to make the size comparison I showed above). There’s very little visible detail; it’s an off-white cue ball. To see anything significant, you have to use wavelengths we can’t actually see.

As it turns out Uranus has insane winds and a lot of stormy weather. Here’s a timelapse of images taken by Voyager:

You can see all sorts of spots, banding, and so on, much like you have on Jupiter and Saturn.

Another major discovery by Voyager II is that Uranus’s magnetic field has multiple axes in it, instead of just one “bar magnet” inside the planet there are two or three of them.

(This is supposed to be an animated GIF; it’s not working for me.) We at first thought that this was due to Uranus’s rotating “on its side” or possibly by luck we caught it in the midst of a magnetic field reversal. But Neptune has a similar situation as we found out in 1989 when Voyager II flew by it, so that scotches both theories (the odds of both planets going through a magnetic field reversal just as we happened to visit them are pretty doggone low). We now think it’s due to a shallow layer of the planet generating the magnetic field.

Hubble space telescope has taken some pictures as well, including the first seen “dark spot” (2006)

And probably the best HST picture I’ve seen…even highlighting the dark rings:

So why did I pick this week to talk about this planet?

Well, in part it was the Hugh Janus jokes from last Thursday. I didn’t have the gumption to write this that week, so here I am doing it today. But really, it’s because James Webb Space Telescope gave Uranus some attention. (Uh, I guess that’s an opening for more jokes.) These pictures were taking with NIRcam (the Near InfraRed camera, i.e., one that uses wavelengths over a wide range…overlapping our eyes in red and orange). Of course these are all false color.

You see rings, and many of the moons. Actually, you can see a lot more moons if you get the full image instead of this cropped excerpt:

(Yes, those are mostly galaxies in the background, including a beaut of a face-on spiral at far right and an obvious edge-on spiral up and to the left of Uranus.) The five classic moons show up as bluish-purple “stars” here; many others are also in the image as we shall see below.

Here’s another picture with the moons labeled:

So…James Webb Space Telescope continues to kick ass!

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

To conclude: My standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!

Remember Hong Kong!!!

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

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

China is in the White House

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

Joe Biden is Asshoe

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

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

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