“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
ingluvies
noun
a crop or craw of birds
a dilation or pouch in the esophagus of certain animals that receives food prior to the main stomach, esp a bird’s craw, or the first stomach of a cow or other ruminating animal
the widened portion of the esophagus of birds and lower animals
a crop or pouch in the esophagus of many birds, in which food is stored or partially digested before passing to the stomach
Used in a sentence with bad American English and Russian accent
“Moose ingluvies, but squirrel not having!”
Ridiculous misleading example of usage generated by bad AI
You don’t have to understand the math, to follow along and understand why light and atoms end up being a lot like vibrating musical strings.
Basically, Erwin Schrödinger plugged a simple but weird equation by Louis de Broglie, which said that matter has a frequency just like light, into the existing wave equation, and he got a matter wave equation.
And all of THAT is revealed on the way to answering, what in the heck is an imaginary number doing in there?
As of desired publication time, 12:01 AM on January 4, there are 16 days, 11 hours and 59 minutes before our Once and Future President, Donald John Trump, is restored to his rightful office.
Not that I’m counting, mind you.
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
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 prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Small Government?
Many times conservatives (real and fake) speak of “small government” being the goal.
This sounds good, and mostly is good, but it misses the essential point. The important thing here isn’t the size, but rather the purpose, of government. We could have a cheap, small tyranny. After all our government spends most of its revenue on payments to individuals and foreign aid, neither of which is part of the tyrannical apparatus trying to keep us locked down and censored. What parts of the government would be necessary for a tyranny? It’d be a lot smaller than what we have now. We could shrink the government and nevertheless find it more tyrannical than it is today.
No, what we want is a limited government, limited not in size, but rather in scope. Limited, that is, in what it’s allowed to do. Under current circumstances, such a government would also be much smaller, but that’s a side effect. If we were in a World War II sort of war, an existential fight against nasty dictatorships on the brink of world conquest, that would be very expensive and would require a gargantuan government, but that would be what the government should be doing. That would be a large, but still limited government, since it’d be working to protect our rights.
World War II would have been the wrong time to squawk about “small government,” but it wasn’t (and never is) a bad time to demand limited government. Today would be a better time to ask for a small government–at least the job it should be doing is small today–but it misses the essential point; we want government to not do certain things. Many of those things we don’t want it doing are expensive but many of them are quite eminently doable by a smaller government than the one we have today. Small, but still exceeding proper limits.
So be careful what you ask for. You might get it and find you asked for the wrong thing.
Political Science In Summation
It’s really just a matter of people who can’t be happy unless they control others…versus those who want to be left alone. The oldest conflict within mankind. Government is necessary, but government attracts the assholes (a highly technical term for the control freaks).
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
[EDIT: Forgot to do this, as of 2:50 AM I have edited it to actually mean something]
Gold went up nicely on Thursday (possibly responses to those attacks that aren’t terrorist attacks, oh no they aren’t!) but lost a lot of those gains on Friday. Still, it’s a bit up this week. Silver managed to gain a little bit of ground against it. On the whole, though, things seem pretty stable as we head for 47.
*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.
Flat Earthers Strike Back
The guru or pope of the Flat Earth movement–the man who produced those “200 Proofs” videos–has now spoken about the Final Experiment.
According to him it was shot in a studio, one of those fancy 360 dome studios like they use for Mandalorian. (Whatever that is–Star Wars? I stopped following Star Wars after those horrifically bad prequels, Episodes I – III. I honestly should have stopped after Episode I.)
I hate like hell to give this lying turd any views, but here’s his video:
The first point is that he complains the sun in the timelapse changes shape. As if the (alleged) special effects team behind his (alleged) dome studio would be too stupid to not do it that way (heck, it’s more work to do it that way). But okay maybe they did it like that deliberately to double fake us, so that people like me would use the “they wouldn’t be that incompetent” argument. But in fact this shot shows a lot of glare from the sun, and the glare is what is changing shape. Eric Dubay knows this. I know he knows this, because the jackass uses this effect in his own videos!!
In their Gleason’s Map model which many are abandoning (but apparently not Dubay), the Sun never actually dips below the horizon plane since it is always roughly 3000 miles above the flat Earth. Instead it just gets further and further away and eventually we just can’t see it any more; they will invoke “perspective” to explain why it seems to be getting lower and lower in the sky. But getting further and further away would imply that the Sun should look smaller and smaller the closer you are to sunrise and sunset. How does Dubay handle that in his 200 proofs videos? He shows shots of the Sun where the glare orb is of different sizes because of differing atmospheric conditions; he just had to find one with a small glare orb near sunset or sunrise, and one with a bigger glare orb closer to midday.
If you photograph the Sun with a strong enough filter (20 or so stops does it; even seventeen might do it), you know, like I did, you will see it’s always the same actual size. There’s an exceedingly tiny variation over the course of a year because of the Earth’s elliptical orbit, but basically nothing over the course of a day. (This is evidence that the sun is far away compared to distances on Earth.)
Dave McKeegan did a second timelapse of the Sun, tracking it with a filter on. No change in sizes either. Oh, wait. That’s fake. Are my photos also fake? Or the ones taken by many other people around the globe?
The next point is the behavior of shadows. He shows McToon walking around (this is actually the “Where are the Guns, Nathan!?!?!” video, and his shadow apparently changing length and direction, which obviously wouldn’t happen if the object casting the light were far enough away you could treat the light rays as parallel. Well, for someone who likes to invoke “perspective” to explain sun angles, he sure has forgotten the concept here. The man taking the video (McKeegan) was walking around, McToon was walking around; this will cause shadows to appear to pivot. McToon was also getting closer to and further from the camera, and this will make shadows get foreshortened when the object casting them is far enough away. That is actual perspective in action, and Dubay is hoping to find marks too stupid to understand this.
Next, footprints in the snow. Well, you’ll actually see SOME footprints in the snow in the shots Dubay is selecting; but the real issue here is that this snow has been compacted by heavy vehicles driving over it to make a flat area to work in (this space was also used by the Antarctic marathon runners…who of course never saw a sunset either.
No wind? There was wind in other videos.
No visible breath? You don’t get visible breath in dry air. I know this personally since humidity is often quite low here, though not nearly as dry as Way Down Under at Union Glacier.
The bit about the snow is easily explained: Witsit wanted to make sure the camera could see him pick up the snow, so he couldn’t be accused of just picking powder out of an (off camera) bucket. Funny that his due dilligence is being used against him.
A not unrelated rant: One thing a couple of Flerfers have accused me of is believing that the Earth is round solely because I was taught that in school. No. I’ve seen actual evidence for it outside of school, and of course as described above I have evidence that the Sun is far away (which wouldn’t rule out the ancient flat earth theories, but does rule out this stupid pizza world with a firmament model–sort of like a snow globe–that the current crop of FEs is fond of).
Remember, you’re simply watching the behavior of grifters dancing as the evidence that they are full of shit keeps piling up.
No Science Section
Neither the time nor the energy. Last week I divided the post in two and saved the other half off; but it needs fleshing out, a lot of it. I thought about covering a workaday-geology topic (e.g., streams), but it’s almost 9 PM.
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
vicegerent
noun
acting in place of another
having delegated authority
not the same as a viceregent, although similar
Used in a sentence
A viceregent is a ruler acting in place of a monarch, while a vicegerent is an appointed representative of a higher authority, often with broader administrative duties.
Now I seem to recall Rand Paul’s name associated with Festivus, and I never quite got it, until this news report. Stay with it for at least a minute. LMAO!!!
Well, DOGE-GONE, it’s BARBIE!
I’m sorry, but Festivus has me in the mood to play my favorite song!
In case you’re wondering what a “ferrocell” is, there’s a fascinating paper describing how one works.
The beauty of this song – other than simply being well-done, is that in some pleasing ways, the actual science of sunlight shining on the orbiting moon, blocked by its own orbiting mass, corresponds with, and maybe even transforms through the “crackpot matrix” to, the dithering of Mr. (at)witsit about ferrocells and whatnot.
Between “real” science and “pseudo” science, I’m falling in love with the crazy beauty of this universe!
Good night, good morning, good day, and MERRY CHRISTMAS!
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
coprophagous
Yes, this word randomly came up in my word source, and I decided to tough it out and keep it. I have never wimped out on a word, and I’m not starting now. So YES. And YUCK.
adjective
eating feces
Used in a sentence
To the AWFULs who destroy innocent patriotic families – Don’t just “be offended”, as Matt Gaetz would say. Be coprophagous!
Shown in a picture (in as “purty” a fashion as possible)
Shown in a video
MUSIC!
DePat said something about she and others all yelling “the cranberries” at the same time.
Well – SOMEBODY was listening!
AND – just for the heck of it – I have to add my new favorite song!
Yes, I may be a hillbilly, and I may have voted for the outlaw and the hillbilly, but I can take a joke, and this song, like Elon Musk, has…..
Gail Combs is still having intermittent trouble both editing and posting on WordPress. This is her draft, fixed up and key-worded as best as I could, on short notice.
W
Gail Combs:
At first I was going to do a round-up of all of POTUS Trump’s picks via screen shots and then realized it would be WAY too long. Also the images would eat up too much time loading and possibly overwhelm Steve’s internet service. Therefore I am going to delve into some of the concerns raised. (If people are interested I can do the Trump picks as a separate article or possibly series of article to chronicle this Historic Post Election period.)
Given the skuttlebutt about Biden pardons, this maybe of interest:
Protect Democracy Org —Checking the Pardon Power:Constitutional Limitations & Options for Preventing Abuse
The author, Paul Ingrassia, is a Constitutional Scholar so it is worth reading in it’s entirety.
…The second branch of the government – aptly outlined under Article II, is the executive. The executive branch, under the Constitution’s very explicit original formulation (which, contrary to the overwhelming sentiment in today’s Washington, is an article that has not undergone emendation…) is vested entirely (in noticeable contradistinction to “mostly” or “largely”) in a (again, singular, one) President of the United States (“The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America” …the executive branch is the only one under our Constitution – which, again, is the law of the land – that is vested in a single individual….
In official duties, the President – or Chief Magistrate – is tasked with law enforcement. He is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, ensuring civilian control over the military — not, as our latter-day betters would have us believe, something to be outsourced to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or the Pentagon, or lobbyists and consultants working for Raytheon.
Being singular or unitary, the President appoints cabinet secretaries and federal judges. The latter [Should be former -GC] answer to him alone. And while Congressional approval, in some cases, is needed to fulfill the President’s constitutional obligation for nominations, the President – as the Unitary Executive – has full discretion over the tenures of each and every one of his underlings within the executive department…
As for the agencies (and the larger bureaucracy), the acute observer will find – well, problematic – that no such fourth branch of government exists within the text of the Constitution…
Ingrassia makes the case that the federal bureaucracy is UNDER the executive branch, that is the PRESIDENT and therefore should be answerable to him. “…the President – as the Unitary Executive – has full discretion over the tenures of each and every one of his underlings within the executive department….” The following article from The Congressional Research Service (.gov) shows how Congress has gradually taken control of the executive from the President and turned it into an unelected, unfireable autocratic government aka The Deep State or Shadow Government.
…A little history: up until the end of the Civil War, the President exercised virtually unconstrained power to dismiss military officers. However, in 1865 Congress passed legislation which purports to limit that power. That legislation was essentially the same as that found today codified in 10 USC § 1161(a).
The legitimacy of Congress imposing statutory restrictions on the authority of the President to remove military officers was initially “subject of doubt and discussion.” It remains controversial even today, particularly since there doesn’t seem to be a case precisely on point as to the constitutionality.
Nevertheless, the better view does seem to suggest that Congress has the power to set some limits on the President’s dismissal authority – at least in times of peace….
To continue our analogy from above, the President is roughly akin to a British King – a comparison made both favorably and unfavorably throughout the Federalist Papers, that handbook to aid constitutional interpretation and explanation, devised by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay.
Thus we can go to The Federalist Papers, IF you can find them, to see what our founders actually meant… If you have any doubts. I had to use Yandex to actually find the papers.
[Listing of papers: https://www.federalistpapers.org/2012/12/federalist-papers.html]
…THE President of the United States is to be “commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several States when called into the actual service of the United States.” The propriety of this provision is so evident in itself, and it is, at the same time, so consonant to the precedents of the State constitutions in general, that little need be said to explain or enforce it. Even those of them which have, in other respects, coupled the chief magistrate with a council, have for the most part concentrated the military authority in him alone. Of all the cares or concerns of government, the direction of war most peculiarly demands those qualities which distinguish the exercise of power by a single hand…
….PANIC IN DC? WHY? WHAT WAS LOST? POWER OF THE PURSE. COMMANDER IN CHIEF OF THE UNITED STATES MILITARY. POWER TO REPLACE SENIOR OFFICIALS WITHIN CRUCIAL GOV POSITIONS (DEPT’S) WHO CAN THEN REPLACE SR+MID+LOW POSITIONS (TRICKLE_DOWN REPLACEMENT). POWER TO APPOINT SC JUSTICES. (What if HRC won and appointed 2+ crooked SCJs?) (The Last Resort) POWER TO DIRECTLY UNDO HUSSEIN/PREV EO’S WHICH HARMED-GREATLY LIMITED THE US IN MANY VITAL/NEC WAYS. POWER TO REBUILD THE UNITED STATES MILITARY (BACK) TO A GLOBAL SUPER POWER. (CHINA PAYOFFS (BRIBE $) FAILURE) POWER TO ENACT LAWS BY EO TO COMBAT AND PROTECT OUR PEOPLE. POWER TO SHIFT FOREIGN POLICY THEREBY REDUCING OUR ENEMIES ABILITY TO PROSPER AND SOMEDAY REIGN. (IRAN DEAL – PARIS ACCORD – CHINA TRADE – SYRIA – ………………….) POWER TO DECLAS CRUCIAL DOCS TO PROVIDE THE PUBLIC W/ THE TRUTH (TRANSPARENCY). POWER TO GIVE BACK POWER TO THE PEOPLE (AS INTENDED BY OUR FOUNDERS). LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD.…
….
Ingrassia also cites Article III dealing with the establishment of the federal courts: the Supreme Court and the other federal courts. So let’s take a look at this branch of government since it is responsible for enforcing US law and the Constitution…. But IT HAS NOT! We pay attention to the DC government but most often over look the long term damage done by the corrupted judiciary.
The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office….
Section 2
The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury; and such Trial shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any State, the Trial shall be at such Place or Places as the Congress may by Law have directed…. [We now have trial by JUDGES or BUREAUCRATS and not juries BTW. – GC]
Section 3
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason…
So can Trump fire federal judges? NO, not according to Publius Huldah. I am a BIG FAN of this lady and I hope POTUS Trump finds a use for her, perhaps in JAG.
From her ABOUT page. “…Publius Huldah” is the nom de guerre of Joanna Martin, J.D., who is a thoroughly nice person, in addition to all the above. And if you hear otherwise, consider this from Socrates, who reportedly said, “When the debate is lost, slander is the weapon of the loser” [Boy, haven’t we seen the truth of that ancient wisdom! Also, if some one is slandered by the MSM, that means they are a threat to the Deep State in IMHO, – GC]
right out of law school & newly commissioned US Army JAGC
To the Department of Homeland Security:
I am delighted to learn of your intense & increasing interest in learning the original intent of Our Constitution! Please feel free to browse around to your hearts’ content.
The comments are worth reading BTW
A search for the word “Judge” on her site turns up some real goodies — LINK. She has a similar opinion of the Supreme Court and judges to mine.
Someone asked me why I write on the US Constitution when the US Supreme Court won’t enforce it.
This is why: Our Declaration of Independence recognizes the self-evident Truth that Rights come from God, and that they are unalienable. Accordingly, there are certain areas of your life which are off-limits to government regulation – you have an “immunity” from governmental regulation of these areas.
But since the federal and state governments are refusing to recognize our Rights, it falls on us to boldly step up to the plate and insist that our Rights be respected. You have no lawful, moral, or religious duty to submit to a government when it violates our Constitution and seeks to take from you the rights God gave you.
Governments do not have constitutional authority to force you to take the COVID JAB.
And in this paper I show that the “privileges and immunities” and “due process” clauses of the US Constitution prohibit the federal, state, and local governments from requiring you to be “jabbed” or putting you into a concentration camp if they assert that you are at “high risk” of getting infected [i.e., those who are 65 years of age or older]….
PLEASE READ!!! Huldah is a Constitutional scholar and lawyer. Her evisceration of the judiciary and Congress is Epic. [COSP =Convention of States Project, Mark Levin is an advocate BTW and thus a viper. I noticed after I pointed that out years ago at OT, the web page disappeared. ]
4I trust you see why Hamilton is viciously smeared. The relentless attacks on our Framers have a purpose: Take them down – and our Foundation is destroyed. Hamilton wrote most of The Federalist Papers, which Madison and Jefferson recognized as the best evidence of the genuine meaning of our Constitution. What effect do these constant attacks on Hamilton have on peoples’ respect for The Federalist Papers? Beware of false friends who undermine our Foundation; and of jealous men whose claim to fame is that they attack Hamilton. [In looking up various Federalist Papers on Brave, I have come across some doozys but could not find the actual papers, just commentary. — GC]
This is her conclusion in her article on Transgenders in the Military.
Conclusion
Let us put the federal courts in their proper place! Congress and the President have the recognized power to refuse to go along with unconstitutional or ultra vires acts of the Judicial Branch; and their Oaths of office require them to do so. Congress also has the power to rid us of usurping federal judges via the impeachment process.
Let’s analyze COSP’s silly argument. We begin by looking at First Principles:
♦The Judicial Branch was created by Art. III, §1, US Constitution. Accordingly, it is a “creature” of the Constitution. 1
♦The federal government came into existence when the States, acting through special ratifying conventions held in each of the States, ratified the Constitution.2
Since the Judicial Branch is merely a “creature” of the Constitution, it follows that it is subordinate to the Constitution, and is completely subject to its terms. It may not annul the superior authority of the States which created the Judicial Branch when they ratified the Constitution; 3 and as a mere “creature” of the Constitution, it may NOT change the Constitution under which it holds its existence! 4
….we elect to Congress people who don’t know our Constitution or The Federalist Papers; and they are unaware of their Duty – imposed by their Oath of office – to function as a “check” on the Judicial Branch by impeaching federal judges who violate our Constitution.
… we delegated only a very few powers to the federal government.
Accordingly, Congress has strictly limited legislative powers over the Country at large. These powers are listed primarily at Art. I, §8, clauses 3-16, and are restricted to war, international commerce & relations; and domestically, the creation of an uniform commercial system: weights & measures, patents & copyrights, a monetary system based on gold & silver, bankruptcy laws, mail delivery & roads. Several Amendments delegate to Congress some power over civil rights.
These enumerated powers are the only areas where the federal government has lawful authority over The States and The People in The States. In all other matters [except those listed at Art. I, §10]the States and The People retain supremacy, independence, and sovereignty. Go here for a complete list of all of Congress’ Enumerated Powers.
Obamacare is altogether unconstitutional because it is outside the scope of the legislative powers We granted to Congress. Nothing in Our Constitution authorizes the federal government to control our medical care (or to exercise the other fearsome powers in the Act)...
… it is a President’s sworn duty to refuse to enforce any unconstitutional “law” made by Congress. And contrary to the misinformation with which we are constantly bombarded, judges are not vested with exclusive authority to declare Acts of Congress unconstitutional.
The Truth is that a President, the States, local governments, and individual citizens, together with the courts, all have the Right &Duty to overrule – to spurn & cast out – unconstitutional laws made by Congress.For it is a fundamental [though long suppressed] Principle of our Founding that an unconstitutional “law” is no “law” at all – it is a “mere usurpation, and deserves to be treated as such”…
I am going to detour to what I consider an important topic in my old notes, JURY NULLIFICATION. It is the American citizens FINAL SAY on the laws passed by our representatives. From 2015:
A pamphlet told the juror what his Constitutional rights and obligations were. This is information the JUDGE should be clearly stating to EVERY JURY. INSTEAD He was arrested for handing out literature. LINK
In fact this is becoming a LAW in some states thanks to the groups handing out the pamphlets.
This is perhaps THE MOST IMPORTANT move any American can make to protect our freedom. WE as Jurorists have the RIGHT and duty to judge not only the case by the LAW itself. We as Jurorists CAN set aside laws passed by Congress! This is the ultimate power of the people over the government and the Elite want to keep it hidden!
…On appeal, however, the jurors’ action was upheld and the right of juries to judge both the law and the facts — to nullify the law if it chose— became part of British constitutional law.
It ultimately became part of American constitutional law as well, With only a few exceptions, juries are explicitly or implicitly told to worry only about the facts and let the judge decide the law.
The right of jury nullification has become one of the legal system’s best kept secrets.
Now a remarkable coalition has sprung up to challenge this secrecy as undemocratic, unconstitutional and dangerous…
FIJA seeks to require that juries be informed of their nullification rights. Informed jury amendments have been filed as an initiative in seven states and legislation has been introduced in the Alaska state legislature.
Merely raising the issue of nullification can make prosecutors nervous, for it takes only one person aware of the right in order to hang a jury. In Washington, DC, where the concept was discussed in connection with the Marion Barry trial, a local television station reported that the US Attorney was worried that a jury might nullify the law in that case……
Far from being an unintended side-effect, jury nullification is explicitly authorized in the constitutions of 24 states.State Language on Jury Nullification
“…Merely raising the issue of nullification can make prosecutors nervous…”
Publius Huldah gets into WHY prosecutors become nervous and what has been done to our legal system.
…The Federalist Papers were written during 1787-88 by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, to explain the proposed Constitution to The People and to induce them to ratify it. Thus, The Federalist is the most authoritative commentary on the genuine meaning of Our Constitution. And at a meeting of the Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia on March 4, 1825 at which Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were present, the following resolution selecting the texts for the Law school, was passed:
…on the distinctive principles of the government of our own state, and of that of the US. the best guides are to be found in 1. the Declaration of Independance, as the fundamental act of union of these states. 2. the book known by the title of `The Federalist’, being an authority to which appeal is habitually made by all, and rarely declined or denied by any as evidence of the general opinion of those who framed, and of those who accepted the Constitution of the US. on questions as to it’s genuine meaning…. (page 83) [emphasis added]
So! Thomas Jefferson, Author of the Declaration of Independence, and James Madison, Father of The Constitution, acknowledged the high authoritative status of The Federalist Papers. They saw The Constitution as having a fixed meaning which one could learn by consulting The Federalist!
2. But supreme Court judges soon refused to submit to The Constitution as explained by The Federalist Papers. In 1907, former Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes said, “…the Constitution is what the judges say it is…”. Judges thus rejected the objective standard provided by The Federalist, and substituted their own subjective interpretations. Law schools embraced this subversion: Instead of teaching The Constitution as a set of fixed principles explained by The Federalist, they taught supreme Court opinions which say Congress may do whatever it pleases. They also taught that supreme Court judges have unbridled authority to say what the Constitution means. Law schools thus produced generations of constitutionally illiterate lawyers & judges who have been indoctrinated with the monstrous Lie that Our Constitution means whatever judges on the supreme Court say! And because these lawyers failed in their sacred duty to think, and uncritically accepted what they were told, Our Country is on the brink of destruction….
Of course our John Dewey Progressive School System made DARN SURE Americans are completely ignorant of our Constitution, rights and remedies, the better to turn us into good little Marxist slaves.
On last, Publius Huldah’s article on calling forth the militia.
Because of its excellence and relevance to the insurrections being fomented in our cities by the Marxist organization “Black Lives Matter”, Antifa, and other revolutionary organizations; I sent the recent paper by Edwin Vieira, JD., Ph.D., titled, “The President’s Authority To Suppress Insurrections” [link], to my lists.
In response, some objected that the riots in the cities are local issues to be handled (or not) by the State and local governments – that they are not “federal” issues over which the federal government has jurisdiction. Some also asserted that Article IV, §4, US Constitution prohibits the President from sending the National Guard into a State to quell such disturbances, unless & until the Legislature or the Governor of the State requests it.
Those objections are not well-founded.
First: What’s going on in our cities is not something which can be prudently brushed aside. It is a classic manifestation of a Marxist revolution – see, e.g., this article from “Workers’ World”. Furthermore, as shown below, the President of the United States has constitutional and statutory authority to exercise his own judgment as to whether he should send in the “Militia” to suppress the uprisings.
Second: Our Constitution provides two separate and independent methods for the federal government to suppress such uprisings.
Dr. Vieira’s paper sets forth the other method of “calling forth the Militia” – the method provided for at Article I, §8, clauses 15 & 16, US Constitution. That provides for the intervention of the Militia within a State at the initiative of the federal government, regardless of whether the State requests it.. 1
I hope you enjoyed my tour through some of Publius Huldah’s articles and will continue reading her excellent commentary. I am now going to look at a few other articles of interest by others.
….a recent Congressional Research Service report explains. “The criteria for election or appointment to these positions are specified in the U.S. Constitution, and except by constitutional amendment, no additional criteria (e.g., holding a security clearance) may be required.”
In fact, the security clearance system itself is an expression of presidential authority. Its scope and operation are defined in an executive order (EO 12968), and its terms can be modified by the President at will.
And if the President wished to grant access to classified information to a family member, for example, there would be no legal barrier to doing so…..
So that kills THAT objection by RINOs and Demonrats when it comes to ratifying POTUS Trump’s picks.
…Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson wrote in a letter to the senators earlier this month that he could not begin a review of the security clearance process without direction from Trump or one of his “designees” because “the authority over access to classified information ultimately rests with the President of the United States.”…
Of course the Senate has ZERO jurisdiction over Security Clearances so this is just more encroachment on the executive.
Matt Gaetz
So You CAN appoint a private citizen as a Special Counsel, and they can begin their important work WITHOUT a Senate confirmation hearing or vote?
Now Adam Schiff is going to be come a senator. I wonder if POTUS Trump will deny him a security clearance…. OR WORSE?
Added by Wolf…..
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) on Tuesday assailed President-elect Donald Trump’s suggestion that he and other former members of the defunct House Jan. 6 committee be imprisoned.
Trump advocated that those on the former panel who investigated the 2021 U.S. Capitol riot and his role in overturning the 2020 election should “go to jail.”
“I don’t think the incoming president should be threatening his political opponents with jail time,” Schiff told reporters on his first full day as a senator. “That’s not the kind of talk we should hear from the president in a democracy, nor do I think that a pardon is necessary for the members of the Jan. 6 committee.”
President Joe Biden is weighing preemptive pardons over fears Trump may seek retribution against Schiff and other high-profile members of the bipartisan panel, including former Chairman Bennie Thomson (D-MS), Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), and former Rep. Liz Cheney. Biden is also considering pardons for other political foes who could come under Trump’s microscope.
“We are proud of the work we did in that committee,” Schiff continued. “It was a fundamental oversight obligation to investigate the first attempt to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power in our history.”
Trump said in an NBC Meet the Press interview that aired over the weekend that he would not direct Justice Department officials to bring charges against the committee members but accused them of engaging in unspecified criminal activity.
“For what they did, honestly, they should go to jail,” Trump said.
In a separate portion, Trump said that “retribution will be through success.” He’s also vowed to pardon those charged with and convicted of crimes related to the Capitol riot.
Let’s see what happens to Pencil-Neck Shifty Schiff!
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
urbiculture
noun
cultivation or development of urban life
the practices and problems peculiar to cities or to urban life
the way of life characteristic of cities
urban culture
Used in a sentence
Is wokeism a natural part of modern urbiculture, or is it a special pathology thereof?
Shown in a picture by Gab’s “wokester” AI, “Woke Gemini”
Apparently shown in a video (by searching on the word)
MUSIC!
SO – the DDG search “urbiculture music” weirdly brings back mostly videos of Ethiopian music, but it also brought back this ambient Greek and Mediterranean music with accompanying scenic photography. Enjoy!
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).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
zymotechnics
noun
the art of fermentation
fermentation technology
Used in a sentence
If one considers Pasteur and zymotechnics to be ancestral to modern biotechnology, then surely Liebig and early organic chemistry are foundational to modern pharmaceutical, agrochemical, and medicinal chemistry. (Derived from THIS LINK.)
Shown in a picture, sorta, kinda, hey, look! A squirrel!
Shown in a Soviet Uzbek film – no, wait – that’s not….. whatever!
MUSIC!
Well, now that we’re committed to the theme…..
UGH. Think I’ll have a sparkling water!
THE STUFF
If you want to see how much bad science is out there, just watch this lady review a scientific paper that was getting some “wowee” buzz.
You don’t have to understand the equations – just assume for the moment that she knows what she’s talking about (this is her area of science).
But notice that the opposite should also be true (and she says it). Some valuable gems get lost in the trash as well. Good science is increasingly not noticed, until it is rediscovered a second or third time and somehow gets more attention.
As of desired publication time, 12:02 AM on November 29th, there are 51 days, 11 hours and 58 minutes before our Once and Future President, Donald John Trump, is restored to his rightful office.
Not that I’m counting, mind you.
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
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 prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Small Government?
Many times conservatives (real and fake) speak of “small government” being the goal.
This sounds good, and mostly is good, but it misses the essential point. The important thing here isn’t the size, but rather the purpose, of government. We could have a cheap, small tyranny. After all our government spends most of its revenue on payments to individuals and foreign aid, neither of which is part of the tyrannical apparatus trying to keep us locked down and censored. What parts of the government would be necessary for a tyranny? It’d be a lot smaller than what we have now. We could shrink the government and nevertheless find it more tyrannical than it is today.
No, what we want is a limited government, limited not in size, but rather in scope. Limited, that is, in what it’s allowed to do. Under current circumstances, such a government would also be much smaller, but that’s a side effect. If we were in a World War II sort of war, an existential fight against nasty dictatorships on the brink of world conquest, that would be very expensive and would require a gargantuan government, but that would be what the government should be doing. That would be a large, but still limited government, since it’d be working to protect our rights.
World War II would have been the wrong time to squawk about “small government,” but it wasn’t (and never is) a bad time to demand limited government. Today would be a better time to ask for a small government–at least the job it should be doing is small today–but it misses the essential point; we want government to not do certain things. Many of those things we don’t want it doing are expensive but many of them are quite eminently doable by a smaller government than the one we have today. Small, but still exceeding proper limits.
So be careful what you ask for. You might get it and find you asked for the wrong thing.
Political Science In Summation
It’s really just a matter of people who can’t be happy unless they control others…versus those who want to be left alone. The oldest conflict within mankind. Government is necessary, but government attracts the assholes (a highly technical term for the control freaks).
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.
Gold took a ninety dollar thumping on Monday, seemed to be going nowhere the rest of the week, but has recovered a little bit on Friday. The same is pretty much true of the other precious metals, though one will note rhodium actually dropped a bit. The gold:silver ratio still sucks (if you’re a silver fan).
*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.
Flat Earth Cowards
Just remember that David Weiss, Eric Dubay, Mark Sargent, Nathan Oakley, Dean Odle, and Volker Meyer, all Flat Earth proponents on the internet, are intellectual cowards at best, and knowing fraudsters (politespeak for motherfucking liars) at worst, and I am in this case inclined to believe the worst.
After years of maintaining that the Sun does indeed set in Antarctica during the southern summer, but then claiming people aren’t allowed to go look, they’ve turned down the opportunity to go look. Worse, many of them condemn Jeranism, Whitsit Gets It, and Lisbeth Acosta for going.
Any reasonable person looking at this behavior should see the hallmarks of a fraudster. The fraudster wants you to believe what he says unconditionally. The fraudster wants you to 1) ignore the lack of evidence for his position and 2) the actual evidence against his position. This is a system for protecting lies.
Would someone condemn people for going and looking, if they sincerely thought their position was true?
These people are pushing bullshit and they know they are pushing bullshit. These people are lying turds.
By contrast, eight of the globers who spend time debunking flerfers are going, one is paying for himself, one is getting the free ride offered as part of TFE, the other six are crowd funded. Globers also crowdfunded Lisbeth to go when the anonymous donor who funded a drawing for the flerfers turned out to himself be a flerfer fraud. Globers crowd funding her, not flerfers. All of the globers (and many who are not going, such as Professor Dave Explains) have vowed to remove their anti-flat earth content and post a statement that the earth is flat, if the sun actually sets for those at the Final Experiment.
Who is acting confident in their position…and who is acting like they are afraid this whole thing will make it obvious they are simply worthless shitbag liars?
On The Fringes? The Trans-Neptunian Worlds
There are nine objects that are likely “dwarf planets” (i.e. objects too small to be “real” planets, but which are nevertheless rounded by their own gravity and orbit the Sun directly). It’s difficult to confirm the roundness of many of these as all we can see of them is a fuzzy blob, even with the Hubble Space Telescope.
Here they are:
Name Minor Planet Number
min, max distances, (mean) (in AUs)
Eccentricity (0=circular, 1=parabola)
Inclination to ecliptic (degrees)
Period (years)
Year Discovered
Precovery Date
Ceres 1
2.55- 2.98 (2.77)
0.0785
10.6
4.60
1801
–
Pluto 134340
29.658- 49.305 (39.482)
0.2488
17.16
247.94
1930
1909
Quaoar 50000
41.900- 45-488 (43.694)
0.04106
7.9895
288.83
2002
1954
Sedna 90377
76.19- 937 (506)
0.8496
11.9307
11,390
2003
1990
Orcus 90482
30.281- 48.067 (39.174)
0.22701
20.592
245.19
2004
1951
Haumea 136108
34.647- 51.585 (43.116)
0.19642
28.2137
283.12
2003
1955
Eris 136199
38.271- 97.457 (67.864)
0.43607
44.040
559.07
2005
1954
MakeMake 136472
38.104- 52.786 (45.430)
0.16126
28.9835
306.21
2005
1955
Gonggong 225088
33.781- 101.190 (67.485)
0.49943
30.6273
554.37
2007
1985
Orbital Parameters of the nine likely dwarf planets
A word of explanation: The “precovery” date is the oldest image found of the object, when they go back looking to see if anyone ever accidentally photographed it. This seems like a bit of trivia, but those images can be extremely useful for determining the orbit of the object (not just the semi major axis, inclination and eccentricity but also the longitude of the ascending node, argument of perihelion and time of perihelion–those three orient the orbit (along with the inclination) and put the object at a certain spot in the orbit). This is why astronomers never throw away an astrophotograph; it may be beneficial decades later.
It should be noted that the full list of possible dwarf planets is 28 objects long, based on estimated diameters, though some have no names (just minor planet numbers). For the sheer sake of self-preservation, one should probably hope that 229762 Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà does not make the list, as !Kung words are notoriously hard to pronounce. (No, I am not making that up.)
By the opposite token, only Ceres and Pluto are absolutely solidly confirmed to be dwarf planets; it pretty much takes a spacecraft mission to confirm it.
Ceres is an outlier, obviously, because it’s the only object in the table that isn’t a trans-Neptunian object. I’ve covered asteroids already, so from this point forward I am going to ignore the world Ceres. (Never was much into baseball anyway.) Aside from Ceres the other oddball is Sedna, with a huge eccentricity and a huge orbit; it makes all of the others pale in comparison.
What would a well behaved full-blown classical planet look like in that table? It would have a low eccentricity and a low inclination. Quaoar actually behaves more like a planet than any of the others in the table (even including Ceres).
Here is another diagram, showing relative sizes, shapes, colors and brightnesses of these and some other objects. The color is of course an average color. In some cases there’s uncertainty as to size (as with Sedna), in which case a half-arc is shown at the maximum diameter. This one might reward a right-click-and-open-in-new-tab.
So now let’s take a look at these in more detail; I’m going to save Sedna and Pluto for last (and not bother at all with Ceres).
Quaoar
Quaoar (pronounced kwah-wahr, though more strictly speaking it should be “kwa’uwar” with the ‘ representing a glottal stop as you hear in the Hawaiian pronunciation of Hawai’i) is named after a deity of the Tongva people, and for me at least that answers nothing until I go look up “Tongva people.” It turns out they were a tribe in what is now the Los Angeles basin. (They also call themselves the Kizh.) Their language is distantly related to Aztec.
Quaoar was discovered 4 June 2002 by Chadwick A. Trujillo and Michael E. Brown at the Palomar Observatory (they were not using the big 200 incher but one of the smaller (but still big) instruments, the Samuel Oschin telescope. They were running a survey looking for Kuiper belt objects (little did they know…). Once it was determined that Quaoar was not in a resonance with Neptune (making it a qubewano-class TNO), the naming convention dictated it be named after a creation deity; Brown and Trujillo consulted with some present-day Tongvas to be sure it was an appropriate name.
Quaoar is an elongated ellipsoidal shape averaging 1090 km across, making it less than half the size of Pluto (2,376.6 km). (We know it’s not perfectly spherical because its brightness varies over a span of 17.68 hours–which we infer is its day. This could just be brightness differences, like with Iapetus, but we’ve also watched Quaoar cross in front of stars and timing the length of the blackouts leads to different estimates of the diameter.) Quaoar is also a very dark object reflecting only 12% of the light it gets from the Sun (which ain’t much to begin with!) It’s somewhat reddish, like 20000 Varuna and 28978 Ixion (both objects that are on the “long list” of possible dwarf planets).
So if it’s not really round, what’s the deal with it being considered a dwarf planet? Normally any rocky body over 900km or so, or any icy body between 200-400 km across should go round. If it’s slowly rotating it should be a bit oblate (wider at the equator than through the poles). A faster rotation should resemble Haumea’s case (see below). So how can Quaoar not be round? It’s absolutely big enough. It’s possible that Quaoar used to rotate more quickly, froze into shape and then Weymot slowed its rotation down due to tidal effects. (Saturn’s moon Iapetus has a similar situation going on but is not as extreme.)
Here are the discovery images put together as a GIF. It’s easy to spot when there’s an arrow, isn’t it?
And now (drumroll) our best image, from the Hubble space telescope:
And yes, Quaoar has a moon, Weywot, discovered by Brown in February 2007; Weywot is the son of Quaoar in Tongva mythology. Weywot is about 200 km across (though some places in Wikipoo show it as smaller), which makes it too small to be rounded (the smallest rounded object known is Mimas (Saturn’s “Death Star” moon), at 396.4 km; there is at least one non-rounded objects that are larger: Neptune’s moon Proteus). Quaoar also has a ring.
Here are a couple more diagrams, the first being a picture of Quaoar’s orbit (in cyan and blue) compared to Neptune (white) and Pluto (red). The two spheres are not only about the right sizes, comparatively speaking (but not compared to the size of the orbits!), but they are correctly colored (an average color) and even the brightness (albedo) is correct.
And another, an “overhead” view with Quaoar in yellow, Pluto in magenta/pink, Neptune in blue, and a few other TNOs in a drab green.
On the whole, we know next to nothing about this one…and that’s pretty much going to be true of most of the others. They’re just too doggone far away.
Orcus
Orcus is estimated to be anywhere from 870-960 km across, thus about the size of Ceres. It’s fairly bright, neutral in color and largely made of water ice; apparently the ice is mostly crystalline so maybe sometime in the past there was cryovolcanism (i.e., water volcanoes).
Orcus was discovered by Michael Brown, Chad Trujillo and David Rabinowitz on 17 February 2004 (note that two of these astronomers also discovered Quaoar). In this case, Orcus got named after one of the Roman gods of the underworld, because it’s a plutino.
What is a plutino? Plutinos are objects that, like Pluto, are in a 2:3 orbital resonance with Neptune, orbiting twice in the time it takes Neptune to orbit three times. (Note in the chart above it has nearly the same year, and mean orbital distance, as Pluto.) But Orcus tends to be furthest away from the Sun when Pluto is closest, and vice versa.
Here we see a Hubble Space telescope image of Orcus, and its moon Vanth. Vanth is estimated to be 475 km across by some, which is easily large enough to end up in that “Medium Small” 250-500km size bucket with Mimas, Hyperion, Proteus and Nereid, but other estimates put it below that 400 km line yet still in that bucket. Considering it’s likely frozen solid, and how rigid ice is at those temperatures, it’s not expected to be a round moon. (Note that I made a point to talk about any moon in that size bucket, and above, as I went through the 8 big planets.)
Vanth was named after an Etruscan deity, a “psychopomp” who guides the deceased to the underworld.
It is, however, big enough that the center of gravity of the Orcus-Vanth system is actually outside of Orcus, making it a double object. Vanth orbits Orcus in 9.54 days, and appears to rotate in the same amount of time. The rotation of Orcus, on the other hand, has been harder to nail down, so we don’t know if both bodies are tidally locked or just Vanth.
All in all, Orcus is often thought of as an “anti Pluto” since it’s phased the opposite of Pluto and has a (proportionately) large moon like Pluto. It’s even more striking when you see the visual of the orbit (Neptune’s orbit in white, Pluto’s orbit in red, Orcus in cyan and blue–note the color changes when the object crosses the ecliptic, and note the spheres are to scale with each other, the correct colors and albedos, again):
Haumea
Haumea is named after the Hawai’ian goddess of childbirth. It was discovered by Mike Brown at Caltech, but announced by a team headed by Jose Luis Ortiz Moreno at the Sierra Nevada Observatory…not our Sierra Nevadas, but rather the ones in Spain. There’s controversy over who should get the credit for this one. It’s the third largest TNO after Pluto and Eris. Here’s a picture, again from the Hubble Space Telescope:
This one’s a bit odd. Based on watching it fluctuate in brightness, it’s a very elongated triaxial ellipsoid, meaning it has a long axis, a medium axis at right angles to that, and a short axis at right angles to the other two. Here’s an artist’s rendering of Haumea:
But this is actually the shape one would expect of a rapidly rotating object under hydrostatic equilibrium; Haumea rotates in about four hours.
So how long are the axes? Haumea is roughly 2100 by 1680 x 1074 kilometers. Or perhaps 2322 x 1704 x 1026. Depending on whose numbers you believe. Either way, it’s a sizeable object.
Haumea has moons, as you likely noticed…not just one but two of them known so far. Hi’iaka (upper right in the picture) is a medium-small moon about 310 km across, in that same “bucket” as Mimas, but probably not rounded. Namaka (lower left) is roughly 170 km across. They are named after two daughters of Haumea, the patron goddesses of the Big Island of Hawai’i, and the sea, respectively.
(That brings us, by the way, to the end of the list of medium-small moons: Mimas, Hyperion, Miranda, Proteus, Nereid, Vanth, and Hi’iaka… or does it? It turns out ttwo additional objects on the long list of possible dwarf planets, Salacia and Varda, also have moons in this size bucket. And there’s an almost perfectly-matched double body, Lempo (at 272 km) and Hiisi, with the best estimate for Hiisi being 251km (just squeaking by). If there’s one thing about TNOs, it’s that they tend to have comparatively large moons!)
Haumea is as bright as snow, with an albedo of 0.73…meaning that 73 percent of the light that hits it is reflected back. It seems to have crystalline ice on it, which is puzzling, because crystalline ice should only form above 100 K, and Haumea is at 50K, and only amorphous ice should form at that temperature. Furthermore once it forms, cosmic rays plus what’s left of the solar wind out there should degrade it to amorphous ice in about 10 million years. On top of that, old surfaces out there end up covered in tholins (“star tar”), making them appear red. So it seems that Haumea’s surface is new, but we don’t know how that could have happened. (I could spitball it, but that would be worth less than you paid for this article.)
Haumea appears to have a ring, discovered as it passed in front of a star.
Haumea turns out to be the largest member of a family of objects that have similar orbits and it appears they may all be remnants of a larger body that broke apart due to a collision. But it appears to have happened at least a billion years ago based on orbital dynamics considerations, so that won’t explain the white, crystalline ice surface of Haumea.
The New Horizons probe that went to Pluto actually took some pictures of Haumea on three different occasions…from quite a distance however. The 2007 shots were from 49 AUs away, others were in 2017 at 59 AU and in 2023 at 63 AU. Still, being able to compare the “side view” from what we see on Earth has been helpful.
Haumea’s orbit turns out to resemble Makemake’s (see below). As a bonus Quaoar is also shown:
Eris
We talked about Eris a lot last time. With a diameter of 2326 km it’s a smidge smaller than Pluto, but it’s denser (more rocks, less ice) but is considerably more massive than Pluto, 27% more in fact. As pointed out last time, if Pluto is a planet, Eris is too.
Here are Eris and Dysnomia photographed in 2006, and we’re lucky to have this, because at the moment Eris is 96.3 AUs from the Sun.
Here’s the same sort of orbital diagram I’ve showed for the others…but note in this one Neptune’s orbit is quite small.
MakeMake
Makemake (MAH-ke-MAH-ke) is comparable in size to Saturn’s moon Iapetus, or 60% the diameter of Pluto. From what little of it we see, it may actually have geothermal activity, even though it’s one of the coldest bodies in the solar system at 40K. (When you see the words “possibly nitrogen ices” in a wikipoo article, you know the place is colder than Hitlary Klinton’s lap.) It’s named after a creator god in the Rapa Nui mythology of Easter Island. Again, Michael Brown is on the list of discoverers. And again we have a fuzzy image from Hubble Space Telescope.
And yet again, we have a moon, one that hasn’t been named yet.
Makemake is bright enough–brighter than any TNO other than Pluto–that perhaps it should have been discovered much sooner (maybe even by Clyde Tombaugh). There are even claims that Tombaugh in fact should have seen it, but it was buried right in the Milky Way and with all those stars around it, it would have been hard to spot. However, it hasn’t been spotted in any of his photographs, so it’s not that he photographed it and didn’t notice. It turns out the earliest precovery date is 1955 and Tombaugh stopped looking for additional objects in 1943.
Here’s another one of those graphics of the orbits, as usual the ecliptic in white, Pluto in red. Haumea is in green and MakeMake is on the blue line. The closest and farthest approaches to the sun (the perihelia and aphelia are given. The spheres are correctly sized, the correct colors and the correct albedos.
Gonggong
Discovered by Megan Schwamb, Michael Brown and David Rabinowitz on 17 July 2007, again as part of that Palomar Distant Solar System Survey. Megan Schwamb actually was the first to spot it with the blinking technique that Tombaugh used to discover Pluto. Gonggong is a water god in Chinese mythology, usually depicted as having a copper and iron human head on a serpent’s body. Gonggong is often accompanied by Xiangliu, his minister, a nine-headed poisonous snake. Both are associated with flooding catastrophes.
But enough about the Deep State.
Gonggong is 1230 km across (give or take 50 km), about half the width of Pluto, and a fairly dark body. Here is another Hubble Space telescope image:
And yes, there’s a moon, named Xiangliu, of course.
Gonggong is very red, so almost certainly covered in tholins. There is some water ice, so maybe there was some cryovulcanism in the distant past.
It’s a lot like Eris in having a large orbit, as seen in this polar view (view from above) in which both it and Eris are shown:
And the same thing, seen from the side:
Gonggong and Eris seem to have similarly-extreme orbits (but not nearly the same orbit). Right now Gonggong is 88 AUs distant. Based on color and brightness it’s likely made of the same stuff as Quaoar.
Sedna
And now to go back to Sedna. Sedna is just…different from the rest. It’s red, it’s far, far away, and it’s going to get a lot farther away, eventually. It’s also the only one of these nine with no known moon. It’s very roughly 1000 km across. And because it has no moon whose orbit we can measure and time, we have only the vaguest notion of its mass. And now for a smashingly spectacular picture from Hubble Space Telescope:
Although I was flippant when I said that, if you think about it, it’s a huge acheivement to be able to take even this picture. Sedna is presently 83.55 AUs or 12.5 billion kilometers away. Right now Eris and Gonggong are further away, but that won’t remain true forever, since Sedna’s aphelion is 937 AU, not only busting into triple digits for the first time, but nearly reaching four digits.
Sedna is not the furthest though. There is a smaller object with and even more extreme orbit, 541132 Leleakohonua, perihelion 65.16 AU and aphelion…are you sitting down? of 2106 AU, with an orbital period of 35,760 years. However, this object is maybe 110 km across and in no way a dwarf planet. Right now it’s about 78 AUs out, getting closer to perihelion in 2078. (As a bonus the eccentricity actually busts the 0.900 mark at 0.93997.)
Neither of these objects would ever have been found if they didn’t happen to be at the near part of their orbits. Given that objects like this spend a lot less time near the sun than they do further away, there are probably a lot of them out there, simply too far away for us to detect.
Objects like this are so extreme, there’s now a new class of objects, “Sednoids” including these two plus one other (a bit less extreme than Sedna). Some have suggested that they’re really members of the inner Oort Cloud. (I haven’t talked about the Oort cloud…yet.)
There is also speculation that these crazy orbits are caused by encounters with a full planet out there somewhere, perhaps 400AU out. The fact that a lot of aphelions seem to be in very roughly the same place lends credence to this. Here are the three “Sednoid” objects (2015 TG387 is Leleakohonua’s provisional number):
Pluto (Finally)
An Ode to New Horizons
Until the Hubble space telescope, a typical photo of Pluto showed a bunch of white dots on a black background, and an arrow pointing to one of them. Pluto was only distinguishable from stars by its motion, which took days to become obvious.
Then Hubble Space Telescope took a look in 2003, and what it gave us, was used to make this animation, as Pluto did a full rotation in 6.4 days…retrograde, apparently:
Then suddenly in 2015…you could buy a fricking globe of Pluto. I saw one for sale in the observatory store at Griffith Park playing tourist one evening while on a business trip and there was no way it wasn’t coming home with me. That simple metal sphere encapsulated everything about our planetary space program…from a dot on a page to a real world, within my lifetime.
So what happened?
THIS happened:
The New Horizons probe went to Pluto.
We first had to get permission. According to Wikipedia:
In 1992 JPL scientist Robert Staehle called Clyde Tombaugh, requesting permission to visit his planet. “I told him he was welcome to it,” Tombaugh later remembered, “though he’s got to go one long, cold trip.”
Tombaugh passed away in 1997. A small portion of his ashes were on the New Horizons spacecraft. He got to go along for the ride. On the container is inscribed, “Interred herein are remains of American Clyde W. Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto and the Solar System’s ‘third zone’ Adelle and Muron’s boy, Patricia’s husband, Annette and Alden’s father, astronomer, teacher, punster and friend: Clyde W. Tombaugh (1906-1997)”.
Could he have possibly imagined back in 1930 that in a very real sense, he’d get to go there?
By the time New Horizons launched in 2006, mere months before Pluto got “demoted” to dwarf planet, we had known (since 1978) that Pluto had a large moon, Charon, one large enough to qualify Pluto as a double planet. And we had found two others, Nix and Hydra, though they are much smaller. At the time, Pluto + Charon was the only known case of a moon that was so large in comparison to its primary that the barycenter (center of gravity) of the system was outside of the primary. As such both the planet and moon orbit a point out in space. Here is a series of pictures taken by New Horizons quite some time before closest approach.
New Horizons did something that back in the 1970s was deemed nearly impossible, a direct trip to Pluto. Back then Jupiter was just barely reachable by a probe of useful size; we could (and did: Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2) get to Saturn, Uranus and Neptune by first going to Jupiter and getting a gravitational assist (a/k/a slingshot) from it.
But this time we went directly to Pluto. Actually, we did use a gravitational assist from Jupiter, but we didn’t have to. We’d have got there without it, albeit after three more years.
This involved launching the probe directly into a solar escape trajectory. How fast is that? At Earth’s distance from the Sun, it’s a bit over 42 kilometers per second. We had to break free of Earth’s gravity and then still be doing 42 km/sec with respect to the Sun, at which point, it doesn’t matter which direction you’re going, you’re never coming back to the Solar System. Of course in this case the direction did matter, we wanted to go to Pluto in particular. And also, we got 30 km/second of that 42 km/second from Earth’s speed around the sun, by launching in exactly the direction Earth was moving.
And to do this we made the probe as small as possible (the size of a desk) and put it on the biggest effing rocket we had, including special upper stages to push the thing harder once in space. It was the fastest thing we ever launched.
And now for the NASA animations. No audio in the first one (and note Pluto doesn’t look right–the animation was produced before the mission):
The second one is more “loaded” technically showing what the instruments are doing every moment, as well as spacecraft orientation. (It also has a music track.)
As you can see, Pluto’s moons were in orbits that made it look like a big target, but the object is to not hit the bullseye. New Horizons had to spend the entire time on July 14, 2015 looking at Pluto and its moons, without stopping to transmit to Earth (it would have to turn around to do that, pointing the big dish antenna basically towards the Sun and losing absolutely irreplaceable time). Only after collecting 6GB of data and with Pluto, Charon, and the other four moons in the rear view mirror, could the spacecraft contact Earth…and then spend the next eighteen months transmitting all of that data.
You can imagine the people at mission control bit their nails clean off, waiting. But then New Horizons phoned home. It had come through just fine and it had goodies to send us.
So what did we get?
1. This:
2. And this:
3. And this:
4. And this:
5. And this:
6. And this:
7. And this (ice volcanos highlighted in blue:
8. And finally (but not really, I could keep going on) this:
And that’s Pluto, yet more pictures and data were taken of its largest moon Charon:
And the other four moons; it’s probably easiest to just throw a composite image at you:
So needless to say we know a lot more about Pluto than we do about all of the other TNOs I’ve talked about, put together.
NASA does engage in CGI sometimes (in spite of the fact that the Flerfers claim it does–they’re generally completely wrong but not in this case) and they produced this video of what a flyby would look like, based on what New Horizons returned:
Pluto Itself
So…here we go.
Pluto was named after the Roman god of the Underworld, the corresponding Greek god was Hades. It’s 2,376.6 km across, give or take 1.6 km. And 0.2 percent as massive as the Earth or 17.7 percent as massive as the Moon. It orbits the Sun in 248 years, rotates once on its axis in 6.38680 days…but with an axial tilt of 122.53 degrees, it’s considered a retrograde rotation. (These numbers are awfully precise, on account of New Horizons.) At this particular time Pluto’s northern hemisphere is pointed towards the Sun, and New Horizons thus was unable to get the very southernmost part of Pluto, it was in darkness during the entire time of the encounter.
Pluto’s rotation is the same as Charon’s orbital period, which means that not only does Charon always show the same face to Pluto (as is true with every other major moon in the Solar System), but Pluto always shows the same face to Charon. Scientists will invent coordinate systems at the drop of a hat, and the line directly facing Charon is the 0 degree longitude line on any map of Pluto.
Geology and Geography
Oh, that reminds me:
Composite “Mercator” image of Pluto (it’s not really a Mercator projection when the latitude lines are equally spaced). Note that a lot of regions are named after spacecraft (Venera, Voyager, Pioneer, Viking) or astronomers (Lowell gets a Regio too). But also notice that a lot of the names come from fantasy and science fiction, like Balrogs and of all things, Cthulhu–though that one was often called “the whale” too. (Bad news on that last, it got renamed Belton Regio.)
Pluto has mountains and plains, and the first picture plainly shows the “Heart of Pluto” which simply had to be named Tombaugh Regio after Clyde Tombaugh. Tombaugh Regio is a plain, and by the way, is on the side of Pluto that faces away from Charon. The plains are mostly nitrogen ice (brrrr), with some methane and carbon monoxide, all in solid form of course.
The western and more distinct lobe of the “Heart” is Sputnik Planitia, a 1000 km wide basin of frozen ice, but as the second image shows it’s divided into polygonal cells, almost certainly convection cells that carry floating blocks of water ice crust and sublimation pits at the margins. There are signs of glacial flows both into and out of the basin. Furthermore, not one single crater was spotted, which indicates that Sputnik Planitia’s surface is less than ten million years old; in fact the latest work claims 140,000-270,000 years. There are also transverse dunes in Sputnik Planitia, which are formed by wind-blown particles, in this case of frozen methane.
What are the mountains made of? Water ice. When you order something “on the rocks” here, you mean it literally. The color ranges from charcoal black to dark orange and white; Pluto has as much contrast as Iapetus.
The fifth “This” above shows lots of 500 m high mountains from Tartarus Dorsa, the spacing reminds people of scales or tree bark. This doesn’t appear anywhere else we know of, except maybe on the unseen side of Triton…or perhaps in the Atacama desert. These are likely penitentes, icy spires that form in deserts, so named because they resemble large numbers of people at prayer.
Cutting through Tartarus Dorsa and Pluto’s heavily cratered northern terrain (and therefore younger than either) are a set of six canyons radiating from a single point; the longest is Sleipnir Fossa which is at least 580 km long.
And cryovolcanos. We’ve identified two possible cryovolcanos, Wright Mons and Piccard Mons. Piccard Mons is not named after Star Trek’s Jean Luc Picard but rather the French ballooning pioneer (two C’s, see?).
Pluto, in short shows an absolutely stunning variety of geology. Glaciological, surface-atmosphere (the dunes), impact (craters), tectonic, likely cryovolcanic, and mass-wasting (rocks falling down hill), it’s all there. This world turns out to be much more interesting than I expected back then.
Internal Structure
We know Pluto’s size. We know its mass. That means we know its average density; divide the mass by the volume. And we get 1.853 g/cm3. That means it’s a mix of rocks (things we think of as rocks) and ice, and it’s roughly 70/30 rock/ice. So we believe Pluto has a silicate (rock) core, surmounted by a mostly-water ice mantle and crust. It may even have a subsurface ocean like Europa and Enceladus. Though some think it may now be frozen, it’s just barely possible it was inhabited at one point. (This is one place where Wikipedia is a bit frustrating. The text makes it sound like no one believes there’s still liquid water down there, but the diagram indicates otherwise.)
Atmosphere
Pluto has an atmosphere as is quite evident in pictures 3 and 8 above. In fact getting New Horizons out there quickly rather than waiting a few more decades was partially motivated by this; Pluto is fairly close to the Sun right now, and that, we thought, would make the atmosphere more active. As Pluto got further from the Sun, its atmosphere might freeze out.
The atmosphere is made up of nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide, all sublimated from the surface ices, and in equilibrium with them (if any of them “snow” out of the atmosphere, then ices elsewhere on Pluto will sublimate to restore them). The pressure is anywhere from 1 millionth to 1/100,000th that of Earth.
Since New Horizons was launched, however, we’ve determined the atmosphere might actually thicken as it gets colder.
In any case, New Horizons‘s parting shot at Pluto was a backlit shot, used to image the atmosphere. Scientists have learned to take a “backlit shot” opportunity when it presents itself.
Moons
Pluto has five moons. And all of them are regular, orbiting in the plane of Pluto’s equator. Here’s a scale diagram…full scale, distances and diameters shown accurately (you rarely see those in astronomy!).
First up is Charon. Orbiting at 19,595.764 km from Pluto (give or take 7 or 8 meters!) and at 1212 km across, it’s a medium size moon according to the terminology I’ve been using, so now we have nine: Rhea, Iapetus, Dione and Tethys at Saturn, Ariel, Umbriel, Oberon and Titania at Uranus, and now Charon.
Pluto is 2376.6 km across. Compared to it Charon is huge. No, wait, yuge. It’s bigger than Ceres.
Charon was discovered in 1978, and named after the ferryman of the underworld in Greek mythology. (You had to pay him a coin to get ferried across. No word on what people who died in the Trojan war (centuries before coinage) had to do.) But that brings up a question. How do you pronounce “Charon”? The Greeks spell it Χάρων, and that X is like the ch in Bach. But no one in English-speaking countries says that, it’s either “Sharon” or “Karon.” The discoverer, James W. Christy (born 1938), maintains that he named it after both Χάρων and his wife Charlene, who was nichnamed “Char” (pronounced Shar), so he goes with “Sharon.” (I’m just insane enough I’d probably try to pronounce it with the ch in Bach if I ever had the chance to talk to someone about it. Y’all are both doing it wrong!)
Christy saw a bulge on the side of blobs taken of Pluto from the Naval observatory at Flagstaff. It would disappear and reappear regularly, indicating something in orbit about Pluto. In the image below (which is a photographic negative) there’s a bulge at the top on the left hand side, and no bulge on the right hand side. And so here’s an example of what Pluto looked like before HST looked at it.
Needless to say we have better pictures now.
A few years after Charon’s discovery, its orbit was edge on to us here on Earth and we could study the light curve and prove an object was transiting in front of Pluto, then behind it, even if we couldn’t resolve it as a separate fuzzy blob.
Charon is yuge compared to Pluto, and it’s the first case of a moon large enough that the center of gravity of the system is outside of the primary. Back before Pluto got demoted from planet status, many proposed that Pluto and Charon be considered a binary or double planet. And if Alan Stern succeeds in convincing people he was right, it might become one again.
In the following animation, you can see Pluto actually swinging around an imaginary point just outside of itself (and as seen above New Horizons confirmed this). There’s a black dot marking the barycenter, you’ll see it in front of Pluto when the moon is at the bottom of the image (the dot is apparently visible through Pluto in the animation). Note that Charon is closest to the viewer when it is at the top of the image. I was momentarily confused by this.
Which means that when I gave you Charon’s distance from Pluto, that was actually not the appropriate number. Its average distance from the barycenter, and thus the true size of its orbit (semimajor axis) is 17,181.0 km. It’s actually moving at a comparatively sedate 210 meters per second, and the orbit is almost perfectly circular. (The difference between the minimum and maximum distance from Pluto (not the barycenter) is a mere 6.31 kilometers.)
Charon’s density is known, 1.7 g/cm3, making it 55% rock to 45% ice (give or take 5 percent). We’re pretty sure the moon is differentiated (i.e., it has a distinct core) and may have once had a subsurface ocean. Here we have two distinct models of what Charon might look like on the inside:
…and…
And…we have a map.
Informal names given to the various canyons included Nostromo, Serenity, Argo, and so on, named after fictional ships including recent ones like from Alien and Firefly. The northern dark area was originally named Mordor. It appears to be formed from gases that escaped Pluto’s atmosphere and blew over to Charon, carried by the solar wind. The temperature here can get as low as 15K during winter, and some tholins will form. When it gets warmer, a balmy 60K, anything that’s still an ice will boil away, leaving the pole dark.
The Other Moons
The other moons, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra, all named after creatures and features of the Underworld in Greek mythology, all have nice tidy circular orbits in Pluto’s equatorial plane. So they’re regular moons. All are less than 51 km across. The innermost, Styx, orbits 48,694 km out…considerably further from Charon. But this makes sense. It would have to be far away from the binary object Pluto/Charon or Charon would perturb Styx’s orbit as it swept by Styx on closest approach.
One more “Moon” is Pluto itself. Since it orbits the barycenter at a distance of 2035 kilometers, which puts the barycenter outside of Pluto’s 1188 km radius, Pluto, not Charon, is actually the closest orbiting body of the whole system.
Arrokoth
New Horizons was able to visit one more object beyond Pluto (blue), shown in green.
It’s 486958 Arrokoth (formerly nicknamed Ultima Thule). We didn’t know about it when New Horizons launched, but the pace of discovery of TNOs was so great we figured something would be out there we could visit with some expenditure of propellant, and Arrokoth (discovered in 2014, a bit over a year before the Pluto encounter) was chosen.
As a result, the second best known Kuiper Belt object is none of the ones I’ve mentioned so far, it’s this otherwise insignificant bit of ice and rock.
It appears to be made out of two smaller bodies, planetesimals that never became part of a planet, touching each other. The two small bodies are roughly 21 and 15 km across, for a total of 36 km along the long axis. Arrokoth orbits the Sun in 298 years. So we have our first high resolution picture of a small TNO.
We got enough data to create a geologic map:
It largely consists of a mix, a solid mix of amorphous water ice and rocky material. (It is not, unlike some objects of similar size, simply a clustering of gravel that is barely stuck together.)
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).
Nevertheless, the better view does seem to suggest that Congress has the power to set some limits on the President’s dismissal authority – at least in times of peace….
]
(or to exercise the other fearsome powers in the Act)...
