“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
Get your rest, Trumpy Bear! You’re going back to the White House!!!
We have to RESCUE it from THE SNIFFER OF KIDS!
The Business At Hand
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
And indeed, it’s Monday…again.
But we WILL NOT let that keep us down!
The Rules
Boilerplate, more or less, but worth reading again and again, if only for the minor changes, and to stay out of moderation.
The bottom line is Free Speech. Theories and ideas you don’t agree with must be WELCOME here, and you must be part of that welcoming. But you do NOT need to be part of any agreement.
Because without Free Speech, we’re little more than SLEEPY THE KID-SNIFFER’S banana republic of SOUTH CANUCKISTAN.
SO….. [ENGAGE BOILERPLATE…..]
We must endeavor to persevere to love our frenemies – even here.
Those who cannot deal with this easy requirement will be forced to jump the hoops of moderation, so that specific comments impugning other posters and violating the minimal rules can be sorted out and tossed in the trash.
In Wheatie’s words, “We’re on the same side here so let’s not engage in friendly fire.”
That includes the life skill of just ignoring certain other posters.
We do have a site – The U Tree – where civility is not a requirement. Interestingly, people don’t really go there much. Nevertheless, if you find yourself in an “argument” that can’t really stay civil, please feel free to “take it to the U Tree”. The U Tree is also a good place to report any technical difficulties, if you’re unable to report them here. Please post your comment there on one of Wolf’s posts, or in reply to one of Wolf’s comments, to make sure he sees it (though it may take a few hours).
We also have a backup site, called The Q Tree as well, which is really The Q Tree 579486807. You might call it “Second Tree”. The URL for that site is https://theqtree579486807.wordpress.com/. If this site (theqtree.com) ever goes down, please reassemble at the Second Tree.
If the Second Tree goes down, please go to The U Tree, or to our Gab Group, which is located at https://gab.com/groups/4178.
We also have some “old rules” and important guidelines, outlined here, in a very early post, on our first New Year’s Day, in 2019. The main point is not to make violent threats against people, which then have to be taken seriously by law enforcement, and which can be used as a PRETEXT by enemies of this site.
In the words of Wheatie, “Let’s not give the odious Internet Censors a reason to shut down this precious haven that Wolf has created for us.”
A Moment of Prayer
Our policy on extreme religious freedom on this site is discussed HERE. Please feel free to pray and praise God anytime and anywhere.
Thus, please pray for our real President, the one who actually won the election.
You may pray for Justice as well, because TRUTH, JUSTICE, and THE AMERICAN WAY are all worth the prayers!
MUSICAL INTERLUDE
For your listening enjoyment, and general encouragement, we continue Wheatie’s tradition of fine music videos, shipped fresh from the seas of information by our intrepid authors.
This one MAY have been posted by Wheatie back in the day.
Check out the date. Then be sure to check out the end credits.
Two Steps From Hell – Freedom Fighters (Extended)
3,042,815 views Jan 6, 2014
WE SEE YOU, PELOSI!
We remember what you did to us!
Call To Battle
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.
“When the Canadian dollar becomes worthless, we will be here to serve you, too.”
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.
Washington’s Birthday
George Washington was a mensch.
He was WAY more of a mensch than, for example, pick-a-POC lady RINOs pushed by the Bush Nazis, sucking up to the central banks and WEF Nazis, letting THEM decide which American statues need to be taken down.
How about NONE?
Is George Washington relevant now?
Hell, yes, you communist and Nazi scum, occupying OUR CAPITOL.
WE SEE YOU! WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE! WE KNOW WHERE YOU HATCH YOUR PLOTS!
We know who your masters, propagandists, and DEMON bureaucrats are!
WE KNOW YOUR PLANS!
WE KNOW WHO YOUR AGENTS AND ASSETS ARE!
YOU betrayed the key principles of the founding of this country, and you WILL abandon your evil plans, or you will PAY for not having done so.
This country was founded on TRUTH, FREEDOM, and JUSTICE – and we will have them ALL BACK, SO HELP US GOD!
Two Weeks To Flatten The Tyrants
TL;DR – When and How We Go On Strike Matters – YUGELY.
By now, you are certainly aware of the proposed idea of a GENERAL STRIKE – largely by truckers, but with the support of the people – to CRASH both the Trudeau dictatorship and the Biden regime.
As well as many other complicit and dictatorial “democratic” governments.
Scott and Aubergine have been the biggest proponents of that idea on this site, and I keep gravitating back to it. It just makes sense.
While some think that as little as 3 days would be enough to crash a city like New York – because that’s all the supplies they have on hand – others think longer. I even picked two weeks, which – just like nuking from orbit – might be the only way to be sure.
Two Weeks To Flatten The Tyrants
The thing is, I had an interesting dream about this, in which I honestly examined many of the “logistical” problems, and by the time I woke up, I realized that there are many ways in which a poorly executed and/or poorly timed general strike serve THEIR interests more than ours.
In fact, I believe that a badly timed general strike is actually a TRAP, going back to the Bolshevik takeover of Russia, and particularly the Holodomor – where the people with the food were STARVED, in a typically evil reversal that communists and Nazis seem to create so easily.
Not only is it possible for us to USE UP our preparations and supplies needlessly – before the REAL BATTLE begins – we may give THEM what they need to pull off ANOTHER January Sixth-type propaganda event.
TIMING IS EVERYTHING.
Thus, I’m not opposed to the idea of a general strike at all, but I think that timing is critical.
Go BEYOND the very real questions of percentage of participating truckers and citizens.
Go BEYOND the very real questions of THEIR ability to thwart or work around our tactics, if we move forward at a time of THEIR choosing.
What’s happening right now?
SECURITY RINOs are running against FREEDOM Patriots in upcoming primaries.
Sure, it’s election time, and we’re hearing plenty of sweet-talk by the suitors.
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine is even trying a DIRECT STROKE OF TRUMP’S BUSINESS JONES, bringing chip-maker Intel to Ohio, right into Wexner’s back yard.
Gotta say, that IS standing up to China, in many but not all ways (there are plenty of Chi-spies in Ohio, just waiting to become plants in those plants), but as far as standing up to DEMOCRATS fronting for China and WEF, DeWine has chosen poorly despite numerous warnings.
Mask mandates are destroying small businesses, while DeWine courts the BIG WOKE corporations that front all the leftist corporatist CRAP upon us, and which enrich themselves by pandemic theater, security theater, and even WAR theater.
We will be able to take DOWN these Bidenista and Bidenazi tyrants. But any distraction away from voting NOW for FREEDOM is going to hurt us TENFOLD down the line.
We did the RIGHT THING. And we did it at the RIGHT TIME.
We participated STRONGLY in the electoral process and CHASED OUT THE COMMUNISTS.
In my opinion, the Democrats are not dropping mask mandates for NOVEMBER.
They are dropping mandates to PROTECT their precious, treasonous RINOs – who can be voted out IN MARCH, APRIL, MAY and JUNE.
If WE push the wrong kind of “disorder” before the election, and the media frames it properly, then SECURITY RINOS ARE SAVED.
So – should we have a strike now?
I honestly don’t know. But I think we need to be VERY, VERY CAREFUL.
We need to keep our EYE ON THE PRIZE.
FREEDOM. ONCE AGAIN. FOR ALL. By being SMART.
Ain’t that right, Cinderella?
Free those kids, my man!
There WILL be a right time for “two weeks to flatten the tyrants”, and it will be at a time of GOD’S CHOOSING. It could be NOW. It could be LATER. By diligent prayer and honest discussion, we will know when that moment arrives. Please think about it now, and prepare for that moment, so that when the time comes, we are ready and able to STRIKE HARD to WIN.
But let us NOT be fooled again.
Because I know PERSONALLY how SNEAKY and WICKED the other side is.
This word is largely in disuse, but leads to all kinds of interesting divergence in words containing the “strophe” root, such as apostrophe, catastrophe, anastrophe, epistrophe, antistrophe, etc.
Used in a sentence:
The word ‘hypostrophe’, meaning the relapse of an illness, is an old medical term likely to be encountered by genealogists.
Used satirically in a sentence:
Called the ‘hypostrophe’, the symbol overrides all known grammatical laws, meaning that it can never be used in the wrong place.
Used in polycyclic aliphatic hydrocarbon nomenclature:
When I was a kid, I got nicknamed “Bald Eagle” because I actually was getting notably thin “up there.” Of course today “Bald Eagle” might be a cool nickname, but in junior high school, it definitely was not a cool thing.
Fast forward to today, and now here I am over twenty years older than you are, and even in spite of that poor start, I have better hair than you do.
And I am not a piss-guzzling, shit-gobbling communist “journalist” (what a sick joke) either.
On both accounts you must absolutely hate looking into the mirror.
And Oh By The Way probably more people read my posts than watch you bloviate on air. And yes, I know your ratings dropped again. One would think there’s be a limit to that…you can’t drop below zero, can you?
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 Tuesday’s 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?
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. (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 2022 or 2024 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.)
More Raucous Mozart
Mozart’s 25th Symphony (as heard in “Amadeus”), ever so slightly suited for the current mood.
Canuckistan Goes After The Canadian Truckers
It became plain on Friday that Trudescu, Glorious Leader of Communist Canuckistan, isn’t playing around. He’s run out of things he can do to get the trucks to leave downtown Ottawa. (Weeeeeellllllll with the exception of, you know, actually talking to them and stopping the mandates.)
So they’re being arrested and towed. The tow truck companies that are helping out have had their names taped over on their trucks, lest people find some way to express their dissatisfaction with them.
Where to from here?
I don’t see anything that Canadians concerned about the direction their government is going, other than going on general strike. If nothing moves “up there” for a couple of weeks, we’ll see what happens. Perhaps the government will convince the general population that the truckers are to blame and are being unreasonable (they’re certainly trying to do so now, with the help of Canuckistanis Broadcasting Communism [CBC]). But a general strike seems to be the only play left. But it requires more than just some fraction (0.1? 0.9?) of truckers to make it work.
So it’s now call…or fold. Let’s see what happens.
[Note: If someone takes umbrage at my use of the terms “Canuckistan” and “Canuckistani,” please notice I only used it for the tyrant Trudescu and his fellating treasonous media maggots. The truckers and their allies are Canadians.]
UPDATE: I just heard about the mounted police sent in to trample the protesters.
There is no longer any satisfactory ending to this that involves Trudescu not being removed, duly tried, and convicted of some capital crime. And that is true for a number of his minions, as well.
I said last week that the tech trader types were saying $1860 was a “barrier” for gold and that, IF it were to cross that line, it was liable to keep going.
It did cross the line, but it didn’t seem like a gigantic breakout. Until I realized that it actually got up to at least 1900.20 before open today.
James Webb Space Telescope Update
James Webb Space Telescope appears to be working on aligning the 18 images, one from each mirror, in a nice tidy arrangement, prior to overlaying them all on top of each other in perfect focus (the mirrors themselves can be “warped” a bit by an actuator that that pulls on the center of each segment, in case they aren’t at precisely right curvature).
However, I don’t know that that’s actually what they’re doing right now. It’s shown as step 2 of 7 mirror alignment steps, and they claim to be done with step one: https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html?units=metric .
Meanwhile, there’s a sensor on board that helps the telescope point at whatever it wants to see, and it seems to be functioning right now according to this blog entry (which I first saw on Thursday): https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/02/17/webbs-fine-guidance-sensor-is-guiding .
So, things seem to be proceeding nicely but right now I don’t actually know what they’re doing.
Temperatures on the “cold side” of the sun shield are now roughly 380 degrees below zero, F.
UPDATE, Friday Afternoon.
NASA just made a liar out of me. New post on the blog. (Everything for the rest of this section is pulled from the blog post. It won’t let me mark the pictures as quotes.)
This early Webb alignment image, with dots of starlight arranged in a pattern similar to the honeycomb shape of the primary mirror, is called an “image array.” Credit: NASA/STScI/J. DePasquale
The Webb team continues to make progress in aligning the observatory’s mirrors. Engineers have completed the first stage in this process, called “Segment Image Identification.” The resulting image shows that the team has moved each of Webb’s 18 primary mirror segments to bring 18 unfocused copies of a single star into a planned hexagonal formation.
This image mosaic (top), which shows 18 randomly positioned copies of the same star, served as the starting point for the alignment process. To complete the first stage of alignment, the team moved the primary mirror segments to arrange the dots of starlight into a hexagonal image array (bottom). Each dot of starlight is labeled with the corresponding mirror segment that captured it. Credits: NASA (top); NASA/STScI/J. DePasquale (bottom)
With the image array complete, the team has now begun the second phase of alignment: “Segment Alignment.” During this stage, the team will correct large positioning errors of the mirror segments and update the alignment of the secondary mirror, making each individual dot of starlight more focused. When this “global alignment” is complete, the team will begin the third phase, called “Image Stacking,” which will bring the 18 spots of light on top of each other.
“We steer the segment dots into this array so that they have the same relative locations as the physical mirrors,” said Matthew Lallo, systems scientist and Telescopes Branch manager at the Space Telescope Science Institute. “During global alignment and Image Stacking, this familiar arrangement gives the wavefront team an intuitive and natural way of visualizing changes in the segment spots in the context of the entire primary mirror. We can now actually watch the primary mirror slowly form into its precise, intended shape!”
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!!!
If anyone ends up in the cell right next to him, tell him I said “hi.”
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 !!!
Get your rest, Trumpy Bear! You’re going back to the White House!!!
Because Sundance is right.
If “THEY” can tell us “You can have ANY MAN BUT ONE for president”, then we are no more free, than if they told us “You can have ONLY ONE MAN for president.”
THE DIAMONDS MUST BE RETURNED.
The Business At Hand
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
And indeed, it’s Monday…again.
But we WILL not just survive – we will THRIVE.
The Rules
Boilerplate, more or less, but worth reading again and again, if only for the minor changes, and to stay out of moderation.
The bottom line is Free Speech. Theories and ideas you don’t agree with must be WELCOME here, and you must be part of that welcoming. But you do NOT need to be part of any agreement.
Free Speech. It must be saved EVERYWHERE.
SO….. [ENGAGE BOILERPLATE…..]
We must endeavor to persevere to love our frenemies – even here.
Those who cannot deal with this easy requirement will be forced to jump the hoops of moderation, so that specific comments impugning other posters and violating the minimal rules can be sorted out and tossed in the trash.
In Wheatie’s words, “We’re on the same side here so let’s not engage in friendly fire.”
That includes the life skill of just ignoring certain other posters.
We do have a site – The U Tree – where civility is not a requirement. Interestingly, people don’t really go there much. Nevertheless, if you find yourself in an “argument” that can’t really stay civil, please feel free to “take it to the U Tree”. The U Tree is also a good place to report any technical difficulties, if you’re unable to report them here. Please post your comment there on one of Wolf’s posts, or in reply to one of Wolf’s comments, to make sure he sees it (though it may take a few hours).
We also have a backup site, called The Q Tree as well, which is really The Q Tree 579486807. You might call it “Second Tree”. The URL for that site is https://theqtree579486807.wordpress.com/. If this site (theqtree.com) ever goes down, please reassemble at the Second Tree.
If the Second Tree goes down, please go to The U Tree, or to our Gab Group, which is located at https://gab.com/groups/4178.
We also have some “old rules” and important guidelines, outlined here, in a very early post, on our first New Year’s Day, in 2019. The main point is not to make violent threats against people, which then have to be taken seriously by law enforcement, and which can be used as a PRETEXT by enemies of this site.
In the words of Wheatie, “Let’s not give the odious Internet Censors a reason to shut down this precious haven that Wolf has created for us.”
A Moment of Prayer
Our policy on extreme religious freedom on this site is discussed HERE. Please feel free to pray and praise God anytime and anywhere.
Thus, please pray for our real President, the one who actually won the election.
You may also pray for our enemies, though not for their success in evil, which would therefore be a contradiction of G_d Himself.
MUSICAL INTERLUDE
For your listening enjoyment, and general encouragement, we continue Wheatie’s tradition of fine music videos, shipped fresh from the seas of information by our intrepid authors.
Packed in ice as necessary, or preserved with lots of SALT.
Thus, let’s start where we left off, with Celtic Woman and their fiddle-playing and harmony.
Quickly switching to some more EPIC MUSIC – you can enjoy 3 hours worth of it, or just stick around for the first song, which is a bit over 3 minutes, but well worth it.
So HEY – let’s MIX IT UP – with a little bit of EPIC CELTIC MUSIC.
Perfect for our next section!
Call To Battle
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
.@CNN: "How the US went from having one of the worst Covid responses to being a global leader in vaccinations under Biden" https://t.co/qCHnRQPyPX
— Andrew Bates Archived (@AndrewJBates46) April 27, 2021
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.
Valentine’s Day Message
Valentine’s Day, also called Saint Valentine’s Day or the Feast of Saint Valentine,[1] is celebrated annually on February 14.[2] It originated as a Christian feast day honoring one or two early Christian martyrs named Saint Valentine and, through later folk traditions, has become a significant cultural, religious, and commercial celebration of romance and love in many regions of the world.[3]
-from Wikipedia
As I write this, I have no idea whether the commies will attempt to pollute the day, as they often do, using false flags combined with their fake news media.
In any case, if they do, pay it no mind.
Make some lucky valentine happy today!
And while you’re at it, think back to the way Valentine’s Day was, when you were a child.
By the principles of RETROCULTURE, UNDO all the mistakes that have been done since then, and REMAKE TODAY AS IT WAS BEFORE.
You can’t ACTUALLY change the PAST, but you CAN change the future by LEARNING FROM IT.
Today’s Political Feature
None. We’re saving it all for the comments! Happy Valentine’s Day!
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Day:
courtly love
term
an experience between erotic desire and spiritual attainment, “a love at once illicit and morally elevating, passionate and disciplined, humiliating and exalting, human and transcendent”.[4]
full definition (Wikipedia)
Courtly love (Occitan: fin’amor[finaˈmuɾ]; French: amour courtois[amuʁ kuʁtwa]) was a medieval European literary conception of love that emphasized nobility and chivalry. Medieval literature is filled with examples of knights setting out on adventures and performing various deeds or services for ladies because of their “courtly love”. This kind of love is originally a literary fiction created for the entertainment of the nobility, but as time passed, these ideas about love changed and attracted a larger audience. In the high Middle Ages, a “game of love” developed around these ideas as a set of social practices. “Loving nobly” was considered to be an enriching and improving practice.[1][2]
The term “courtly love” was first popularized by Gaston Paris and has since come under a wide variety of definitions and uses. Its interpretation, origins and influences continue to be a matter of critical debate.
Used in a sentence:
Despite the rules surrounding courtly love, the moral parameters were vague.
Or rather, “Hey Chinese Communist Party and your entire array of servitors, ass-wipers, and fellators!”
You’re not even worth my time this week. When you decide to act like civilized people, maybe I’ll give you a lesson or two in how non-barbarians behave.
Hey BiteMe! (Or, Whoever Has Their Hand Rammed Up That Putrefying Meat Puppet’s Ass)
[Language warning]
You and yours have caused a lot of injury. Literal injury with your war on people who don’t want to take an untested vaccine. When people die in an emergency room because a hospital won’t admit them because they haven’t had their clot shot, that’s a crime.
I’m going to address here the insult on top of the injury, because I am among the insulted. I still have my health but apparently you want me to live under the 8th Street Bridge (which actually isn’t on 8th Street, but whatever, that’s what the I-25 overpass over Cimarron is called), so maybe if you have your way that won’t be true for long. Dreadful time of year to become homeless.
No, you’re just trying to make me unemployed, because I won’t take your fucking shots.
Well, that threat is NOT going to work. I. Won’t. Take. Your. Fucking. Shots.
And it looks like enough people agree, that you’re having to back down, you worthless asswipe.
You’re LOSING.
You LOSER.
You Chinese-bought ratfucking traitor.
I would love to see you die an agonizing, humiliating death. (This isn’t a threat, because I am not threatening to cause that death. I am just announcing my intention to party if it happens.) It would be just recompense for the way you’re killing America…and millions of Americans.
His Fraudulency
Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, we haven’t heard much from the person who should have been declared the victor, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.
One can hope that all is not as it seems.
I’d love to feast on that crow.
(I’d like to add, I find it entirely plausible, even likely, that His Fraudulency is also His Figureheadedness. (Apparently that wasn’t a word; it got a red underline. Well it is now.) Where I differ with the hopium addicts is on the subject of who is really in charge. It ain’t anyone we like.)
Justice Must Be Done.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Trucking
I saw a few rumors here that something would start…today. Others report at least three other expected start dates.
Some believe it will be more caravans. Some think the truckers ought to do something else (like just quitting in place). I could even see the expectation of caravans being a distraction from mass quitting. If the opposition concentrates all its resources to block convoys expected on I-70, I-40, I-80, and I-95 (plus any others, like I-81 to I-66) they can’t be “out there” trying to force truckers to continue working.
This reminds me, of course, of something out of Atlas Shrugged.
Atlas Shrugged was written in an age where trains were the predominant long-haul transportation mode, and it describes the “frozen train” phenomenon. Locked into their jobs, forbidden from quitting, being fired, or being promoted by Directive 10-289, sometimes an entire train crew would just decide “to Hell with this shit,” stop the train, and walk away. Passengers would become rather upset.
Truckers could do just this (though they needn’t walk away), and might even disable their trucks–the railroads could send another crew out and get the train moving, but if a truck is broken, it’s going nowhere. Meanwhile the feds are waiting for convoys that “need to be stopped” before they choke DC traffic. (Not that anyone would be able to tell the difference.)
In a way, we’re actually seeing Scott’s suggestion of a general strike. Not just with the trucks, but with all of the people who have quit working. Unfortunately, at least until the trucks stop rolling, the punch is a lot less when people quit gradually over the space of a year, than when they all stop work at once. But there it is. Millions of people are dropping out. Some use the phrase “going Galt” but that’s an injustice to the concept of going Galt. When the people in Atlas Shrugged “dropped out,” if they didn’t completely disappear, they took an almost-no-thought-required menial job. Their minds were on strike, but they still felt that they should support themselves. John Galt himself was a track walker. They certainly did not go on the dole like many are doing today.
The reason the trucks going on strike (be it by caravan or “frozen” truck) is potentially devastating is that almost everything we buy spends at least some time on a truck. Notably including food–and food is hard to go without for more than a very few days. Of course you can (and hopefully did) prepare for this by stocking up. (I believe I’m good for 2-3 months, though I might reach the end of such a time span willing to kill for a change in my menu. On the other hand some things I saw on Friday tell me I shouldn’t consider that adequate and need to get more food.)
But food isn’t the only issue. Personally, I’m likely to be very inconvenienced by a truck strike for other reasons I’m not going to go into.
I’ll be inconvenienced, but really, that’s no big deal in the grand scheme. Because my level of inconvenience pales next to that of the people rotting in DC jails because they were in the wrong place on January 6 (as it happens, they were somewhere within a hundred yards of me, not that distance from me is the issue).
So even for the prepared, this could be a very rough time. Unless you’ve been living and breathing “prep” for a few years (or even if you have been), there’s likely something you forgot about. And you might not be able to find it.
But something has to happen. The Opposition isn’t going to back down until we make this country useless to them. If we’re really lucky, it won’t get worse than a few weeks with empty shelves at the grocery store. But I’m going to try not to grouse about my inconvenience…and if I just have to do it as an alternative to exploding, I am going to lay the blame where it belongs.
On the truckers? HELL NO. On the deep state, the swamp, whatever you want to call it. Our self-appointed “masters” who need their heads mounted on pikes. They acted, we are responding in defense of our lives and liberty. If they didn’t feel a pathological need (and entitlement) to control others who just want to be left alone, none of this would be necessary. They are mentally ill. And we shouldn’t accommodate them.
So let’s see what happens. Canada is serving as our guinea pig. Hopefully Trudeau’s government will back down, even if he won’t.
If you’re the praying type, pray for Justice. That is what we’ve lacked for decades.
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.
Now THAT is big. The people who are technical traders–i.e., those who try to read the tea leaves based on the way the line looks on a chart–say that the $1860 line is a barrier. Gold will try hard not to go through it, but if it does, it’s going to keep going.
Now merely touching that mark isn’t definitive, but this is a Friday (when gold usually goes down) and it was UP 32 bucks today. Are the manipulators out of leverage? We’ll see next week.
Silver, too is up. Platinum has moved a bit, back and forth but ended up right where it was last week. Palladium and rhodium, however, are moving up again, and they are used a lot by the auto industry, which has been slowly coming back to life.
Inflation is real, and the conventional wisdom is coming around to having it stay for a while. That will push upward on gold prices.
James Webb Space Telescope Update
I had heard nothing about JWST all week, but suddenly Friday morning, there was a bunch of stuff.
The first step to getting the eighteen primary mirror segments (plus secondary mirror) to act as one mirror, was to assess how badly out of whack they are. So JWST took a photograph of the star HD 84406 near the Big Dipper. Actually, it took a lot of photographs near and around it. They took a mosaic covering about the size of the full moon; hundreds of photos. As it happens HD 84406 has few other stars near it as seen from Earth, so any dots that showed up were liable to be that star.
As it happens most of the mosaic was wasted; all eighteen segments put their image of the star fairly close to each other. Here’s what they saw:
HD 84406, seen as eighteen images by eighteen mirrors not quite lined up with each other.
So this was very positive news. The Near Infrared Camera is working; it can record light and send us the results. (“Near Infrared” is a term for the shortest wavelengths of infrared light, closest to being visible light.)
They were able, over the course of the week, to determine which image was coming from which mirror.
Images labeled by mirror segment. “A” segments are the inner ring of 6, “B” segments are corner segments on the outer ring, “C” segments are between the corner segments.
The two wings that swung into place as the last steps of deployment are circled.
So now they have enough to begin the process of getting the mirrors pointed right. Somewhere (not marked here, but in the lower right near the edge–it is shown in the video below, but turned upside down) is the spot they want the image to appear…so when they tell the telescope to point to such-and-such Right Ascension and Declination, that’s what will appear in the center of the field of view. They want this star’s 18 images to all be there and all be in perfect focus, and with the light waves in phase. So they have their work cut out for them over the next two and a half months.
It turns out there’s a lens inside the instrument package that allows JWST to take a picture of its own main mirror. Here’s a sample:
JWST “Selfie.” The one white hexagon is a mirror that happens at the moment to be pointed right at a star. You can see the edges of the other hexagons, as well as reflections of the three arms that hold the secondary mirror in place (vertical white fuzzed mess and two diagonals below it). This will be a useful tool in the months ahead.
And here (for anyone still reading whose interest is not sated) is a video talking about all of this. Three minutes long. (Cthulhu will be happy to see HD 84406 marked in relation to the Big Dipper; he was asking about this a couple of weeks ago.)
There were no nasty surprises…like an obviously defective mirror segment.
“So far, so good, but we do have a long way to go”
Obligatory PSAs and Reminders
China is Lower than Whale Shit
Remember Hong Kong!!!
Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
China is in the White House
Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.
Joe Biden is Asshoe
China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.
But of course the much more important thing to realize:
Joe Biden Didn’t Win
乔*拜登没赢 !!! Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!! Joe Biden didn’t win !!!
Get your rest, Trumpy Bear! You’re going back to the White House!!!
We need to restore sanity in the White House, and it’s time to get Winnie the Pooh OUT.
The Business At Hand
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
And indeed, it’s Monday…again.
But it doesn’t matter, because with God, every day is glorious!
And if you need that in a song…… ONE MORE TIME…..
The Rules
Boilerplate, more or less, but worth reading again and again, if only for the minor changes, and to stay out of moderation.
The bottom line is Free Speech. Theories and ideas you don’t agree with must be WELCOME here, and you must be part of that welcoming. But you do NOT need to be part of any agreement.
Thus we are assembled here to peacefully address our grievances to whom they may concern, even each other, using both our freedom of speech and of press, as well as our freedom of religion.
SO….. [ENGAGE BOILERPLATE…..]
We must endeavor to persevere to love our frenemies – even here.
Those who cannot deal with this easy requirement will be forced to jump the hoops of moderation, so that specific comments impugning other posters and violating the minimal rules can be sorted out and tossed in the trash.
In Wheatie’s words, “We’re on the same side here so let’s not engage in friendly fire.”
That includes the life skill of just ignoring certain other posters.
We do have a site – The U Tree – where civility is not a requirement. Interestingly, people don’t really go there much. Nevertheless, if you find yourself in an “argument” that can’t really stay civil, please feel free to “take it to the U Tree”. The U Tree is also a good place to report any technical difficulties, if you’re unable to report them here. Please post your comment there on one of Wolf’s posts, or in reply to one of Wolf’s comments, to make sure he sees it (though it may take a few hours).
We also have a backup site, called The Q Tree as well, which is really The Q Tree 579486807. You might call it “Second Tree”. The URL for that site is https://theqtree579486807.wordpress.com/. If this site (theqtree.com) ever goes down, please reassemble at the Second Tree.
If the Second Tree goes down, please go to The U Tree, or to our Gab Group, which is located at https://gab.com/groups/4178.
We also have some “old rules” and important guidelines, outlined here, in a very early post, on our first New Year’s Day, in 2019. The main point is not to make violent threats against people, which then have to be taken seriously by law enforcement, and which can be used as a PRETEXT by enemies of this site.
In the words of Wheatie, “Let’s not give the odious Internet Censors a reason to shut down this precious haven that Wolf has created for us.”
A Moment of Prayer
Our policy on extreme religious freedom on this site is discussed HERE. Please feel free to pray and praise God anytime and anywhere.
Thus, please pray for our real President, the one who actually won the election.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump prays with pastors during a campaign visit to the International Church of Las Vegas and the International Christian Academy in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S., October 5, 2016. REUTERS/Mike Segar
MUSICAL INTERLUDE
For your listening enjoyment, and general encouragement, we continue Wheatie’s tradition of fine music videos, shipped fresh from the seas of information by our intrepid authors.
YouTube is absolutely bombarding me with videos of that Japanese art-pop girl-band “Perfume” that I showed on Friday. The YouTube Wocommie Mensheviks must have some foul intention, so I think I’ll go looking for something else, but just ONE video is a good lead-in, so here you go.
Thankfully, YouTube isn’t just recommending girl groups to me, as long as I get OFF a girl group video page, in which case girl groups are THE ONLY THINGS they recommend.
On a “blank” YouTube page, I also get “epic music” now!
This is a nice one. Don’t mind the “furries” and assorted anime characters.
https://youtu.be/XrisCsNzOlo
This is a long one, too – you can come back for it while reading the features below.
Next, we have one of Wheatie’s favorite artists – Two Steps From Hell – celebrating our lady warriors!
Yes – beware those who would go after our kids…….
They might not be expecting WHO exactly it is, who will DELIVER THE MILLSTONES.
So let’s close out with a REAL girl group – complete with a fiddle!
Now THAT’S what I’m talkin’ about!
Call To Battle
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.
BUT FIRST, let me freshen you up with where things were as of February 3, when Robert Malone had THIS to say about the military data showing that the mandated mRNA jabs were definitively causing harm.
That’s just a quick overview of the problem. Here’s the latest, and in more detail. H/T TradeBait2 for this one. This addresses the jaw-dropping and eye-rolling defense by NIH and their Pentagram buddies, which just dropped military credibility by another factor of two.
Is woke mil causing damage? COMMUNISM always causes damage!
As Malone points out in the latter article, in a beautifully understated way, the “defenders of the jab” are now offering excuses that strain credibility to the breaking point. It is very easy to see that the other side is committed to any deception, of other or of self, to keep the jab train rolling.
They are NOT willing to honestly look at the striking relative dangers of these BAD VACCINES.
Something is very wrong, we can plainly see, but let’s just play along and pretend that this whole ridiculous scenario still deserves debate.
We have plenty of observations at this point, but the “old theory of harmless jabs” is able to play “what about” and temporarily evade many if not most of those explanations, lacking an obviously more compelling theory of WHY THE JABS CAUSE HARM, which would make “whataboutisms” unpalatable, even to those who want to believe them.
Well, is there such a compelling theory?
We have advanced certain key principles which explain things, and those are important.
We know about the pathogenic spike protein.
We know about vaccine migration and persistence.
But something is different, now.
NOW we have a theory which includes both of those things, PLUS a principle of IMMUNOLOGICAL ERROR.
In my opinion, we’re there.
The title of this work is:
Innate Immune Suppression by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccinations: The role of G-quadruplexes, exosomes and microRNAs
The abstract is instructive, and if you want to “TL;DR” past the rest of things, at least give that a read. Better yet, stick around for my interpretation of the abstract.
ABSTRACT
The mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccines were brought to market in response to the widely perceived public health crises of Covid-19. The utilization of mRNA vaccines in the context of infectious disease had no precedent, but desperate times seemed to call for desperate measures. The mRNA vaccines utilize genetically modified mRNA encoding spike proteins. These alterations hide the mRNA from cellular defenses, promote a longer biological half-life for the proteins, and provoke higher overall spike protein production. However, both experimental and observational evidence reveals a very different immune response to the vaccines compared to the response to infection with SARS-CoV-2. As we will show, the genetic modifications introduced by the vaccine are likely the source of these differential responses. In this paper, we present the evidence that vaccination, unlike natural infection, induces a profound impairment in type I interferon signaling, which has diverse adverse consequences to human health. We explain the mechanism by which immune cells release into the circulation large quantities of exosomes containing spike protein along with critical microRNAs that induce a signaling response in recipient cells at distant sites. We also identify potential profound disturbances in regulatory control of protein synthesis and cancer surveillance. These disturbances are shown to have a potentially direct causal link to neurodegenerative disease, myocarditis, immune thrombocytopenia, Bell’s palsy, liver disease, impaired adaptive immunity, increased tumorigenesis, and DNA damage. We show evidence from adverse event reports in the VAERS database supporting our hypothesis. We believe a comprehensive risk/benefit assessment of the mRNA vaccines excludes them as positive contributors to public health, even in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.
What I absolutely LOVE, LOVE, LOVE about this abstract, is that it takes some of the most key points of what the Fake News calls “conspiracy theories” and restates them in fact-bolstered scientific jargon that absolutely cannot be disputed. It’s just beautiful.
Because this abstract is important for understanding as we go into the paper, I’m going to take it “line by line” and explain, so that when we get to the paper itself, you can understand what is being talked about and get the gist of it, even if the scientific nuances are not entirely clear to you.
There are TWELVE sentences, each worthy of consideration.
HANG ON FOR A QUICK WARM-UP RIDE.
Analyzing the Abstract
(1) The mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccines were brought to market in response to the widely perceived public health crises of Covid-19.
“Widely perceived”.
This is an unarguable fact. It’s a great way to start the argument. State a truth without leaning on the “real crisis” narrative cheese in the center of the trap.
It does NOT say that the mRNA vaccines were brought to market unreasonably, which is open to debate, and which will be a contested question. Remember – many people (including me) HOPED that new technologies – which we were led to believe were needed – would free us from the virus.
Are you starting to see how they USED Trump? In my opinion, we still don’t understand the full extent of the deception and counter-deception. But none of that is said here – it is just ALLOWED under the statement of fact without narrative.
(2) The utilization of mRNA vaccines in the context of infectious disease had no precedent, but desperate times seemed to call for desperate measures.
“Seemed to”.
This is also factual, if we’re honest. The Jab Justifiers will quibble about veterinary vaccines, and experimental vaccines, and all that, as precedents, but those are quibbles. The truth is, you and I never got one of these genetic vaccines before, and that’s because they had never been approved before.
The beauty of this phrasing – “but desperate times seemed to call for desperate measures” – is that it forces us to admit the context of the phony crisis created by the Fake News and Democrats, by only saying “seemed to call for” instead of “called for”.
What the authors are doing here is dropping out the “fake normal” created by the media.
And THAT is an ongoing lesson for science itself to return to control by science and TRUTH.
This is absolutely true, and absolutely key. The mRNA of the vaccines encodes a FULL “half” of a very particular version of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. However, in order to accomplish several goals, the mRNA which WOULD code for that half of the spike protein is substantially altered in several different ways to make the whole process work.
And that leads to the next sentence.
(4) These alterations hide the mRNA from cellular defenses, promote a longer biological half-life for the proteins, and provoke higher overall spike protein production.
There is a lot of nuance here, so I will take some time to explain the 3 items.
(a) These alterations hide the mRNA from cellular defenses
There are multiple reasons that the “mRNA” of the vaccines is not actually normal mRNA, but a kind of “pseudo” mRNA.
Cells have to be careful not to “execute the instructions” of what is essentially WRONG RNA. Cells are a lot like soldiers who have been trained to NOT carry out unconstitutional orders.
The fact that mRNA vaccines and related forms of mRNA-based gene therapy actually work AROUND cellular defenses is a hint RIGHT THERE that they might do something bad. Our bodies are designed to FIGHT OFF foreign mRNA.
Be careful how you interpret what I’m saying there. It’s not an indictment of the mRNA method per se, because MANY if not ALL drugs have to “work around cellular and bodily defenses”. That is a huge part of the science of drug delivery.
HOWEVER, it is always cautionary to admit THAT one is working around defenses, because this will inform one as to the RISKS which are being taken BY working around those defenses.
What if you aren’t actually working around the risks?
So, one truth is that the mRNA has certain bases changed to avoid “tipping off” those defenses. It’s a SNEAKY and LUCKY break that we actually CAN work around those defenses.
But are we doing so CLEANLY and to good outcome?
(b) promote a longer biological half-life for the proteins
This is a HUGE double-edged sword.
Remember – the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein CHANGES SHAPE as it breaks into the cell. When it’s all done, it looks like a different protein – even to antibodies.
The drug designers have (literally, but synthetically) mutated the original reported Wuhan spike protein sequence. The primary reason to do this, is to make the protein “LOCK IN” the original, highly infectious, three-dimensional shape of the “fresh” protein, so that antibodies will form PROPERLY against that, instead of forming against depleted, spent, “used” spike protein. This reduces the chances of ADE (antibody-dependent disease enhancement), which comes from “inappropriate antibodies” that evolved to the WRONG TARGET.
The problem with stabilizing the highly pathogenic spike protein for triggering more desirable antibody formation, is that it also stabilizes the highly pathogenic spike protein for pathogenesis, too.
“WHOOPS!”
So – spike-protein-based “long haul” symptoms from the vaccine can be very long – even compared to long haul from the disease. The synthetic spike protein is really good at sticking around in its mutated, long-lasting, highly pathogenic form.
And THAT might not be a good thing.
Ask this question – why doesn’t the VIRUS do that? Maybe a more stable protein is not only bad for the virus, but also bad for the host, and THAT is in turn bad for the virus AGAIN.
(c) provoke higher overall spike protein production
This is a DIRECT call-out of a problem that will almost certainly lead to arguments with “peer reviewers” who want to defend the vaccines. Note that the wording very intentionally does not say “These alterations are intended to…..[three things]” – it simply says “These alterations….. [three things].”
The alterations are INTENDED to provoke higher overall spike protein antibody production. But the fact is, unless the increase in antibodies comes from better and stronger adjuvants, which act as immunity multipliers, then it’s coming from higher (or otherwise more antigenic and pathogenic) overall spike protein production.
Thus, peer reviewers who want to cover up spike protein malfeasance will likely insist on dragging the wording back to being about the antibodies. This follows the lead of Tony Fauci and his “antibody hypnosis” act, designed to keep attention OFF all of the things that are WRONG with the vaccines.
As you can see, we’re only 4 sentences in, and there is a lot of “battle prep” already going on.
(5) However, both experimental and observational evidence reveals a very different immune response to the vaccines compared to the response to infection with SARS-CoV-2.
This is a very general but very powerful FACTUAL statement, which DEFIES the Fauci / Fake News narrative – a narrative which can’t even bring itself to ADMIT that disease-conferred immunity is a reality.
This is a point about which – if you have read even SOME of the COVID-19 scientific literature – there is literally no debate. Only in the Fake News media and on controlled social media is this twisted. Scientists now marvel ALL THE TIME at the differences between vaccine-conferred immunity and disease-conferred immunity.
And, almost ALWAYS, practically speaking (but ignoring any risks of acquiring immunity), disease-conferred immunity is superior.
You will note that Fauci NEVER talks about this stuff.
But there is more – much more. ANY adverse effects which happen due to the vaccines and not the disease, or happen MORE with the vaccines, rightly count as differences.
The paper is not saying this out loud – but you can understand that it is implied.
This right here – the point about a difference between vaccine immunity and disease immunity – is the HAMMER of the gun going back and making a “clicking” noise.
(6) As we will show, the genetic modifications introduced by the vaccine are likely the source of these differential responses.
THIS HERE IS THE BIGGIE.
There are SO MANY potential implications here, I don’t want to steal their thunder from the analysis of the paper.
However, without knowing ANYTHING FURTHER, this is a profoundly common-sense scientific statement. It is simply saying that different molecules from the virus RNA may lead to different outcomes. That’s almost a no-brainer.
This could happen in multiple different ways.
differences in how the “changed mRNA” is handled by the body
differences in how it is interpreted
differences in the protein product
All of this makes wonderful sense.
(7) In this paper, we present the evidence that vaccination, unlike natural infection, induces a profound impairment in type I interferon signaling, which has diverse adverse consequences to human health.
Oh, wait – THIS is the biggie.
This is saying that there is an important cellular communication screw-up with mRNA vaccination – a screw-up which does not occur with natural infection. Stated in reverse, there IS an important cellular communication channel opened during natural infection, which is MISSED by the mRNA vaccines.
IN OTHER WORDS, A PROGRAMMING ERROR.
This is all too believable to me, because I’ve seen this before. And NOT just when I “learned to code”.
This is LITERALLY a sibling programming error of what happens when too many vaccines are given at the same time, and interferon signals STEP ON EACH OTHER.
Now the Fake News media “fact checkers” absolutely will not admit that there is a problem with multiple simultaneous vaccines, but once the standard mechanism of vaccine-acquired immunity was explained to me, it became OBVIOUS AS HELL that signal interference was behind the observed but somewhat unpredictable problems with tight vaccine schedules.
You are allowed to have a different scientific opinion from these biased and forked-tongued “fact checkers” with agenda.
But let’s save the details for later.
For now, just remember that humans are evolutionarily adapted for disease, not hacky pseudo-mRNA vaccines. Our PROGRAMMING MODEL – our DESIGN – our API – is different from what the hackers thought they could get away with, and they got caught.
(8) We explain the mechanism by which immune cells release into the circulation large quantities of exosomes containing spike protein along with critical microRNAs that induce a signaling response in recipient cells at distant sites.
More specifics.
This is fascinating, because AND LOGIC is now telling me that it’s not just the vaccine migrating, but spike protein as well.
And THAT explains a LOT.
Do you see how everything is tying together nicely around the pathogenic spike protein that is NOT being degraded soon enough or fast enough, like the VIRUS DOES FOR US?
Think about our little human biome friends next time, science. They may have a BETTER PLAN.
(9) We also identify potential profound disturbances in regulatory control of protein synthesis and cancer surveillance.
OK, this is bad stuff. But it’s also bad stuff that is right up the alley of FAKE SCIENCE to now “discover” and get big bucks to study. It’s DETAILS that cannot be dismissed.
This is the GRENADE thrown into the narrative machine gun bunker with half a second left on the fuse.
KABOOM.
This is where every “me too!” funding whore is going to jump on the bandwagon with justification.
(10) These disturbances are shown to have a potentially direct causal link to neurodegenerative disease, myocarditis, immune thrombocytopenia, Bell’s palsy, liver disease, impaired adaptive immunity, increased tumorigenesis, and DNA damage.
Oh, wait! Isn’t this the stuff that Robert Malone warned us about?
Isn’t this the stuff that Ryan Cole spotted?
Isn’t this the stuff that FAKE NEWS ignored and “debunked”, but is now appearing in every possible mainstream source of data?
Common sense is going to win here.
INVESTORS had better TAKE NOTE. The landscape is going to change, IMO.
(11) We show evidence from adverse event reports in the VAERS database supporting our hypothesis.
The beauty of VAERS is that it’s flawed, but we know HOW it’s flawed.
Thus, if you see something that can only be MAGNIFIED by correcting for the known flaws, then you have something you can use.
Just stroll past those Fake News fact checkers and Fake Social Media “con-TROLLS” who spew their talking point about “VAERS IS A FLAWED SYSTEM”. SORRY. Not good enough, trolls.
Everything is a flawed system. Knowing the DIRECTION of the flaws is what turns all systems into useful logical tools.
We will use common sense here, long after these people who deny it are OUT OF POWER.
(12) We believe a comprehensive risk/benefit assessment of the mRNA vaccines excludes them as positive contributors to public health, even in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.
This is where they land when all is said and done.
They’re saying that they believe the risks outweigh the benefits with THESE vaccines.
This does NOT say that vaccination per se is a bad strategy for COVID-19.
It says that mRNA vaccination as it currently exists is not a good strategy for COVID-19.
It doesn’t say that viral vector cDNA, “full” spike protein subunit antigen, or RBD subunit antigen vaccines are doubtful in any way. They may be, but the authors don’t say that (although some of the specifics DO have implications for the other vaccines).
The authors only say that THESE particular, current, mRNA vaccines are “not positive contributors to public health”.
And you can do the math from there.
Can the current mRNA vaccines be fixed?
Good question. This paper is likely a roadmap to any such fixes. But until then…..
Mandating these vaccines is WRONG, if not INSANE.
Analyzing the Paper
Now we get to the meat of the paper.
I am just going to drop my impressions, placing them in context as needed. On some of these, I blab on and on. On others, I just make a short point. I do a lot of quoting where the authors say it nicely. This is very seat-of-the-pants.
Introduction
The FIRST paragraph is a generous summary of the basics of vaccination, FULLY in compliance with the CDC definitions. Please take note of that. There is no quibbling about the mRNA vaccines not being vaccines.
The SECOND paragraph summarizes and exemplifies the presence in the literature of a viewpoint that the mRNA vaccines are very similar to natural immunity. There is a point made that is basically my contention of Fauci’s “antibody hypnosis”, but it is phrased very politiely.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) makes the case based upon antibody titers generated by prior infection vs. vaccination, in addition to production of memory B cells, to argue that the immune response to vaccination is analogous to the response to natural infection [4]. It is this similarity in the humoral immune response to vaccination vs natural infection, paired with both trial and observational data demonstrating reduced risk of infection following vaccination, that stands as the justification for the mass vaccination campaign.
The THIRD paragraph is long, but absolutely key.
It is the summary of the guts of the paper.
You will note that the authors are pointing out EXISTING MAINSTREAM SCIENCE which is contradicting the media-trumpeted, but “CDC-silent” narrative that vaccination is superior to “natural immunity”, by pointing out (without saying it bluntly) that it’s not even AS GOOD as disease-conferred immunity, because known “good” responses to the natural antigen are completely missing.
And worse than that, the mRNA vaccines seem to do WRONG THINGS to the immune system as well.
In this paper we explore the scientific literature suggesting that vaccination with an mRNA vaccine initiates a set of biological events that are not only different from that induced by vaccination but are in several ways demonstrably counterproductive to both short- and long-term immune competence and normal cellular function. These vaccinations have now been shown to downregulate critical pathways related to cancer surveillance, infection control, and cellular homeostasis. They introduce into the body highly modified genetic material. A medRxiv preprint has revealed a remarkable difference between the characteristics of the immune response to an infection with SARS-CoV-2 as compared with the immune response to an mRNA vaccine against COVID-19 [5]. Differential gene expression analysis of peripheral dendritic cells revealed a dramatic upregulation of both type I and type II interferons (IFNs) in COVID-19 patients, but not in vaccinees. One remarkable observation they made was that there was an expansion of circulating hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) in COVID-19 patients, but this expansion was notably absent following vaccination. A striking expansion in circulating plasmablasts observed in COVID-19 patients was also not seen in the vaccinees. All of these observations are consistent with the idea that the vaccines actively suppress type I IFN signaling, as we will discuss below. In this paper we will be focusing extensively, though not exclusively,on vaccination-induced type I IFN suppression and the myriad downstream effects this has on the related signaling cascade.
Again, I point out that this is being pulled out of the “mainstream” literature.
Does this immune suppression that researchers found remind you of anything?
Note that this is on BitChute because YouTube deleted it as “misinformation”.
If you’re thinking “Wow, the media and social media has really screwed up science!”, well, all I can say is “They won’t be able to walk the streets.”
The FOURTH paragraph then begins dropping bombs on the Pfizer clinical trial shenanigans, which basically covered up the placebo group to obfuscate vaccine problems.
The message is roughly “Because Pfizer covered things up by vaccinating their placebo group, as well as other tricks, we were forced to look at VAERS and the scientific literature to find out what the vaccines are doing – AND BOY, DID WE FIND A TON OF PROBLEMS.”
But done much more politely.
The next two paragraphs are a WITHERING ATTACK on the vaccines, simply using the scientific literature. OMG – the spatter on the walls – there are quite a few easy targets that the Fake News Media has been protecting by ignoring, but it’s very hard to “memory hole” the scientific literature to those who can “pay to play”, so the authors just mention a string of scientific findings that Fauci hoped the public would never see.
Thus, the FIFTH paragraph is a summary of VACCINE FAILURE, with references.
The SIXTH paragraph then brings up the wonderful idea that if benefits are as low as we now understand them to be, maybe RISKS need a closer look.
You may want to read the whole introduction, because that is the last easily readable section of the paper for a while.
NOW it gets really technical.
Interferons: An Overview with Attention to Cancer Surveillance
This section is extremely complex and hard to read, even if you’re familiar with most or all of the various biochemical and biological acronyms that are thrown into the melange.
It starts off with a review of what is known about INTERFERONS (IFNs), as well as substances which regulate them, known as INTERFERON REGULATING FACTORS (IRFs).
This is what you need to know:
Type I IFNs play a powerful role in the immune response to multiple stressors. In fact, they have enjoyed clinical therapeutic value as a treatment option for a variety of diseases and conditions, including viral infections, solid tumors, myeloproliferative disorders, hematopoietic neoplasms and autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis [16].
As a group, IFNs play exceedingly complicated and pleiotropic roles that are coordinated and regulated through the activity of the family of IFN regulatory factors, or IRFs [17]. IRF9 is most directly involved in anti-viral as well as anti-tumor immunity and genetic regulation [18-20].
Basically, interferons are critical players in the CLEANUP OF GENETIC BAD GUYS CAUSING TROUBLE. Those genetic bad guys can be EXTERNAL WRONG-GENES (viruses) or they can be ROGUE CELLS (cancer and the like).
This section then summarizes the complex interactions and feedback loops which characterize anything involving interferons, but particularly related to their anti-cancer role. It is made exceedingly clear that improper interferon levels and disruptions of the complex interferon systems are known to lead very directly to clinical appearance of cancers of various kinds.
Near the end, COVID-19 is brought into the mix. A recent Chinese paper is cited, the work having shown interference with IRF signaling by a non-mRNA, inactivated virus, COVID-19 vaccine. The changes are EXPECTED to reduce resistance to cancers, and the mechanisms are discussed in detail. ELEGANTLY, those same mechanisms are found in Alzheimer’s patients, and appear related to development of dementia symptoms that sound remarkably like COVID brain fog.
Finally, a documented case of a rare lymphoma being accelerated by the Pfizer vaccine is described, and a summary statement is given:
Given the universally recognized importance of optimally functioning BRCA1/2 for cancer prevention and given the central role of the TRAIL signal transduction pathway for additional cancer surveillance, the suppression of IRF7 and IRF9 through vaccination and subsequent spike protein production is extremely concerning for long-term cancer control in injected populations.
Considerations in the Design of mRNA Vaccines
This section basically describes the long list of HACKS – many of them very ELEGANT HACKS – that were needed to get all the way from Robert Malone’s initial discovery which enabled mRNA gene therapy, to where mRNA vaccines are today.
The implications of all these hacks for relevant IMMUNOLOGICAL and GENETIC biochemistry, including INTERFERONS and CANCER, are described.
This section SETS UP the long list of concerns which are going to necessarily follow.
Quite a bit of attention is paid to the components of the lipid nanoparticles, their roles, and their potential risks and side-effects.
This section is fairly readable, and if you’re curious about the various hacks, and particularly the purpose and mechanism of the lipid nanoparticles, then you may enjoy reading past the jargon.
GC enrichment and potential G4 (pG4) structures in vaccine mRNAs
This is a difficult section to understand, if you’re not familiar with DNA and RNA “beyond the double helix”. It’s a bit like Morse code. Everybody knows what Morse code is, and maybe how to do an “SOS”, but not many people remember Morse code well enough to compose and send long signals at will, let alone send a telegram. OTOH, if you’re in genetic medicine or biology, you may be familiar with more than just 4 bases and the double helix.
The bottom line is that, among the various hacks that have gone into the mRNA vaccines, some of them are basically “genetic tricks” to increase production of spike protein. The PROBLEM with that, is that the FINAL implications of some of these tricks are not fully known.
Because there is redundancy in the genetic language, and the efficiency of different spellings is not the same (nite vs. night, thru vs. through, etc.), certain things can be re-encoded using the most efficient letters to create MOAR SPIKE PROTEIN. And MOAR is always BETTER. RIIIIIIIIGHT?
Well, it turns out that spellings have implications for how mRNA behaves. How mRNA behaves has implications for things like CANCER.
Going back to the title of this section, “G” and “C” are the efficient bases that are switched to, to make proteins with higher efficiency. The problem THERE is that “G” can do something every interesting – it can bind with itself in a square, to form a quadruple helix called a “G quadruplex”, which is abbreviated G4. See the image above for cross-sections of such a structure, at the point of binding.
There are ways to predict if a G quadruplex will form – these cases are called “pG4” for “potential G quadruplex”.
Midway through the section, this quote:
Summarizing the topic to this point, the enrichment of GC content in vaccine mRNA will inevitably lead to an increase in the pG4 content of the vaccines. This, in turn, will lead to dysregulation of the G4-RNA-protein binding system and a wide range of potential disease-associated cellular pathologies including suppression of innate immunity, neurodegeneration, and malignant transformation [83].
There are further implications. The more mRNA can form these self-shielding quadruplexes, the less that “micro RNAs” – miRNAs – can bind to the mRNA and control the expression. And THAT leads to another cascade of potentially unintended consequences.
The multitude of pG4s in the mRNA of the vaccine would predictably act as decoys, distracting miRNAs from their normal function in regulating human protein expression. The increase in G4 targets due to the vaccine would decrease the availability of miRNAs to target human-expressed G4s for regulation of gene expression. This can result in downregulation of miRNA expression which is implicated in cardiovascular pathology [96], onset of neurodegeneration [97], and/or cancer progression [98].
Type I IFNs and COVID-19
This is a very interesting section on the relationship of interferons to COVID-19. It appears that:
lower levels of interferons lead to more severe COVID-19 outcomes
IFNs can be used for treatment early, but make things worse if given late
interferons seem to prevent infection by COVID-19
this would explain enhanced susceptibility to COVID-19 after vaccination
COVID patients with antibodies against interferons are common in severe cases
Interferons are clearly key, and look to be one of the most significant differences between the disease and the vaccine.
Are the methylation strategies for cellular housekeeping generally omitted by vaccine mRNAs?
This is a rhetorical question about one of the hacks used by the mRNA vaccines.
To put it a bit too simply, the synthetic mRNA is “capped” both to evade detection AND to generate more spike protein, and most likely without regard for downstream unintended consequences, due to the fact that capping is normally supposed to be both a signaling and a regulating mechanism. The “hack” abuses this feature to make more spike protein.
Rather than simply making an accusation, the question is asked, whether the hack accounted for some of the more likely consequences.
E.g., …..
Furthermore, this also means that eIF4E, which is a powerful oncogene regulator and cell proliferation modulator, will sustain its activities by this competition, for an unnaturally prolonged period of time, trying to counterbalance the competition between robustly-capped mRNAs in vaccines and IRES-containing mRNAs[113,65]. This type of condition results in dysregulation of co-transcriptional m6A mRNA modifications and seriously links to molecular progressions of various cancers [114], as well as creating predisposing conditions for subsequent viral infections [113].
My money is on the idea that nobody in the management chain at Pfizer or Moderna gave a flying F, because Fauci and Walensky are all about the antibodies. This is a CLASSIC downstream effect of antibody hypnosis.
Exosomes and MicroRNAs
This is an interesting grab-bag of stuff, and it’s not that hard to follow, for the most part, so you may want to read it.
Exosomes are basically little bubbles of cell that break off and carry crap, a lot like “virus-like particles” or even “lipid nanoparticles”. It turns out that much of the spike protein which is produced in vaccine-infected cells LEAVES THE SCENE inside exosomes, or studded into their surface. This was in fact discovered by a group in India.
Also, under conditions of overwhelming production of spike protein due to SARS-CoV-2 molecular vaccination, it would of course be expected that a significant proportion of over-abundant intra-cellular spikeproteins would also be exported via exosome cargoes [128]. A seminal paper by a research team in India investigated the role of exosomes in the cellular response to internally synthesized SARS-CoV-2 spike protein [50]. They wrote in the abstract:“We propose that SARS-CoV-2 gene product, Spike, is able to modify the host exosomal cargo, which gets transported to distant uninfected tissues and organs and can initiate a catastrophic immune cascade within Central Nervous System (CNS).”
Things get even worse. It turns out that these exosomes also carry micro-RNAs that turn off interferons in the distant places to which they carry the spike protein.
Thus, the available evidence strongly suggests that endogenously produced spike protein creates a different microRNA profile than does natural infection with SARS-CoV-2, and those differences entail a potentially wide range of deleterious effects.
A central point of our analysis below is the important distinction between the impact of vaccination versus natural infection on type I IFN. While vaccination actively suppresses its production, natural infection promotes type I IFN production very early in the disease cycle. Those with preexisting conditions often exhibit impaired type I IFN signaling, which leads to more severe, critical, and even fatal COVID-19. If the impairment induced by the vaccine is maintained as antibody levels wane over time, this could lead to a situation where the vaccine causes a more severe disease expression than would have been the case in the absence of the vaccine.
Another expected consequence of suppressing type I IFN would be reactivation of preexisting, chronic viral infections, as described in the next section.
SO – this would explain “vaccine-induced disease enhancement” – not antibody-dependent (ADE), but rather interferon-dependent (IDE). And in this case, it could be significantly different diseases that are being enhanced, because of the generality of the interferon network.
Speaking of which…..
Reactivation of Varicella-zoster
Fully consistent with the proposed vaccine-induced negative effects on interferon signaling, would be the significant number of cases of shingles appearing post-vaccination with the mRNA vaccines.
There is also a documented case of viral hepatitis flaring up because of the vaccine.
An additional case of viral reactivation is noteworthy as well. It involved an 82-year-old woman who had acquired a hepatitis C viral (HCV) infection in 2007. A strong increase in HCV load occurred a few days after vaccination with an mRNA Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, along with an appearance of jaundice. She died three weeks after vaccination from liver failure [142].
Personally, I have no desire to get shingles again.
Impaired DNA Repair and Adaptive Immunity
As stated – more examples from the literature.
We have to speed up here. This is a long paper.
Immune Thrombocytopenia
This is your “clot shot” mechanism, explained.
This quote is interesting.
It has been shown that the mRNA vaccines elicit primarily an immunoglobulin G (IgG) immune response, with lesser amounts of IgA induced [155], and even less IgM production [156]. The amount of IgG antibodies produced is comparable to the response seen in severe cases of COVID-19. It is IgG antibodies in complex with heparin that induce HIT. One can hypothesize that IgG complexed with the spike protein and PF4 is the complex that induces VITT in response to mRNA vaccines. It has in fact been shown experimentally that the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the spike protein binds to PF4 [157].
PPAR-α, Sulfatide and Liver Disease
Two paragraphs are worthy of your attention.
As we have already stated, an experiment by Mishra and Banerjea (2021) demonstrated that the spike protein induces the release of exosomes containing microRNAs that specifically interfere with IRF9 synthesis[50]. In this section we will show that one of the consequences of suppression of IRF9 would be reduced synthesis of sulfatide in the liver, mediated by the nuclear receptor peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor α (PPAR-α).
…
Multiple case reports in the research literature describe liver damage following mRNA vaccines [165-167]. A plausible factor leading to these outcomes is the suppression of PPAR-α through downregulation of IRF9,and subsequently decreased sulfatide synthesis in the liver.
As you can see, there is a prediction here, and plenty of room to investigate.
Guillain Barre Syndrome and Other Neurological Conditions
This is worth reading. There is a laundry list of neurological conditions clearly attributed to the vaccine, and a clear mechanism by which they happen.
Bell’s Palsy
A known problem which appeared during the clinical trials of the mRNA vaccines.
Placebo 1, Treatment 7. Do the math.
Myocarditis
Signals and mechanisms are discussed. Particularly compelling is the proposed role of exosomes in carrying the toxic spike to cardiac tissue.
My money is still on migrating vaccine, but AND LOGIC will do for now.
Considerations Regarding the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)
The underreporting of the system is discussed, with some doubt about the commonly cited figure of “100X” underreporting, as well as mention of a more sophisticated figure of 31X obtained by Rose.
VAERS Signal for Immune Suppression, Thrombocytopenia and Neurodegeneration
A comparison of the data from COVID vaccines to ALL OTHER VACCINES COMBINED is made, and the results are impressive.
Many different things are listed. It’s worth looking at.
VAERS Signal for Cancer
After detailing the numbers for cancer (nice table), where the mRNA vaccines have HUGE numbers compared to all other vaccines combined, this statement:
This cannot be explained by reference to a disproportionately large number of people receiving an mRNA vaccination in the past year compared to all other vaccinations. The total number of people receiving a non-COVID-19 vaccination is unknown, but over the 31 years history of reports VAERS contains it is unquestionably many orders of magnitude larger than the number receiving an mRNA vaccination in the past year. Overall, in the above table, twice as many cancer reports to VAERS are related to a COVID-19 vaccination compared to those related to all other vaccines. That, in our opinion, constitutes a signal in urgent need of investigation.
To me, this is enough to say that the mRNA vaccines are related to cancer. Period.
Discussion
This is worth reading:
There has been an unwavering message about the safety and efficacy of mRNA vaccinations against SARS-CoV-2 from the public health apparatus in the US and around the globe. The efficacy is increasingly in doubt, as shown in a recent letter to the Lancet Regional Health by G¨unter Kampf [215]. Kampf provided data showing that the vaccinated are now as likely as the unvaccinated to spread disease. He concluded:“It appears to be grossly negligent to ignore the vaccinated population as a possible and relevant source of transmission when deciding about public health control measures.”
In this paper we call attention to three very important aspects of the safety profile of these vaccinations. First is the extensively documented subversion of innate immunity, primarily via suppression of IFN-α and its associated signaling cascade. This suppression will have a wide range of consequences, not the least of which include the reactivation of latent viral infections and the reduced ability to effectively combat future infections. Second is the dysregulation of the system for both preventing and detecting genetically driven malignant transformation within cells and the consequent potential for vaccination to promote those transformations. Third, mRNA vaccination potentially disrupts intracellular communication carried out by exosomes, and induces cells taking up spike mRNA to produce high levels of spike-carrying exosomes, with potentially serious inflammatory consequences. Should any of these potentials be fully realized, the impact on billions of people around the world could be enormous and could contribute to both the short-term and long-term disease burden our health care system faces.
Given the current rapidly expanding awareness of the multiple roles of G4s in regulation of mRNA translation and clearance through stress granules, the increase in pG4s due to enrichment of GC content as a consequence of codon optimization has unknown but likely far-reaching consequences. Specific analytical evaluation of the safety of these constructs in vaccines is urgently needed, including mass spectrometry for identification of cryptic expression and immunoprecipitation studies to evaluate the potential for disturbance of or interference with the essential activities of RNA and DNA binding proteins.
This is what I was talking about at the beginning. There is enough here for an enormous amount of productive research on the downside of these vaccines. It’s EASY RESULTS. Maybe not easy grant money, but plenty of easy CLOUT when it’s all over.
This does NOT go back in the toothpaste tube.
Conclusions
Presented in whole:
It is imperative that worldwide administration of the mRNA vaccinations be stopped immediately until further studies are conducted to determine the extent of the potential pathological consequences outlined in this paper. It is not possible for these vaccinations to be considered part of a public health campaign without a detailed analysis of the human impact of the potential collateral damage. It is also imperative that VAERS and other monitoring system be optimized to detect signals related to the health consequences of mRNA vaccination we have outlined. We believe the upgraded VAERS monitoring system described in the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Inc. study, but unfortunately not supported by the CDC, would be a valuable start in this regard [208].
In the end, we are not exaggerating to say that billions of lives are at stake. We call on the public health institutions to demonstrate, with evidence, why the issues discussed in this paper are not relevant to public health, or to acknowledge that they are and to act accordingly. Until our public health institutions do what is right in this regard, we encourage all individuals to make their own health care decisions with this information as a contributing factor in those decisions.
That’s where I’m at. Do not take the clot shot. Do not give it to your kids. Tell people how you honestly feel.
I am OK with people having the freedom to take a bad vaccine, but I personally think that coercing anybody in the slightest to take it, is a CRIME.
If you’re scared of getting or giving COVID, there are far better ways to deal with it, than a bad vaccine that does a lot of damage.
Can the mRNA Vaccines Be Fixed?
That’s MY question.
I suspect that they CAN be fixed, but not for at least several years – maybe 5-10, if we’re lucky.
Until then, they should be taken off the market, IMO.
Hopefully antigen vaccines will do better, but if they don’t, we can fall back to treatment and “real” immunity.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Day:
wolven
noun
Of or pertaining to wolves; wolflike; wolfish.
Used in a sentence:
Adjectives for wolf include wolfish, wolfless, wolflike, wolfly, wolfy, wolven, wolvish, wolfed, wolfing, wolved and wolving.
(If you can find a better one, please add it to the comments!)
The Chinese Should Think Before Wiping Us Out As Sometimes They Need Us To Solve Their Problems For Them
Okay you knuckledragging ChiComs trying to take us down…here’s a history lesson for you.
For millennia, you had to suffer from this:
Yep. Steppe Nomads. They laid waste to your country, burned, raped and pillaged (but not in that order–they’re smarter than you are) for century after century.
You know who figured out how to take them on and win? The Russians.
Not you, the Russians. And it took them less than two centuries. And Oh By The Way they were among the most backward cultures in Europe at the time.
You couldn’t invent an alphabet, you couldn’t take care of barbarians on horseback, and you think you can take this board down?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! We’re laughing at you, you knuckledragging dehumanized communists…worshipers of a mass-murderer who killed sixty million people!
I mean, you still think Communism is a good idea even after having lived through it!
By my reckoning that makes you orders of magnitude more stupid than AOC, and that takes serious effort.
His Fraudulency
Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.
One can hope that all is not as it seems.
I’d love to feast on that crow.
“No Chemicals”
A detailed analysis of the contents of His Fraudulency’s skull was performed.
Absolutely no chemicals found!
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.
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).
James Webb Space Telescope Update
Mirror alignment has begun. This is a complex process described here:
It continues to cool off slowly, with the “cold side” of the sun shield down to over 350 degrees below zero, F.
Just in case you thought the recent weather was chilly.
This is still about a hundred degrees F above absolute zero. So, still too hot for many of the instruments. But the instruments themselves are warmer; their temperatures range from -199 down to -292F
The What?
There are Olympics going on?
Just goes to show I don’t give a rat’s hindquarters (I threw that out there for any Leftists who might find that part of a rat exciting) about that sort of thing.
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 and silver continue bouncing around inside a range that is (I believe) being forced by the central banks and other shitbag actors, in spite of all the inflationary signs we are seeing.
Obligatory PSAs and Reminders
China is Lower than Whale Shit
Remember Hong Kong!!!
Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
China is in the White House
Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.
Joe Biden is Asshoe
China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.
But of course the much more important thing to realize:
Joe Biden Didn’t Win
乔*拜登没赢 !!! Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!! Joe Biden didn’t win !!!
Get your rest, Trumpy Bear! You’re going back to the White House!!!
The Business At Hand
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
And indeed, it’s Monday…again.
But we are AWAKENING GREATLY!
The Rules
Boilerplate, more or less, but worth reading again and again, if only for the minor changes, and to stay out of moderation.
The bottom line is Free Speech. Theories and ideas you don’t agree with must be WELCOME here, and you must be part of that welcoming. But you do NOT need to be part of any agreement.
Seriously, this stuff is in the Bible. Just follow the “wise gals”.
She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.
We must endeavor to persevere to love our frenemies – even here.
Those who cannot deal with this easy requirement will be forced to jump the hoops of moderation, so that specific comments impugning other posters and violating the minimal rules can be sorted out and tossed in the trash.
In Wheatie’s words, “We’re on the same side here so let’s not engage in friendly fire.”
That includes the life skill of just ignoring certain other posters.
We do have a site – The U Tree – where civility is not a requirement. Interestingly, people don’t really go there much. Nevertheless, if you find yourself in an “argument” that can’t really stay civil, please feel free to “take it to the U Tree”. The U Tree is also a good place to report any technical difficulties, if you’re unable to report them here. Please post your comment there on one of Wolf’s posts, or in reply to one of Wolf’s comments, to make sure he sees it (though it may take a few hours).
We also have a backup site, called The Q Tree as well, which is really The Q Tree 579486807. You might call it “Second Tree”. The URL for that site is https://theqtree579486807.wordpress.com/. If this site (theqtree.com) ever goes down, please reassemble at the Second Tree.
If the Second Tree goes down, please go to The U Tree, or to our Gab Group, which is located at https://gab.com/groups/4178.
We also have some “old rules” and important guidelines, outlined here, in a very early post, on our first New Year’s Day, in 2019. The main point is not to make violent threats against people, which then have to be taken seriously by law enforcement, and which can be used as a PRETEXT by enemies of this site.
In the words of Wheatie, “Let’s not give the odious Internet Censors a reason to shut down this precious haven that Wolf has created for us.”
A Moment of Prayer
Our policy on extreme religious freedom on this site is discussed HERE. Please feel free to pray and praise God anytime and anywhere.
Thus, please pray for our real President, the one who actually won the election.
You may also pray for our enemies, as instructed by YOU KNOW WHO.
MUSICAL INTERLUDE
For your listening enjoyment, and general encouragement, we continue Wheatie’s tradition of fine music videos, shipped fresh from the seas of information by our intrepid authors.
Time for a DEEP DIVE into a GAS GIANT.
Starting from something still left in my tabs.
Earworm. Can’t quit this one. So “Train”.
…..we move on to an enjoyable acoustic version……
…..with some interesting captioning.
BUT WAIT – there’s more.
Imagine this song being done by Taylor Swift BEFORE she became fully “woke”.
Yes, only 4 years of Obama-era cultural Marxism had not yet turned her.
Check it out.
Apparently her “arm lyrics” are a thing (that doesn’t leave a permanent scar).
From there, I was led to this enjoyable bit of fluff.
Perfect for a Monday!
Hey, I get it. Why so serious? Sometimes it’s good to just dance!
Have a great week!
Now….. BUCKLE UP. The WOOF is on a mission.
Call To Battle
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces, acting though TREASONOUS Democrat Communists.
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.
Because TIME is on our side – and our VOICES WILL BE HEARD.
This is actually something that the ChiNazis are desperately afraid of – a SMALL NATION that stands up to them.
Big nations are COWARDS regarding the ChiNazis.
I spent four decades watching the utter COWARDICE of American academia, industry, and government, in their teeth-chattering, self-deluded refusal to deal with ChiNazi theft, subversion, blackmail, military attack on civilians, and every other horror of Chinese communism.
If Lithuania stands against the CHINAZI MENACE, then I stand with them.
FUCK CHINA JOE and his EVIL FRIENDS – COWARDS who LIE about standing up to China – as THEY THEMSELVES become more like China every day.
Paul Hong Kong – THE Source for ChiNazi Crimes
Paul Hong Kong is the guy you want to follow to get all the stories that the ChiNazis and their friends in Washington try to suppress. He’s on Twitter, and he finds and retweets EVERYTHING about the ChiNazis. You can tell that his stats are WILDLY suppressed.
Paul has a separate website which deals with a truly horrifying subject – the police cover-up of people murdered by the ChiNazis in Hong Kong.
Most of these murders are “solved” by the police as suicides or accidents. The PEOPLE of Hong Kong know that they’re not suicides – they’re REGIME MURDERS – but the police know better than to investigate.
One of the favorite methods of the ChiNazis is apparently to simply throw people out of buildings. Cheaper than bullets and easier to explain.
Do we want this shit coming to America and the rest of the world?
No. The evil CCP must be destroyed.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Day:
usufruct
yoo͞′zə-frŭkt″, -sə-
noun
The right to the use and profits of something belonging to another.
In law, the right of enjoying all the advantages derivable from the use of something which belongs to another so far as is compatible with the substance of the thing not being destroyed or injured.
The right of using and enjoying the profits of an estate or other thing belonging to another, without impairing the substance.
Wikipedia:
Usufruct (/ˈjuːzjuːfrʌkt/)[1] is a limited real right (or in rem right) found in civil-law and mixed jurisdictions that unites the two property interests of usus and fructus:
Usus (use) is the right to use or enjoy a thing possessed, directly and without altering it. Fructus (fruit, in a figurative sense) is the right to derive profit from a thing possessed: for instance, by selling crops, leasing immovables or annexed movables, taxing for entry, and so on. A usufruct is either granted in severalty or held in common ownership, as long as the property is not damaged or destroyed. The third civilian property interest is abusus (literally abuse), the right to alienate the thing possessed, either by consuming or destroying it (e.g., for profit), or by transferring it to someone else (e.g., sale, exchange, gift). Someone enjoying all three rights has full ownership.
Used in a sentence:
The remaining legal question delves into arcane jargon of whether the Garden’s lease is a “usufruct,” where the City retains all ownership rights and the tenant thus can’t ban guns, or an “estate for years,” where the Garden has some ownership rights as well and thus can ban guns. (From: Court decision on guns in leased parkland could be bigger than ‘constitutional carry’)
Used in a picture:
Used in a video:
Used in Reality
If you do business with the ChiComs – if you even TOUCH Chinese money – you might as well have given everything to the ChiComs, with them leaving you mere usufruct as a form of deceitful cover. The lesson of all those who have lost their businesses to the Chinese is simple – never touch Chinese money. It’s poison. And it’s POISON the moment you start doing business with them – NOT just by the time you figure out that you’ve been SCAMMED.
SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom
You knuckle-dragging barbarians are still trying to muck with this site, so I’ll just repeat what I said last time.
Up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”
Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.
Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?
Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:
OK, with that rant out of my system…
Loop it if you like; I will wait.
Richly deserved.
Justice Must Be Done
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
A major hammering for gold, silver and platinum. Conversely, palladium is going nuts again. I guess people are buying catalytic converters (with minor propulsive attachments so they can move around) again. Supposedly, everybody but everybody expects the Fed (I am fed up with the Fed) to raise interest rates. That suddenly makes dollars more attractive than they were last week, even though the rate of inflation hasn’t changed. Hence gold going down when you would think the dollar should be spiraling around the drain (of the toilet).
James Webb Space Telescope Update
OK, it’s all deployed, it’s in its orbit…so what comes next? What’s going to occupy the next five months?
Well, the telescope has to cool down. Yes, 348 degrees below zero F is not cold enough for those infrared sensors. It’s going to take a while. Heat can only be carried away three ways…conduction, convection, and radiation, and two of those are unavailable in space. The spacecraft isn’t touching anything else, so conduction won’t work, and it’s not fluid, so convection can’t work either. (Convection is the process that causes water near or at the boiling point to roil; heated water from the bottom of the pot rises, carrying the heat to the surface; cooler water at the top descends where it will get heated.) So what’s left is radiation, losing the heat by electromagnetic black body radiation. This is what causes an incandescent light bulb filament to cool off and stop glowing (in visible light) the moment you flip the light switch. Sometimes you can see it take a perceptible amount of time to dim. But that’s the heat in the filament being turned into light and radiating away.
A light bulb filament cools off fast, but that’s because it’s very hot. JWST is a mere 112 degrees (F) above absolute zero, so it will radiate much more slowly.
In fact, how much an object radiates is proportional to the fourth power of its temperature. An object at 100 degrees above absolute zero radiates sixteen times as much as one at 50 degrees above absolute zero. JWST, as it gets closer and closer to absolute zero, radiates less and less.
Besides just cooling JWST off, the instruments behind the mirror must be turned on and calibrated, but this can’t be done until the instruments cool down some more…though I believe at least some of them are close to their maximum operating temperature.
So, what can be done right now? The third thing: Mirror alignment. Here’s the last paragraph of the latest entry on the NASA JWST blog.
Next up: HD 84406! That is the first star Webb will point at to gather engineering data to start the mirror alignment process. The team chose a bright star (magnitude 6.7 at a distance of about 260 light-years, as measured by Gaia). The star is a sun-like G star in the Ursa Major constellation, which can be seen by Webb at this time of the year. This is just the first step; HD 84406 will be too bright to study with Webb once the telescope starts to come into focus. But for now, it is the perfect target to begin our search for photons, a search that will lead us to the distant universe.
NASA Blog: https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/01/27/the-webb-team-looks-back-on-successful-deployments/
It’s in astronomese. Fortunately I speak it well enough to translate. (It’s not just for professional astronomers; there are probably millions of amateur astronomers or just general geeky types who will have no problem reading that paragraph. But most here are not among them.)
Short translation: They’re basically going to point Webb at a particular star that’s fairly bright, and fiddle with the individual mirror segments to get them aligned with each other. The eighteen hexagons were all made to look as if they were cut from a parabolic mirror; they must be lined up to within nanometers of that parabolic shape. This is expected to take about three months
Longer translation: As above, but I’m going to do a deep dive on some of the specifics that will seem cryptic.
Let’s start with “HD 84406.” That’s a catalog number, the Henry Draper catalog. This catalog contains over 225,300 stars and was published between 1918 and 1924. (If you thought these posts were boring, go read the catalog. This is part of an index to it, and No, I have no idea why the numbers aren’t sequential: Henry Draper Catalogue – SKY-MAP)
[Annie Jump Cannon, who you might remember from one of my physics posts, was very heavily involved in the publication of this catalog and a couple of extensions to it that have come out since.]
Of course only about 6000 stars are bright enough to be visible to the unaided (naked) eye even far away from city lights, so clearly most of these Henry Draper stars are very, very dim.
“The team chose a bright star (magnitude 6.7…” OK they’re calling HD 84406 a “bright star” because it’s at “magnitude 6.7.” What does “magnitude 6.7” mean?
It’s a historical artifact. The brightness of astronomical objects is given in this funky magnitude scale. The lower the number, the brighter the star, so yes that seems backwards! This is because they would say something like “Spica is a first-magnitude star.” A “second-magnitude” star is clearly a lesser star than a “first magnitude” star. A “sixth magnitude” star was one that was just barely visible under ideal conditions.
Astronomers came up with instruments to objectively measure this sort of thing, however, and the magnitude scale got modified. In 1856 the modern scale was adopted, it was suggested by Norman Pogson at Oxford. Under his system, the scale is logarithmic and a star of magnitude X is 2.512 times as bright as a star of magnitude X+1. OK, so where did they pull that number from? Someone’s rectal database?
Actually that number is the fifth root of 100. Basically, a first magnitude star is 100 times as bright as a sixth magnitude star. That’s five “magnitudes” and it’s a logarithmic scale, so a single magnitude is going to be whatever number you can multiply by itself five times to get 100, i.e., the fifth root of 100, or about 2.512. (Remember, some people take an astronomy class in college because they are severely math challenged and have to take a science class to graduate and figure astronomy won’t have any math in it. But you can’t even describe stars’ brightnesses without logarithms-base-fifth-root-of-100. Bwahahaha!)
With a logarithmic scale, you can have fractional/decimal magnitudes, and more fun ensues. As it turns out many ancient “first magnitude” stars are actually considerably brighter than others. On the modern scale Sirius is -1.46 (a negative number), Arcturus is -0.04 (basically 0 on a 1-6 scale), Aldebaran is 0.85 and Spica is 1.04. Nor do you need to confine it to those little point-like stars in the night sky; nebulae, planets, the Sun and the Moon are on the scale too. The sun is magnitude -27. Sometimes, if you catch it just right the International Space Station is at -6. By the way, if it’s not a pointlike object, the magnitude is totaled up over the entire span of the object, so imagine the sun’s brightness in a single point (much more intense!), and that point is over ten billion times brighter than the point-source we call Sirius. When they describe the brightness of a nebula, it can seem misleadingly bright because the light from the nebula is smeared out over some patch of sky, rather than being gathered together in a point like a star is. So a nebula of a certain magnitude will always look fainter than a star of the same magnitude.
OK, so now when we see that HD 84406 is magnitude 6.7, we can judge that it’s actually not even visible to the unaided human eye! Yet they called it “bright” and even “too bright to study with Webb.”
[Note: some people (authors of books for amateur astronomers in particular) in very dark places (e.g., on the eastern slope of the “Big Island” of Hawaii) claim to be able to see clear down to magnitude 8. I’m not sure I believe them, to be honest.]
But if your eye’s pupil is 22 feet across, that actually will seem to be pretty damned bright! And that’s basically what JWST has going for it. So once they’re done using this blazingly bright star to align the mirrors, they won’t spend time looking at it any longer.
Next, “at a distance of about 260 light-years…” That’s the distance to the star, and a light year is the distance light travels in one year…about six trillion miles. 260×6 = 1560 trillion miles, that’s how far away HD 88406 is.
Next there’s this: “…The star is a sun-like G star in the Ursa Major constellation,” A “G star” is a reference to the star’s spectral class, which is to say the pattern of absorption lines in the spectrum; it so happens that G is the class the Sun is in. It’s mainly a rough shorthand for how hot the star is, and hence what color it is. Yellowish-white is the G type color. “In the Ursa Major constellation” means if you look at the Big Bear constellation, HD 88406 appears to be in it. Ursa Major includes the Big Dipper (but that’s not the whole constellation by any means). Astronomers actually drew boundaries between the 88 recognized constellations quite some time ago so every bit of sky (even apparently empty places) are part of a constellation; a star doesn’t have to be on the line drawings to be considered part of the constellation.
The constellation Ursa Major (white area). You can pick out the “Big Dipper” (also called “The Wagon” in some cultures) readily. Incidentally, a pattern like that that isn’t a complete constellation (or consists of pieces of different constellations) is called an “asterism” so the Big Dipper or Wagon is an asterism, not a constellation. Also note in the lower right the magnitude scale; the smaller the dot the fainter the star and the higher the magnitude number.
Nor must you be a star to be “in” a constellation. Galaxies, too are in constellations, it’s just a way to indicate where they appear as seen from earth. (For instance “the” Andromeda Galaxy, M31 is in the constellation of Andromeda. And, to expand on things I said earlier, M is for the Messier Catalog which has about 110 objects in it; it’s also cataloged in the New General Catalog as NGC 224. The magnitude of M31 is 3.44 but remember it’s smeared out over a certain part of the sky so it looks very faint. I can barely see it; in fact I’m never quite sure I really am seeing it. It shows up well even in tiny binoculars, though.)
Wow, there’s an awful lot behind that paragraph from NASA, ain’t there?
No Science Post This Week
Having beaten exoplanets into the ground, I’m not sure what I want to take up next. Of course you might be protesting that you just read one, but it’s largely stuff covered earlier, and it’s in what would otherwise seem a totally random order, dictated by the phrasing of a NASA blog post.
Fuck Joe Biden
Biden, you don’t even get ONE scoop of ice cream today.
(Please post this somewhere permanent, as it will continue to be true; the SOB will never deserve a scoop.)
Incidentally, I’m writing this on Friday. This morning I saw a full-sized pickup truck in the oncoming left turn lane with a forest of flags in the bed. Once he turned and drove left-to-right in front of me, I could see two American flags near the cab, and SIX “Let’s Go Brandon” flags near the tailgate. That was unusual; usually there’s a mix of FJB (only not abbreviated) and “Trump Won” and “Trump 2024” flags when someone does this.
I haven’t seen such a display in a few weeks, by the way. Even the guy at the office complex where I work with the FJB flag on his pickup seems to have removed it (or doesn’t work there any more–trucks all look alike to me from the back, and all crossovers look like cockroaches).
Obligatory PSAs and Reminders
China is Lower than Whale Shit
Remember Hong Kong!!!
Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
China is in the White House
Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.
Joe Biden is Asshoe
China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.
But of course the much more important thing to realize:
Joe Biden Didn’t Win
乔*拜登没赢 !!! Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!! Joe Biden didn’t win !!!
Get your rest, Trumpy Bear! You’re going back to the White House!!!
The Business At Hand
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
And indeed, it’s Monday…again.
But we WILL ….. RISE to the occasion!
The Rules
Boilerplate, more or less, but worth reading again and again, if only for the minor changes, and to stay out of moderation.
The bottom line is Free Speech. Theories and ideas you don’t agree with must be WELCOME here, and you must be part of that welcoming. But you do NOT need to be part of any agreement.
Try to live up to the FOUNDERS.
Value FREEDOM over COMFORT.
SO….. [ENGAGE BOILERPLATE…..]
We must endeavor to persevere to love our frenemies – even here.
Those who cannot deal with this easy requirement will be forced to jump the hoops of moderation, so that specific comments impugning other posters and violating the minimal rules can be sorted out and tossed in the trash.
In Wheatie’s words, “We’re on the same side here so let’s not engage in friendly fire.”
That includes the life skill of just ignoring certain other posters.
We do have a site – The U Tree – where civility is not a requirement. Interestingly, people don’t really go there much. Nevertheless, if you find yourself in an “argument” that can’t really stay civil, please feel free to “take it to the U Tree”. The U Tree is also a good place to report any technical difficulties, if you’re unable to report them here. Please post your comment there on one of Wolf’s posts, or in reply to one of Wolf’s comments, to make sure he sees it (though it may take a few hours).
We also have a backup site, called The Q Tree as well, which is really The Q Tree 579486807. You might call it “Second Tree”. The URL for that site is https://theqtree579486807.wordpress.com/. If this site (theqtree.com) ever goes down, please reassemble at the Second Tree.
If the Second Tree goes down, please go to The U Tree, or to our Gab Group, which is located at https://gab.com/groups/4178.
We also have some “old rules” and important guidelines, outlined here, in a very early post, on our first New Year’s Day, in 2019. The main point is not to make violent threats against people, which then have to be taken seriously by law enforcement, and which can be used as a PRETEXT by enemies of this site.
In the words of Wheatie, “Let’s not give the odious Internet Censors a reason to shut down this precious haven that Wolf has created for us.”
A Moment of Prayer
Our policy on extreme religious freedom on this site is discussed HERE. Please feel free to pray and praise God anytime and anywhere.
Thus, please pray for our real President, the one who actually won the election.
You may also pray for our enemies, perhaps that they might not fear our prayers, nor scoff at them, but simply HEED them and be blessed.
MUSICAL INTERLUDE
For your listening enjoyment, and general encouragement, we continue Wheatie’s tradition of fine music videos, shipped fresh from the seas of information by our intrepid authors.
I’ve decided to go straight for the “epic” genre tonight. Back from ROCK’N’ROLL and COUNTRY BABES to some CORE WHEATIE. But maybe with a WOLF SPIN.
Let’s start off with some EPIC VIOLIN….
Interesting, but not quite the real McCoy for classical fans.
So how about the same sort of thing, with “epic classical”?
Here you go!
And yet…. I’m still searching for something else.
Maybe a little “Epic Pop”?
AH. That’s what I wanted.
Call To Battle
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
…..and speaking of “getting out”, there are a HERD of RINOs who could be evicted this spring! Are we up to the task?
Who Are The RINOs?
There are too many – FAR to many – to detail here.
So I’ve selected just three of the RINOs who HAVE TO GO.
All of these RINOs have let us down – not by fake plots like the “Trump let us down” crap that was mouthed by “Buffalo Boy” / “QAnon Shaman” on the orders of Deep State and Woke Military, but by actually acting like DEMOCRATS and letting us down.
There will be more. This is just the beginning.
SUNDANCE has a GREAT POST about how we need to NOT just say “AWW, SHUCKS – cOvID is over – let’s just forgive the tyrants” – NO. There must be an ANSWERING for what was done.
If you see RINOs backing off and backing down, you know why. They know that they kowtowed and genuflected to the WRONG TYRANNY.
Let’s start off with the biggest loser in the bunch.
Doug Ducey – Arizona Senate
Horrible RINO Doug Ducey, governor of Arizona, who allowed the UniParty to steal the election from Trump, is no friend of the people. Term-limited to two terms, he can’t remain governor – but that doesn’t stop the UniParty from finding a new place to park his RINO azz.
The wicked OLD CROW Shanghai Mitch is pushing the election theft-protecting RAT Doug Ducey to run for the Senate, to help in Mitch’s CHINO-RINO plans.
So far, “The Deuce” hasn’t signed on, but keep an eye on this dastardly plot.
RINOs. They fight extinction….. HARD!
Greg Abbott – Texas Governor
Remember when it was Abbott vs. DeSantis for the title of “Most Trumpian governor”?
Well, look at who COVID and THE BORDER destroyed.
THE PEOPLE have a way of seeing ALL TALK and NO ACTION.
Not sure what happened to Abbott, but he has NOT been stepping up strongly.
So who has? STAY TUNED.
Mike DeWine – Ohio Governor
Mike DeWine is a nice guy, but there are millions of nice guys who are not equipped to be a wartime governor – much less fight a war against tyranny – against sinister forces – both foreign and domestic.
The enemy was quickly identified as not being COVID per se, but rather a coalition of self-interested VULTURES. Radical leftists, resurgent Soviets, European globalists, DC bureaucrats, psychotic elites, woke corporations, Big Pharma, virtue-signaling science and professional organizations, rogue intelligence agencies, the DNC, and Chinese hegemonists – and that’s before we start at the bottom with Mask Karens and vaxx pushers.
A conspiracy of instincts and interests – of people who have designs to plunder this great nation, and have already staked far too big a claim on Ohio.
MASS FORMATION PSYCHOSIS, FORMING A MASS OF NPCs.
DeWine made a HUGE mistake with his mask mandates and Amy Acton-inspired COVID buffoonery. Republicans tried to warn him as it became clear that we were being snookered by the leftists and globalists, but DeWine failed to listen.
Eventually people figured it out. Mike DeWine is John Kasich’s third term, just like Biden is Obama’s third term.
Do we REALLY want a fourth Kasich term?
UniParty Republicans have been good for business when the business was selling out America, but now that America’s gas tank is almost EMPTY, maybe it’s time for people who actually understand that profiting on a CHINA FUND isn’t actually WINNING.
Why DeWine is so beholden to the Dems and China is beyond me, but it may have something to do with Columbus, Ohio being a deep blue zone that runs a bright red state. I think the statehouse is basically OWNED by the surrounding turf, and the Democrats communists are able to control or at least influence the perceptions of everybody in Ohio politics.
In any case, DeWine is a RISK to Ohio. The left manipulates him with impunity. He’s a nice guy – he’s an easy candidate to sell to DEMOCRATS – but he’s also UTTERLY CONTROLLABLE by the DNC.
There ARE other choices.
And not just in MASKS.
Who Will Send the RINOs and DEMs Packing?
Looking at the three RINOs above, and in Ducey’s case, the office that he’s leaving, let’s see who is “chasing out the RINOs”.
Technically, it was TERM LIMITS that sent Dupey Ducey out of office, to be swooned by the OLD CROW himself, Mitch McConnell, to run for one of Arizona’s two Senate seats. There are several Republicans running for governor now. ALL of them appear solid on the issues, but the one that MAGA loves, and the left fears the most, is clearly Kari Lake.
The EVIL BITCH Katie Hobbs is running for Arizona governor on the Dem ticket because her “life out of jail” depends on it. More wicked Maricopa County cheating may keep Hobbs out of jail, too – but if anybody can beat her, it’s Kari Lake, so Hobbs is ALREADY gearing up against Lake on a “Kari is QAnon” platform.
Trust me – when Kari Lake is done with cheatin’ Katie Hobbs, Katie’s gonna look like the CAT LADY she is.
Don’t let Arizona become the next California or New Mexico. Kari Lake is the FIREWALL.
My, how Allen West has outlived the UniParty machine that always painted HIM as the whack-a-doodle – only for that machine to go along with the utter INSANITY we see coming out of Washington now.
If you're hitting the grocery store to prepare for winter weather, please just buy what you need and leave some for others!
You may have noticed empty shelves in some stores due to national supply chain issues, but there is no need to buy more than you normally would. pic.twitter.com/RcCNNa4Zj4
— DC Homeland Security & Emergency Management (@DC_HSEMA) January 15, 2022
(Hat Tip sundance)
The people who went along with all this crap need to be REMOVED.
End of story.
Yeah, Abbott ain’t Muriel Bowser or Kate Brown, but he’s no DeSantis. And speaking of which…..
Ohio – Jim Renacci or Joe Blystone
Ohio Republicans have a problem. They have three main choices for governor.
“Milquetoast” Mike DeWine, who will INEVITABLY order fresh mandates – to the ability that he can – if the Democrats and China release another virus.
“Constitutional Conservative” Joe Blystone – a “guilty pleasure” candidate who the MSM absolutely loves to inflate, then harass and scandalize, because he’s an easy target, with an utterly chaotic “Farmer Joe” campaign.
“Ohio’s DeSantis” Jim Renacci – who the media and UniParty absolutely DO NOT want anybody to realize is an option, and having been rather successful in that regard.
In my opinion, Blystone is the most like a Trump voter, but Renacci is the most like Trump. Do the math.
The media is clearly elevating Blystone to try to STOP a Renacci challenge, and keep DeWine in office, nice and controlled.
Renacci has LITERALLY promised to govern like Florida’s Ron DeSantis. Renacci also picked a very interesting Lieutenant Governor candidate to run with him – somebody very skilled with MSM-independent media messaging – an Ohio-based Christian film producer named Joe Knopp.
You may remember one of his films.
Knopp did a documentary on Trump, seen through the women around him, and in doing so, was spurred to enter politics.
Here is a great article on Knopp and how he became Renacci’s co-candidate.
Ultimately, in the general election, I will support ANY of these three against WHOEVER the Demon Dems decide to run. But for the primary, I think the smart money is on Renacci. He’s always been in the Ohio Republican machine, but he’s “new machine” – Trump era.
Blystone? In my opinion, his winning the primary leads by any of several paths to a succession of Democrat governors. And that is the LEAST of the reasons why the Democrats are behind him.
Trump was a finely tuned weapon that we aimed at the mess in Washington, and hit a bullseye.
Renacci would be the same for Ohio.
Blystone is a stinkbomb that we would enjoy throwing into the Statehouse – for ONE TERM MAX, and more likely ZERO TERMS.
Renacci has experience – as a mayor, as a Congressman, and as a businessman. I think he’s the guy.
And he can always appoint Blystone as Secretary of Cleaning Out RINOs.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Day:
stalking horse
noun
A horse used as cover by a hunter stalking game
A candidate put forward instead of any of several potentially successful candidates in order to initiate a leadership debate, gauge feelings, divide opposition, etc.
A stalking horse is a figure used to test a concept or mount a challenge on behalf of an anonymous third party. If the idea proves viable or popular, the anonymous figure can then declare its interest and advance the concept with little risk of failure. If the concept fails, the anonymous party will not be tainted by association with the failed concept and can either drop the idea completely or bide its time and wait until a better moment for launching an attack.
Used in a sentence:
In American politics, George W. Romney believed that Nelson Rockefeller had used him as a stalking horse in the 1968 Republican Party presidential primaries by promising support, then not providing it and hinting at his own entry into the campaign.
SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom
I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”
Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.
Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?
Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:
OK, with that rant out of my system…
Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit
…we can move on to the next one.
Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.
Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.
Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!
It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.
In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.
Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.
The So-Called Vax
I think I can actually make sense of the Vaxers now. (And I’m going to call it the “treatment” from here forward.)
Everything they do makes sense (from their point of view, that is), if you assume that they believe the purpose of the treatment is to prevent the recipient from infecting others. It’s not to protect the recipient from others, it’s to protect others from the recipient.
(Now it is true that an actual vax helps slow the spread of the disease. I know you can sometimes transmit a disease if vaxed, but it’s more difficult if you don’t actually don’t catch it. But I am not talking about the side-benefit of a real vax; I’m talking about what they think of THIS treatment, where, apparently the only benefit it confers is to prevent people from transmitting it.)
Under those circumstances, they can consider you selfish for not wanting to protect others. After all you refuse to take a treatment that will prevent others from catching the disease from you. And, indeed, they do consider you “selfish” and not in the positive way that Ayn Rand used the term.
But it’s yet another one of those things where ONE non-compliant individual ruins it for everyone else–at least, that’s what they think it is. ONE untreated person could infect the entire human race, because they aren’t protected from him.
Never mind that this is not what a vaccine is supposed to be doing. If you assume that the motherf*cking toilet licker in front of you shrieking about how you’re Satan Incarnate for not being jabbed believes that the sole purpose of the treatment is to prevent the recipient from spreading the disease–not to prevent the recipient from catching it–suddenly his behavior makes sense, at least based on what he believes (and you can’t expect anyone to behave in accordance with things they don’t believe).
So perhaps the best way to argue with these people is to simply point out calmly that a vaccine (their word) is supposed to protect the recipient from those with the disease [which of course we say] not prevent them from giving it to other people [identify their false premise and face it head on] they might actually feel like they’re being argued with, rather than talked past.
If you don’t confront their actual premise, arguing with them can accomplish nothing.
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.
Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.
Mozart
Sedate. The adagio (2nd movement) from his clarinet concerto.
And a bit…less sedate. Last movement of his Symphony #41 which is the last one he wrote.
(Don’t be fooled by the fact that there’s a Symphony #42, or 43, or…well up to #55 at least…as I explained last time the numbering isn’t really chronological. To the best of my knowledge he’s got at least 51 symphonies under his belt (though some are disputed), so if we were ever to renumber them, this one would be #51. But we never will renumber them; that would cause confusion for centuries.)
By the way, that sucker ends in a five part fugue. Not easy to write!
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
All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend).
Is this a break out? Platinum and palladium are up like gangbusters. Rhodium hasn’t moved much, but gold and silver are up fairly nicely (again, today they’re down, Thursday’s close was even higher).
Is the inflation of the “Fern” (Federal Reserve Note) finally manifesting?
JWST Update
The James Webb Space Telescope has succesfully deployed all 18 pieces of the primary mirror and the secondary mirror from their “stowed for launch” positions. That involved moving them half an inch (12.5mm) from where they were before, using the same actuators that will be used over the next three months for the next major phase of the mission.
I was surprised to see that NASA had slipped the L2 insertion burn a day. I didn’t think that was possible; at some point the spacecraft has reached where it needs to be to do this, and you don’t want to miss the window. Obviously, I don’t know all the details…because despite being originally scheduled for Sunday, it’s now slated for Monday.
At some point after that, I believe, they will begin the process of lining up the mirror segments with each other. They need to mimic a single parabolic mirror, and that will require them all to be re-positioned with accuracies of less than ten billionths of a meter. This will be done with the same motors that took the mirrors out of “stowed” position. That motion was a million times larger, yet the same actuators were responsible. It’s as if you had a combined brain surgery scalpel/chain saw for cutting things around the house. The mirror alignment is expected to take three months, and the impression I’ve received is that they will be done one at a time and checked with algorithms that have benefited people with certain visual impairments here on Earth (including one that I have). I have no idea how much, if any, NASA will be updating people during the process.
Meanwhile the sensors that these mirrors gather the light for, continue to cool and will also be brought on line and calibrated. We’re still looking at June for the first meaningful pictures, which will be false-color infrared pictures.
The First Exoplanets Not Orbiting Star Corpses
One Last Detection Method
There’s one more, rather rare, method of detecting extrasolar planets (or “Exoplanets” for short) and the surprising thing about this method is it actually has happened.
Occasionally we will see one (fairly close) star pass directly in front of a more distant star; the closer star will appear to be moving faster (more likely) than the distant one.
When that happens, the gravity of the nearer star bends some of the starlight from the more distant star, and that star is “gravitationally lensed.” More light from that star reaches us than would otherwise be the case and it gets brighter as the other star crosses in front of it.
This has actually been observed to happen. Furthermore, sometimes there’s a secondary “spike” in the brightness of the distant star, which we believe is due to gravitational lensing around a planet of the nearby star. It’s a lot weaker and of shorter duration than the main event, but it can be detected.
It seems incredibly unlikely that this should ever happen, but it has. A small (but significant) number of exoplanets have been detected this way. However, we’ll almost certainly never be able to confirm the planet by the same means, because the star would have to pass directly in front of yet another star for this to happen.
But that’s getting ahead of our story for tonight.
Patience Rewarded
Geoffrey WIlliam Marcy (b. 1954) was, in the early 1990s, chasing rainbows. He was having trouble with his main line of research, and was beginning to think he was a failure as an astrophysicist. So he decided to flame out with a bang…and search for exoplanets.
Remember that back then, this was something no one wanted to be caught dead trying to do; it smacked too much of looking for E.T.
That didn’t stop Marcy; he began trying to use the Doppler Shift method I described last week. And I should have been more careful describing it; it turns out it’s called the “Radial Velocity Method.”
He looked for years, and found nothing. His instruments weren’t sensitive enough to detect a small (Earth size, say, or smaller) planet, and there simply weren’t any indications of large planets, either. He had spent years looking for a signal of a large planet, in a large (and therefore long-period) orbit. This is what everyone expected. But, nothing.
But then in December, 1995, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, Swiss astronomers, reported having found an exoplanet in orbit around a star named 51 Pegasi.
“51 Pegasi” is a “Flamsteed designation” according to a system invented by John Flamsteed in the early 1700s; he essentially numbered the stars in each constellation, and 51 Pegasi is a star in the constellation Pegasus. Almost every naked-eye-visible star visible from England got a Flamsteed number. This includes stars that already had a Bayer designation (constellation name plus a Greek letter). For instance Betelgeuse, Alpha Orinonis, is also 58 Orionis according to the Flamsteed designation.
The upshot is that 51 Pegasi is a faint star, but is visible to the naked eye (barely) on a very dark night far away from city lights. In fact, it’s of almost exactly the same spectral class as our Sun; it’s a G2IV whereas our Sun is a G2V. It’s believed to be a bit older (6.1-8.1 billion years versus 4.6 billion) than our Sun.
But it’s a nice, ordinary star, maybe getting a bit long in the tooth, but a nice, ordinary star. Not some pulsar corpse of a star, made of solid neutronium, spewing massive amounts of radiation everywhere like a firehose as it spins like a top hundreds of times a second!
The planet was immediately designated 51 Pegasi b (according to that convention I complained about two weeks ago), and it fell to Marcy and his team mates to confirm it.
Which they almost immediately did.
It didn’t take long to do so. They were able to watch it orbit 51 Pegasi a couple of times, because this planet (originally dubbed Bellerophon, after the mythic rider of Pegasus, but now called Dimidium), has a 4.23 day year. So they could look for a Doppler “wobble” with that period, and they found it, immediately.This is a damned short year. Mercury is the closest planet to our Sun, and its year is 88 days.
In other words, no one expected such a short year, from any sort of planet.
But that wasn’t the biggest surprise. The planet’s mass is 0.46 Jupiter masses; in other words, it’s more massive than Saturn. It’s a gas giant!
OK, now if you remember back two weeks, I described what we expected a “typical” planetary system to look like…based on our own. And the gas giants should be far away from their stars. Not just because that’s what we see here, but because there’s simply no way they could form any closer to a star; it’s simply too hot for the ices, and the hydrogen and helium, to hang around long enough for the rocky core of such a planet to be able to capture them. Out at 5 AU, it is possible–that’s Jupiter’s distance–but at 0.05 AU, where 51 Pegasi b is, no way!
That sound you’re imagining is the sound of bullshit meters pegging in the skulls of every astronomer and astrophysicist in the world.
But here was a discovery, from Switzerland, confirmed by a team in the United States, of something that shouldn’t exist.
Well, OK…maybe the planet formed farther out and somehow migrated inwards? Seems unlikely, but it could happen. Current thinking is that much of the time, planet formation is a very chaotic process and planets, as they form, fling other planets clear out of the planetary system, to wander forever in interstellar space as “rogue” planets. Or planets can be flung into their stars. Or into some close orbit.
But it gets better: Marcy and his team may not have bagged the first planet orbiting a normal star, but they had been gathering spectroscopic data from hundreds of stars for years. When they went back and looked–this time for very short period signals instead of ones with periods of several years–they found a lot of exoplanets like 51 Pegasi b.
Within two months, Marcy’s team was able to announce planets orbiting 47 Ursae Majoris (the Big Bear) and 70 Virginis (Virgo).
47 Ursae Majoris b is at least a bit more normal. The parent star is again, very much like our Sun. The planet orbits in just under 3 years at a distance of 2.1 AU. But it is at least 2.5 times as massive as Jupiter. (Remember that masses found by the Doppler method are minimums; if the orbit is tilted with respect to our line of sight, then some of the velocity of the star induced by the planet is transverse, rather than radial and the Doppler effect is smaller than it “should” be…meaning the planet is more massive than the signal would indicate.)
That’s still a bit close to its star for a gas giant. And yes, as mentioned, it’s a bigger planet than Jupiter. How big can a planet get? Once it gets to be about 10-14 Jupiter masses, it’s considered a “brown dwarf” star since some nuclear fusion of rare isotopes of hydrogen and helium can (and does) occur.
(Today, we know there are two other planets orbiting 47 Ursae Majoris orbiting at 3.6 and 11.6 AUs. That outer planet takes almost 40 years to orbit and has the distinction of being the longest-period planet ever discovered by the radial velocity method.)
70 Virginis is a star a bit more massive than the Sun and might be starting to swell into a red giant phase. It has a planet orbiting it, about 7.5 Jupiter masses…and it’s in a 116 day orbit. Although not as extreme as 51 Pegasi b, it’s too close to be a gas giant. But the bigger surprise is that the orbit’s eccentricity is 0.4!
One of the other things we expected, based on our own Solar System, was that planets would be in almost circular orbits. A circular orbit has an eccentricity of 0.0. 0.4 starts looking distinctly oval shaped.
Red: Eccentricity 0 (a circular orbit) Green: Eccentricity 0.2 Cyan: Eccentricity 0.4 Orange: Eccentricity 0.6 Magenta: Eccentricity 0.8 All orbits have the same semimajor axis (that’s half of the width of the ellipse, measured the long way), so the planets shown have the same period. Note how much the magenta planet speeds up and slows down, though.
(Mercury is the most eccentric planetary orbit in our Solar System, at about 0.2. Which is why it was possible to spot the precession of its aphelion so easily, as figured into Einstein’s discovery of general relativity.)
A large planet in an eccentric orbit will tend to destabilize things in orbits in between its periastron (closest approach) and apoastron (furthest distance) from the star it’s orbiting. So this is yet more evidence of chaos in planetary system formation.
Many of Marcy’s exoplanets turned out to be gas giants orbiting “too close” to their stars…so we’ve given this absurd-seeming class of planets a name: we call them “Hot Jupiters.”
And they don’t seem to make sense. But they were, for a while, by far the most common kind of planet we knew of.
But…and this is an important lesson…that is because they were far and away the easiest to detect! They orbited close to their parent star (which increased the Doppler wobble) and they are massive (which increases the Doppler wobble). Remember, a nice normal planet like Earth would be undetectable by this method! So of course they didn’t find anything like Earth, because they couldn’t.
Kepler Space Telescope (2009-2018)
Fast forward to 2009. The business of looking for exoplanets is now very respectable.
And NASA launched a space telescope named Kepler, after Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), who first identified the laws of planetary orbital motion. There couldn’t be a better choice of name.
This was a very specialized instrument. It did exactly one thing. It hunted for exoplanets.
It simply stared at a patch of sky near the constellation Cygnus (the Swan, it contains the Northern Cross). It continuously stared at 150,000 stars all at once, watching their brightness.
Kepler Field Of View
What was it doing? It was applying the transit method of detecting extrasolar planets.
If you recall, this method relies on the planet crossing between us and the star it’s orbiting. This is a very unlikely configuration (the orbit could be tilted at any angle with respect to the line of sight; it has to be very, very close to crossing directly through our line of sight to see the planet move in front of its star). But if you’re looking at a hundred and fifty thousand stars all at once, you will get some hits. If there are any planets. And remember that if you can detect a planet this way, you won’t just get its mass and its orbital period, you’ll get a good estimate of its physical size…and hence you’ll be able to compute its density. And that tells you whether it’s made of rocks or gas…or ice.
In other words, we could collect a statistically meaningful sample to find out just how common exoplanets really were (many times as common as were detected, because most planets won’t transit as seen from here). The transit method is more sensitive and can detect planets closer to Earth-like if it works at all.
One vital condition of “earthlike” is the size of the planet…but another is its distance from the star it’s orbiting. We want to know if the planet is at a temperature where water can be a liquid on its surface. And that requires that it be in the “Goldilocks zone.” Not too hot, not too cold…but just right. More formally, this is called the star’s habitable zone. This is about 1 AU out for a star the size (and brightness) of our sun. Most stars are smaller and cooler and their habitable zones are closer to the star as a consequence.
The mission ran until 2018, when Kepler ran out of fuel. It was switched off on November 15th, the 388th anniversary of Johannes Kepler’s death.
And Kepler found 2,662 confirmed exoplanets–plus an additional 3600 unconfirmed candidates. Every star that seemed to have planets got a Kepler number, e.g., Kepler 1544, so the exoplanets have imaginative names like Kepler-1544 b.
In many cases multiple planets were detected orbiting a star.
A handful of these planets orbit in the habitable zone and appear to be rocky planets. In fact, Kepler-1544 b is one of them. Its radius is 1.78 times as much as Earth, and the mass is 3.84 times as much as Earth.
There are a number of these “Super Earths,” in fact, many not in their stars’ habitable zones. It’s hard, even with this method, to detect smaller planets. The planet orbits at about .54 AU with a year of 168 days. This is NOT too close to the star, however, because Kepler-1544 is a cooler star than our Sun. In fact most finds seem to have been around stars markedly cooler than the Sun.
Want to see the list? Here you go, knock yourself out.
Here’s another one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-1649 . This star appears to have both a Venus-like planet and an Earth like planet in orbit about it. The star itself is a red dwarf, so the planets orbit at less than 0.1 AU, and their years are 8 and 19 days long, respectively.
Post Kepler
Kepler did a lot of work, but others have been adding to the count.
One system that is famous right now is TRAPPIST-1. It’s 39 light years away in the direction of Aquarius, and is 9% as massive as the Sun–hence much cooler in temperature. In 2016-17, astronomers at the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope in Chile discovered that there are no less than seven terrestrial (rocky) planets in orbit about this star. Three, or maybe even four, of the planets appear to be in the habitable zone. Orbits range from 0.011 to 0.06 AUs. Remember this is a cool star. In fact, it radiates mostly in the infrared, so even at noon on the planets, it probably wouldn’t seem brighter than at sunset here on Earth, though temperatures would be closer to “normal.”
(Apparently Kepler did look at this star at one point.)
There is also a new satellite, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), launched in 2018. It has already found over four thousand candidate planets, yet to be confirmed.
Using the gravitational lensing method, in 2020 astronomers reported an earth-mass rogue planet (one that is wandering interstellar space). Apparently it crossed in front of some star when someone was looking at that star.
A device called a vortex coronagraph has allowed astronomers to directly image large, distant exoplanets more easily than before. Recall that direct imaging works for such planets (the farther out the better; the closer the star to us, the better); I’ve even seen a time lapse GIF of four planets orbiting a star. The Hale Telescope at Mount Palomar has been very useful for this sort of thing. (Seventy years old and still going strong!)
So, we’re getting better at this. I’ve pointed you to lists and some number counts, but let’s look at a diagram that might clarify things:
The higher up you go on that diagram, the bigger the planet. You can see pictures of Jupiter, Neptune and Earth at the right to give a sense of scale. To the left, planets orbit near their star. Hot Jupiters appear here. To the right, they’re further out and you will see a group labeled “Cold Gas Giants.” Then further down you see large planets that appear as though they may consist largely of water, or ices.
But the overwhelming majority of dots, mostly Kepler detections, are “Rocky planets” like our own, many, many of them much larger than Earth (which is the largest rocky planet in this planetary system). And ones very close to their star are expected to have molten lava surfaces, simply because that close to the star they get very hot.
But in the lower right, is the “Frontier.” If there are planets here, we can’t detect them yet. (And we know of some such planets, for instance Mars.)
The Future
This is very, very much a story in progress. The James Webb Space Telescope is expected to be able to not only see some of these planets, but also detect and analyze their atmospheres.
What we would be really excited to see is planets with water and an oxygen atmosphere.
Water, because that’s the one thing every life form we know of must have. Even oxygen isn’t as universally necessary. (There are bacteria that manage to live in water near boiling, and others that manage to thrive inside nuclear reactors, and of course there are plenty of anaerobic critters out there (like botulism) but nothing we know of can live without water.)
Oxygen, because if we find an oxygen atmosphere it’s almost certainly a sign that life exists on that planet.
If plants stopped photosynthesizing right now, no oxygen would be created. And the oxygen in the air would slowly combine with other things on Earth and be bound up, much like on Mars, which is largely a rusty planet. In other words, an oxygen atmosphere is not stable, because oxygen is so reactive. An oxygen atmosphere can only exist if something continually creates more oxygen. And although there are some other possibilities a strong candidate for creating oxygen would be living things. It would be by far the strongest evidence we have that life exists elsewhere. Though that doesn’t mean “ET” because that life might just be algae–pond scum in other words.
But pond scum is still life, after all no one accuses Joe Biden of being dead, just demented.
Obligatory PSAs and Reminders
China is Lower than Whale Shit
Remember Hong Kong!!!
Whoever ends up in the cell next to his, tell him I said “Hi.”
中国是个混蛋 !!! Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!! China is asshoe !!!
China is in the White House
Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.
Joe Biden is Asshoe
China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.
But of course the much more important thing to realize:
Joe Biden Didn’t Win
乔*拜登没赢 !!! Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!! Joe Biden didn’t win !!!
