“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
incompossible
adjective
incapable of coexisting
not capable of joint existence
incompatible
inconsistent
not mutually possible
mutually exclusive in logic
Used in a sentence
Leibniz’s well-known thesis that the actual world is just one among many possible worlds relies on the claim that some possibles are incompossible, meaning that they cannot belong to the same world.
Question: Is mRNA vaccine technology incompossible with “gold standard” treatment, if it is not part of the “Generation Gold Standard” universal vaccine platform for “pandemic” viruses?
I remain surprised that nobody in public is talking about mRNA technology being EXCLUDED from the new vaccine platform being promoted by HHS and NIH.
Is this due to the fact that, if nobody ever talks about the elephant in the room, then nobody will talk about it when it leaves the room? If so, then strategic opportunities abound!
Next Question…..
Is autoimmune disease in COVID-vaccinated kids the end of the shots for kids? First, what’s happening…..
BREAKING: HHS to END COVID-19 Vaccine Recommendations for Kids & Pregnant Women
With over 600,000 estimated COVID shot deaths in the U.S., HHS moves to roll back CDC guidance—amid mounting criminal referrals, legislative efforts, and growing calls for a complete moratorium.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration—under the leadership of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—is preparing to end routine CDC recommendations that pregnant women, teenagers, and children receive COVID-19 vaccines. This decision, expected to be announced in the coming days, represents a long-overdue departure from current ill-advised CDC guidance, which still urges vaccination for everyone aged six months and older, including during pregnancy.
Well, take a look at this. Is this why?
TL;DR / BLUF – COVID vaccines, not COVID, cause autoimmune problems in kids, and they do it about 9 months later, on average, thus escaping scrutiny.
NEW STUDY: COVID-19 Vaccines Increase Risk of Long-Term Autoimmune Disease in Children — Not the Virus
A massive study of 493,705 children found a 23% increased risk of developing autoimmune disease after COVID-19 vaccination, with symptoms emerging about 9 months after injection.
During the COVID-19 pandemic there were reports of an increased association between COVID 19 and various autoimmune diseases (AID) in adults. This study aims to investigate the incidence of AIDs in children before and during the pandemic and explores potential links to SARS-CoV-2 vaccination.
Methods
We analyzed 493,705 anonymized medical records from Maccabi Healthcare Services, Israel’s second-largest healthcare provider, to study AID incidence during 2014–2022. The study period was divided into three phases: two pre-pandemic phases of equal duration (A and B) and a pandemic phase (C).
Results
Of 4,596 (0.9%) patients diagnosed with an AID in the cohort, incidence rates were 0.9% for Group A (2014–2016), 1.0% for Group B (2017–2019), and 0.9% for Group C (2020–2022) (p = 0.13). Logistic regression showed no significant differences in overall autoimmune disease incidence between the pre-COVID and COVID periods. Notably, specific conditions like celiac disease showed reduced incidence in Group A (OR 0.8309, p = 0.0071) while arthritis was significantly more common in Groups A and B. Additionally, COVID-19 diagnosis was not significantly associated with increased autoimmune disease risk (HR 1.092, p = 0.491); however, receiving at least one COVID vaccine was linked to higher risk (HR 1.2323, p = 0.0033).
Conclusion
Our findings suggest that the overall incidence of new-onset autoimmune diseases in children remained relatively stable during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study indicates a potential association between COVID-19 vaccination and an increased risk of developing autoimmune diseases, necessitating further research to elucidate long-term effects in the pediatric population.
Suddenly the multiple cases of “sudden new autoimmune problems” among my vax-friendly liberal friends and neighbors make a lot of sense.
Is photonic quantum computing the way? Maybe so!
Don’t feel bad if this sounds complicated. Even the following 2021 explanation is not easy stuff.
Yep, Kurt has noticed that lots of people are getting twanging schadenböners.
And you do not have to be male to get this kind of böner.
Hat tip to Scott (I think–if it wasn’t Scott it was 4GodAndCountry) for this video, which implies a LOT of schadenböners in our future.
[WOLF EDIT – for whatever reason this YouTube video no longer embeds, even as the shortened URL (below), so I have converted both URLs to links which open up in a new tab.]
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 spent the last two days below $3200 before managing to claw its way just over that line at the very end of the day Friday. The current lower prices are attributed to less economic fears with respect to ChinaIsAsshoe.
Silver is now worth more than one percent of gold. I saw an interesting quip about it; it gets the worst of both its worlds. When the equity markets are panicking, silver is seen as an industrial metal…so it goes down. When the equity markets are booming, silver is seen as a precious metal so people want to sell off and put their money in stocks, so it goes down.
I remember back when Canada helped us out with three embassy people in Iran (1979) a Canadian comedian being featured on Nightline; he said that our two dollars were tied together. “When your dollar goes down, our dollar goes down. When your dollar goes up, our dollar goes down” said the Canadian.
Similarly it seems that gold and silver are tied together; when gold goes down, silver goes down, when gold goes up, silver goes down.
Buying opportunity for the white metal?
*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.
It Didn’t Start With Wegener
And now for the one at least some people have been waiting for.
It really started with Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598) a cartographer from what was, back then, the Spanish Netherlands–which is to say he was a Dutchman who had a Spaniard for a king. He was the publisher of the first modern atlas in 1570 so he knew what the continents looked like as much as anyone did then. Here is a map from that atlas:
He published a book on ancient geography in 1587, the Thesaurus Geographicus, then revised it in 1596. Apparently, in that 1596 edition he described America (regarded as one continent back then, not two) as “torn away from Europe and Africa … by earthquakes and floods.” Furthermore: “The vestiges of the rupture reveal themselves, if someone brings forward a map of the world and considers carefully the coasts of the three [continents].”
This is the first known mention of the continents possibly having rifted apart. And it was totally forgotten until the late 20th century.
However, other people had the same thought, among them Theodor Christoph Lilienthal (1756), Alexander von Humboldt (1801 and 1845), Antonio Snider-Pellegrini (1858), and others.
We have an illustration by Pellegrini:
There were arguments among geologists over just how much the Earth had changed culminating in the mid 1800s. I can’t write this better than wikipedia did, so I’ll just paste it in:
In 1889, Alfred Russel Wallace remarked, “It was formerly a very general belief, even amongst geologists, that the great features of the earth’s surface, no less than the smaller ones, were subject to continual mutations, and that during the course of known geological time the continents and great oceans had, again and again, changed places with each other.” He quotes Charles Lyell as saying, “Continents, therefore, although permanent for whole geological epochs, shift their positions entirely in the course of ages.” and claims that the first to throw doubt on this was James Dwight Dana in 1849.
In his Manual of Geology (1863), Dana wrote, “The continents and oceans had their general outline or form defined in earliest time. This has been proved with regard to North America from the position and distribution of the first beds of the Lower Silurian, – those of the Potsdam epoch. The facts indicate that the continent of North America had its surface near tide-level, part above and part below it (p.196); and this will probably be proved to be the condition in Primordial time of the other continents also. And, if the outlines of the continents were marked out, it follows that the outlines of the oceans were no less so”. Dana was enormously influential in America—his Manual of Mineralogy is still in print in revised form—and the theory became known as the Permanence theory.
The Challenger expedition, 1872-1876, showed that rivers dumped their silt–eroded from continents–onto continental shelves, not the deep ocean, which made it appear that oceans were permanent features, not something that could “change places” with the continents.
Eduard Seuss (1831-1914) proposed a supercontinent “Gondwana” (1885) consisting of pretty much all of today’s southern continents, plus India. In fact it was named after the Sanskrit name for a location in India. He also noted that the Mediterranean, Black and Caspian seas, and Indian Ocean may once have been connected; that he named the Tethys Ocean (1893) (it’s often called the Tethys Sea). But Seuss was not a proponent of continental drift. He believed that South America and Africa (and the other present day pieces of Gondwana) had been separated by the land subsiding and being flooded to form oceans. Presumably the dry areas that used to be the Tethys are the result of land that rose at some time in the past.
He brought evidence: Glossopteris (Gk: Tongue fern) was a widely distributed genus of plant across all of the present day southern continents, New Zealand, and India. It lived in the Permian Period (298.8 – 251.902 Ma). [Yowza, thousand year precision for the end of the Permian and Paleozoic!] They appeared to have died out during the Great Dying, the biggest mass extinction event since multicellular life began. (Compared to this, the end of the dinosaurs pales.)
Otto Ampferer (1875-1947) was a geologist who believed that mountains were uplifted by convection in the asthenosphere.
In fact, Ampferer is the real founder of what is called the “modern” view of continental drift, since a lot of his work was done in the 1900s (i.e., the 0s of the 20th century). He even largely won the argument about convection and mountains by 1906–and those concepts would eventually play heavily in modern plate tectonics theory.
Roberto Mantovani between 1889-1909 proposed that the continents had rifted because the Earth had expanded. In other words the Atlantic was basically a stretch mark. (This has long since been recognized to be…well, frankly, ridiculous though Wikipoo just says “now discredited.”)
Frank Bursey Taylor in 1910 proposed “continental creep” caused by tidal forces. He was among the first to realize that continents’ motions could have a lot to do with raising mountains, such as the Himalayas being formed as India and Asia came together. [We now know that India is still moving into Asia; the Himalayas continue to grow as a consequence.]
Then Alfred Wegener (1880-1930) came along, and published in 1912, January 6th of that year to be precise, in a presentation to the German Geological Society. He proposed that all continents, not just the southern ones, had once formed one supercontinent which he called “Pangaea” which had broken up into pieces that had since drifted to their current locations.
Wegener brought a lot of evidence, rock formations from the Permian or Triassic that matched up but were now on separate continents, for instance.
Wegener considered Taylor’s ideas the most similar to his own, and in the mid 20th century for a time you’d hear the term “Taylor-Wegener hypothesis.”
Wegener actually invented the term “continental drift.”
However, despite the evidence which might seem compelling, there was one gigantic fly in the ointment.
Wegener couldn’t explain how this could have happened. What force could possibly plow the continents through oceanic crust? No one had any idea. And unfortunately, this idea was deemed more ridiculous than having to find some other explanation for Wegener’s evidence. (And to be honest, given what they knew, geologists were right to reject it. Continents plowing through ocean floor crust was absurd, and it still is.) Another issue is that he estimated the speed at 2.5 meters per year. This was (and still would be) considered implausibly high, and is about a hundred times faster than what we actually measure today.
Arthur Holmes (1890-1965) in 1931 championed continental drift, when it was profoundly unfashionable. We have him to thank for radiometric dating, but also for suggesting mantle convection as a mechanism. This was the first hint of sea floor spreading.
In 1947, a team led by Maurice Ewing showed that there was a rise in the central Atlantic ocean, based on soundings laboriously collected up to then. They were also the first to note that ocean beds were essentially basaltic rock, unlike continents which were mostly granites. Over the next years, an entire system of mid-oceanic ridges all over the world was found.
Meanwhile, we had noticed magnetic anomalies in the ocean floor, using devices originally designed in World War II to detect submarines. As more and more data was collected, we began to realize that these weren’t “anomalies” at all, but rather formed a pattern. Here’s Wikipedia again:
In a series of papers published between 1959 and 1963, Heezen, Dietz, Hess, Mason, Vine, Matthews, and Morley collectively realized that the magnetization of the ocean floor formed extensive, zebra-like patterns: one stripe would exhibit normal polarity and the adjoining stripes reversed polarity.[58][59][60] The best explanation was the “conveyor belt” or Vine–Matthews–Morley hypothesis. New magma from deep within the Earth rises easily through these weak zones and eventually erupts along the crest of the ridges to create new oceanic crust. The new crust is magnetized by the Earth’s magnetic field, which undergoes occasional reversals. Formation of new crust then displaces the magnetized crust apart, akin to a conveyor belt – hence the name.[61]
Without workable alternatives to explain the stripes, geophysicists were forced to conclude that Holmes had been right: ocean rifts were sites of perpetual orogeny at the boundaries of convection cells.[62][63] By 1967, barely two decades after discovery of the mid-oceanic rifts, and a decade after discovery of the striping, plate tectonics had become axiomatic to modern geophysics.
The plate tectonics revolution is regarded as having occurred between 1957 and 1967.
We now had our mechanism. The continents don’t plow through the ocean floor. Rather, the ocean floor behaves like a conveyor belt; the oceans spread and push the continents ahead of them.
[Technically that’s not quite right–it’s more accurate to say that the ocean floors are pulled along behind the continents–but I’ll have to defer that explanation a bit. Suffice it to say continents don’t plow through ocean floors.]
And it’s not called “continental drift” any more, it’s called “plate tectonics.” Because we have come to realize that the crust of the Earth consists of distinct plates which move around, sometimes spreading from each other at mid-ocean ridges, in other places one plate is being submerged under another.
What does this word “tectonics” actually mean? It’s ultimately from Greek tektonikos, “pertaining to building.” [As an aside, in the original Greek, Jesus is described as a “tekton”, someone who made things with his hands. Not necessarily a carpenter in particular.] As for plates, here are the sixteen principal plates:
Note that most boundaries are in the ocean. Boundaries are drawn in different colors for a reason. Deep red are “spreading centers”–i.e., places with a ridge where magma is surfacing to make ocean crust. The slightly lighter red (e.g., through east Africa) is an “extension zone” though unless the distinction has something to do with mid-ocean ridges, I can’t figure out what the difference is. In both cases spreading is happening. Here’s what they look like in general (this diagram seems to be represending one on a continent, like the rift running through East Africa).
Blue is a subduction zone, where one plate is an ocean floor, and the other is a continent; the ocean floor is subducting under the continent. Notice these on the edges of South America, between the northern pacific and the North American plate at Alaska and the Aleutians; also between the Juan de Fuca plate and the US’s Pacific Northwest, and running through Indonesia and Polynesia. And right through the Mediterranean, too.
What do these places all have in common? Volcanoes!! As it happens, volcanoes are almost always caused by subduction zones. Notable exceptions are Hawaii and Yellowstone. There are also some volcanic islands on mid oceanic ridges, like Iceland, St. Helena, Ascension, Tristan de Cunha in the Atlantic Ocean. Volcanoes form along subduction zones as the ocean plate melts and basaltic magma rises, eventually forcing its way to the surface.
[Please note, Pat, it’s “subduction” not “seduction,” no matter how volcanic those seductions can be when handled correctly.]
The Pacific “Ring of Fire” is now explained; the Pacific ocean is shrinking as continents encroach on it. My childhood book on volcanoes was out of date just a couple of years before I read it.
Subduction zones tend to have the worst earthquakes, e.g., Chile 1960, Alaska 1964, Sumatra 2004, Tohoku 2011 (Fukushima), Kamchatka 1952. These are the five strongest earthquakes in recorded history and all were at least a Richter 9. [Three more earthquakes estimated to be over 9.0 happened in Chile before we had good instruments to measure them; and two more in Kamchatka. A few more with estimated ranges straddling 9.0 happened in those locations, plus one more in Sumatra. Plus, one more, in 1700 in the Pacific Northwest. (This should worry people who live there. A similar quake there now would be the worst natural disaster in US history.)]
One more thing to note about subduction zones. The ocean floor almost always subducts below the continent. Why? Because the ocean floor is mafic or basaltic, and that makes it denser than the continents (I told you the greater density of mafic rocks would turn out to be important). Another detail related to density is the fact that the slope up to a mid-oceanic ridge tends to be fairly gradual, which is to say the ocean drops away from the ridge at a shallow slope. That too is an effect of density; the inside of the ocean floor “slab” is hotter nearer the ridge; that makes the rock take up more volume (solids expand when hot), which makes it less dense; it rides higher on the mantle than does the cooler ocean floor farther away from the ridges (near the continents).
Purple boundaries (note the one along the northern edge of India) are where two continents are colliding; this forces mountains upwards. That diagram above is technically of this case rather than an ocean floor subducting, but the idea is the same. (I don’t know why they don’t show sea floor diagrams in the Wikipoo article, unless they think the “big picture” diagram further down the page covers it. That diagram, alas has other stuff in it I want to cover later, so I didn’t use it; I found a different diagram below
Orange and green boundaries are “dextral” and “sinistral” transverse faults, respectively. These are places where the plates move sideways at the boundary, no encroaching. “Dextral” means if you are standing on one of the two plates looking at the other, it appears to be moving to the right. Sinistral, means the apparent motion is to the left. The San Andreas fault is the most famous of these, and is dextral.
Putting convergent and divergent boundaries together you get something like this: You can think of the ocean as the Pacific, up near Seattle. The plate at the far left is the Pacific plate, the one in the middle, that is subducting, is the Juan de Fuca, and the continent is North America.
Not shown is North America’s eastern edge, where it continues down into an ocean floor; the floor of the Atlantic is attached to the continents surrounding it. Yes, the ocean floor between the mid-Atlantic ridge and the US is part of the North American plate. I found a much smaller diagram of the Atlantic between South America and Africa, which is essentially the same:
Iceland sits directly on the Atlantic ridge, which means part of the island is on the North American plate, and part is on the European plate.
Iceland has a national park, Þingvellir Park (As near as I can tell that’s pronounced “Thing-vet-leer”), and there is actually a rift through the park; in some places it’s filled with water and you can scuba dive in it and put one hand on each side, touching Europe and America.
If you think about it, there are a couple of predictions this theory makes that can be checked.
First, we should be able to measure the motion, and indeed we can. The following is a collection of measurements (that seem to line up along great circles), the longer the arrow the faster the motion.
Second: Ocean floor should be younger than continental rock, because ocean floor is of recent manufacture. And indeed this turns out to be the case; the oldest ocean floor rock we have ever tested (other than the occasional bits of ocean crustal rocks that end up on top of continents) is about 200 million years old, age established by radiometric dating and absolutely no surprise to anyone in the field. Even the pacific floor is new; there are “midocean” ridges making fresh ocean floor in the Pacific, too. (They’re closer to the Americas than to Asia but they are there.)
OK, so the next few times I cover this in more detail.
But here’s a couple of parting shots.
Other worlds have “tectonics” that rework the surface, but not necessarily plate tectonics. Io, for instance just has a lot of volcanic activity and no plates. Venus probably has great episodes of volcanism every few hundred million years (based on counting how many craters it has unit area; a way of dating planetary and moon surfaces). Even ice moons like Europa and Enceladus can have tectonics of some sort or another.
I mentioned that the Atlantic is spreading at about 2.5 centimeters a year–this is based on GPS measurements. It’s commonly compared to how fast your fingernails grow.
How long has this been going on? 2.5 centimeters is an inch; so the Atlantic widens by a foot every 12 years, or a mile every 60,000 years (I’m rounding here because the original yearly number is itself not very precise). The Atlantic is very roughly 3,000 miles wide, so that should be…180,000,000 years to have attained its current width. And wouldn’t you know, that’s the early Jurassic, about when the rocks indicate the split happened between South America and Africa based on dating those rocks. So we have two totally different lines of evidence pointing to roughly the same time for that event.
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
placeholder
noun
a dummy post on The Q Tree
other definitions we don’t care about
still more definitions we don’t care about
Used in a sentence
A placeholder is not the same as the command to place Holder under arrest.
Shown in a picture
Shown in a video
MUSIC!
Placeholder!
THE STUFF
Well, it looks like we have a placeholder for a nuclear clock!
Thorium. Useful stuff.
Just sayin’!
And remember…….
Until victory, have faith!
And trust the big plan, too!
And as always….
ENJOY THE SHOW
W
NOTE:
What you see above is essentially the “Monday Placeholder”. If you see nothing more, and no different, then you are seeing the placeholder.
If I have time and the inclination, I may swap in a new Word of the Week, some new videos, and possibly even an added topic.
Today, I will leave the placeholder alone, for reference, but I will add a topic. Thanks!
W
The Strategy I See Behind the New “Universal Vaccine Platform”
Some of you have to be asking yourselves why Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seems to have gone from being an opponent of vaccines, to being a proponent of them. I will try to explain.
To begin with, it helps to read the following document (H/T to PAVACA for producing these images). You can use this link, or the images below it.
HHS, NIH Launch Next-Generation Universal Vaccine Platform for Pandemic-Prone Viruses
It is hard for me to put into words, how much of a change this really is. But let me give you a quick “TL;DR” list of the big-ticket items.
Big Pharma is completely cut out of this platform – it’s US government owned and driven.
The vaccines are designed to be resistant to evolution of the pathogens they protect against. The vaxxes themselves are immune to “scariants”.
The vaccines completely abandon mRNA, cDNA, recombinant antigen, spike protein, lipid nanoparticle, and all genetic and related technologies.
The vaccines abandon Fauci’s always-failing strategy of targeting current variants, and instead seek to handle both current and future variants.
The result is fewer and less frequent shots. The better the shot, the more this is true.
The vaccines must pass rigorous safety standards, or otherwise fail to be approved.
The vaccines change direction and focus, from smaller subunits to whole-virus immunity.
The vaccines are potentially capable of inhibiting transmission.
IMO this is not just about changing the vaccines – it’s about changing minds in government science.
Most scientists, sadly, are sheep. They have neither the courage nor the inclination to challenge anything in the current scientific narrative – particularly as reported by our toxic media. If the media says “most scientists believe X”, then most scientists think this is true, and won’t bother to check, much less actively disagree.
The evil media has trained us all to believe certain myths.
There will be more and more exotic diseases coming at us from nature
There will need to be more and more vaccines, and more and more injections of them
Vaccines get better by using newer technology, not by working better for people
Vaccine hesitancy is a bad thing, and must be prevented at all costs
Vaccines are all safe, and rumors that any are bad, are dangerous
Apparently, despite the iron fist of Faucism, somebody in NIAID was thinking in ways that lead in the opposite direction from where Pfizer was taking us. I suspect that these forces sat tight, waited for “reinforcements to arrive” (Trump, RFKJ, and Dr. Jay), and had their proposal working up the chain of command as soon as Trump won.
Will this vaccine approach work? IMO it will work better than mRNA. Whether it works well enough to pass Kennedy’s new standard, based on comparison to placebos and true controls, is another question.
For the sake of those who still want vaccines, I hope so.
I suspect that these vaccines will be safer than mRNA, but not completely safe – particularly with a pathogen like COVID. As long as these vaccines are not mandated, I’m OK with their existence. In any case, the vaccines will have to prove themselves safe and effective.
We should all remember Deplorable Patriot and Wheatie as we push forward with the fight. This is NOT over by any means.
Fight! Fight! Fight! Because JUSTICE must be served on those who foisted the “Vax” shit on us. And for all the other things they have done to this country.
“Don’t Tread On Me,” it says. You failed to pay attention to this advice. You went out of your way to do the opposite. You chose to rub our faces in it, imprison those who dared complain, and even to kill our people. Now you shall pay just a tiny fraction of the real price, Ratfuckers.
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
RINO scum. Like Murkowski and Collins.
That’s OK. We go around ’em for now.
January 6 Tapes Reminder
OK…I’m sick and tired of reminding you to no effect, Speaker Johnson, so I’ll do the more emotionally satisfying thing and call you a cowardly, lying, fraudulent sack of diarrhetic monkey shit.
Johnson, you are a cowardly, lying, fraudulent sack of diarrhetic monkey shit!
A Caution
Just remember…we might replace the RINO candidates. (Or we might not. The record is mixed even though there is more MAGA than there used to be.) But that will make no difference in the long run if the party officials, basically the Rhonna McDaniels (or however that’s spelled–I suspect it’s RINO), don’t get replaced.
State party chairs, vice chairs, secretaries and so on, and the same at county levels, have huge influence on who ultimately gets nominated, and if these party wheelhorses are RINOs, they will work tirelessly to put their own pukey people on the ballot. In fact I’d not be surprised if some of our “MAGA” candidates are in fact, RINO plants, encouraged to run by the RINO party leadership when they realized that Lyn Cheney (and her ilk) were hopelessly compromised as effective candidates. The best way for them to deal with the opposition, of course, is to run it themselves.
Running good candidates is only HALF of the battle!
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.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Paper Spot Prices
All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend). (Note: most media quotes are for the bid…the price paid by the market makers, not the ask, which is what they will sell at. I figure the ask is more relevant to people like us who wish we could afford to buy these things. In the case of gold the difference is usually about a dollar, for the PGMs the spread is much wider.)
Gold managed to push up into the 3430s (at least) on Monday/Tuesday night/morning. Apparently the Chinese markets were closed May 1-5. The Chinese markets tend to boost gold while the European and US markets push it down.
That said gold was back down to the low 3300s by Thursday evening, and seems to have settled into that range once again.
*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.
Leading Up To The Big Revolution In Geology
As of the late 1950s geology had made tremendous strides in about two and a half centuries. Geologists had come to understand a lot about rocks, how they were made, how they endured (or didn’t), and had used this understanding not just to reconstruct a lot of Earth’s past, but also life‘s past.
But a lot was missing, too. We knew, for instance, that land rose and fell; we had obvious ancient sea floor in what is today nosebleed-high mountain ranges. And we knew that it wasn’t because the water had risen, but rather that the land had risen afterwards.
What we didn’t know was why. Why was terrain being uplifted from time to time?
Geologists had won their argument with the astronomers over how old the Earth had to be, but that win left them with another aspect of this problem. If the Earth were indeed hundreds of millions of years old (as, by about 1900 at the latest they figured must be the case), then why did we have continents at all? They should have eroded away long ago!
Another mystery was volcanoes. They happened a lot in some places, and not in others. Why? No idea. I had access to an outdated book on volcanoes (probably written in the late 1950s) as a kid in the early 1970s. It asked this question and gave no answer beyond, essentially, “we don’t know.”
Today we know the answers to all of this. And indeed looking back on it, the geologists who lived through what can only be described as an Awakening (and yes, some of them are still alive), realize that geology made no sense without the answer. Oh, the little stuff made sense; mountains erode, volcanoes erupt, streams silt up, until you dug a bit deeper and realized there was no rhyme or reason to it when you tried to put together a big picture. Why were the mountains there to erode? Why weren’t volcanoes in New York State?
There really wasn’t a big picture.
And then, in not much more time than it takes for a Trump attorney general to be confirmed, there was a big picture!
What a glorious time it was to be a geologist!
I’m not guessing at this; I’ve heard many of them talk.
Plate tectonics brings order and sense to geology. Much like the periodic table brings order and sense to chemistry, gravitation brings sense to astronomy, and evolution brings sense to biology.
(You might want to argue with that last one. You’d be wrong. I’ve heard biologists talk too. Biology literally would make no sense–it would be a jumble of miscellaneous facts–without evolution to tie it together.)
So this is going to be the story of how we came to recognize that plate tectonics exists, and how it works. And it will probably take several posts to cover.
But first…some background. (You should have seen that coming.)
Igneous Rocks
There are three broad classes of rocks, igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. (I hope this is a refresher to you, as I’ve covered this before.) Igneous rocks were certainly the first kind to exist, since those are the kind of rock you get when lava or magma cool and solidify. Then there is sedimentary rock, formed from bits of other rocks (of any of these types), that erode, are transported downhill, and (usually) end up at the bottom of a body of water where they become sandstone, or limestone, and things like that. Metamorphic rock results when any rock is subjected to high temperatures and pressures and undergoes chemical and structural changes without going all the way to melting and re-solidifying. Marble and flint are examples of metamorphic rock.
We’re going to concentrate on igneous rocks.
Magma and lava are typically mixtures of different chemicals, and as they cool the chemicals crystalize (and become minerals). You can tell how quickly an igneous rock cooled; if it cooled very slowly you get large crystals; if it cooled quickly you may have very small crystals, perhaps small enough you need a microscope to study them. In extreme cases there may be no crystals at all and the rock is considered a volcanic glass, like obsidian.
(A rock with crystals large enough to be seen by the naked eye is “phaneritic” while others are “aphaneritic.” As a side note to this side note, “phaner-” also appears in the name “Phanerozoic,” which is a hint as to where it got its name; the Phanerozoic is the eon where life was big enough to see. Though that’s a bit of a misnomer now since the Ediacaran period, right before/below the Cambrian and thus not in the Phanerozoic eon, also had life big enough to see. But that discovery post-dates the naming of the Phanerozoic.)
Lava being out on the surface cools quickly and generally has very small crystals, whereas intrusive rocks (like dikes and sills), and gigantic bodies of magma called “batholiths” are underground and cool very slowly; leading to big crystals. In fact, geologists will distinguish between extrusive (lava) and intrusive (the others) igneous rocks as the “mode of occurrence.”
There is also, independent of that, another distinction, a chemical one. Magmas in general are mostly silicon, oxygen, aluminum, sodium, potassium, calcium, iron and magnesium; these all go together to form silicate minerals, which make up at least 90 percent of all igneous rocks. Silicate minerals are made up largely of silica, SiO2 (as I tried to explain the one time I dared to take up mineralogy), but not entirely. Different magma bodies have different proportions of these materials.
Felsic rocks have the most silica, and end up consisting mostly of quartz and feldspar, with other things thrown in like mica. The dividing line seems to be 63% or more silica makes it a felsic rock. And the result is either granite (intrusive, slow cooling from magma) or rhyolite (extrusive, quick-cooling from lava, fine-grained). These rocks are usually fairly light in color, and have a relatively low density compared to the other sorts of igneous rocks. (That low density has very important consequences, so don’t forget it!)
Below, some of the minerals that appear in felsic rock, plus a picture of some granite from an obscure location that I picked totally at random (right).
Quartz
Various minerals of the feldspar family
Mica
Pikes Peak granite
Intermediate rocks are 52-63% silica, and the intrusive version is diorite while the extrusive one is andesite. You might ask, “intermediate between what, and what?” Well, intermediate between felsic and…
Mafic rocks are 45% to 52% silica. The intrusive, coarse-grained type is gabbro, while the fine grained type is basalt. In general, these rocks will have a lot of pyroxenes, olivines, and calcic plagioclase in them.
diopside, a pyroxene
olivine
Basaltic lava, still cooling
Anything less than 45% silica is ultramafic. The coarse grained, intrusive example is peridotite, while the fine grained ultramafic rocks are komatiite.
If you do a deep dive there are further and further fine-grained (sorry. OK, no I’m not) ways of classifying igneous rocks.
The average adult has heard of granite. He may have heard of basalt. The other six broad kinds of igneous rock are probably foreign to him.
Most lava flows are basaltic in nature. Most rocks that form deep underground (known as plutons) inside mountain ranges are granitic. So there’s both a compositional and textural distinction between lava and plutonic rock. At least, usually. The exceptions are notable when they happen.
(Every once in a while I hear a tourist opine that Pikes Peak must surely be a volcano. No…it’s made of granite–see the picture above–much like the Appalachians. Granite doesn’t happen in volcanoes (or if it does, it’s very rare). Tour guides must be really tired of this one.)
The Earth’s Crust
(More background)
The Earth has a layered structure. The below diagram shows (lower left) to scale, and the notional “pie wedge” at upper right is not to scale. (We have some notion of these layers because we can “watch” seismic waves curving and refracting at the boundaries between the layers. The liquid outer core, in fact, blocks some kinds of seismic waves completely. I have described this before.)
The crust is on average 35 kilometers thick (out of a total of 6371 (average) or 6378 (max) kilometers to the center of the Earth). There is also the lithosphere, the top 60 or so km of the Earth (note that the crust is part of the lithosphere). The mantle lies directly underneath the crust and goes down 2900 km or so; it’s divided into an upper and lower layer about 660 km down.
Most of the mantle is solid but does flow over time; the very topmost layer of it is a lot more rigid which is why it is grouped with the crust into the lithosphere.
In fact the boundary between crust and mantle is where there is a sudden shift in the speed of seismic waves; this is the Mohorovičić discontinuity which for some reason I can’t fathom gets abbreviated to “Moho.”
In some cases upper mantle material has ended up on the Earth’s surface, and it’s generally 55% olivine, 35% pyroxene and 5-10% calcium oxide and aluminum oxide minerals such as plagioclase, spinel, and garnet. In other words, the mantle is mafic. It’s also much more dense than the Earth’s crust, which means that over time the crust is likely to stay “up there” essentially floating on the mantle.
One other thing that the diagram does is to distinguishes between “continental” and “oceanic” crust. Other than the fact that the oceanic crust is a lot thinner than the continental crust, does it really make a difference? Both are largely silicate, but it turns out the ocean floors are, underneath the sediment layer, largely made of basalt, diabase, and gabbro. In other words the ocean floors are mafic. They’re also only about 5-10 km thick.
Continental crust on the other hand is mostly felsic and can be anywhere from 25-70 km thick. (Note that the continental crust includes the continental shelves; geologically speaking they’re part of the continents, not part of the oceans.) Some really thick areas of continental crust are the Tibetan plateau and the Altiplano next to the Andes, where the crust can be as thick as 80 km.
So continental crust is lighter and thicker than oceanic crust. One would think the composition would be about the same everywhere, and likely less difference in thickness too, but no we have these pronounced differences and it turns out we now know it’s for a very good reason.
Note that the difference in thickness is greater than the distance from the top of mount Everest to the ocean floor, This implies that where there are continents the continental crust drops further into the Earth than the oceanic crust.
In fact it ought to remind you of icebergs, floating on top of a liquid medium with with a large portion beneath the surface, or sticking into the mantle layer.
I recall reading somewhere (I can’t confirm it) that if (say) ten feet were to erode off the top of Pikes Peak, then (given a lot of time) the mountain would “bob” up about nine feet for a net loss of elevation of a whole foot. Clearly to erode the entire thing away (it sticks up about 8000 feet above the surrounding terrain), 80,000 feet or sixteen miles would have to erode away–not just 8000 feet.
Below is a diagram with contour lines of the thickness of Earth’s crust.
And now, with today’s ramble plus prior ones, you have the background to understand the story of the great geological revolution.
This man, making Christmas calls from the White House, believes the world is a sphere. And he has even flown around it! So has our beautiful FLOTUS, who happens to be his wife!
Truth and common sense must be valued by us, as individuals, in order to lastingly disempower the authoritarian fake news media. This includes the perniciously smarmy science media, which never answers for its errors and lies. I believe that the media has been responsible not only for leftist pathologies like scientism, medical fascism, and radical gender ideology, but also for reactionary movements like modern flat Earth, rejection of all medicine, and Biblical geological literalism.
Just as Wheatie’s Stormwatch Monday Open Thread was created as a place for people to openly express their thoughts and opinions, so, too, is this Thank God Thursday Open Thread, where honest but civil discussion of all topics is encouraged. This thread is also to be known as Theistic Evolution Thursdays, due to the author’s expected “pontification” about his scientific, religious, and political opinions. You are welcome to pontificate back! Free speech matters!
Please label all AI-generated content as being such, unless it is patently obvious (e.g., humorous AI images). It is important that we as individuals not begin to pretend that socially derived artificial intelligence is actually our own, as this form of stealthy social information averaging and feedback would be one more pretense and deception between people, in service of stupid Marxist socialism, and of those who wish to substitute their communally protected lies for actual truth.
The source of alleged truth matters, not for the truth itself, but for validation.
And yes, it’s THURSDAY…again.
And that’s it. We’re done stealing from Wheatie.
OK – maybe her rules need to be posted.
No food fights.
No running with scissors.
If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
Other rules may be derivable from these, and that conjecture is left for discussion.
If there is nothing beyond the “W” below, then this is a placeholder. For health reasons, I can’t always post a timely opinion before each Thursday, but I will try. Otherwise, you have this placeholder post, where YOU provide the content. Enjoy!
W
I begin this first post with an aside. The header for Thank God / Theistic Evolution Thursdays is a stained glass depiction of the first chapter of Genesis from the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
It is the author’s contention that there ARE actual answers in Genesis – but they’re more profound and astounding than even the very smart people of antiquity could imagine, or even more recent minds from the 1800s, when modern humanity fell hard for the “6000 year” trickery.
To uncover the mechanistic details of the creation outline in Genesis, requires the work of many people over a long period of time. THAT very point – big things, long times – being a pattern worth noting.
God works with WAY bigger math than we can comprehend. At least, that is MY conjecture.
Q-Level Vaccine Strategy
It is my belief that what we are seeing unfolding right now, in HHS, NIH, FDA, and CDC, is the result of deep strategy and planning by some very smart and well-intended people, who are changing American healthcare for the better, whether it wants to make the necessary changes or not.
If that sounds like the Q folks, then good. If that merely sounds like the Trump administration, doing what it was elected to do, then good. If that sounds like some super-secret project of some other nature, then good. If that sounds like God taking a hammer to Satan’s bureaucracy, then good. I don’t care so much to convince you WHY it’s happening, as much as I want to show you THAT it’s happening.
What I hope to do here, is to quickly and simply explain where I see this hidden hand making plays, and why it might be making them.
I begin by explaining when and where I became aware that something good was going on.
First, barkerjim reported this item discussed on “Coffee and COVID”:
In summary, vaccines will now need to be tested against placebos – in ways that will critically distinguish safe vaccines from risky vaccines. This is a HUGE win for honest medicine.
I want to emphasize how strategically brilliant this is. Asking that vaccines be tested “normally” not only reverses outrageous vaccine non-testing that was installed by Fauci and Friends during COVID – it reverses sketchy and abused science all the way back to the 1960s and 1970s.
It’s undoing ALL of the bad stuff that has happened in vaccination since the middle of the last century.
And yet – “nutjob” RFK Jr. isn’t demanding the banning of even a single vaccine, as his opponents screamed and howled he would. No – he’s simply asking that vaccines be tested for safety like everything else.
What is happening here is unassailable. And yet, this move is going to stop sketchy vaccines like the COVID vaxxes IN THEIR TRACKS. Even other vaccines with “good” track records are going to have to prove themselves. And some “good” ones may turn out to be “not so good”.
This is the perfect move right now. Does this sound like something “beginner” secretary RFK Jr. would choose to play, all on his own, in the deadly DC chess game, against highly experienced globalist scum bureaucrats?
I don’t think so. It’s too smart. Something is going on.
But it gets better. And it was at the “gets better” point that I knew something very awesome was going on.
And no – I’m not talking about this, that eilert brought!
🚨BREAKING: DNI Tulsi Gabbard is investigating Dr. Fauci for perjury and his role in funding Wuhan gain-of-function research tied to COVID-19.
It only took about 2 seconds for Aubergine to figure out what I was saying.
Reread that if you have to – that’s the bottom line, pretty much.
I’m going to explain it in more detail below.
And that’s why we’re here. I’ll get to it in a minute, but let’s finish capturing the discussion.
Here, PAVACA notes that this “universal vaccine platform” isn’t being championed by only the good guys, and being openly opposed by the bad guys. Not at all. The bad guys have their fingerprints all over it, too, and seem to be helping it. But note the military connections. I suspect that’s important.
Things get interesting here, and require some explanation.
As Trump says….
“Complicated business.”
IMO Fauci was doing what Fauci does. Get close to it. Get power over it. Then kill it or sabotage it. So we need to watch out for the Fauci Minions trying to take down MAHA.
Kalbo opined that it would be nice to get those deadly COVID mRNA vaccine EUAs withdrawn ASAP, and I have to agree. But again, it looks like what is being done here is strategic, and even in a military way, where a non-zero number of casualties are accepted to insure victory.
What I mean here is that by making two ostensibly pro-vax moves that are going to nuke the COVID vaccines shortly, guaranteed, it will be impossible to stop the withdrawal of the EUAs down the road. No amount of media-Democrat propaganda acting and photo ops will be able to stop the EUAs from being withdrawn.
Finally, this comment of mine, which I will explain.
So what the heck is going on? The “test vaccines against placebos” part sounds like a no-brainer, and also like a “no-risk winner”. But why should we trust ANYBODY talking about some new vaccine platform? They’re even using Fauci’s cynical, cringe-inducing “gold standard” terminology, which was even used for remdesivir and all kinds of other Fauci horrors.
Time for me to explain my opinions on some fundamentals.
The mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were always flawed, but in more fundamental ways than even most scientists realized. By being authoritarian drones, most scientists never questioned the most fundamental problem with the Pfizer, Moderna, Novavax, and Corbevax vaccines, which affected them all, despite their multiple different technologies.
None of these vaccines targeted anything but the spike protein.
NONE of them.
NOTHING more.
In contrast, the Chinese CoronaVac / Sinovac whole-virus vaccine, using the same beta-propiolactone deactivation method as the new proposed universal vaccine platform, targets every protein coded in the viral genome.
Stated differently, immunity created by the Chinese CoronaVac whole-virus vaccine technology, is much more like natural immunity, than is immunity created by the mRNA vaccines.
That means that the immunity is broader – targets more viral proteins – and thus acts against more variants and future variants.
So by now, readers have to be asking why on Earth the Americans would be pursuing the “clot shot” technology – and not the likely best vaccine technology, which was being pursued by China.
This, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that the storage and processing of Pfizer’s clinical data is done in China. ALL of it. In China.
I don’t want to get sidetracked by the “why” of American stupidity and errors on vaccines, which potentially gets into medicine under communism versus under capitalism, as well as what communists might do, medically, in a war on capitalism. But I do want to point out that – for some very good but very weird reason, we are suddenly doing things right in the area of vaccines.
It’s important to look at the HHS announcement on the universal vaccine platform. Reading it really sheds light on what is going on.
I will include the text here, with my comments in ***bold. Note the date of the press release – May 1, 2025. This is happening right now, basically.
HHS, NIH Launch Next-Generation Universal Vaccine Platform for Pandemic-Prone Viruses
*** Note that this is not only changing all these vaccines to a “new” platform – it is clearly targeting anything over which the wicked Fake News Media might declare a “pandemic”. IMO the use of the terms “Next-Generation” and “Universal” are targeted and very intentional.
Washington, D.C. – The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the National Institutes for Health (NIH) today announced the development of the next-generation, universal vaccine platform, Generation Gold Standard, using a beta-propiolactone (BPL)-inactivated, whole-virus platform.
*** Again, this is the Chinese CoronaVac technology.
This initiative represents a decisive shift toward transparency, effectiveness, and comprehensive preparedness, funding the NIH’s in-house development of universal influenza and coronavirus vaccines, including candidates BPL-1357 and BPL-24910. These vaccines aim to provide broad-spectrum protection against multiple strains of pandemic-prone viruses like H5N1 avian influenza and coronaviruses including SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV-1, and MERS-CoV.
*** The goal shift toward broad-spectrum protection is key. This is good for doctors, patients, and society – it is BAD for drug company profits. It does not provide an enduringly problematic if not endless money churn, like spike protein vaccines do.
“Our commitment is clear: every innovation in vaccine development must be grounded in gold standard science and transparency, and subjected to the highest standards of safety and efficacy testing,” said HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
*** First note that Kennedy is making this statement. Next, note the tie-in to the improved testing with real placebos and not morally framed but morally sketchy tricks to avoid them. Transparency seems to imply that past vaccine development was done quietly between government and drug companies, and not in public, where it should be done.
The program realigns BARDA’s operations with its statutory mission under the Public Health Service Act—to prepare for all influenza viral threats, not just those currently circulating.
*** Changing the focus of BARDA to include “sustainability” of viral control – meaning it has to think about future virus variants and not just the variant of the week, is a brilliant way to break up the grift between regulators and vaccine makers, which is based on evolutionary churn of targeted proteins (like the spike), and pretending not to know that this is fundamentally designed to continuously fail. The designed failure, which seems to have the purpose of sticking more needles into more people at younger and younger ages, is certainly advantageous for depoppers, who IMO may be identifiable from decisions that ultimately supported the grift. A key point is that Geert vanden Bossche’s warnings about viral mutation under the pressure of leaky vaccines must now be considered – these warnings cannot be ignored by intentionally blind policy, which is a cold but effective technique.
“Generation Gold Standard is a paradigm shift,” said NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. “It extends vaccine protection beyond strain-specific limits and prepares for flu viral threats – not just today’s, but tomorrow’s as well – using traditional vaccine technology brought into the 21st century.”
*** Look whose name is on this! Jay Bhattacharya! This shows that honest science is re-taking control of what Pfizer was running. The point about “traditional vaccine technology brought into the 21st century” is talking precisely about CoronaVac, using smarter and smarter inactivation technologies.
Generation Gold Standard, developed exclusively by NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID):
*** This sounds like bullshit to me, probably to placate the demons in NIAID, but maybe there were honest people in NIAID who were liberated from their captivity and suppression under Fauci, and they created this effort. If so, great!
*** The following points are most excellent, and explain why modern inactivated whole virus vaccines are so good. But the bottom line is that this is a MASSIVE shift away from the mRNA vaccines. Just read this carefully.
Recalibrates America’s pandemic preparedness. Unlike traditional vaccines that target specific strains, BPL-inactivated whole-virus vaccines preserve the virus’s structural integrity while eliminating infectivity. This approach induces robust B and T cell immune responses and offers long-lasting protection across diverse viral families. Moreover, the intranasal formulation of BPL-1357 is currently in Phase Ib and II/III trials and is designed to block virus transmission—an innovation absent from current flu and COVID-19 vaccines.
Embodies efficient, transparent, and government-led research. The BPL platform is fully government-owned and NIH-developed. This approach ensures radical transparency, public accountability, and freedom from commercial conflicts of interest.
Marks the future of vaccine development. In addition to influenza and coronavirus, the BPL platform is adaptable for future use against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), metapneumovirus, and parainfluenza. It also offers the unprecedented capability to protect against avian influenza without inducing antigenic drift—a major step forward in proactive pandemic prevention.
Clinical trials for universal influenza vaccines are scheduled to begin in 2026, with FDA approval targeted for 2029. The intranasal BPL-1357 flu vaccine, currently in advanced trials, is also on track for FDA review by 2029.
###
SO – you can certainly see that it sure looks like the “good guys” are winning – and winning very easily. Too easily, IMO.
As long as the Fauci embeds are being watched carefully, to make sure they don’t interfere and sabotage, then I think we are headed in a very good direction.
Bottom Line – There is too much winning here to be just lucky beginner success by MAHA.
IMO, MAHA is getting help from behind the green curtain. And I would not be surprised if I was to learn that “Q players and Q friendlies” are part of that help.
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
Our Turn
[Yes, I did this one just after the election. But it was too cathartic to just throw away.]
We’ve often seen that quote from David Plouffe: “It is not enough to simply beat Trump. He must be destroyed thoroughly. His kind must not rise again.”
This was of course a declaration of intent to annihilate not just Trump, but rather “his kind.”
You know what? I think we should flip it around. David Plouffe’s kind should be destroyed thoroughly and their kind must not rise again.
What is Plouffe’s kind? I suppose it depends on who’s talking and what they are thinking of in particular. Well, at the moment it’s me talking and I am thinking of the sort of maggot who is attracted to politics not to better his world but rather so that he can wield power over others, or line their pockets with “free” money. Often these people end up as what Ayn Rand called “pull peddlers,” receiving money in exchange for using their connections to do favors.
This type is parasitic. Utterly parasitic. And they should be destroyed thoroughly and not allowed to rise again.
The bad news is we will never eradicate them. Useless turds who can’t do anything productive will always be with us. As will the outright sociopaths.
Of course they find Trump to be their enemy. And of course they find us to be their enemy. If we won’t simply lie down and let our “betters” have their way with us, we’re a problem, we’re something to be got rid of. And of late, we haven’t lain down without a protest, as we are “supposed” to do. Dang uppity Garbage Deplorables! We don’t know our place!!!
The good news is we can provide far fewer niches for these parasites. The niches come into being when something that people formerly did of their own free will is taken over by the government; then every aspect of that activity becomes a political football.
Take for instance education. Since the government runs it, if you don’t like what’s being done, you have to form a political movement and try to work your way around the maggots embedded in the bureaucracy. If education were private, then if you didn’t like what they were doing to your child, you’d take your money and your child elsewhere. And people who didn’t even have school-age children presently would have no voice–and not have to pay money. Making it a government “thing” turned it into a political thing, and the maggots began to swarm.
So we wreck them by seriously cutting government and giving them fewer places to exist. Among all of the other benefits, the body politic would have fewer sociopaths and parasites in it.
People like Plouffe are the same type, but they are the full-on political hacks who set policy, rather than implement it. They’re just as bad if not worse; they help government grow, and steer it into serving its own ends, rather than those of the people it is supposed to be serving.
The Deep State is nothing more than a government that serves its own ends.
And we have had enough of this.
They must be destroyed thoroughly, and their kind must not rise again.
This election wasn’t the end, it was the beginning. There are millions of these malignancies in this country and we’ve just defeated two of them. Keep pushing. Now we can go after them wholesale.
It’s our turn.
Our turn.
Our turn.
OUR TURN!
You stole the 2020 election. You’ve mocked and ridiculed and put people in prison and broken people’s lives because you said this thing was stolen. This entire phony thing is getting swept out. Biden’s getting swept out. Kamala Harris is getting swept out. MSNBC is getting swept out. The Justice Department is getting swept out. The FBI is getting swept out. You people suck, okay?! And now you’re going to pay the price for trying to destroy this country.
And I’m going to tell you, we’re going to get to the bottom of where the 600,000 votes [are]. You manufactured them to steal this election from President Trump in 2020. And think what this country would be if we hadn’t gone through the last four years of your madness, okay? You don’t deserve any respect, you don’t deserve any empathy, and you don’t deserve any pity.
And if anybody gives it to you, it’s Donald J. Trump, because he’s got a big heart and he’s a good man. A good man that you’re still gonna try to put in prison on the 26th of this month. This is how much you people suck. Okay? You’ve destroyed his business thing. And he came back.
He came back in the greatest show of political courage, I think, in world history. Like, [Roman statesman] Cincinnatus coming back from the plough [returning to politics to rescue the Roman Republic]. He’s the American Cincinnatus. And what he has done is a profile in courage. We’ve had his back. But I got to tell you, he may be empathetic. He may have a kind heart. He may be a good man. But we’re not. Okay? And you deserve, as Natalie Winters says, not retribution, justice. But you deserve what we call rough Roman justice, and we’re prepared to give it to you.
Steve Bannon, on election night
OUR TURN!!
OUR TURN!!!
OUR TURN!!!
OUR TURN!!!
January 6 Tapes?
Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.
For all your high talk about your Christian moral background…you’re looking less and less like you have any kind of moral background.
If You are a Patriot and Don’t Loathe RINOs…
Let’s talk about RINOs, and why they are the lowest form of life in politics.
Many patriots have been involved with politics, often at the grassroots, for decades. We’ve fought, and fought, and fought and won the occasional illusory small victory.
Yet we can’t seem to win the war, even when we have BIG electoral wins.
I am reminded of something. The original Star Trek had an episode titled Day of the Dove. It was one of the better episodes from the third season, but any fan of the original series will tell you that’s a very low bar. Still, it seems to get some respect; at a time when there were about 700 episodes of Star Trek in its various incarnations out there, it was voted 99th best out of the top 100.
In sum, the plot is that an alien entity has arranged for 39 Enterprise crew, and 39 Klingons, to fight each other endlessly with swords and other muscle-powered weapons. The entity lives off of hostile emotions, you see and it wants a captive food source. (The other 400 or so Enterprise crew are trapped below decks and unable to help.) Each side has its emotions played and amplified by the alien entity; one Enterprise junior officer has false memories implanted of a brother who was killed by Klingons. The brother didn’t even exist.
Even people killed in a sword fight miraculously heal so they can go do it again.
The second best line of the episode is when Kang, the Klingon captain, notes that though they have won quite a number of small victories including capturing Engineering, can’t seem to actually finally defeat the Enterprise crew. He growls, “What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*”
Indeed. He may have been the bad guy, but his situation should sound familiar.
We are a majority in this country. We have a powerful political party in our corner. There is endless wrangling.
And yet,
What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?
In our case, that power is the RINOs in our midst. They specialize in caving when on the verge of victory. Think of Obamacare’s repeal failing…by one Republican vote. Think of the way we can never seem to get spending under control (and now our entire tax revenue goes to pay interest on the debt; anything the government actually does now is with borrowed money).
We have a party…that refuses to do what we want it to do, and that refusal is institutionalized. If you’ve been involved with GOP politics, but haven’t seen this, it’s because you refuse to see it. Or because you are part of the problem yourself. (If so, kindly gargle some red fuming nitric acid to clear the taste of shit out of your mouth, and let those not part of the problem alone so they can read this.)
We fight to elect people, who then take a dive when in office. But it’s not just the politicians in office, it’s the people behind the scenes, the leaders of the national, state and county branches of the party. Their job is to ensure that real patriots never get onto the general election ballot. They’re allowed a few failures…who can then become token conservatives who will somehow never manage to win (Jordan), or can be compromised outright (Lauren Boebert?).
That way it doesn’t actually matter who has a congressional majority. I remember my excitement when the GOP took the Senate in 1980. But all that did was empower a bunch of “moderate” puddles of dog vomit like…well for whatever reason forty years later the most memorable name is Pete Domenici. And a couple of dozen other “moderates” who simply had no interest in doing what grassroots people in their party–those same grassroots people who had worked so hard to elect them–wanted them to do.
Oh, they’ll put up a semblance of a fight…but never win. And they love it when we fight the Dems instead of fighting them. Just like that alien entity, whose motto surely was “Let’s you and him fight. It’ll be delicious!”
If you think about it, your entire political involvement has come to nothing because of these walking malignant tumors.
That should make you good and mad.
The twenty five who blocked Jordan, and the hundred people who took that opportunity to stab Jordan in the back in the secret ballot should make you good and mad.
I’ll close this with another example of RINO backstabbing, an infuriating one close to home.
In my county, the GOP chair is not a RINO. She got elected when the grassroots had had enough of the RINOs. Unfortunately the state organization is full of RINOs, and the ousted county RINOs have been trying to form a new “Republican Party” and get the state GOP to recognize them as the affiliate. I’m honestly amazed it hasn’t happened yet.
In other words those shitstains won’t just leave when they get booted out; they’ll try to destroy what they left behind. It’s an indication that they know we know how important that behind-the-scenes party power is.
So they must be destroyed. That’s the only way they’ll ever stop.
We cannot win until the leeches “on our side” get destroyed.
What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*
We know it. What is going to be done about it?
*NOTE: The original line was actually “What power is it that supports our battle yet starves our victory.” I had mis-remembered it as feeds. When I checked it, it sure enough was “supports” and that’s what I originally quoted. On further reflection, though, I realized my memory was actually an improvement over the reality, because feeds is a perfect contrast with starves. I changed it partway through the day this originally posted, but now (since this is a re-run) it gets rendered this way from the start.
If one must do things wrong, one should do them wrong…right.
RINOs an Endangered Species? If Only!
According to Wikipoo, et. al., the Northern White Rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) is a critically endangered species. Apparently two females live on a wildlife preserve in Sudan, and no males are known to be alive. So basically, this species is dead as soon as the females die of old age. Presently they are watched over by armed guards 24/7.
Biologists have been trying to cross them with the other subspecies, Southern White Rhinoceroses (Rhinoceri?) without success; and some genetic analyses suggest that perhaps they aren’t two subspecies at all, but two distinct species, which would make the whole project a lot more difficult.
I should hope if the American RINO (Parasitus rectum pseudoconservativum) is ever this endangered, there will be heroic efforts not to save the species, but rather to push the remainder off a cliff. Onto punji sticks. With feces smeared on them. Failing that a good bath in red fuming nitric acid will do.
But I’m not done ranting about RINOs.
The RINOs (if they are capable of any introspection whatsoever) probably wonder why they constantly have to deal with “populist” eruptions like the Trump-led MAGA movement. That would be because the RINOs stand for absolutely nothing except for going along to get along. That allows the Left to drive the culture and politics.
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
It says “Justice” on the picture.
And I’m sure someone will post the standard joke about what the fish thinks about the situation.
But what is it?
Here’s a take, from a different context: It’s about how you do justice, not the justice that must be done to our massively corrupt government and media. You must properly identify the nature of a person, before you can do him justice.
Ayn Rand, On Justice (speaking through her character John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged):
Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.
Ayn Rand identified seven virtues, chief among them rationality. The other six, including justice, she considered subsidiary because they are essentially different aspects and applications of rationality.
I’m sure enough of this that I put my money where my mouth is.
The 2020 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.
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.
Martin Luther King
When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice
President Donald Trump, 20 January 2017 (The “Dark” Inauguration Speech).
[NOTE: Yes, technically this is something I should delete since it’s not January 18th any more and it is dated, but I decided to give it one more run, because some things said here don’t depend on what’s showing on the page-a-day calendar.]
….But I’ll still say something about MLK. He was a decidedly mixed individual. As are we all. But I think he, and many others of his time, did something important and unpleasant; he (and those others) forced a recognition that even after the Civil War we were being hypocritical on the subject of equality under the law. Those people who descended from those who (shall we say) involuntarily migrated to what is now the United States were still getting the shitty end of the stick in many parts of this country, as a matter of law.
He was one hundred percent correct on that.
Unfortunately his successors have turned the point full circle and want a leg up from the law, supposedly to make up for the past mistreatment, but that can only lead to an endless round of back and forth. There are some signs that MLK himself had he not been killed (he would be turning 96 this year were he still alive), would have been right alongside the race baiters (which include some who were with him), other signs that he wouldn’t have.
But just as Thomas Jefferson penned these words, in spite of owning slaves, the words that eventually shamed us into abolishing the “peculiar institution”:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…
I’ll go with what Martin Luther King said…not all that far from where the Inauguration will take place:
And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Emphasis mine. Judge people by the content of their character.
That is as it should be.
I see that at Trump rallies. His words about opening hearts to patriotism were true.
I see nothing but reverse racism on the Left. To them the world is defined by what one group does to another, some group must be on top shitting on everyone else. And it shows. There’s a false dichotomy in their thinking. Either white shits on black, or black shits on white. The way to deal with this false dichotomy, though, is not to gin up a third “group” to make it a trichotomy, or a fourth group to make it, what, a tetrachotomy? quadrichotomy? Is either of those actually a word? Gee maybe we can have a different group on top every week of the year at least until some jackass makes up a 53rd group! (Let’s leave aside the one or two day remainder you get from dividing 365(or 6) by 7. These are leftists studying critical race theory, not mathematicians.)
How about we do something different? How about we work towards a system where the law shits on NO ONE except those who violate the rights of others?
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
Gold took a beating Thursday, down into the low 3200s, but it partially recovered towards the end of the day. It managed to recover another 30 cents (whoop-te-do) on Friday. Silver managed to slip against gold, and platinum is doggedly hanging onto mediocrity.
*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.
May the (Strong Nuclear) 4th be with You
A day early, but I figure it’s not too early to celebrate Star Wars Day especially with the twist I like to put on it.
Use the (Strong Nuclear) Force!
The Final Experiment
Exodus from Flat Earth
It isn’t just Jeran of Jeranism who has become normal (i.e., someone who accepts the Earth is round). Many others have done so too including Mark Sargent’s former co-host who appeared with him in the famous Flat Earth documentary many years ago.
Some of those remaining in the Flat Earth community have gone after three of the departees (including the former co-host, but not including Jeran, not this time), accusing them of having been paid off to lie about the shape of the Earth. The three are about to sue for defamation (this is discussed in the above video). One of those about to be sued is Dave Weiss a/k/a “Flat Earth Dave” a/k/a “Dirth” a/k/a “the Potato”. How that particular guy isn’t in jail already is beyond me. And there is Mark Sargent, who simply laughed (on video) at the “Cease and Desist” letter and doubled down. The third person who received the letter did back down, quietly, and his retraction is buried under twenty more-recent videos.
Back to Geology
I’ve spent a lot of time discussing radiometric dating for a simple reason: It’s something that people not actually interested in the truth do their best to try to discredit (even though a little less publicly they’ve had to admit it’s actually valid whilst trying to weasel out of it–I’ll have a lot more to say about that in a future post, so please hold your questions until then).
Thus far I’ve told the story of the discovery and recognition of units known as eons, eras, periods, epochs and ages (each one of those is a subdivision of the one before it), based largely on fossils present in rocks and the principle of superposition–new rock layers get laid down on top of older ones. Geologists could determine which ones came before which other ones, and could generally identify which unit sedimentary rocks–rocks laid down as sediment precipitated out of bodies of water–belonged to based on the fossils they contained, but it was much, much more difficult to identify igneous rocks (rocks that had solidified from a molten state, either ancient lava flows, or intrusive “dikes”) with a particular unit, because igneous rocks don’t contain fossils. If a lava flow lay on top of a sedimentary layer, we knew it was newer than that; i.e., we had a maximum age. If a sedimentary layer, in turn, lay on top of a lava flow, that established its minimum age. Dikes, similarly, had to be newer than every layer of sedimentary rock that they cut across.
Here, by the way, are a couple of pictures of dikes. The vertical column in the top picture (from Maktesh Ramon in Israel) is a dike (and it’s harder than the rocks it cuts through, which is why it literally stands out)
Or this one from near Shiprock, New Mexico. The Shiprock itself is a volcanic plug, but the ground around it cracked and magma was able to form vertical sheets in the cracks. Again, the igneous rock is harder than what it cut through, so we’re now left with vertical “walls” of it as the softer stuff has eroded away.
So now, ironically with radiometric dating established, it was easier to absolutely date igneous rocks than it was to date sedimentary rock (which as far as I can tell is effectively impossible); but relative dating was easier with the sedimentary rock.
How to get around this? Lots and lots of field work! Igneous rocks occur everywhere and we can measure their ages. That lava flow I talked about that was lying on top of a layer of sedimentary rock? Let’s say that sedimentary rock can be identified as belonging to the Aalenian age of the Middle epoch of the Jurassic Period (of the Mesozoic Era of the Phanerozoic Eon; though geologists (and many non geologists) recognize “Jurassic” and already know that last part without it being spelled out). That establishes the absolute earliest time the lava flow could have happened. We then date that lava flow and the age comes back at 154 Ma (Ma = Millions of years ago). The layer sitting on top of the lava flow is the Turonian age of the Late epoch of the Cretaceous period (of the Mesozoic Era of the Phanerozoic eon). Everything between sometime in the Aalenian and sometime in the Turonian is missing, but here’s this lava flow in its place.
(The ages that are missing in whole are the Bajocian, Bathonian, Callovian, Oxfordian, Kimmeridgian, and Tithonian in the Middle and Late Jurassic, and the Berriasian, Valanginian, Hauterivian, Berrmian, Aptian, Albian, and Cenomanian in the Early and Late Cretaceous. That’s quite a number of them. These may have been deposited and then eroded away before or after the lava flow, or never been deposited here at all, or some combination. We just know the surface layer at the time of the eruption was sometime in the Aalenian, and the first rock to be deposited on top of the lava, that is still here, is from the Turonian.)
So what have we learned? We’ve learned that the Turonian must have ended sometime after 154 Ma (we can’t say it started here because more than likely the early part of the Turonian didn’t get deposited right on top of the lava; it’d be quite a coincidence if the Turonian started just at the time deposition began). And we know that the Aalenian must have started over 154 Ma.
That doesn’t seem very helpful, because the large number of missing ages means we’ve actually got a LOT of play in those numbers. It’s possible the flow actually happened during the Aalenian, in which case the Aalenian started just over 154 Ma. Or that the flow happened during the Turonian. Or any of the 13 ages in between.
But combine this with other dating done on other igneous rocks in other parts of the world–or maybe even nearby where less rock eroded away before the eruption, and part of the Bajocian was present there when the lava flowed and solidified. Or, Imagine finding a flow where the rocks both above and below it are from the same age! Do this enough and you can eventually narrow down the dates that things happen.
And these dates can be further refined as we get more accurate lab equipment able to measure isotopic ratios more accurately; we get a more accurate result for that lava flow, say 153.8 Ma instead of 154 Ma.
When I was a kid, I had access to a kid’s book on paleontology that (probably) dated back into the late 50s. It gave the beginning of the Cambrian (hence the beginning of the Paleozoic and the Phanerozoic) as being 560 Ma. I was somewhat startled to visit a museum exhibit sometime around 2000 (I think it was Chicago, but could have been the Smithsonian), and seeing this age given as 542 Ma. And now? The latest and greatest number? 538.8 Ma. Note that the numbers are more and more precise; to the nearest ten million years, then the nearest million, and eventually down to the nearest 100,000 years. Just looking through Wikipedia, I see dates given to 100,000 year increments, except in some places where it’s whole millions of years. Whether that’s imprecision or the number really should be given as “<blah blah blah>.0 million years ago” (meaning it too is to the nearest 100,000 years) is unclear.
When you get to the Oligocene you start seeing 10,000 years precision; the Oligocene epoch (of the Paleogene period of the Cenozoic Era) ended 23.04 million years ago; in fact that happens to be the end of the Paleogene as a whole.
And we can go into the Precambrian eons, the Hadean, Archean, and Proterozoic, which have little to no fossils in them, and establish (largely arbitrary) time boundaries to them.
The Hadean ran from 4,567 Ma (based on dating things not on Earth, but believed to have formed at the same time) to 4,031 (give or take 3) Ma. The Archaean ran from that time to 2500 Ma. The Proterozoic ran from there to 538.8 Ma. In other words slightly over four billion years elapsed from the formation of the Earth, to the Cambrian, when we first start to see abundant multi-cellular, hard-shelled fossils. (That doesn’t mean there was no life before the Cambrian…in fact there most certainly was.) Before radiometric dating we could do little to distinguish these times from each other, because there were no index fossils to go by.
Within the Phanerozoic, the Paleozoic ran from 538.8 Ma to 251.9 Ma; the Mesozoic from there to 66 Ma, and the Cenozoic from there to the present. And of course you can subdivide into Cambrian, Ordovician, etc. But at this point I’m going to throw in a handy-dandy (and colorful) chart (which, alas, has slightly older numbers in it!).
Before moving on to a more staid (but more complete) graphic, there is a very subtle thing to note about this one.
The layers within the Paleozoic and Mesozoic are periods. (Cambrian, Ordovician, etc., through the Cretaceous.) For the Cenozoic, they skip the periods (Paleogene, Neogene and Quaternary) and go down one more level to the seven epochs (all ending in -cene). The lowest three of the epochs are Paleogene, the next two Neogene, and the upper two Quaternary. (And yes, they habitually put the oldest at the bottom, which might seem counter intuitive [reverse chronological order] until you realize they’re doing it the way the rocks lay down.)
This actually reflects the way paleontologists talk, at least when presenting things to the public; they’ll talk in periods before the Cenozoic, and epochs within the Cenozoic. The epoch names before the Cenozoic seem to be less imaginative (“early” or “lower”, “middle”, then “upper” or “later”) in general.
If you want more completeness (but at the cost of showing the pictures of typical fossils), the below is from 2018 and also does not have the latest and greatest age numbers. (It does show all of the ages I rambled about, above–in fact it’s how I knew what they were.) Apparently the best way to get current unit boundary ages is by visiting individual Wikipedia pages. (E.g., the Cambrian is given on Wikipedia’s “Cambrian” page as running from 538.8 +/- 0.6 Ma to 486.85 +/- 1.5 Ma.) These pages for specific periods, eras, etc., will show tables of the subdivisions of whatever unit you’re looking at.
Even here, though, there’s some eliding going on. The first three columns show eon, era, period, epoch and age (or talking about the rocks rather than the chronology: the eonthem, erathem. system, series and stage). The last column, however, adds a column to the left for “Precambrian” (which is informally the first three out of four eons/eonthems put together) and drops epochs and ages. Which makes some sense because these lowest levels aren’t defined back that far, but can be confusing (especially because of the added false level of “Precambrian” shifting the other levels to the right). Hadean, Archean, and Proterozoic are at the same level as Phanerozoic–which covers the other three columns all by itself. (As you can see, periods are not defined before the Proterozoic, and Eras are not defined in the Hadean. At the risk of channeling Sundance, we can’t be very granular that far back.)
By the way this bit about the dates changing is a feature it is not a bug. As we learn more we refine our numbers. The fact that we’re able to measure things so consistently that statistically we think we are correct to within (sometimes well within) 1 percent should be enough to assure people that these numbers are very close to the correct numbers. (I.e., yes, there’s still uncertainty…but not so much that the correct answer to “when did the Cambrian start?” could possibly be “less than six thousand years ago”. Not nearly so much. In fact 6000 years is off by a factor of nearly 100,000.)
OK, so hopefully we have enough under our belts to debunk a popular Young Earth Creationist talking point. Though this point gets pushed by the lower-quality YECs–the ones who are either the most ignorant, or are hoping you are.
This is Kent Hovind, who is one of the most infuriating people alive IMHO; between straw men, other fallacies, and his smug and condescending manner–oh and by the way he was convicted and spent years in prison for fraud…well…I’ll say no more.
OK, so he’s complaining that you date the fossils by the rocks, and the rocks by the fossils, and that’s circular reasoning.
He’d have a point except for the stuff he’s leaving out, which he must be aware of from being corrected a zillion times. (In other words, he’s lying.)
One dates a typical fossil, by noting that the stratum it is in (the rock) is of a certain unit, e.g., the Rhaetian age of the Upper Triassic Epoch. These units are identifiable by very specific index fossils (i.e., other fossils), either directly or indirectly. You then have a date range, which was established by radiometrically dating other rocks. Lots of other rocks. Fossil to rock to fossil to rock is not circular if it’s two different fossils and two different rocks.
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
onomasiology
noun
the study of nomenclature
a branch of lexicology concerned with the names of concepts
the study of words and expressions having similar or associated concepts and a basis (as social, regional, occupational) for being grouped
a branch of linguistics concerned with the question “how do you express X?”
Used in a sentence
The onomasiology of Trump enemy nicknames will one day be a scholarly sub-specialty.
Used in another sentence
Onomasiology, as a part of lexicology, starts from a concept which is taken to be prior (i.e. an idea, an object, a quality, an activity etc.) and asks for its names.
How the Gab AI “Gabby” illustrates the idea of onomasiology
Shown in an image of text
MUSIC!
A Bhutanese folk song about onomasiology (seriously)
Some musical, medical journalism featuring Heart!
THE STUFF
More math and computer stories, featuring that annoyingly happy woman with a British accent.
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
January 6 Tapes?
Where are the tapes? Anyone, Anyone? Bueller? Johnson??
Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.
Evading Reality
Many things the Left believes are simply not true. Right now the focus is on the size and scope of our government, and the many many billions of dollars the government has been spending on no-one-knew-what. None of that money is going to a key role of government. Which, after all, has the sole purpose of protecting rights.
And if you, Leftist Lurker, want to dismiss this as dead white cis-male logic…well, you can call it what you want, but then please just go fuck off. No one here buys that bullshit–logic is logic and facts are facts regardless of skin color–and if you gave it a moment’s rational thought, you wouldn’t either. Of course your worthless education never included being able to actually reason–or detect problems with false reasoning–so I don’t imagine you’ll actually wake up as opposed to being woke.
As Ayn Rand would sometimes point out: Yes, you are free to evade reality. What you cannot do is evade the consequences of evading reality. Or to put it concretely: You can ignore the Mack truck bearing down on you as you play in the middle of the street, you won’t be able to ignore the consequences of ignoring the Mack truck.
And Ayn Rand also pointed out that existence (i.e., the sum total of everything that exists) precedes consciousness–our consciousnesses are a part of existence, not outside of it–therefore reality cannot be a “social construct” as so many of you fucked-up-in-the-head people seem to think.
So much for Leftist douchebag lurkers. For the rest of you, the regular readers and those lurkers who understand such things, well here we go for another week of WINNING against the Deep State.
I confess that the novelty has not worn off.
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.
Yes, we won this time around. Not only did we win, we got to KEEP that win instead of having it stolen from us.
But no one should imagine that that’s the end of electoral fraud. Much work needs to be done to ensure it doesn’t just happen again next time around. And incidentally to rescue those states currently in the grips of self-perpetuating fraud, where the people who stole the last election, make sure it’s easier to steal the next one.
This issue, though it’s not front-and-center right now, is not going away, and if we ignore it, we’ll pay the price. See the article above about the consequences of evading reality.
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 went on QUITE a ride this week!. It came within a loud shout of $3500 but then plummeted, dropping all the way into the 3200s, and ended up almost where it began. Silver didn’t drop as hard, and Gold:Silver dropped below 100, but again it seems almost as if silver really wants to be right there at 1/100th of an ounce of gold.
*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.
Carbon Dating
Carbon dating is when you date identical twins, one of whom is a carbon copy of the other. Generally available only to people as cool as the Fonz (who IIRC dated triplets at one point). Alternatively it is defined as dating having reached the point where a diamond is involved, possibly because uranium-lead dating or potassium-argon dating got out of hand.
OK, more seriously…it involves the isotope 14C or carbon-14 or C-14, depending on who’s writing the stuff you’re reading and how lazy they are. I’m lazy enough not to bother with the first, most technically correct, notation.
Carbon dating is generally not relevant to geologists, but is very relevant to archaeologists, who dig up human remains and/or human artifacts. Why? Timescale. The half life of carbon-14 is 5700 years (give or take 30 years). This makes it worthless for geological time; they generally don’t want to push it past 50,000 years. But it’s eminently suitable for modern humans and gets us well back into the prior ice age which ended roughly 12,000 years ago.
Even though this is supposed to be a geology series, I decided to cover carbon dating anyway because it has a number of features that make it a contrast to the other methods used. And also hopefully to immunize my readers against the next earnest-sounding ignoramus who complains about carbon-dating the age of the Earth.
Carbon, element 6, has two stable isotopes, carbon-12 (6 protons, six neutrons), and carbon-13 (6 protons, 7 neutrons). And then there is carbon-14, with six protons and eight neutrons. As noted above, it’s unstable with a half life of 5700 years (give or take 30 years). It undergoes regular ol’ beta decay and turns into an atom of nitrogen-14, which is quite stable.
Carbon dating is sometimes conflated with radiometric dating in general, especially by the general public. They talk about dating rocks, or determining the age of the Earth, with carbon dating, oftentimes with a sneer because they don’t believe the result. Ironically, they’d be right to do so if we actually tried to use carbon dating for these purposes. (It’s much more hilarious when a professional young earth creationist makes this particular blunder.) Carbon dating is radiometric dating, but not all radiometric dating is carbon dating.
Carbon-14 is not used to date rocks, it’s used to determine when something organic died. Living things ingest carbon-14 with their carbon dioxide, food, you-name it, when they die, they no longer bring carbon-14 in and the radiometric clock starts ticking.
For a number of reasons, carbon dating is the oddball method of all the ones I’ve discussed, because it does not depend on a primordial isotope. Uranium-235 and -238, thorium-232, rubidium-87, potassium-40 are all primordial isotopes, meaning what we see out there today was “with us” when the Earth formed.
Obviously this won’t be true for carbon-14; the Earth is way too old for that. So carbon-14 must be getting created today.
(Indeed, the mere fact that no short lived isotopes are around any more except in cases where we can demonstrate they are being created now, is evidence that the Earth is quite old. The shortest lived primordial (non-renewed) radioisotope is U-235 with its 704 million year half life. In general after about 40 half lives the radioisotope is effectively gone; roughly one atom in a trillion is still around. The next longest half life of any radioisotope after U-235 is samarium-146 at 92 million years. [That’s quite a gap! It’s surprising nothing other than U-235 has half lives in the hundreds of millions of years.] And sure enough 40 half lives of that is 3,680 million years…so it would be essentially gone after that amount of time. And guess what. It is in fact all gone [actually traces should still be around, we haven’t detected them yet], as one would expect if and only if the Earth is old.)
Most carbon-14 is generated by cosmic rays plowing through our upper atmosphere. This creates free neutrons, some of which will glom onto nitrogen-14 atoms, and kick out one of the protons; this replacement of a proton with a neutron is as if the C-14 to N-14 beta decay is run in reverse. This apparently happens (depending on who is doing the calculation) 16,400 or 18,800 times per second per square meter of the Earth’s surface, all at altitudes between 9 and 14 km. (As you can imagine this is tough to measure under those circumstances; hence the approximate calculations that do match what we observe later on in the process.)
The nitrogen (N2) molecule becomes a CN radical and eventually the C-14 atom ends up in carbon dioxide, where it can be sucked in by plants. Once incorporated in the plant tissue it can make its way through the entire food chain as some animal eats the plant, some other animal eats the first animal, and so on. Every living thing is constantly pulling carbon-14 into its system, replacing any that happens to decay while it’s living. When it dies, this process ends and decaying C-14 is no longer replaced. We now have something we can radiometrically date, just as we can date rocks once they solidify.
In this particular case they take their sample and count carbon-12, carbon-13, and carbon-14 atoms, and compare the ratios to what we see in atmospheric CO2 today. After doing the same sorts of calculations I’ve highlighted in previous posts, they get a date which is reported as “Before Present.” That has become a bit of a misnomer, now, because “Present” was 1950, and 75 years have since elapsed.
And therein lies the need for an asterisk. As it turns out the C-14 to C-12 ratio in our atmosphere is not constant. Not only is it not constant over time, it’s not constant over location either. Even today we can measure it’s lower near cities than out in the middle of nowhere; that’s due to the extra CO2 emissions near cities. Fossil fuels have essentially no C-14 in them, so when they burn they add purely to the amounts of C-12 and C-13, which pushes the ratio down. Time variation can be caused by anything from solar flares, other variations in cosmic ray flux, and even nuclear tests which tend to dump large numbers of neutrons, giving a big boost to C-14 production.
What effect does this have on carbon dating? Let me illustrate with an example, a made-up one. Let’s say that (for whatever reason) 43,000 years ago the C-14:C-12 ratio in the atmosphere was twice as high as it is today. At that time a Neanderthal grabs a piece of deadfall and takes it to his cave to build a fire, but for whatever reason it doesn’t end up being burned.
Today, an archaeologist finds that piece of unburned wood right next to a bunch of cave paintings, and decides he wants to know how old that Neanderthal dwelling is. So he sends it off to the lab to get it dated. What he doesn’t know is that when the tree grew, the C-14:C-12 ratio in the atmosphere was twice as high as it is today. 43,000 years is about 7 1/2 half lives of C-14; after each half life has elapsed, the C-14 count is still twice as high at that age as it would have been if the wood had started with today’s amount of C-14 in it.
So as far as the lab can tell, 6 1/2, not 7 1/2, half lives have elapsed since the sample was formed (because they don’t know the sample started out a half-life “behind”), so they send back: 37,300 (43,000 – 5,700) years old.
That’s quite a difference!
Scientists realized this was a potential issue at least as far back as 1955–in fact the first to point it out was Willard Lilly, who invented radio carbon dating! And it became an absolute certainty when samples of known ages started coming back with variant ages. So they started working on ways to calibrate carbon dating.
The unadjusted age number is now called radiocarbon years. That’s the “flag” to warn the reader that the date is not calibrated. In our example, the firewood came back as being 37,300 radiocarbon years old, even though we (with our god’s eye view) know it’s really 43,000 years old.
What is needed is a way to look up a figure given in radiocarbon years, and read off the corrected age. In our example, the archaeologist (or perhaps the lab that did the work) would look up in the right table (it turns out we need different tables for marine and land, and northern and southern hemisphere) “37,300” radiocarbon years and read off “43,000” calendar years.
So how do we make such a table? By radiocarbon-dating samples of known age, and seeing what the results return.
Of course, these are scientists. Why would they use a table when they can make a graph? Here’s an actual graph.
In actual fact, I chose that 43,000 number for the example fairly carefully. If you look up 43,000 on the horizontal axis (the true, calendar ages) and read up you hit one of the spots where the blue crooked line is furthest from the diagonal line where the calendar age would equal the radiocarbon age [no correction needed]. It’s almost, but not quite, off by a half life. So my example wasn’t all that exaggerated.
A graph is also handy because of another potential problem. If you look really closely where the squiggly line crosses 10,000 cal years…that bit of the line looks flat. What that means a bunch of numbers close to 10,000 cal years all have the same radiocarbon age. In fact looking at about 14,000 cal years, there’s almost a thousand year long stretch with nearly the same radiocarbon age.
So because of the variation, sometimes the age will come back ambiguous.
This is actually much more of a problem for recent times.
Consider the fact that these numbers always come out with a margin of error, e.g., +/- 80 radiocarbon years.
Here’s the calibration curve for things that date 1000-1400 radiocarbon years.
Looking over at the left, sample one returned (eyeballing it), a range of 1360-1380 radiocarbon years (blue lines). Reading across, we find a place where the calibration curve is steep, so we end up with a very narrow, 10 year calendar range, 1290-1300 years BP, which is to say 650-660 CE. Steep is good!
It’s shallow that can be a bit of a disaster. Look at sample two, 1260 to 1280 radiocarbon years (red lines), just one century newer in radiocarbon terms than sample 1.
But here the curve zigzags across our range! There are therefore three distinct ageranges that our sample could actually date from, roughly 1185-1190 years BP, 1205-1215 years BP, and 1230-1260 years BP. A 55 year spread, with gaps in it.
The third sample is maybe better, maybe worse depending on how you look at it. No gaps but an even bigger spread. Radiocarbon age is 1180-1205 BP, but because here the curve is very shallow, basically horizontal with ups and downs, the calendar age is is 1075-1175 years BP–a full century of uncertainty.
And even this method (which is called the “intercept” method is now out of date, there are much more complex probabilistic methods that require computing power, which we now have readily available. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject of radiocarbon calibration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_calibration
Ambiguity can be combated by working on ways to have the lab be more accurate but note that in case 2 even if we had the radiocarbon age to an exact number of years, we’d still have three answers.
OK, I showed curves, but how did we come up with those curves?
As it happens we have plenty of other ways to date some artifacts that can also be radiocarbon dated, enough that we can fill in a lot of the table (or plot points on the graph). This of course is very tedious work and whoever does it won’t get a Nobel prize, but they are unsung heroes of archaeology. It is thanks to them that we can have great confidence in our data, in most cases (and know when we shouldn’t, as in the case of the poor guys who had samples 2 and 3 in the graph above).
What are some of those ways of determining absolute ages? Actually the first attempts to do this were from Egyptology. Because ancient Egyptian records sometimes reference astronomical events happening during such-and-such reign, we know when that reign happened–because we can calculate when the astronomical event happened (good ol’ astrodynamics…). If we have papyrus from that time, we can see how old it is in radiocarbon years. This has since been extended to other civilizations.
But the most famous means used (though by no means the only one) is a product of nature: dendrochronology, which is, in essence, counting and matching up tree rings. As trees grow they leave annual rings in the wood grain. (They’re rings going across the log, otherwise, running the length of the log, they have the sort of “woodgrain” pattern you see in lumber of any kind.) In fact, this pattern will tend to have thicker and thinner rings depending on whether the tree got a lot of water or less water that particular season; more growth equals a thicker ring. Different trees from the same region will show the same pattern of thick and thin rings for the same years. And it’s even possible to match up the pattern in old pieces of wood to the corresponding years in either a) newer pieces of wood or b) trees growing today. We’ve managed to construct at least one sequence that goes back 13,900 actual years BP (i.e., 13,975 years before today).
The oldest tree-ring series are known as floating since, while their constituent rings can be counted to create a relative internal chronology, they cannot be dendro-matched with the main Holocene absolute chronology. However, 14C analyses performed at high resolution on overlapped absolute and floating tree-rings series enable one to link them almost absolutely and hence to extend the calibration on annual tree rings until ≈13 900 cal yr BP.
In this case we can simply date the wood taking samples from (say) every tenth or hundredth ring. We know the actual age from simple counting of the rings; we can fill in the entries of the calibration table based on the uncalibrated results the lab returns to us. We can supplement this from atmospheric gases trapped in ice cores (which also have annual layers) and organic debris in varves (layers of sediment).
And this is why I left carbon dating for last. The other sorts of dating don’t need calibration, not because ratios were constant but because we have ways of accounting for variation, built into the method. With radio carbon dating we don’t have that luxury, at least not purely by analyzing the sample, so we have to calibrate. Luckily at the short (by geological standards) timescales radio carbon dating covers we have other means of correcting what we get.
As I said before, carbon dating won’t help geologists date things in the geologic column (at least not before the very topmost thin layer), but I felt I had to cover it because it gets confused with the other forms of radiometric dating. It also has the additional complication of needing calibration; someone might get the impression from this that the other methods have the very same issue. They don’t.
(And of course if you run into someone complaining about “carbon dating” dinosaur fossils, he literally doesn’t know what he’s talking about; he’s hopefully misremembering something he heard from someone else, or [less hopefully] the someone else he’s remembering is himself clueless…or a charlatan. The good news is most of the well-funded young-Earth creationist organizations today do know better than to make this particular blunder.)
One last point to make: There are Young Earth Creationist talking points about finding radiocarbon in diamonds (up to billions of years old) or in carbon in fossils of dinosaurs (66-235 Mya). If these held up of course that would be serious trouble for old earth viewpoints, but the problem here is that there’s every sign that they’re measuring contamination. Samples are sent to multiple labs all around the world, and the reported ages are a) not far below the upper limit of C-14 dating and b) wildly different from each other, by at least a half life. Whereas what we see with properly collected samples is consistent ages. (More about this in the second video below at about 13:30.)
Bonus Videos
Here is a video by Aron Ra (as far as I can tell that’s his legal name), talking to an actual scientist (Dr. Jonathan Baker) while said scientist runs a rock sample in the lab, measuring uranium and thorium isotopes–he’s actually using a method different from any I covered, one suitable for ages less than a million years. Aron Ra is famous in atheist circles for combating creationism (all types not just Young Earth) so he does kid the scientist about his data popping out with 6000 years. Between the two of them they make the point that there are literally hundreds of studies that return consistent results.
There are some fundamental differences between this method and other methods, having to do with the fact that the daughter isotope is even more radioactive than the parent (and the parent is water soluble while the daughter is not, so it’s used for dating stalactites), but I am sure you don’t want another Saturday open devoted to that topic, so I’ll punt you over to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium%E2%80%93thorium_dating
A more general video by the same two people. Aron Ra got hit by a troll who threw a bunch of AIG talking points; he has Dr. Baker respond, and the responses are educational (not simply anti-YEC polemics). A lot of info on carbon dating here starting about 13:30 in.
Quotable line: “They do seem fascinated with carbon dating, it’s like they’re not even aware that there’s like well over a dozen, maybe a dozen and a half other radioisotopes that they would be using for dinosaurs, that they don’t use carbon dating for dinosaurs, and why they don’t. I don’t know why they insist on doing that.” Hence this “intruder” topic into a geology series.
Another line: the troll asks “Do you know that forest fires, atomic activity, volcanic eruptions, factories that produce carbon, solar flares, carbon reservoirs, contribute to the inconsistent decay rate and contamination that results to the inaccuracies in carbon dating?” and Dr. Baker responds…”uh, yes, I did know that.” But we know how to take these things into account and can often cross-check with other methods of dating (which is what he was doing in the first video).
And from Dr. Baker’s channel (Age of Rocks):
Ted Talk by a paleontologist about hunting for dinosaurs, he talks a lot about geology here (interestingly that diagram behind him in the thumbnail also appears in the prior video; I guess it’s a pretty popular graphic). Please excuse the “sixth mass extinction” stuff at the very end. (Well, at least he didn’t say “global warming.”)
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
From the throats of herons and lost wolves, we learn of a mistake made by the gods. They gave us red-winged birds and vesper sparrows who make songs of leaf-light and flying. The gods thought we’d be so happy— all that fruit, one big garden, our nakedness in sun and water. They never counted on our needing a sound for longing, too. They gave that to the loon, to wild dogs whose teeth throb from the light of the moon; they poured it into the long necks of birds. How could they have known? Where in our bodies would they have moored the slender cry of the crane who calls out that night is closing the sky, taking away the glinted green of the frogs’ moist backs, the dazzle the sun makes of every hair, of every shining wing?
MUSIC!
A “deep house” electronica playlist called “Orectic Mix”……..
Epic orchestral video found by searching on “orectic music”
THE STUFF
SO – for “Action April” we are taking two weeks to study something called the Principle of Least Action.
Here is the second of TWO videos covering the topic.
Not sure I’m buying this, as my colleague, Prof. Suspicious Cat, has questions similar to those mentioned in the video, about the significance and interpretation of the role of the diffraction grating, and its potential behavior in lensing at odd angles.
