His Fraudulency

Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, we haven’t heard much from the person who should have been declared the victor, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

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

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

Spot Prices.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

Gold $1734.30
Silver $25.13
Platinum $1192.00
Palladium $2748.00
Rhodium $25,000.00

This week–markets closed 3PM Thursday for Good Friday (or April Fools, depending)

Gold $1731.80
Silver $25.01
Platinum $1216.00
Palladium $2736.00
Rhodium $26,800.00

What I am seeing here is precious metals trading within a pretty well defined range. Gold has dropped down into the 1680s twice but then immediately bounced up. Which implies (to some) that it might be prepping to go up again. Silver seems to be in the doldrums right now; I don’t know whether it’s going up or down (does anyone really ever know about these things?) and won’t even hazard a guess.

Note: Last week’s gold and platinum prices are almost identical to the prices from five weeks ago! Five weeks ago:

Gold $1735.60
Silver $26.80
Platinum $1191.00
Palladium $2379.00
Rhodium $26,000.00

Iridium: The Smoke From The Smoking Gun

4.567 billion years ago, our solar system began to “condense” from the nebula. Clumps of dust particles began to come together, part of a poorly-understood process that eventually led to the planets. The nebula had a potpourri of “stuff” in it. Mostly elements up to iron, with a heavy leavening of ones after iron, created in supernovas or even neutron star collisions. (Most gold is believed to have come out of neutron star collisions…next time you admire that gold coin or your wedding band…think about where that stuff has been! Any of it not from a collision got blasted out of a supernova at 70,000,000 miles per hour.)

Very large bodies, moon sized and larger certainly, would heat up as they formed, from the potential energy of infalling stuff, and also from the fact that this dust had a lot of radioactive stuff in it. Many isotopes with very short half lives, like aluminum 26, were common then; we have no trouble seeing their traces in meteorites today. But back then they were a source of intense heat. Even today, much of the heat of the earth’s interior comes from radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and even potassium (which has one fairly uncommon radioactive isotope).

Those large bodies became molten, and the heavy stuff sank towards the center. Iron was quite common in the nebula, and iron is heavier than the sorts of things that became typical rocks, and so we today have planets with iron cores.

A lot of good stuff went down into the core with the iron, including gold, the platinum group metals, and silver. Some gold hung around with the lighter slag since gold likes quartz. That resulted in gold being relatively more common than the PGMs in the earth’s crust.

But a lot of things in the solar nebula got big, but not big enough to melt. They became asteroids, and they are relatively rich in PGMs as compared with the earth’s crust. (If we can ever start mining those suckers…PGM prices will go down, and gold will go down somewhat…remember it’s relatively common in the earth’s crust, but that means it won’t become as common, proportionately to where it is today, when we go after asteroids.)

So one sure-fire sign of a meteorite is extra PGMs.

There was once an asteroid the size of Mount Everest. It probably hung out in the asteroid belt for about 4.5 billion years; in fact, it hung out, wherever it hung out, for almost exactly 4.5 billion years.

Then something happened to alter its orbit. And then, sometime after that, perhaps within a million years, it chanced to encounter Earth.

It plunged through the atmosphere–which rapidly raised its surface temperature. Then it slammed into the ocean, at a point just off the coast of what we today know as the Mexican State of Yucatan. The rocks it hit were the worst possible thing it could find…sulfur-rich gypsum, calcium sulfate. The meteorite vaporized in an instant. And so did a lot of that gypsum.

The tsunami in the Gulf probably reached as far inland as Illinois.

The sky was filled with sulfur trioxide, which became sulfuric acid and rained out over the next few days. And the amount of sunlight reaching the surface of the earth was cut, both by the sulfuric crud and just ordinary dust ejected into the stratosphere by the impact, putting another challenge on plant life. Which is at the root of the food chain. Fewer plants, fewer herbivores, fewer herbivores, fewer carnivores.

There’s good reason to believe life was already under stress from massive volcanic eruptions in what is now the Deccan traps, in India. This was just exactly what wasn’t needed for icing on the cake. (Alternatively, the Deccan eruptions may have been triggered by the impact. Yes, even though they were almost on the other side of the world!)

75 percent of species died out, including almost all of the dinosaurs. Some of the ones that had taken to the air and had feathers and warm blood survived the next five years of darkness. And of course many of those little mammals survived too.

Thus ended the Cretaceous Period and the Mesozoic Era (which included the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous).

The Cretaceous Period had lasted some 80 million years–note, longer than everything since. If you were to go back in time halfway to the beginning of the Cretaceous, you’d be in the Cretaceous.

65.6 million years later, give or take 300,000 years, a couple of geologists were investigating exposed rock near Raton, New Mexico (less than two hours away from me). They knew from fossil evidence that this little thin white stripe in the rock separated Cretaceous from Paleogene (which used to be called the “Tertiary”). Below the line, many kinds of dinosaurs were alive when the rock was deposited. Above it, only the birds.

They analyzed the white stripe. It had 100 times as much iridium as the rock above and below it. Still not a lot (a hundred times almost, almost nothing is still almost nothing), but it was the smoke that showed the smoking gun was an asteroid.

An asteroid almost certainly killed the big “Jurassic Park” dinosaurs.

Many have read this story and come away thinking the asteroid was made out of iridium. No, no more than the gun found at the crime scene is made out of fingerprint oil. Iridium was along for the ride, but the sulfur the asteroid found at its destination probably did as much as anything to kill almost every large animal on earth.

So what is this “iridium” anyway? It’s element #77, with 77 protons in the nucleus, tucked in between osmium and platinum. It was discovered alongside osmium in 1803/4 by Smithson Tennant, a story I told last week. It’s almost as dense–the difference is so small you wouldn’t be able to perceive it. And it’s another one of those bothersome high-melting point elements…six hundred kelvins below osmium but still 2400K. But it does not form iridium tetroxide and kill people. In fact, it may be the most chemically inert metal known, the noblest metal. It is not attacked even by aqua regia, a mixture of acids that will make short work of gold.

What I didn’t mention last week was that iridium tended to be the major impurity in those Russian platinum coins. It could be detected while processing the platinum, because at one point during that processing, some of the aqueous solutions would be orange or even red if any iridium were present, rather than yellow. And indeed when analyzed today iridium and iron are the major impurities in those coins.

Today, iridium can be rendered a solid, with some work. This video is well worth watching! Osmium is rarely made into big solid objects. Iridium, on the other hand…

The professor mentioned the price of iridium. It’s now running six thousand dollars an ounce. Back in early December it was $1700, before that it was fairly stable, the ten year chart shows a few years of $1000/oz and even $600/oz iridium, before it blooped up to $1500 in 2018, slowly rose to $1700, and then went bananas. http://www.dailymetalprice.com/metalpricecharts.php?c=ir&u=oz&d=2400

And now for a link to the story of a man who had two kilograms of iridium powder, and decided to go get it melted. Some of you expressed interest in just how it works with these super-high-melting elements; there’s detail here for you.

https://theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Stories/077.x3/

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

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

China is in the White House

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

Joe Biden is Asshoe

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

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

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

His Fraudulency

Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, we haven’t heard much from the person who should have been declared the victor, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

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

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

Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $1746.90
Silver $26.33
Platinum $1198.00
Palladium $2688.00
Rhodium $29,000.00

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $1734.30
Silver $25.13
Platinum $1192.00
Palladium $2748.00
Rhodium $25,000.00

Gold and platinum are fairly stable, silver took a fairly big hit, Palladium took a healthy jump, and rhodium seems to have dropped 4000 bucks, however, it did so a couple of weeks before and bounced right back up again. I think rhodium has found a range, a wide one…for now.

Osmium. This One Can Kill You.

Someone last week made snarky comments about writing about precious metals, so I figured I’d respond the only way I could: by continuing to do so. In fact, I was thinking about combining osmium and iridium, and now I know I shouldn’t!

Osmium is one of the Platinum Group Metals. In fact, it’s the one directly “below” last week’s metal, ruthenium, in the periodic table.

It’s famous for one thing. It is the densest stable element, bar none. In other words, it’s the most efficient paperweight. It packs more weight into a smaller volume than anything else, bar none…well, at least until you start spooning up pieces of white dwarf or neutron stars. It comes in at 22.59 grams per cubic centimeter–just a shade more than iridium, which we’ll get to in due course.

It also tends to have a slight bluish cast, not unlike zinc (which is neither dense nor valuable). And it’s very hard (Mohs 7.0) and almost completely incompressible.

Provided, of course, that you can get it in bulk. It generally is marketed as a finely-divided powder, and even if you buy melted beads, the beads will often have voids on the inside, because of the same issues that arise when melting any of the refractory metals. That will make the beads lighter than one might expect.

The melting point is a whopping 3306 K, 5491 F, with rhenium and tungsten the only metals with higher melting points. That’s difficult to attain, even in a black car with black interior parked in Phoenix.

Osmium and iridium both were discovered in 1803 as part of the investigation of platinum by Wollaston and Tennant in England. Smithson Tennant gets the credit for osmium and iridium, while Wollaston gets the credit for rhodium and palladium. Tennant found osmium and irididum by studying the black residue left over after dissolving what they thought was pure platinum in aqua regia.

Aqua regia (royal water) is actually a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acids; unlike other acids, gold will be attacked by aqua regia, and so will platinum. But even after dissolving the platinum, there was this black residue, which (after a lot of trial and error with various chemical reactions) proved to contain two new metals, osmium and iridium.

Osmium proved to have an oxide, OsO₄,. And that’s where the “kill” comes from. Osmium tetroxide is a solid that readily sublimates, turning directly to vapor like dry ice, and it stinks. Hence the name osmium, from osme, “a smell.” Worse: osmium tetroxide is poisonous, and if it doesn’t kill you, it’s liable to damage your eyes.

And if you open a container of powdered osmium, it can catch fire spontaneously, reacting with the air to form osmium tetroxide. This makes it difficult to machine…imagine lathe turnings catching fire and killing or blinding the lathe operator.

Quoting from wikipedia regarding osmium tetroxide:

OsO₄ is highly poisonous. In particular, inhalation at concentrations well below those at which a smell can be perceived can lead to pulmonary edema and subsequent death. Noticeable symptoms can take hours to appear after exposure.

OsO₄ will irreversibly stain the human cornea, which can lead to blindness. The permissible exposure limit for osmium(VIII) oxide (8 hour time-weighted average) is 2 µg/m³.^[7] Osmium(VIII) oxide can penetrate plastics and food packaging, and therefore must be stored in glass under refrigeration.^[14]“

wikipedia

Based on this…you can die from it even if you can’t smell it.

When the Russians made that platinum coinage I talked about a few weeks ago, part of their purification process involved dealing with the osmium they were extracting from the raw platinum in a way that was safe; fairly sophisticated stuff for the early-mid 1800s.

There is good news: even though the powder can kill you, osmium is completely safe (and practically impervious to anything) in bulk form. (It might start to form osmium tetroxide if heated to 400 C.)

Depending on who you ask, osmium is the least common stable element in the earth’s crust…averaging fifty parts per trillion by mass (weight).

Osmium is found with platinum, but also turns up as a by product of copper and nickel mining. Perhaps that is why its price hasn’t gone bananas like some of the other PGMs, whose production depends on platinum mining.

It’s mainly used in alloys, to harden them (rather than as a catalyst). Osmiridium and iridosmine, for instance (you can guess what they are mixtures of). Osmium and its alloys were once used as fountain point pen tips, and still see use as instrument pivots,electrical contacts. Osmium was also used for phonograph needles. Ballpoint pen balls sometimes contain a tiny bit of osmium, too.

Total world production is very hard to nail down, but in 1971 the US produced about 60 Kg as byproduct of copper mining. We import about twice that much, on average, every year. 120 Kg, by the way, is very roughly a gallon and a half of this stuff. (And we are talking about over 250 grocery pounds here. heavy stuff!!) I found in one place a claim that only one or two metric tons is produced per year world wide. (That would be a slab a meter on a side and about four inches thick, tops.)

The “spot” price is hard to nail down on something so thinly traded, but it seems to be about $400 an ounce (and has sat there for years). On the other hand, I’ve also found a site that claims it’s 1200 euros per gram which would make it something like 36000 euros an ounce–probably about 40,000 dollars an ounce. (That flat out doesn’t seem right to me.) If you do find it close to the spot price, it will be in powder form, in a container you had better not break the seal on.

I can’t really recommend it as an investment, the market for it is so small.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

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

China is in the White House

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

Joe Biden is Asshoe

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

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

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

What IS Hopium Anyway?

Based on some of the reactions to my post of two weeks ago, it became apparent that some people misconstrue where I’m coming from.

When I condemn hopium, am I condemning any and all hope? NO. It’s true that hopium is hope, but not all hope is hopium. So when I condemn hopium, I am not condemning hope as such only false and unfounded hope.

In fact, I wasn’t even dumping on all hopium two weeks ago. I was talking specifically of the kind that implies that at some date in the near future, all will suddenly become well, and more specifically, the speculation that names a date. (This is, by the way, something that Q never did, and I am aware of that yet I got criticized on that point as if I were going after Q for naming dates.)

A perfect example, someone posted a thing from John Solomon claiming the long-awaited indictments would be coming out in 4-6 weeks. That means, before the end of April. I have a couple of questions in all earnest to anyone who pays any attention to John Solomon.

1. How many times has he promised the indictments would be coming in just a few weeks?
2. How many times has he been right?
3. Given the answers to 1 and 2, why in blazes is anyone still paying attention to this guy?

Or for that matter to ANY prognostication about a specific date?

I’m thinking we may finally have broken ourselves of that particular habit. Because I don’t see too much of it any more. Good.

And now to clear up a misunderstanding I did my fair share to contribute to.

I had heard others here refer to Marica’s as a place with a lot of hopium, and (my mistake!) I assumed that they meant it included this sort of date-specific stuff. Having misunderstood them, I took them at what I thought was their word. (And I probably shouldn’t have trusted them at all, much less expected them to mean the same thing by hopium as I do.)

So when I said later on that they really needed to get off the hopium, I meant the date specific stuff. And when I went over there later, and picked a random page off that day’s daily…I found no date specific stuff! So I was wrong about that, not that one would necessarily be able to tell, since *I* failed to define my terms. Regardless, it was factually wrong and I apologize.

Not that there isn’t hopium of other types, there, and here.

The emphasis over there is quite a bit different. They’re Deplorable over there, of course, but a lot of the content is about peoples’ personal lives, their other hobbies, their current difficulties, and so on. It may or may not be more your cup of tea than this place (which is 90% politics); if you think you need a change of pace, go have a look-see over there.

OK, one other thing to get out of the way. Someone (either there or here, I do not remember) seemed puzzled that I could say that I believe something is happening, when I clearly don’t believe the “movie set” and “Trump is really in charge” interpretations of today’s events. Am I contradicting myself or backing off from that?

No, because that word something could literally mean a trillion different things, and I don’t believe it means either of the two things I mention above. Trump is doing something, but I doubt it’s a countercoup; more likely he’s doing a bunch of stuff behind the scenes to discredit a lot of bad actors, and trying (quietly) to fix the fraud issues and trying to defeat the worse-than-useless dogpuke RINOs. A lot more mundane than what many are thinking, but it’s all important stuff that has to happen one way or another.

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

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

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

Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $1728.90
Silver $26.03
Platinum $1207.00
Palladium $2426.00
Rhodium $22,000.00

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $1746.90
Silver $26.33
Platinum $1198.00
Palladium $2688.00
Rhodium $29,000.00

Just when I thought Rhodium might start returning to sane levels…it jumped right back up again. Iridium, too, is going bonkers, in the realm of $5000. It’s a congener of rhodium. (That’s a fancy word meaning “in the same classification group as.” In chemistry, specifically, it means it’s in the same column of the periodic table, which tends to govern chemical properties.)

What’s causing the PGMs other than platinum to go up while platinum is in the dumpster (relatively speaking)? (And the PGMs are: Platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium, ruthenium and osmium.)

According to one analysis I read, it’s platinum being in the dumpster that is causing all of these problems! (And I can’t verify this, but it makes sense.)

The other PGMs are not mined in their own right; they are quite rare and specifically going after them is uneconomical. Since they do appear with platinum, they are a byproduct of platinum mining. So production of them halts when platinum production halts, and resumes again once someone starts mining platinum.

And platinum was produced a lot back in 2008-2009, to the point where it became a glut on the market. And it is still a glut on the market. Then Covid came along and killed what little platinum production was still going on. The analysts expect this to continue to be a factor until 2024-25.

If they are correct, it’s still a good time to get into PGMs, however, I at least really can’t afford to do so. On the other hand if rhodium, for instance, were to hit $100,000 or more it might just force a restart of platinum mining!

Watch your tailpipes. Your catalytic converter has about $400 in rhodium in it (which as you might imagine, is not much). There is a rash of practitioners of socialist economics thieves sawing off tailpipes on certain model cars now.

Ruthenium

We have five precious metals to go, having done silver, rhodium, platinum, and rhenium already.

Rhenium is very difficult to find in bar form, and so is this week’s metal, ruthenium. (Even rhodium is showing iup in bar form at Kitco, PAMP is making bars now.) Ruthenium is one of the “platinum group metals,” that block of six metals tucked in under iron/cobalt/nickel. If you find a nugget of one of these metals, the others will be in that nugget as impurities.

(It’s important not to confuse the two names even though they’re very similar. Rhenium and ruthenium are different things, even if the only difference in spelling is the “ut.” It’s of the “ut”most importance not to let this confuse you.)

Ruthenium’s density is 12.45, which makes it a bit heavier than lead. But do not use it for bullets; the bad guys are barely worth the regular cost of ammo. And it would probably wreck your rifling, being a lot harder than lead (even jacketed lead). Besides, you’re going to have a very difficult time casting it! It melts at 4,233 F (2607K, 2334 C), which is pretty darned hot–about like the filament in an incandescent bulb (2400K), but other precious metals would shrug even that amount of heat off (e.g, rhenium, which melts at 5767F or 3459K). To give you another notion as to how hot this is, iron melts at 2800 F, 1811K.

Ruthenium was, in fact, the last of the PGMs to be discovered, in 1844, by Karl Ernst Klaus. Don’t let that name fool you. He had German/Baltic ancestry, but he was born in the Russian Empire (and indeed, many Russian scientists had very Germanic names, at the time). He named the element ruthenium, after Ruthenia, the Latin term for Russia.

It appears that Klaus discovered ruthenium while going through the residue left over when refining raw platinum for the Russian platinum ruble coinage that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. And indeed the timing is right, the series was produced between 1828-1845.

Ruthenium has some catalytic uses (like rhodium, platinum, palladium and iridium), but not to as great an extent, so its spot price seems to be roughly $385-400 depending on exactly where you look. It seems to be slowly climbing. But even so, it’s by far the cheapest of the PGMs…if you can find it in bar form. It usually trades as “sponge” which is to say loose powder.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

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

China is in the White House

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

Joe Biden is Asshoe

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

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

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

Scroll down for some info, some of it may be useful, some may be interesting, some might even be both, but more likely most is neither, about precious metals and what sorts of products are out there.

His Fraudulency

Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, we haven’t heard much from the person who should have been declared the victor, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

The last distraction/hopium magnet was the Supreme Court pretending to think about taking up a bunch of election-related cases on the 19th. This week, they weaseled out of hearing them on the grounds that they were moot. I’m not terribly surprised; under the Constitution Congress is the final arbiter of elections and they arbitered it arbitrarily on the 6th. Done, get out of my courtroom!

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

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

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

Spot Prices.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

Gold $1785.60
Silver $27.36
Platinum $1276.00
Palladium $2412.00
Rhodium $23,000.00

This week:

Gold $1735.60
Silver $26.80
Platinum $1191.00
Palladium $2379.00
Rhodium $26,000.00

Basically, everything but rhodium took it in the shorts. Rhodium went up by more than the price of any one of the other metals. It has gone up over 200% in the last year, because, apparently, it’s needed for catalytic converters. Of course, so are platinum and palladium, and they don’t seem to be going bananas.

Rhodium is an odd one. It’s recovered as a byproduct of mining other things, even more so than some of the other PGMs. When there’s a sudden upsurge in demand (or we start running out of it), it’s still too expensive to mine for its own sake…we’re not going to mine more nickel (say) just to get the tiny amount of rhodium that’s along for the ride. Of course if the price goes up enough. who knows? We (meaning the world, in this case) only produce about 30 tons a year.

This leads to a dynamic where the price is reasonably stable, then suddenly jumps up when we run out. Inelastic supply, as economists would call it. Once we recover some more the price drops again. But will it ever drop from this surge? Hard to say. People seem to think this time is different, somehow. Anyhow, I can’t afford to play this, but if the price drops to a sane level, I may just buy some for the next time time. Hopefully someone else here can play this time.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

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

China is in the White House

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

Joe Biden is Asshoe

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

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

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