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

Our Turn

[Yes, I did this one fifteen weeks ago, 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 so-called populists stand for absolutely nothing except for going along to get along. That allows the Left to drive the culture and politics.

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

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

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

Justice

It says “Justice” on the picture.

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

But what is it?

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

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

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

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

—Ayn Rand Lexicon (aynrandlexicon.com)

Justice Must Be Done.

Trump, it is supposed, had some documents.

Biden and company stole the country.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $2,883.10
Silver $32.22
Platinum $984.00
Palladium $992.00
Rhodium $4,975.00
FRNSI* 138.470-
Gold:Silver 89.482-

This week, at Friday close:

Gold $2,936.30
Silver $32.53
Platinum $980.00
Palladium $990.00
Rhodium $4,975.00
FRNSI* 141.044-
Gold:Silver 90.265+

Gold dipped a tiny bit Friday from its Thursday high mark. Silver dropped 46 cents. Par for the course; silver just can’t keep up with gold for whatever reason. As a result the gold:silver ratio just busted 90, again (it was this high a few weeks ago).

And of course the FRNSI is up, having handily busted the 140 mark.

*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.

A Canadian Talks Back

Here’s a video from a Canadian’s Youtube channel. That channel normally is about urban planning or something like that, but he’s stressed out about the “51st State” stuff. And the tariffs.

If this person’s attitude is typical of the Canadian in the street…well, it’s interesting.

I admit I can’t understand what PDJTs play is here. (I think I may have figured out Greenland.) I understand the tariffs; I don’t understand the “51st state” even though I’m aware he might not actually want to take over Canada and then give it statehood. At first I thought he was simply trolling TrueDope, but if so that would have ended when TrueDope announced he was stepping down. Anyhow, maybe someone reading this has ideas that make some sense of this.

The Final Experiment: More Hypocrisy from the Flerfs

The Flerfs have been going over the videos taken in Antarctica with a fine-toothed comb, and when one of them thinks they’ve found an irregularity, he trumpets it.

And then the others mindlessly echo it. In other words they hold normal people up to a microscope and apply zero critical thinking to claims made by their own side.

Up to 14:06, Jeran allegedly said the sun set in Antarctica, while there. No amount of denials on Jeran’s part will sway them. After 14:06 the clowns don’t know how to read a file listing.

Meanwhile Flat Earth Dave, a/k/a Dirth a/k/a Potato finds his bluff called discussing things with an MIT physicist, who wants to set up a big formal working group to design experiments (starting at 2:38:30 and running through 3:50:00 at least though it gets good at about 3:40:00–at 3:55:00 Flat Earth Dave realizes he’s fucked). Throughout this whole conversation MC Toon analyzes Dave’s cult recruiting techniques.

And his leaking-like-a-sieve app is about to get him in BIG trouble in multiple countries.

Potato was moderating the chat in a livestream Witsit was holding, and people started coming in to say his app leaked, and he spent a half an hour banning those people, starting around 17 minutes in, picking up steam at about 26 minutes.

Glaciation

Another method of wearing down the landscape that we often see today is glaciation. And it leaves behind very obvious signs, enough so that we can chart the extent of glaciation during the geologically recent Ice Age.

Though to be sure we are still in the ice age. We just happen to be in the middle (I hope it’s the middle and not the end) of an “interglacial,” a temporary retreat of the glaciers. The interglacial started in roughly 10,000 BCE (I usually see 9,700 BCE) and that is the beginning of the current epoch, the Holocene. (As a reminder, an epoch is the largest subdivision of a period; a period is something like the Cambrian, Permian, Jurassic, Cretaceous, or Quaternary (the one we’re in), and periods are the third level of subdivision of geologic time after the eon and era.)

[As a complete aside, some advocate for changing our year numbering, by adding 10,000 to them, which would make this the year 12,025. The advantage is that there would be no negative dates throughout human recorded history, yet any idiot can convert the new date back to the old for anything that’s not “BC”. Doing so would pretty closely align with the Holocene, so this is called the “Holocene Calendar.” NB that the year 10,001 is 1 CE, and the year 10,000 is 1 BCE (there was no zero in our current system). Using this system: Julius Caesar was assassinated in 9957 HE; Alexander the Great died in 9678 HE, and the Great Pyramid was built in about 7400 HE, but most importantly Trump began his second term in 12025 HE.]

OK so how do we detect past glaciation? It helps to understand what glaciers are. They are ice, but they start out as snow falling in places where it never has the chance to melt; today that’s high up in mountains, in Greenland, and in Antarctica. Even in those latter areas, though it tends to start in the interior high areas of those landmasses.

As the snow piles up it compresses and gets packed into ice. Ice is not particularly hard stuff (compared to rocks), and will eventually start to flow under the pressure, once it’s about 30 meters (100 feet) thick. There’s still some trace of the layered structure of the snow and these layers are relatively weakly bonded to each other. So a glacier is in many ways like a super-super slow river. A typical speed is about one meter per day though that can vary greatly. Imagine a glacier forming way up in a mountain valley, and then flowing downhill.

Here’s an example, from Denali Mt McKinley. (Incidentally, Wikipedia has not changed the name yet, but searching for “Mt. McKinley” redirects to “Denali.”)

You’ll note the flat area on the left that sort of looks like a river; that’s the top of a glacier. And if you look closely, you’ll even see tributaries on the right hand side, smaller glaciers flowing from smaller valleys into this glacier, with black stripes marking the boundaries. The color differences are generally due to stuff falling onto the top of the glacier; if that happens more in one “tributary” than another, there will be a color difference when they merge.

Some glaciers are actually lubricated by a thin layer of meltwater where they touch the ground; this can be from geothermal activity, or just the sheer mass of the glacier melting the ice, the same way the blade of an ice skate will momentarily melt the water under the skate. This helps the glacier “flow” more quickly.

The upper layers of a glacier have less stress on them than lower layers and don’t want to flow. They’re essentially being carried along by the layers underneath, and will actually crack if the glacier goes over some irregularity in the terrain below, creating crevasses, like here:

If snow should happen to fall on this sort of thing and obscure it, it can be deadly. In fact, the Union Glacier camp in Antarctica is marked off by flags; if you go beyond those flags you could step onto a hidden crevasse and at that point you’re likely dead before you can be rescued. On the other hand geologists will sometimes deliberately descend into crevasses to take samples. Not for the faint-hearted.

So…how can we tell a glacier used to be somewhere but has since melted away?

One way, that works in mountains, is to note the shapes of the mountains and valleys. Glaciers tend to leave wide, U shaped valleys. They also tend to leave pyramidal-shaped mountains, because they will eat away at the mountain and often there are several glaciers off the same mountain. As they eat back into the mountain they will leave sharp edges between adjacent glaciers. Both of these can be seen in this notional diagram:

A cirque is a depression formed by a glacier, if and when it melts, a lake or pond called a tarn may be left behind. Cirques seem to form at the very heads of glacial valleys (I can’t quite find a statement that straightforward, but all the diagrams I see imply it). Neighboring glaciers leave sharp ridges called aretes, the ends of fingers of rock can be ground away by a main glacier to leave a truncated spur, and the mountain at the middle ends up becoming a horn…as in Matterhorn.

Compare a picture of the Southern Rockies in Wyoming:

To the Northern Rockies well into Canada, Banff Park:

Notice that the Canadian peaks are much sharper (and OhByTheWay note the blatantly obvious layering of the sedimentary rocks in those mountains); they’ve been worked over by glaciers and the Southern Rockies in Colorado and Wyoming have not. In fact the lake is Moraine Lake because it appears in a moraine.

When a glacier is doing it’s thing there are two ways it can grind down the terrain it’s on, plucking and abrasion.

Plucking is where the glacier actually uproots rocks–even parts of bedrock–as it passes over them. It’s aided in doing so by having subglacial water get into cracks in the rock and then freezing; that breaks up rocks fairly quickly. Rocks of many different sizes get plucked and incorporated into the underside of the glacier.

Here is a landscape that had much of its rock plucked away at some time in the past, the Aland Islands in the Baltic Sea.

Which leads to the second method, abrasion: Now the bottom of the glacier is like rough grit sandpaper and as the glacier flows grooves or striations can be cut in the underlying rock, as shown here in Mount Rainier national park:

Here’s an illustration showing the two at work. Note that as the glacier goes over the hump, crevasses open up as the top layers flex.

The rock ground away in this fashion becomes fine powder a few thousandths of a millimeter in diameter.

All this suspended rock, the stuff that fell on top of the glacier and the stuff it picked up through plucking and abrasion, eventually gets out of the glacier.

If the glacier ends on land, it can dump a lot of its load as it melts and retreats; this is called glacial till. This ends up as fine sediment with larger rocks in it, in moraines. Also quite a bit can be carried by the stream coming out from under the glacier–all that subglacial water is now released.

The furthest a glacier got before beginning is often revealed by a ridge called a terminal moraine, which can often be seen long after the glacier is completely gone. These are used to determine the extent of the last glaciation that covered much of North America and Europe.

A melting glacier will drop the large stuff it contains, too. If the glacier was particularly large, it might have carried things hundreds of miles, such as these rocks from Norway found in the Netherlands; these are called “glacial erratics”:

However it’s much more common to get smaller rocks appearing in a matrix of finer-grained rock, like this:

When a geologist sees this, it practically screams that a glacier left this behind.

If the glacier gets out over water and starts calving icebergs, those boulders melt out and drop right down into what would otherwise be a nice orderly layering of sediment. This photo is of just such a dropstone and is iconic.

Here’s another…from Namibia. Remember this; I’ll get back to it.

Thus far I’ve been talking about glaciers termed “alpine” and “valley” glaciers, because they start way up in some valley in the mountains…somewhere. But sometimes, a glacier can completely cover a mountain or volcano, as seen in Iceland; that’s called an icecap. But there are even bigger ones; anything over about 50,000 square kilometers is called an ice sheet or a continental glacier. Today there are two of those: Greenland and Antarctica. These tend to flow outward in all directions from a center. We can detect former ice sheets by looking for all of these landforms and even tell where the center was from the direction of the striations left by abrasion. Here is the Laurentide ice sheet from the last glaciation. (For some reason, forms of the word “Laurentian” get applied to North America by geologists.) Note it’s actually contiguous with the “Cordilleran” ice sheet over the Canadian Rockies, and the Innuitian Ice Sheet over the northern Arctic Islands…and the Greenland Ice Sheet, which is still with us today albeit a bit smaller. Iceland was completely covered; its current icecap now confined to the interior of the island was larger back then. The Rockies further south had much more limited glaciation.

The weight of all of that ice (it can be thousands of feet thick) can actually push down the rocks underneath it. The rocks underlying the Earth’s crust are plastic and will flow, if you push on them hard enough and for a long enough time. Then when the ice melts, there’s not nearly as much weight there any more and the land slowly rises. The area around the Great Lakes is still undergoing “isostatic rebound” (or “postglacial rebound”) as the rock continues to rise after the weight of the ice is gone. The Great Lakes essentially fill a depression formed by the weight of the ice; depending on how much rebounding happens they may eventually empty out as the depression ceases to exist.

While a glacier is in the process of melting “proglacial” lakes can form, either dammed by ice that hasn’t melted, or in cirques (the aforementioned tarns), or behind terminal moraines. Sometimes these lakes can be very large and if caused by an ice dam, a major flood can happen when it breaks open. Lake Agassiz is an example. It has been known for quite some time; here’s a map drawn in the 19th century by Warren Upham.

(And there’s that word “Laurentian” again in the title). Note also labelings of Keewatin and Assiniboia for parts of Canada now in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Northern Ontario. Canada tended to give “new” territory to already existing provinces.)

Lake Agassiz may even have been larger than the Caspian Sea at one point. But once enough ice melted in what is now Hudson Bay, torrents of water–a million cubic meters per second–likely poured into Hudson Bay and thence out into the Atlantic. Sea levels probably rose anywhere from 0.8 to 2.8 meters from this one event alone. But that was only the more recent formation and melting of the lake, the prior one 13000 years ago may have caused the Younger Dryas cooling worldwide.

Here is a a diagram reconstructing the history of what is now the Great Lakes. Notice 4000 years ago the Ottawa River drained Lake Huron.

Glacial lakes, while they exist and are fed by meltwater, can have sediment deposited in their beds and these are known as varves. (I see conflicting information on whether varves only happen in glacial lakes, or any lakes, but everything I read agrees they form in fresh water, not salt water.) The layers are annual, a repeating sequence every year, like the alternating light-and-dark bands of tree rings. What causes the annual structure? Springtime runoff is much more energetic and brings larger particles with the water, so one can see alternating coarse/fine layers in the sediment. The reason for thinking varves cannot form in salt water is that the salt will cause clay particles to clump together, erasing the fine/coarse/fine/coarse sequencing. It’s therefore much harder to see annual layers in ocean-deposited sediment.

Varves can be correlated over limited distances and sequences up to 50,000 years long have been assembled, in a process similar to dendrochronology, where tree ring sequences have extended back over ten thousand years. This is a recent varve formation in Japan. More ancient ones running for twenty million annual layers have been found.

One might argue that the assumption that the layers are annual, though plausible (seasonal changes in seasonal water flow are quite plausible), are unwarranted. Note though that those making this argument are arguing for a young earth, and generally they want to believe that all of the varves were laid down within one year. But that twenty million layer formation would still be 50,000 years old if the varves were laid down once a day, and the 50,000 years of the lake in Japan would have taken well over a century at that rate. And the sediments within the varves are simply too fine to have settled out that fast, so thinking about an even faster rate is even more unreasonable. But leaving that one aside, sometimes there is an event that causes a non-annual layer to form, such as a flash flood. But we’ve seen these happen, and they are invariably quite irregular (due to turbulence in the water, I am guessing) and easy to tell from a ‘regular’ annual varve–we’ve also watched those happen and they’re nice and regular. Varves laid down in the past generally look like the annual varves being laid down today, and we can account for the irregular ones that don’t. Another factor is that we can detect seasonal pollen changes in recent varves. And we can date organic fragments in recently-laid-down varves via radiocarbon dating (and I will get to such methods of dating soon), and those results are consistent with annual layers.

Not the First Ice Age

The current intermittent Ice Age began at the beginning of the Quaternary period; indeed that’s how the Quaternary is defined.

I’m going to bring the outline of eons, eras, and periods in from a few weeks ago, to refresh our memories. I’m going to highlight certain things I’ll discuss below, and also expand the Cenozoic.

• Phanerozoic (the current eon/eonthem)
  • Cenozoic (the current era/erathem)
    • Quaternary
      • Holocene
      • Pleistocene
    • Neogene
      • Pliocene
      • Miocene
    • Paleogene
      • Oligocene
      • Eocene
      • Paleocene
  • Mesozoic
    • Cretaceous
    • Jurrasic
    • Triassic
  • Paleozoic
    • Permian
    • Carboniferous (Mississippian + Pennsylvanian)
    • Devonian
    • Silurian
    • Orodivician
    • Cambrian
• Proterozoic
  • Neoproterozoic
    • Ediacaran
    • Cryogenian
    • Tonian
  • Mesoproterozoic
    • 3 periods
  • Paleoproterozoic
    • 4 periods
• Archean
  • Neoarchean
  • Mesoarchean
  • Paleoarchean
  • Eoarchean
• Hadean (starts with the formation of the Earth)

But it wasn’t the first and it is far from being the worst. We have been able to detect the signs of widespread glaciation in the late Paleozoic (late Devonian through late Permian), an early Paleozoic ice age running from the late Ordovician into the Silurian, and a Huronian ice age, during the early Proterozoic (that’s the eon before the current Phanerozoic, so this was quite some time ago! All of these highlighted above.

But there was also a late Proterozoic ice age, and it was a doozy. As might be suggested from the fact that the name “Cryogenian” suggests “cryogenics” and other things having to do with cold.

The Cryogenian was established as a recognized period in 1990, so it’s fairly “new” in that respect.

The entire world froze over. All of it. At least, everything we can find today shows it happening–we can’t tell what was happening in the mid-oceans. Not only that this happened twice, in events called the Sturtian and Marinoan glaciations (named after epochs within the Cryogenian). That Namibian rock was not dropped recently; Namibia wasn’t affected by the recent ice ages.

But with very little doubt every continent on Earth was blanketed by these two glaciations.

Here’s a map as best as we can reconstruct things that happened that long ago. You’ll note the continents are in very different locations (USA south of the equator and rotated 90 degrees clockwise, just for instance); we’ll get to that in a future post.

The Sturtian lasted most of the Cryogenian, and the Cryogenian was a LONG period, longer than the Cretaceous. (The preceding Tonian was much longer.) Before the Cryogenian, there are possible fossils of something resembling sponges. I have some difficulty imagining any multicellular life surviving what turns out to be tens of millions of years of the Earth being mostly if not entirely covered with ice, in an extreme case looking superficially like Jupiter’s moon Europa.

This was well before the Cambrian “explosion” of fossils that resemble things alive today; it’s possible that this age wiped out any multicellular life that was out there and cleared the way for things more familiar to us (except that we don’t know yet how the Ediacaran life fits in to that–so what I just said is worth exactly what you paid for it).

How do we know this happened? Because there are glacial deposits everywhere on Earth from this time period. More precisely, on every continent, if we can find Cryogenian systems, they show signs of glaciations; not like the Quaternary events where the evidence of glaciation is confined to the northern parts of Earth and, of course (duh) Antarctica. Here’s one of the right age (Neoproterozoic) from Idaho:

You should have no problem recognizing this for what it is, though of course you can’t date the rock with your eyeballs, so you don’t know from this picture when it is.

The one thing we can’t quite be certain of is whether the oceans completely froze over; no oceanic floor rocks survive from then (again, something that will be discussed in a future post). It’s also possible some thin ribbons of land remained uncovered. But if not, if the whole planet truly froze over, well, we call that “Snowball Earth.” If some parts were exposed…that’s “Slushball Earth.”

So what happened? The thing about ice ages is, at the start they are a positive feedback loop. If it gets a bit colder, and more ocean freezes over, that white ice (covering deep blue ocean) increases the Earth’s albedo, meaning we reflect more light and heat, and absorb less, so the Earth cools down more. Which creates more pack ice, which lowers the albedo again. Without some sort of counterbalancing effect, everything freezes. And this time there doesn’t seem to have been any counterbalancing effect.

In some ways the more interesting question is why, having gone global or nearly so, it ever ended. We may have volcanoes to thank for that, as they gradually pumped more and more CO2 into the atmosphere. With no plant life to consume it, it simply warmed the planet to the point where the ice could start to melt…and then the feedback now runs in the opposite direction; more dark oceans increase heat retention. So after tens of millions of years, the Sturtian is over. But the respite isn’t long, because the Marinoan began some time after that…running roughly ten million years.

One can imagine an alien exploratory vessel coming by during this period, looking at the Snowball Earth, and saying, “No point in tarrying. Uninhabitable. Nothing multicellular will ever live here.”

I’ve hinted here at some durations, and these came from subtracting two sets of absolute dates. But I haven’t actually covered absolute dating…so that’s next.

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.

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

Spot Prices.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

Gold $2,861.10
Silver $31.89
Platinum $984.00
Palladium $990.00
Rhodium $5,025.00
FRNSI* 137.406-
Gold:Silver 89.718-

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $2,883.10
Silver $32.22
Platinum $984.00
Palladium $992.00
Rhodium $4,975.00
FRNSI* 138.470-
Gold:Silver 89.482-

Gold went up nicely this week and closed in the 2920s Thursday. And then it got beaten with the ugly stick on Friday, dropping 45.60. Although silver took a hit on Friday, also, it wasn’t as bad so this week we see the gold:silver ratio dropping just a bit. Still it’s nowhere near the 83-ish range it was in not so long ago.

*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.

The Final Experiment Fallout

The fallout continues.

Jeran is now a glober. To those who have been following this for years (and no, I am not one of them), it’s simply stunning; they could never have imagined it. Austin Witsit has been trying to figure out how he got “fooled” which means he is looking for excuses to remain a flat Earther. It’s an interesting study in psychology. They both saw the same things. One had an epiphany, the other is burrowing deeper into the bullshit that the sights ought to have blasted away.

But of late something else has caught my attention. A South African who goes by the name “Flatzoid” is running hard to be the most obliviously stupid person on the face of the Earth. And yes he has quite a bit of competition from a lot of people on the Left, but from what I see he is up to the challenge.

[Take for instance the fact that he is South African, yet hasn’t noticed that the sun doesn’t rise and set where it should (i.e., to the northeast and northwest) if flat Earth were correct. He once even attempted to measure its sunrise position, and did so on video so people could see he was using a method guaranteed to introduce error. Sure enough he got an answer a few degrees off, loudly trumpeted that the globe earth couldn’t make the prediction…and ignored the fact it was many times further off any conceivable flat earth prediction. Not that they actually make predictions that aren’t just copying off of Globe Earth’s paper during the test.]

It’s referred to as the “upper left” award by the globe defenders; this is an allusion to the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is commonly depicted on a graph like this:

The “upper left” is the peak of stupid but confident, or even arrogant. In this case Flatzoid has accused people far more knowledgeable than he is of being incompetent, and has said so to them in online meetings and debates.

In the case I’m thinking of his target is an Aussie engineer (with almost the same education background that I have), who goes online by “Critical Think” (which makes it very hard to find his channel).

This video is a reaction by an engineer, to the debate between Fkatzoid and Critical Think.

(Warning: You are about to see the worst case of Dunning-Kruger ever. Fkatzoid has no comprehension of the experiment, no actual conception of what it means to control variables, no conception of measurement error, and is so smugly confident he knows more than Critical Think that it can be infuriating at times.)

Flatzoid was on the list to be invited to The Final Experiment, but complained (as his excuse not to go) that he never received an invite. Will Duffy told him (in a livestream) that that was because his email did not appear on his youtube channel page. Flatzoid hastily went to add it so he could claim it had been there all along, but fatfingered his name and it showed as fkatzoid@<whatever the provider was>, so now he’s often called fkatzoid by Globe defenders.

Critical Think was not only invited, but actually did go on the Final Experiment. And he did something very interesting. He brought a very accurate electronic scale with him, along with its test weights. He has been taking those things to various places (like Malaysia), himself lives in (IIRC) Brisbane Australia, and had it with him in Chile–Santiago and Puntas Arenas. And of course Union Glacier camp in Antarctica.

What was he hoping to prove? He was hoping to validate the WGS-84 model of the Earth’s shape. Earth is a very slightly oblate spheroid (not enough so to look “squashed” in pictures–in fact proportionately speaking it easily meets the specs for cue balls) on account of its rotation. This has two effects on the gravity: 1. At the poles you are closer to the center of the Earth than you are at the equator, so you should feel very slightly stronger gravity. 2. The centrifugal effect of the rotating earth should reduce the net gravity on the equator, because the centrifugal effect partly counteracts the pull of the Earth’s mass. #2 is by far the larger of these two effects.

How does one check this? By measuring the force of gravity in different places using the same masses.

You can do this with a scale…but it has to be the right kind of scale. And you have to know how to use it.

And in order for this to make sense, you must understand the distinction between weight and mass. Which Flatzoid clearly does not.

Mass is the amount of “stuff” in an object, and it manifests as a resistance to forces applied to it. You can feel this by trying to push on objects. (Don’t try to lift them for this part.) To wipe out the effect of friction, pick the object up, hold it in your hand, then move your hand toward or away from you. If the object is massive enough you’ll definitely feel it “resisting” the force you’re applying.

This resistance is the same everywhere. Here on Earth. Anywhere on earth. In outer space. You’d feel it even in orbit on the ISS. The Moon. Mars. Jupiter (if there were a surface to stand on). And so on. The same.

Weight on the other hand is the force exerted on the object. The weight of something is actually the force with which it is being pulled, by the Earth.

This is why you can weigh differently on (say) the Earth and the Moon, even without a trip to the bathroom on the way from one to the other, in other words, even though your mass stays the same. The force exerted by gravity is different, and weight is the force.

The distinction usually doesn’t matter for us “groundhogs” here on Earth. Hence there’s a tendency even for STEM people working their STEM jobs to conflate the two. Pounds are actually a unit of force, but it’s not hard to find references to something called “pounds mass” in, say, rocketry, where a lot of the industry stuck with the US Customary System until fairly recently–it’s the mass that on the surface of the earth weighs one pound. (Oh and by the way our customary system is not the “imperial” system as I’ve heard many people call it lately: if you don’t believe that note the difference in volume measurements. A US gallon is smaller than an Imperial one.) So it’s quite correct to say that 100 lb (when she is on Earth) woman weighs 16.5 lbs on the Moon.

The kilogram, the SI unit, is actually a unit of mass. But people are happy to talk about things weighing a kilogram, really meaning (whether they realize it or not): weighing as much as a kilogram does on Earth. (The SI unit of force is the Newton, and to be truly correct, a kilogram of mass weighs 9.8 Newtons. But absolutely no one makes a scale reading in Newtons, though pressure measurements (“pounds per square inch” to us) and torque do reference Newtons.)

Let’s not forget we’re eventually getting back to Fkatzoid vs. Critical Think.

There are two ways to measure “weight” (one of them actually measures mass). 1) A balance beam scale. This is the conceptually simplest variant:

This works by comparing the force exerted by gravity on whatever it is you want to weigh, against the force exerted on known weights. If the two pans are in balance (as indicated by the long vertical bar pointing up from the pivot point), the two forces are equal, and therefore the two weights are equal. For this kind of scale, though, there’s a bonus: You also know the two masses are equal. It can actually be used to measure mass. It would work if you took it to the Moon; the mass of your object would be the same as the mass of the known weights in the other pan, and you will get the same reading.

There are more complex versions of this, including ones with sliding weights where the known weight is moved closer or farther, to balance things like having people of two different weights on a seesaw. The lighter one has to move further out.

If you remember those scales at your doctor’s office with the sliding weights, that’s this kind of scale; it’s set up so that you “hang” from a place very close to the pivot, while the sliding weights are further away; they therefore exert more leverage and a balance can be struck without actually putting something as heavy as you are on the balance beam.

The second kind of scale essentially measures the compression or stretching of a spring (or some other device sensitive to force) caused by gravity pulling on whatever it is you’re weighing.

Springs (et. all.) do their thing in response to a force, so these scales measure force. Take a 1 kilogram mass and a scale like this (that reads off in kg though it should technically read off in Newtons) to the moon and it will read 165.4 grams, not 1000 grams. That’s because it’s really measuring a force then, under the assumption it’s being used in Earth’s gravity, converting to read in kilograms. (If you are ever in such a situation, don’t be fooled into thinking the mass has changed.)

Your bathroom scale, the scale you use to measure ingredients in the kitchen, the scale at the deli and the scale at the post office are all this type (unless you’re like me and bought a used medical scale). If you reload you may have a balance beam scale of some type for the powder.

OK, so now to Critical Think’s experiment. He has a scale…of the second type, and it came with a kilogram mass.

Normally, you’d set up the scale, turn it on, make sure it zeros…and then you calibrate it. How? you put the kilogram mass on it, and push a button, which tells it that the force it is detecting right now is from local gravity acting on a one kilogram mass. It’s then smart enough to know what to do if it feels twice that force: it will tell you that what you’ve put on the scale has a mass of two kilograms. Likewise for any other mass: read out in proportion to that force which it has been taught means there’s a mass of one kilogram.

Why the need to calibrate the scale? Because if you don’t, it will be thrown off by the slight differences in the Earth’s gravitational field. Mountaintops, latitude, depressions like Death Valley or the Dead Sea, etc. will all change the force ever so slightly, and by calibrating the scale, you get it to correct for that.

What if you move the scale to another location, and don’t calibrate it? Your mass readings will be off by a bit, because the force you measure isn’t the same. It’s a small amount, a few hundredths of a gram per kilogram, but nonetheless measurable by Critical Think’s scale.

So this is what he did: He calibrated the scale at home. So in his house, the weights read 1000 g. He then takes the scale and weights somewhere else, and repeats the measurement without calibrating the scale. So the 1 kilogram mass now weighs a bit more or a bit less, and the difference is actually due to the difference in gravity.

On returning home, you weight your kilogram mass again to make sure the scale actually did hold its initial calibration. If the scale doesn’t read 1000 g again, something actually fell out of adjustment in the scale.

Critical Think’s data (multiple weighings of the known mass at each site), by the time you do the stats work that every scientist must do with their data, confirms the WGS-84 ellipsoid combined with the rotation of the Earth.

But it’s key: for this to work, you must not calibrate the scale at the other locations. Otherwise all you’ve done is show that the scale will report 1000g every time you calibrate it.

This is totally, completely beyond Fkatzoid’s comprehension. He insists that because Critical Think did not calibrate the scale at each location, the entire experiment is worthless–oblivious to the fact that the point of the experiment was to use the same calibration in different areas.

Furthermore Fkatzoid has no conception of measurement error. Critical Think took multiple readings at each location, and averaged them. This is standard operating procedure when taking data, because of measurement error. However, when this came out in the conversation, that the multiple readings had all been slightly different from each other, Fkatzoid triumphantly declared all of the data worthless, because it wasn’t “repeatable.”

And finally, Fkatzoid insists that temperature and humidity are factors that must be taken into account. Why? Because. Because what? Because. It turns out that Critical Think actually checked these beforehand, by varying the temperature and humidity at home and seeing what effect they had on the scale (by again, calibrating once then measuring under different temperatures and pressures–and noting that they had no significant effect, so he could from that point forward ignore them so long as he stayed within the operating temperature range of the scale. This point, too, is completely lost on Fkatzoid.

He’s trying to argue about basic science with an experienced engineer. Not that experienced engineers are automatically right by any means, nor are they necessarily geniuses. But engineering is where the scientific rubber meets the road in a way that’s visible to everyone. All branches of engineering must study and understand physics at a bare minimum (many branches have to go into other disciplines like chemistry as well), and they must apply it to solve real-world problems.

If the physics they understand doesn’t have a close relationship to reality, their solutions can’t work. And sometimes they “don’t work” badly enough to kill people. The Romans knew this. Their engineers would have to stand under the arches they designed, as the blocking for construction was removed. If the engineer had messed up…he died. Better him than someone who had trusted him.

There are certainly plenty of examples of engineering failures in history. (Engineers get to learn about them!) But even those who fail when pushing the envelope understand the basics.

Fkatzoid never had to learn any science past the third grade level (complete with all of the oversimplifications made to get the basic concept across) and it shows here. I don’t think I’ve every seen someone more obliviously but arrogantly ignorant than Fkatzoid.

And in the wake of the Final Experiment, he’s one of the leaders of the Flat Earth movement.

No Geology This Time

I will try to write something up this weekend, for next weekend.

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

Speaker Johnson: A Reminder.

And MTG is there to help make it stick.

January 6 tapes. A good start…but then nothing.

Were you just hoping we’d be distracted by the first set and not notice?

Are you THAT kind of “Republican”?

Are you Kevin McCarthy lite?

What are you waiting for?

I have a personal interest in this issue.

And if you aren’t…what the hell is wrong with you?

Fun Quote

(HT Aubergine)

This is amazing. This is glorious. Summon a surgeon – it’s been a little over a week and you’re supposed to call the doctor after just four hours.

From Kurt Schlichter, who can certainly write a good rant (https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2025/01/30/trumps-winning-streak-is-totally-discombobulating-the-democrats-n2651308)

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.

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 (i.e., paper) Prices

Last week:

Gold $2,771.70
Silver $30.64
Platinum $957.00
Palladium $1,008.00
Rhodium $5,000.00
FRNSI* 133.081-
Gold:Silver 90.460+

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, Kitco “ask” prices. Markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $2,801.20
Silver $31.27
Platinum $989.00
Palladium $1,036.00
Rhodium $5,000.00
FRNSI* 134.508+
Gold:Silver 89.581+

Gold zig-zagged across the 2,800 mark (which is record territory) on Friday. Since most people quote bid, not ask, and the bid for gold is 2799.20 you might hear that it closed just short of $2,800 on Friday. (I quote ask, because that’s the buyer’s price and you should be buying, right?) Gold was even above 2,810 at least once on Friday.

Of course this means that the FRNSI is at an all-time high.

Silver, on the other hand, actually dropped on Friday but still up nicely for the week as a whole. At least the gold/silver ratio has dropped a bit.

*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 is a CULT

Admittedly, the channel I am about to point you to–a brand new one–has one big Dufus Factor involved and that is the silly mask the guy wears for some reason having to do with his other gaming channel.

But when talking about Flat Earth he is spot-on. (And I’ve seen serious content delivered by people in sillier costumes–e.g., dinosaurs.) And…hallellujah! Except for two interviews his videos are short! Anyhow, his comparison of Flat Earth and cults seems spot on.

Nathan Oakley (as in “where are the GUNS, Nathan?!?!?”) tried to respond but of course was selective. As Oakley is credibly alleged to be a child abuser I won’t give him a link (you can surely find it if you want), but the response to his response is here.

CyberWaffle also has a response to the claims that The Final Experiment was done in a studio. Apparently he has some experience with the movie industry.

(In a later video he says he got the cost wrong…it should be 26 billion dollars.)

There seem to be four distinct responses to the Final Experiment from Flat Earthers (based on the interview with MC Toon).

1. Some maintain it doesn’t matter. “We never made a claim.” Well you still have to be able to explain what was seen.
2. Some retroactively claim that they were able to predict a 24 hour sun (this is revisionism (i.e., bare faced lying); there are plenty of videos of big-name Flerfers saying they would like to go to Antarctica during Austral summer, see the sun set, and thus prove the globe wrong–they didn’t erase them fast enough). But now they’re claiming that the Sun they saw was a reflection off the dome. (Decisively disproven by sunspot photos.)
3. One pastor claims the Sun was actually Satan.
4. But the most common claim is that it was faked; apparently “Flat Earth Dave [Weiss]” (who originally stood up against claims of “greenscreen”) has been brought back into line.

The problem is, they took plenty of videos not yet released to show it wasn’t a fake. Claims it was in a 360 degree surround studio are exploded by a drone flight to about a mile AGL (above ground level), a video that has been released. No studio could be that tall; that’s much taller than any building we have ever built.

MC Toon points out that anyone can go, but clearly the great expense (the Final Experiment cost $31K per participant) is a barrier. He has a standing offer to anyone who thinks it was fake. He will put $100,000 in escrow; they can do the same. Then they go together. Whoever’s right about the Sun gets the money. If they get turned away at gun point the Flerfer gets the money. None of them are confident enough in their position to have taken him up on it. (If they were that confident but poor, they could borrow the money for the trip and the 100K fully confident that they will have $200K afterwards to pay off the $131K loan with. Though perhaps a bank will laugh in their face when they make the application and explain why they are going.)

The Final Experiment team tried to anticipate every possible way that Flerfs could deny they had done what they did. As CyberWaffle put it: “That’s the only really bizarre thing about this trip to Antarctica, where the whole purpose of the trip to Antarctica, the whole time….no one’s ever done an expedition on the pure purpose to have to prove that they did the expedition.”

Here’s an Interview with MC “Where are the GUNS Nathan” Toon. Pay especial attention from 50:36 on and then at 58:00 (though if you have time the whole thing is worth watching).

Another; his most recent (unless he releases one between now (Thursday) and Saturday). This one lays out the best why I harp on this. Flat Earth isn’t just wrong, which is bad enough, it is harmful to the people who believe it. As often as not they lose their friends and even alienate their families.

But here’s a final one, from a totally different source. This one makes a larger philosophical point, and is an interesting exposition on the subject of “respecting one’s elders.”

[Edit to add: This last video’s conclusion could be taken as implying that we should, for instance believe the medical establishment. Maybe he actually does mean that. But I’ll go so far as to say that sometimes the experts disagree with each other and we do have experts on our side in this case. And the “establishment” has plenty of motivation to warp its judgement. That’s quite a different situation than disagreeing with your mechanic.]

CyberWaffle sometimes talks disparagingly of “conspiracy theories” and, in the way he understands the term, he is right to do so. The classic conspiracy theory is impossible to argue with, not because it is true, but because the holder of the theory is primed to dismiss any contrary evidence as faked or a lie, as part of the cover up.

The sorts of things we discuss here are (almost entirely) not like that. We bring a lot here, and so far as I know, if someone were to actually bring contradictory evidence the response here would not be to shove fingers in ears, shake our heads and say “nuh-uh!”

On the other hand, if you ever get to that point of wanting to simply dismiss any counter-evidence as fake, then you’re in danger of disconnecting from reality–in the unlikely event that you haven’t already done so.

That’s a very bad place to be. As Ayn Rand once said (and I’m paraphrasing), one is free to evade reality, but one cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.

And sometimes the consequences may be fatal.

More On Geology
The Geologic Timescale

The same Kurt Schlichter article I quoted at the top since Aubergine couldn’t resist calling out the schadenböner reference, has this line (earlier in the same paragraph):

We have more energy than the freshly unleashed Permian Basin.

What is this “Permian Basin”? As it happens there are two of them, one centered on the North Sea in Europe (remember a lot of oil comes from offshore rigs in the North Sea), and the other is the one in West Texas and southeast New Mexico.

If you type “Permian Basin” into Wikipedia, you go to a page that tells you this, and you can then select the one you’re interested in. It also mentions that neither of them are in Perm Krai.

What on Earth is “Perm Krai”? Perm Krai does not have a link (but should). A “krai” (край, plural края́) turns out to be “one of the types of federal subjects of modern Russia, and was a type of geographical administrative division in the Russian Empire and the Russian SFSR.” A krai was traditionally a far out, peripheral frontier area (in fact it’s etymologically related to the word “Ukraine”), while an oblast was a bit more central. In today’s Russian Federation there’s no functional difference between a krai and an oblast; a subdivision of Russia is one or the other based on tradition. (Russia also has other kinds of subdivisions: republics, cities of federal significance, an autonomous oblast, and autonomous okrugs. All have equal status as constituent entities of the Russian Federation according to Article 5 of the Constitution of Russia.)

So here’s a map–which unfortunately lost its labeling on the way over from Wikipoo:

In green are “Republics” which have a little more autonomy (the biggest one is Sakha, better known as Yakutsk to Risk players, and is the largest territorial subdivision in the world). Orange are krais, yellow are oblasts, red are the two federal cities (Moscow and St. Petersburg; Sevastapol in Crimea is also a federal city but most nations do not recognize Russian ownership of that or the four Ukrainian oblasts recently annexed from Ukraine [in cross-hatch at the left side of the map]). The one autonomous oblast in in purple, four autonomous okrugs in blue.

Getting back to our subject, Perm Krai is here, tucked up against the Ural Mountains on the west side. (The Ural Mountains form the traditional border between Europe and Asia, since they aren’t really separate continents. The eastern border of Perm Krai is part of that dividing line.)

Perm has its own coat of arms (just like every “Federal Subject” does):

Despite being deep inside Russia, Perm Krai has a significant population of ethnic minorities; some are not ones you’re likely to have heard of, though: Tatars and Ukrainians, Komi-Permyaks, and Bashkirs. Bashkirs are actually Turkic, but the Komi-Permyaks…well, they’re “Uralic” meaning their closest well-known relatives are the Finns and Hungarians. Its largest city is named…Perm (it gave its name to the Krai), with just a bit over a million people. The total population is roughly 2.5 million, down from 3 million when the Soviet Union collapsed.

OK…so that was (maybe) interesting and even has a tiny bit to do with current events, but…why on Earth is an energy-rich place in Texas and New Mexico named for this place?

SO glad you asked!

The Geologic Timescale Today

I struggled with this topic a bit. Trying to just talk about it historically is hard, because a lot of what I am reading assumes you know what we know today. And a lot of this topic is naming conventions and historic holdovers, but a lot is not. If I were to try to trace this from the beginning without some context, it would get a bit confusing. which is unsatisfactory. So I’m going to briefly outline the modern picture, then jump back and try (and likely fail) to explain how we got here. That might be more confusing, but I aim to excel.

The geologic timescale as we know it today is our best effort to order the different rocks we find around the Earth, by time; and since this is science things need to be classified in buckets so that we can see patterns that will help illuminate what is going on.

This is a vast topic so it gets subdivided. In fact it gets sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-subdivided; there are six “levels” of subdividedness (if that wasn’t a word before, it is now); generically referred to as “units.” Except that there are two different names for the levels. When considering the rocks themselves, they are “chronostratigraphic units,” when talking about the times, they are “geochronologic units.” However when we get to looking at specific ones, they have the same names. Thus “Permian” refers to both a chronostratigraphic unit and a geochronologic unit.

The entire history of the Earth is first subdivided into eons (geochronologic, time) which are each equivalent to eonothems (chronostratigraphic; rock layers). There are four of these according to the standard scheme. In order, newest to oldest (newest is always at the top, because it mimics the principle of superposition, they are:

• Phanerozoic (the current eon/eonthem)
• Proterozoic
• Archean
• Hadean (starts with the formation of the Earth)

As you might imagine, the older, the less well understood. Thus, the Hadean is not further subdivided; we have almost nothing to work from with this one. The other three eons are subdivided into eras (geochronologic; time) or erathems (chronostratigraphic; actual rock layers). There are ten defined eras, from oldest to newest these are: The Eoarchean, Paleoarchean, Mesoarchean, Neoarchean, Paleoproterozoic, Mesoproterozoic, Neoproterozoic, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic. As you likely guessed, the first four are subdivision of the Archean, the next three of the Proterozoic, and the final three by elimination are subdivisions of the Phanerozoic; we are living in the Cenozoic era, with rocks being laid down now part of the Cenozoic erathem. To summarize:

• Phanerozoic (the current eon/eonthem)
  • Cenozoic (the current era/erathem)
  • Mesozoic
  • Paleozoic
• Proterozoic
  • Neoproterozoic
  • Mesoproterozoic
  • Paleoproterozoic
• Archean
  • Neoarchean
  • Mesoarchean
  • Paleoarchean
  • Eoarchean
• Hadean (starts with the formation of the Earth)

The eras that are part of the Proterozoic and Phanerozoic (the Archean and certainly the Hadean are not subdivided to this level) are further subdivided into periods (geochronologically, time) equivalent to systems (chronostratigraphic, rock layers); there are 22 of these. You may recognize some of these names, but the ones from the Proterozoic eon/eonthem are new. I won’t be mentioning these much; the last two, however are the Cryogenian and Ediacaran. Once you get into the Phanerozoic, though, the Paleozoic is subdivided (oldest to newest) into the Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous (which is a special case, there are two sub-periods of it called the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian), and Permian, and I will be talking about these. (In particular if I don’t discuss the Permian after that intro, someone will probably put a price on my head.) The Mesozoic is subdivided into the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. (If you have never heard of the Jurassic, you’ve been living under a rock. Maybe even one that formed in the Jurassic.) The Cenozoic is subdivided into the Paleogene, Neogene and Quaternary periods (or systems). [Note: the Cenozoic was reorganized in 2008 [edit]. Before then used to be a period called the “Tertiary” instead of the Paleogene and Neogene.] We are living in the Quaternary period; rocks laid down now are part of the Quaternary system.

• Phanerozoic (the current eon/eonthem)
  • Cenozoic (the current era/erathem)
    • Quaternary
    • Neogene
    • Paleogene
  • Mesozoic
    • Cretaceous
    • Jurrasic
    • Triassic
  • Paleozoic
    • Permian
    • Carboniferous (Mississippian + Pennsylvanian)
    • Devonian
    • Silurian
    • Orodivician
    • Cambrian
• Proterozoic
  • Neoproterozoic
    • Ediacaran
    • Cryogenian
    • Tonian
  • Mesoproterozoic
    • 3 periods
  • Paleoproterozoic
    • 4 periods
• Archean
  • Neoarchean
  • Mesoarchean
  • Paleoarchean
  • Eoarchean
• Hadean (starts with the formation of the Earth)

That’s three levels, and that’s as deep as I am likely to get. However, you should remember there are finer gradations, the epoch/series, the subepoch/subseries, and the age/stage (giving the “time” name first, then the “rock” name second). These exist because there’s really no situation where a single distinct rock layer covers an entire period.

I’m certainly not expecting you to remember these last three levels. I certainly won’t. But please be aware that they are there. The systems (hence periods) were often originally built up by combining series (epochs).

(However, even popular treatments will break the Cenozoic down one more level than this down to the epoch level, and all of those have names ending in -cene. None, fortunately were named after the Russian river Ob.)

In some cases which smaller units got grouped into which larger units is arbitrary, but in other cases it’s anything but. There are clear, obvious dividing lines between the Paleozoic and Mesozoic, as well as between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic; as we will see there was a mass extinction event at both of those dividing lines. Other, lesser mass extinctions turn out to be boundaries between periods/systems.

One more thing to add: For historic reasons, the first three entire eons put together are sometimes informally called “the Precambrian,” almost as if they were only as important as a mere period (two levels below them in the schema). This is largely due to the fact that until recently we knew next to nothing about those three eons and had a hard time distinguishing them from each other in any case. It was just some indefinitely long time.

The whole schema as it exists today (and with some text about proposed changes) is laid out in painstaking detail here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale, broken down all the way to Ages where such subdividing has been done.

Which brings us to the question of how we tell these apart from each other (and why those methods failed, at first, with the Precambrian). And so now I will switch to the historical perspective. So tuck all of that away in the back of your minds, wipe the mental slate temporarily, and…here we go.

Historical Development

Back to the late 18th and early 19th century, where we start to see the development of the geologic timescale. Between mining and the coal industry that was firing up to support the Industrial Revolution, geologists started to realize the fossils could tell us a few things. Similar fossils would appear at the same places in a bottom-to-top sequence and they could often be used to establish that the rocks were of a specific age. William Smith could distinguish otherwise-similar formations (i.e, rocks of the same color and texture) based on what fossils appeared in them. Putting things together people like Georges Cuvier and Alexandre Brogniart realized you could set up a complete sequence of rocks, oldest to youngest, based on index fossils. Index fossils are fossils that were widely distributed (hence could be seen in large parts of the globe) and existed briefly, so they’d be confined to one stratum.

When they published in 1811, we saw the birth of modern stratigraphy. We started to see what today we consider the systems/periods within the Phanerozoic.

(Cuvier, by the way, used the sequence to argue for catastrophism. This means multiple disasters–not just one, that caused many of the different abrupt boundaries in the geologic column. And you know what…he wasn’t completely wrong, though it took some time for this to be recognized.)

Note that not every kind of fossil is an index fossil. A good candidate for an index fossil will be something that lived in the oceans (hence was probably nearly global) and doesn’t appear across a long span of time. The narrower the time, the more precisely you can date a formation.

Because fossils were used to distinguish epochs and periods from each other, we really could only get anything useful from a certain time onwards. Before that time the rocks apparently had no fossils in them (we know now this is not quite true). After that time…we have fossils.

This was a very iterative process, with people noting strata and their relationships slowly and a big picture emerging at last. In many cases the epochs were noted first and combined into the periods later; with some re-groupings along the way. So here’s what we ended up with, listed from oldest to youngest, and not by any means in the order they were discovered or got their final names.

English geologists were particularly prolific, identifying the following periods (from oldest to youngest): the Cambrian (from Cambria, meaning Wales), in 1835; the Ordivician (from a Celtic tribe) in 1879; the Silurian (another Celtic tribe) in the early 1830s; the Devonian (named after Devon, England) also in the 1830s, and the Carboniferous (named after the coal) in 1811. Anything older than the Cambrian at the time appeared to have no fossils in it, and as mentioned earlier just got called the “Precambrian”. These periods are abbreviated, respectively, Ꞓ, O, S, D, and C.

In North America, the Carboniferous period was initially treated as two periods, the Mississippian (older) and Pennsylvanian (younger)…so America does make its way into the schema. This kind of monkeywrenched the scheme when one group of geologists talked about the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian and the other talked of the Carboniferous. The compromise eventually arrived at is to consider this period, and only this period, as consisting of sub-periods by those names. Other periods don’t have sub-periods but go directly to being divided into epochs.

(That wasn’t the only dispute by any means. As you might have noticed, the Ordovician was first named much later than the others, and was created by reorganizing what we had before, as a way to settle a different argument altogether.)

England certainly has newer rocks than the Carboniferous, but for whatever reason other countries beat England to the punch as far as identifying and naming more recent periods.

The very next period, the Permian (P), was found in the Ural mountains of Russia and added to the scheme in 1841–and this is how the Permian basin of Texas got its name. It turns out to consist of rocks from the same period. (Famous fossils from the Permian include a lot of corals [an entire reef nows form the Gaudalupe mountains in West Texas] and Dimetrodon, the sail-back lizards, which contrary to popular belief were not dinosaurs.)

(As for how a coral reef ended up way out in West Texas at elevations up to 8751 feet…well, that’s for a future post.)

The next one after that was the Triassic (T), first noted in Southern Germany. This was in turn composed of three rock layers (hence the “tri” in the name). It got that name in 1834, however it had been noted earlier than that.

In the Jura mountains of France and Switzerland, we found the Jurassic (J). This was a markedly earlier discovery from 1795.

The Cretaceous was first identified in the Paris basin in 1822 and the name comes from the extensive beds of chalk (calcium carbonate from the shells of microscopic sea organisms). Its abbreviation is K, not C, from German Kreide, chalk.

Next was the Tertiary. Those rocks are quite new (as such things are measured); it brings us almost to the present day. This name actually goes back to the middle 1700s and Arduino, who divided geologic time into primitive, secondary, and tertiary periods based on what he saw in Northern Italy, so the Tertiary was essentially discovered in Northern Italy. For a time, this period was identified has having been laid down during the Flood.

The Tertiary is now considered obsolete and has been broken up into two periods, the Paleogene (Pg) and Neogene (N). I know that the Tertiary used to be abbreviated T, but that means the Triassic must have had a different abbreviation back then. This relatively recent rearrangement was very controversial and part of the dispute was what to do about the very next (and latest) period…

The Quaternary, which was named such because it followed the Tertiary. It was first identified by Arduino in 1759 (by contrast with the Tertiary) and very nearly didn’t survive the recent reorganization of the Tertiary; it almost got folded into the Neogene. This is the latest period/system.

These periods were (and still are) grouped into three Eras, with the Cambrian through Permian making up the Paleozoic (“old life”) era, the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous making up the Mesozoic (“middle life”) era, and the Tertiary and Quaternary making up the Cenozoic (“new life”) era.

Anything before the Cambrian got lumped together as the “Precambrian.” There were no index fossils in those rocks (at least we didn’t think so at the time), so although we could look at the rocks at one location and do relative dating on them, we couldn’t correlate the Precambrian rock layers in one location with those in another location far away.

Eventually we would overcome this and build up the much more refined timescale we have today, but for a long time the Precambrian was an difficult-to-chart wasteland of geologic time.

Geologists worked on and after two centuries of development, we have today’s schema.

As a reminder, today the Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras are in turn grouped together into the “Phanerozoic Eon” and we’ve been able to subdivide the Precambrian into three full eons with some subdividing into eras and periods.

I’m going to jump ahead a bit, and talk about the Precambrian fossils that we have more recently discovered. But first, I have to bring up a basic point.

What are fossils, and what causes them?

A fossil is any preserved remains, impression or trace of past life. Usually these are preserved in rocks, but preservation in amber (a la Jurassic Park) also happens.

We actually have to distinguish different kinds of fossils. Sometimes all we have are “trace fossils.” I always found this name misleading (I’m used to other meanings of the word “trace”), but here it means such things as footprints, tracks, burrows (without any remains of the burrower), and so on…indirect evidence of the critter. Another category of fossil that goes into this bucket is “copralites.” And these are fossilized dung. (Who would have guessed that wokester brain matter existed back then?)

In many cases we have nothing more than trace fossils to identify something, or rather to identify that something existed. We can learn a few things from them, such as that the critter liked to burrow in the sediment at the bottom of a shallow sea and was of a certain size, but we won’t learn a lot.

Sometimes we have external molds. An organism is buried, decomposes, dissolves and is gone…but the void it left in the sediment is preserved as the sediment turns to rock. Sometimes sediments fill an organism’s interior and we end up with an internal mold or endocast.

Sometimes we get an impression of the creature. This can be very interesting since we might learn about skin texture. Skins usually don’t fossilize.

There are microfossils, things you need a microscope to examine. These often are of the critters themselves.

But the “classic” fossil like the skeleton you’ve seen in museums is when a buried organism’s tissues are slowly replaced by minerals coming out of solution. This is much more likely to happen if the organism is buried underwater right after it dies and as you might imagine, that’s far more common for sea life (which is already underwater) than land life.

This turns out to be a big subject, and I am going to take the easy way out and punt you over to Wikipedia if you want to know more. (Note that on occasion a fossil is made out of iron pyrite (fool’s gold)!)

It’s much, much easier to fossilize if you have hard body parts. Skeletons, exoskeletons, shells, etc., because the other stuff is likely to decompose or otherwise be consumed by animals even when buried. The reason why “fossils show up” only in the Cambrian and later is because that’s when hard body parts first show up. (Why not earlier? My speculation: This is when predators first showed up, and critters suddenly needed body armor.)

But we do have some fossils from before the Precambrian, after all.

For instance, fossilized bacterial mats called stromatolites going clear back into the Archean, and not just the late Archean either. (These mats still exist in certain isolated places today–the situation has to be just right, however, or they get eaten before the mats can really form. Shark Bay in Western Australia is one of these places–it’s so important for that reason that UNESCO made it a World Heritage Site.) Those things that look like lumpy brown rocks are alive.

And a number of soft bodied creatures did manage to get impressions preserved in the rocks from immediately before the Cambrian; this led to the recognition, for the first time in 120 years, of a new period, the Ediacaran, named after the Ediacara Hills of South Australia, at the tail end of the Neoproterozoic era. Interestingly, many of these fossils were first noticed in England by schoolchildren, and the paleontologists around them, knowing the local surface rocks were Precambrian, dismissed their stories until one of them went with the kids and looked. These organisms look like nothing around today (unlike the Cambrian ones), and they are collectively called the “Ediacaran biota” though they only appear in the more recent part of the Ediacaran system. Here is an artist’s impression (very speculative)

And here are some pictures of the actual fossils, first charnia:

And dickinsonia.

Before that we have fossils of algae. Such as stromatolites.

Fossils versus Index Fossils

I’m going to make one more thing clear. I’ve noted that the periods were defined by index fossils..in fact in many cases the fossils actually identify epochs and ages within the periods. Completely distinct rocks in widely separated locations can be identified as being from the same epoch or age based on the index fossils they contain. The narrower the time span, the better. Not every fossil is an index fossil. Sometimes the geographic range is too small (the creature wasn’t wide spread enough) and sometimes that particular species was around for far too long.

But those non-index fossils are still confined to a certain time range, even if it’s a broad one.

Take trilobites, an entire class of creatures. (Mammals are a class. Insects are a class. Trilobites were that big a grouping.) There isn’t a single trilobite alive today. All of them lived from the middle of the Cambrian to the end of the Permian. The fossils were found in those systems so they date to those periods. (In fact the abrupt disappearance of the trilobites is one of the reasons the Permian–and the entire Paleozoic Era–is regarded as ending right then.)

We’ve identified, from fossils, 22,000 distinct species of trilobites spread out over the entire Paleozoic. There were surely many, many more. Some got to be 28 inches long. Some were scavengers, some were predators, some were filter feeders. They were an incredibly diverse and successful class. I can’t find anything to say for sure (I’m running out of time), but I would be surprised if at least some specific species of trilobites weren’t index fossils.

But you never find a trilobite after the Permian system. Never. They died out at the end of the Permian in a mass extinction, among the victims of the biggest one of all time. You can’t tell what period a generic trilobite is (though if you can identify the specific species, you have a better shot at it), but if your rock has a trilobite fossil in it, it’s Paleozoic, not Mesozoic or Cenozoic. And certainly not Precambrian.

Similarly, dinosaurs lived at characteristic times. Tyrannosaurs, for instance, are from the very end of the Cretaceous. Allosaurus and stegosaurus (and closely related species) are Jurassic. You never see these creatures outside of those ranges.

And not just for these examples, but for every species we have fossils of. This sort of precise and consistent location within the geologic column is very, very hard to explain if someone wants to claim that the entire column was laid down all at once. And this is what Young Earth Creationists claim…the whole thing was laid down in one year by the Great Flood.

But if a single flood event laid down the entire geologic column with the fossils all being things that drowned in the Flood, why would you not find drowned trilobites and tyrannosaurs and brachiosaurus and apatosaurus and pelycosaurs and ambulocetus and archaeopteryx and anomalocaris and eurypterids and camerata and ammonites and I could go on and on and on, but especially fossilized fish and gigantic Mesozoic marine reptiles of various extinct species (which could surely have held out longer) throughout the entire geological column if the whole thing happened within one year, or at least with lots of overlap? Instead we see things strictly segregated by layers. Even if you want to appeal to objects forming layers by density a) the brachiosaur bones would be in the Precambrian not the Cretaceous–in other words things didn’t sort by density and b) even if we grant for the sake of argument that they did, we’d see at least SOME cases of things not falling as far as they should because some piece of debris got in the way. Enough that we couldn’t ignore them. But we don’t. They’re segregated too perfectly by era, period and epoch. The segregation is so good because something would have to be thousands of years out of its time at the very least to end up in the wrong layer (and how would that happen? Time travel?), not just “it needed to fall for just a few more seconds to the right layer but something else blocked it.”

I’m sorry but the “all due to Noah’s Flood” claim is absurd. And this is just one line of argumentation that that is so.

Is there plenty of evidence of flooding in the geological record? Oh, yes, yes indeed, but there is no indication that it was a single event, or that any of the multitude of episodes were global. We can do relative dating on these things, after all.

(So Georges Cuvier, who as far as I can tell, believed in global catastrophes, was wrong. Or was he? Stay tuned.)

Not a Single Number?

You may have noticed that I have not given any numbers here. When were these periods? Just for instance, what’s the timespan of the Jurassic period? From when to when?

We didn’t know back then. We could look at index fossils and say that this rock from Russia was the same age as this other rock from Texas (even though from totally different formations). We could say that that rock was older than this other rock, and newer than yet a third rock. This is called relative dating. But other than crude order-of-magnitude estimates like was done with Etna, we could not do any sort of absolute dating where we could assign an actual number to the age of the rock. We could say “millions of years” or “more millions of years.” And by the way, there’s a symbol for that: Ma means “million years ago,” so 66 Ma means 66 million years ago.

How we got to absolute dating is a future topic (I might cover some other things before that). I know something about the modern methods. I have no idea (yet) how precise they were able to get before the modern methods were available, and I hope I can find out. (I may even have to walk back some of what I said in the prior paragraph if I’ve underestimated the cleverness of 19th and early 20th century paleontologists and geologists.) This is a learning experience for me too.