“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
vicegerent
noun
acting in place of another
having delegated authority
not the same as a viceregent, although similar
Used in a sentence
A viceregent is a ruler acting in place of a monarch, while a vicegerent is an appointed representative of a higher authority, often with broader administrative duties.
Now I seem to recall Rand Paul’s name associated with Festivus, and I never quite got it, until this news report. Stay with it for at least a minute. LMAO!!!
Well, DOGE-GONE, it’s BARBIE!
I’m sorry, but Festivus has me in the mood to play my favorite song!
In case you’re wondering what a “ferrocell” is, there’s a fascinating paper describing how one works.
The beauty of this song – other than simply being well-done, is that in some pleasing ways, the actual science of sunlight shining on the orbiting moon, blocked by its own orbiting mass, corresponds with, and maybe even transforms through the “crackpot matrix” to, the dithering of Mr. (at)witsit about ferrocells and whatnot.
Between “real” science and “pseudo” science, I’m falling in love with the crazy beauty of this universe!
Good night, good morning, good day, and MERRY CHRISTMAS!
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
This post is scheduled to go “live” at 10:01PM MST on Friday, December 20, 2024. That’s 00:01 EST on Saturday, December 21, 2024 for those of you in that benighted timezone near the Atlantic Ocean.
As of that moment, there are 30 days, 11 hours, and 59 minutes until our rightful President of the United States is restored to office.
Not that I’m counting, mind you.
January 6 Tapes Reminder
OK…I’m sick and tired of reminding you to no effect, Speaker Johnson, so I’ll do the more emotionally satisfying thing and call you a cowardly, lying, fraudulent sack of diarrhetic monkey shit.
Johnson, you are a cowardly, lying, fraudulent sack of diarrhetic monkey shit!
A Caution
Just remember…we might replace the RINO candidates. (Or we might not. The record is mixed even though there is more MAGA than there used to be.) But that will make no difference in the long run if the party officials, basically the Rhonna McDaniels (or however that’s spelled–I suspect it’s RINO), don’t get replaced.
State party chairs, vice chairs, secretaries and so on, and the same at county levels, have huge influence on who ultimately gets nominated, and if these party wheelhorses are RINOs, they will work tirelessly to put their own pukey people on the ballot. In fact I’d not be surprised if some of our “MAGA” candidates are in fact, RINO plants, encouraged to run by the RINO party leadership when they realized that Lyn Cheney (and her ilk) were hopelessly compromised as effective candidates. The best way for them to deal with the opposition, of course, is to run it themselves.
Running good candidates is only HALF of the battle!
Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit
…we can move on to the next one.
Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.
Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.
Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!
It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.
In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.
Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.
Justice Must Be Done.
The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.
Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.
Kamala Harris has a new nickname since she finally went west from DC to El Paso Texas: Westward Hoe.
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)
Spot Prices
All prices are Kitco Ask, 3PM MT Friday (at that time the markets close for the weekend). (Note: most media quotes are for the bid…the price paid by the market makers, not the ask, which is what they will sell at. I figure the ask is more relevant to people like us who wish we could afford to buy these things. In the case of gold the difference is usually about a dollar, for the PGMs the spread is much wider.)
Silver down over a dollar…which sounds bad until I tell you it went up fifty cents on Friday, and is still down over a dollar. So Thursday, it really sucked. And the gold:silver ratio is getting really, really bad.
The only thing that went up is…miracle of miracles…platinum, which is still on fricking sale.
*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 Sucks To Be A Flat Earth Charlatan
If you are a flat earth charlatan, my just telling you you suck would be the LEAST bad aspect of your life. How can you look at yourself in the mirror?
As for everyone else (including Flat Earth true believers–i.e., the victims of the charlatans), you all likely know that The Final Experiment (TFE) happened this last week. At this point the participants are on their way home, except for Critical Think, whose flight from Punta Arenas to Santiago Chile isn’t for another day or two. Then he flies directly from Santiago to Sydney Australia…oh, wait, I forgot, that flight doesn’t exist according to Flat Earthers.
In many cases they collected terabytes of data. (“tera” is what comes after “giga” if you don’t know. “Tera” equals “trillion” (twelve zeroes) and that should be easy to remember because both start with t.) One person recorded over 24 hours of 11K video (not a time lapse, full time video) of the sun. Others took numerous sun spot shots (and they have thousands of emails from people like me waiting for them, for comparison). But it’s taking them days to get back, and now they have to deal with the holidays. So don’t expect much out of them before New Year’s. As for the documentary the one flat-earther professional is putting together, who knows how long that will take. They have all kinds of stuff, that should sink this bullshit once and for all, but won’t, because many of their followers are having cult psychology kick in. “Terabytes of evidence against my position? It must be fake. I can’t possibly just be…wrong about this.”
I’ll post a couple of videos here, some of them are repeats. This one is SciManDan, a Glober who was not part of TFE, talking about various types of copium being taken by the Flerfs:
Here’s something new I found. Lots of clips up front of the Flerfer charlatans insisting that what was seen could not possibly exist–which to me would mean that what was seen invalidates the Flat Earth. But these people move the goal posts. Once that evidence comes up, they need something else…yeah, that is what you need to disprove flat earth. (Marred by the fact that Peterson confuses Ushuaia Argentina with Punta Arenas, Chile):
And this is one I posted earlier. McToon (Glober) is letting Nathan Oakley (Flerfer Charlatan) have it with both barrels.
Wolf took exception to this, thinking McToon was over the top. I disagree. Oakley is a fraudster. This is the least of what that species of “human” deserves. They should have “CON MAN” tattooed on their foreheads.
I will, nevertheless post a Nathan Oakley response:
Precession of the Equinoxes
We’ve got a lot of prerequisites fresh in our minds, so let’s take up precession of the equinoxes, a subject that seems to come up frequently. And I’d normally not touch it with a ten foot pole or a lot of graphics. An animation would be best honestly, and I found one but I wish it showed a bit more (like relation with the Earth’s orbit).
Remember this from last week?
Since the Earth’s axis of rotation is tilted about 23.5 degrees with respect to its orbit, the celestial equator is tilted 23.5 degrees with respect to the ecliptic, as shown below.
Last Week
But then I went on to say:
But since we’re thinking in a set of coordinates that goes from the celestial equator, we think of it the other way around: we think of the ecliptic being tilted with respect to the celestial equator.
Me rambling on more, last week
Well this time we are going to think the the way the diagram shows; the ecliptic will be the basis of another coordinate system, known as…drumroll…the ecliptic coordinate system.
There are actually two ecliptic coordinate systems, one centered on the Sun (heliocentric), the other on the Earth (geocentric). Since the planets generally orbit in planes almost aligned with the Earth’s orbital plane (which is the ecliptic plane), and the Sun is the center of gravity of the solar system, the sun-centered system is very useful for talking about the solar system. Indeed, even though I didn’t mention it at all in the recent series on the planets, I have used it here–go back to the articles on the great conjunction almost exactly four years ago; I did those plots in that system.
But we’ll focus on the Earth centered (geocentric) version this time.
For both systems (as well as the equatorial system I talked about) the primary line is the one pointing towards the vernal equinox (or March equinox, or (sometimes) the “first point of Aries”). It lies in the “reference plane” of all systems. For the ecliptic system, the “poles” are simply a line perpendicular to the ecliptic plane; in the diagram above they are called the north and south ecliptic poles.
In the ecliptic system, the two coordinates are called ecliptic longitude and ecliptic latitude and both are measured in degrees; no mucking around with hours of right ascension and minutes and seconds of arc that aren’t the same kind of minutes and seconds as the other minutes and seconds.
In the heliocentric system longitude is represented by l (italic lower case L) while in the geocentric system it’s represented by Greek letter lambda, λ. Latitude is represented by b (heliocentric) or β (geocentric).
Or, if you know the distance to whatever it is you’re considering, you can go Cartesian, a grid instead of spherical coordinates:
x = r cos β cos λ y = r cos β sin λ z = r sin β
The x axis points towards the first point of Aries, the y axis is 90 degrees counterclockwise from it in the ecliptic plane, and z points toward the north ecliptic pole. The formula is the same for the heliocentric system (swapping b for β and l for λ) and it was the Cartesian version of the helicentric system I worked with in those old posts from four years ago. (And similar conversions can be done with equatorial coordinates.)
[Digression: Both equatorial and ecliptic coordinates are considered “right handed” coordinate systems. Why? Imagine pointing the fingers of your right hand along the x axis, then bending them to point along the y axis (or, if in spherical coordinates, curling the fingers in increasing longitude or right ascension). Raise your thumb like “thumbs up” and it points along the z axis. On a left handed system, this works for the left hand instead. I find this easier than whiddershins and diesel or whatever those words were.]
Imagine a line drawn from “Autumnal Equinox” through the Earth to “Vernal Equinox.” It’s the intersection of the celestial equatorial plane and the ecliptic plane. (Two planes that aren’t parallel and aren’t the same plane, will intersect in a line.) It just happens to be the case that Earth is tilted in such a way that this particular line represents the intersection (and is the X axis in both the equatorial and ecliptic systems).
What if it were in a different place? It’s pretty arbitrary, isn’t it? Why couldn’t it be in a different place?
It would be, if the Earth’s equator were oriented differently–meaning, also, “if the earth’s axis were pointed differently.” Oh, I suppose the Earth’s orbital plane could shift, but that’s much harder than shifting the poles.
I can say this with confidence because the Earth’s axis does indeed shift direction! It does so without changing the angle between the celestial equator and ecliptic. Over the course of some 26,000 years the line of intersection shifts through a full 360 degrees. (And unlike almost everything else…it goes clockwise.) The first point of Aries precesses and the line points to the two equinoxes, so this is precession of the equinoxes.
If you are having trouble visualizing this, well, we’re both in luck. I found a good animation.
By about 30 seconds in you can see how it works.
The effect of this is to move the first point of Aries (represented with that symbol) around the ecliptic…which means it moves through the Zodiac. The first point of Aries was actually in Aries from about 2000 BCE to 1 CE, then it was in Pisces. It’s about to leave Pisces and shift into Aquarius (“the Age of Aquarius” actually means something…but nothing magic here).
As the first point of Aries moves, the Earth’s axis draws a cone through space, scribing circles on the celestial sphere centered on the ecliptic poles.
There are two other effects of this.
First off, it mucks up both equatorial and ecliptic coordinate systems, because the x axis, the primary axis…is moving! With ecliptic coordinates, you could probably just ignore this…and say we’re going to use the x axis direction from (say) 2000 and just leave it there. Big deal. The fundamental plane doesn’t change. Even if you let the X axis change, the Z axis does not, and you can just add or subtract a correction from ecliptic longitude and be current.
But this precession of the equinoxes absolutely hoses the equatorial coordinate system, because the fundamental plane itself shifts. And we can’t just go on using an old set of axes; the point of the equatorial system is so that you can be assured that if you set a telescope to a certain declination, it will stay at that declination as the earth rotates (even if you don’t have the telescope track whatever you’re looking at). So we issue new charts every fifty years ago, epoch 1950, epoch 2000; with all star coordinates shifted. At some point we will need to switch to something newer–or perhaps they’ll just let computers do the work of listing coordinates according to where the equinoxes are right now.
The other effect is on our year. Just like we have sidereal and solar days, the first being one rotation as seen from the stars, the other being one rotation as seen from the Sun, we have sidereal and tropical years.
A sidereal year is how long it takes for Earth to return to the same spot in its orbit, as seen from far away, in the stars (a sort of “God’s Eye View” of the situation). But our calendar does not track the stars, it tracks the seasons, and the interval between two crossings of the March equinox is called the “tropical year.” We set our calendar up so that the average length of a year (in whole days) is as close to one tropical year as possible. Otherwise, our calendar shifts with respect to the seasons. (We had trouble with that while following the “every four years is a leap year” rule. The calendar would slip against the seasons about 3 days every four hundred years. So we changed the calendar to drop three leap years out of every four centuries. The old schema is called the “Julian calendar” while the new one is the “Gregorian calendar”, each named after the person who instituted the system.)
A calendar year is the interval between one equinox and the next time we’re at that equinox, not (quite) the amount of time it takes for the sun to (apparently) return to the exact same place in the sky.
Actually since a calendar year is a whole number of days, we want the average length of a calendar year to be equal to the amount of time it takes to return to the same equinox (or solstice).
Since, as seen from either the north celestial pole or the north ecliptic pole, the Earth orbits counterclockwise but the equinoxes shift slowly clockwise, the effect is that one tropical year elapses just before the Earth can finish a full orbit with respect to the stars. How much before? About 1,224.5 seconds faster, roughly 20 minutes, 24.5 seconds. You can estimate the exact amount of time it will take the equinoxes to precess by dividing the number of seconds in a sidereal year by 1,224.5 and you get 25,772 years–which invariably gets rounded to 26,000 when you see this talked about in science popularizations. And this makes sense because it happens that the rate itself does vary; it’s not always 1,224.5 seconds per sidereal year.
13,000 years or so from now, Earth will be on the other side of its orbit when springtime hits the Northern hemisphere…but even though the Earth will be on the other side of its orbit, it will still be called March 21, because the calendar tracks the seasons, not the stars.
Speaking Of Earth
Go back through my series of articles on planets, moons, comets, asteroids and the Sun, and it appears I left one thing out, something fairly high up on the list.
The sixth largest body in the solar system.
Yep. I never talked about the third round rock from the Sun, Earth.
I picked that picture because it was taken from the Galileo space probe. The one that went to Jupiter. Before it got to Jupiter, it played gravity assist pinball, getting a boost from Venus then two assists from Earth. It was the first interplanetary probe to return to Earth (though it didn’t linger).
It also took pictures of the Simpson desert in Australia and the Ross ice shelf in Antarctica (the latter is a mosaic assembled from smaller images).
It was useful to see how Galileo’s cameras would behave taking pictures of a known target.
And the Earth is well known; we’ve been stomping around on it for millennia.
So: the basics.
Earth has a radius of 6,371 kilometers. (Try to take so much as one orbital dynamics class without having that number burned into your brain by the time of the final exam.) That is an average. Through the poles, it’s 6356.752 kilometers, through the equator, it’s 6378.137 kilometers. The mean density is 5.513 grams per cubic centimeter…and that is a record for any round body in the solar system. (Metallic asteroids will be higher of course.) It even beats out Mercury which has a large (for its size) core.
Density is useful for helping to figure out what something is made of. A lot of those outer planet moons have very low densities, indicating they’re mostly ice; others have slightly higher densities, indicating they’re more rock than ice…and so on. A typical rock has a density of about 3, and ice is just below 1.
I’ve often talked about the average density of different bodies in the solar system, and you may have wondered how we could possibly know this. It’s not as if we’ve sampled Earth at all depths, much less any of the other bodies we’ve only flown by once.
It turns out we can know this, relatively easily in fact. The average density of some planet or moon is its mass, divided by its volume, so we need to know two other things to get the density. Volume is easy: once you have a radius, r, you can compute the volume of the object via (4/3)πr3. Mass is a little trickier, but we can get most of the way there if something is in orbit around the body. The orbital speed for a circular orbit is v = √(μ/R). Since we’re after the mass, let’s rearrange that a bit: v2R = μ This time R stands for the orbital radius (not the radius of the planet). That other letter, Greek mu (μ), is the gravitational parameter of the body–that’s different for every body. So if we know the distance between the satellite and its primary, and we time how long it takes to orbit (T), we can get the velocity readily (2πR/T). We can substitute into the first formula and get μ = 4π2R3/T2 And then we have this “gravitational parameter” thingie, based totally on the orbital radius and the time it takes the satellite to orbit.
(Gravitational parameter is another thing we had burned into our brains…but at least I’ve managed to forget its value since then. I just looked it up, Earth’s gravitational parameter is 3.986 x 1014 m3/s2. Except I was used to deal with kilometers per second, so I used 3.986 x 105.
But we wanted mass. Well it turns out that μ is equal to the mass of the primary, M, times the gravitational constant, G. But that’s as far as we could go for about a hundred years; we could measure μ, but we actually had no idea what G was, so we couldn’t get from μ to M. In the late 1790s Henry Cavendish was able to measure the gravitational force between known masses, so this time, he knew the mass, and could compute G. As soon as he did that, every known value of μ, be it for Earth, the Sun, Jupiter, Saturn, could be used to compute a mass. So.
Earth is being orbited by the Moon, so we could do the calculations above and arrive at the total mass of the Earth, then divide by the volume. If a body didn’t have a satellite, though, we were SOL. So we found ourselves in the situation where we knew Uranus’s mass better than we knew the mass of Venus, even though Venus is much closer. Uranus has moons, Venus does not. And of course moons themselves didn’t have anything orbiting around them, so we couldn’t determine their masses, except in the case of our Moon, which is big enough to have a noticeable effect on the Earth.
Once we could send spacecraft out there, though, we could determine masses, by watching how much their trajectories bent as they flew by. That’s a hyperbolic orbit, and the formulae for it also contain μ.
So with Earth being far denser than typical rocks, what’s inside of it? One cause of higher density might just be that rocks deep down might compress some under the weight of the rocks above them, and we now know that this is part of it. But we still need Earth to be largely made of stuff quite a bit denser than average ol’ rocks.
And so we get something like this diagram (which is not to scale, the ocean and crust are drawn much too thick):
The liquid outer core and solid inner core are believed to be composed mostly of iron, with densities ranging from 9.9 to 13.1 grams/cubic centimeter. (Iron on the surface has a density of 7.874–clearly the iron in the core is compressed.) But given that we can’t drill down even to the mantle, much less down to the core, how do we know this? We can kind of guess that the innards are iron, since iron is very common in the universe (supernovas happen when stars try to fuse iron; the supernovas end up basically barfing the iron out into space). And we get meteorites consisting of mostly iron, to reinforce that. But liquid? How much?
That one’s a bit harder than computing average density. But the answer, in one word, is “seismology.”
If you think I’m just going to leave it there…you don’t know me very welly.
Seismic waves are waves through the solid material of Earth, resulting from earthquakes, volcanoes, movements of magma underground, and even man-made explosions. There are all sorts of different kinds of seismic waves, and different ways to divvy them up.
One is surface waves vs. Body waves. Surface waves travel along the surface of Earth, while body waves travel through the whole body of earth. Surface waves will tend to get weaker in proportion to distance, while body waves will get weaker in proportion to distance squared. (There’s a good intuitive reason for this. Think about a surface wave traveling away from its source ten kilometers. The entire energy of the wave is contained along a circle 2π x 10 km in circumference. Wait for the wave to reach a 20 km distance, all of the energy is distributed along 2π x 20 km of line. Twice as much, so the wave will be half as strong. Body waves travel outwards along consistent hemispheres, not circles, and the hemisphere’s area multiplies by four when the radius doubles.)
Body waves, in turn, come in two types: P (or primary) waves, and S (or secondary) waves. These names come from the fact that the P waves move faster, so they reach seismographs first. Below is an example, the P wave hits, then the S wave.
The two types are fundamentally different. P waves are longitudinal…which means that the medium the wave is traveling through moves in the same direction the wave is moving. This is very much the way sound works; the sound wave consists of denser and less dense atmosphere and the air molecules move towards and away from the sound source to build up bands of compression and rarefaction. Below is a diagram of a longitudinal wave traveling from left to right.
I said they are much like sound waves, and in fact when a P wave reaches the surface, it will often make a noise. Travel speeds are 330 m/s in air, 1450 m/s in water and 5000 m/s in granite.
Secondary waves are transverse (like light waves).
They take roughly 1.7 times as long to cover the same distance as a P wave, and there is one other key difference: They don’t go through fluids. P waves do but they will bend. In fact both will curve when the density of the medium changes (this is another example of refraction).
So we can glean some information about what’s inside the Earth just by looking at how seismometers in different parts of the world react to strong earthquakes. S waves never show up more than 103 degrees away from the epicenter of an earthquake, beyond that, you are in the S wave “shadow”–a shadow cast by a liquid layer deep inside the Earth. P waves have a much complex shadow pattern, as seen below, caused by an abrupt bend in the wave at the core boundary. The core doesn’t stop P waves, but it does bend them sharply.
So we know we have a liquid core outer core. How do we know what it’s made of? It does cause Earth’s magnetic field so we know it’s a metal. Meteorites (which came off other bodies of the solar system) come in many different types but occasionally one will show up that is almost pure metal, and that will be roughly 90 percent iron, ten percent nickel. (In fact the meteor that created the Barringer or “Meteor” crater in Arizona was an iron-nickel type.)
So that’s the beginning of how we know what’s inside there. We get the occasional mantle rock brought up by geologic processes, too.
[It just occurred to me this is another bit of evidence for a globe shaped earth. S wave shadows exist. Plot them on a globe, and compare to the origin of the waves. Then do the same on the flat earth disc. Which of the two patterns is symmetric and simple to explain, and which is just some random-seeming curve-bounded area with no obvious physical explanation? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else bring this up.]
I’m going to leave it there.
“But Steve, you skipped over Earth in your series on the planets, and this is all we get?”
You proceed from a false premise. This isn’t part of the series on the planets and moons and other stuff in our Solar System. That series is over.
This is the first part of a new series, on geology. There will be more, lots more.
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
coprophagous
Yes, this word randomly came up in my word source, and I decided to tough it out and keep it. I have never wimped out on a word, and I’m not starting now. So YES. And YUCK.
adjective
eating feces
Used in a sentence
To the AWFULs who destroy innocent patriotic families – Don’t just “be offended”, as Matt Gaetz would say. Be coprophagous!
Shown in a picture (in as “purty” a fashion as possible)
Shown in a video
MUSIC!
DePat said something about she and others all yelling “the cranberries” at the same time.
Well – SOMEBODY was listening!
AND – just for the heck of it – I have to add my new favorite song!
Yes, I may be a hillbilly, and I may have voted for the outlaw and the hillbilly, but I can take a joke, and this song, like Elon Musk, has…..
Gail Combs is still having intermittent trouble both editing and posting on WordPress. This is her draft, fixed up and key-worded as best as I could, on short notice.
W
Gail Combs:
At first I was going to do a round-up of all of POTUS Trump’s picks via screen shots and then realized it would be WAY too long. Also the images would eat up too much time loading and possibly overwhelm Steve’s internet service. Therefore I am going to delve into some of the concerns raised. (If people are interested I can do the Trump picks as a separate article or possibly series of article to chronicle this Historic Post Election period.)
Given the skuttlebutt about Biden pardons, this maybe of interest:
Protect Democracy Org —Checking the Pardon Power:Constitutional Limitations & Options for Preventing Abuse
The author, Paul Ingrassia, is a Constitutional Scholar so it is worth reading in it’s entirety.
…The second branch of the government – aptly outlined under Article II, is the executive. The executive branch, under the Constitution’s very explicit original formulation (which, contrary to the overwhelming sentiment in today’s Washington, is an article that has not undergone emendation…) is vested entirely (in noticeable contradistinction to “mostly” or “largely”) in a (again, singular, one) President of the United States (“The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America” …the executive branch is the only one under our Constitution – which, again, is the law of the land – that is vested in a single individual….
In official duties, the President – or Chief Magistrate – is tasked with law enforcement. He is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, ensuring civilian control over the military — not, as our latter-day betters would have us believe, something to be outsourced to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or the Pentagon, or lobbyists and consultants working for Raytheon.
Being singular or unitary, the President appoints cabinet secretaries and federal judges. The latter [Should be former -GC] answer to him alone. And while Congressional approval, in some cases, is needed to fulfill the President’s constitutional obligation for nominations, the President – as the Unitary Executive – has full discretion over the tenures of each and every one of his underlings within the executive department…
As for the agencies (and the larger bureaucracy), the acute observer will find – well, problematic – that no such fourth branch of government exists within the text of the Constitution…
Ingrassia makes the case that the federal bureaucracy is UNDER the executive branch, that is the PRESIDENT and therefore should be answerable to him. “…the President – as the Unitary Executive – has full discretion over the tenures of each and every one of his underlings within the executive department….” The following article from The Congressional Research Service (.gov) shows how Congress has gradually taken control of the executive from the President and turned it into an unelected, unfireable autocratic government aka The Deep State or Shadow Government.
…A little history: up until the end of the Civil War, the President exercised virtually unconstrained power to dismiss military officers. However, in 1865 Congress passed legislation which purports to limit that power. That legislation was essentially the same as that found today codified in 10 USC § 1161(a).
The legitimacy of Congress imposing statutory restrictions on the authority of the President to remove military officers was initially “subject of doubt and discussion.” It remains controversial even today, particularly since there doesn’t seem to be a case precisely on point as to the constitutionality.
Nevertheless, the better view does seem to suggest that Congress has the power to set some limits on the President’s dismissal authority – at least in times of peace….
To continue our analogy from above, the President is roughly akin to a British King – a comparison made both favorably and unfavorably throughout the Federalist Papers, that handbook to aid constitutional interpretation and explanation, devised by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay.
Thus we can go to The Federalist Papers, IF you can find them, to see what our founders actually meant… If you have any doubts. I had to use Yandex to actually find the papers.
[Listing of papers: https://www.federalistpapers.org/2012/12/federalist-papers.html]
…THE President of the United States is to be “commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several States when called into the actual service of the United States.” The propriety of this provision is so evident in itself, and it is, at the same time, so consonant to the precedents of the State constitutions in general, that little need be said to explain or enforce it. Even those of them which have, in other respects, coupled the chief magistrate with a council, have for the most part concentrated the military authority in him alone. Of all the cares or concerns of government, the direction of war most peculiarly demands those qualities which distinguish the exercise of power by a single hand…
….PANIC IN DC? WHY? WHAT WAS LOST? POWER OF THE PURSE. COMMANDER IN CHIEF OF THE UNITED STATES MILITARY. POWER TO REPLACE SENIOR OFFICIALS WITHIN CRUCIAL GOV POSITIONS (DEPT’S) WHO CAN THEN REPLACE SR+MID+LOW POSITIONS (TRICKLE_DOWN REPLACEMENT). POWER TO APPOINT SC JUSTICES. (What if HRC won and appointed 2+ crooked SCJs?) (The Last Resort) POWER TO DIRECTLY UNDO HUSSEIN/PREV EO’S WHICH HARMED-GREATLY LIMITED THE US IN MANY VITAL/NEC WAYS. POWER TO REBUILD THE UNITED STATES MILITARY (BACK) TO A GLOBAL SUPER POWER. (CHINA PAYOFFS (BRIBE $) FAILURE) POWER TO ENACT LAWS BY EO TO COMBAT AND PROTECT OUR PEOPLE. POWER TO SHIFT FOREIGN POLICY THEREBY REDUCING OUR ENEMIES ABILITY TO PROSPER AND SOMEDAY REIGN. (IRAN DEAL – PARIS ACCORD – CHINA TRADE – SYRIA – ………………….) POWER TO DECLAS CRUCIAL DOCS TO PROVIDE THE PUBLIC W/ THE TRUTH (TRANSPARENCY). POWER TO GIVE BACK POWER TO THE PEOPLE (AS INTENDED BY OUR FOUNDERS). LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD.…
….
Ingrassia also cites Article III dealing with the establishment of the federal courts: the Supreme Court and the other federal courts. So let’s take a look at this branch of government since it is responsible for enforcing US law and the Constitution…. But IT HAS NOT! We pay attention to the DC government but most often over look the long term damage done by the corrupted judiciary.
The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office….
Section 2
The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury; and such Trial shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any State, the Trial shall be at such Place or Places as the Congress may by Law have directed…. [We now have trial by JUDGES or BUREAUCRATS and not juries BTW. – GC]
Section 3
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason…
So can Trump fire federal judges? NO, not according to Publius Huldah. I am a BIG FAN of this lady and I hope POTUS Trump finds a use for her, perhaps in JAG.
From her ABOUT page. “…Publius Huldah” is the nom de guerre of Joanna Martin, J.D., who is a thoroughly nice person, in addition to all the above. And if you hear otherwise, consider this from Socrates, who reportedly said, “When the debate is lost, slander is the weapon of the loser” [Boy, haven’t we seen the truth of that ancient wisdom! Also, if some one is slandered by the MSM, that means they are a threat to the Deep State in IMHO, – GC]
right out of law school & newly commissioned US Army JAGC
To the Department of Homeland Security:
I am delighted to learn of your intense & increasing interest in learning the original intent of Our Constitution! Please feel free to browse around to your hearts’ content.
The comments are worth reading BTW
A search for the word “Judge” on her site turns up some real goodies — LINK. She has a similar opinion of the Supreme Court and judges to mine.
Someone asked me why I write on the US Constitution when the US Supreme Court won’t enforce it.
This is why: Our Declaration of Independence recognizes the self-evident Truth that Rights come from God, and that they are unalienable. Accordingly, there are certain areas of your life which are off-limits to government regulation – you have an “immunity” from governmental regulation of these areas.
But since the federal and state governments are refusing to recognize our Rights, it falls on us to boldly step up to the plate and insist that our Rights be respected. You have no lawful, moral, or religious duty to submit to a government when it violates our Constitution and seeks to take from you the rights God gave you.
Governments do not have constitutional authority to force you to take the COVID JAB.
And in this paper I show that the “privileges and immunities” and “due process” clauses of the US Constitution prohibit the federal, state, and local governments from requiring you to be “jabbed” or putting you into a concentration camp if they assert that you are at “high risk” of getting infected [i.e., those who are 65 years of age or older]….
PLEASE READ!!! Huldah is a Constitutional scholar and lawyer. Her evisceration of the judiciary and Congress is Epic. [COSP =Convention of States Project, Mark Levin is an advocate BTW and thus a viper. I noticed after I pointed that out years ago at OT, the web page disappeared. ]
4I trust you see why Hamilton is viciously smeared. The relentless attacks on our Framers have a purpose: Take them down – and our Foundation is destroyed. Hamilton wrote most of The Federalist Papers, which Madison and Jefferson recognized as the best evidence of the genuine meaning of our Constitution. What effect do these constant attacks on Hamilton have on peoples’ respect for The Federalist Papers? Beware of false friends who undermine our Foundation; and of jealous men whose claim to fame is that they attack Hamilton. [In looking up various Federalist Papers on Brave, I have come across some doozys but could not find the actual papers, just commentary. — GC]
This is her conclusion in her article on Transgenders in the Military.
Conclusion
Let us put the federal courts in their proper place! Congress and the President have the recognized power to refuse to go along with unconstitutional or ultra vires acts of the Judicial Branch; and their Oaths of office require them to do so. Congress also has the power to rid us of usurping federal judges via the impeachment process.
Let’s analyze COSP’s silly argument. We begin by looking at First Principles:
♦The Judicial Branch was created by Art. III, §1, US Constitution. Accordingly, it is a “creature” of the Constitution. 1
♦The federal government came into existence when the States, acting through special ratifying conventions held in each of the States, ratified the Constitution.2
Since the Judicial Branch is merely a “creature” of the Constitution, it follows that it is subordinate to the Constitution, and is completely subject to its terms. It may not annul the superior authority of the States which created the Judicial Branch when they ratified the Constitution; 3 and as a mere “creature” of the Constitution, it may NOT change the Constitution under which it holds its existence! 4
….we elect to Congress people who don’t know our Constitution or The Federalist Papers; and they are unaware of their Duty – imposed by their Oath of office – to function as a “check” on the Judicial Branch by impeaching federal judges who violate our Constitution.
… we delegated only a very few powers to the federal government.
Accordingly, Congress has strictly limited legislative powers over the Country at large. These powers are listed primarily at Art. I, §8, clauses 3-16, and are restricted to war, international commerce & relations; and domestically, the creation of an uniform commercial system: weights & measures, patents & copyrights, a monetary system based on gold & silver, bankruptcy laws, mail delivery & roads. Several Amendments delegate to Congress some power over civil rights.
These enumerated powers are the only areas where the federal government has lawful authority over The States and The People in The States. In all other matters [except those listed at Art. I, §10]the States and The People retain supremacy, independence, and sovereignty. Go here for a complete list of all of Congress’ Enumerated Powers.
Obamacare is altogether unconstitutional because it is outside the scope of the legislative powers We granted to Congress. Nothing in Our Constitution authorizes the federal government to control our medical care (or to exercise the other fearsome powers in the Act)...
… it is a President’s sworn duty to refuse to enforce any unconstitutional “law” made by Congress. And contrary to the misinformation with which we are constantly bombarded, judges are not vested with exclusive authority to declare Acts of Congress unconstitutional.
The Truth is that a President, the States, local governments, and individual citizens, together with the courts, all have the Right &Duty to overrule – to spurn & cast out – unconstitutional laws made by Congress.For it is a fundamental [though long suppressed] Principle of our Founding that an unconstitutional “law” is no “law” at all – it is a “mere usurpation, and deserves to be treated as such”…
I am going to detour to what I consider an important topic in my old notes, JURY NULLIFICATION. It is the American citizens FINAL SAY on the laws passed by our representatives. From 2015:
A pamphlet told the juror what his Constitutional rights and obligations were. This is information the JUDGE should be clearly stating to EVERY JURY. INSTEAD He was arrested for handing out literature. LINK
In fact this is becoming a LAW in some states thanks to the groups handing out the pamphlets.
This is perhaps THE MOST IMPORTANT move any American can make to protect our freedom. WE as Jurorists have the RIGHT and duty to judge not only the case by the LAW itself. We as Jurorists CAN set aside laws passed by Congress! This is the ultimate power of the people over the government and the Elite want to keep it hidden!
…On appeal, however, the jurors’ action was upheld and the right of juries to judge both the law and the facts — to nullify the law if it chose— became part of British constitutional law.
It ultimately became part of American constitutional law as well, With only a few exceptions, juries are explicitly or implicitly told to worry only about the facts and let the judge decide the law.
The right of jury nullification has become one of the legal system’s best kept secrets.
Now a remarkable coalition has sprung up to challenge this secrecy as undemocratic, unconstitutional and dangerous…
FIJA seeks to require that juries be informed of their nullification rights. Informed jury amendments have been filed as an initiative in seven states and legislation has been introduced in the Alaska state legislature.
Merely raising the issue of nullification can make prosecutors nervous, for it takes only one person aware of the right in order to hang a jury. In Washington, DC, where the concept was discussed in connection with the Marion Barry trial, a local television station reported that the US Attorney was worried that a jury might nullify the law in that case……
Far from being an unintended side-effect, jury nullification is explicitly authorized in the constitutions of 24 states.State Language on Jury Nullification
“…Merely raising the issue of nullification can make prosecutors nervous…”
Publius Huldah gets into WHY prosecutors become nervous and what has been done to our legal system.
…The Federalist Papers were written during 1787-88 by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, to explain the proposed Constitution to The People and to induce them to ratify it. Thus, The Federalist is the most authoritative commentary on the genuine meaning of Our Constitution. And at a meeting of the Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia on March 4, 1825 at which Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were present, the following resolution selecting the texts for the Law school, was passed:
…on the distinctive principles of the government of our own state, and of that of the US. the best guides are to be found in 1. the Declaration of Independance, as the fundamental act of union of these states. 2. the book known by the title of `The Federalist’, being an authority to which appeal is habitually made by all, and rarely declined or denied by any as evidence of the general opinion of those who framed, and of those who accepted the Constitution of the US. on questions as to it’s genuine meaning…. (page 83) [emphasis added]
So! Thomas Jefferson, Author of the Declaration of Independence, and James Madison, Father of The Constitution, acknowledged the high authoritative status of The Federalist Papers. They saw The Constitution as having a fixed meaning which one could learn by consulting The Federalist!
2. But supreme Court judges soon refused to submit to The Constitution as explained by The Federalist Papers. In 1907, former Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes said, “…the Constitution is what the judges say it is…”. Judges thus rejected the objective standard provided by The Federalist, and substituted their own subjective interpretations. Law schools embraced this subversion: Instead of teaching The Constitution as a set of fixed principles explained by The Federalist, they taught supreme Court opinions which say Congress may do whatever it pleases. They also taught that supreme Court judges have unbridled authority to say what the Constitution means. Law schools thus produced generations of constitutionally illiterate lawyers & judges who have been indoctrinated with the monstrous Lie that Our Constitution means whatever judges on the supreme Court say! And because these lawyers failed in their sacred duty to think, and uncritically accepted what they were told, Our Country is on the brink of destruction….
Of course our John Dewey Progressive School System made DARN SURE Americans are completely ignorant of our Constitution, rights and remedies, the better to turn us into good little Marxist slaves.
On last, Publius Huldah’s article on calling forth the militia.
Because of its excellence and relevance to the insurrections being fomented in our cities by the Marxist organization “Black Lives Matter”, Antifa, and other revolutionary organizations; I sent the recent paper by Edwin Vieira, JD., Ph.D., titled, “The President’s Authority To Suppress Insurrections” [link], to my lists.
In response, some objected that the riots in the cities are local issues to be handled (or not) by the State and local governments – that they are not “federal” issues over which the federal government has jurisdiction. Some also asserted that Article IV, §4, US Constitution prohibits the President from sending the National Guard into a State to quell such disturbances, unless & until the Legislature or the Governor of the State requests it.
Those objections are not well-founded.
First: What’s going on in our cities is not something which can be prudently brushed aside. It is a classic manifestation of a Marxist revolution – see, e.g., this article from “Workers’ World”. Furthermore, as shown below, the President of the United States has constitutional and statutory authority to exercise his own judgment as to whether he should send in the “Militia” to suppress the uprisings.
Second: Our Constitution provides two separate and independent methods for the federal government to suppress such uprisings.
Dr. Vieira’s paper sets forth the other method of “calling forth the Militia” – the method provided for at Article I, §8, clauses 15 & 16, US Constitution. That provides for the intervention of the Militia within a State at the initiative of the federal government, regardless of whether the State requests it.. 1
I hope you enjoyed my tour through some of Publius Huldah’s articles and will continue reading her excellent commentary. I am now going to look at a few other articles of interest by others.
….a recent Congressional Research Service report explains. “The criteria for election or appointment to these positions are specified in the U.S. Constitution, and except by constitutional amendment, no additional criteria (e.g., holding a security clearance) may be required.”
In fact, the security clearance system itself is an expression of presidential authority. Its scope and operation are defined in an executive order (EO 12968), and its terms can be modified by the President at will.
And if the President wished to grant access to classified information to a family member, for example, there would be no legal barrier to doing so…..
So that kills THAT objection by RINOs and Demonrats when it comes to ratifying POTUS Trump’s picks.
…Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson wrote in a letter to the senators earlier this month that he could not begin a review of the security clearance process without direction from Trump or one of his “designees” because “the authority over access to classified information ultimately rests with the President of the United States.”…
Of course the Senate has ZERO jurisdiction over Security Clearances so this is just more encroachment on the executive.
Matt Gaetz
So You CAN appoint a private citizen as a Special Counsel, and they can begin their important work WITHOUT a Senate confirmation hearing or vote?
Now Adam Schiff is going to be come a senator. I wonder if POTUS Trump will deny him a security clearance…. OR WORSE?
Added by Wolf…..
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) on Tuesday assailed President-elect Donald Trump’s suggestion that he and other former members of the defunct House Jan. 6 committee be imprisoned.
Trump advocated that those on the former panel who investigated the 2021 U.S. Capitol riot and his role in overturning the 2020 election should “go to jail.”
“I don’t think the incoming president should be threatening his political opponents with jail time,” Schiff told reporters on his first full day as a senator. “That’s not the kind of talk we should hear from the president in a democracy, nor do I think that a pardon is necessary for the members of the Jan. 6 committee.”
President Joe Biden is weighing preemptive pardons over fears Trump may seek retribution against Schiff and other high-profile members of the bipartisan panel, including former Chairman Bennie Thomson (D-MS), Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), and former Rep. Liz Cheney. Biden is also considering pardons for other political foes who could come under Trump’s microscope.
“We are proud of the work we did in that committee,” Schiff continued. “It was a fundamental oversight obligation to investigate the first attempt to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power in our history.”
Trump said in an NBC Meet the Press interview that aired over the weekend that he would not direct Justice Department officials to bring charges against the committee members but accused them of engaging in unspecified criminal activity.
“For what they did, honestly, they should go to jail,” Trump said.
In a separate portion, Trump said that “retribution will be through success.” He’s also vowed to pardon those charged with and convicted of crimes related to the Capitol riot.
Let’s see what happens to Pencil-Neck Shifty Schiff!
Joe Biden never won. This is our Real President – 45, 46, 47.
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
urbiculture
noun
cultivation or development of urban life
the practices and problems peculiar to cities or to urban life
the way of life characteristic of cities
urban culture
Used in a sentence
Is wokeism a natural part of modern urbiculture, or is it a special pathology thereof?
Shown in a picture by Gab’s “wokester” AI, “Woke Gemini”
Apparently shown in a video (by searching on the word)
MUSIC!
SO – the DDG search “urbiculture music” weirdly brings back mostly videos of Ethiopian music, but it also brought back this ambient Greek and Mediterranean music with accompanying scenic photography. Enjoy!
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
zymotechnics
noun
the art of fermentation
fermentation technology
Used in a sentence
If one considers Pasteur and zymotechnics to be ancestral to modern biotechnology, then surely Liebig and early organic chemistry are foundational to modern pharmaceutical, agrochemical, and medicinal chemistry. (Derived from THIS LINK.)
Shown in a picture, sorta, kinda, hey, look! A squirrel!
Shown in a Soviet Uzbek film – no, wait – that’s not….. whatever!
MUSIC!
Well, now that we’re committed to the theme…..
UGH. Think I’ll have a sparkling water!
THE STUFF
If you want to see how much bad science is out there, just watch this lady review a scientific paper that was getting some “wowee” buzz.
You don’t have to understand the equations – just assume for the moment that she knows what she’s talking about (this is her area of science).
But notice that the opposite should also be true (and she says it). Some valuable gems get lost in the trash as well. Good science is increasingly not noticed, until it is rediscovered a second or third time and somehow gets more attention.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Gail Combs can’t get into the WordPiss editor – it’s some kind of browser/WordPiss compatibility problem. Doesn’t matter – we shall overcome. I am able to get past the problem, thankfully. Thus, this PLACE HOLDER UNDER ARREST post, which is a tweaked copy of a post I made on 20240403, which included the notorious PLACE HOLDER UNDER ARREST-ORAMA image and Word Of The Week.
So here we go. Start thinking about Trump’s inauguration.
Who here is going? Any plans being made? Time to start thinking about it!
So now we return to this lightly updated “vintage” post. Enjoy!
W
Joe Biden didn’t win, and neither did Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris. This is our Real President:
U.S. President Donald Trump prepares to board Marine One with first lady Melania Trump en route to his Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach, Florida following the release of the Mueller report at the White House in Washington, U.S., April 18, 2019. REUTERS/Carlos Barria – RC1F20A769B0
AND our beautiful REALFLOTUS.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Please forgive us, Wheatie, we did not know That you had left us with armor in tow We had no idea with what you dealt We did not know the pain you felt And now we can only imagine With you what really did happen Cause rarely did you complain And/or share your personal pain Of one thing we are most certain You are flying high behind the curtain Watching over us above the crowds Our Warrior Angel above the clouds Thank You, Wheatie, for caring for us While you were here among the fuss We miss you dear you have no idea Since time began in the pangaea With you there was no time In your wisdom you would chime To clarify and magnify The what where how and why We did not question when you left We were not slightly bereft But over time we wondered why You did not at least stop by Now we know where you have gone With the break of this new dawn We could be angry but are not Tho with an arrow we’ve been shot Rest peacefully Warrior Angel dear Send us a sign that you are near A butterfly a flower a kiss of rain From your love do not refrain God sends Angels to watch over us And now we have an Angel Plus A Warrior Angel of Magnificence From today and forward hence
Boilerplate, more or less, but worth reading again and again, if only for the minor changes, and to stay out of moderation.
MINOR CHANGE NUMBER 1 – RETRACTED!
No reasons for you not to joke about Team Harpies On Pedestals, now that the nation has voted overwhelmingly for FREE SPEECH. Just remember that I really avoid deleting posts, so if you say something stupid, and you regret it later, you will need to add a clarification comment, as opposed to deleting it.
OK? Them’s the rules.
OTHER THAN THAT…….
The bottom line is Free Speech. Theories and ideas you don’t agree with must be WELCOME here, and you must be part of that welcoming. But you do NOT need to be part of any agreement.
Bottom line – respect other people’s FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS.
Our only additional requirement is that you do so NICELY. Or at least try to make some effort in that direction.
SO….. [ENGAGE BOILERPLATE…..]
We must endeavor to persevere to love our frenemies – even here.
Those who cannot deal with this easy requirement will be forced to jump the hoops of moderation, so that specific comments impugning other posters and violating the minimal rules can be sorted out and tossed in the trash.
In Wheatie’s words, “We’re on the same side here so let’s not engage in friendly fire.”
That includes the life skill of just ignoring certain other posters.
We do have a site – The U Tree – where civility is not a requirement. Interestingly, people don’t really go there much. Nevertheless, if you find yourself in an “argument” that can’t really stay civil, please feel free to “take it to the U Tree”. The U Tree is also a good place to report any technical difficulties, if you’re unable to report them here. Please post your comment there on one of Wolf’s posts, or in reply to one of Wolf’s comments, to make sure he sees it (though it may take a few hours).
We also have a backup site, called The Q Tree as well, which is really The Q Tree 579486807. You might call it “Second Tree”. The URL for that site is https://theqtree579486807.wordpress.com/. If this site (theqtree.com) ever goes down, please reassemble at the Second Tree.
If the Second Tree goes down, please go to The U Tree, or to our Gab Group, which is located at https://gab.com/groups/4178.
We also have some “old rules” and important guidelines, outlined here, in a very early post, on our first New Year’s Day, in 2019. The main point is not to make violent threats against people, which then have to be taken seriously by law enforcement, and which can be used as a PRETEXT by enemies of this site.
In the words of Wheatie, “Let’s not give the odious Internet Censors a reason to shut down this precious haven that Wolf has created for us.”
A Moment of Prayer
Our policy on extreme religious freedom on this site is discussed HERE. Please feel free to pray and praise God anytime and anywhere.
Thus, please pray for our real President, the one who actually won the 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections.
You may also pray for our nation, our world, and even our enemies.
Musical Interlude
In honor of dear Wheatie, we now present some music to soothe, inspire, invigorate, or relax.
Here are three “placeholder” videos, selected from old Wheatie posts.
This Stormwatch Monday Open Thread remains open – VERY OPEN – a place for everybody to post whatever they feel they would like to tell the White Hats, and the rest of the MAGA/KAG/KMAG world (with KMAG being a bit of both).
Our various sister sites, listed in the Blogroll in the sidebar
Our beloved country is under Occupation by hostile forces.
Daily outrage and epic phuckery abound.
We can give in to despair…or we can be defiant and fight back in any way that we can.
Joe Biden didn’t win.
And we will keep saying Joe Biden didn’t win until we get His Fraudulency out of our White House.
Wolfie’s Wheatie’s Word of the Week:
volacious
adjective
able, apt or fit to fly
Shown in a picture
Used in a sentence
It’s not a question of whether or not to toss the toxic dwarf into GITMO – the question is whether he is sufficiently volacious to make it there intact without bubble wrap.
MUSIC!
Speaking of volcano sacrifices, as a belated Halloween offering, and with EPIC musical character beloved by Wheatie, we bring you this little number…..
And now for…..
THE STUFF
Thank you, Elon! You did it!
SO, in honor of Senator “Lurch” Thune, we have this!
And if that’s not enough Lurch, here’s more than you can handle!
symbol) around the ecliptic…which means it moves through the Zodiac. The first point of Aries was actually in Aries from about 2000 BCE to 1 CE, then it was in Pisces. It’s about to leave Pisces and shift into Aquarius (“the Age of Aquarius” actually means something…but nothing magic here).
Nevertheless, the better view does seem to suggest that Congress has the power to set some limits on the President’s dismissal authority – at least in times of peace….
]
(or to exercise the other fearsome powers in the Act)...
