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!

SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom

I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”

Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.

Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?

Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?

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

And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:

OK, with that rant out of my system…

Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit

…we can move on to the next one.

Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.

Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.

Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!

It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.

In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.

Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.

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).

Last Week:

Gold $1,946.20
Silver $23.41
Platinum $1,033.00
Palladium $1,458.00
Rhodium $7,900.00

So here it is, Friday, 3PM MT after markets closed and we see:

Gold $1,948.50
Silver $23.68
Platinum $1,015.00
Palladium $1,459.00
Rhodium $7,450.00

Again, gold being kept below 2000 at all costs. It took a 30 dollar hit Friday after climbing on Thursday. So things ended up almost exactly where they were a week ago.

Pi…or π if Greek Floats Your Trireme

I probably should have done π before doing e. It’s a lot more relatable for most people, who find compound interest magical…and if they don’t find that magical, the idea of continuously compounding it might induce a headache if they think about it too much. (The way out involves concepts verging on calculus.)

But who the heck can’t visualize a circle?

Pi is, of course, the ratio of the circumference of a perfect circle, to its diameter.

The ancients wrestled with this. Pi isn’t quite 3. Nor is it 22/7ths (or 3 1/7 if you can’t stand so-called “improper” fractions and have to see it as a “mixed number” [an integer plus a “proper” fraction]). [An “improper” fraction is any fraction where the top number is at least as large as the bottom number, e.g., 22/7 or even 5/5.]

Perhaps they just needed a different fraction. 333/105 is closer to π, 355/113 is closer still…but neither are spot on. Nor are 52163/16604, 103993/33102, 104348/33215 nor even 245850922/78256779.

There is no possible fraction with integers top and bottom (numerator and denominator) that will represent π. It cannot be expressed as the ratio of two whole numbers. It is ir-ratio-nal. Which leads to “irrational” numbers being a term. It’s unfortunate, because it makes them sound crazy, woke, Leftist, or something.

However, if you truly want a crazy number, consider either the number of illegal “immigrants” coming through…or the US Federal debt.

Pi works out to 3.14159265358……approximately.

There are plenty of irrational numbers out there. For example, if a number isn’t a perfect square (e.g., 1, 4 (2×2), 9 (3×3), 100 (10×10), or 3721 (61×61), then the square root of that number is irrational. So the square root of 3 is 1.732050807…. (easy to remember the start of this, as George Washingon was born in 1732 (new style)).

An irrational number can’t be written as a fraction, and if written as a decimal never ends.

But wait, 1/3, when written as a decimal never ends, either. And 1/3 is clearly a ratio-nal (rational) number.

But a rational number written as a decimal will fall into a repeating pattern if it doesn’t actually end. 1/3 = 0.33333…. (obvious repeat), 1.6 = 0.166666 (repeats, after the first digit). 1/7th = 0.142857142857…. (a seven digit group, repeating forever). In fact the maximum number of digits before repeating is the denominator itself minus 1; 1/7th is at that maximum since it repeats after 7-1=6 digits. So does 2/7, 3/7 and so on (in fact the repeating digits form the same sequence, just started in different places. 5/7= 0.714285714285…. In fact fractions n/7 start with every single one of the numbers in the sequence ending with 6/7=0.857142857142.

[This repeating nature of some fractions…but not 1/2, 1/4, 1/5, 1/8, 1/10, 1/16, 1/20 and so on, is an artifact of our decimal system, operating in base 10; 10 expressed as the product of primes is 5 x 2. As a result, if the denominator is a number that factors completely into 2s and 5s (i.e., any number of 2s and any number of 5s, in any combination), the decimal point representation will eventually end. But if the prime factors of the denomination include any other number…the decimal will never end, but will repeat. So, for instance, 60 (2 x 2 x 3 x 5) has that one 3 in it, so fractions with sixty in the denominator may not end. They will end if the numerator also divides by 3; then the 3s cancel out, e.g., 42/60s also equals 14/20ths or 7/10ths. The denominator is only 5s and 2s and so that fraction is just 0.7.]

So e and π are both irrational numbers, along with almost every square root, cube root, fourth root, and so on.

But π and e are also members of a class known as transcendental numbers. These are numbers that are irrational and can’t be found by solving a polynomial (which can involve taking a root of some other number). In other words, you cannot write a formula like this:

xⁿ – m = 0

Where m and n are any integers you care to pick, and have x equal to π or e or any other transcendental number, whereas the square root of 2, which is also an irrational number, isn’t transcendental because it solves this problem with m and n both set to 2:

x² – 2 = 0

(By the way that’s true even if you combine different powers of x; I just gave a simple case.)

Pi can now be computed to billions of digits, and there’s no sign of it ever ending (nor is it expected; it has been proved to be transcendental, and in math you can actually prove things to be solidly, incontrovertibly true).

Pi is hugely important in mathematics; it shows up all over the place. And in the sciences just about anything having to do with geometry will have π in it. It shows up in Maxwell’s equations and in Einstein’s equation describing general relativity, both of which involve geometry.

Pi also shows up in measuring angles. Consider a circle of radius 1. (We don’t care about whether that’s a meter, furlong, line, chain, light year, or parsec, though the last two would be a bit unwieldy in a diagram.)

Now imagine starting at the right side of the circle (3 o’clock), and going counterclockwise, measuring the length of the arc. If you go all the way around the circle, your total length is 2π. (Remember the radius is 1, not the diameter.) Since this is based on the radius of the circle, we say you have measured an angle of 2π radians. And this works as an angle (not a linear measurement) because it doesn’t matter what the size of the circle is; the full trip around the circumference is of course 2π times the radius, a full circle is 2π radians as well as being 360 degrees.

This sounds like it should be a solid pain in the butt. A 30 degree angle is 1/12th of the full circle, so that works out to π/6 radians or 0.5235987755982987307710723054658…radians. Most people would give up sooner than I did. But who wants to write that out even to five digits?

So they don’t. They’ll write that angle as π/6.

Since radians are simply one length divided by another, without any sort of constant fudge factor thrown in, they’re dimensionless (in physics) and for mathematicians are the “natural” way of working with angles, just like e is the natural base of logarithms.

OK, so how about, instead of stopping after traveling around the full circle, you stop after some other, arbitrary angle? Where are you? You start at one unit to the right and zero units up. After a quarter circle (π/2 radians), you’re now at zero units to the right, and one unit up.

How about that thirty degree angle? Which is to say, 1/12th of the way around the circle, which is to say π/6 radians? Well it turns out you are 1/2 a unit up (exactly), but the square root of 3, divided by 2 a/k/a sqrt(3)/2 units to the right. So yes most of the places on a circle have coordinates that are irrational (but not necessarily transcendental) numbers. Some few places have “special” coordinates, like 45 degrees (π/4 radians), where both sine and cosine are the square root of 2, divided by 2 or sqrt(2)/2; most are just some irrational number you can’t relate to the square root of some nice tidy little number like 2 or 3.

You can conceive of a function that will tell you how many units to the right you will be for any given angle…and another that will tell you how many units up you are for any given angle. You could even give these functions names, like, oh, say…cosine and sine.

Of course, I didn’t just pull those names out of my rectal database. Those are the actual names, and they get abbreviated cos and sin. (So somebody else pulled those names out of his rectal database, and managed to get everyone else to go along with it.)

It seems like this is a contrived situation, but this is astoundingly useful. First objection: Not all circles have a radius of 1. In fact most of them don’t.

So what? It scales. If a circle has radius 1.945, you can compute those positions by simply multiplying the sin and cosine of whatever angle, by 1.945.

[Or you can look at it another way…all circles have a radius of 1…provided you can pick whatever measuring system you want!]

So you will see sines and cosines all over the place in physics; just for instance the way you break a vector up into its components uses the sine and cosine of the angle the vector is pointing towards. A vector of length 10 pointing off at a 60 degree…ahem, π/3 radians) angle will have an x component of 5 (i.e., 10cos(π/3)) and a y component of 10 sqrt(3)/2 (i.e., 10 sin(π/3)). (Note that the cosine and sine of 60 degrees are swapped from the cosine and sine of 30 degrees.)

So sine and cosine can be very useful. And mathematically speaking, if you just take the cosine of some number…that number is assumed to be in radians. (Even deep in the bowels of your computer, in the arithmetic coprocessor, the sine function will take radians as its parameter. What you see on your spreadsheet when you ask for sin(30) is computed only after turning 30 degrees into radians.

And again radians are the natural way to do this. So much so that when taking about, say, the sine of some number, mathematicians don’t even bother to specify “radians” because a radian is simply a dimensionless ratio of arclength to radius without a fudge factor in it, like there would be for degrees.

Now there’s one more thing, and I will give my fingers (and your brains) a rest. The names cosine and sine imply a connection between the two functions, one is the co– of the other.

And that’s true. Let’s switch to degrees for a moment and check a few key values. The cosine of zero is 1. The cosine of 90 is 0. The cosine of 180 is -1. The cosine of 270 is 0 again. And the cosine of 360 is 1 again. And you can fill in the halves, the northeast, northwest, southwest and southeast: The cosine of 45 is sqrt(2)/2, the cosine of 135 is -sqrt(2)/2; the cosine of 225 is again -sqrt(2)/2, and the cosine of 315 is sqrt(2)/2. Merging the two sequences, and writing them out in order: 1, sqrt(2)/2, 0, -sqrt(2)/2, -1, -sqrt(2)/2, 0, sqrt(2)/2 and back to 1, after which 405 degrees is basically the same as 45 degrees, so we repeat the same cycle, over and over again.

Now let’s do the same thing for sines. We get: 0, sqrt(2)/2, 1, sqrt(2)/2, 0, -sqrt(2)/2, -1, -sqrt(2)/2, and back to 0.

Note that they are the same sequence…just starting at different places. If you were to actually graph these functions, they’d look identical…just one would be shifted compared to the other. So there’s definitely a connection worthy of deeming one of them to be the co– of the other.

The sine and cosine are important concepts, and although you can learn to play all kinds of tricks with them–enough so to be worthy of a full semester of math class–really what you’re going to need if you haven’t already rage-quit reading my posts, is to remember that the cosine is the distance to the right of zero (so it’s negative if you’re to the left of zero), and the sine is the distance above zero (so it’s negative if you’re below it), of a point on the “unit circle” (radius 1).

[And yes, being to the left of 0 as in 0bama is pretty far left.]

One last note. The full circumference of a circle is 2π. And because of that, a lot of formulae in physics have a 2π in them. So much so that some argue that the more natural constant is the one we think of as 2π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its radius rather than its diameter. That, of course would be 6.283…rather than 3.1415926…and those who make this argument advocate for calling this number τ, i.e., the Greek letter tau. (It rhymes with how.) This position is becoming increasingly popular but I doubt it will ever supplant pi. On the other hand, it’s natural to talk of τ/4 radians and have that be a quarter circle (rather than half of a half circle); that’s more intuitively a right angle than π/2 is.

OK, so far we’ve discussed numbers that show up on a number line. They may be transcendental, impossible to write out in full even as a fraction, but you can say that e is between 2.71828 and 2.71829, and that π is between 3.1415926 and 3.1415927.

Our next number, however, will be one you cannot do that with.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

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

China is in the White House

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

Joe Biden is Asshoe

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

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

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

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!

SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom

I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”

Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.

Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?

Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?

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

And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:

OK, with that rant out of my system…

Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit

…we can move on to the next one.

Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.

Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.

Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!

It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.

In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.

Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.

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).

Last Week:

Gold $1,984.90
Silver $25.17
Platinum $1,134.00
Palladium $1,682.00
Rhodium $9,000.00

So here it is, Friday, 3PM MT after markets closed and we see:

Gold $1,991.60
Silver $25.15
Platinum $1,084.00
Palladium $1,588.00
Rhodium $9,300.00

Things aren’t moving around all that much lately.

Globular Clusters

Time for a wrenching change of subject…because JWST took a picture of a globular cluster.

I was pretty much done with orbits anyhow.

A globular cluster is a grouping of stars, tens of thousands or even millions of them, forming an approximate sphere. The stars are very closely packed in the center and as you move away from the center the density decreases markedly.

This is Messier 2, a globular cluster that (as seen from Earth) is in the constellation Aquarius. (Note this is not the JWST’s image–it’s from Hubble.)

Charles Messier in the 1700s was interested in comets. In telescopes, before they get close to the sun and (possibly) become bright enough for people to see with the naked eye, they simply look like fuzzy blobs. Also, since they orbit the Sun, they move against the background stars (which are at least ten thousand times further away). So Messier would record a fuzzy blob in a certain location then check that location again a few days later. If the blob had moved, he likely had a comet. Otherwise, it was a permanent feature of the nighttime sky.

There were enough permanent blobs that Messier made a list of them, so when he stumbled across that blob again, he’d know he could ignore it. This is now the Messier catalog of about 110 objects. Many of the most famous nebulae in the night sky are Messier objects; many nearby galaxies are too. (Andromeda, for instance, is M-31, and the 800 bazillion ton gorilla of the Virgo cluster, M87 (the one with the really, really big black hole in its center), well, is a Messier object.

Many of Messier’s blobs were fuzzy spheres in his telescope (which was fairly primitive); as optics got better it became apparent they were clusters of tens of thousands or even millions of stars.

It also became apparent that there were quite a number of these in our galaxy…but they do not lie in the plane of the galaxy like the spiral arms do; they are in a swarm in what’s called the galactic halo, a spherical region centered on the bulge at the center of our galaxy. So if you imagine the Milky Way galaxy as, say a CD, some of the clusters are above it, and some below, most are just a few inches from the center of the cd. Other galaxies have them too, and they’re readily visible in powerful telescopes.

Another quirky feature about globular clusters is that the stars in them tend to be very old, over ten billion years old. For a while, astronomers would measure the age of a globular cluster, and come up with a number greater than the cosmologists’ number for the age of the universe. Of course this was absurd…how can an object in the universe be older than the universe. Over a number of decades as measurements were refined the discrepancy went away, but nevertheless, globular clusters are old.

Probably the most famous globular cluster (often just called “globulars”) is Omega Centauri. It’s so bright it was mistaken for a star by the ancients. It does not have a Messier number as it’s not readily visible from northern Europe where Messier worked–but folks living in Australia get to enjoy it. Another famous one is the Hercules cluster, M 13. It’s an easy one to find even with binoculars since it lies on a line between two stars in the Hercules “keystone” pattern (four stars that look like they outline a keystone).

JWST took the following picture of M 92, which is also in Hercules. It’s one of the brighter and more spectacular ones but is overshadowed by M 13. It’s particularly interesting because it’s one of the oldest globular clusters, somewhere between twelve and 13 billion years old. (The universe itself is presently believed to be 13.787 billion years old, give or take 0.02 billion years.) Scientists hope to learn something new about the universe as it was back then.

(We already know from spectrographic analysis the stars shown have almost no “metals” (astrophysicist terminology for elements other than hydrogen and helium) in them…they formed before the elements themselves were formed in more massive stars.)

The first thing you’ll notice is that the center of the cluster is missing. This was deliberate. The astronomers using JWST were interested in the outlying stars and the millions of stars clumped together in the center would have washed them out. They were able to use a gap that exists between two of the NIRCam long wavelength detectors. Talk about making lemonade from lemons!

M92 is about 27,600 light years away. It’s 16,000 light years outside of the plane of the Milky Way and 33,000 light years away from the galactic center. (We are about 27,000 light years from the center.)

This is of course a false-color image, because it’s JWST. None of what you see in this picture is actually visible to the human eye. Rather, this image was taken at four infrared wavelengths we can’t see, then the four each given their own color of visible light and the group combined together into one image. From the NASA website: “This image is composite of four exposures using four different filters: F090W (0.9 microns) is shown in blue; F150W (1.5 microns) in cyan; F277W (2.77 microns) in yellow; and F444W (4.44 microns) in red.” For reference, red light is about 0.7 microns and blue light is 0.4 microns. All of the things seen in the picture are therefore “redder than red.”

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

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

China is in the White House

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

Joe Biden is Asshoe

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

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

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

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!

SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom

I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”

Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.

Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?

Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?

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

And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:

OK, with that rant out of my system…

Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit

…we can move on to the next one.

Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.

Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.

Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!

It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.

In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.

Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.

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).

Last Week:

Gold $1,990.30
Silver $22.70
Platinum $985.00
Palladium $1,495.00
Rhodium $10,000.00

So here it is, Friday, 3PM MT after markets closed and we see:

Gold $1,978.30
Silver $23.31
Platinum $993.00
Palladium $1,507.00
Rhodium $9,300.00

After dropping substantially earlier this week, gold reversed course by Thursday and spent most of Friday getting close to $2,000 but not over, then dropping down again. It ended up net down -15.20 for the day, which means it was over 1990 at close yesterday. I can’t see it going down much, honestly; the dollar is circulating the drain, and to keep it from going down the drain they would have to crater the economy. Because our “betters” play stupid games with the currency…we all win stupid prizes.

Galilean Relativity

Well, let’s give this a go, on short notice.

I like to write a first draft of science posts a couple of days beforehand. I’ll then come back in a couple of days and see a much better way of organizing it, or perhaps a more useful analogy, or other things like that.

I don’t have that luxury today; it’s 8PM mountain time already. So here’s hoping I’m organized from the get-go, because I am going to give it a go.

I’ve been planning to cover “gravitational slingshots” (the click-baity name) or “gravity assists” since much of what NASA has been doing is utterly dependent on them. That’s going to be a big topic, but I realized I can at least lay some groundwork tonight.

Consider a typical two body problem: some small satellite or even a space probe, and a big honkin’ planet.

I’ve been talking as if the probe orbits a point at the center of the planet. Technically that’s not true. The two bodies both orbit the “barycenter.” That’s basically the center of gravity of the system. Imagine the planet and the satellite on a seesaw, at whatever their “current” distance is. A million miles? five thousand? Ten billion? Whatever.

The barycenter is the point at which you’d want to put the fulcrum of the seesaw.

Now when it’s Earth and, say, a GPS satellite, that point turns out to be so close to the center of the earth that it’s likely immeasurable, because the earth is about 1.5 septillion times more massive than the satellite (6×10²⁴ kilograms versus 4 kilograms; a one with 24 zeros after it is a septillion). And the GPS satellite orbit is about 20,000 km in radius (it’s a circular orbit so we can speak of a radius here).

So the “balance point” between Earth and the satellite is 1/1,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th of the way in from one of the ends. Which works out to 13 and a third femtometers. Recall that a femtometer is roughly the size of a proton or neutron; much much much smaller than an atom, and you’ll see the difference between the barycenter and the center of the earth Just. Doesn’t. Matter.

It can matter, though when the two bodies are closer to each other in mass. The sun-Jupiter barycenter is significantly far from the center of the sun (the mass ratio is almost exactly a thousand to one, the sun is almost half a million miles in radius, Jupiter’s orbit is a bit over half a billion miles in radius). In fact the barycenter is actually outside of the sun. Earth and Moon are closer together in mass, but much closer together, so the Earth/Moon barycenter is still a thousand miles or so down below the surface. Pluto and Charon are more nearly the same mass…they’d be a double planet if they were planets. The barycenter of that system is out in space.

When New Horizons was still far out from Pluto it took the pictures that were assembled into the GIF above of Pluto and Charon. The white x marks the barycenter.

OK, so now that I’ve set the record straight and planet and satellite both orbit a barycenter, I’ll now pose a question that is going to sound like it comes completely out of left field.

What if the barycenter is moving?

Take a space probe doing a flyby of a planet. It’s an escape orbit…it’s flying by never to return, so we are talking about a hyperbola. Under the circumstances the barycenter is effectively at the center of the planet.

So what if the planet is moving? They do move you know.

It turns out that this makes absolutely not a shred of difference. The spacecraft will move along a neat hyperbola as seen from the planet, no matter how fast the planet is moving.

The deep reason for this is that one level, it’s meaningless to talk about a planet or a star moving.

Einstein didn’t quite invent the concept of relativity; rather he refined it. Galileo truly originated it, to cover cases where (for instance) you’re in a moving railroad car tossing a ball in the air, and you have no way to tell the railroad car is moving. In fact, you could claim the railroad car is stationary, and the world is moving. As long as the train isn’t accelerating, you will feel like you aren’t moving.

It turns out that all of the mathematics of speed, velocity, and so on, is exactly equivalent no matter whether you regard the train car as stationary and the earth moving, or vice versa. The signs (plus or minus) on all the numbers are different, but the moving objects behave the same way either way. Galileo realized that there’s no absolute motion, only relative motion. The train is moving? Relative to what? The earth? Or the passengers on the train? Or the bug flying into the locomotive’s windshield?

It’s even more true out in space. Who’s moving, and who’s stationary. Is anything stationary?

You pick a frame of reference and go from there. Since they’re all equivalent, pick a convenient one. And it turns out in the case of the spacecraft flying by a planet, the convenient frame of reference is the center of the planet (I mean the barycenter of the planet/spacecraft system…here let me find my atom-sized measuring stick to correct it). In that frame of reference, draw a hyperbola, that’s what the spacecraft does.

Even though the planet is moving in orbit around the sun. Well, from the planet’s point of view the sun is going in circles around the planet.

[I remember in a college class discussing the sun as seen from Earth; the professor described the sun’s apparent path through the sky as if it were in a one year orbit around the earth. He gave us orbital elements just like I discussed a few weeks ago. And it worked, because…Galileo. We could compute where the sun would appear on any particular day. Of course some satellite in a 150,000,000 kilometer orbit around Earth is not going to complete that orbit in a year…not even in a thousand years. So we had to pretend the sun was closer than it is. The reason why is that in analyzing an orbit we need the combined gravitational parameters of the planet and the satellite…but again the satellite’s contribution is twenty or so digits past where you round off, so we don’t bother adding them together. Similarly, with the sun-earth system, the gravitational parameter that matters is the sun’s, not the earth’s; our gravitational parameter is a rounding error. So we can either put the sun closer to the earth for this analysis…or use the sun’s gravitational parameter in place of our own. The prof went with putting the sun closer.]

OK, we’re halfway to understanding the “slingshot.” I can’t say “see you next week” with a perfectly straight face, so I’ll settle for “see you next time.”

[PS: So what did Einstein add? He added that the rules change when the relative velocity between two objects gets close to the speed of light, and later on he incorporated accelerations into the mix–Galileo specifically excluded them.]

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

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

China is in the White House

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

Joe Biden is Asshoe

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

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

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

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!

SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom

I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”

Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.

Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?

Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?

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

And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:

OK, with that rant out of my system…

Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit

…we can move on to the next one.

Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.

Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.

Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!

It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.

In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.

Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.

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).

Last Week:

Gold $1,866.50
Silver $22.08
Platinum $956.00
Palladium $1,614.00
Rhodium $12,950.00

So here it is, Friday, 3PM MT after markets closed and we see:

Gold $1,843.20
Silver $21.81
Platinum $930.00
Palladium $1,583.00
Rhodium $11,900.00

Everything trending down. I don’t think I’ve seen palladium or rhodium this low in a long, long time. And those are likely to be good economic indicators as their uses are industrial.

Hyperbolic Orbits

We now turn to the remaining two-body case, the hyperbolic orbit. This is the sort of orbit an object is in whenever it is moving at above escape velocity.

You get a hyperbola whenever you slice through both “halves” of a cone. It doesn’t have to be vertically as shown in this diagram, the plane just has to be “vertical” enough in the diagram to not miss one of the two “halves” of the cone.

More formally, it’s going to look like this:

Note that this curve has two parts. An orbit will only be one of these two lines–the other is physically meaningless–and the focus for that line (F1 if it’s the right line, F2 if it’s the left) will be where the primary is. You can sketch a hyperbola by crossing two lines (the asymptotes) as in the diagram, then drawing a curve that never quite reaches the asymptotes (it gets closer and closer without ever reaching it, which is where the term “asymptotic” appears, as in “Trump’s administration asymptotically approached being able to actually arrest one of the people in the Deep State”) on either the left or right side of the X. Actually a not-uncommon trick is to draw a rectangle, make the crossed lines the diagonals of the rectangle, then sketch the hyperbola, with the vertex touching the middle of the sides of the rectangle. That point where it touches (and is closest to the focus) is the vertex and of course corresponds to periapsis. Apoapsis is at the ends of the line…which is infinitely far away. Mathematically speaking one end of the line is infinitely far in the past, the other infinitely far in the future, but of course in reality the object has to have come into being more recently than that, and closer than infinity, too.

Another way to draw a hyperbola is to graph the function 1/x. At 0, it’s undefined (or infinite, if you want to stretch a point), the line drops down from infinity until it reaches x=1, y=1, then zooms off to the right…but never reaches y=0. Though it can get so close you’d never be able to tell it wasn’t straight there. The asymptotes are the X and Y axes, and of course the thing is tilted at a 45 degree angle counterclockwise to the one in the diagram above.

And yet another way is to plot all of the points, whose distance from F1 minus their distance from F2 is some constant…and that constant is the distance between the vertices, or 2a. (And a here functions in many ways identically to the a in an elliptical orbit.) This is weirdly analogous to an ellipse, where the sum of the distances from any point on the ellipse to both foci is 2a.

The net effect of a “flyby” on a hyperbola is the object’s direction of travel is bent at some angle (the angle between the two asymptotes). To try to make this visualizable, imagine you are that object, just zipping along through space. If not interfered with, you’ll go in a straight line, at a constant speed (no friction to slow you down). But as it happens some large object (a star, say) is almost in your path. As you get closer and closer, it is pulling you towards it, so you speed up, and you pull off your path a bit; as you get closer and closer, you move faster and are pulled more and more off that straight line you were moving along. Then you fly past it. At that moment you’ve been bent pretty far off your former straight line path, and you are moving really, really fast. But now the process runs in reverse; the object pulling at you almost from behind slows you down and bends your path even more…but once you’re far away, you’re back to traveling a straight line, and nearly constant speed. But it’s a new straight line; the star bent your path.

You can determine whether or not you are in a hyperbolic orbit by measuring your speed and distance from the primary; just plug that distance into the escape velocity formula from last week; if your speed with respect to the primary is higher than that, you’re in a hyperbolic orbit, and you will escape from that primary. And furthermore, this is the only time you’ll encounter it. (To know the exact trajectory an object will follow, of course we will need its direction at that time, best determined with multiple measurements.)

This was famously demonstrated by ‘Oumuamua, an object that zipped through our solar system in a hyperbolic orbit back in 2017. It came from some other star, or maybe from the interstellar void. It was the first time we detected anything like that. It was discovered by the Pan-STARRS telescope on Maui (which spends a lot of time searching for comets and asteroids). ‘Oumuamua is the Hawai’ian word for “scout,” which was a perfect choice.

Here is a video AND a static diagram.

And here is another view…zoomed out quite a bit, Neptune’s orbit at about 30 AU is visible, whereas before Mars at 1.52 AU is the outer orbit in the diagram above. Mars is red in both diagrams. In the diagram below ‘Oumuamua is about to leave the upper left side of the picture. Also note the vertical lines which help give you a sense of ‘depth’ looking at the picture. The lines end at the plane of the planets’ orbits.

Here, from Wikipedia, are the orbital elements plus a few other things. The “epoch” for this is the 23rd of November 2017. (Other objects will pull on ‘Oumuamua and alter its orbit…I’ll have more to say about that sort of thing in future posts.)

Perihelion	0.255916±0.000007 AU
Semi-major axis	−1.2723±0.0001 AU[b]
Eccentricity	1.20113±0.00002
Average orbital speed	26.33±0.01 km/s (interstellar)[10] 5.55 AU/year
Mean anomaly	51.158°
Mean motion	0° 41m 12.12s / day
Inclination	122.74°
Longitude of ascending node	24.597°
Argument of perihelion	241.811°
Earth MOID	0.0958 AU · 37.3 LD
Jupiter MOID	1.454 AU

An AU is the average distance between the Earth and the sun, so basically this thing got four times closer to the sun than Earth does; this was inside the orbit of Mercury. Note the inclination, the longitude of the ascening node, the argument of perihelion, all explained in past posts. And the eccentricity is greater than 1, just like for any hyperbola. The kicker, though, is the average orbital speed…26.33 kilometers per second. But that was its speed “way out there” (‘Oumuamua will spend 99.99999999999% of its existence out there) not its speed as it flew by the sun! Its maximum speed was 87.71 kilometers every second. To put that in perspective, earth’s orbital speed is about 29.7 kilometers per second. When it was the same distance from the sun as Earth is, it was moving at 49.67 km/sec–comfortably above the escape velocity here which is about 40 km/sec.

This encounter bent ‘Oumuamua’s straight line trajectory by 66 degrees.

Even at its interstellar speed of 26.33 kilometers per second, it covers 5.5 AU in a year, which means it covers the distance from the Sun to Jupiter (5.2 au) in less than a year.

The MOID numbers are how close the line of the orbit of ‘Oumuamua comes to the line of orbit of Earth and Jupiter. This is not how close the asteroid came to either planet though, because when ‘Oumuamua was closest to those orbits, those planets were nowhere near that point in their orbits. (MOID is used to assess the possible future risk of a collision. When both objects are in elliptical orbits and keep coming back to the same place time after time, they could, sometime perhaps millions of years from now, be at the points nearest each other’s orbits at the same time.)

‘Oumuamua turns out to be quite a puzzler. They’re not sure what it is made of; it didn’t outgas much like a comet would, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t made largely of ices; nitrogen ice is a candidate. And we simply don’t know whether it formed near some other star and got ejected from that star’s planetary system, or whether it might have coalesced deep in the interstellar void far from any star. (Wikipedia has more info than I have time this evening to read, much less relate.)

And that touches on a topic. I’ve described these orbits as if they will persist forever. They would, actually, if only there were just two bodies–primary and satellite–involved (there would be a minuscule amount of energy slowly radiated away by gravity waves, an effect not accounted for in Kepler’s and Newton’s work, but that is immeasurable over billions of years for planets and the like).

So how do things get ‘ejected’ from planetary systems? How do comets get kicked into the central part of the solar system where they get to play pinball with planets? How do comets’ orbits get altered so they are short period comets that come back again and again every few years or decades?

One answer, that applies mainly to comets is that as they heat up and outgas, the jet of gas acts like a rocket and nudges the comet into a slightly different orbit.

But that’s not the full explanation, nor even one that applies in all but a minority of cases (though it did affect ‘Oumuamua).

Satellites in orbit around Earth will be affected by the equatorial bulge; this effect can sometimes make 500 miles’ difference after one day of orbiting. The bulge affects, and is very definitely acted on by, the moon. But those effects are small for large orbits, like those of the planets around the sun.

No the real explanation is that there are more than two bodies in the universe, and sometimes that can make a big difference. And, just to make life interesting, those calculations are very time-intensive to do. (As the joke goes, “This is why God made computers.”)

We’ll take that up next time.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

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

China is in the White House

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

Joe Biden is Asshoe

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

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

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

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!

SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom

I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”

Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.

Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?

Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?

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

And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:

OK, with that rant out of my system…

Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit

…we can move on to the next one.

Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.

Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.

Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!

It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.

In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.

Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.

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).

Last Week:

Gold $1,866.70
Silver $23.92
Platinum $1,100.00
Palladium $1,889.00
Rhodium $13,250.00

So here it is, Friday, 3PM MT after markets closed and we see:

Gold $1,921,60
Silver $24.38
Platinum $1,073.00
Palladium $1,863.00
Rhodium $13,000.00

Gold is going somewhere–we’re not at record levels (~$2070), but at the rate things are going it won’t be long, unless of course it reverses course (let’s face it: “they” will do their darndest to make that happen). Silver is too, though not as much. The others…not very much at all. This looks like the prime “pusher” is people worried about the economy. They will tend to pick gold over silver…and the other metals won’t share in that.

My gut feel is that it will end up dropping again, hard. If I am wrong and the dollar is going to collapse to the point where you can pay off your house with a silver dime because silver is at a million toilet-paper bucks an ounce…well, so be it.

If inflation gets THAT bad, expect your credit card companies to amend their agreements so as to index your balance to inflation. And certainly any other new loan. But old car and house loans cannot be amended!

How Far Are the Stars?

Thanks to Hollywood, it’s easy to imagine that since we’ve gone to the Moon (and yes, we have gone to the Moon), the planets are just one step away–one we inexplicably didn’t just take right after Apollo–and the stars one more step after that.

The moon’s orbit’s semi-major axis (which is one half of the length of the elliptical orbit, measured across the longest part; this serves as a good average distance) is 384,399 kilometers. But you should subtract the earth’s radius from that, as well as the moon’s, as it’s center-to-center. Let’s call it, very roughly, 375,000 kilometers.

Compare that to the distance between the earth and the sun, one “astronomical unit” of 149,597,870.7 kilometers. It’s 398.9 times as far…call it four hundred times. And these are the sorts of distances we’d have to travel to get to Mars. Sure it gets closer to us than 150 million kilometers, but we would not be traveling that shortest distance; we’d be using a “Hohmann Transfer” or something very similar to that (because it would take a lot less delta-V to do that; i.e, a lot less fuel), and that would easily be over 300 million kilometers.

Traveling 400-800 times as far is not a “small step.”

Compare Columbus traveling 3000 miles or so (one way) to the sorts of things people did before him, where they hugged the coastline but often traveled thousands of miles. Comparatively speaking, that’s a much smaller jump than going to Mars, having gone to the Moon, would be.

This is in large part why we’ve been doing everything with robot probes. It takes them as long as it would take astronauts, but they don’t have to bring along food and life support for months or years of travel…so that makes it possible to do it with smaller rockets…smaller meaning rockets smaller than a mountain.

Neptune, the outermost planet, is at about 30 AUs distance; that’s a 15-fold jump over a trip to Mars. Significant, especially when you consider the time it would take, but not that big a jump from getting to Mars. If we can start sending people to Mars, it won’t be that much harder to go other places (assuming there’s something there at the other end that’s not instantly lethal…and let’s face it Jupiter’s moons are mostly close enough to Jupiter’s radiation belts that astronauts would be broiled alive without a lot of heavy shielding…and that word “heavy” is a deal breaker). But, nonetheless, the planets are at similar distances to each other…compared to the jump it will be to go from moon travel to planetary travel.

What about the stars?

Proxima Centuari is the nearest star. And it is 268,000 AUs away. In other words it’s basically ten thousand times as far as Neptune.

We could have Southwest Spaceways running daily (except when their computers go tango uniform) trips to Neptune for tourists…and we’d be nowhere near ready for star travel. For a number of reasons, the main one of which would be having to go a thousand times as fast just to get there in a lifetime. But that’s just a consequence of the YUGE jump in distance.

That day we first set out for the stars, will represent a “giant leap for mankind” bigger than everything before it, put together.

Calculus Made Easy (No Joke)

This is a conceptual introduction to calculus; the meat of it starts about three minutes in–assuming, of course, that it posts at all! There’s no actual math drudgery involved for the conceptual part (though he does start flinging it at you around 12 minutes or so), though you do need to understand graphs. You should come out of it with an understanding of what integration and differentiation are, even if you don’t actually know how to do them.

If it buggers up here’s the link: h ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuOxDh3egN0 (remove the space).

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

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

China is in the White House

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

Joe Biden is Asshoe

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

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

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

Another Twitter Censorship Drop.

I must admit it’s having more of an effect than I expected. The Left is having to squirm really hard to pretend it’s not there, meaning it’s penetrating their MSM armor…somewhat.

We got another dump Friday night, and this time more directly to do with the 2020 election, instead of some very-well-connected shit-for-brains’s laptop.

May the Left go apeshit and stroke out. They deserve worse, so I guess I’ve practiced charity/mercy just this once.

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!

SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom

I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”

Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.

Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?

Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?

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

And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:

https://youtu.be/WjM26GWWoGk?t=21

OK, with that rant out of my system…

Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit

…we can move on to the next one.

Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.

Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.

Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!

It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.

In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.

Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.

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).

Last Week:

Gold $1,798.30
Silver $23.19
Platinum $1,023.00
Palladium $1,974.00
Rhodium $14,100.00

So here it is, Friday, 3PM MT after markets closed and we see:

Gold $1,798.90
Silver $23.56
Platinum $1,034.00
Palladium $2,026.00
Rhodium $13,350.00

It looks like gold didn’t move, to speak of! Actually it dropped and (unusual for a Friday) came back up. It’s trying to bust through $1800 but hasn’t done so. In a normal (non-manipulated) market, you would expect it to either bust through and then just keep going, or turn around and go the other way. In this distinctly not non-manipulated market, who knows?

Artemis I Coming Home

The unmanned Artemis I mission is on its way back, after three weeks in space. In the days of the Space Shuttle going just to orbit (instead of to the ISS) that was a fairly long mission. But this time it not only went to the moon it went significantly farther. It even took a picture of the (round) Earth behind an (also round) Moon, the sort of view you would expect if you were arriving from interplanetary space.

This is the furthest any spacecraft designed to carry people in it has ever gone from Earth. And, presuming that the manned flight slated for 2024 follows the same path, those four people will set a record for furthest distance from Mother Earth, ever. And even before they are more than a thousand miles above the surface they will have been further than anyone has been in half a century.

Apollo only took roughly three days to go to the moon (each way); Artemis was about as fast, actually, but took some side trips once it got there. (It would actually be harder to go to the Moon more slowly…orbital mechanics can be surprising sometimes.) But the fact that the missions are slated to take three or more weeks is an indication we have deep space exploration in mind now…as in other planets, as in Mars. (Which sucks, but much less than anywhere else other than Earth.)

The Orion module has a solar array, there are cameras mounted on it so it’s possible to see the spacecraft from the outside. No need for NASA animations like they did for Apollo, and if something like Apollo 13 should happen [I certainly hope NOT], they’ll be able to actually look at the outside of the spacecraft to see what happened. In the actual Apollo 13, the astronauts couldn’t see the damage until they separated from the service module to start re-entry.

Which brings me to today’s topic.

I have to explain something up front, and that is: how a rocket works. It’s not rocket science (seriously; I tell people that rocket science isn’t rocket science, at least it sure ain’t compared to particle physics). In essence a rocket moves because of Newton’s third law…every action comes with an equal but opposite reaction. If you push something away from you in the direction opposite of the one you want to go, you react by going the direction you want to go. A rocket functions by adding a bunch of energy to a bunch of mass and letting that mass go out one end…the rocket goes the other way. The rocket changes speed; and that’s the goal…the change in speed is called delta V, delta V costs reaction mass, and the heavier you are at the time, the more reaction mass it costs.

With nothing to grab onto in space–like, say, tires on pavement, that’s pretty much the only way to get moving (with the exception of a solar sail). You can’t push on something outside your spacecraft, so you have to push on something you brought with you. But that means you must carry a bunch of mass with you for the sole purpose of throwing it away en route! (It is called “reaction mass” for that reason.) And that mass requires even more mass to get moving. The engineering trick is to find the fuel (as it turns out liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen are the best readily available) that will generate the most impulse (change in momentum) for the least amount of weight. (Heating it up by burning it and letting it blast out the back end under high pressure is basically how we do it.) And to design your rocket to be as light as possible and as efficient as possible. That is hard, and we seem to be doing it as about as well as can be done; there’s little room for improvement without an (likely as yet unimagined) radically different way.

We’ve done halting experiments with using a nuclear reactor to heat the reaction mass hotter than burning it would; that would help but few people relish the thought of setting up an almost-explosion under a nuclear reactor and sending that reactor up into the air.

Anyway, in a nutshell, and without supplying numbers, that is the “30,000 foot” “granular” view of what rocket science is trying to overcome.

Apollo was just barely possible. The biggest rocket we could build could barely do the job. Think of it in terms of how many times you have to change velocity, each of which requires reaction mass. And you need to think of it back-to-front. You have to change velocity to safely land on Earth (rather than go splat! and leave a very Moon-like crater), after traveling through space at, basically escape velocity because you just did a ballistic orbit from somewhere far away. That takes reaction mass–a lot of it because the delta-V is something like 25,000 miles per hour. (Except we found a way to avoid that…but I am getting ahead of myself.) That fuel has weight, just like the capsule and astronauts do; in fact it would weigh many times as much as the astronauts and capsule. But in order to get to Earth from the Moon, they have to leave Lunar orbit and get to escape velocity. So you need enough fuel to push the astronauts, and that fuel being brought along for landing, through a second-to-last delta V. That’s much more fuel than you would need if it was just the astronauts and spacecraft you needed to push. And then, you have to get off the Moon in order to be in lunar orbit. More fuel, and it’s like compound interest, all the way back through landing on the moon, entering lunar orbit, leaving earth orbit, and getting to Earth orbit…such that it would require a truly gigantic amount of fuel for the initial boost off of Earth, because most of what you’d be lifting was…fuel. The rocket would be as big as a mountain. And that is not that much of an exaggeration; it might not be any exaggeration at all.

We couldn’t do that then. And we can’t do that now.

No I am not claiming we never went. I am claiming we did a lot of creative engineering, instead of just building a massive one-piece rocket. We set things up in such a way as to save fuel. We didn’t, for example, land the whole spacecraft on the moon, just a very tiny, fragile part of it, and we only sent two of the three astronauts down. We also threw away empty fuel tanks (i.e., rocket stages) on the way (a trick we need to do just to get to Earth orbit, unfortunately), so at least we weren’t coming back to earth with a gigantic (read massive) spacecraft that was mostly empty fuel tanks, then trying to land it gently. We were coming back with the bare minimum mass. And of course one other thing, perhaps the most essential, which I’ll get to very shortly.

Even with all those savings, it’s insane. Artemis weighed 5,750,000 pounds at launch. What’s coming back to us in Sunday weighs 18,200 lbs, less than 1/300th as much. That’s 99.7% overhead or 0.3% payload. And they did their best to make sure as much of that was fuel as possible. If you want to double the weight of that capsule, you don’t just add another 18,200 pounds to Artemis’s liftoff weight…no, you make Artemis 11,500,000 pounds. Every pound sent to the moon and then back to Earth requires 300 pounds of rocket plus fuel. (I expect they make sure the astronauts don’t eat too much the night before launch.)

You are, I hope, beginning to understand why space travel costs so damned much.

I promised to tell you about one more savings, and I saved it because it’s going to cover the rest of this post: The most critical and scariest thing we did was to come up with a way to make the final delta-V–the one that would make the rocket as big as a mountain–without expending any fuel at all! That was a yuge savings, because that gets compounded through all of the phases of the mission, not just the first two or three of them. And that alone might just have reduced Apollo to one 1/4 the size it would have been, otherwise–changing 25,000 miles an hour into zero miles an hour takes a lot of fuel there at the end.

I refer, of course, to slamming into the Earth’s atmosphere at escape velocity and letting air resistance slow the capsule down for us. No fuel burned.

The trick was (and is) to do so in a way that didn’t result in spacecraft+astronauts burned instead. Slamming into the atmosphere at 32 times the sea-level speed of sound will heat things considerably; five thousand degrees Fahrenheit is quite toasty. (And incidentally, this is one of the major reasons hypersonic travel in the atmosphere is a challenge.)

It’s called aerobraking, when it isn’t called “bring me my brown pants.”

Because the rocket equation (which implies all that compounding) was well known since WWII if not earlier, we knew we’d have to do this if we were to go to the moon, and tests had been done well before Apollo 11. The first thought was to make the spacecraft extremely streamlined, but that turned out to be a bad idea. So instead a nearly flat face with as much air resistance as possible would be presented to the atmosphere smacking into the vessel at 25000 miles per hour. (And I thought the wind here was bad.) But it had to be a material that wouldn’t just burn away, so that took a lot of materials engineering. In the case of the Space Shuttle the heat-resistant tiles did the job (though the Space Shuttle didn’t come back at nearly as high a speed).

But that wasn’t the only issue. We had to hit the atmosphere at an almost perfectly precise angle. Too steep, and the spacecraft would burn up anyway. Too shallow and the spacecraft would actually skip off the atmosphere like skipping rocks off a pond. (Before you object that the air–certainly not the thin upper atmosphere–isn’t as substantial as the water, try hitting it at 25,000 miles per hour and report back.)

Skipping off the atmosphere would not be instantly fatal, but the spacecraft would now be moving away from Earth at escape velocity and there’s be absolutely no way to rescue the astronauts and (remember, no fuel) no way for them to turn around and come back.

As the spacecraft is approaching Earth, which presents a circular cross section to it, it has to aim near the edge of that cross section…somewhere in a ring about 22 miles thick (but thousands of miles cross). Outside the ring…skip. Inside…slag.

The movie Apollo 13 had one clip in it from an actual newscast at the time, where a blowtorch was aimed at a model of the capsule as the “news”reader talked about what had to happen. I tried to find that clip and failed, but it was an understatement of the peril they had to go through.

So you gotta hit the right angle. And you have to hit the right part of the arc of the ring, too, or you end up landing in Antarctica or Siberia instead of near the Navy ships sent to retrieve you.

Your arrival time at the ring (hopefully not ‘of fire’) is dictated by one thing: the time you left lunar orbit. Because once you’ve done that, you’re basically a bullet, only much bigger and much faster. (Yes, you can make tiny course corrections…but those are basically windage and elevation, not arrival time at target. And you need windage and elevation, because that’s how you make sure you’re going to hit that ring.) So where the astronauts came down was dictated days in advance and they didn’t have much in the way of choices, which is why they came down at the corner of No and Where out in the Pacific. It was a matter of which way the Earth was facing when they hit that ring, which, again, depended on when they left lunar orbit.

And yet, we did this nine times for Apollo 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17. (As well as for Apollo 7 and 9, but only from Earth orbit.) Nary a hitch. The Columbia disaster was a failure of the Shuttle tile system and is similar, but Apollo had a perfect record handling a tougher problem.

In the last fifty years almost nothing has changed. We still have to play meteor to get back to Earth. We’ve gotten better at building spacecraft, but we didn’t use the mass savings on fuel to brake at the return; we just made the spacecraft bigger. Artemis is supposed to hold at least four astronauts, not just three. And it has to do the same trick the Apollo astronauts had to do.

We have a couple of advantages they didn’t have though, and they all boil down to better computing. The computers on Apollo were extremely primitive by today’s standards; you have thousands of times more computing power in your phone. More computing power means finer control over those tiny midcourse corrections, which means more control over how you come back.

The other one, which also comes back to computing power, is that Artemis actually will, deliberately, skip off the atmosphere…but very late in the process, after it has slowed down to merely a nice suborbital velocity. It’ll do this by tumbling in just the right way at just the right time. Once it’s back up in space it can cool off a bit, but then it will come back at a slower speed (typical of mere low-earth-orbit craft) and there will be a lot of control over where it comes down. In fact, they’re going to splash down just off of San Diego. This reduces the maximum g-force during reentry from 6.8 g to about 4 g. (And I’ve actually been on amusement park rides at 4 g.)

This is, as far as I know, a first time trying this, so keep your fingers crossed on Sunday.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0

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

China is in the White House

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

Joe Biden is Asshoe

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

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

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

A Caution

Yes, it’s great that one of the most rancid cunts in US politics is destined to leave office on January 3rd of next year, having been primaried out…by a great big (but not big enough) margin.

But just remember…we might replace the RINO candidates. But that will make no difference in the long run if the party officials, basically the Rhonna McDaniels (or however that’s spelled), 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!

SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom

I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”

Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.

Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?

Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?

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

And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:

https://youtu.be/WjM26GWWoGk?t=21

OK, with that rant out of my system…

Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit

…we can move on to the next one.

Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.

Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.

Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!

It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.

In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.

Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.

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).

Last Week:

Gold $1,646.70
Silver $19.34
Platinum $952.00
Palladium $1,981.00
Rhodium $15,000.00

So here it is, Friday, 3PM MT after markets closed and we see:

Gold $1,682.60
Silver $20.98
Platinum $974.00
Palladium $1,950.00
Rhodium $14,300.00

With one exception everything went up, 3-7+ percentage points today, after a relatively flat or even declining rest-of-the-week, silver moving the most, percentage-wise. Rhodium is the exception; it didn’t change today and had (obviously) dropped over the course of the rest-of-the-week.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L3tnH4FGbd0

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

China is in the White House

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

Joe Biden is Asshoe

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

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

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

Was I The Reason?

I’m skipping all the boilerplate invective this week, as fun as it is. Because something just occurred to me.

Let me quote, at length, from my own post about January 6. Or you can look at the original: https://www.theqtree.com/2021/01/09/2021%c2%b701%c2%b709-kmag-daily-thread/ (On the sidebar it’s “Steve’s House Rally Photo Thread”

At some point I got hit with a light dose of something or other. I beat a bit of a retreat but someone got to the top of the scaffolding with an American flag.

Fourth And Final Dump of Pictures

The next thing I remember, after getting close in, is a gas cartridge landing about ten feet away from me. I had already gotten light exposure twice to something that made one cough, and once to something that also stung when you inhaled it. Sticking around here would no doubt entail more than light exposure. I backed away.

When the smoke cleared, I noticed people charging up the steps. Lots of people charging up the steps. In fact I can see them in the prior picture too if I blow it up.

OK, that ends the quote.

Note that I missed the key moment…the moment the people on that stairway started to pour through.

They got through, right after the tear gas landed right next to me.

Let me remind you what I was doing…I was near that stairway, with a camera.

Not a phone, a “real” camera, with an 18-200 mm lens. It’s a lot smaller than it sounds but still, it’s gear in a way that a phone is not. Also, but not visible from the outside (unless someone recognizes the camera model), this little camera takes 32 megapixel pictures. (What I posted on the thread was considerably reduced in size!)

Was that tear gas canister…which landed less than ten feet away from me…fired specifically for the purpose of distracting me while they let the stairway people breach the line?

Maybe, maybe not. But the timing and placement of that canister and the “breach” sure makes me wonder.

The timestamp for the first picture I took after the gas canister hit was 1:19:36 MST. This picture is the first one above with the cloud of tear gas. The camera numbered it #3175.

(Note: That is almost certainly not the right time. I routinely forget to adjust the clock on my camera when I bring it out for use…which is sporadically. And the camera’s clock isn’t all that accurate, it slips from the correct time greatly over the span of a few months. But the time stamps can be used to establish relative timing.)

The timestamp for the last picture I took before that (#3174) was 1:17:46. It’s similar to the last one in my post before the tear gas, which was #3157…that was taken at 1:17:30. (Yes, I took seventeen 32 megapixel pictures in 16 seconds…and the camera didn’t break a sweat; it can do 15 per second for half a minute before the buffer fills up and it chokes. And, by the way, this is not even, by a long shot, the best camera that company makes. This is a fairly small camera whose design emphasis was portability.)

It’s a damned shame I wasn’t taking video. (The last video I took, 2:22 seconds worth, was of the stairway, culminating in some guy in a blue coat getting pepper sprayed. Screen capture (also in my original post) below):

The video (numbered #2944) is time stamped 1:00:58…almost nineteen minutes before the grenade. I don’t know if that’s the start time or the end time. The video is 1080p and you will never see a Bigfoot video of remotely that quality.

Like I said it’s a damn shame I wasn’t videoing at the right time.

Of course these days everyone has a camera with them, in their cell phone, so a lot of cops abusing citizens (and “model citizens” abusing cops) get filmed by passers-by these days, to say nothing of dash cams, body cams, and so on. But at this rally, only a small fraction of people were using their cameras. Most were busy waving flags, and yelling and screaming. Some people put gopros and similar things on poles, but for all I knew they were “media” or Antifa plants or even undercover cops, and therefore harmless to “them.” In fact, I’m at least a bit confident that those guys with cameras on poles were gone by the time the grenade hit.

So anyone else with a “real” camera (interchangeable lens) might have stuck out like a sore thumb.

Out of all those people, did I have to be distracted?

Like I said, I’ll never know.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Countering Wokeism

Article is behind a “you get two free articles” paywall. The Objective Standard is a quarterly written from an Objectivist point of view; Objectivism is the philosophy originated by Ayn Rand.

https://theobjectivestandard.com/2022/08/wokeism-and-how-to-counter-it/

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).

Last Week:

Gold $1,645.40
Silver $18.93
Platinum $864.00
Palladium $2,153.00
Rhodium $14,500.00

So here it is, Friday, 3PM MT after markets closed and we see:

Gold $1,662.10
Silver $19.13
Platinum $869.00
Palladium $2,244.00
Rhodium $14,900.00

Gold seems to be stabilizing a bit; it has climbed a bit for the past few days.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

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

China is in the White House

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

Joe Biden is Asshoe

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

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

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

A Caution

Yes, it’s great that one of the most rancid cunts in US politics is destined to leave office on January 3rd of next year, having been primaried out…by a great big (but not big enough) margin.

But just remember…we might replace the RINO candidates. But that will make no difference in the long run if the party officials, basically the Rhonna McDaniels (or however that’s spelled), 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 wheelhouses 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!

SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom

I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”

Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.

Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?

Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?

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

And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:

OK, with that rant out of my system…

Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit

…we can move on to the next one.

Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.

Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.

Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!

It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.

In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.

Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.

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).

Last Week:

Gold $1,676.90
Silver $19.69
Platinum $916.00
Palladium $2,217.00
Rhodium $14,950.00

So here it is, Friday, 3PM MT after markets closed and we see:

Gold $1,645.40
Silver $18.93
Platinum $864.00
Palladium $2,153.00
Rhodium $14,500.00

Gold continues to drop…and the standard story is that it’s because the dollar looks attractive to the big financial weenies because the interest rate is climbing. And it’s trending up against the euro. Personally I think both are circling the drain, so something else is in play…conspiracy theories about big buyers forcing the price down are certainly not out of order.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

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

China is in the White House

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

Joe Biden is Asshoe

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

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

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

A Caution

Yes, it’s great that one of the most rancid cunts in US politics is destined to leave office on January 3rd of next year, having been primaried out…by a great big (but not big enough) margin.

But just remember…we might replace the RINO candidates. But that will make no difference in the long run if the party officials, basically the Rhonna McDaniels (or however that’s spelled), 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 wheelhouses 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!

SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom

I normally save this for near the end, but…basically…up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”

Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.

Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?

Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?

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

And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:

OK, with that rant out of my system…

Biden Gives Us Too Much Credit

…we can move on to the next one.

Apparently Biden (or his puppeteer) has decided we’re to blame for all of the fail in the United States today.

Sorry to disappoint you Joe (or whoever), but you managed to do that all on your own; not only that, you wouldn’t let us NOT give you the chance because you insisted on cheating your way into power.

Yep, you-all are incompetent, and so proud of it you expect our applause for your sincerity. Fuck that!!

It wouldn’t be so bad, but you insist that everyone else have to share in your misery. Nope, can’t have anyone get out from under it. Somehow your grand vision only works if every single other person on earth is forced to go along. So much as ONE PERSON not going along is enough to make it all fail, apparently.

In engineering school we’re taught that a design that has seven to eight billion single points of failure…sucks.

Actually, we weren’t taught that. Because it would never have occurred to the professors to use such a ridiculous example.

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).

Last Week:

Gold $1,805.00
Silver $20.97
Platinum $972.00
Palladium $2,296.00
Rhodium $15,600.00

So here it is, Friday, 3PM MT after markets closed and we see:

Gold $1,748.60
Silver $19.16
Platinum $906.00
Palladium $2,210.00
Rhodium $14,900.00

——-

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

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

China is in the White House

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

Joe Biden is Asshoe

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

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

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