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

January 6 Tapes?

Paging Speaker Johnson…this is your conscience calling you out on broken promises.

For all your high talk about your Christian moral background…you’re looking less and less like you have any kind of moral background.

If You are a Patriot and Don’t Loathe RINOs…

Let’s talk about RINOs, and why they are the lowest form of life in politics.

Many patriots have been involved with politics, often at the grassroots, for decades. We’ve fought, and fought, and fought and won the occasional illusory small victory.

Yet we can’t seem to win the war, even when we have BIG electoral wins.

I am reminded of something. The original Star Trek had an episode titled Day of the Dove. It was one of the better episodes from the third season, but any fan of the original series will tell you that’s a very low bar. Still, it seems to get some respect; at a time when there were about 700 episodes of Star Trek in its various incarnations out there, it was voted 99th best out of the top 100.

In sum, the plot is that an alien entity has arranged for 39 Enterprise crew, and 39 Klingons, to fight each other endlessly with swords and other muscle-powered weapons. The entity lives off of hostile emotions, you see and it wants a captive food source. (The other 400 or so Enterprise crew are trapped below decks and unable to help.) Each side has its emotions played and amplified by the alien entity; one Enterprise junior officer has false memories implanted of a brother who was killed by Klingons. The brother didn’t even exist.

Even people killed in a sword fight miraculously heal so they can go do it again.

The second best line of the episode is when Kang, the Klingon captain, notes that though they have won quite a number of small victories including capturing Engineering, can’t seem to actually finally defeat the Enterprise crew. He growls, “What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*”

Indeed. He may have been the bad guy, but his situation should sound familiar.

We are a majority in this country. We have a powerful political party in our corner. There is endless wrangling.

And yet,

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

In our case, that power is the RINOs in our midst. They specialize in caving when on the verge of victory. Think of Obamacare’s repeal failing…by one Republican vote. Think of the way we can never seem to get spending under control (and now our entire tax revenue goes to pay interest on the debt; anything the government actually does now is with borrowed money).

We have a party…that refuses to do what we want it to do, and that refusal is institutionalized. If you’ve been involved with GOP politics, but haven’t seen this, it’s because you refuse to see it. Or because you are part of the problem yourself. (If so, kindly gargle some red fuming nitric acid to clear the taste of shit out of your mouth, and let those not part of the problem alone so they can read this.)

We fight to elect people, who then take a dive when in office. But it’s not just the politicians in office, it’s the people behind the scenes, the leaders of the national, state and county branches of the party. Their job is to ensure that real patriots never get onto the general election ballot. They’re allowed a few failures…who can then become token conservatives who will somehow never manage to win (Jordan), or can be compromised outright (Loren Boebert).

That way it doesn’t actually matter who has a congressional majority. I remember my excitement when the GOP took the Senate in 1980. But all that did was empower a bunch of “moderate” puddles of dog vomit like…well for whatever reason forty years later the most memorable name is Pete Domenici. And a couple of dozen other “moderates” who simply had no interest in doing what grassroots people in their party–those same grassroots people who had worked so hard to elect them–wanted them to do.

Oh, they’ll put up a semblance of a fight…but never win. And they love it when we fight the Dems instead of fighting them. Just like that alien entity, whose motto surely was “Let’s you and him fight. It’ll be delicious!”

If you think about it, your entire political involvement has come to nothing because of these walking malignant tumors.

That should make you good and mad.

The twenty five who blocked Jordan, and the hundred people who took that opportunity to stab Jordan in the back in the secret ballot should make you good and mad.

I’ll close this with another example of RINO backstabbing, an infuriating one close to home.

In my county, the GOP chair is not a RINO. She got elected when the grassroots had had enough of the RINOs. Unfortunately the state organization is full of RINOs, and the ousted county RINOs have been trying to form a new “Republican Party” and get the state GOP to recognize them as the affiliate. I’m honestly amazed it hasn’t happened yet.

In other words those shitstains won’t just leave when they get booted out; they’ll try to destroy what they left behind. It’s an indication that they know we know how important that behind-the-scenes party power is.

So they must be destroyed. That’s the only way they’ll ever stop.

We cannot win until the leeches “on our side” get destroyed.

What power is it that feeds our battle yet starves our victory?*

We know it. What is going to be done about it?

*NOTE: The original line was actually “What power is it that supports our battle yet starves our victory.” I had mis-remembered it as feeds. When I checked it, it sure enough was “supports” and that’s what I originally quoted. On further reflection, though, I realized my memory was actually an improvement over the reality, because feeds is a perfect contrast with starves. I changed it partway through the day this originally posted, but now (since this is a re-run) it gets rendered this way from the start.

If one must do things wrong, one should do them wrong…right.

RINOs an Endangered Species?
If Only!

According to Wikipoo, et. al., the Northern White Rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) is a critically endangered species. Apparently two females live on a wildlife preserve in Sudan, and no males are known to be alive. So basically, this species is dead as soon as the females die of old age. Presently they are watched over by armed guards 24/7.

Biologists have been trying to cross them with the other subspecies, Southern White Rhinoceroses (Rhinoceri?) without success; and some genetic analyses suggest that perhaps they aren’t two subspecies at all, but two distinct species, which would make the whole project a lot more difficult.

I should hope if the American RINO (Parasitus rectum pseudoconservativum) is ever this endangered, there will be heroic efforts not to save the species, but rather to push the remainder off a cliff. Onto punji sticks. With feces smeared on them. Failing that a good bath in red fuming nitric acid will do.

But I’m not done ranting about RINOs.

The RINOs (if they are capable of any introspection whatsoever) probably wonder why they constantly have to deal with “populist” eruptions like the Trump-led MAGA movement. That would be because the so-called populists stand for absolutely nothing except for going along to get along. That allows the Left to drive the culture and politics.

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

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

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

In Defense of Ranked Choice Voting

One of the biggest obstacles to direly-needed change is RINOs, and one of the weapons in their arsenal is the “Wasted Vote” argument.

Periodically a third party has arisen, trying to hold RINOs to account by putting pressure on them from outside of the party, since doing so from the inside has historically done very little good. But, even if you find a third party candidate who perfectly reflects your views, you’re likely to vote for the RINO anyway. Why? Because if you don’t, the Democrat might win, and that would be even worse. So if you vote for that third party (that few will vote for), you’re throwing your vote away and increasing the likelihood of the Democrat winning. (It’s half as much a gain for the Democrat, as actually voting for the Democrat would be. Not as much, but half as much. Because although you denied the R your vote, you did not flip your vote to the Democrat.)

The Republican Party Establishment knows you don’t love them. But they know you hate the Democrats worse, and they use that to continue to herd you into supporting them. With gritted teeth you cast your vote, but your vote counts the same whether you cast it enthusiastically. And the other alternative, pissing on the voting apparatus to express your actual feelings, is probably a felony.

But what if you could vote for that third party without increasing the chances of the Dem walking away with the prize?

This is what ranked choice voting, or instant runoff voting, can do provided it is properly implemented. (And this includes the votes, and only genuine votes, being counted honestly, of course. However, I’m going to compare it to what we have today, and pretend that is honestly done too. RCV can’t work if it’s not honestly administered, just like our current system isn’t working because it isn’t honestly administered.)

The idea behind RCV is to vote by expressing your order of preference. You could vote for the Patriot Party, then for the RINO Party as your second choice (and ignore the Democrat, the Green, the Overt Socialist Schmuckmonkey Party, etc).

What does this do? It nullifies the wasted vote argument. Your vote will be counted for the Patriot party, first, then instead of it being “wasted” when the Patriot Party loses, it ends up going to the RINO. Actually, it’s just barely possible that the Patriot Party would actually beat the RINO, if people weren’t all individually afraid to vote for it.

It’s just like the famous “Prisoner’s Dilemma” where your fear of other peoples’ actions prevents you from doing the optimal thing–and vice-versa. As long as Job Lowe is afraid to vote Patriot because he’s afraid you’ll vote RINO, you’ll have to vote RINO because you fear that Job Lowe will, because he fears you will.

So on the whole I like RCV. It gives you a no-risk way to vote against the RINO scum, and in favor of someone who deserves your vote.

The problem is, as done here in the US, it comes packaged with a “jungle primary.” A bunch of candidates get to put their name out there, and the top four (or so) candidates get onto the “main” ballot. This gives party establishments their way around the threat of a good third party bumping them off. Because they know that few people bother with primaries, and third parties don’t have the resources to run in a primary…so they throw two or three establishment hacks into the primary and they will probably beat the third party. The result is the RINOs end up with two of the four slots in the general election, and the Dems get the other two. Now there’s suddenly no third party candidate on the ballot at all.

If we were to combine RCV with the present system where each party could nominate exactly one candidate to appear on the November ballot, or at the very least, ensure minor parties could get onto the ballot with at least one candidate regardless of the primary, we would be getting somewhere, but the establishment is smarter than we like to give them credit for. They will support the jungle primary + RCV “solution” rather than the more appropriate one-candidate-per-party + RCV solution.

It’s not RCV that is the problem, it’s the primary structure grafted onto it.

Justice

It says “Justice” on the picture.

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

But what is it?

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

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

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

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

—Ayn Rand Lexicon (aynrandlexicon.com)

Justice Must Be Done.

Trump, it is supposed, had some documents.

Biden and company stole the country.

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

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

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

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

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

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

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

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

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

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

Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $2,019.90
Silver $22.88
Platinum $923.00
Palladium $984.00
Rhodium $5,050.00

This week, at Friday close:

Gold $2,040.70
Silver $22.75
Platinum $901.00
Palladium $970.00
Rhodium $5,050.00

Platinum and palladium continue their slow slide. Gold bounces around in the 2000-2060 or so range. Although up for the week, it was down on Friday.)

The Solar System: An Overview

My infamous Hugh Janus article from five weeks ago is, I hope, going to be the first in a series about our own astronomical back yard, the Solar System.

I wrote about tidal forces last week in large part because the concept comes up again and again talking about different places in our back yard. Tides are more than just a way to lift all boats.

But first an overview and a bit of history.

As far back as we have written records…and likely much further back than that…it was noticed that the night sky rarely changed. Sure, it would show you different stars at different times of the year, but then the same time next year you’d get the same stars all over again.

But there were some exceptions. The Moon of course is blatantly obvious. A bit less obvious is the Sun, but it was realized early on that the reason the night sky cycles over the course of the year is that the Sun appears to be moving across it; daytime of course represents times when the Sun is above the horizon and blots out the stars quite thoroughly. You can, by pulling an all nighter, see most of the night time sky cycling across, with just a narrow fringe of it only up when the sun is up. So you can make a mental model of a “celestial sphere” surrounding us at some great distance, with the Sun and Moon moving around on it. (It’s still handy to think of it this way in certain circumstances, even though we know there’s no hard surface out there, and we know that we are moving, not the Sun and Moon.) The ancients regarded the stars on the celestial sphere as nailed in place, they were (and sometimes still are) called the fixed stars. (They do move but too slowly to notice without very painstaking measurements. You’ll never notice with your eyeballs.)

The Sun and Moon both move right to left…west to east…against the celestial sphere. You have to note the position of the Moon against the stars several nights in a row to see this; the usual intuition is to think the Moon moves east to west because that’s the direction it travels every night, but in reality it’s the celestial sphere (appearing to) move in that direction; the Moon moves west to east relative to the celestial sphere, but not nearly as fast as the celestial sphere appears to move in the other direction, it’s as if the Moon is being dragged along.

Some of the brightest “stars,” though, also moved. The very brightest “star”, in fact, moves, it’s sometimes “ahead” of the Sun and sometimes “behind” it on the celestial sphere, but never strays too far away from it. When it’s ahead of the Sun, it’s an “evening star” visible in the West after sunset, when it’s behind, it’s a “morning star” visible in the East before sunrise. In fact, it wasn’t until historical times that people in Mesopotamia finally realized that the morning and evening stars were the same object.

This is of course Venus I am talking about.

Essentially, Venus will start climbing in the evening sky from night to night (seen at the same time after sunset, reach “maximum elongation” then drop like a rock, dropping rapidly down in the sky until it’s simply too close to the Sun at sunset to be seen. Then it shows up in the morning sky, rapidly climbing one day to the next, reaching “maximum elongation”, then slowly dropping again until it is too close to the Sun to be seen in the glare of twilight just before the Sun rises.

There’s another one of these wandering stars, fainter and sticking closer to the Sun, that’s Mercury.

And finally there are three more, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, which are not restricted as to how far away they are from the Sun, they simply outrun it and lap it in a timespan of over a year. They do sometimes make a loop-de-loop in the sky, going the wrong way (“retrograde”) for a while, but that’s typically when they are on the opposite side of the sky from the Sun.

So these seven objects, Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, wandered through the night sky, but nothing else up there did other than the occasional comet or shooting star. They were called wanderers, or, planets (yes, back then the Sun and Moon were classified as planets).

And there things sat. Almost everyone believed all of these objects went around the Earth and that even the celestial sphere rotated around the Earth in just under 24 hours. For philosopical reasons, people thought the planets were carried on concentric spheres all nested within the celestial sphere.

We finally came to our modern understanding of these bodies and how they move during the 15-1600s, between Galileo, Kepler, and Copernicus it was figured out that the Moon did indeed orbit the Earth, but that everything else orbited the Sun. And that included us. Earth is actually a planet. The Sun got promoted to being a star, the Moon got demoted to being a satellite. Planets orbited the Sun, moons orbited planets…and yes we knew about other moons, four for Jupiter, and one big one for Saturn, plus smaller ones you needed a better telescope for.

Mercury and Venus orbit in paths closer to the Sun than Earth’s path, that’s why they never get too far away from the Sun. The other three (Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) all were in orbits outside of our orbit, so they could travel completely around the sky.

The planets’ orbits around the Sun were all ellipses, all of them oriented in almost exactly the same plane. Earth, of course was among these, so our point of view is almost directly in the plane of all the planets’ orbits, So what we see is the planets sticking pretty close the the path the Sun appears to take across the celestial sphere, which is called the zodiac.

Planets had another distinction from stars. Stars invariably looked like points of light of zero width, even in the most powerful of telescopes. Planets, however, would in a telescope show a disk (or a crescent, or even funkier shapes); they looked bigger than points. It was possible to conceive of planets as being other worlds, at least somewhat similar to Earth.

So…scales. And I’m going to jump right on ahead to the modern age.

The Earth is roughly 150,000,000 kilometers from the Sun (or 93 million miles). This number wasn’t always known, in fact first determining it was an epic feat of observational science that had to take place when Venus crossed directly in front of the Sun (an even that happens in pairs four or eight years apart…but those pairs are a hundred years apart).

Even before we knew this number, though, we could state with great confidence (thanks to Kepler and Newton) that (for instance) Jupiter’s average distance from the Sun is 5.2 times as much as ours. We could come up with a whole table of the size of planets’ orbits…provided you were willing to accept “multiples of Earth’s average distance from the Sun” as units of measure. Well, they did, and still do today, actually; that number is now called an “Astronomical Unit” or AU. It’s useful for talking about distances within the solar system because it tends to be manageable numbers, rather than hundreds of millions when you use miles or kilometers.

So that’s one yardstick, for distances between planets. Another reference is mass; how much “stuff” do planets have in them (directly related, by the way, to how much gravity they have). That tends to be quoted in Earth masses or Jupiter masses. Jupiter, it turns out, is 318 times the mass of the earth. Diameters (actual physical sizes) do tend to be quoted in kilometers or miles. Jupiter, it turns out is about 11 times as wide as Earth. (88 thousand miles vs. 8 thousand miles in diameter).

The problem is, of course, that the sizes of the planets are much, much, much smaller than the distances between them. So we can show, in a diagram, the sizes of the planets to scale, or the distances between them to scale, but not both at the same time. Even making the planet one pixel in diameter, you couldn’t show it and the Sun without a lot of horizontal scrolling.

OK, here is a diagram showing sizes to scale:

Distances, however, will look like this:

Note the white bars under the planets; that represents the range of distances it can be at, at different points in their elliptical orbits. The planets (and even the Sun) are much too large, physically, on this diagram, where only distances are to scale.

Here is an actual scrolling diagram. Or you can hit the little dingus on the lower right and move along at light speed. Very dull, actually.

https://www.joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html

One more thing I want to get into (and it’s already 16 minutes after midnight!) and that’s different regions of the Solar System. It doesn’t take a lot of insight to see that things are hotter, the closer you are to the Sun, but as it happens there’s a point between Mars and Jupiter called the “snow line.” Outside of that line, things like water, carbon dioxide and ammonia are cool enough not to boil off. Inside that line, planets and other objects are mostly rocks. Outside, planets can be substantially gas or ice. So those four inner planets (bunched together) are the rocky or “terrestrial” planets, while the outer four are “gas giants” with an additional distinction between Jupiter and Saturn on the one hand, and Uranus and Neptune on the other. The latter two are called “ice giants” not because they actually have lots of ice on them, but because they are relatively rich in water, ammonia, methane, etc. compared to Jupiter and Saturn, which are overwhelmingly made of hydrogen and helium.

Going out from the Sun, then, we have concentric zones: the Inner Planets, an Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, the Outer Planets, and then outside of the orbit of Neptune, we have the Kuiper Belt, a large number of actual balls of ice and rock.

That whole “close to the Sun it’s too hot for gases and ices” is a very critical theme in any look at our solar system.

OK, I’d better hit “Publish” before someone puts out an APB or BOLO on me. Next time…well, I’ll pick a planet and it won’t be Hugh Janus a/k/a George a/k/a Everyone’s Asshoe.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

To conclude: My standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!

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 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 !!!