Holidays are a busy time at the Institute, due to Webb launching on Christmas instead of Halloween like we thought it would at the beginning of the year. I was going to retire tomorrow, but that’s been moved back to the end of February. But the standard Institute holidays are still being observed, even if all of us can’t use them because Webb is busy getting itself ready for science.

My part of Webb testing was completed some weeks ago and now I’m teleworking from home, finishing up some stuff, mostly documentation to hand off when I retire. I’ve another three day weekend starting tomorrow and the thought keeps popping up in my head that I need to pack the car and take an overnight somewhere, even if it isn’t far. Maybe Ocean City NJ again, or just wander somewhere south where it’s warmer.

Then I remember…another highly contagious variant is out and about too. I really shouldn’t be going anywhere until this next wave has passed. This next wave that’s happening because of all the unvaccinated mask opposing MAGA morons travelling for the holidays without care one for the common good. In theory I could just roam about too because I’m vaccinated and I got my booster last October and I’m good. I have N95 and KN95 masks I can take with me, and even some rapid COVID test kits. But I am not tempting the dragon. I’ll just stay home. I have things I need to do around the house anyway.

I think it was Garfield who said it isn’t the valleys in life I mind so much as the dips.

Let me start out by reminding my readers here once again, that I am an atheist. And also, that my atheism isn’t a knee jerk reaction to any specific religion. I realized that I’d drifted into atheism once I was ready to admit to myself that belief had stopped making sense to me quite some time ago. Your mileage may vary, and I’m fine with that, as long as it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

I say this all up front, because I have to tell you that sometimes I find myself wondering. Like when I read this, about the new COVID variant…

With omicron, it may be harder to tell if you have covid, the common cold or flu

Unlike earlier variants of concern, like delta, omicron has a higher affinity for the upper respiratory epithelium, said Landon: “It’s more likely to make people sniffle more, sneeze more or be congested.”

The mildness of omicron’s symptoms for vaccinated people in particular may give them a false sense of confidence that they have a cold rather than a highly-transmissible variant of covid-19.

Go read the whole article from the Washington Post. The takeaway I get is that in those of us who are vaccinated the new variant can present like a common cold. Adding to that is it looks like the variant has a preference for the upper respiratory zone. It is more likely to give you the sniffles and sneezes and nasal congestion. So you think it’s just a cold and it isn’t.

There’s also this Twitter thread from an ER doctor…who says…

Every patient I’ve seen with Covid that’s had a 3rd ‘booster’ dose has had mild symptoms. By mild I mean mostly sore throat. Lots of sore throat. Also some fatigue, maybe some muscle pain. No difficulty breathing. No shortness of breath. All a little uncomfortable, but fine.

Most patients I’ve seen that had 2 doses of Pfizer/Moderna still had ‘mild’ symptoms, but more than those who had received a third dose. More fatigued. More fever. More coughing. A little more miserable overall. But no shortness of breath. No difficulty breathing. Mostly fine.

Most patients I’ve seen that had one dose of J&J and had Covid were worse overall. Felt horrible. Fever for a few days (or more). Weak, tired. Some shortness of breath and cough. But not one needing hospitalization. Not one needing oxygen. Not great. But not life-threatening.

And almost every single patient that I’ve taken care of that needed to be admitted for Covid has been unvaccinated. Every one with profound shortness of breath. Every one whose oxygen dropped when they walked. Every one needing oxygen to breathe regularly.

So. Four years of Trump…a thief and a sexual predator celebrated by various American religious right figures including Franklin Graham almost as if he was the second coming…wildly popular with grassroots white culture war evangelicals…one of many such all over the world burning democracies wherever they can while waving their bibles…

…or whatever religious idols they venerate. Suddenly a plague of…well…Biblical proportions appears, almost out of nowhere. And for a couple years it strikes terror and hardship all over the globe. 

But the helpers, as Mr. Rogers called them, come forth, as they do, and taught us how to protect ourselves and our neighbors until a vaccine could be produced. And then a vaccine was produced. And we wore our masks, and we kept our distance, and got our shots because that is how decent people behave in a plague.

…and the despots pushed back against all of it, the rich and powerful and the cul-de-sac kook pew deplorables alike, because that is how the wicked traditionally behave all the time. And we are all still suffering this plague because they won’t take one simple little iota of responsibility for doing their part to fight this plague if it means they have to be inconvenienced, or worse, admit the helpers were helping where they themselves could not be bothered in the least.

I was raised in a Baptist household. I take pains these days to specify a Yankee Baptist household, and while most of us didn’t thump a racist pulpit (which is why there is a Southern Baptist Convention), lots of us still warned each other darkly about crossing an angry vengeful God. You really needed to experience the theater of a tent revival to know what genuine fire and brimstone pulpit thumping is. But mostly, in the pews I sat in when I was a kid, I heard about a God of Love. Yeah you could make him angry at you, but the God I was preached to about loved all the children of the world, red brown yellow black and white, and just wanted us to be good to each other, love our neighbors, and love Him back.

So never mind my atheism, everything in my wiring does not really want to see an angry vengeful God in the fact that after two years of plague, and about half the county and too much of the rest of the world is furiously fighting any steps to mitigate the spread of this virus, because they’d rather hundreds of thousands of their neighbors die then admit to any sort of social responsibility, let alone work toward the common good, suddenly there appears a variation on the horrible theme. And it spreads even more rapidly. Only this time it is gentle on those of us who did our part and got the shots, and still very Very deadly to those who did not. Almost as if it is passing us by.

So I take a deep breath. I do not believe in such a God. Or any God. And calling it karma feels too much like washing my hands of responsibility. So I keep wearing the mask where appropriate. And I’ve ordered some home rapid tests. I don’t need to believe an almighty God exists to know my neighbor exists. And you can’t judge a book by its cover. I want to look in my bathroom mirror and see a helper, not an angry god.

That’s a paraphrase of something Neil deGrasse Tyson once said about going to the moon. We went to the Moon, and discovered the Earth. What I’ve learned from 23+ years working at the Space Telescope Science Institute, first on the Hubble Space Telescope grant management system, and then JWST integration and test, is how deeply human that desire is to know more about the cosmos. All the tribes of the Earth share it. And doing that work not only gives us a better understanding of the universe, but also of each other. 

Webb launched from the European Spaceport in French Guiana. It’s a cooperative project between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). The morning of the launch I was at home watching the event on NASA TV, streamed through my Roku box. As we got down to the final minutes of the countdown, I was hearing NASA commentary in English, but the mission operation center in Kourou is run by the French, and all the call outs I was used to hearing from Cape Canaveral, I was hearing now in French. I don’t know much of any French, and yet I could follow along because I knew the drill; I’d watched this over and over and over again since the first Mercury astronauts went up. Hearing it in French for the first time, it struck me how Webb was a human project.

For a moment we were all earthlings with a common purpose. I’d heard that said over and over during Apollo, and I could see the truth of it, but my reference back then was still firmly planted in the United States. This was a European launch. It was their baby, with ours on top of it. I was watching it happen from the European point of view. But even our baby on top of that rocket, the telescope itself, was a project of many different countries. And I knew that for a fact, because for the past couple decades I’d been living it at the Institute.

I was raised by a single divorced mother and made my way there by way of restoring shortwave radios and building my own computer from parts I got at a HAM Fest. I taught myself how to program it, and that path eventually led to my becoming a software developer, and eventually to the Institute. And there I was working side by side with scientists, astronomers, computer geeks with multiple college degrees in computer science. But also facilities people, AV nerds, public outreach specialists. Many people, from many walks of life worked on this thing. I could walk the hallways and hear English spoken, but also other languages. We had astronomers from all over the globe working there. And we’re located on the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus, where kids from all over the world come to learn. Practically every human tribe on Earth had a hand in the work we do.

For two decades I have been surrounded by this culture, this deeply human culture of science and exploration. It has kept me sane through the past several years more than I knew.

And so yesterday morning was a very spiritually uplifting event. Something I really needed to see in this horrible time of rising fascism, conspiracy theory kookery, anti-science nuttiness. From all walks of life and every corner of the Earth we came together and put a new instrument up into space because we wanted to know more about the universe that we were born to. I got back my view of the human status. We can do good things. We can make progress. 

We went into space, and we discovered ourselves.

Note: Those of you who know I’ve a part of the James Webb Space Telescope that launched yesterday (Finally!)…this blog doesn’t have much of my moment-to-moment thoughts on that. Those are on my Facebook page and they’re usually (but not always) set to “Public”. I will try to be more communicative about it here since we launched, and since I am trying to disentangle myself from Facebook. But this isn’t the easiest place for me to whip my smartphone out and start posting when something happens like Facebook is. I’ll try to change that too…somehow…

[Posted to my Facebook page on Christmas Eve…the day before launch…] 

You may be seeing on the news now, shots and videos of this room. It’s going to be a very busy place tomorrow, and for months to come. But for a while, I was part of a team working there. Back in 2017, when this was taken, I was part of the Integration and Test team that did the initial end to end tests between the spacecraft and the Institute. I did work for a time in the flight ops room. Early on it was actually a simulator we were talking to, just to test the network connectivity, although I was there later, when the first commands were sent to the actual spacecraft and it replied.

This is me, sitting in the center front row seat in flight ops, performing Test Conductor duty. The three ring binder there next to me holds the very meticulously established test procedure for us to follow (I blanked the pages out here and the monitors too because that’s a high security area). After each step there was a place for my initials to sign off on that step having been done. I would call out the steps over the deep space network to all the stations involved in the test, and the flight engineer next to me would send the commands on my mark. One of my team members sat in the row behind us, doing Test Director work. Test Director was who you talked to when you needed an executive decision on how to proceed. I just basically followed procedure. Those test documents will be stored away for I don’t know how long, but once again there’s a little piece of me in the record of space exploration.

And it’s all still so stunning. So amazing. I did this. I really did this.

About a year or so ago my work in the flight ops room was done, and my access to it removed. That’s how it has to be, though I may still have work to do later in the other areas of the MOC. But this will always be for the rest of my life a fantastic part of it. I had other work besides this, gathering telemetry from the various cryo-vacuum tests on the science part of the spacecraft, watching as it spoke its first words. It was amazing.

Oh..and that little gold keycard around my neck is…special… (I’ve distorted that also for security reasons) I’ll probably have to give it back someday but at least I have pictures of me wearing it.

And now…it’s time to launch. Everything all these years has been leading up to this moment. Time to launch.

[Note: I’d call that a Mary Poppins Launch…practically perfect in every way! As of my posting this we’ve had our first course correction burn and everything is still looking good! Best Christmas present ever!]

[Note: That photo was taken in 2017 and and…yeah…I look much better with the beard at this age. Alas. I really don’t like beards…but…gay male vanity. I reckon I’ll keep it…]

Facebook has this “Memories” feature that will show you all your posts on this day, all the way back to when you first signed on. So today I got all the posts I ever made on December 20. Among them are my posts from ten years ago about buying a Mercedes diesel ‘E’ class sedan. So my car is now 10 years old. It had six miles on the odometer when I took delivery on it, I’ve put almost 160k on it since, and it’s still a champ. A Mercedes diesel is a much better road trip car than I imagined it would be. It’s the car I want to drive to the end of the road with.

A few more years back on this date…was this…from a better time after my reunion with a certain someone…

It was a weapon that served me well for about another few years. These Facebook memories can stab you right in the heart sometimes. But they’re good for inoculating you against gaslighting. He was signing his emails to me ‘T’.

This from Wayne Besen’s Truth Wins Out…

Gay Sex Spree by ‘Ex-Gay’ Freedom March Founder Leads TWO to Call on Fraudulent Group to Shut Down

DELRAY BEACH, FL – Truth Wins Out condemned Freedom March founder Jeffrey McCall today as a hypocritical fraud after he admitted online to multiple hookups and romantic attachments with men, even as he continues to shamelessly lead “Freedom March” parades of so-called “ex-gays”.

Dig it. He was hooking up with guys at the same time he’s leading his ex-gay Freedom March. Wayne asked me to do a cartoon about that for the last one they held in Washington DC…

It was one of the easier assignments I’ve had, because I’ve watched this dismal march happening so many times before. And at my age it’s getting really tiresome to watch this keep happening, and the obvious lesson is never learned.

Wayne quotes this passage from his confession:

In 2020 I met someone that I was trying to help (I was helping in other ways he didn’t deal with SSA) which lead to me being unfaithful to Jesus and giving my heart away. After denying what I wanted with him I then went on to fall sexually with a man when I felt wounded and lonely. This lead to multiple falls with men over time. (None of these men were Christians or people from ministry) Everytime I fell I would truly repent and turn away again. I would feel Gods love, mercy, and forgiveness sometimes before I could even finish the prayer.

As they say, Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven. And forgiven. And forgiven. And forgiven. And forgiven… 

And above all: not responsible.

It would be simple to look at McCall as another victim of homophobic religion. We can point our fingers at the Franklin Grahams, the Tony Perkins, the Pat Robertsons, the James Dobsons. But like a junkie supporting his habit by selling junk to others, McCall has to know what it is he’s doing to his customers, because it’s doing it to him. He is no politically powerful heterosexual harvesting hate for even more power…someone who doesn’t have to live with what he’s doing to others. McCall knows what it does. He is living it.

They say the reason we’re homosexual is we were abused as children. But we are as we are, whether we have brown eyes or blue, black hair or blond, are gay or straight, or every color of the rainbow in between. We bear within us every day or our lives a living history of millions of years of life on earth. And deep within is the command to love and be loved. For some of us, love is another man. It is written in our flesh and blood. There is something terribly poignant in McCall’s confession of giving his heart away to another man as though it was an awful sin and not his human birthright. His abusers teach us to be afraid of love, so they can build their stepping stones to heaven out of the broken pieces of our hearts, so they can harvest votes from the hate that is strangling our lives. You want to forgive McCall since he’s a victim also. Then you remember he keeps making himself a willing accomplice, despite the fact that he has loved. And so the abused becomes the abuser.

…as in Disney the big media conglomerate.  I discovered an Epcot parody account on Twitter the other day that’s pretty brutal…

There was a time I would have absolutely hated this. But with all the changes to the parks that have happened in the last few years, and the blatant disrespect I keep seeing for the theming, and for Walt Disney’s vision, I’m kinda enjoying it. There’s the big screen TV they put on the wall in the Belle Vue Lounge, so people could watch their sports broadcasts there? Have I mentioned how much I despise that? The theming is it’s a turn of the 19th century Coney Island boardwalk hotel, and the Belle Vue Lounge was a small out of the way spot where you could relax, enjoy a drink in one of the old fashioned leather chairs, and listen to one of the old radios playing The Green Hornet, Jack Benny, or Studio One. It’s supposed to be from a time before television. But no…some complete moron decided it needed a big screen TV. I suppose because there isn’t a sports bar anywhere nearby…

I think that was when I began to question management’s commitment to the theming of the parks. I forget whether that was before or after they replaced The Writer’s Stop with a Beer Taproom, because Starbucks couldn’t abide the competition for coffee and pastries, and selling alcohol to adults is more important than selling books to kids. And then they replaced the Great Movie Ride with Mickey’s Runaway Railroad. Get me started on the new look of Walt Disney’s cartoon characters…

But I’m been slowly coming to a place of acceptance. It isn’t Walt Disney’s World anymore, it’s Disney World, and Disney isn’t a keeper of the vision. It’s keeper of the media properties.

Yeah, they still do a lot of good things, especially when it comes to treating their LGBT customers like everyone else. Yeah I’ll keep coming back. There is still just enough of Walt in there, and enough fun, to keep me coming back. But not nearly as often. I’m giving up my annual pass. In part it’s because if I only go once a year it isn’t buying me anything my DVC membership isn’t already. But mostly it’s the park reservation system, which completely kills any reason I might otherwise have for having an annual pass, even one of the lesser ones with blackout dates.

Basically it’s too much money and not enough Walt Disney. And it’s mostly a hassle, where before it was mostly fun. I feel like I got in just in time to enjoy the last of what was Walt Disney’s World.

Now I’m kinda enjoying this parody account. It sticks the knife in right where I think it belongs.

And it almost reads like it’s being done by someone who either worked there once, or still is and hates the new management…

Oh…They have one at the Belle Vue Lounge! Turn the volume up if the noise coming from all those old radios is bothering you.

I have an open reel tape that has several Christmas music albums on it, and come December I can put that on while I’m doing household chores and let it play for several hours. I have it on now. The calico came in a few minutes ago for food and pets, and while I was petting her she never took her eyes off the Teac tape player. Something about the reels slowly turning must have tweaked her cat curiosity. Or maybe she was judging my tastes in Christmas music.

Via Digby this morning I catch this from Dan Froomkin…

Fox News is not news. Say it with me.

Fox “News” is a right-wing propaganda operation wrapped inside an entertainment channel. It does not adhere to the professional standards of journalism. And every moment is it allowed to operate under the guise of “news” gives it more credibility than it deserves as it chips away at our democracy.

You must Absolutely go read this! And especially Froomkin’s suggestions to reporters as to how to deal with the grave danger to our democracy it poses, because a lot of that are things we should All be doing.

Here are three items I think everyone can work on:

Demand that search and social media platforms not treat it as news. Legitimate news organizations should not have to compete against propaganda under the rubric of news. Demand that Facebook News stop linking to Fox. Urge Google News to downgrade or identify propaganda outlets.

Establish that people and businesses showing it in public places are making a political statement. Once you establish that Fox is not simply a news outlet with a different view but a dangerous disinformation vector, then its public display should be seen as an attack on news and truth.

Stop partnering with it in any way, including debates and distribution deals. Fox News sullies whatever it touches.

Fox News gets money from your cable provider whether or not you watch it, simply by being available there. So I hear, that money is a big part of what keeps it afloat. Tell your cable provider you want them to remove Fox News from your lineup and not make you pay for it, and if they make excuses drop them and switch to streaming a’la cart content instead. I have a Roku box, but there are many ways of ditching the cable. Make sure you tell them that it’s Fox News that drove you to it.

Read this. We are not helpless. We can fight back.

I was reading a news article yesterday about the guy who let the Crumbleys into his art loft and they started hiding out in it. It said he didn’t watch the news, so he had no idea they were on the run. The cops believe him. Reading that article, I believed him too. Reading the news these days is very stressful for me, and I’m a Nixon/Vietnam/Cold War/Duck And Cover/Kennedy and King assassinations era kid. But commercial mainstream news is way different now than it was then.

Case in Point: The current feckless mainstream media howling about the Vice President’s personal security tactics. I’ve seen nothing about it that strikes me as anything other than completely sensible for a person in her position now, and back when she was California AG. Politico did an entire thing the other day about the fact that Harris uses wired earbuds instead of Bluetooth.

Most commercial news these days is crap, designed to keep us agitated because apparently that keeps us addicted to it. I have a carefully curated Google news page and some select Twitter accounts I follow for links, but I am careful to look for sources that, like Joe Friday once said, are just the facts ma’am. And when I feel myself getting wired I break off and go do something else.

It’s a struggle to stay informed and sane at the same time these days. I don’t blame the poor guy who let in the Crumbleys for not paying attention to the news. On the other hand it nearly got him arrested as an accomplice. Ignorance is bliss like heroin is.

[UPDATE…] The comments to that twitter thread by Alex Thompson of Politico are withering. Tons of IT folks weighing in about wireless security and Bluetooth. But my favorite is the user who called Politico the Tiger Beat of the Potomac. Yeah…that. Exactly.

There needs to be Christmas carolers there in that shot. It just isn’t a Christmas photo without Christmas carolers.

I’ve Been Trying To Explain The New York Times To People For Years And He Just Tweeted It Out

Atrios points to the following tweet from Clyde Haberman…

@ClydeHaberman
I confess to some ambivalence about Chris Cuomo’s suspension. It’s deserved on many levels. But wouldn’t you help your brother if he fell into trouble, even of his own making?

Yeah. Quite. This is Haberman, who as Atrios points out has a long history with the Times, and is the father of their current White House Correspondent, saying that he’s ambivalent about a fellow Times staffer, and the brother of the governor of New York, helping to cover up his brother’s sex abuse scandal because…family. Atrios responds thusly…

A lot to work with here (“fell into some trouble” lol), but I would submit that most of us would not actually do what Chris Cuomo did, or anything analogous, to help our “brothers.” Sure I would help my brother, but I wouldn’t do *that* to help my brother. Make sure he had a good lawyer. Help him figure out how to stop abusing people. That kind of thing.

And the point here isn’t simply, “oh, well, family is family, you can sympathize a bit,” it’s “since you can sympathize a bit, it seems a bit harsh for the man to be suspended from his job.” This is “there should be no consequences for people who are, in many ways, qwhite like me.”

This is something I would do myself, therefore it isn’t really wrong and there should be no negative consequences for it. QED. Boom!

Who amongst us would not abuse our power to smear victims of sexual harassment and assault (whatever “groping” would legally be in your jurisdiction)? Disobeying my employer’s rules and edicts and lying to them? Why would we ask for anything different from the most powerful people in the country? And should we really face consequences for that? Famiglia.

What would elite journalists do to protect their families and people in their close social circles? People who they cover, but are also quite friendly with, even party with and see on vacation? What happens in the Hamptons… Believe people when they tell you who they are.

This is something that I think many of us who subscribed to the Times figured was what the social strata was like in the top floor offices. Villagers. It’s a term Atrios coined I think, for the Georgetown DC mindset. That DC circuit party schmoozing among media executives, Capitol Hill politicians and their Very wealthy Georgetown money teats. but it can apply to a lot of other places where the same dynamic exists. Villagers. They stick together.

It’s something to keep in mind when you’re reading their newspapers and magazines: You are getting the Villager’s point of view. That’s not always a bad thing, which is why I bought Woodward’s books about Trump. Sometimes you want to know what they’re thinking. But a steady diet of it is disorienting.

Eventually I had enough of it an cancelled my subscription. I’m still subscribed to the Post though.