Lots of hurdles to come, but a good start for the new observatory.

interesting tidbits still came out to play. To wit:

“I adhere to that traditional approach that a woman is a woman and a man is a man. A mother is a mother, a father is a father. And I hope that our society has the internal moral protection dictated by the traditional religious denominations of the Russian Federation,” he said.

Later he added:

“If somebody thinks that a woman and a man are the same thing, they’re welcome to [their opinion], but a certain common sense should exist,” the head of state pointed out.

There’s a lot to mull over here.

Putin is a fascinating fusion of Russian old, middle, and new. A product of the Soviet Union’s strong-arm socialistic/communistic political era, unlike many products of his time he understands the value of traditional Russian culture. The most noticeable difference between Putin and his predecessors is his approach to the church.

While his personal beliefs are known only to himself and God, outwardly, Putin has utterly discarded the USSR era’s open disdain for, and none-too-subtle efforts to at least reduce, if not altogether eliminate, the church’s influence on Russian society. Instead, Putin has embraced the church and its insistence on traditional moral values.

Putin saw how Pope John Paul II laid to waste Stalin’s smirk about how many divisions does the Pope have. As it turned out, the heavenly hosts are armed to the teeth. The people of Eastern Europe and the USSR itself overthrew the Soviet regime and its puppets not through armed revolt but by lighting candles, saying prayers, and carrying out faith-emboldened quiet resistance against their oppressors.

Putin is both sharply intelligent and keenly aware of the times. While the West is doing everything it can to run the church out of town, what’s left of the church insists on emasculating itself via the abandonment of its own truths, Putin is reinforcing the church, confident that doing so will simultaneously strengthen his hand and raise his appeal to Western people growing ever wearier of weakness in the face of wokeism.

Charley fell ill with “camp fever” (probably typhoid or typho-malarial fever) and was sent home to recover for several months with his family. That summer, having missed the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), he rejoined his unit on August 15, 1863.

On the first day of that December, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was dining alone at his home when a telegram arrived with the news that his son had been severely wounded—inaccurately stating that he had been shot in the face—four days earlier. On November 27, 1863, while involved in a skirmish during a battle of of the Mine Run Campaign, Charley had been shot through the left shoulder, with the bullet exiting under his right shoulder blade. It had traveled across his back and nicked his spine. Charley avoided being paralyzed by less than an inch. //

On Friday, December 25, 1863, Longfellow—as a 57-year-old widowed father of six children, the oldest of which had been nearly paralyzed as his country fought a war against itself—wrote a poem seeking to capture the dynamic and dissonance in his own heart and the world he observes around him that Christmas Day. //

He heard the Christmas bells ringing in Cambridge and the singing of “peace on earth” (Luke 2:14), but he observed the world of injustice and violence that seemed to mock the truthfulness of this optimistic outlook.

The theme of listening recurs throughout the poem, eventually leading to a settledness of confident hope even in the midst of bleak despair as he recounts to himself that God is alive and righteousness shall prevail.

Within a decade (1872), the poem was put to music by the English organist John Baptiste Calkin for a processional, set to the the melody “Waltham.”

In South Africa, nearly every early case of Omicron was in fully vaccinated people, despite only 23.8% of the population being vaccinated at the time. While that data would suggest that vaccinated people are more likely to be infected with Omicron than the unvaccinated, I stopped short of saying that because it was still very early in the spread of Omicron and the data could change. What was clear, though, was that South Africa was in the midst of an outbreak of a new and more transmissible variant. //

With an astounding 1100% increase in cases, South Africa only had an 8.32% increase in deaths. Again, at the time, South Africa’s vaccination rate was below 25%. Meanwhile, the United States, with more than double the vaccination rate of South Africa, has nearly twice the new caseload and five times the rate of death from COVID than that of South Africa. That data would suggest that being vaccinated makes you more likely to be infected with Omicron than being unvaccinated. //

Now, data from a new study suggests negative effectiveness, that is the very thing Fauci warned as a potential: a higher likelihood of being infected with Omicron than if you had simply been unvaccinated, 90 days after being vaccinated. The study, entitled “Vaccine effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 infection with the Omicron or Delta variants following a two-dose or booster BNT162b2 or mRNA-1273 vaccination series: A Danish cohort study,” shows that both mRNA vaccines maintained a better than 50% effectiveness against previous variants of COVID-19, that effectiveness drops to nearly zero 60 days after the vaccine is administered and actually provides a negative response after 90 days. In fact, initial vaccine efficacy against Omicron for both vaccines tested was below that of the effectiveness against Delta after more than 90 days.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.20.21267966v2.full //

When factoring for the confidence interval, both vaccines show a potential of causing negative effectiveness after 30 days, and the data show that only the Pfizer vaccine has results that indicate a positive effect for the first thirty days. Moderna’s vaccine consistently shows the potential of cause in negative results, that is, a higher likelihood of infection, from the date of vaccination forward.

And while we don’t know how many were actually infected on the Carnival Freedom, we do know that the Symphony of the Seas docked several days ago with 48 positive cases, despite 95 percent of the ship being fully vaccinated. Of those who tested positive, 98 percent were fully vaccinated. In other words, there’s no possible way to blame that outbreak on the “unvaccinated.”

Forty-eight positive tests out of thousands of people on board may not sound a lot, but when you do the math as a seven-day rolling average, something common in judging COVID infection rates, that’s actually around the same positivity rate as New York City (800 per 100,000 vs. 1050 per 100,000), which again is seeing record high case numbers.

What this says to me is that vaccine passport systems are completely nonsensical. We’ve known for a long time that everyone spreads COVID-19, and now Omicron is even more transmissible. Given that, you are accomplishing nothing of value by segregating the vaccinated and unvaccinated.

Instead, these vaccine passport schemes are simply meant to punish and shame. There is no reason to stop a person from eating at a restaurant or going to a baseball game because they are unvaccinated. They represent no more of a statistical risk of spreading the coronavirus than the vaccinated person sitting next to them.

Besides, isn’t the entire point of getting fully vaccinated that it supposedly works? And if it works, what does it matter who the vaccinated interact with? None of this makes any logical sense, and again, that’s the point. This is about bending people to the political will of the left, not actually protecting anyone.

Longfellow had fallen into a depression in 1861 when his second wife Frances died. She had been sealing envelopes with hot wax when a flame caught her clothes on fire. Henry had rushed to her aid and tried to smother the flames. But by the time the fire was out, Frances had been burned beyond recovery.

She died the next day. Henry, burned badly as well, was too sick to attend her funeral.
The death marked a turning point in Longfellow’s life. His physical appearance changed dramatically as he began growing his beard because the burns disfigured his face. Mentally, he sank into depression. //

In 1863, Longfellow suffered another blow. The poet was a staunch abolitionist, but he, like the entire country, was troubled by the Civil War. His son Charley in March of 1863 had decided that, regardless of his father’s wishes, he would join the fight. He ran off to Washington to enlist in the 1st Massachusetts Artillery.

“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” is a lesser-known Christmas song, and not generally the first to be requested around the Christmas tree. The lyrics were born out of painful circumstances, but as with other classic hymns, the story behind the song gives it gravity and drives home the message of hope and the power of God’s marvelous plan. //

Longfellow was a staunch abolitionist, something that was proudly reflected in some of his writing. So, when the Civil War came, his oldest son, Charley, was eager to do his part. As a Second Lieutenant, Charley fought in the Battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia, and narrowly dodged the Battle of Gettysburg by coming down with typhoid fever, writes Justin Taylor of the Gospel Coalition. He was back in the fight by August 1863, but Charley’s luck was running out.

Taylor writes that “While dining at home on December 1, 1863, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow received a telegram that his son had been severely wounded four days earlier. On November 27, 1863 … Charley was shot through the left shoulder, with the bullet exiting under his right shoulder blade.” Longfellow’s son survived his injury and was brought home to recover.

Longfellow found himself staring down another Christmas season as a widower, with five children dependent on him and now one child on the brink of death. Outside, he heard the Christmas bells ringing, but I imagine he could also hear the cannons and gunfire of war in his mind. The world was tearing itself apart. There didn’t seem to be much space for peace on earth or goodwill toward men. //

I think I love this song especially because it is raw and real. It’s a Christmas song that doesn’t cover up the world with holly and tinsel and say everything is just fine. Longfellow acknowledges that the world is broken, but he doesn’t leave it there. There’s more to the story, and that’s what makes the message of Jesus’ birth so joyful.

Radio spectrum, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, is divided into different frequency bands that have been allocated for data, voice, and wireless communications used by a variety of different industries. Aircraft radar altimeters operate within 4.2–4.4 GHz, the lower half of which falls within the C-Band—a frequency range from 3.7–4.2 GHz where the combination of the range of signal transmissions and capacity are optimum.

A graphic shown by AVSI's Andrew Roy during a Dec. 7 NBAA webinar shows power levels of the previous satellite emissions that were occurring in the 3.7–3.98 GHz band that 5G stations in the U.S. will start using next year.

The 5G wireless networks scheduled to be switched on by AT&T and Verizon next month will occur within the 3.7–3.98 GHz frequency range, close to the altimeters. As the FAA indicated in its Dec. 7 AD, while it has heard concerns from airlines, the FAA, and aircraft OEMs over the potential interference issues posed by the deployment of 5G in the C-Band, it has not yet been presented with data or information that shows altimeters are not susceptible to interference.

Noah Rothman
@NoahCRothman
Wow. “The pandemic is potentially driving another national crisis related to its effects on behavioral health, with people experiencing new or exacerbated behavioral health symptoms or conditions.”
Perspective | The pandemic could drive another national health crisis, GAO warns: covid-19 anxiety
washingtonpost.com //

According to the experts Gueren interviewed for her article, she wrote, and the “limited research we have so far, the COVID-19 pandemic has come with a unique set of factors that can certainly fuel health anxiety in people”—particularly people who are already susceptible to the virus.

Josh Spitalnick, Ph.D., a licensed psychologist and CEO of Anxiety Specialists of Atlanta, told Health:

People who are having real medical and/or physical symptoms and they’re terrified about what they might mean—that’s typically understood as somatic symptom disorder.

And then there are people who worry about just getting a disease — getting COVID, getting cancer, having a stroke—where there’s no real physical or medical symptoms. //

“The worry that we have for health anxiety is productive at the beginning,” said Spitalnick, “which only each person can individually measure, but increasing becomes ‘not healthy.'”

And that place, RedStaters, is exactly where Biden, Fauci, and the Democrat Party want you to live–in the land of the not mentally healthy. Why?

Because people who are afraid of something, particularly irrationally so, are more susceptible to listening to advice about that “something” from “experts” and “leaders” who profess to know what they’re talking about—even when said advice is consistently wrong.

while reading a recent post by whistleblower Edward Snowden about Julian Assange of WikiLeaks infamy, titled Everything Going Great.

After a lengthy and somewhat rambling preamble regarding bad faith’s meaning, Snowden gets to his point, namely that the U.S. attempt to extradite Assange is a direct attack on freedom of the press.

I agree with my friends (and lawyers) at the ACLU: the U.S. government’s indictment of Assange amounts to the criminalization of investigative journalism. And I agree with myriad friends (and lawyers) throughout the world that at the core of this criminalization is a cruel and unusual paradox: namely, the fact that many of the activities that the U.S. government would rather hush up are perpetrated in foreign countries, whose journalism will now be answerable to the U.S. court system. And the precedent established here will be exploited by all manner of authoritarian leaders across the globe. What will be the State Department’s response when the Republic of Iran demands the extradition of New York Times reporters for violating Iran’s secrecy laws? How will the United Kingdom respond when Viktor Orban or Recep Erdogan seeks the extradition of Guardian reporters? The point is not that the U.S. or U.K. would ever comply with those demands — of course they wouldn’t — but that they would lack any principled basis for their refusals. //

If we had honest media dedicated to the truth and not the narrative, it would be rallying around Julian Assange. This is not the case. Instead of being infected with the omicron variant of COVID, the media is infected with omertà. When the worm turns against the worms, the cost will be high. In ignoring Julian Assange’s plight because the Democrats were the ones embarrassed by his actions, the media sets itself up to have no one to blame but itself when the government comes down hard at the release of classified (read: embarrassing) material.

Jane Goodall is warning people against giving live animals to communities or individuals in developing countries this year, arguing that these gifts can strain the areas’ water supply.

Several charitable organizations encourage donors to give animals like goats, pigs, sheep or heifers to people in developing countries.

Goodall says donor money would be better spent on initiatives like seed hubs, water irrigation systems and soil regeneration.

The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements. – Brian Kernighan, “Unix for Beginners” (1979)

When writing shell scripts, the programming logic tends to be shorter and is often contained within a single file. So there are a few built-in debugging options we can use to see what is going wrong. The first option to mention is probably the most useful too – the xtrace option. This can be applied to a script by invoking Bash with the -x switch.

 $ bash -x <scriptname>

first let’s contrast -x with its opposite -v, which shows each line before it is evaluated instead of after.