Mars 2020 Launched

Atlas 5 Mars 2020 Launch ~ NASA

NASA's latest Mars mission, Mars 2020 and its Perseverance Rover and Ingenuity helicopter drone, launched successfully today from Cape Canaveral. They will land in the planet's 28-mile-wide Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021 with the mission to look for microbial life.

Mars 2020 ~ Perseverance & Ingenuity – NASA

Here's some 4K video stitched together recently from thousands of NASA's still images by Britain's ElderFox Documentaries.

We're all in this together?

Steve Breen ~ San Diego Union-Tribune

Opening Day

David Sipress ~ The New Yorker

Comet NEOWISE

A Katonah friend shared this remarkable photograph of Comet NEOWISE taken this week near the Muscoot Reservoir.

Heat Wave

Teresa Burns Parkhurst ~ The New Yorker

Bari Weiss and The New York Times

I no longer subscribe to The New York Times. This wasn't a recent decision.  In fact, I parted company in September 2001, just days after Osama bin Laden's 9/11 attacks.

What compelled the cancellation was a long series of readership experiences where the paper's editors and writers no longer spoke to my worldview and political sensibilities. The truth and the paper's motto "All The News That's Fit To Print" had become farcical. And it wasn't just the liberal tilt, it was the facile dishonesty, Bush-bashing, and in-your-face disdain for conservatism.

Op-ed staff editor and writer Bari Weiss's resignation from the NYT yesterday – especially her letter to NYT publisher A.G. Sulzberger – was a lightning bolt of validation of my own far less consequential decision all those years ago.

Will her letter have any impact on the paper's leadership, editorial strictures, and ever-narrowing woke orthodoxy? Probably not.

Excepts here:

"I joined the paper with gratitude and optimism three years ago. I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives, and others who would not naturally think of the Times as their home. The reason for this effort was clear: The paper's failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant it didn't have a firm grasp of the country it covers."

"But the lessons that ought to have followed the election – lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society – have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially this paper: the truth isn't a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else."

"Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative."

"But I can no longer do the work that you brought me here to do – the work that Adolph Ochs described in that famous 1896 statement: 'to make of the columns of The New York Times a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance, and to that end to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.' "

Wash Your Hands

Whatever . . .

Pie In The Sky ~ Woods Hole, Massachusetts

Nighthawks 2020

Edward Hopper's renowned painting Nighthawks is often imitated and parodied. It was a meme for loneliness and possible predation before there were memes. Here's the latest Covid-19 treatment.

Edward Hopper ~ Nighthawks, 1942

Jason Adam Katzenstein ~ The New Yorker

Wear Your Mask