News bits: Vaccine buggery; Alito's chat with DJT; About the NGRST

The NYT reports that childhood vaccination rates are falling, even without anti-vaxx crackpot RFK Jr spreading his anti-vaccine crackpottery from a position of real power. Falling vaccination rates have created creating new pockets of students no longer protected by herd immunity, the range considered high enough to stop an outbreak.

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Just one day before his sentencing for his 34 felonies in New York, DJT called Sam Alito for a chat. Dissecting the phone call, it seems reasonable to think that he wanted to see if the USSC could somehow dismiss his criminal sentence. Of course Alito denies that was the reason for the phone call. Instead Alito claims that DJT called to vet a law clerk for a mid-level government position who had worked for Alito 13 years ago. That person, William Levi, has since gone on to work in the 1st DJT administration. Alito said Levi asked him to take a call from DJT. Levi previously worked in DJT's administration as chief of staff to then–Attorney General Bill Barr and GOP Sen. Mike Lee before that. In other words, that guy was already very well vetted. Slate writes:

So why is it that the president-elect vetted a midlevel lawyer with a sitting Supreme Court justice, just as that same president-elect had a case rocketing to the high court?

The most obvious answer is: Because who is going to stop him? Performative flouting of the ethics rules that demand the appearance of neutrality, barely a week after the chief justice himself claimed that the courts had a key role to play in preserving public trust? That stuff is catnip for authoritarians whose images are built upon regularly proving that the rules do not apply to them. It should surprise nobody that Trump wanted a call with Alito. Regrettably, it should also surprise nobody that Alito took it.

Beyond that flex, we can think of two other reasons for the call. First, Levi played a major role in marshalling federal law enforcement to subdue the insurrection on Jan. 6, summoning the FBI for backup after rioters overwhelmed the Capitol Police. Perhaps this action landed him on Trump’s blacklist, and the president-elect wanted confirmation that Levi would serve as a loyal foot soldier in his second administration, with all that Jan. 6 business forgiven and forgotten. As a steadfast champion of the president-elect’s agenda, Alito is well positioned to vouch that his former clerk remains a true believer in the cause despite his regrettable lapse four years ago. The justice, after all, shares Trump’s paranoid loathing for the so-called deep state that is, allegedly, forever plotting to sabotage the past and future president. Alito would surely know if his own former clerk was a Never Trumper in MAGA clothing.  

It is also possible that Trump sought to flatter Alito by calling upon him as a character reference, part of his long campaign to butter up the justices whom he wants to retire.The charm offensive worked on Justice Anthony Kennedy, convincing the erstwhile swing vote that his seat would be better off in Trump’s hands.

Ah yes, corrupt Trumplandia machinations have begun anew.

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NASA is busily building the $4 billion NGRST (Nancy Grace Roman Space Telecsope) in Maryland. NASA wants to launch the telescope by May 2027.

Nancy Grace Roman stands next to a scale model of the Hubble Space Telescope outside the Hubble control center at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Roman is known as the “Mother of Hubble.”

One source writes: 

The telescope will be roughly the size of the Hubble Space Telescope, but not quite as long (a “stubby Hubble,” some call it). What the astronomy community and the general public will receive in exchange for the considerable taxpayer investment of nearly $4 billion is an instrument that can do what other telescopes can’t.

It will have a sprawling field of view, about 100 times that of the Hubble or Webb space telescopes. And it will be able to pivot quickly across the night sky to new targets and download tremendous amounts of data that will be instantly available to the researchers.

A primary goal of the Roman is to understand “dark energy,” the mysterious driver of the accelerating expansion of space. But it will also attempt to study the atmospheres of exoplanets — worlds orbiting distant stars.

Roman joined the agency when it was just getting started, in 1959, and retired two decades later, having lobbied for the creation of a space telescope. She died at the age of 93 in 2018, and 15 months later NASA honored her by renaming a telescope that had originally been called WFIRST, for Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope. The central feature of the telescope is an exquisitely polished, concave primary mirror, 2.4 meters (7.9 feet) in diameter.

An essential feature of the Roman is that, just like the Webb, it is not designed to be repaired by astronauts if something goes wrong in space. That’s because, unlike the Hubble, it will not be in low Earth orbit. It’ll be where the Webb is, in a stable solar orbit called Lagrange point 2, or L2, roughly a million miles from home and never straying too far away.

So it needs to be put together correctly — perfectly shipshape, immaculately clean — before it gets flung into deep space.