Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) told a group of Covid vaccine critics that he’s in a “guerrilla war” against the medical establishment, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

Said Johnson: “I need every guerrilla fighting this guerrilla war right now. Don’t get out ahead of what the public is willing to accept as truth.”

“An invasive species of spider the size of a child’s hand is expected to ‘colonize’ the entire East Coast this spring by parachuting down from the sky,” Axios reports.

“Initial observations of an asteroid dubbed ‘2022 AE1’ showed a potential Earth impact on July 4, 2023—not enough time to attempt deflection and large enough to do real damage to a local area should it strike,” Phys.org reports.

“It has since been confirmed that 2022 AE1 will not impact Earth.”

As John Ellis noted: Finally, some really good news.

David Leonhardt: “The misery of the Covid-19 pandemic — with its death, illness, isolation and frustration — has left many Americans desperate for clear guidance on how to live safely. People want to protect themselves, their family and their communities, especially the most medically vulnerable members of it. This instinct is both understandable and profoundly decent.”

“But it has led to a widespread misunderstanding. Many people have come to believe that expert opinion is a unitary, omniscient force. That’s the assumption behind the phrases ‘follow the science’ and ‘what the science says.’ It imagines science almost as a god — Science — who could solve our dilemmas if we only listened.”

Scientific American: “The relief was as deep as the stakes were high. At 7:20 A.M. (ET), the rocket carrying the largest, most ambitious space telescope in history cleared the launchpad in French Guiana, and the members of mission control at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore roared their elation.”

“The suspense was not quite over. Half an hour postlaunch, the telescope still needed to decouple from its host rocket, after which had to deploy solar panels to partly power its journey. Only after that first deployment proved successful, said a NASA spokesperson in a statement to Scientific American, would ‘we know we have a mission.’ When the announcement of a successful rocket separation and solar-array deployment finally came, it was almost drowned out by cheers.”

New York Times: “When the coronavirus surfaced last year, no one was prepared for it to invade every aspect of daily life for so long, so insidiously. The pandemic has forced Americans to wrestle with life-or-death choices every day of the past 18 months — and there’s no end in sight.”

“Scientific understanding of the virus changes by the hour, it seems. The virus spreads only by close contact or on contaminated surfaces, then turns out to be airborne. The virus mutates slowly, but then emerges in a series of dangerous new forms. Americans don’t need to wear masks. Wait, they do.”

“At no point in this ordeal has the ground beneath our feet seemed so uncertain.”

“A plan to protect the confidentiality of Americans’ responses to the 2020 census by injecting small, calculated distortions into the results is raising concerns that it will erode their usability for research and distribution of state and federal funds,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The Census Bureau is due to release the first major results of the decennial count in mid-August… The bureau will adjust most of those statistics to prevent someone from recombining them in a way that would disclose information about an individual respondent. Testing by the bureau shows that improvements in data science, computing power and commercial databases make that feasible.”

Jeff Bezos offered to cover up to $2 billion in NASA costs if the U.S. space agency awards his company Blue Origin a contract to make a spacecraft designed to land astronauts back on the moon, The Guardian reports.

Nasa in April awarded SpaceX, owned by rival billionaire Elon Musk, a $2.9 billion contract to build a spacecraft to bring astronauts to the lunar surface as early as 2024, rejecting bids from Blue Origin and defense contractor Dynetics.

A new Gallup poll finds 64% of U.S. adults say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in science, compared with 70% when Gallup last measured it more than four decades ago.

Digging deeper, there’s a big difference between the two political parties. Confidence in science among Democrats has risen from 67% in 1975 to 79% today. Among Republicans, confidence in science has fallen from 72% in 1975 to just 45% today.

Confidence in science is falling among Republicans despite the success of the coronavirus vaccines — perhaps the greatest scientific advance of our lifetimes.

Axios: “Canada is seeing extreme heat, with the country’s June high-temperature record tied on Saturday and smashed on Sunday at Lytton in British Columbia by nearly 3°F, with a high of 116°F. This was broken again Monday, with the same location recording 117.5°F.”

According to Wikipedia, 7 out of the 10 highest temperatures ever recorded in Canada came in the past three days.

“It is essential as a scientist that you evolve your opinion and your recommendations based on the data as it evolves… And that’s the reason why I say people who then criticize me about that are actually criticizing science.”

— Dr. Anthony Fauci, on the Sway podcast.

Scientific American: “A large part of the answer is that this is what the party’s spokespeople have been saying for 40 years, from the early days of acid rain to our ongoing debates about climate change.”

“It has mostly been Republican governors resisting mask mandates, even when science showed they slowed the spread of COVID-19. And it was, by and large, Republican governors lifting those mandates in the spring, even while Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, begged them not to.”

“Everyone deserves accurate information to be presented in an apolitical way and to be addressed with respect and not condescension. But the reality is that most of the science that matters most comes from the government or from scientists funded by the government. Until Republican leaders stop telling voters not to trust the government, many of them won’t trust science.”

A group of high-profile scientists published a letter calling for renewed investigation into the origins of COVID-19 — including the theory that it spilled out of a Chinese virology lab.

Axios: “The possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a Chinese lab and accidentally escaped — rather than emerging naturally from an animal — was initially dismissed as a conspiracy theory. But the letter shows a potential lab leak is increasingly being taken seriously.”