Submersible Passengers Died in Implosion (VIDEO)

We all know now.

But this was the big breaking letdown for so many yesterday. I personally saw no hope of survival, and the more we saw the more my initial intuition proved correct.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Search crews found debris from craft on ocean floor near Titanic shipwreck."

There's more at NPR (a great piece), "James Cameron says the Titan passengers probably knew the submersible was in trouble."

And an incredibly lucid and scientifically-informed interview with Cameron, at CNN with Anderson Cooper:

The interview continues here, "James Cameron on the 'surreal irony' of Titanic wreck and Titan implosion."

Debris From OceansGate Search Confirmed as Coming From External Body of 'Titan' Sub

It was almost beyond hope, but now we know.

The U.S. Coast Guard press conference on the loss of the OceansGate submersible is about to begin. 

The company issued a statement, per CNN. Follow along:

JUST IN: Debris discovered within the search area of the missing Titanic submersible has been assessed to be from the external body of the sub, according to a memo reviewed by CNN https://t.co/AD7UcVJ3zQ

— CNN (@CNN) June 22, 2023

As COVID Turns 3, Experts Worry Where the Next Pandemic Will Come From – And If We'll Be Ready

At Instapundit, "WELL, NOBODY TRUSTS THEM NOW, WHICH IS AN ISSUE."

How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate

It's David Zweig, at the Free Press, "The platform suppressed true information from doctors and public-health experts that was at odds with U.S. government policy."

Britain's Tavistock Scandal (VIDEO)

Douglas Murray's at the video below.

And at the New York Times (the mainstream, noncontroversial take), "England Overhauls Medical Care for Transgender Youth: The National Health Service is closing England’s sole youth gender clinic, which had been criticized for long wait times and inadequate services."

Also, at Spiked, "How ‘The Blob’ smothered the Tavistock scandal: The civil service is determined to crush any dissent against gender ideology."

And from Kathleen Stock, at UnHerd, "Why the Tavistock had to fall: Its ideological roots were rotten from the start":

For years, the seeds of the Tavistock’s downfall have been hiding in plain sight, as a picture has slowly emerged of its clinicians doling out harmful drugs to gender-confused youth as if they were sweets. At the same time, though, a more subtle clue to the clinic’s endemic dysfunction has been contained in the generic communications that followed each new crisis.

“Thoughtful” is a self-description that crops up repeatedly. In response to critical reporting from Newsnight in 2019, the clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service insisted that it was “a thoughtful and safe service”. When Keira Bell and others took their case to the High Court a year later, arguing that under-16s could not give informed consent to puberty blockers, a GIDS spokesperson replied obstinately that theirs was “a safe and thoughtful service”. And when the Care Quality Commission rated the service as “inadequate”, the Tavistock’s ensuing statement defensively began: “The first thing to say is that GIDS has a long track record of thoughtful and high quality care.”

Alongside this manic insistence on thoughtfulness, there has also been a marked tendency to engage in special pleading about the especially difficult and highly contested cultural position the service occupies. For instance, in response to the damning CQC report, CEO Paul Jenkins replied that GIDS “has found itself in the middle of a cultural and political battleground”. And to the news of the closure last week, a spokesperson commented, with the air of someone sighing heavily: “Over the last couple of years, our staff… have worked tirelessly and under intense scrutiny in a difficult climate.”

Presumably what they really mean by this is that, as is now known, for several years GIDS has been caught between the emotionally blackmailing demands of transactivist organisations such as Mermaids and GIRES, talking constantly about suicide risk and lobbying hard for yet more relaxed attitudes to medicalising children, and the criticisms of those who profoundly object to the notion of a “trans child” in the first place. Former employees such as Susan Evans have reported the historical influence of Mermaids and GIRES on managers at the service, despite their lack of formal medical expertise and the possession of clearly vested interests.

Now, you might think that it is the job of a healthcare provider — and especially one who dispenses medication to children — to try to remove itself from current furores, social trends, and pressure from political activists, and to just get on with providing evidence-based medicine according to whatever gold-standard methodology is available at the time. And you might also think that while being thoughtful is all very well in a medical provider, you don’t exactly want them to emulate Hamlet. But to apply these earthbound medical standards to GIDS is to fail to recognise some of the distinctive and converging influences on the service that have led to the unholy mess we now see.

A crucial yet underappreciated part of the story is the clinic’s strong emphasis on psychoanalysis and psychodynamic approaches to mental health. The founder of the Tavistock, Hugh Crichton-Miller, was explicitly influenced by Freud and Jung. And when Domenico Di Ceglie founded the Gender Identity Service for children in 1989, later commissioned nationally as the only English NHS provider, he too was heavily influenced by psychoanalytic methods.

In a 2018 article describing his process, Di Ceglie quotes a Jungian perspective approvingly: “the psyche speaks in metaphors, in analogies, in images, that’s its primary language, so why talk differently? We must write in a way that evokes the poetic basis of mind… it’s a sensitivity to language.” He goes on to describe some of the metaphors and images he has found useful in trying help young dysphoric patients understand their own experience: the metaphor of being “a stranger in one’s own body”, for instance, or the image of navigating between the binary of sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis from The Odyssey. Throughout Di Ceglie’s published writing, there is an emphasis on the co-creation of meaning with young patients in the absence of access to any empirical certainty about who the patient “really” is.

This intellectual focus upon the fluidity and construction of meaning, and upon the power of narrative to create more stable personalities, is also heavily present in the published work of Bernadette Wren, Head of Psychology for 25 years at what insiders tweely call the “Tavi”. By her own description, she was “deeply involved” with the GIDS team for much of that time. Alongside psychoanalysis, she adds post-structuralist philosophy to her formative influences, citing figures such as Richard Rorty and Michel Foucault as important in her thinking.

True to the relativism of these philosophers, in Wren’s intellectual vision there are no objective truths but only a series of subjective narratives. She writes: “If the idea of living in the postmodern era means anything, it is that in all our activity together we are in the business of making meaning.” She continues: “In our time, it is hard to see any knowledge or understanding as ‘mirroring’ nature, or ‘mirroring’ reality.” She concludes: “There is an implication here for our work in gender identity clinics: that we are in the business of helping actively to construct the idea and the understanding of transgender, and for this we should accept responsibility.” In other words, ordinary binary notions of truth and falsity, or of discovering what is right and wrong, are inapplicable when it comes to the treatment of gender-dysphoric youth — because there are no prior fixed facts about identity, or truth, or morality here to discover. All meaning is up for grabs.

Against this intellectual background, the Tavistock’s flannel about being a thoughtful service sheltering from the storm of our present culture wars starts to make more sense. At least historically, senior clinicians at the Tavistock have never believed there is anything but certain context-bound forms of thought, floating about in a post-modern void. They have assumed meaning is constructed, not found. They have denied that there is any certain or timeless knowledge, but only specific cultural dynamics to navigate in the here and now. Under such an approach, what else could you do but be “thoughtful”?

A recognition of ambiguity within the life of the psyche would be perfectly fine — indeed, I assume, therapeutically helpful — if all that had ever happened at GIDS was that people sat around talking to one other. But the general relativist stance of senior clinicians was made incredibly dangerous for patients by the presence of an additional factor in the therapeutic mix, nestling somewhat anomalously among Di Ceglie’s stated foundational aims for his service. Alongside commonplace psychodynamic goals such as “to ameliorate associated behavioural, emotional and relationship difficulties”, “to allow mourning processes to occur”, “to enable symbol formation and symbolic thinking” and “to sustain hope”, we also find: “to encourage exploration of the mind-body relationship by promoting close collaboration among professionals in different specialities, including paediatric endocrinology.”

I don’t know about you, but when I read this, the birds — or rather the mermaids, perhaps — stop singing...

 

Democrats' Far-Left Climate Agenda Costing Americans More and More (VIDEO)

Here's Sean Hannity from earlier tonight:

Space-X Falcon 9 Launches 53 Starlink Satellites Into Orbit (VIDEO)

Hey, the guy bought Twitter, but as the owner of Space-X and other big properties, can he keep all his balls in the air?

WATCH:

Watch Falcon 9 launch 53 Starlink satellites to orbit → https://t.co/3Cr99l2Cre https://t.co/2SPtX3ketY

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 29, 2022

What Students With Disabilities Lost to COVID.

From Glenn Reynolds, at Instapundit, "THEY DIDN’T LOSE IT TO COVID, THEY LOST IT TO THE LOCKDOWNS AND THE TEACHERS’ UNIONS."

Marc Marano, Green Fraud

At Amazon, Marc Marano, Green Fraud: Why the Green New Deal Is Even Worse than You Think.

About the Climate Change 'Consensus'...

Following-up, "Climate Change Debate."

Climate Change Debate

Longtime readers know I'm a hardcore "climate change" skeptic. (See my earlier post, "The Climate Emergency.")

That said, to me, this current concatenation of violent weather events, from East to West (here in the U.S., not to mention worldwide), reveals something very significant happening with weather patterns and events. 

In my international relations class one year, I showed the Patrick Moore video, which resulted in literally a revolt in the classroom, with students enraged at someone, something, anything that challenged their pre-fed beliefs that the Earth is burning up. 

It was an unpleasant experience. Honestly, it was so bad I hesitate to show that video in class these days, though Moore is exactly right: In science, the key is always skepticism --- and, most importantly, scientists can really never know all the potential causal factors that may result in any particular event, in political science, or climate science, or any field of inquiry. 

Of course, this is the age of "cancel culture," and especially the dominance of leftist indoctrination in the schools, extreme political polarization, and a general postmodern trend toward the rejection of authority, especially among the young. 

In any case, check out this scientific debate today, up at RealClearPolitics:

From Christopher Lingle, at the American Institute for Economic Research, "Climate Science: Seeking Truth or Defending Consensus?"

And from Adam Sobel, at CNN, "This Is a Dystopian Climate Change Moment."

Try to stay safe, dear readers.

The New Era of Space Travel

Following-up, "Jeff Bezos Blasts Into Space Aboard Blue Origin (VIDEO)."

At the Los Angeles Times, "Jeff Bezos launches new era of space travel with Blue Origin ride":

VAN HORN, Texas — The New Shepard rocket rumbled to life early Tuesday, catapulting Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and three others to the edge of space and allowing the world’s richest person to achieve a childhood dream.

Back on Earth, spaceflight enthusiasts saw the brief voyage as the realization of decades of promise — the beginning of a new era for space tourism.

“Space tourism is finally here,” said Alan Ladwig, author of the book “See You in Orbit? Our Dream of Spaceflight.” “It’s still going to be expensive, it’s still not going to be something everybody can do right away, but it’s a first step.”

Bezos’ suborbital flight — his company Blue Origin’s first crewed launch — came a little over a week after British billionaire Richard Branson along with five others boarded a space plane built by his Virgin Galactic firm and flew to the edge of space and back, making it there ahead of Bezos, who had announced his plans earlier. Virgin Galactic plans to complete two more test flights before it begins flying paying customers to space next year.

Although Blue Origin flew its first paying customer on Tuesday’s flight — 18-year-old Oliver Daemen, the son of a Dutch private equity executive and now the youngest person to go to space — it has yet to announce seat prices or additional details about its commercial operations. During a livestream of Tuesday’s launch, Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin’s director of astronaut sales, repeatedly encouraged interested customers to email the company.

Already the company is approaching $100 million in private sales, Bezos told an assembled audience of guests, employees and reporters after the launch.

An auction for a seat on Tuesday’s flight ended with a winning bid of $28 million, but the ticket holder, whose identity has not been disclosed, postponed the trip, citing scheduling conflicts, according to Blue Origin. They will fly on a future mission. (Proceeds from the auction for a spot on Tuesday’s launch went to the Club for the Future foundation, which was founded by Blue Origin and is aimed at promoting science, technology, engineering and math careers. From those proceeds, 19 nonprofit organizations were selected to receive $1-million grants.)

But suborbital flights aren’t the company’s only goal; Blue Origin plans to build a family of larger rockets that could hoist cargo, satellites and people to orbit and beyond, eventually creating an ecosystem to allow millions of people to live and work in space. Bezos has previously suggested building cylindrical habitats with artificial gravity known as O’Neill colonies, after the physicist Gerard K. O’Neill, who pioneered the idea.

“Big things start small,” Bezos said Tuesday. “We’re going to build a road to space so that our kids and their kids can build the future.”

The seeming arrival of the era of suborbital space tourism after years of hype has fueled public debate around the increasing commercialization of space and the role that billionaires play in the industry.

After his flight, Bezos thanked Amazon employees and customers, saying, “You guys paid for all this.” He has previously said he has sold about $1 billion of Amazon stock a year to fund Blue Origin...

Well, you can't say the man ain't got the money. *Shrug.*

Still more.

 

Jeff Bezos Blasts Into Space Aboard Blue Origin (VIDEO)

Absolutely spectacular:

Also, "SPACED OUT Mystery lottery winner who paid $28million to travel on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space flight is too BUSY to make trip."

PREVIOUSLY: "Richard Branson and Crew Go Weightless on Historic Virgin Galactic Space Flight (VIDEO)."

The Climate Emergency

Following-up, "The Climate Apocalypse is Near!"

Here's the best video ever, featuring Patrick Moore, for Prager University:

The Climate Apocalypse is Near!

Look, the climate certainly is changing --- for example, with the record-setting temperatures in California's Death Valley a few days ago. But I always ask people: How do you know it's carbon emissions or some other factor or phenomenon that's causing changes in climate, etc? It's simple science: One has to definitively rule out other possible causal factors for the changes. The Earth's axis wobbles a bit as it travel its orbit around the sun, or the sun itself has extreme periods fire-blast flareups off its surface, sending down more radiation than it normally would. Fact is, the Earth's climate is always --- and has been --- changing, for eons.

And we know much of the climate phenomena happening in this era has happened before, especially fires and floods on a biblical scales. And never forget that we had a warming pause for about 20-25 years starting around 1990, a period when more carbon emissions were spewed into the atmosphere ever in history. No one can explain why temperature remained flat during that time, when there should have been --- according the climate "experts" --- a significant increase of heat on the surface of the Earth. I didn't happen. 

So, always remain skeptical of stories that cite anthropological climate change. 

In any case, at the New York Times, "‘No One Is Safe’: Extreme Weather Batters the Wealthy World":

Some of Europe’s richest countries lay in disarray this weekend, as raging rivers burst through their banks in Germany and Belgium, submerging towns, slamming parked cars against trees and leaving Europeans shellshocked at the intensity of the destruction.

Only days before in the Northwestern United States, a region famed for its cool, foggy weather, hundreds had died of heat. In Canada, wildfire had burned a village off the map. Moscow reeled from record temperatures. And this weekend the northern Rocky Mountains were bracing for yet another heat wave, as wildfires spread across 12 states in the American West.

The extreme weather disasters across Europe and North America have driven home two essential facts of science and history: The world as a whole is neither prepared to slow down climate change, nor live with it. The week’s events have now ravaged some of the world’s wealthiest nations, whose affluence has been enabled by more than a century of burning coal, oil and gas — activities that pumped the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that are warming the world.

“I say this as a German: The idea that you could possibly die from weather is completely alien,” said Friederike Otto, a physicist at Oxford University who studies the links between extreme weather and climate change. “There’s not even a realization that adaptation is something we have to do right now. We have to save peoples lives.”

The floods in Europe have killed at least 165 people, most of them in Germany, Europe’s most powerful economy. Across Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, hundreds have been reported as missing, which suggests the death toll could rise. Questions are now being raised about whether the authorities adequately warned the public about risks.

The bigger question is whether the mounting disasters in the developed world will have a bearing on what the world’s most influential countries and companies will do to reduce their own emissions of planet-warming gases. They come a few months ahead of United Nations-led climate negotiations in Glasgow in November, effectively a moment of reckoning for whether the nations of the world will be able to agree on ways to rein in emissions enough to avert the worst effects of climate change...

Reining in global warming emissions, blah, blah, blah...

Developing countries will not forego the use of fossil fuels to power their development. Even China, which is an economic powerhouse these days --- is in many respects still a developing country, and its leaders won't sign on to a global pact to cut the use carbons, lest they halt their upward economic trajectory, and consign hundreds of millions of their people to perpetual poverty. 

These are truth claim, not scientific hokus pocus. *Shrugs.*

Still more here.

Nicholas Schmidle, Test Gods

At Amazon, 

Nicholas Schmidle, Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut.

Richard Branson and Crew Go Weightless on Historic Virgin Galactic Space Flight (VIDEO)

So amazing --- absolutely breathtaking!

At LAT, "Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic crew go to the edge of space and back":

Richard Branson goes weightless in space and sends a message to future generations.

Read more about his voyage to the edge of space: https://t.co/hYsLFJ1sQa pic.twitter.com/i77ytElH2q

— Sky News (@SkyNews) July 11, 2021

In 2004, British billionaire Richard Branson proclaimed he would fly into space on his company’s spaceship in just three years to kick off what he hoped would become a routine travel experience, drinks and all.

Nearly 17 years after that proclamation, he finally did it.

Branson, along with five other Virgin Galactic employees — two pilots and three others who were testing parts of the in-cabin experience, including research opportunities — launched to suborbital space Sunday on the company’s first flight with a full crew aboard. The carrier aircraft with the spaceship attached to its belly took off around 7:40 a.m. Pacific time from a New Mexico spaceport near the city of Truth or Consequences.

The crewed flight marks a shift years in the making, as companies edge into launching recreational trips to space — efforts they hope will eventually prove profitable. The flashy, Branson-flavored Virgin Galactic event — with a livestream hosted by late-night host Stephen Colbert and a concert by singer Khalid — aimed to increase potential customers’ confidence and interest in the flight experience, which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars for a seat.

The spaceship carrying Branson and the others detached from the carrier aircraft about 45 minutes after launch, once it reached an altitude of about 45,000 feet and a designated release point in the airspace. The ship then rocketed to suborbital space.

The craft reached a speed of Mach 3, or 2,300 mph, and a maximum altitude of 53.5 miles above the Earth. The U.S. military and NASA consider space to start at 50 miles above the Earth, though the world body governing aeronautic and astronautic records, as well as other organizations, define space as 62 miles above Earth’s surface, a designation known as the Karman line.

A livestream of the mission showed the crew floating in the cabin once the craft reached space. As the ship returned to Earth, Branson — wearing sunglasses — told viewers on the livestream that it was the “experience of a lifetime.”

The ship landed back at the spaceport around 8:40 a.m. Pacific time, about 15 minutes after it detached from the carrier aircraft. Video inside the cabin showed Branson clapping at touchdown. As he emerged from the spacecraft, he pumped both arms in the air and waved to the assembled crowd.

Branson told reporters after the flight that it was impossible to describe the experience of accelerating to Mach 3 in seven to eight seconds and that the views of the Earth were “breathtaking.”

He added that “99.9% was beyond my wildest dreams.”

“It’s so thrilling when a lifetime’s dream comes true,” said Branson, who carried to space photos of his children, a woman who died but always dreamed of going to space, and a tiny image of the head of Colbert.

The flight put Branson in space ahead of billionaire rival Jeff Bezos, who is due to launch to suborbital space July 20 in a capsule developed by his Blue Origin space company. Bezos congratulated Branson and the Virgin Galactic crew in an Instagram post Sunday, adding, “Can’t wait to join the club!”

Like Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin plans to sell tickets to tourists who want to experience a few minutes of weightlessness in suborbital space. Bezos’ company is also developing a larger rocket called New Glenn intended to launch satellites, and it had hoped to win a NASA contract with Lockheed Martin, Draper and Northrop Grumman to build a lunar lander that was instead awarded to Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Sunday’s flight marks a milestone for the 17-year-old Virgin Galactic, which spent years developing its SpaceShipTwo craft and larger carrier aircraft.

The company has faced its share of setbacks...

Still more.

 

Richard Branson Blasts Into Space! (VIDEO)

Now this is something to be proud about. Civilian space travel is here. 

Branson, along with crew, successfully launched and landed Virgin Galactic's spaceship, the VMS Unity.  

At USA Today, "Virgin Galactic space plane carrying billionaire adventurer Richard Branson reaches edge of space, returns safely":

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, N.M. – Billionaire entrepreneur and adventurer Richard Branson's dream of space travel was realized and celestial tourism took a leap forward Sunday as Virgin Galactic's rocket ship reached the edge of space during a historic flight from Spaceport America.

Branson and his crew experienced about four minutes of weightlessness before their space plane smoothly glided to a runway landing. The entire trip, delayed 90 minutes because of bad weather the previous night, lasted about an hour. An ecstatic Branson hugged family and friends who greet him after landing.

"Thank you to every single person who has believed in Virgin Galactic and the team who has worked so hard to make this dream come true," Branson said after the flight. "It's 17 years of painstaking work, the occasional horrible down and large ups with it. And today was definitely the biggest up."

Branson, who turns 71 this week, and a crew of two pilots and three mission specialists were carried to an altitude of more than eight miles by the aircraft VMS Eve, named after Branson's mother. Live video then showed the space plane VSS Unity release from the mother ship's twin fuselages, using rocket power to fly to the boundary of space, more than 50 miles above the Earth.

Tributes – and criticism – rolled in on social media...

 

Chicago's Climate Crisis

On "climate change" the jury's still out for me, but hey, maybe the climate really is changing. My issue is always whether the crisis is "man-made" (that this is a made-up boondoggle pushed by radical leftists to foment their revolutionary takeover of industrial civilization in the West). 

Either way though, it's obvious that's something changed. 

This report at NYT is pretty astonishing, in fact. See, "The climate crisis haunts Chicago’s future. A Battle Between a Great City and a Great Lake."

Chicago is a city built for a different time. The time before climate change.https://t.co/VqxrZy0eAv

— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 8, 2021

Now THIS Is Some Big Pandemic News

It's at Gallup, "Americans' Worry About Catching COVID-19 Drops to Record Low."

Obviously this is monumental news, and it's especially big because this data goes against practically everything the elites in D.C. and virtually all the "blue states" are telling everyone --- which means, of course, they're lying. 

The only thing more they needed at the report here is a breakdown by party identity, because while the huge overall majority reports little to no worry about catching the "'rona," no doubt idiot leftist Dems are swallowing everything that comes out of the D.C. swamp (and the stupid so-called progressive "blue state" capitals, with their idiot governors, and Cuomo, Newsom, and Whitmer come to mind), and, naturally, these "woke" Democrats love their masks and social distancing, and are ready to keep up with this crap until mid-century, if not later. 

No need to quote the whole thing (just read it at the link above), although I'll post the conclusion here:

Americans have become substantially less worried about contracting COVID-19 as a growing proportion of adults have been fully vaccinated and as satisfaction with the vaccine rollout has improved. These shifts have occurred while coronavirus infection rates have fallen substantially from highs reached in January of this year. Optimism about the COVID-19 situation has also spiked to a record high. Gallup previously observed a meaningful relationship between Americans' perceptions of the coronavirus situation and changes in reported numbers of daily new cases.

After the March survey was conducted, infection rates began to rise again. This may be at least partially connected to the decrease in reported strict social distancing by Americans at a time when more contagious variants of the virus are spreading. Public health experts see the U.S. now in a race to get large numbers of Americans vaccinated before those variants spread further. The outcome of that race will determine the future course of infections in the U.S. and will likely determine whether Americans show continued increasing optimism about the COVID-19 situation or a course correction in their attitudes.

So, if you do decide to "RTWT," the graphs at the peace are real nice. 

UPDATE: Idiot me spoke too soon without checking on the tables (rather than the graphs), although, despite that, I'm not much wrong: Still half of all Democrats surveyed reported being being "worried" about catching the virus; although Dems are more likely to see things as "getting better," but that's an artifact, no doubt, of having the "Harris-Biden" administration in power, and these still stupid "woke" Dems are more likely to be "swallowing down" all the new "regime's" lies and propaganda --- so, I guess I wasn't too off in my estimations, despite the absence of a couple of more detailed graphs.

Mea culpa! Mea culpa, lol!