June 19, 2026

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Ariane 6 launches with more powerful boosters: a new record for Europe. “The flight featured the debut of four new boosters based on the P160C solid-propellant rocket motor. Holding 14 tonnes more propellant each, the larger, more powerful rocket motors allowed 36 Leo satellites to be placed into orbit on one launch – four more than the two Leo launches Ariane 6 has delivered before. The P160C-based boosters can increase Ariane 6 performance by 10% to 15% depending on the orbit.”

Posted at 2:50 pm by Stephen Green

KEIR STARMER ‘CONSIDERING RESIGNING’ AFTER ANDY BURNHAM BY-ELECTION VICTORY:

Starmer is considering resigning amid mounting pressure from his Cabinet in the wake of Andy Burnham’s by-election victory, according to reports.

The Time reports that Starmer will consider his future as Prime Minister over the weekend despite him publicly insisting this morning that he will not “walk away”.

Several Cabinet ministers have reportedly told Starmer “to go” or set out a timeline for his departure. The list includes Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband and Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander.

Andy Burnham’s allies believe Starmer should set out a timetable to hand over the premiership in September to avoid jeopardising Labour’s prospects in the Greater Manchester mayoral race, it is understood.

Starmer’s departure won’t do much to change the political landscape, though: Labour’s heading for a catastrophic collision with reality.

The likely makeup of a Burnham cabinet is amusingly grotesque and indicates exactly why his premiership looks doomed before it starts. The New Statesman has breathily anointed Harriet Harman protégé Miatta Fahnbulleh as ‘the brains behind Burnham’, which is like naming someone the moral guide behind Boris Johnson or the personality guru behind Keir Starmer. Meanwhile, Sheffield’s answer to the Artful Dodger, Louise Haigh, has been given the mandatory Fabian bob-cut in preparation of a return to government. Another member of the inner sanctum is Anneliese Midgley, who as a measure of her depth as a politician, recently called for the Netflix show Adolescence to be screened in all British schools. Meanwhile, Labour insiders are talking about Ed Miliband in Number 11, which will give hope to lunatics with asylum-running ambitions everywhere.

Burnham doesn’t represent Labour realising it has to do something drastic to survive but, as his post-Oasis vibes-vomit of a victory speech today showed, is in fact a sort of anti-reality, a denial that any change has to happen at all.

To be fair, anti-reality is the order of the day in Old Blighty:

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE CRITICAL DRINKER ON TOY STORY 5: Did We Really Need This?

In his review of Toy Story 5, John Podhoretz writes, “How the mighty Pixar has fallen!“

[D]irector Andrew Stanton has come up with an inspired idea at its center: He literalizes the danger posed to childhood itself by internet devices in the form of a tablet dubbed Lilypad. It is gifted to a very shy little girl and immediately takes the place of the toys that formerly provided her solace and an outlet for her imaginative play. The toys need to find a way to save her from becoming a screen-addicted zombie.

Smart, right? The problem here is that Stanton and his cowriter Kenna Harris really chicken out when it comes to exploring the theme—which is perhaps understandable, as Pixar was largely the handiwork of Steve Jobs, the person most responsible for the hypnotic power the iPhone and iPad have over all of us. Pixar lecturing us about how we let our kids drown themselves in their screens is a little like a tobacco company attacking a vape pen. It turns out that Lilypad just wants the little girl to make friends and soon sees the error of her ways—then ends up becoming part of the gang that saves her.

When Pixar had nothing to lose, it made a great and unsentimental comedy called Toy Story. It followed that with Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, WALL-E, and The Incredibles—each of them a masterpiece. Then it began stumbling. And now that it has everything to lose, Pixar has gone and made a decent and false work of sheer sentimentalism called Toy Story 5. I’m sure it will make a billion dollars. I’m also pretty sure Pixar will never again make anything remotely resembling a masterpiece.

But Toy Story 5 should sell lots of real toys to kids, which will continue to endure Pixar with their corporate bosses: “What’s the best way to get kids to play with toys? Selling new ones, of course! That’s why we have Woody wearing a red bandana in this movie for no reason whatsoever other than to sell you the new version of this toy. Why do we have a storyline in this movie surrounding 50 shipwrecked Buzz Lightyears, complete with a new design? To sell you the new design, of course!”

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

THIS STUFF IS AWESOME: goop Beauty Tinted Lip Balm. #CommissionEarned I don’t generally like lip balm but this feels weightless and the peony color is very low key.

Posted at 2:12 pm by Helen Smith

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Cigars, a canceled lacrosse season and the scandal rocking a Massachusetts town.

The boys gathered on an Ipswich, Mass., beach to celebrate their high-school graduation, some with medals draped over their black gowns. Jutting from each mouth: cigars that may or may not have been real.

The photos taken under cloudy skies June 7 mirrored those snapped all around the country lately. But in this coastal enclave dubbed America’s Best-Preserved Puritan Town, those snapshots have lit a burning debate.

What’s beyond dispute: Six of the grads were on Ipswich High School’s lacrosse team, and administrators suspended all six from a playoff game two days later for violating state athletic association rules against tobacco use. The team ultimately voted to forfeit the contest—and just like that, their championship run went up in smoke.

Now, this hamlet of 14,000 north of Boston is in a fierce debate over whether the penalty matched the foul. It has grown into a saga featuring a “a CSI-level investigation” at a local grocery store, and a heated showdown involving two dads in the principal’s office—captured on a police body camera.

“Come on, how many times you’ve been pulled over and a cop has said, ‘Ahh, go ahead?’ ” said Marc Randazza, a lawyer representing one of the suspended students and his father. “There is always discretion, right?”

To Ipswich resident Heidi Garofalo, though, the line was clear. “Kids have to learn the consequences when they do something wrong,” she said. “You have to abide by the rules. It just takes one slip [to] ruin everything.”

It really is “America’s Best-Preserved Puritan Town” – as H.L. Mencken famously wrote, “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy:”

Posted at 1:40 pm by Ed Driscoll

RYAN ZICKGRAF: A tombstone for Obamaism.

What it resembles most, I’d argue, is a mausoleum, the Obamausoleum, if you will. The tower is clad in New Hampshire granite, rises in a faceted, asymmetrical mass with almost no windows, and looms over a grassy public park. It even has words carved near the top, giving the whole thing the unmistakable air of the world’s largest headstone. But what it marks — unintentionally — is the final resting place of Obamaism: a politics after politics, a monument to the fantasy that if enough institutions speak pleasant bromides in a reassuring voice, if politicians act like noble characters from The West Wing, some ineffable thing called “the arc of the moral universe” will bend and everyone wins. Who needs culture war when you can have culture peace?

That’s not what was originally sold to voters. When Obama was elected in 2008 — almost 20 years ago — he promised a sharp political pivot from the neoliberal consensus of both the Bushes and the Clintons — “change you can believe in.” But then he spent much of his presidency convincing everyone that massive structural change was impossible in the face of Republican opposition. What he offered instead was the thin gruel of himself: Obama as symbol, Obama as cultural ascendance, Obama as proof that America had already become better simply by recognizing him. Now the Obama Center represents a near-billion-dollar effort to convince visitors that the symbolism of the first Black president was not a consolation prize but the victory all along.

Obama was always about little more than Obama. The Obamausoleum is just the unmissable eyesore expression of that.

UPDATE (From Ed): In its summation of a recent time that leftists look back upon as a bygone era, the Obamausoleum resembles the media’s attempt at building the “Newseum,” which lasted from April of 2008  until the end of 2019 in Washington DC. John Podhoretz correctly dubbed it “The News Mausoleum” in the May 2008 issue of Commentary:

The rise of the Craigslist model has devastated classified advertising in newspapers, once the only place in a city to sell a used car or list a job opening. True, today’s newspapers have duplicated all their classified ads on their websites, and they have attempted to best Craigslist and its emulators by offering different features, new ways to search, and so forth. But the result is harder to use, and in any case why should you spend $100 putting something up for sale in the paper when you can post it on Craigslist for free? Why list a job for $200 when you can list it for $10?

There is no answer to these questions. The only solution is for newspapers to lower their prices to Craigslist levels, but at that point someone else will come along and restore the entirely free model, and the end result will be the same. Last year, classified advertising dropped nationally by more than 16 percent; overall, it is down 34 percent since 2000. Over the next ten years, the cash cow of any newspaper will dry up entirely.

Feverishly anticipating the demise of their 19th-century industrial product, newspapers are once again renewing their efforts to take advantage, somehow, of the growth of the Internet. But they are uniquely ill-positioned to do so. When it comes to reporting the news, their greatest competitive asset is the size of their news-gathering and news-writing staffs. But they can afford those staffs only because of advertising revenue. And, on the web, they will generate only a fraction of the advertising revenue they have been able to generate in print as an effective monopoly. Moreover, and unlike the case with every other rival they have faced in the past, the technical cost of competing with them is astonishingly low.

All they will have left is a very powerful brand—the term we now use for what used to be called a name. That brand will be worth a very great deal, but it will not be worth enough on its own to produce the kind of comprehensive news portrait that has been the defining purpose of urban and regional newspapers for a century and a half. That is why, to many observers, it seems a certainty that these brands will eventually be bought out by Internet monoliths, like Google and Yahoo, which are hungry for “content.”

_____________

The prospect is a very stark one for people who work in, write, and edit newspapers. For these people do not think of themselves as “content providers.” They think much more highly of themselves than that. They believe they play a vital role, perhaps the most vital role, in the defense of the freedoms of every citizen. After all, who else is there to keep a vigilant watch over the official custodians of society? Who else is there to protect the people from the depredations of business and government? Is not freedom of speech—the very freedom that enables journalists to ply their trade—the first of our freedoms, primus inter pares, and who will guard it if not they?

The middle of 2008 was when the DNC-MSM* were in full swoon for the man who, once in office, as Michael Barone wrote in 2013, would crack down “on journalists more than any since Woodrow Wilson,” three years before going all-in on the Russian collusion hoax against Trump:

* QED:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Stephen Green

THE NEW SPACE RACE: ‘It’s quite a bit more than we expected’: Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering.

The data surprised the team behind the project and indicated that satellites orbiting far from Earth aren’t the only ones that experience degradation of their positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) signals, which could affect their performance and the safety of their operations.

The new measurements were made by Pulsar-0, the first satellite of the novel Pulsar navigation constellation developed by California-based Xona Space Systems. The experimental satellite orbits 310 miles (500 kilometers) above Earth, testing Xona’s technology before the company begins deploying its navigation constellation of 300 spacecraft in low Earth orbit (LEO) later this year.

The purpose of the Pulsar constellation is to provide a more resilient PNT service compared to the United State’s GPS network and other global navigation satellite systems (GNSS).

Faster, please.

Posted at 11:44 am by Stephen Green

CHANGE: The Professional Guest Is Dead. The Need They Filled Is Not.

Charles Nelson Reilly, a Tony winner before he ever sat down at Match Game, became known almost exclusively for that seat. Paul Lynde, a Broadway force in Bye Bye Birdie, was reduced in cultural memory to the center square on Hollywood Squares. Rip Taylor had a fake mustache and confetti. Nipsey Russell rhymed couplets between commercial breaks. Zsa Zsa Gabor presided over the ecosystem with what may be the most durable case of evidence-free celebrity in American history. Rock himself appeared on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show as many as 84 times, usually with nothing to plug.

The architecture that produced them was specific and quantifiable. The daytime talk shows — Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, Dinah Shore — ran five days a week, 52 weeks a year, each needing three to five guests per episode. The celebrity panel game shows, Match Game, Hollywood Squares, To Tell the Truth, Password and The Gong Show, needed several panelists at a time. Latenight talk needed two or three guests a night, five nights a week.

The arithmetic produced a structural demand for warm, entertaining bodies that the supply of A-list stars could not meet. The Professional Guest filled the gap, and the medium rewarded a specific craft for doing so: the compressed bit, the affectionate self-caricature, the ability to enter a crowded format and command three minutes without disrupting it.

What made these performers a new species was that their fame exceeded their act. Each had a defined craft: a bit, a routine, a signature. But the craft was eclipsed by the persona that carried it. Corey was not famous as a stand-up; he was famous as “Professor Irwin Corey.” Rock was not famous as a hairdresser or a singer; he was famous as “Monti Rock III.” The persona was the product, and the product was infinitely renewable as long as the formats kept buying.

And then the medium stopped buying. The ecosystem collapsed in the 1980s, killed by a convergence of structural forces every executive reading this column will recognize. The daytime variety talk show declined as syndication economics shifted. Issue-oriented daytime shows, Donahue first, then Oprah, found that ordinary people’s confessions drew larger audiences at lower cost than celebrity banter. The classic celebrity panel game show went extinct as audiences fragmented to cable. The habitat disappeared, and with it the species.

At least until YouTube and TikTok came along. As an old line in 1990s-era Wired magazine went, in the future, everyone will be famous to 15 people.

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll

IT’S TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN, XI: China says ‘spy turtles’ are snooping in its waters. “Large living marine animals are hung with sensors, swimming in specific areas, collecting sensitive data on the nearby water temperature, salinity, ocean currents and other marine environment in real time, and transmitting them abroad through satellites.”

Honestly, it would be pretty cool if we were doing that.

Posted at 10:42 am by Stephen Green