To read this post please scroll down.

 

Readers! A November fund-raising drive!

 

It is unfortunately time for another November fund-raising campaign to support my work here at Behind the Black. I really dislike doing these, but 2025 is so far turning out to be a very poor year for donations and subscriptions, the worst since 2020. I very much need your support for this webpage to survive.

 

And I think I provide real value. Fifteen years ago I said SLS was garbage and should be cancelled. Almost a decade ago I said Orion was a lie and a bad idea. As early as 1998, long before almost anyone else, I predicted in my first book, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, that private enterprise and freedom would conquer the solar system, not government. Very early in the COVID panic and continuing throughout I noted that every policy put forth by the government (masks, social distancing, lockdowns, jab mandates) was wrong, misguided, and did more harm than good. In planetary science, while everyone else in the media still thinks Mars has no water, I have been reporting the real results from the orbiters now for more than five years, that Mars is in fact a planet largely covered with ice.

 

I could continue with numerous other examples. If you want to know what others will discover a decade hence, read what I write here at Behind the Black. And if you read my most recent book, Conscious Choice, you will find out what is going to happen in space in the next century.

 

 

This last claim might sound like hubris on my part, but I base it on my overall track record.

 

So please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. I could really use the support at this time. There are five ways of doing so:

 

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

 

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation. Takes about a 10% cut.
 

3. A Paypal Donation or subscription, which takes about a 15% cut:

 

4. Donate by check. I get whatever you donate. Make the check payable to Robert Zimmerman and mail it to
 
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652

 

You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.


Democrats rewrite their attempt to repeal the first amendment

The Democrats have rewritten their attempt to repeal the first amendment, adding one word in the hope no one will notice that it really changes nothing.

This is the new language:

To advance democratic self-government and political equality, and to protect the integrity of government and the electoral process, Congress and the States may regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections.

The phrasing is slightly different than the original, with the addition of the word “reasonable,” thus making believe that this makes their constitutional amendment more palatable. It does not. What it does do is illustrate once again that the modernDemocratic Party is not in favor of free speech. 42 Democratic Senators have endorsed this amendment. As John Hinderaker so cogently notes in the article above — paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson — the Democrats “have sworn eternal hostility against every limitation on government’s tyranny over the mind of man.”

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

3 comments

  • Hugh Mann

    Remember these 42 traitorous parasites when the shit hits the fan.

  • ken anthony

    These are the trees. See the forest. Man dominates man to his injury. It has always been so. Soon it will be more obvious. Government is never for the people or by the people. These are ideals that can not stand up to reality.

  • Edward

    “Government is never for the people or by the people.”

    Ken, I disagree. In the early days, our government was for the people AND by the people. We did not have a ruling class, and government protected our freedoms rather than usurping them. Indeed, despite several Supreme Court rulings that have favored tyranny over freedom; the recent Hobby Lobby ruling is an example of our public servants being *for* the people.

    “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” — Thomas Jefferson
    (“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.”
    –Thomas Paine)

    It is not that government is never for the people or by the people, it is that We the People have not been sufficiently vigilant for the past century or so. We let our government slowly work its way toward tyranny.

    Before an excessive number of people decided to make careers out of elected office, our politicians came from We the People and returned to us. They were not perfect — nobody is — but they understood how we lived and knew that they would soon live that way again. If they did not protect our freedoms, then they too would live under a tyranny.

    Unfortunately, it is not just the career politicians who we have to worry about, these days, it is also the modern overcompensated and overbearing career public servants (who seem to act as though the public are the servants — reference: the recent attitude of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen). Career politicians and government workers have distinguished themselves as a class above We the People. We are now taxed and ruled not by our elected representatives but by unelected bureaucratic regulators, such as the IRS, EPA, NSA, and IPAB.

    When this country was first formed, our government was “for the people,” having firsthand knowledge of what a tyrannical government can do. Before the 16th amendment, which allows direct taxation of the people by the federal government, the government had just enough money and power to perform the basic functions, to protect We the People and to mediate disputes. For those early decades, America prospered at a rate never before seen in the world.

    Once the government was allowed to choose how much to tax We the People, tyranny began to work its way into the hearts of those governing (please refer to such stories as Robin Hood and Zorro). Government suddenly had more money than it knew what to do with, thus it expanded from protection and mediation into *providing for* those who were not productive — by taking from those who were. Our economic growth keeps slowing with each passing decade, because we are being slowly stifled by an overtaxing, overregulating, tyrannical government that uses the power of taxation to keep us obedient to its demands; the 2013 Obamacare individual mandate ruling by Chief Justice John Roberts is an example of our public servants being against We the People, allowing government to impose any tyrannical thing upon us as long as they associate it with a tax. What other tyrannical country has *ever* had the audacity to require its people to buy a good or service?

    Because of freedom — government being “for the people” — this country prospered for four three centuries. We started as a literal backwoods settlement in 1620 and grew in less than 200 years into a force that defeated the greatest power on Earth. In less than 300 years, we grew into the world’s greatest power, one that rescued Europe (and the colonial world it ruled) from itself in 1917 and 1918.

    You are wrong that it can never be, but you are right that ours is no longer a government of the people, by the people, for the people. That seems to have perished from the Earth — unless We the People can rescue it from those who have hijacked it.

    Have you called your Senators yet? It is their house of Congress that proposes this addition to our tyranny.

    “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” — Edmund Burke

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *