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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.


How leftwing journalists lie

Oink! The Washington editor for Bloomberg today demonstrated to all the dishonest way liberal journalists like to cover the budget debates in Congress.

In an opinion piece for Bloomberg, editor Albert Hunt says that the Republican cuts to the budget threaten the American lead in science. According to him, “House Republicans want to cut NIH funding for the current year by more than $1 billion, to $29.5 billion.” Because of this cut would “future advances in areas like brain science are especially threatened.”

NIH research is “absolutely indispensible” to breakthroughs in neuroscience, says Guy McKhann, the founding director of the Mind/Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the former chairman of the department of neurology at the university’s medical school.

Even worse, “Young researchers would be most affected” and might flee the country for “places like Singapore and China.”

To further strengthen his case, Hunt finds a former Republican Congressman, an Illinois RINO by the name of John Porter, who while in Congress had helped triple the NIH’s budget over that past 15 years and who is “horrified” by these cuts. “These are blind cuts that take us exactly in the wrong direction; they are wrong-headed and short-sighted.”

The trouble with so-called analysis is that while Hunt makes it sound as if the budget cuts are going to decimate the NIH and all future research, he fails to note that all the Republicans are proposing to do is have NIH go back to the budget it had in 2008.

How terrible! Wasn’t it only two years ago that we all had to go to witch doctors to cure our sicknesses, and doctors used leeches to heal illness? In fact, before Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress under Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi appropriated that extra money in 2009 and 2010, no medical research was possible in America! The NIH was bankrupt and could do nothing! And if we let these barbaric Republicans cut those extra dollars, it is very clear that American society is going to quickly return to the Dark Ages!

You see how absurd this is. The Republicans propose cutting the federal budget back to the perfectly acceptable numbers from 2008, and we are all going to die!

Hunt should be ashamed.

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

2 comments

  • LINO

    Anyone in congress (of either party) who lies on the floor of the body in a public statement that misleads voting should be thrown the hell out.

    That would empty the place quickly.

  • larry

    Get a grip. Your science stuff is ok. But all of us have fallen in to this werid left-right analysis – which short circuit any intelligent discussion. People Lie and People are assholes. And some people work on telling the truth or what the understand the truth to be…

    Simplifying the scenario for “them” vs. “us”, is just a high school perspective.

    The big issue as you point is the where is the $ going! It’s the classic Monte Carlo on a large scale.

    Uncomfortable facts, And then comes the emotional smokescreens.

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