Scroll down to read this post.

 

Readers!

 

The time has come for my annual short Thanksgiving/Christmas fund drive for Behind The Black. I must do this every year in order to make sure I have earned enough money to pay my bills.

 

For this two-week campaign, I am offering a special deal to encourage donations. Donations of $200 will get a free autographed copy of the new paperback edition of Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, while donations of $250 will get a free autographed copy of the new hardback edition. If you desire a copy, make sure you provide me your address with your donation.

 

As I noted in July, the support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.

 

In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.

 

Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.

 

Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four 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.
 

3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:

 

4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed 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.


NASA pushes discrimination to favor minorities in its education workshops

NASA: dedicated to segregation!
NASA: dedicated to the new segregation!

“Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” A NASA press release today proudly touted what it called a “Culturally Inclusive Planetary Engagement in Colorado,” one of a series of recent science/education workships designed specifically to help “black and Latinx youth and their families.”

Though the events are apparently not segregated, it also appears that white and Asian kids and their parents were not really welcome.

Planetary scientists and engineers from Boulder, as well as scientists from Florida, Maryland, and Alaska participated. ReaCH partnered with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Metro Denver, whose staff participated in the workshop to share their perspectives. Other educators local to the Denver area also participated, along with an educational specialist from NASA@ My Library (another Science Activation program). The workshop culminated in an event at the Shopneck Boys & Girls Club in Brighton, CO; workshop participants facilitated a variety of hands-on planetary activities for approximately 120 children. Workshop participants also shared information about college pathways into science professions with teenagers at the Club.

The location and the local organizations were specifically chosen to aid these specific minorites above anyone else.

[Workshop l]ocations are near concentrations of planetary research facilities and/or Latinx/Black communities.

There was a time more than a half century ago when such a program might have made sense, especially when real segregation and racial discrimination was prevalent. Today however it simply reeks of bigotry and favoritism, simply replacing the old favored race (whites) with a new set of races (blacks and hispanics). This bigotry is very evident in the program’s “objectives and outcomes” statement:

Learn evidence-based strategies for engaging Black and Latinx audiences:

  • Deepened understanding of the effect of an individual’s identity and bias on engagement practices
  • Deepened understanding of the features of equity-oriented, authentic partnerships
  • Deepened understanding of how to recognize and elevate audience assets

Practice planetary science engagement through a culturally inclusive lens:

  • Expanded network of planetary scientists and informal educators
  • Increased confidence in co-designing culturally inclusive, planetary science engagement
  • Increased confidence in implementing culturally inclusive, planetary science engagement

The focus isn’t really education or science, but teaching these minority kids that they have been oppressed, and that they therefore deserve special treatment to teach their oppressors a lesson. Great stuff to teach little kids!

I also strongly suspect — though I have no direct evidence — that this program was more explicitly discriminatory in the past, but has since eliminated such language to avoid lawsuits. The press release for example refers to “careful revisions to these workshops and detailed evaluation,” without specifying those revisions. The changes could be of course revisions to make the events more effective, but based on recent history it is just as likely the program managers suddenly realized that expressly limiting attendence only to minorities was blatantly illegal.

Nor is this program the only NASA educational outreach program that appears to favor minorities. In fact, the only other such program, labeled VIRTEX (Virtual Trips to Extreme Environments), appears to partner with the same organizations in the same locales, thus favoring the same minorities. As far as I can tell, NASA has no similar outreach program designed to work with all schools, regardless of race.

The bill that founded NASA included a requirement that it foster education nationwide. It did not say that the agency should play favorites based on race, ethnicity, or sex. Yet that is what NASA is now doing, and like many government agencies and those organizations funded by the government, it is doing it routinely and systemwide.

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. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. 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

13 comments

  • Chas

    Doesn’t make any difference since the quality white workers will be working for Musk on actual spacecraft and NASA has
    become a dysfunctional old relic…

  • Max

    “Education equity”, because there are minorities in every country, the left feels better about themselves to give selected groups “favored status”.
    Every Democrat is mother Tresa now and won’t feel bad about the evil they do as they are compelled to make the world in their own image.
    Just as John Karry’s daughter became a doctor to help people, and then advises the world economic forum to encourage countries to start executing climate deniers and conservatives.
    That goes along with documents on official government websites outlying the redefinition of what American terrorist is, and how the descendants of the terrorist in the rebellion against King George creating this illegal country and how they must be punished along the East Coast starting with denial of government help with Hurricane relief. Good grief.
    Or claiming women have the right to do with their body anything they wish… Only as long as they don’t refuse to take a vaccination shot. A persons right to do with their body extends just so far with the liberals. It seems you only have a right to your Genitals/reproductive organs. (if you do not own your own body, then you truly own nothing)

    Which brings me to the point… The left screams about democracy but it soon will be twisted into a pretzel as majority vote (mob rule) can no longer be tolerated because it’s not sustainable, equitable or good governance!
    Democracy “violates equity”.
    (But that’s why we are a republic)

    Hasn’t become obvious to everyone? That those who think they know a better way of doing things has no connection to reality? The “do gooders” are destroying this world. but then we could’ve told them that the “road to hell” is paved with “good intentions”.

  • Q: Is this just a temporary trend in a cycle until some measure of a new balance can be arrived at?

    Or, a founding of a new paradigm in human education and work that will lead the country and the world to a new reality of excellence?

    If I had to choose, In the long run, I choose the former.

    Stay tuned.

  • This is a representation a representative of the latter: https://youtu.be/2ypMZ_KaY6k?si=nx6A4UvweeOnLs5Q

  • Catch Thirty-Thr33

    Don’t forget the obsession with “needing more girls in STEM”. To which I say, “What’s wrong with girls and boys doing what they are best at no matter what it is?”

  • Ashley B Carrier

    Do I really care if the best people NASA can find look like Ed Bagley, Jr. and Scarlett Johanssen?

    No, I really don’t care.

  • Htos1av

    It’s ok as the timeline is to allow all of us from Gen.1 to die off and not be able to edify the younger generations. /sarc=”off”

  • Jeff Wright

    You want as many pro-space folks as you can get.
    Without this, the only science many youths will see are ecology studies that lambast spaceflight.

  • pzatchok

    When can white men be forgiven for their ancestors crime?

    How many generations does it take for a new free equal people or immigrant to reach educational and financial equality with the “native” peoples of that land?

  • Jeff Wright

    It isn’t just WASP dudes…in Africa we are seeing how “truth & reconciliation” type blood guilt fails everyone.

    A true secular humanist (I know, boo/hiss) stresses the brotherhood of man. Intersectionality undermines that message.

    No conflict ever was resolved by one participant saying “the fight’s over when I hit you back.”

    I remember a story on CNN by Amanpour, when she was overseas at a makeshift prison.

    I think it was Rwanda.

    The genocide was more hands on than in Germany and Poland—but the folks there have always lived in a hostile environment.

    I think there were families, mind you, behind wires.

    Every so often, some suited UN blowhard would walk outside, read some high-falutin screed about how bad everyone was, then walk back inside.

    Though it was a prison for criminals—it itself looked more like a concentration camp.

    All reparations did was make Germany come back ten times as hard.

    I’m with Henry Ford in saying history is bunk. Kids play together just fine until their parents sow seeds of division in their heads—even if it is well meaning.

  • Edward

    pzatchok asked: “When can white men be forgiven for their ancestors crime?

    It cannot be too long. Mexicans are not being blamed for the barbaric sacrifices that the Aztec and Mayan empires performed up until the evil Spaniards put a stop to the practice, half a millennium ago. So we should be able to be forgiven well within half a millennium. It seems to me that at the time of the Mexican-American war, these sacrifices were long forgotten, so we should be forgiven within a quarter of a millennium of the end of our ancestors’ crimes, which would be less than a century from now.

    But wait. Not all white men are descended from those who are guilty of the crimes all the rest of us are being treated as guilty of. In fact, many white men are the ones who spent treasure and spilled their own blood to stop the crimes of a small number of other white men. And what about the guilt of black former slaves who then became slaveowners themselves, while it was still legal? Should not their descendants be considered just as guilty as the descendants of the white men who committed crimes and more guilty than the white men whose ancestors are completely innocent of such crimes? It isn’t just that the crimes of the fathers are visited upon their sons, but it seems that they are visited upon the great great grandchildren of those who stopped the crime, and by the great great grandchildren of those who were not even in the country at the time of the crime.

    Man, how fair is that?

    It seems to me that an iniquity is being visited on the undeserving innocent. If the descendants of the criminals are treated as guilty, then shouldn’t the descendants of the saviors be treated as heroes? It looks like the attack on the guilty is done with a shotgun approach and many innocents are injured from the widespread spray. It doesn’t help that the attack comes after the guilty have all died.

    How many generations does it take?

    Exodus 20 gives a clue:

    … for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who …

    Exodus 34 supports that:

    The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

    If God can forgive the fifth generation, then surely the non-jealous man can forgive sooner, but why does the man even blame the savior and the uninvolved?

    Oh, I should not have gone there. If the non-jealous man is capable of blaming the uninvolved — and worse, blame the savior — then he may not be capable of ever forgiving the sinner’s descendants, and maybe not the descendants of the innocent or the savior, either.

    Perhaps we white men are being tested for having the patience of Job. We may have to suffer the blame for people who can only be associated with us due to similar skin tones, not associated by relations, proximity (temporal or geographical), or creed (San Francisco city and California state are pondering paying reparations, and neither ever had or supported slavery). The descendants of those who rejected slavery are considered as guilty as those who actually embraced and practiced it.

    So, at what skin shade are men considered not guilty of someone else’s ancestor’s crime?

    If reverse discrimination can be used to correct an inequity, then can double reverse discrimination be applied for just as may generations in order to correct the iniquity being used to counteract prior iniquity? And how many cycles of such iniquities would have to be applied in order to damp out the oscillations between counteracting inequities caused by all the recursive reverse discriminations?

  • Gonzotx

    I’m with Henry Ford in saying history is bunk. Kids play together just fine until their parents sow seeds of division in their heads—even if it is well meaning.

    Henry Ford was responsible for bringing in Muslims to work his factories

    He hated Jews

  • Max

    A great example the the sins of the father is Haiti.

    A slave colony, who rebelled and threw off their masters. The first in the west to do so. Large loans to establish the colony were not paid back so the East Indies trade company (Britain?) would not allow any trade until the debt was paid and used it as an example to keep others in line.
    Haiti is still the poorest nation in the world to this day.

    Look at the dominion republic who shares half the island and ask yourself what causes the difference between the two?
    Racial hatred is largely manufactured by our betters because if we’re fighting each other we can’t rise up against them. We’ve seen it firsthand with Antfa and black lives matter…

Readers: the rules for commenting!

 

No registration is required. I welcome all opinions, even those that strongly criticize my commentary.

 

However, name-calling and obscenities will not be tolerated. First time offenders who are new to the site will be warned. Second time offenders or first time offenders who have been here awhile will be suspended for a week. After that, I will ban you. Period.

 

Note also that first time commenters as well as any comment with more than one link will be placed in moderation for my approval. Be patient, I will get to it.

Leave a Reply

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