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Readers!

 

It is now July, time once again to celebrate the start of this webpage in 2010 with my annual July fund-raising campaign.

 

This year I celebrate the fifteenth anniversary since I began Behind the Black. During that time I have done more than 33,000 posts, mostly covering the global space industry and the related planetary and astronomical science that comes from it. Along the way I have also felt compelled as a free American citizen to regularly post my thoughts on the politics and culture of the time, partly because I think it is important for free Americans to do so, and partly because those politics and that culture have a direct impact on the future of our civilization and its on-going efforts to explore and eventually colonize the solar system.

 

You can’t understand one without understanding the other.

 

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A campaign ad that says it bluntly: “You lied.”

A campaign ad that says it bluntly: “You lied.”

It is… remarkable, the way that the Democrats were so bald-faced in that lie. It’s like they thought that the rules simply didn’t apply to them, or something. Apparently, the plan was to simply bull on through and expect nobody to call them on the fact that their entire policy position was based on things that everybody knew just weren’t so.

The Democrats must be called on these lies, strongly and often.

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

One comment

  • Kelly Starks

    I guess we voters are to blame. Politicians more and more blatently lie, because voters are increasinly unwilling to check to see if they are lieing – especially if the press doesn’t point it out.

    For example. A old friend was ranting against Paul Ryan (my congressmen) saying hes another born again hard social right christian, and he lied about when Obama said he’ld help keep a GM plant in his home town open. “It was proven that the plant was closed before Obama took Office.”

    Ok, the hard right social christian thing certainly doesn’t fit in with any of the votes, public sttaements, adn things he publishes in his newsletterm sttaement papers etc I get in email from him — and lets face it, hard core christian right folks are really in your face about it. My friend dismissed that, obviously I’m biased (toward christian fundy social attityudes??!!!)

    The second was more blunt. I looked up that city paper and GM history web pages. Obviously both would mention the closing of a 100 year old plant. Took about 5 min to find that the date of the shutdown in both was spring of Obama’s first year in office – not before Obama’s election. Said friend said that was wrong, it was “proven” that Ryan lied and the plant closed before Obama was elected. I.E. all the big papers he read said it, and he was utterly unwilling to bother looking at contradictory evidence.

    Similarly though simple numbers, demographics, projections by actuaries, etc etc, all said say Obamacare couldn’t do what they said it would – the believers (including the press) believed without question.

    Were increasingly a nation of folks taking political/technical/etc positions on faith.

    Carl Sagan warned about this decades ago in a interview that’s been cycling around the web last week or two..

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