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As I do every July, it is once again time for my annual anniversary fund-raising campaign to support this website and the work I do here.

 

This year I celebrate Behind the Black’s sixteenth anniversary. In those sixteen years I have done more than 35,000 posts (which means I added more than 2,000 in the last year), with my main focus covering the global space industry and the related planetary and astronomical science that comes from it. Along the way I sometimes also 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 culture have a direct impact on the future of our civilization and its on-going efforts to explore and eventually colonized the solar system.

 

You can’t understand one without understanding the other.

 

For those who still wish to support my work, please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. 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

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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.


Academic publisher Springer Nature to divest itself of woke Scientific American

Scientific American logo
About to go the way of the dodo.

As the saying goes, “Go woke, go broke.” The academic publisher Springer Nature has now announced it is selling off its two consumer magazines, Scientific American and the German Spektrum der Wissenschaft, stating that it wishes “to focus on its core global publishing activities across research, health and education.”

I don’t know about the German magazine, but I do know that Scientific American has become a junk and very woke publication in recent years, unreliable for good reporting as its editorial policy has been instead to push a variety of leftists tropes, from queer sex theories to Covid falsehoods. As the article at the link notes,

The low-lights from the magazine’s stack of articles include:

  • Scientific American colluding with other media to normalize “climate emergency” terminology, despite vast swaths of scientific evidence showing the Earth’s climate has continuously changed over 4 billion years.
  • The magazine pushing “birth parent” terminology, which is utter nonsense in the face of real biology.
  • The magazine offering a ridiculous take on football injuries…tying them to racism.
  • Endorsing Kamala Harris for President.

Other examples of the magazine pushing junk science can be seen here and here.

The article above also notes the interesting timing of this announcement, just before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was to approve the union its writer staff has recently overwhelming voted for. The unionization was supposedly about “compensation, workload, job security,” but it also included the demand for “editorial independence”, the typical code words used by the leftist journalists to demand the ability to write whatever they want, even if the magazine’s owners protest.

Well, rather than protest, this magazine’s owners decided to fire the magazine entirely.

Hat tip to reader Gary.

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

3 comments

  • BMJ

    I first started reading Scientific American on a regular basis when I started subscribing during my undergrad days more than 50 years ago. I kept renewing, but, after a while, I didn’t have enough “round tuits” to read it, so the magazines piled up.

    After I moved into my current apartment, I created some extra room by donating the issues after SA became politically correct. It appears that I was fortunate to not have had time to read them.

    I recall reading Philip Morrison’s book reviews and Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games columns. I found The Amateur Scientist feature quite interesting when “Red” Stong and, later, Jearl Walker wrote it. (Think of it as Hackaday decades before Hackaday was created.)

    I also remember that SA published an excellent set of books on building amateur telescopes, including how to grind and finish mirrors. (That was another “round tuit” project for me, but those items became rather scarce.)

    To quote a title of song by the rock band Queen, another one bites the dust.

    • Jeff Wright

      They were VERY ugly to Bjorn Lomborg

      I liked “21st Century Science & Technology” even if it was a Lyndon Larouche rag.

  • Jeff Wright

    They were VERY ugly to Bjorn Lomborg

    I liked “21st Century Science & Technology” even if it was a Lyndon Larouche rag.

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