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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


AGs from 22 states blast Biden’s attempt to illegally insert racial quotas and climate change into federal contracting law

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Joe Biden imposes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s
Green New Deal on all federal contractors

In May 2021 President Biden signed an executive order [pdf] requiring federal agencies to make climate change and helping “disadvantaged communities and communities of color” a major priority in all their work.

That executive order, which in many ways was simply a rewording of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s communist and bigoted Green New Deal, required agencies to do things like reconsider where their pension funds were invested and to change those investments — not to get the best return on the dollar as required by law — but to protect them from “the threats of climate-related financial risk.”

The executive order also demanded that the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council (FARC) require federal contractors to:

…publicly disclose greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related financial risk and to set science-based reduction targets; and (ii) ensure that major Federal agency procurements minimize the risk of climate change, including requiring the social cost of greenhouse gas emissions to be considered in procurement decisions and, where appropriate and feasible, give preference to bids and proposals from suppliers with a lower social cost of greenhouse gas emissions. [emphasis mine]


Such a regulation would apply to contracts issued by NASA to companies like SpaceX, and would almost certainly hinder their efforts while forcing them to advocate in favor of social political movements they might not agree with. For example, the language of the order makes it clear that it wants contractors to favor minorities and those “disadvantaged communities.” To do so would violate many civil rights acts, yet if these contractors refuse to do so the order will consider them “nonresponsible” and ineligible for federal contracts.

The attorneys general of twenty-two states have now sent the Biden administration a letter [pdf] protesting these regulatory changes, noting that not only is it not legal for Biden to change these contracting rules by executive order (they are established by laws passed by Congress), it is also a violation of the first amendment rights of contractors to force them to advocate specific political positions. As noted in the press release issued by the AGs:

This proposal is both extraordinarily costly and unlawful. Not only does President Biden lack the authority to directly instruct FARC to adopt these new emissions requirements, but even if he did, Congress never conferred upon FARC the ability to impose left-wing climate-change policies.

The letter was sent in response to the regulatory changes proposed forced by Biden’s executive order, and requests that the order and those regulatory changes be withdrawn.

Will the Biden administration consider this comment and change its approach? Of course not. I expect that a lawsuit will soon follow, and it will be filed not only by these attorneys general but by many companies as well.

Will the lawsuit work? As long as Democrats control the executive branch, both at the elected level as well as within the ranks, I doubt it. Consider the recent actions of the FCC. It did not get a presidential order, but it has still gone ahead and created new satellite regulations that exceed its legal statutory authority. And nothing is being done to stop it.

Unless a major house-cleaning occurs very very soon at the federal level, leftist policies and their advocacy are going to become the law of the land. Dare to say or do anything different as a contractor dependent on federal work and you will find yourself out of work, and bankrupt.

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. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.

 

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. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to 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.

 

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13 comments

  • If a contract specifically favors certain demographics, would that not make the unfavored demographics a ‘disadvantaged community’? Indeed, there can hardly be a greater social and political disadvantage than to be specifically excluded by government on account of race. I believe we have some historical experience with that.

    Welcome to the New American Theocracy, where the marginalization of those who don’t profess belief in ‘Climate Change’ and [very narrowly defined) ‘Diversity’ is not only encouraged, but codified. We’ve seen this movie, too.

  • Max

    Is your retirement secure? The rules on fiduciaries have changed, forcing them to “save the planet” with your money rather than saving your retirement.
    https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ebsa/ebsa20221122
    “a final rule that allows plan fiduciaries to consider climate change and other environmental, social and governance factors when they select retirement investments“

  • James Street

    Notice how you never hear about the American communist party any more? They’ve gone underground in the environmental and race hustling business.

    A couple of quotations from a YouTube conversation between Jordan Peterson and Christopher Rufo (I’ve never heard of him). They say the godless commies failed to bring about their godless commie utopia in America using economic inequality, now they are trying gender and racial (and environmental) inequality.

    Imposing Limits on the Woke? | Christopher Rufo | EP 335
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3t5cpGZwik
    46:30 Jordan Peterson: Identity politics – The Marxist experiment failed on the economic front and all the Marxists did was perform a slight of hand and reform an economic inequality and oppression into identity inequality and oppression.
    47:00 What constitutes Critical Race Theory defined by Christopher Rufo
    There are 3 main concepts
    1. The social analysis that the United States is a white supremacist country that promotes the concepts of freedom and equality but this is merely a smoke screen for naked racial domination
    2. The doctrine of intersectionality says that the world can be divided between oppressor and oppressed but innovating from the Marxist economic axis they say no no no it’s actually an access of identity, predominantly race but also including gender and sexuality
    3. The third component is what do you do to fix it? They argue that the Constitutional protections of the first amendment, the fourteenth amendment, private property should be overridden, should be suspended, and then society should engage in large scale wealth seizure and redistribution along the axis of race until you have equal outcomes.
    48:00 Jordan Peterson: It’s basically Marxism repackaged using ethnic, racial and sexual identity, especially with regards to the notion that the entire Capitalist infrastructure needs to be redistributed. It’s like well it’s not the bourgeoisie and the proletariat it’s whatever racial group or sexual group or ethnic group that you happen to place in the ascendancy.

  • James Street: 1. Rufo is now a big player in Florida. DeSantis has given him a position of power within the education bureaucracy, specifically at New College. Do some searches. He strongly believes, as I do, that conservatives have to be fearless in the use of legislative power, something Republicans have been too cowardly for decades to do.

    2. If you step back from Peterson’s analysis of modern woke theory, as described in your comment, it immediately becomes indistinguishable from Nazism, identity-based to determine who gets power and who gets killed.

  • And let me add one more point to #2: This is proved right time and again, every time you point it out and the left goes crazy with outrage that you dared do it.

  • David

    Democrats have made a huge mistake tying environmental and climate matters into their social agenda spelled out in the executive order president Biden signed that Mr. Zimmerman has outlined above.

    E & C issues require approaches and thinking that are in short supply when it comes to our country’s political machinery at many levels.

  • SDN

    “Dare to say or do anything different as a contractor dependent on federal work and you will find yourself out of work, and bankrupt.”

    And what the courts say will not mean squat. Our government operates on the principle of any other gang: “If you can’t shoot me, you can’t stop me.”

    That ESG rule will be put into effect because only companies that “volunteer” the information will be considered. Companies that refuse to “volunteer” will be audited and inspected into oblivion. See Gibson Guitars, SpaceX and the EPA, etc.

  • wayne

    “The White Pill”
    Official trailer
    Michael Malice
    https://youtu.be/oq2vj0ZD6Qg
    4:33

    “For every crime that was committed, there was someone to come to their defense.
    For every murder, there was an alibi. For every atrocity, there was an excuse.
    There were heroes, and there were villains. There were victims and there were victors.
    This is the History lesson they never bothered to teach you in school….”

  • Mark Ruscoe

    Totalitarianism, with nary a shot fired.

  • M Puckett

    Based on recent court rulings, I don’t think this is long for the world. It should bring a quick injunction.

  • M Puckett

    See the recent WV V EPA SCOTUS ruling.

  • Star Bird

    Biden selects from the Legion of Doom Black Manta and Giganta

  • David

    M Puckett makes a great point. Like many previous controversial executive orders handed out by presidents of both parties, this one will likely be tied up in the courts until a new president arrives on the scene to void it. There have been exceptions, but most of these “social” directives just don’t have permanent impacts.

    The seemingly ever rising waves of presidential executive orders issued by presidents over the last 20+ years points out the increasingly dysfunction of congress with the collapse of bipartisan efforts to solve the nation’s most vexing problems.

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