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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
 
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c/o Robert Zimmerman
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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.


Boeing replaces the head of its defense/space/security division

Ted Colbert
Ted Colbert

Boeing today announced that the head of its defense/space/security division, Ted Colbert, has been removed, effective immediately.

New Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg in his first significant move since taking over in August, said Ted Colbert would be leaving and Steve Parker, the unit’s chief operating officer, would assume Colbert’s responsibilities until a replacement is named at a later date.

One project that Colbert was in charge of was Starliner, a program that has cost the company at least $1.6 billion in overruns because of numerous faulty engineering problems.

Colbert might not be to blame for the endless problems at Starliner, but the fish stinks from the head. He also might be very qualified, but sadly, as his picture shows, he is a minority, and since Boeing went all in on DEI racist hiring quotas a few years ago, which makes the skin color and gender of an applicant a major qualification in hiring, one can’t help wondering if he was a DEI (Didn’t Earn It) hire. At Boeing that policy created a goal to increase black staffing by 20%. Its full report [pdf] makes it very clear it no longer made talent, experience, or skill the primary qualification for getting hired, but skin color and sex took precedence.

As I said, one cannot help wondering if Colbert was hired not because of his great management and engineering knowledge, but because he happened to born with a dark skin color. If so, that might help explain the failures in this paricular division.

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

10 comments

  • Directly related:

    TWO FACED “BADASSED” FRUAD: POLITICAL TREASON

    “I very specifically remember this event and I was thinking at the time: This was Kamala Harris’s Ronald Reagan “I am paying for this microphone” moment and would have been revealed as a true badass. A rare and valuable missed opportunity.”

    https://www.sigma3ioc.com/post/two-faced-badassed-fruad-political-treason

  • This is a textbook example of how demographic-based hiring practices devalue real achievement. For anyone not a Straight White Male (The Oppressors), there will always be doubt as to the person’s actual ability; often, unjustified. But, still there. It’s reverse prejudice, and like the regular kind, harms the same people, but for State-approved reasons. By the same token, any Oppressor in a major role is viewed as having ‘gotten over’ on some exploited minority. Yeah, the Progressive Vision codified the last several decades, ain’t exactly as advertised. Remember that, when you vote Democrat.

  • Judd Clark

    Blair Ivey: “…there will always be doubt…” exactly. This is one of the worst evils of DEI.

  • Robert Pratt

    Non leftist minorities have been pointing to this very real phenomena for decades, it was on affirmative action before DEI, but Democrats don’t care because at root the pushers of this stuff are often the authentic bigots.

  • M. Murcek

    There used to be this thing in Corporate Land called a “performance review.” You either performed at or above the expectations, or you didn’t.

    Peter Drucker posited that an organization can have only one mission. As soon as it has two or more it will fail at all of them.

  • GaryMike

    My Chemistry degree and years of employed Astronomy instruction is not enough to pretend to be an engineer.

    White males need not apply.

    That’s the point.

    Illusions, delusions.

    In a generation or two, will white males be owed reparations?

  • Agree with all the DEI comments. One other thing is going on here: This is a complete disaster for the competent black engineer hire. Cheers –

  • BLSinSC

    WOW – I thought I’d be the voice of “reason” here with my comment “This is the problem with the Leftists’ “didn’t earn it” policies! Does the person REALLY have the abilities or just the “qualifications”? But, it looks like many others see the same issues of having PREFERENTIAL HIRING!! Sure there should be PREFERENTIAL HIRING, but it should be We PREFER SOMEONE WHO CAN DO THE JOB and HAS THE JOB EXPERIENCE and PROVEN RESULTS!!
    It is a shame that now people look upon a minority in a position and the first thought is “probably AA or DEI”! That’s not fair to people who have worked hard and succeeded on their own merit! The DEMOcrats don’t care – it’s the VOTES that they crave!
    Now, having said all that, did the guy REALLY have the experience and knowledge? If so then he surely had incompetent people below him!

  • pawn

    “Agree with all the DEI comments. One other thing is going on here: This is a complete disaster for the competent black engineer hire.”

    I know this to be true. I worked with and became friends with a black engineer who grew up in the Cherry Hill area of Baltimore.

    You should here him rant about the “racist honkies” he’s had to deal with over the years.

    Pretty funny actually and he takes in all in pretty good humor.

  • Craig Austin

    The feminists said everything will be better by eliminating males, the racists said that everything will be better when we eliminate whites. They are both habitual liars.

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