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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.

 

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The count now more than 20

Corruption: More than twenty Obama officials have lost or destroyed emails after learning that Congress wanted to see them.

[I]n each case, the loss wasn’t disclosed to the National Archives or Congress for months or years, in violation of federal law,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R-California) said of [the] lost e-mails. “It defies logic that so many senior Administration officials were found to have ignored federal record-keeping requirements only after Congress asked to see their e-mails.”

Actually, it doesn’t defy logic. It is perfectly logical. This administration is corrupt, has broken the law numerous times, and is now aggressively destroying evidence to cover-up its corruption.

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

8 comments

  • Cotour

    I am listening to Elizabeth Holtzman, who was a Congress person at the time of the Nixon resignation on the Brian Lehrer radio show. She admits that she was amazed that throughout following presidency’s that presidents continue to go over the Constitutional line to varying degrees given the example of Nixon’s actions and the consequences that he paid. I think that is an excellent illustration about how naive we all are about what it is that the Constitution was designed to achieve.

    Just like the example of the above story about how this particular administration and the people that populate it are very willing and capable of a very organized and determined operation to deceive the sitting Congress and the American people about what it is that they are actually doing. This should come as no surprise to anyone, we are dealing with humans who in the end, when push comes to shove will surrender their sworn fiduciary responsibilities for their own party’s self interest and agenda. And that simply is what the Constitution is designed to counter balance in order that our country and society can move, as conceived and designed, in a cohesive way into the future

    Think about it, a sitting Congress person who is in the belly of the beast, passing law, pushing the buttons of power and spending all of that tax money was “shocked” that after the Nixon example that the following presidents would dare go over that line. How naive she was, didn’t she read and understand the handbook? (the Constitution)

    Let US not be naive about what it is that is going on, has gone on and will continue to go on. Human beings are what they are and taking that into consideration lets all have a fresh appreciation for what was accomplished those short 236 years ago by people who were able to “see” objectively the human animal and what it would take to counter balance their natural tendencies as it relates to the abuse of power and the individual.

    This president and the people who follow him and the continuing ongoing agenda to usurp the power and the rights of the individual are all expected events and were foreseen by the people who designed the solution to the ever subjective and self interested human being and their tendency to abuse power.

    These actions perpetrated by this administration (all administrations, party affiliations aside) must be rectified and things must again be brought back into the ever shifting balance that is the American political system. WE THE PEOPLE must insist on it!

  • Chris Kirkendall

    Many Administrations have had varying degrees of dishonesty or corruption, but the things we’re seeing with this Regime are unprecedented. In my lifetime I have never seen such blatant disregard for the Law or the Constitution, or complying with Congressional subpoenas. Their explanations for all the missing e-mails are just laughable. In Nixon’s case, the press was not about to let him off the hook for attempting to cover up the Watergate scandal. What’s different now is, never in my memory has the so-called Main-stream Media so blatantly cooperated in the cover-up. They not only don’t show any signs of holding the Obama Administration’s feet to the fire, they bend over backward in the opposite direction, accusing anyone who wants to get to the truth of being on a witch hunt. I’m not sure we can ever recover from the twin damages done by this Regime and the MSM…

  • Cotour

    The explanation to your question about the media standing down in the face of the clearly anti Constitutional nature of this administration:

    http://eagnews.org/1000-member-secretive-progressive-journalist-group-uncovered/

    The medias proactive nature regarding this particular administration and president may be a chink in the Constitutional armor but it is still the PEOPLE that must educate themselves and right the ship. Maybe I am naive at this point in expecting such moves by the general public who eats what the media serves up every day. You are what you eat.

    ” “The medium is the message” is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. ” Wikip.

    The media has chosen sides, organized and has surrendered their fiduciary responsibility due in part to the ongoing liberalization of the education system and as a function of the disconnect between the people that exist in the fantasy that is modern America. They are now propagandists.

    We live many layers from real reality in America and can while within this fantasy believe that we can reinterpret or further intellectualize reality to how we believe that it should actually operate. In other words we in America who have in real terms changed the world as an extension of our Constitution are a kind of victim of our own success. What irony, the reality of the universe in which we live may reclaim us in the end anyway. But never the less, we must accomplish what we must accomplish.

  • Pzatchok

    Don’t these people know that ALL Emails go through a server in order to be routed to their destination?
    Pretty much just like all snail mail goes through the post office first.

    They can erase all their hard drives all day long but the server keeps a copy of the Email.
    These are federally funded servers so they MUST keep back up copies of EVERYTHING that goes through them.
    Normally backed up once but often several times a day.

    Why are no investigators searching the servers for the Emails? Or are they doing it quietly and waiting to drop the bomb on the administration during the election?

  • Chris Kirkendall

    Right – that has been my question all along. Bob did provide a partial answer to this same question I posed a couple weeks ago – that there is some (rather remote) possibility that the data wasn’t kept (i.e., was NOT deliberately deleted), but that all the IT experts he talked to regarded their explanations as not credible…

  • Chris Kirkendall

    Yes, I just heard about this 1,000 member Leftist organization of so-called “Journalists” a few days ago. I’m not surprised it exists, but mildly surprised we were able to find out about it from a FOI request…

    Q: Why would they keep their group a secret? What they’re doing is not illegal, so why not just be truthful about it?

    A: Because they want the stories they write to APPEAR to be from a neutral, unbiased source! If they openly declared themselves Left-Wingers, most of their readers would immediately understand they were being fed Leftist propaganda ! ! They need to keep their true affiliations hidden to try to maintain their “objectivity”, which is non-existent.

    Funny – Conservatives are almost always happy to openly identify themselves & don’t feel the need to hide their true beliefs. That should tell you something about who’s really holding the moral high ground…

  • Pzatchok

    I can see a few( a very few) emails getting lost but the circumstances would have to be pretty specific.

    Maybe if I sent an email and it makes it to the server. But the server hard drive dies totally before the auto backup kicks in.

    Maybe then. But the server company would try to recover the data in several different ways, and they would at least keep the hard drive in storage for the length of the federal records keeping rules even if it was not recoverable yet.

    And wouldn’t the server farm be running something like a RAID hard drive setup for high through put speeds and at the same time a sort of running back up system?
    I don’t know if something similar to RAID is still even used.(just looked it up and it still is)
    Using a RAID system it would then require more than one hard drive to fail at the very same time. Any single drive failure is recoverable. And in many cases multiple drive failures can be recoverable.

    Desk top PC failure is not an option. It would not result in the loss of email data.

  • Chris Kirkendall

    re: ”
    Desk top PC failure is not an option. It would not result in the loss of email data.”

    Entirely correct – I made the same point in my comment a few weeks ago. I had an older Dell laptop that died (hard drive crash) a couple years ago & they were able to retrieve about 90% of the stuff I had stored there, and of course, once I bought a new one, VOILA ! – there was all my e-mail ! ! This story they’re telling makes you realize either how stupid they are, or how stupid they think WE are – maybe both…

    Reply

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