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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.

 

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Trump exits Paris climate agreement

As he had promised during the campaign, President Trump today announced that he was withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate treaty that Obama had agreed to (but was never ratified by the Senate).

More here.

Despite Trump’s moderate liberal leanings on many issues (budgets, healthcare), it does appear that when it comes to the environmental movement’s corruption of science and overuse of regulation he is quite willing to do things that will upset the elitist ruling class that has done such a bad job of ruling for the past two decades.

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

11 comments

  • Cotour

    And this is the correlation that the media is making:

    http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/massive-crack-antarctic-ice-shelf-grows-11-miles-article-1.3213327

    Trump could have stopped that crack!

    But he chose not to.

  • wayne

    This is a good thing from Trump.

    Cotour–
    – an inconvenient truth about Al Gore, I know you will enjoy:

    in brief; his house in Tennessee, circa 2007– “… uses an average of 17,768 kWh of electricity per month.”
    And this was apparently UP from the previous year, after he bragged about installing new insulation and additional solar-panels, blah, blah, blah.

    Disingenuous liar, is he.

    one of many articles that appeared at the time-

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/2153179/Al-Gores-electricity-bill-goes-through-the-insulated-roof.html

    Personally, I use about 500 +/- kWh a month, 700-800/month during the Summer air-conditioning Season. 15 cents a kWh, all-in.
    (1,800 sq ft house) ((yes, we do use A/C in Michigan))

  • Willi

    i’m on the mailing list maintained by “Senate Conservatives Action”. I just received a message from them asking me to thank President Trump for his action on the Paris accord by sending him a thank-you form letter via email. The process of sending the form letter gave me a chance to edit the letter. So, I retained the first sentence that said “thank you” and replaced the remainder with words about how I disapproved of his breaking his promise to move Israel’s capitol and would be voting against him in the 2020 Republican presidential primary. Probably a useless gesture but it made me feel better.

  • Max

    Elon musk and other CEOs are leaving the Trump administration.
    http://fortune.com/2017/06/01/elon-musk-trump-paris-agreement/
    It would be great if he could give a detailed response to trumps speech, So we can all admire his reason for leaving as a well-thought-out correct response that he thinks it is. It would give us some insight on how this man’s brain works…

  • Garry

    Wayne, you asked in another thread how much electricity costs in Connecticut: we’re currently paying 13 cents per kWh. We were paying much more until my wife took a close look at our bill and found that buying directly from the utility was a better deal.

    It’s funny you find it necessary to say that you use air conditioning in Michigan; my only visit to Michigan was in the mid 80s when I was stranded for a few days at (now closed) Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Oscoda. They told us it was a record setting temperature at the time; I don’t remember what it was, but it was well over 100 degrees.

    I know Michigan has a relatively cold climate, but because of that experience my first thought when I hear Michigan is “that hot place.”

    Similarly, I have a friend who stayed with us for 10 days and the sun never came out, which was unusual. To this day he says “next time someone tells me to stick something where the sun don’t shine, I’m taking it to Connecticut.”

    Local weather has more variation and is more complicated than the “experts” insist.

  • wayne

    Garry–
    thank you. I know the area of which you speak— doesn’t often get that warm “up north”, but once you install the A/C, you never go back! (I drove for 20 years without car A/C, now I wouldn’t leave the driveway without it.)
    Electric costs me 15 cents kWh, all-in. (SW Michigan shoreline. Natural Gas, Coal, and Nuclear, in that order, account for 80% of State generation.)
    It does gets ungodly hot (humid) in Michigan, although that is generally confined to July-August. Lake Michigan moderates a lot of my extremes, and the interior is generally warmer in the Summer & colder in the Winter.

    Max–
    Musk was only one of ‘like’ 20 people that voluntarily serve on the economic advisory panel. (They only meet 1x a month. It’s largely a show-panel.)

    Musk is a Crony Statist, at heart. He may or may not be a radical-egalitarian, but he’s definitely a utopian Statist. One things he is not, is the Poster Boy for honest capitalism.
    His rockets work, but he’s not driven by profit per se, he wants to die on Mars.
    Tesla and Solar City (started by his cousin) are textbook examples of hand-in-glove industrial crony policy. (Paypal made money, Tesla & Solar City, do not. )

    tangentially– I wish all these people would shut up.
    I had to listen to them lecture me and spout all their blatant lies non-stop 24/7, for 8 years, totally completely sick of it all.

  • Alex

    @wayne:

    I use about 100 kWh a month (or 1200 kWh / year), that is 0,5% of El Gore’s consumption!

  • wayne

    Alex–
    thanks for that factoid.
    How much does that 100 kWh’s cost you?? (Can you convert that to US dollars?)

    How much is gasoline in your Country? In Michigan, we are hovering around $2.40, the US gallon. (128 ounces)
    Milk– “$1.78 a gallon, at Walmart. (“Live better, spend less, Walmart.”)
    ((who, btw, receive 18% of gross revenues & 10% of gross profits, from the SNAP (“food stamps”) program.))

  • Garry

    I hate to rain on anybody’s parade, but Trump hasn’t pulled out of the Paris Agreement; he’s merely announced that he is going to do so, while saying that he would like to renegotiate it.

    Given that he sees everything through the lens of “negotiation,” is he actually going to pull out, or is he just holding that as a threat in his efforts to get a better deal? I think he’s going to pull out, but am not 100 percent convinced; I don’t completely trust any politician, and don’t yet have a real good feel for how Trump acts.

    I would like to see an action to actually pull out, preferably the quickest way possible.

    And I have not read anything about what happens between the time we submit the documents to pull out, and when the pull-out become effective (anywhere from a year to 4 years, depending on the route). Wish I had more time to research that, or that journalists would do their background work and spell it out for us.

    The most likely long-term result is what happened with the Kyoto Protocol: the US was one of the few countries not to sign on, yet was also one of the countries to achieve its goal as stated in the Protocol. I’d be good with that, so long as the CO2 reductions come from economically rational decisions (which is probably a result of the US not signing on to Kyoto, and a cause of the achievement of the goal).

  • wayne

    Garry–
    good stuff.

    We’re not out, until we are actually, out.
    In the meantime, the cash still flows, out of our Treasury, the wrong way.
    (Tillerson– he’s never met a carbon-tax scheme, he didn’t love.)

    Just wait until Priebus, Ryan, and Mitch, cook up a “better scheme,” when they “exit, but replace,” with an “even more wonderful plan.”
    Said it many times before; Trump loves our LGBTQNAACP, United Mine workers, who also assemble cars in the off-season, for the United Auto Workers.

  • Edward

    Garry wrote: “Trump hasn’t pulled out of the Paris Agreement; he’s merely announced that he is going to do so, while saying that he would like to renegotiate it.

    Given that he sees everything through the lens of ‘negotiation,’ is he actually going to pull out, or is he just holding that as a threat in his efforts to get a better deal?

    I noticed this, too. He certainly is not adamant about being skeptical of AGW. As wayne noted, Trump often “keeps” his promises, but not in the way he led us to expect. We may end up with an “even more wonderful plan.

    Garry wrote: “I don’t completely trust any politician, and don’t yet have a real good feel for how Trump acts.

    “Repeal and replace” with a similarly disastrous plan seems to be a modus operandi. “Put it in writing so that it can be stopped by the courts” seems to be another.

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