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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.
 

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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.


BBC Earth – Swarms of ten million starlings in Rome

An evening pause: These birds know nothing of social distancing. And good for them!

Hat tip Cotour.

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

4 comments

  • Skunk Bucket

    These images of huge flocks of birds in flight are beautiful and mesmerizing, but the poop problem is very real. When I was a child back in the late sixties and early seventies, the campus of the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley faced the same issue that Rome does now. Millions of jet black starlings (a non-native species in the US) would fly in for the night after a day’s feasting on the bountiful Weld county fields. Their cacophony was near deafening and the resulting mess disgusting.
    The university came up with a plan in which campus personnel and neighbors in the immediately surrounding area would simultaneously play that same starling distress call on whatever audio equipment they could find and bang blocks of wood together until the flocks took off.
    Living just a block from campus, my father, a professor there, would haul our big console stereo out onto the front porch, then play that horrendous screeching bird noise while my little sister and I banged our blocks together until our ears rang. Our neighbors up and down the street did likewise.
    It was all very scientific, with the local experts determining the best time of the evening to launch the attacks. It evidently worked, too, because as I grew older, flocks of starling weren’t an issue anymore. Still, for years after that we would occasionally pull out that 45 of the tortured starling and play it on the stereo to drive our pet cats absolutely batty.

  • Alex Andrite

    Call in the Falcon’s.

  • Captain Emeritus

    Just before dark, a crop-duster would spray liquid detergent over the massive roost.
    Spraying was timed to co-ordinate with light rain falling, and near freezing temperatures.
    The detergent washed away the birds protective oils, and they simply froze to death overnight.
    Front end loaders hauled them away, along with their droppings, measured in feet, below the trees.
    I still have small scaring in a lung from my own bout with histoplasmosis..
    That was the way the infestations were handled near Memphis Tn. in the late fifties.

  • Chris

    Mother Natures swarming drones

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