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Readers!

 

It is now July, time once again to celebrate the start of this webpage in 2010 with my annual July fund-raising campaign.

 

This year I celebrate the fifteenth anniversary since I began Behind the Black. During that time I have done more than 33,000 posts, mostly covering the global space industry and the related planetary and astronomical science that comes from it. Along the way I have also felt compelled as a free American citizen to regularly post my thoughts on the politics and culture of the time, partly because I think it is important for free Americans to do so, and partly because those politics and that culture have a direct impact on the future of our civilization and its on-going efforts to explore and eventually colonize the solar system.

 

You can’t understand one without understanding the other.

 

Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent independent analysis you don’t find elsewhere. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn’t influenced by donations by established companies or political movements. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.

 

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John Williams – Raider’s March

An evening pause: From one of the best films ever made, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). As I wrote about it at the time for a comic book fan group, it recognizes that there is good and evil, and that there is something in the universe that casts judgement on each. Such concepts had and continue to be largely rejected by modern intellectualism, at our peril.

Hat tip Edward Thelen.

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

6 comments

  • wayne

    Raiders, is an excellent movie. -First-date with my future wife, and at her preference.

  • Andrew

    I think our modern intellectualism is not that powerful. All of these films, Star Wars, Raiders, Even Pirates of The Caribbean, all of them play against that very backdrop! All of these films make millions of dollars! Why? Because right in our guts, we resonate to these underlying truths. We all know, at a very deep level, that there are good guys and bad guys and we all KNOW that the Good Guys ALWAYS face stiff odds. And we like it that way. Because we love our heros. No Evil? No Heros. Those films flop, because most people don’t resonate to that.

  • Steve Earle

    If you love ROTLA, as I do, then don’t watch this episode of the Big Bang Theory:

    “The Raiders Minimization”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfUUGrSMmxI

  • Frank

    The tone of the horns is splendid in this version.

  • eddie willers

    I, too, was (am) enamored with Raiders. I couldn’t find fault with any aspect of the film.

    That brings me to the most disappointment I ever had in a movie, and that was the followup. When I heard there would be a second Indiana Jones movie and that it was going to be a prequel I was ecstatic. That meant that Belloq and the nasty “I know you will” Nazi could return! We might get the story of Indy and Marion and Professor Ravenwood. The possibilities were endless.

    Instead, we got a screaming mess of a Goonies movie that had absolutely no reason to even be placed “in the past”. Leaden and unfun.

    I’m thinking the difference was Lawrence Kasdan.

  • wayne

    eddie–
    Yes– the follow up movies went in an entirely different direction, in my opinion. . They sorta degraded into a caricature of themselves, and not in a way I found appealing.

    (I do however enjoy the “Back to the Future” franchise, possibly because they made II & III at the same time, and I’m a sucker for time-travel tales.)
    (I am waiting for “them” to completely ruin Star Trek.)

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