Category: Essays And Commentaries

Long essays or op-ed length commentaries on the issues of the day or on topics of special interest.

Just as I refuse to say “native American”, I refuse to say “Gulf of America”

1:57 pm

A British map from 1700, with the Gulf of Mexico labeled at
A British map from 1700, with the Gulf of Mexico
labeled at “The Great Bay of Mexico”

The recent effort by Donald Trump to get the name of the Gulf of Mexico changed to the “Gulf of America” appears at first glance to have many laudable aspects, the most important of which his desire to energize the American people to have pride in their country. For too long young Americans have been indoctrinated with the anti-American Marxist poison pushed by our modern bankrupt academic community, and have thus been trained to think timidly and with hate about their own country.

Advocating this name change is Trump’s way of quickly countering that negativity. The United States is founded on noble principles — “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” — and it has lived up to those ideals with remarkable success during its entire 250 year history. Thus, Americans have plenty to be proud of, and to Trump’s mind something needed to be done to underline that fact.

Hence, his push to change the “Gulf of Mexico” to the “Gulf of America.”

And yet, as much as I support his general effort to invigorate Americans to their glorious past, to my mind this particular effort by Trump is as false and as shallow as the left’s never-ending demands that we use new language for everything. American Indians should be “native Americans”, even though everyone born in the U.S. is native. “Chairman” must become “Chair” or “Chairperson,” even though such usage is ugly and unnecessary. Spaceflight can never be “manned,” football teams can’t be “Redskins,” and “communists” must now be called “progressives.”

And worst of all we must all use the pronouns demanded by perverts, even if when by doing so we are denying reality.

Such abuse of language offends me, as a writer. » Read more

21 comments

A positive endgame in Gaza begins to loom

2:10 pm

Israel food products, provided directly to Gazans
Israel food products, provided directly to Gazans.
Click for video.

Several news stories in the past few weeks suggest to me that we are beginning to see the first signs of the end game that will bring about the defeat of Hamas and the establishment of a sane society within the Gaza strip.

First, it appears that Hamas is short of cash, according to a news report from a Saudi newspaper and then re-reported by an Israeli news outlet.

Sources within the terror group revealed that Hamas is struggling to pay salaries — not only to government employees, but also to members of its military wing and staff in other affiliated bodies at all levels.

The sources added that the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing, have not paid salaries to terrorists for approximately three months and are facing serious financial difficulties in acquiring essential equipment for their military operations.

One of the things that has propped Hamas up for decades has been its control of foreign aid. The money comes in and Hamas doles it out while keeping large portions for its own use. The distribution of money gives Hamas leverage, while the money it keeps reinforces its power. Under Trump that foreign aid spigot has been largely shut down, and this story suggests we are now seeing the first results of this policy.

Second, Israel is now taking over the direct distribution of humanitarian aid. In the past Hamas maintained its power over its citizens by acting as the go-between of food and medicine. Nothing would go to anyone unless Hamas got its dirty hands on it first. Often no aid at all would reach Gazans. Hamas would keep it all, shipping it underground to its tunnels for use later during siege. Or it would sell that aid on the black market, raising money to fund its terrorist operations.

Israel, in partnership with the United States, is now ending that vile practice.
» Read more

12 comments

SpaceX launches Starship/Superheavy on ninth test flight, but experiences issues in orbit

5:40 pm

Starship in orbit before losing its attitude control
Starship in orbit before losing its attitude control

SpaceX today was able to successfully launch Starship and Superheavy on its ninth test flight, lifting off from SpaceX’s Starbase spaceport at Boca Chica.

The Superheavy booster completed its second flight, with one of its Raptor engines actually flying for the third time. Rather than recapture it with the launchpad chopsticks, engineers instead decided to push its re-entry capabilities to their limit. The booster operated successfully until it was to make its landing burn over the Gulf of Mexico, but when the engines ignited all telemetry was lost. Apparently that hard re-entry path was finally too much for the booster.

Starship reached orbit and functioned successfully for the first twenty minutes or so. When engineers attempted a test deployment of some dummy Starlink satellites, the payload door would not open properly. The engineers then closed the door and canceled the deployment.

Subsequently leaks inside the spacecraft with its attitude thrusters caused the attitude system to shut down and Starship started to spin in orbit. At that point the engineers cancelled the Raptor engine relight burn. The spacecraft then descended over the Indian Ocean as planned, but in an uncontrolled manner. Mission control then vented its fuel to reduce its weight and explosive condition. It essentially broke up over the ocean, with data was gathered on the thermal system until all telemetry was lost.

Though overall this was a much more successful flight than the previous two, both of which failed just before or as Starship reached orbit, the test flight once again was unable to do any of its objectives in orbit. It did no deployment test, no orbital Raptor engine burn test, and no the re-entry tests of Starship’s thermal protection system. Obviously the engineers gathered a great deal of data during the flight, but far less than hoped for.

SpaceX has a lot of Superheavy and Starship prototypes sitting in the wings. I expect it will attempt its next flight test, the tenth, relatively quickly, by July at the very latest. I also do not expect the FAA to stand in the way. It will once again accept SpaceX’s investigative conclusions instantly and issue a launch license, when SpaceX stays it is ready to launch.

As Starship reached orbit as planned, I am counting this as a successfully launch. The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

64 SpaceX
30 China
6 Rocket Lab
6 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 64 to 49.

33 comments

Supreme Court declines case of blacklisted student who declared “There are only two genders”, proving the large leftist blob is not going away no matter what Trump does

12:54 pm

The shirt that offended teachers at Nichols Middle School
Liam Morrison, wearing the evil shirt that he wore the
second time teachers at Nichols Middle School sent
him home.

The Supreme Court today declined by a vote of 7-2 to hear the case of Liam Morrison, who as a 12-year-old was sent home from Nichols Middle School in Massachusetts because he wore a T-shirt that said “There are only two genders.” Later he came to school wearing the shirt in the picture to the right, and was sent home again.

Morrison and his parents sued, noting in their complaint that since the 1960s the courts have consistently ruled that students have free speech rights. However, in almost all those earlier cases the students were expressing views supportive of leftist causes, so of course their first amendment rights were aggressively protected by the courts.

Because Liam Morrison was taking a conservative rightwing position, however, the court now believes students like him are too young to have first amendment rights, and so of course he has been effectively silenced in school, permanently.

This case illustrates something that all freedom-loving Americans had better recognize. Just because Trump is shutting down whole agencies, firing hundreds of thousands of leftist government workers, denying federal funds to indoctrination universities like Harvard, we should not assume that all will be well in just a few years.
» Read more

4 comments

The real reason we celebrate Memorial Day

9:38 am

Francis James Floyd's plane after crash

To the right is another cool image, but this one has nothing to do with astronomy, though you will likely be hard pressed to figure out exactly what you are looking at without some study. It is clearly some broken metal object inside a forest, but identifying its exact nature is not obvious.

What you are looking at is the remains of a propeller plane (likely flown on a reconnaissance mission) that crashed in the jungles of Vietnam during that long and tragic war of the 1960s and 1970s. Most amazingly, despite its twisted nature, the pilot survived and was fortunately quickly rescued by American troops before the arrival of the Vietcong.

That pilot’s name was Francis James Floyd. His son Jeffrey, a regular reader of Behind the Black, sent me the picture to illustrate that guys who fly wingsuits are not the only ones willing to do crazy things in the air. As he wrote,

Our dad fought in WWII, Korea and Vietnam as an Air Force pilot. While he had to learn how to parachute jump, he hated it. Even if the engine(s) failed, as long as he had his wings attached, he would not exit (jump). He said “There are two kinds of people that jump out of airplanes: idiots, and people in the armed services.”

So, the attached photo is what was left of his plane in Vietnam. He used the tops of the forest trees to try to slow down, like skimming the water. Fortunately, the good guys reached him first, and he came home.

Francs Floyd however was not an exception or rare thing, like the wingsuit fliers are today. He was one of a massive generation of Americans who, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, quickly enlisted to defend the United States and — more importantly — its fundamental principles of freedom and limited government.

Floyd was only twenty when he enlisted in 1942. He had no flight experience, but was quickly trained to become a pilot who flew fighter bomber missions over Italy. Later he returned to fly in the Korean War, and then again in Vietnam. As his son adds,
» Read more

3 comments

Fish & Wildlife has expanded its regulatory rule to every tree in much of the U.S.

11:35 am

Areas now subject to regulation if you intend to cut down any trees
The blue and green areas are now subject to
Fish & Wildlife regulation if you intend to cut
down any trees

Apparently in a bid to give itself more power over every proposed building project in the United States, the Fish & Wildlife Service in October 2024 (just before the election) wildly expanded its regulatory rules for protecting endangered bats.

According to the new rules, Fish & Wildlife now considers the removal of any trees at such projects to be a risk to the endangered species, because those trees “may” have been used as roosts and would therefore threaten the species ability to survive if removed.

No matter that there may be thousands of other trees nearby, including many acres of forest. If you are building anything that involves cutting down any trees, you will be subjected to Fish & Wildlife supervision that could block construction. And the area this new rule covers includes almost the entire eastern and northern parts of the United States, as shown on the maps to the right, taken from the new regulation guidelines [pdf].

Long time reader Jack O’Leary informed me of this new power grab. He also sent me information about one particular project in Massachusetts involving the installation of a well and pump station in a forested area southeast of Boston, far from any bat hibernacula. The only impact this project might have on any bats is the removal of some trees, though the project is located in a forested area with hundreds of acres of trees all around (as shown clearly on the satellite view on Google maps).

Yet Fish & Wildlife makes it clear in its letter [pdf] to the project that its “Endangered Species Act requirements are not complete.” Fish & Wildlife admits that the project will pose no direct threat to the endangered bats, but the very act of cutting down a few trees “may affect” the bats, so therefore government regulatory supervision is required.
» Read more

9 comments

In telling us why they are fleeing Trump America, three Yale professors prove they are unqualified for their jobs

12:11 pm

What many now label the
The “Poison Ivy League” may have finally
gotten better!

Good riddance! In a New York Times op-ed on May 14, 2025, three former Yale professors attempted to explain why they have quit their jobs at Yale and moved to teach in Canada at the University of Toronto.

Unbeknownst to them, their idiotic and ignorant reasons for leaving demonstrated that they are actually completely unqualified to be college professors, and that Yale (and the United States) will be better off without them.

Professor Stanley is leaving the United States as an act of protest against the Trump administration’s attacks on civil liberties. “I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency,” he said.

Professor Shore, who has spent two decades writing about the history of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe, is leaving because of what she sees as the sharp regression of American democracy. “We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink,” she said. “And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”

Professor Snyder’s reasons are more complicated. Primarily, he’s leaving to support his wife, Professor Shore, and their children, and to teach at a large public university in Toronto, a place he says can host conversations about freedom. At the same time, he shares the concerns expressed by his colleagues and worries that those kinds of conversations will become ever harder to have in the United States.

As noted in this analysis of their actions, all three say they are doing this because they have studied fascism and thus “equate ‘Make America Great Again’ with Adolf Hitler’s ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.'”

The analogy is so weak and incoherent as to be laughable. As the essayist in this second link notes, it cheapens the meaning of fascism and in fact suggests these three “professors” don’t have the slightest idea what the word means, despite their claim they have studied it.

More important however are the three quirks of personality illustrated by their position and actions that signify why their are unqualified to be professors to begin with.
» Read more

26 comments

Trump administration releases its proposed NASA budget for 2026

10:29 am

The Trump administration today released [pdf] its proposed federal budget for the 2026 fiscal year, calling for an overall reduction in federal spending by about 7.6%, with NASA getting a budget cut of about 24%.

A summary of the budget can be found in this NASA press release. The main bullet points are these:

  • SLS and Orion will be retired after flying the two more missions. Whether those flights will be manned or not however is left vague.
  • Lunar Gateway will be shut down
  • The Mars Sample Return mission will be cancelled.
  • The overall manned budget for interplanetary development is increased, and now includes a line item of $1 billion for “Mars-focused programs”.
  • Flights to ISS are reduced (cutting a half billion from this budget) to facilitate the “transition to a more cost-effective commercial approach to human activities in space as the space station approaches the end of its life cycle.”
  • Eliminates “low-priority climate monitoring satellites”, shifting the focus to getting such data from commercial sources.
  • Major budget cuts are proposed for many other departments, and also include a major restructuring of NASA’s entire operation to “streamline the workforce, IT services, NASA Center operations, facility maintenance, and construction and environmental compliance activities.”

Below is a screen capture from the budget proposal detailing these cuts.
» Read more

22 comments

The American Geophysical Union: the privileges of government-paid scientists must come above the Constitution and the ordinary citizens who pay the bills

2:08 pm

The American Geophysical Union, where science is no longer practiced
The American Geophysical Union, where
science is no longer practiced

In a public letter issued late yesterday, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) announced it has joined a lawsuit attempting to make the salaries, jobs, and various research grants of scientists immune from cancellation or the budget cuts that have been ordered by the elected president of the United States, Donald Trump.

Plaintiffs assert that such a sweeping Executive Order — which would impact hundreds of thousands of federal workers — goes far beyond the authority of the President to direct, and that such a massive reorganization of federal agencies must be planned in accordance with law and approved by Congress. AGU’s role in the case will involve illustrating the extensive ways in which scientists and the public will be irreparably harmed by the execution of the President’s order, in particular through proposed mass terminations at NOAA, the Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, the Environmental Protectional Agency, and the National Science Foundation.

“This Executive Order is demanding layoffs on such a massive scale that they will have drastic, cascading effects on our members, the global scientific community, and the public,” said Janice R. Lachance, Interim Executive Director and CEO of AGU. “From forecasting severe weather and ensuring healthy crops to preventing uncontrollable wildfires and preparing communities for sea level rise, fully functioning federal scientific agencies are critical.” [emphasis mine]

The highlighted phrases show the priorities. The public comes last. More important are “federal workers,” the “members” of the AGU, and “the global scientific community.” Moreover, the letter reeks of privilege and smug superiority. It assumes that the paychecks from the taxpayers must never end, no matter what. The very idea that the president — duly elected by the American people and whom the Constitution vests with the sole power to run the executive branch of the federal government — should actually do what he promised the voters during the campaign actually offends them. “We come first! To hell with what the public wants!”

None of this should surprise anyone. The AGU, along with most national scientific organizations, has been corrupted by leftist politics for decades. It threw out the fundamentals of objective science years ago when it declared that it will reject any paper that does not support the theory of human-caused global warming. Its PR department has consistently reinforced this unscientific bias, pushing global warming in practically every press release.

And if you still have doubts about its leftist agenda divorced from objective science, you need only read its own description at the end of yesterday’s letter, outlining the organization’s priorities:
» Read more

22 comments

An American government program to get to the Moon is simply not necessary; If we let them Americans will do it on their own

12:08 pm

As a historian I often bring to any discussion of modern politics and our American space effort a perspective that is very alien to modern Americans. I see things as they once were in the United States back before we had a big overbearing federal government that everyone looked to for leadership. Instead, I see the possibilities inherent in a free nation led by the people themselves, not the government, as America was for its first two centuries.

This sadly is not how America functions today, and it is for that reason that as a nation we can no longer get great things accomplished routinely, as we once did.

Norwegian Amundsen, first to reach the south pole
Norwegian Amundsen, first to reach the south pole.

To understand how different the American mindset once was, consider just one example, the 19th century effort by numerous nations and individuals to plant their flag at both the north and south poles. While a handful of private American citizens mounted their own expeditions to reach the north pole, none attempted to do so in Antarctica. At both poles the bulk of the effort was done by other nations, sometimes on expeditions privately funded, and sometimes by expeditions with extensive government aid.

In the U.S. however there was no government program to compete in this race. Nor was their the slightest desire by Americans to create one. The attitude of Americans then was very straightforward. They found the race to get to the poles exciting and fascinating, and thoroughly supported the efforts of the explorers both intellectually and emotionally. They however had no interest in their government committing one dime of their tax dollars on its own campaign.

You see, they did not feel a need to establish American prestige in this manner. So what other nations got to the poles first? What mattered to Americans then was what each American wanted to do, and what Americans wanted to do in the 19th century was to settle the west and build their nation into a prosperous place to raise their children.

And so, the south pole was first reached by a Norwegian, followed mere weeks later by an Englishman. Americans played no major role in that early exploration. Nor did it harm America’s prestige in the slightest that it did not compete there. The nation was growing in wealth and prosperity, its citizens were completely free in all ways to follow their dreams, and everyone worldwide knew it.

America might not be the leader in far-flung exploration, but the world knew it was the leader in something as important if not more so, the idea that a nation and a government could be built on the premise that the citizen is sovereign, and that all law should be based on making that citizen’s life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness primary in all things.

And in the end, it did not really matter that the U.S. did not compete in that race to the poles. » Read more

28 comments

Maybe it finally is time we actually made these major budget cuts at NASA

12:05 pm

Chicken Little rules!

This past weekend the pro-government propaganda press has been in an outraged uproar concerning unconfirmed rumors and anonymous reports that the Trump administration is considering major cuts to NASA’s many science divisions and projects, cuts so large that several space missions, such as Mars Sample Return and the Roman Space Telescope, would have to be canceled. Here are just a few examples, with the first few the ones that broke the story:

Of this list, the Politico story is the most amusing. Suddenly this leftwing news outlet loves Musk again, since he is expressing opposition to these cuts. Just days before he was the devil incarnate because of his partnership with Trump in cutting government waste. Now that he might oppose these NASA budget cuts will lefties start buying Teslas again? Who knows? The depth of their thinking is often quite shallow and divorced from rationality.

As is typical of the propaganda press, all these stories focused on quoting only those opposed to the cuts, from Democrats in Congress to leftist activist organizations. Very few offered any alternative points of view. These reports were thus typical of the propaganda press and the Washington swamp whenever anyone proposes any cuts to any government program: We are all gonna die! Civilization is going to end! Only evil people would dare propose such ideas!

The truth is that there are many ample and rational reasons to consider major budget cuts to most of NASA programs. Like the rest of our bloated federal government, NASA is no longer the trim efficient government agency it was in the 1960s.
» Read more

23 comments

Congress: Let’s throw some more astronaut lives away so we can preen for the camera!

2:48 pm

Jared Isaacman
Jared Isaacman

Here we go again: As I noted yesterday, the hearing this week of Jared Isaacman, Donald Trump’s nomination to become NASA’s next administrator, revealed almost nothing about what Isaacman plans to do once confirmed by the Senate. He very carefully kept his options open, even while he strongly endorsed getting Americans on the Moon as fast as possible in order to beat the Chinese there. When pressed by senators from both parties to commit to continuing the SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway projects to make that happen, Isaacman picked his words most cautiously. He noted that at the moment that plan seemed the best for getting to the Moon first. He also noted repeatedly that this same plan is years behind schedule and overbudget.

Like any smart businessman, Isaacman knows he cannot make any final decisions about SLS, Orion, or Gateway until he takes office and can aggressively dig into the facts, as administrator. He also knew he could not say so directly during this hearing, for to do so would antagonize senators from both parties who want those programs continued because of the money it pours into their states. So he played it coy, and the senators accepted that coyness in order to make believe they were getting what they want.

But what do these senators want? It appears our politicians (including possibly Trump) want NASA to launch humans to the Moon using SLS and Orion and do so as quickly as possible, despite knowing that both have real engineering issues of great concern. Instead, our elected officials want politics to determine the lunar flight schedule, instead of engineering, the same attitude that killed astronauts on Apollo 1 in 1967, on Challenger in 1986, and on Columbia in 2003. The engineering data then said unequivocally that things were not safe and that disaster was almost guaranteed, but NASA and Congress demanded the flights go on anyway, to serve the needs of politics.

With SLS and Orion it is now the same foolishness all over again. » Read more

20 comments

Hamas and American leftists: both driven solely by mindless hate

2:24 pm

Actions taken this week by both the terrorist group Hamas in Gaza as well as the leftist terrorists in the United States has once again illustrated how little difference there is between these two groups.

Hamas vs Israel
The obvious reasons why killing the leaders
of Hamas and Hezbollah is a good thing.
Courtesy of Doug Ross.

In Gaza, Hamas responded to the public demonstrations against it by ordinary Gazans last week by torturing and killing one of the demonstration leaders.

Hamas operatives kidnapped, tortured and executed a 22-year-old Palestinian man who participated in last week’s wave of protests against the terror group, according to his family. Oday Nasser Al Rabay’s body was left in front of his family’s home over the weekend. On Saturday, many dozens were filmed participating in his funeral procession, shouting, “Hamas out!”

Hamas has reportedly been threatening Palestinians who participate in the protests against the terror group, but this appears to be the first time that anyone has been killed in connection to them.

Hamas, which is strongly supported by many politicians in the Democratic Party, has thus illustrated its unwavering intolerance of any opposition, an intolerance so strong that torture and murder is considered a viable option for maintaining power.

Driving that intolerance however is not simply a lust for power, but a hate that fuels Hamas’s every action. The members of Hamas hate all non-Muslims, especially Jews, and want to kill them all. Anyone that stands in the way of this goal thus earns death as well.

Hate allows for this kind of evil. It has to be fed somehow, and if murder is the food, than so be it.

What does this have to do with the American left? » Read more

9 comments

Starliner’s troubles were much worse than NASA made clear

11:51 am

Starliner docked to ISS
Starliner docked to ISS.

According to a long interview given to Eric Berger of Ars Technica, the astronauts flying Boeing’s Starliner capsule on its first manned mission in June 2024 were much more vulnerable than NASA made it appear at the time.

First, the thruster problem when they tried to dock to ISS was more serious than revealed. At several points Butch Wilmore, who was piloting the spacecraft, was unsure if he had enough thrusters to safely dock the capsule to ISS. Worse, if he couldn’t dock he also did not know if had enough thrusters to de-orbit Starliner properly.

In other words, he and his fellow astronaut Sunni Williams might only have a few hours to live.

The situation was saved by mission control engineers, who figured out a way to reset the thrusters and get enough back on line so that the spacecraft could dock autonomously.

Second, once docked it was very clear to the astronauts and NASA management that Starliner was a very unreliable lifeboat.
» Read more

22 comments

Sunspot update: NOAA scientists try to hide how wrong they have gotten things

12:00 pm

My monthly sunspot update today will have less to do with the Sun’s sunspot activity itself — which continues to show a very very slow decline from a peak in August 2024 — and more to do with more games-playing by NOAA solar scientists to fool the public into believing they know more than they do.

Below is my annotated version of NOAA’s monthly graph showing the amount of sunspot activity on the Earth-facing hemisphere of the Sun. This graph is significantly different from the graph that NOAA’s scientists have issued for the past few years, with all the changes designed to make it seem as if these scientists’ predictions are on the money, when they have been entirely wrong now for two solar cycles in a row.
» Read more

10 comments

UK government continues to dither about fixing its serious red tape issues relating to space

10:11 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea

Three different news articles from three different British news sources in the past 24 hours strongly suggest that the factions within the government of the United Kingdom are still unfocused about fixing the serious regulatory red tape that not only bankrupted the rocket startup Virgin Orbit but has delayed for years the first launches from either of its two proposed spaceports in Scotland. The headlines might sound positive, but the details are far less encouraging:

The first article describes the comments of industry officials at a House of Lords committee hearing, where they pleaded with the government to help foster a British launch capability. Sounds good, eh? The problem is that such hearings have been held now repeatedly for the last several years, and Britain’s parliament has done nothing to reform its very cumbersome, complex, and byzantine launch licensing process. Getting approvals still takes months if not years.

It appears that this particular hearing is no different. While it provided government officials the chance to express sympathy for industry in front of news cameras, there is no indication parliament will do anything to fix anything.

The second article describes comments by the Labor government’s technology secretary Peter Kyle before the House of Commons. » Read more

10 comments

The insane left keeps shooting itself in the foot!

1:41 pm

Tesla vandal identified and arrested
Click for video.

The recent string of vandalism of Tesla vehicles as well as swatting attacks on well known conservatives by leftist crazies might be scary, horrifying, and disgusting, but if you take a step back from these emotions for a second to look dispassionately at the situation, you will realize these attacks are only the dying screams of a bankrupt political movement that has no proposals, no ideas, and no goals except the obtaining of power — now through the use of violence because its political support has dropped to such record lows.

First, the attacks are beyond senseless. In the case of the vandalism of Teslas, the attacks are actually doing harm to those who in the past were most likely to have supported the Democratic Party’s leftist political agenda. Conservatives in general have not been buying electric vehicles, because they have no need to virtue signal leftist climate goals. So, by damaging Teslas owned by innocent bystanders, just because the car was built by a company founded by Elon Musk, the vandals are not only not winning converts to their cause, they are making enemies of people who were once on their side.
» Read more

14 comments

The next time someone tells you Mars lacks water, show them this picture

1:09 pm

Lots of near surface ice on Mars
Click for original image.

In the past decade orbital images from Mars have shown unequivocally that the Red Planet is not the dry desert imagined by sci-fi writers for many decades prior to the space age. Nor is it the dry desert that planetary scientists had first concluded based on the first few decades of planetary missions there.

No, what the orbiters Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Express have clearly shown is that, except for the planet’s equatorial regions below 30 degrees latitude, the Martian surface is almost entirely covered by water ice, though it is almost always buried by a thin layer of protective dust and debris. Getting to that ice will be somewhat trivial, however, as it is almost always near the surface.

The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, is a perfect example. It was taken on January 31, 2025 by the high resolution camera on MRO. At the top it shows part of a small glacial-filled crater surrounded by blobby ground clearly impregnated with ice. That crater in turn sits on the rim of a much larger very-eroded ancient 53-mile-wide crater whose floor, also filled with glacial debris, can be seen at the bottom of this picture. The wavy ridge line at the base of the rim appears to be a moraine formed by the ebb and flow of the glacial ice that fills this larger crater.

None of these glacial features is particularly unique on Mars. I have been documenting their presence now at Behind the Black for more than six years. Yet, I find still that most news organizations — including many in the space community — remain utterly unaware of these revelations. Any new NASA or university press release that mentions the near-surface ice that covers about two-thirds of the planet’s surface results in news stories claiming “Water has been found on Mars!”, as if this is a shocking new fact from a place where little water is found.

It is very shameful that so many reporters and news organizations are so far out of touch with the actual state of the research on Mars.
» Read more

11 comments

SpaceX launches new crew to ISS

10:16 pm

Falcon 9 first stage barreling home to Florida
Falcon 9 first stage barreling home to Florida tonight.

After a scrub two days ago due to a ground equipment issue, SpaceX tonight successfully launched a new crew of four to ISS, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Kennedy in Florida.

The Dragon capsule is Endurance, on its fourth flight. The first stage completed its third flight, landing back in Florida.

This launch will allow the two-person crews launched by Boeing’s Starliner capsule in June and SpaceX’s Freedom capsule in September to come back home on Freedom.

When it was decided not to allow the Starliner astronauts to come home on Starliner because of thruster issues on the capsule, NASA decided to keep its ISS launch schedule as normal as possible, thus forcing that crew to complete a mission of about eight months, with a planned return in February 2025. Initially their Starliner mission was expected to last anywhere from two weeks to two months-plus, depending on how well Starliner functioned while docked to ISS.
» Read more

20 comments

Is the nomination of Jared Isaacman as NASA’s administrator facing political headwinds?

10:18 am

Jared Isaacman
Jared Isaacman

I admit immediately that I have no inside information to back up the speculation that will follow. Instead, it is based entirely on my fifty years of experience observing the political machinations that take place inside the DC swamp.

In the past week there have been a slew of stories all aimed at pressuring Congress to quickly confirm Jared Isaacman (billionaire, jet pilot, businessman, and commercial astronaut), Trump’s pick to be NASA’s next administrator. For example, two days ago NASA’s last Republican-appointed administrator Jim Bridenstine publicly called for Isaacman’s confirmation by the Senate.

“I think Jared Isaacman is going to be an amazing NASA administrator,” he said. “I think he’s got all the tools to be what could be the most consequential NASA administrator given the era in which we live in now.” That era, he said, involves greater reliance on commercial space capabilities. “He’s going to be able to take that and do things that have never been able to be done before.”

This week there was also an article in Space News, touting Isaacman’s desire to increase funding to NASA’s planetary defense program, expressed by him in February when it looked like asteroid 2024 YR4 had a good chance of hitting the Earth in 2032.

Furthermore, a group of seven Republican senators this week also joined the chorus, sending a letter [pdf] to Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Maria Cantwell (D-Washington), the chair and ranking members respectively of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, extolling Isaacman in glowing terms and calling for his quick confirmation.

So with all this enthusiastic support bubbling out everywhere, why do I suspect Isaacman might actually be in trouble?
» Read more

31 comments

Thank you to everyone who donated during my February birthday fund-raising drive

12:11 pm

Readers!

My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.

As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!

5 comments

Expect no end, no slowdown, in Trump’s non-stop offensive

1:41 pm

Trump defiant after being shot
Trump defiant

For those like me who have been around for awhile, the present Trump administration is truly remarkable in that it harks back to an old, very fundamental American military strategy established by Ulysses S. Grant: Never stop your offensive, not for one instant.

When Grant won a battle he didn’t rest on his laurels. He immediately pushed forward because he knew he had his enemy on the run and at its weakest. When he lost a battle (which almost never happened) he didn’t pull back to lick his wounds, but instead re-configured his forces to push forward nonetheless, knowing that his victorious enemy was likely unprepared for a new assault.

Eisenhower demonstrated his understanding of this strategy during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. The Germans had surprised the Allies with their offensive, and thus had successfully pushed a major westward prong splitting Eisenhower’s forces in two. Rather than retreat, however, Eisenhower immediately went on the offensive, moving to pinch off that salient from the north and south and thus trap the German army behind enemy lines. That strategy ended up defeating the Germans, forcing them either to surrender or retreat.

This Trump administration is different from all other Republican presidents, including Trump’s first term, in that he is following this basic winning military strategy, keeping the pressure up continuously, with an enthusiasm that is breath-taking. » Read more

23 comments

Once again the leftist propaganda press takes out its knives to stab SpaceX and Musk

11:18 am

Superheavy captured safely by the chopsticks, for the third time in four attempts
Superheavy captured safely yesterday by the chopsticks,
for the third time in four attempts

As should be expected, the destruction of Starship yesterday just before it made orbit on its eighth test flight was immediately used by partisan leftist media outlets to play “Let’s beat up on SpaceX and Elon Musk because he’s a friend of Trump!”

All these outlets decided to emphasize the falling debris and disruption to air traffic, but in doing so they all spun the story in a very dishonest way. First, both SpaceX and the FAA had been prepared for this possibility, and had used well-established procedures — in league with all other involved nations — to respond to the launch failure. The air space was cleared for only about fifteen minutes, as only this Florida Today article noted. Take-off delays at affected airports ranged from minutes to almost an hour, but hardly much different that normal delays seen every day.

Most important, no one was hurt, no planes were damaged, and there were no negative consequences. If anything, yesterday’s Starship flight illustrated the competence shown by SpaceX as it runs a very ambitious and radical development program of the most powerful rocket ever built. For example, why so little mention of the successful catch of Superheavy, something SpaceX has been able to do three times in the first four test flights? That achievement is truly mind-blowing.

The obviousness of these attacks is truly getting tedious. Moreover, why the hostility to one of the most spectacular efforts by an American company? Shouldn’t the American news outlets above be enthused by this effort? Have they become so hateful of their own country in all things, they want it to fail, always?

Sadly, I think we know the answer to that last question. The leftist indoctrination effort that now dominates almost all of America’s universities has produced a generation that does hate America, because they literally know nothing of its history except the distorted lies put forth by these Marxist colleges. They would rather destroy success than have America succeed.

It is both tragic and shameful, and a perfect example of someone cutting off their own nose to spite their face.

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Democrats: A party so filled with hate it can’t even cheer a child because Trump introduced him

1:32 pm

In the next day or so you will hear a lot of analysis of Trump’s speech yesterday to Congress, both good and bad. The bulk of that commentary will focus on what Trump has or has not accomplished, for good and ill. Some will talk about the overall foolish behavior of many Democrats, who refused to applaud anything Trump said (something Trump predicted would happen near the start of the speech), with one Democrat getting ejected from the building for heckling the president and refusing to stop.

During such speeches presidents usually tout their past achievements and future goals. With each proclamation, the members of that president’s party will repeatedly give him a short standing ovation, with the opposition party usually sitting quietly. This fake theater is one reason I generally don’t watch such events, relying on reviewing them after the fact to save a LOT of time.

Another tradition during these speeches is for the president to invite several ordinary citizens to attend in order to honor them in some way. At these moments, when the president introduces the citizen, the entire room would routinely stand and cheer, because these individuals are generally not party partisans, and the ruling president and his party usually have nothing to do with that person’s particular achievement.

Last night however was starkly different, and the screen capture below captures the one moment that demonstrates so fully the utterly bankrupt nature of the Democratic Party. One of the private citizens Trump invited to honor was a 13-year-old boy, DJ Daniel, who five years ago was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and given only six months to live. Five years later he is still alive and healthy, and proudly wears a police uniform frequently in public because of his dream to be a cop someday.
» Read more

31 comments

The real underlying battle between Trump and Zelinsky

2:01 pm

The kerfuffle last week between the United States and the Ukraine, instigated by the unprecedented ugly end to the press conference that concluded the visit of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House, is actually quite understandable if one is willing to consider the perspective of both sides. Unfortunately, I have seen little such analysis anywhere. Instead we get emotional attacks. On the left Trump is a vicious politician who wants to carve the Ukraine up for the benefit of Russia. On the right Zelensky is a corrupt barbarian who simply wants the war to continue forever so that he can steal as much U.S. foreign aid as possible for his own private benefit.

Neither of these conclusions are very helpful. Nor do they provide any insight to what is really going on.

So, what are the different perspectives that caused this confrontation?
» Read more

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Pushback: North Carolina University quickly backs down when challenged over its remaining DEI policies

2:03 pm

NC State: Maybe rotten to the core
NC State: Rotten to the core?

The tide really is turning: Two weeks ago I reported the effort by Stephen Porter, a professor at North Carolina State University, to force it to eliminate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs (DEI) from its many policies. Porter had been ostracized and demoted by its faculty and staff back in 2021 for daring to question these policies then, but managed to keep his job.

Though the university had claimed in 2023 it had dropped DEI and instead instituted a “institutional neutrality” policy, Porter had no trouble finding DEI requirements and webpages still scattered everywhere in its rulebooks and webpages.

He decided to go to war, to file complaints with the NC Board of Governors about four different violations of its own “institutional neutrality” policy.

To his surprise, less than two weeks later the university responded somewhat positively. First, the university eliminated DEI from its overall strategic plan. That this hadn’t been done earlier either indicates sloppiness and incompetence by NC State’s administration, or a real reluctance to eliminate DEI. Either way, they have finally done so.

Second, they have quickly removed the still standing DEI websites that Porter had cited in his complaint.
» Read more

6 comments

Musk: ISS should be de-orbited quickly! And he may be right.

12:23 pm

Figure 3 from September Inspector General report
Figure 3 from September Inspector General report, showing ISS and outlining the airlieak annotated to show Zvezda and Poisk locations.

Food fight! Yesterday Elon Musk did a Donald Trump, issuing a bunch of tweets that are likely causing some heads to explode inside NASA, Congress, and Europe.

First — and far less significant — Musk got into a war of insults with European Space Agency astronaut Andreas Mogensen over his comments in recent days accusing the Biden administration of delaying the return of the two Starliner astronauts “for political reasons.” Mogensen accused Musk lying about this, and Musk responded by calling Mogenson “fully retarded” and an “idiot,” adding that “SpaceX could have brought them back several months ago. I OFFERED THIS DIRECTLY to the Biden administration and they refused. Return WAS pushed back for political reasons.”

Since Musk was there and Mogensen was not, it seems Musk won that battle. NASA meanwhile issued a mild statement saying everything it has done has been to maximize safety, a statement that matches the facts quite accurately.

Then Musk — on a far more important topic — stirred the pot more by tweeting his belief that ISS should be retired now.

It is time to begin preparations for deorbiting the Space_Station. It has served its purpose. There is very little incremental utility. Let’s go to Mars.

In a second tweet he recommended the de-orbit should occur “two years from now.”

Left unstated by Musk was what might be his most important reason for retiring ISS so quickly: the fragile condition of the Russian-built Zvezda module. » Read more

26 comments

Ghouls and Monsters in Gaza

12:22 pm

Hamas in all its monstrous glory

Word fail. For any decent human being, the behavior of the Hamas killers today in releasing the four bodies of their kidnapped hostages — which included a baby and a toddler — was beyond monstrous.

The picture to the right gives only a sense. The coffins were put on display on a stage, with celebratory music blaring. The poster in the background shows the faces of the four dead hostages, including a 9-month-old and a four-year-old, with a vampire-version of Bibi Netanyahu dripping blood on them. A large crowd of several thousand was there to watch, with many cheering. The coffins were then carried one by one to Red Cross vehicles while that crowd cheered and the music blasted. Even UN officials were offended, noting that the parading of bodies violates international law.

The coffins themselves were locked, and Hamas provided no keys. Before they can be pried open so that the bodies can be properly buried, Israeli technical experts have to first determine if the coffins are booby-trapped. (Sounds insane, but would you nonchalantly pry open one of these Hamas-sealed coffins?)

Hamas tried to put the blame on the death of these four innocents by claiming they were killed by an Israeli bombing attack. That however is utterly irrelevant, even if it was true. These four human beings were ripped from their homes on October 7, 2023 by Hamas/Gaza savages and imprisoned in the hellhole tunnels of Gaza, merely because they were Jews. Hamas is entirely at fault.

UPDATE: Forensic evidence has now shown that the baby and toddler were actually murdered about one month after their kidnapping while in captivity, and the woman’s body was not of their mother, Shiri Biba, but of an anonymous unidentified body. In other words, Hamas dug up a body of some unknown person and gave that back to Israel. At this moment we have no idea if Shiri Biba is alive or dead, though she is most likely dead but Hamas did not want to release the body probably because it would have revealed more evidence of their savagery. I suspect they raped and tortured her before killing her.

Worse, Hamas is proud of what it has done. At no point has the leadership of Hamas ever backed off from its goal of killing all Jews, worldwide, and then all Christians, in order to establish a worldwide caliphate of Islam.

As Islamic scholar Robert Spencer noted in documenting this horror show,
» Read more

20 comments

With CBS helping him, under no condition should Trump settle his $10 billion lawsuit against the network

4:37 pm

Lying lefist propaganda, through and through
Lying lefist propaganda, through and through

Don’t settle! In the fall Donald Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS News, alleging the network interfered with the election by maliciously editing a 60 Minutes interview with vice president Kamala Harris to hide and improve her incoherent word salad answers, and it did so to aid her just days before the election. In February, when the actual transcripts of the interview were released, proving CBS’s misconduct, Trump expanded the lawsuit to include CBS News’s parent company, Paramount Global, which streamed the program.

Though some might argue the lawsuit rests on weak legal grounds, it seems that Trump’s complaint has some merit, especially since the leftist bias of the older alphabet news outlets (CBS, CNN, NBC, MSNBC, ABC, PBS) has become so obvious in the past decade. These networks no longer even try to report the news fairly or with any accuracy. Instead, they twist every story to either promote the Democratic Party or slander the Republican Party.

That bias has caused these networks a lot of trouble in the courts in recent years, when others have sued them for defamation and slander. » Read more

6 comments

Modern academia: “We aren’t going to hire another white guy, are we?”

1:52 pm

Whites need not apply
Whites need not apply.

The quote in the headline above comes from a lawsuit [pdf] filed by a former professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, Stephen Kleinschmit, who was eventually terminated because he had raised concerns within his department about its hiring practices, which beginning in 2019 became entirely focused on choosing its new faculty employees solely on whether they were born to the correct race, not on their talents or qualifications.

Kleinschmit raised his concerns because he was required to participate in the hiring process, and feared if he did not do so it “would make him a participant in illegal activities for which he would be held liable.” Instead of recognizing the clearly discriminatory and illegal nature of its racial hiring practices, however, the department decided to terminate Kleinshcmit’s contract instead.

He was ultimately terminated in August 2023 spring semester, ostensibly as a result of the need for “budget cuts.” Kleinschmit said the decision to fire him at that time appeared to be intentional, to not only cut him loose from his job at UIC, but also deny him the opportunity to seek employment at another university for more than a year.

However, Kleinschmit said he – the department’s only white male faculty member – was the only faculty member terminated at that time, despite claims of lack of finances, even as UIC moved forward with plans to hire more “diverse” faculty.

The complaint noted that Kleinschmit’s old job was later posted as eligible for hiring. But now the job ad was written in a way to encourage non-white male applicants, “as UIC shifted resources to a new job focused on fulfilling its racially discriminatory goals.” [emphasis mine]

In other words, the department fired its only white professor in order to replace him with a minority.
» Read more

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