Category: Essays And Commentaries

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

SpaceX successfully launches Superheavy and Starship

6:57 am

Superheavy & Starship, on their way
Note how all 33 Superheavy engines are firing.

SpaceX this morning successfully launched its Superheavy/Starship heavy lift rocket into its test orbit.

The test flight achieved far more than the first test in April. First, during the entire flight of Superheavy all 33 Raptor-2 engines fired normally. None cut out prematurely. Then at very risky hot fire stage separation — where the second stage (Starship) ignited prior to separation from Superheavy — the correct number of engines shut down, Starship’s engines fired, and Superheavy successfully separated and began its maneuvers for a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.

At that point mission controllers issued the self-destruct command to destroy Superheavy. Though it appeared that the stage was struggling to flip for its controlled return to Earth, it is also very likely that mission controllers wanted to test that flight termination system after its not perfect performance on the first test flight. Then, the self-destruct command did not activate the instant the command was given, being delayed by about 40 seconds. This time it appeared it worked as planned.
» Read more

71 comments

Thank you to all who donated during short two-week November fund-raising campaign

4:00 pm

UPDATE: My quickie two-week fund-raising campaign for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to all those who donated or subscribed. I am as always overwhelmed with gratitude. No one has to give me a dime to read what I write, and yet you all do so anyway.

This note of thanks will remain at the top of the page for the next few days, just to make sure everyone sees it. Scroll down for new stories.

4 comments

Frank Borman, an old-fashioned American of the highest order, passes away at 95

9:54 am

Frank Borman, suited up just before the launch of Apollo 8 in 1968
Frank Borman, suited up just before
the launch of Apollo 8 in 1968

Frank Borman, who was the commander of both the Gemini 7 manned mission that proved that humans could live in weightlessness for two weeks as well as the Apollo 8 mission to the moon, the first human mission ever to another world, passed away on November 7, 2023 in Montana at the age of 95.

For a detailed obituary, go here. Though still survived by his crewmates on Apollo 8, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders, his death ends that mission’s status as the last fully surviving crew of an Apollo mission.

My experience with Frank Borman was personal, as I interviewed him several times in writing Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8. In fact, he in many ways made the book possible. At the time I was still a relatively new science journalist, with no books to my credit. In trying to reach all three astronauts from Apollo 8, I did many web searches, and though I was able to locate the business numbers of Borman and Lovell, I found it impossible to locate contact information for Bill Anders.

Nonetheless, I started with Borman, and cold-called the car dealership he then owned in Corpus Cristi. When the phone was answered I was astonished to recognize the voice of Borman on the other end saying “How can I help you?” (Apparently it was lunch time, and Borman was holding the fort while his staff went out to eat.)

I immediately asked, “Is this commander Borman?” and got a very skeptical and suddenly doubtful “Yes” in reply. I realized immediately that Borman’s fame meant he was often harassed by fans in ways that could be annoying. I quickly explained who I was and that I wanted to write a history of the Apollo 8 mission, and to do so I wished to personally interview both him and his wife Susan. I explained that I strongly felt the story of the mission couldn’t be told properly without her perspective.
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Intellectual dishonesty caused the experts to misread the Gaza military situation

3:50 pm

Lies from CNN
Lies from CNN

Lies from MSNBC
Lies from MSNBC

Before Israel began its full scale ground assault on Gaza and the Hamas tunnels two weeks ago, the general consensus from practically every expert interviewed or writing about the attack assumed it would be long, hard, and difficult, taking many months before Israeli troops were able to take control of the Gaza strip and render Hamas impotent.

A good example of that analysis can be seen in this October 13, 2023 article. To quote:

When the huge force Israel has amassed is finally given the orders to enter Gaza and destroy Hamas, they will face a deeply dug-in, well-armed enemy with thousands of anti-tank weapons, drones, and small arms on the most complex battlefield there is. Hamas will be fighting from tunnels, sewers, and strong points set up in high-rise buildings and rubble. They will rake incoming troops with machine guns from alleyways and windows, as well as employ heavier weapons from rooftops and prepared cover, and then melt into the urban maze that makes up much of the Gaza Strip. There will be no element of surprise for this sojourn into deeply hostile territory.

Israeli troops “will face the greatest challenge of their lifetime,” John Spencer, chairman of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point told The War Zone. “Attacking a defended city like this will be combat in hell. I do believe they can do it, but the cost will be high in urban warfare like this, since they will be attacking multiple cities.”

All the experts generally predicted the offensive would take months, and would involve huge casualties on the Israeli side.

I however predicted that the offensive, though not easy, would unfold far faster than these predictions.

This invasion will not be easy, but I also suspect it will not be as hard as many have suggested. Hamas’s power is mostly that of a bully, all threats and violence against the weak and helpless, with little real military capabilities. Israel now enraged is neither weak nor helpless. It will steadily but implacably work its way through Hamas’s tunnel system, but I think it will do so within a month.

Based on this report today, the experts now admit their pessimistic assessments were all wrong, and my analysis was right.
» Read more

19 comments

The Democratic Party and its voters endorse bigots and murderers

2:28 pm

Democrats: The party of genocide and bigotry
Democrats: The party of genocide and bigotry

My headline could not be more blunt, but it is also an honest appraisal. Today, when the House of Representatives voted 234-188 to censure congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) for her support for Hamas and her public endorsement of its goal to kill all Israelis, 184 of those nay votes were Democrats. Only 22 were willing to condemn her actions.

What did these Democrats vote against? Here is what the House resolution [pdf] stated Tlaib was guilty of doing:

Whereas Representative Rashida Tlaib, within 24 hours of the October 7 barbaric attack on Jewish citizens of the State of Israel, representing the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, defended the brutal rapes, murders, be-headings, and kidnapping – including of Americans – by Hamas as justified ‘‘resistance’’ to the ‘‘apartheid state’’;

Whereas Representative Tlaib’s October 8 statement claimed that Hamas’ October 7 attack on the Jewish people was partly attributable to United States security aid provided to Israel, which ignores the fact that the Iron Dome, a co-developed air defense system, saved lives that day by intercepting rockets launched from the Gaza Strip against Israeli civilian targets;

Whereas on October 18, 2023, Representative Tlaib continued to knowingly spread the false narrative that Israel intentionally bombed the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital on October 17 after United States intelligence, Israeli intelligence, and President Biden assessed with high confidence that Israel did not cause the explosion;
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11 comments

The goal of Hamas (and its supporters) is to kill all Jews

1:52 pm

Map of Hamas massacres on October 7, 2023

It shouldn’t be necessary to have to spend any time proving the bigoted, Jew-hatred of Hamas, considering the horrible murder of about 1,400 Israeli men, women, children, and babies on October 7, 2023, with many burned alive, decapitated, tortured, and raped. Their actions that day were right out a Nazi handbook, and any sane decent human being should be able to easily see it.

And yet, it sadly is necessary, because that barbaric behavior is now being justified and excused by too many very ignorant people, not just in Gaza and the West Bank but worldwide, even in the most famous colleges in the U.S.

The map to the right is a good first data point. Hamas officials have gone on television and arrogantly claimed “We did not have any intention or decision to kill any civilians.” This lie is proven unambiguously by the map. The red dots indicated the locations of bodies. The black dots those who have been kidnapped. The locations of both illustrate how well planned this Hamas operation was, and its outright intention to kill civilians. These are not military facilities, but Jewish settlements where civilians live. Hamas mapped those locations, and targeted them precisely, including the Re’im music festival, which was a specific event and contained nothing but civilians.

This map, titled “Mapping the Massacres”, is available online, and provides close-ups of the murder maps for each massacre. If go to the link and click on the “Walkthrough” button on the bottom right, it will not only zoom in step-by-step to each massacre, it then provides detailed descriptions of what happened at each location. For example:
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26 comments

Israel’s Pearl Harbor

1:27 pm

Israel's Israeli ambassador wearing a yellow star
The Israeli UN ambassador and his staff wearing
yellow stars to shame the world’s diplomatic com-
munity for its willingness to appease mass murderers.

For Israel, it is now quite apparent that the mass murder by Hamas of more than a thousand Israeli civilians, including women, children, and babies, was not perceived as just another terrorist attack requiring a measured and surgical response.

No, in this case the entire nation of Israel, from the secular left to religious right, has finally recognized that Hamas had long ago declared war on the Jewish people, and the massacre on October 7th was its way of underlining that state of war.

Israel is now responding in kind, just as the United States did after Pearl Harbor. After that attack on December 7, 1941, American were resolved that they were in a war of survival that could not end until the Axis powers of Germany and Japan were utterly obliterated. There would be no ceasefire or negotiations, as had happened at the end of World War I.

For the Israelis, October 7th is their day of infamy. It is for this reason that the Israeli ambassador put on a yellow star yesterday, similar to the Star of David the Nazis forced Jews to wear, but with the words “Never Again” emblazoned thereon. He then bluntly told the appeasers at the United Nations:
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18 comments

Don’t forget: The protesters supporting the Hamas mass murderers are all Democrats

12:51 pm

Pro-Hamas demonstrations

As Israel now ramps up its offensive against Hamas in Gaza, slowly but steadily moving tanks and troops into the strip from numerous directions, protests by supporters of Hamas’s mass murders on October 7th have exploded in numerous locations in the United States and elsewhere.

To the right are screen captures from two very large protests, the top showing a demonstration of an estimated 7,000 pro-Hamas protesters taking over the Brooklyn Bridge in New York on October 28, 2023. In the video at one point you can read a sign that clearly says, “Our soldiers will not be held accountable for anything.”

The second picture is from a protest in Chicago. The demonstrators at this moment are chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”, a chant that has always meant in plain language, “We will kill all the Jews in Israel because Allah said only Muslims can live there.” It is also written into the Hamas founding charter, which states unequivocally that it “owes its loyalty to Allah, derives from Islam its way of life, and strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.”
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A new global map of the near-surface ice on Mars

1:51 pm

Global map of near-surface ice on Mars
Click for interactive map.

A project begun in 2019 to use all the presently available orbital data to compile a global map of the near-surface ice on Mars has now been released that global map, shown by the graphic above, taken from Figure 16.7 from the project’s science paper.

The various areas in blue show the evidence of ice down to about 5 meters, or about 15 feet, with darker blue areas indicated ice at greater depth. The study focused on latitudes below 60 degrees latitude, while also blocking out areas above one kilometer in elevation (as indicated in black on the map above). As the paper noted,
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2 comments

No launch of Starship/Superheavy until February?

10:15 am

Superheavy still going strong, shortly after Max-Q
Superheavy still going strong, shortly after Max-Q,
during April test launch

In an email statement released on October 19, 2023 by the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and reported by Bloomberg news today, FWS decided to initiate a ” a formal review of the upgrades SpaceX has made to its Starship launch system”, beginning on October 5.

Most of the Bloomberg article is behind a paywall, but the second paragraph is really the key quote:

The FWS now has as long as 135 days to create an updated biological opinion about how Starship and its launches impact the local environment, however the agency does not “expect to take the full amount of time,” a representative said in the statement.

If FWS does take the full time period, no launch can occur before February. Nor should anyone naively believe its statement that it does not expect to take the full amount of time. For example, SpaceX completed installation of its upgraded Starship/Superheavy launch system, including the water deluge equipment at its base, in early August. Why did Fish and Wildlife wait till now, almost three months later, to begin its review?
» Read more

22 comments

Has the tide actually turned?

12:53 pm

Winston Churchill, who recognized you can't negotiate with mass murderers
Winston Churchill, who understood you can never
negotiate with mass murderers

My essay yesterday on the present unstable world situation — sparked by the murderous attack by Hamas on Israel — opened with a noteably pessimistic conclusion:

In the past week, it seems more and more that appeasement is the watchword of the day.

I had come to this conclusion by citing two unfolding events, first Israel’s seemingly endless delays in initiating its promised invasion of Gaza to destroy Hamas, and second, the apparent decision by Republicans in the House of Representatives to choose as their pick for speaker Tom Emmer, the only man running who denied any voter tampering and election fraud in the 2020 election and who also had been a spokesman for an organization funded by George Soros, making him clearly an untrustworthy person to lead conservatives.

One day later there are signs that my pessimism might have been premature. First, the Republicans in the House finally came together today to elect a speaker, choosing Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), a man who appears not only wholly different than Emmer but in fact almost all Republican speakers since Newt Gingrich. Unlike the moderates of the past three decades, Johnson is a strongly conservative man (pro-life, opposes the queer agenda, skeptical of too much aid to the Ukraine). Maybe the best sense of his fighting spirit is gained from his comments in 2020, when he actually noted Nancy Pelosi’s violation of the law when she tore up the original of Donald Trump’s state of the union speech in January 2020.

Thus, Republican voters might finally have a speaker in the House who is more allied with their goals than the corrupt goals of the establishment based in Washington, DC. The battle itself over the speakership further suggests that the establishment itself is losing power over the Republican Party. In the end the only viable candidates that remained were all Trump supporters who had repeatedly opposed the endless continuing resolutions that the Republican leadership has forever given to its Democratic Party allies.

We shall see however. In matters of politics it always pays to never get too enthusiastic about any positive development, as for the past six decades the positive has too often quickly turned negative.

Next there is the situation in Israel. » Read more

22 comments

“Formerly clandestine Nazis will continue protesting, sometimes violently”

1:37 pm

Enthusiatically and publicly cheering for another genocide
The left is now enthusiastically cheering for another
Jewish genocide in Israel

The headline sums up the situation. It is a quote from an article about the Israeli army’s green light to invade Gaza and take as long as necessary in order to utterly destroy Hamas. In its conclusion that article couldn’t help noting the expected and guaranteed enraged protests from all the usual suspects when that invasion begins.

The attempt by Israel to defend itself after a brutal terrorist attack by Hamas, torturing and killing what appears to be more than a thousand people, including many women, children, and babies, has accomplished one and only one good thing: It has caused the Nazis among us — almost all of which are on the left — to finally make clear their true feelings and goals: It’s all right to kill Israelis, especially if they are Jews. And it’s also all right to torture little children before you do it.

The examples of this are so many it is difficult to document them all. Over and over people from all walks of life but especially our elitist intellectual class enthusiatically called for the massacre of Jews while demanding Israel stand down and let Hamas do it. Here are only a few examples:
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Our utterly bankrupt “mainstream” press

2:17 pm

Lies from CNN
Lies from CNN

Lies from MSNBC
Lies from MSNBC

The so-called bombing of a hospital in the Gaza strip yesterday has revealed better than anything the utter bankruptcy of our modern press.

Without any confirmation mainstream sources like CNN and MSNBC accepted without question the claims by Hamas that the bombing was an “Israeli strike” and that 200 to 500+ people were killed. The graphic to the right illustrates CNN’s dishonesty. The report itself seemed eager to accept the Hamas claims, without any checking, while simultaneously treating the Israeli reports (that evidence showed that the impact was caused by a misfired Hamas rocket) with great skepticism and doubt requiring double and maybe triple verification.

MSNBC immediately reported the claims of Hamas, without any verification, while also exaggerating the damage incredibly, as shown by the second graphic to the right. The reporter first claims “the images coming out of Gaza are absolutely harrowing,” then notes that the known damage was in “the courtyard area of this hospital,” even as the video being shown during his report shows no damage, just ambulances arriving at a hospital with a variety of patients.

The irony is that not only have video and audio evidence confirmed without question now that the rocket was from Hamas (including audio of Hamas’ agents admitting to this fact), the impact itself didn’t appear to hit the hospital itself, just that courtyard/parking lot. As noted at the tweet, “How did 500 people die in a parking lot?”

In fact, the death toll remains very unclear indeed. It could very well be that very few were killed, though determining that fact will not be easy.

Both of these reports follow the standard operation procedures of all the mainstream press, not just CNN and MSNBC. » Read more

34 comments

Very bad things are on the verge of happening

3:15 pm

Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war!

Yesterday I wrote about how I thought the public might finally be awakening to the evil that now controls so much of American cultural and political life.

I noted several positive developments, and then added that the window of opportunity for freedom and the rule of law however was quickly closing. Without strong action these positive developments will mean nothing, to be quickly overrun by the immoral actions of the power-hungry, who will not take losing their power kindly.

Today I am far more pessimistic. I sense deeply that very very bad things are about to happen, on all fronts. The right is divided and weak, and too often unwilling to stand up to the worst behavior of the left. It is so divided that it can’t even elect a speaker in the House of Representatives.

The left meanwhile is united and angry, and willing to use that anger forcefully at all times. For example, for the last week decent people on the right found themselves being forced by the left to debate the absurd question of whether Hamas terrorists beheaded babies or merely killed them, as if that distinction mattered.

And in Gaza the destruction of a hospital by a missile is immediately being used as a propaganda weapon against Israel. First the claim by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry that “500+” people were killed is immediately accepted without question, without evidence. Second, it is immediately accepted that the missile likely came from Israel, though there is evidence otherwise.

You need to read the AP report at the link to grasp the full flavor of this anti-Israeli propaganda. Somehow only Israeli is killing civilians, while Gazans huddle in fear and helplessness against that evil empire throwing bombs and missiles at them.
» Read more

21 comments

The public wakes up, but the window for freedom will remain open for only so long

12:39 pm

Is a real house-cleaning about to happen?
Is a real house-cleaning about to happen?

The barbaric massacres committed by Hamas in Israel last week along with the left’s endorsement worldwide of those atrocities has appeared to awaken the long dormant outrage of the general population. Suddenly, people no longer seem willing to accept the lies and slanders of the left. Claiming Hamas was justified in killing babies and children while also taking many women and children hostage is a position that even many leftists cannot tolerate.

If you don’t believe me, watch this short clip from Bill Maher’s show, Real Time. Not only does Maher — a proud self-admitted lefty himself — trash the modern left in academia, the audience joins in to cheer that trashing.

It isn’t however only the left’s recent open support of Hamas that has inspired this disgust. It is also likely inspired by the many other abuses of power by the government (an arm of the power-hungry left) during the past three years. Those abuses, from lockdowns to censorship to blacklisting to mask and medical mandates, accomplished only one real thing: The abuses turned neutral ordinary people into ardent warriors against the left.

This shift was evident in three elections worldwide in the past few days.
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19 comments

You can’t negotiate with someone who wants to kill you

3:32 pm

Gaza and Israel

The horrors that occurred in Israel this past weekend when Hamas terrorists committed an organized attack on innocent civilians living near the Gaza Strip should finally put an end to demands that Israel negotiate with these people. Such negotiations are as pointless as the endless negotiations seen in the 1930s with Hitler. All you will do each time is to give up ground that is then used by these villians to continue waging war against you.

I say this with utter confidence for two reasons:

1. For decades the founding documents of both the Palestinian Authority (in control of the West Bank) and Hamas (in control of Gaza Strip) have made it very clear that they do not recognize the existence of Israel, and that their eventual goal is its utter destruction, including the elimination of all its citizens. Hamas this weekend demonstrated how these thugs intend to achieve that elimination, by killing every Israeli Jew they can find.

2. Repeatedly Israel has demonstrated forcefully its willingness to live in peace with the Palestinians, and each time has been met with hate and murder. In Gaza specifically Israel unilaterially exited in 2005, actually forcing Israelis who had settled there to give up their property so that Gaza could be handed in its entirety to the Palestinians as their own independent nation. At that moment the Palestinians had an opportunity to prove they wanted to live in peace. Instead, they elected a terrorist organization to run Gaza, and have spent the last two decades using it as a base for attacking and killing Israelis.

The attack this past weekend simply underlined these two fundamental facts. » Read more

37 comments

The emerging long term ramifications of the Ukraine War

2:09 pm

With the war in the Ukraine now in the second half of its second year, with no clear outcome on the horizon, I thought it might be a good time to step back and look at what Russia’s invasion has wrought, not just on Russia and the Ukraine, but on the rest of the world, now and possibly into the long term future.

My goal in this essay is to look at the forest, not the trees, and to do so in very broad strokes, based on my experience as a historian who has taken this approach in all my histories.

First however it is necessary to give a short update on the war itself. In my previous two updates in April and July I concluded that the war was devolving into a stalemate, much like the ugly trench warfare of World War I. Nothing has changed that conclusion in the two months since July, a fact that is starkly illustrated by the two maps below, originally created by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and modified and annotated by me to highlight the most significant take-aways.
» Read more

57 comments

The American Geophysical Union shows off its ignorance of the scientific method

1:03 pm

Recently a climate scientist caused an uproar among scientists and peer-review journals when he admitted in an op-ed that the only way he could get his climate paper published in the journal Nature was to fake his results in order to fit them to the narrative that human-caused global warming is causing all our environmental problems.

In my paper, we didn’t bother to study the influence of these other obviously relevant factors. Did I know that including them would make for a more realistic and useful analysis? I did. But I also knew that it would detract from the clean narrative centered on the negative impact of climate change and thus decrease the odds that the paper would pass muster with Nature’s editors and reviewers.

While that op-ed brutally exposed the political biases at Nature that make it impossible to get honest research published, it only told a part of the story. Nature is only one journal, and if it was the only place this corruption of science was occurring, the problem would be manageable.

In truth it is only one example of a far more widespread problem, because it is now practically impossible for any skeptic of global warming to get his or her work published in almost any scientific journal. Worse, most of the major science organizations worldwide no longer simply favor pro-global warming climate research, they act aggressively to promote only one kind of result, to the point that the things they publish sometimes are little different than Soviet propaganda.

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

As a prime example, I want to focus today on the American Geophysical Union (AGU), an scientific organization initially formed as an umbrella group to help American scientists publish and publicize their research on the study of the Earth, its interior, and its nature as a planet. To do so the AGU publishes a wide range of peer-review journals, all intended as fair-minded outlets for new research.

Sadly, in the past two decades the AG abandoned that primary function. For example, it has made its global-warming biases clear for several decades, essentially telling every climate scientist worldwide that if you submit any paper that raises any questions about global warming, it will be rejected outright.

More recently however the AGU has become even more up front and public about its close-minded approval of the as-yet unproven theory that humans are causing the climate to heat up. » Read more

6 comments

Why are news organizations still asking advice from the COVID liars of 2020?

1:50 pm

Fauci: Washington's top liar
Anthony Fauci: Washington’s liar-in-chief

Two stories in the past week got some notice in the conservative press as it reported on the increasing ramp up of fear-mongering about a new COVID epidemic (coincidently timed to arrive just before the 2024 election) by politicians, health officials, and the mainstream press.

The first story produced a lot of coverage because it involved the embarrassing appearance of Anthony Fauci on CNN, who when challenged directly on the recent research that has found masks accomplish nothing (which by the way simply confirms decades of earlier research that told us the same thing) still claimed that masks worked, and that this evidence should be ignored. You can watch Fauci’s moment of tragic black comedy here. His key response is at best incoherent, and at worst an utter lie and a denial of plain facts.

“Yes, but there are other studies, Michael, that show at an individual level, for individual, when you’re talking about the effect on the epidemic or the pandemic as a whole, the data are less strong. But when you talk about as an individual basis of someone protecting themselves or protecting themselves from spreading it to others, there’s no doubt that there are many studies that show that there is an advantage. When you took it at the broad population level like the Cochrane study, the data are less firm with regard to the effect on the overall pandemic. But we’re not talking about that, we’re talking about an individual’s effect on their own safety. That’s a bit different than the broad population level.”

Fauci refers to the “many studies” proving his position, but of course he can’t name them because they don’t exist. Even during the worst of the Wuhan panic the few studies that came out claiming some efficacy of masks were all found to be weak or flawed or downright fraudulent. He also makes the patently stupid claim that masks still work on an individual level, even though he admits the evidence for more than a century shows they don’t work at all.

This is what Michael Cantrell at PJMedia had to say about Fauci’s rationalizations:
» Read more

11 comments

Starship and Superheavy: Ready for launch but still blocked by the White House

11:02 am

Starship stacked on Superheavy, September 5, 2023

Elon Musk yesterday tweeted a short video showing Starship prototype #25 as it was stacked on top of Superheavy prototype #9, stating that both were now ready for their orbital test launch, the second attempt by SpaceX to launch this new rocket.

The image to the right is a screen capture from that movie, showing the full rocket ready to go. When it will go however remains a complete unknown, as Musk himself noted in the tweet: “Starship is ready to launch, awaiting FAA license approval.”

In May I predicted that though Musk predicted at that time that SpaceX would be ready to do this launch in August, it would not happen then or likely for months afterward, because the FAA under the Biden administration is slow-walking all launch approvals for SpaceX, as I showed in detail in a later June essay.

It is now September. SpaceX didn’t meet Musk’s original August ready date for launch, but it only missed that target by about five days. And as I predicted, the FAA has also not yet approved the launch license.
» Read more

19 comments

The New York Times suddenly allows two scientists to admit the Big Bang theory might be wrong

9:09 am

Modern science
Modern science

The refusal by many in the scientific community to deny there is any uncertainty of science has been best illustrated for decades by the cosmologists who have put together the framework of the standard model for the creation of the universe, centered on the Big Bang, and their pitchmen in the mainstream press. Since the 1960s any skepticism of this model was generally treated as equivalent to believing in UFO’s, aliens, and the Face on Mars.

Thus, astronomers and astrophysicists did what necessary to protect their careers. Even if they had great doubts about the standard model and the Big Bang, they generally kept their mouths shut, saying nothing. Meanwhile, our increasingly corrupt press pushed this one explanation for the formation of the universe, treating the cosmologists who pushed it as Gods whose every word was equivalent of an oracle that must never be questioned.

This past weekend the New York Times suddenly admitted to the uncertainty surrounding the Big Bang, and for possibly the first time in decades allowed two scientists to write an op-ed that carefully outlined the problems with the standard model and the Big Bang theory, problems that have existed and been growing since the 1990s but have been poo-pooed as inconsequential and easily solved. Data from the Webb Space Telescope however has made that poo-pooing more and more difficult, as astrophysicists Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser make clear:
» Read more

17 comments

Marilyn Lovell, wife of Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell, passes away at 93

11:18 am

Marilyn Lovell, holding son Jeffrey, watches the Saturn 5 lift-off with daughters Susan, right, and Barbara, left
Marilyn Lovell, holding son Jeffrey, watches Apollo 8 lift-off on
December 21, 1968 with daughters Susan, right, and Barbara, left

On August 27, 2023, Marilyn Lovell passed away at the age of 93 in Lake Forest, Illinois, where she and her astronaut husband had lived since he had retired from NASA following his last space mission, Apollo 13.

Jim Lovell of course is the famous one. In the 1960s space race he was the leading space cadet, spending more time in space than any other person, with flights on Gemini 7 (the longest mission yet), Gemini 12 (proved it was possible to do work on a spacewalk), Apollo 8 (first mission ever to another planet), and Apollo 13, which was supposed to be Lovell’s crowning achievement, a walk on the Moon. Unfortunately an explosion in the Apollo service module on the journey out to the Moon forced the crew to use its Lunar Module as a lifeboat so that the three astronauts could get back home safely. That failure meant Lovell would never step on the Moon, despite a life dedicated to taking the first tentative steps in the exploration and the eventual settlement of the solar system by the human race.

It could however be argued that none of that laudable career would have happened had he not had Marilyn Lovell for a wife.
» Read more

12 comments

The sunspot count in August demonstrates fully the utter uncertainty of science

1:46 pm

In doing these sunspot updates every month since I started Behind the Black thirteen years ago, one of the repeated common themes has been noting how little we really know about the basic fundamental processes within the Sun. We know the process involves nuclear fusion combined with fission, and that process also creates a powerful magnetic field that every eleven years flips in its polarity. We also know that this eleven year cycle corresponds to an eleven year cycle of rising and then falling sunspot activity.

The devil however is in the details, and we know very little about those details. How those larger processes link to the specific changing features on the Sun remains little understood, if at all. The sudden and entirely unexpected steep drop in sunspot activity in August, as noted in the release yesterday of NOAA’s monthly update of its graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere, demonstrates this level of ignorance quite starkly.
» Read more

17 comments

Reviewing a book blacklisted by Amazon because it dared say things Amazon doesn’t like

1:35 pm

The Plague of Models, blacklisted by Amazon
The Plague of Models, blacklisted by Amazon

They’re coming for you next: Last week I posted an essay on the over-use and misuse of computer modeling in today’s scientific community, focused specifically on the unreliability of all climate models to successfully predict any actual climate trends.

One of the individuals who read my essay, Kenneth Green, immediately commented here on Behind the Black to note that he had just published a book on this very subject, entitled The Plague of Models: How Computer Modeling Corrupted Environmental, Health, and Safety Regulations, describing how the misuse of models has resulted in the proliferation of government regulations based not on actual data but on computer models that in many ways are nothing more than the opinions of the computer programs.

Green also noted that Amazon has refused to make his book available for sale, essentially banning it for no justifiable reason. As he explained to me in an email,

My publisher, who is a start-up small Canadian publisher specializing in public policy books, tried to upload The Plague of Models to Amazon, as he had previously done with half a dozen other books while working at previous institutions as in-house publisher.

This time, unlike his previous experiences, the book was taken down shortly after it was uploaded (and we know the upload process worked, since the book was available briefly for preview, so there was no technical issue with the manuscript file). The publisher got a form-letter email saying that the book had been taken down because it may have violated some (non-specific) Amazon Term of Service. When he sent a note back requesting clarification/appeal, he got another form letter, this one repeating that the book may have violated some term of service, and warning that any attempt to re-upload would get his entire account terminated.
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Reality strikes: Democrats in Democratically-controlled cities complain about the consequences of Democratic Party policies

1:34 pm

The Democratic Party, always failing but always voted for
The Democratic Party, though always failing it remains
the only party the voters in these cities can support

You get what you vote for: The utter disaster of the Marxist policies of the modern radical Democratic Party are now coming home to roost in numerous cities across America, making them all increasingly “unlivable” in ways that are savage, violent, and devastating. Crime is up, shoplifting is now a sports event, and murderers go free while local prosecutors indict ordinary citizens for simply defending themselves.

These facts are not news however. Since the 1960s Democratic Party policies have routinely done damage to the livability of American cities. What makes this collapse in civilization now even more significant however is who is noticing, as shown by three recent articles in the past week.

Let’s start with Minneapolis, where numerous videos document a formerly pleasant midwest city that has now become a hellhole.
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I will NOT wear a mask, part two

5:16 pm

Here we go again! When the first panic over COVID arrived in 2020 and government thugs and their leftist minions in the culture began demanding that everyone wear a mask, I wrote the following:

It apparently has not been enough that they have successfully destroyed a thriving economy, put millions out of work, destroyed the airline, entertainment, sports, and restaurant industries, over a disease that, at best is nothing more than a slight blip in the overall death rate, and at worst will be comparable to similar past epidemics that we lived through without government-imposed panic or economic disaster.

No, destroying millions of lives has not been enough. They need to do more. They need to find more ways to squelch our freedom, nullify the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and, to paraphrase Orwell, stamp a boot down on our faces, forever.

And in this case, they mean to do this, almost literally.

They are now beginning to demand that we wear masks at all times in public, in the mindless and stupid belief that this will somehow stop COVID-19 from spreading.

I also declared unequivocally that I would not wear a mask, “and if you demand it of me you will have a revolution on your hands.”
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It is time to devalue the software research of climate models

1:29 pm

When the table of contents of the most recent issue of the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Geophysical Research Letters was released on August 16, 2023, I could not help noticing it contained a string of papers repeatedly showing that the models used to prove the coming fire of global warming continue to remain untrustworthy and unreliable. All of the following papers indicated biases and uncertainties of both climate models as well as the data they used, and each did so in their titles:

All of these papers considered the models valid for future research, and were instead focused on refining and increasing the accuracy of the models. All however showed once again how little we should trust these models.

What makes the publication of these papers significant is that it was the AGU that published them, even though the AGU has a decidedly biased editorial policy in favor of global warming. Despite the AGU’s insistence that “realistic and continually improving computer simulations of the global climate predict that global temperatures will continue to rise as a result of past and future greenhouse gas emissions,” it still cannot avoid publishing papers that repeatedly disprove that conclusion.
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Movies when our culture was not run by barbarians

2:58 pm

Today’s essay will in a sense be part two of an essay I wrote earlier this week, entitled “We are becoming a nation of barbarians”. Then, I tried to show the decay in the western civilization by describing the accepted — almost encouraged — crudeness of modern language. While public cursing could easily be consider only a small and trivial issue, I think the increased use of obscene language in normal discourse is equivalent to the “broken windows theory” of psychology, which posits that minor visible signs of disorder and misbehavior encourage further and worse disorder and misbehavior, eventually leading to collapse.

Today I’d like to instead give some examples of the much more civilized nature of popular entertainment from only a half century ago, in order to contrast this with the present. To do this I will cite just four movie examples, and challenge everyone today who is a passionate fan of modern films to watch them (all of which are available for free on the internet) and recognize the differences that I will describe. If you like movies, you will enjoy the experience, but I warn you, modern popular entertainment films do not compare well with these mid-twentieth century pop movies.
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West Virginia University: to save money it eliminates 32 majors instead of its bloated overhead

1:15 pm

West Virginia University logo
West Virginia University: An example of bankrupt academia?

Bankrupt academia: The bankruptcy of intellectual thought in modern American academia is finally beginning to percolate down to the bankbook, at least in West Virginia. On August 11, 2023 the administration at West Virginia University released a report proposing the elimination of 32 majors while also eliminating 169 faculty positions.

The preliminary recommendations, released Friday afternoon, said 12 of those programs are undergraduate majors and 20 are graduate-level majors. Other programs were told to reduce their faculty size — 169 faculty jobs are on the line for cuts.

Programs marked for discontinuation included: master’s and doctorate in Mathematics; master’s and doctorate in Higher Education Administration; master’s of Public Administration; master’s of fine arts in Creative Writing; and a bachelor’s in Recreation, Parks and Tourism Resources. The Department of World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, which includes Spanish, Russian and Chinese studies, was marked to be completely dissolved.

You can read the full report here. It is important to look closely at it, as it reveals some stark facts about how bankrupt academia remains. » Read more

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We are becoming a nation of barbarians

2:16 pm

From Netflix's Barbarians series
Making heroes of barbarians, on Netflix

I have previous railed against the decline in the use of language in the United States. Not only do Americans now routinely use obscenities in normal language, they have been meekly acquiescing to the demands of the radical and somewhat insane queer movement to accept its weasel words in order to hide what it really is.

The recent viral and passionate endorsement by conservatives of all stripes to a new song and the performance by a new country singer, Oliver Anthony, illustrates how this decline to barbarism is accelerating. The focus of Anthony’s song is the cruel destruction of the American way of life by the power-brokers in Washington, and how those power brokers are making life so difficult for ordinary people.

What makes Anthony’s song indicative however of society’s increasing barbarous trend is his language. Right from the start he nonchalantly uses obscenities that would have once been considered unacceptable by everyone, and until recently utterly unacceptable among our more conservative population.

Yet now, even conservatives see nothing wrong with Anthony’s use of obscenities. Apparently, it is now okay for everyone to spew curse words everywhere, in public, in songs, for all to hear, from children to adults. Anthony’s message condemning the tyranny coming from Washington is too important to ignore. It must be touted widely, no matter how obscenely he couches his statement.

In other words, now even conservatives don’t care if our culture is debased and damaged. It doesn’t matter if we teach young children that they can act like barbarians, cursing and expressing wild emotions without thinking. It is policy and political power that matters, not doing right and behaving properly.

For though curses and obscenities have their place and proper time, in a civilization of rational civil adults one does not encourage their use. » Read more

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