Category: Essays And Commentaries

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

Today’s blacklisted Americans: Anyone who worked in the Trump administration

12:47 pm

Death to the Bill of Rights!

They’re coming for you next: Today’s post about the new effort by leftists and Democrats to blacklist all their opponents does not concern any single individual (as has been the focus of my previous posts), but instead will focus on the all-encompassing effort by the Democratic Party and its leftist supporters to blacklist anyone who worked in Trump administration, so they can never get work again.

Thus, today have three stories illustrating the left’s oppressive and intolerant effort to destroy any who oppose them.

First, there is a bill introduced in Congress by a congresswoman Stephanie Murphy (D-Florida) that would ban any person from federal employment or military service who might have attended any protest rally that claimed the November 3rd election was stolen, or even suggested that there was voter fraud.

This level of attempted government repression is breathtaking in its scope. As a rule, anyone who is convicted (and that’s a key word) of having breached the Capitol building on January 6th and committing acts of vandalism or attacks on law enforcement officers will likely disqualify themselves from obtaining a security clearance. (And hence, a federal job in most cases.) The same is true for all serious offenses, though you can generally receive a waiver for misdemeanors and minor violations. No new legislation would be needed to make that happen.

But this bill is something entirely different. It would effectively criminalize every person who showed up for the rally and remained out in the streets protesting. The same would go for the hundreds of other rallies held across the nation in the preceding months. Further, depending on how the legislation is interpreted, if you ever engaged with Q-anon believers on social media or other discussion groups, you could be similarly canceled from working in the public sphere.

In other words, Democrat Murphy is aiming to make second class citizens of anyone who dared protest the election of Joe Biden. While it is doubtful her legislation will pass as is, do not be surprised if it gets slipped into a larger omnibus bill somewhere, when no one can spot it. And don’t be surprised when the Democrats controlling Congress help her get this done.

Next we have an effort by leftist activists to develop a real blacklist and use it to prevent anyone who worked for the Trump administration from getting a job in the private sector.
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The strange moated mesas of the Kasei Valley on Mars

1:37 pm

Overview map

In showing my readers today’s cool image, I want to present it as it is seen by scientists, first from a far distance that with time increasingly zooms in to reveal mysteries on a very human scale.

The overview map to the right essentially gives us the view of Mars as seen by scientists following the Mariner 9 orbiter mission that began mapping the Martian surface in late 1971 after the conclusion of a global dust storm that had hidden its surface initially. As the first high resolution map of Mars, the orbiter revealed numerous puzzling and surprising features, including the largest volcanoes and canyons in the solar system. The orbiter also found that the red planet’s surface was comprised of two very different regions, the northern lowland plains and the southern cratered highlands.

The overview map, covering from about 13 degrees south latitude to about 34 degrees north latitude, shows us all but the southern cratered highlands. The white box in Kasei Valles is where today’s cool image is located. Both Kasai and Valles Marineris represent those giant canyons, all invoking to Earth eyes the possibility of catastrophic floods of liquid water sometime in the past.

Ascraeus Mons is the northernmost of the three giant volcanoes east of the biggest volcano of all, Olympus Mons. All sit on what scientists now call the Tharsis Bulge.

Chryse Planitia, where Viking-1 landed in 1976, is part of those northern lowlands that some scientists believe might have been once had an intermittent ocean sometime in the past. Today’s image is about 600 miles from the outlet into Chryse Planitia.

The geological mystery of all these features demands a closer look, something that scientists have been pursuing now for more than a half century.
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The pit caves of Mars: Can humans someday live in them?

1:24 pm

Four more pits in the Tharsis Bulge on Mars

It has been more than four months since my last report on the pits of Mars. Time to do another.

The collage to the right shows the four different pits photographed by the high resolution camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) since October. The links to each image are:

Like almost all the cave pits so far found on Mars, all are in the Tharsis Bulge of giant volcanoes to west of Valles Marineris. The overview map below shows these pits in the context of every other pit in this region that I have featured on Behind the Black.
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An empty Biden inauguration for a false victory

11:47 am

Comparing crowds at presidential inaugurations
Photos from here.

For those who still think Joe Biden won his election legitimately and with popular support, you need only look at the two screen captures to the right, comparing the crowds at the previous presidential inauguration (at the top) and the crowd today at Biden’s inauguration.

It is also important to note that the Trump crowd in 2017 was totally normal, comparable to every past public inauguration since such events became occasions of grand splendor.

For Democrat Joe Biden, however, the lack of a crowd is essentially unprecedented. While past inaugurations were greeted with large enthusiastic crowds of citizens coming to celebrate the democratic and peaceful transition of power, today’s event was heralded by wartime security, barbed wire fences, military checkpoints, and a military police guard of 25,000 troops. Biden officials claimed this tight security was necessary because of the threat of violence.

I ask however: If 80 million voters swarmed the polls on November 3rd to elect Joe Biden, why does his new administration feel so afraid of the American people? No president in the past was this terrified of taking his oath of office in front of a gigantic crowd. Even Abraham Lincoln did so before a huge crowd in 1865, even as the Civil War still raged, as the photo below shows most emphatically.
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Pioneers and the future

1:31 pm

The asteroid mining ship Dream Watcher docked on the Mars space station.
From Pioneer: The asteroid mining ship Dream Watcher docked
on the Mars space station Landville, c2183.

When I first wrote my sole science fiction book, Pioneer, back in the mid-1980s, I strongly believed (and still do) that for the human race to prosper in space and truly build new civilizations on other worlds, freedom, private enterprise, and courage would be required.

It was for this reason there is absolute no mention of NASA in the book. Unlike most modern movies that idolize this mostly dysfunctional government agency and see it as the only solution for accomplishing anything in space (watch The Martian again to see what I mean), I knew that while government will be strongly involved in space exploration for the foreseeable future, for anything to get done quickly those governments will best step aside and figure out how to let their citizens both freely do it and also own what they do.

This weekend’s aborted SLS static fire test illustrates my point perfectly. Rather than depend on private enterprise to get this rocket built, both George Bush Jr. and Congress decided to give the job to their government bureaucrats. The result has been nothing for now over a decade.
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Blacklists are back and the Democrats have got ’em

9:50 pm

The Bill of Rights, cancelled

They’re coming for you next: Oh boy, it’s the 1950s again and its time for witchhunts from Congress and big corporations.

Unlike the 1950s, however, the question will not be whether you have ever been a member of the Communist Party. No, now the question will be much more effective and to the point. It will be “Have you ever been conservative or a member of the Republican Party?”

And as always, today’s progressive Democratic Party is on the ball! Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has revealed members of the House are planning to form a commission to “rein in” conservative media, to prevent them from “spewing disinformation and misinformation.”

During a lengthy Instagram Live on Tuesday evening where she revealed that she feared for her life during the siege, the “Squad” member accused the mainstream media of “spewing disinformation” ahead of the deadly riot in which five people died.

“There’s absolutely a commission that’s being discussed but it seems to be more investigating in style rather than truth and reconciliation,” she said. “I do think that several members of Congress in some of my discussions have brought up media literacy because that is part of what happened here,” Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) went on. “We’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation,” she said.

Hey, Alexandria, I’ve got the perfect name for your congressional commission. Why not call it the House Un-American Activities Committee? You could subpoena right-wing writers and journalists to testify against their will in Congress, demanding to know their party affiliations. You could also set up lists of these proven conservatives so that businesses nationwide can blacklist them and keep them from working.

In fact, many of big corporations, their boards dominated by Democrats, are already ahead of the curve, cutting off all donations to all Republicans who simply wanted to find out if there was election fraud in the 2020 election. Other businesses in turn have begun firing anyone who worked for Trump.

It is obvious, Alexandra, that the work will be rewarding and productive. Get that committee going. Send out those subpoenas. Harass those witnesses.

We can’t have those evil Republicans poisoning our glorious socialist paradise, can we?

23 comments

We are about to find out who our real friends are

1:59 pm

Sergei Krikalev on the space shuttle
Russian Sergei Krikalev on the space shuttle, February 1994.

When in 2002 I was writing my space history, Leaving Earth, I spent more than a month interviewing Russian astronauts in Moscow. Many of those individuals had also flown on the American space shuttle during the initial Mir-Shuttle joint missions followed by the start of the assembly of ISS, which had given them a unique opportunity to get an outsider’s perspective on American culture.

One man Sergei Krikalov, was especially unique. He not only was the first Russian to train at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, he was the first Russian to fly on the space shuttle, and the first to enter ISS’s first module after launch. Because of that experience, he also spoke excellent English, which meant he could describe his experiences to me directly, and not through an interpreter.

When it came to American culture, he noted how as a Russian, he was appalled at the empty nature of American friendships.
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The new dark age of silencing

10:52 pm

Screen capture of Rantingly on January 8, 2021
Click for most recent page.

The dark age has arrived! The screen capture on the right, cropped, rearranged, and color adjusted slightly to fit here, comes from the front page of the conservative news aggregate site Rantingly from tonight, the evening of January 8, 2021, only two days after Congress certified Joe Biden as president-elect and only three days after the Democrats had confirmed that they will have majority control of the both the House and Senate in Congress.

I have highlighted in red the pertinent stories. Very quickly, the Democratic Party’s allies in at Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Apple have moved to shut down many legitimate and popular conservative and Republican news outlets, including the Twitter feed of the President of the United States. With the Democrats in control of the government, these leftist internet platforms know they have nothing to fear by doing this, that if anything the Democrats controlling Congress will applaud them and encourage them to censor more conservative and Republican outlets, to shut them all down if possible.

Beforehand, these social media platforms had held their fire somewhat out of fear that the Republicans would change their special tax status exemptions that define them as open platforms, not publishers. No longer. Their desire to silence their opponents can now swing into high gear, and they are pushing it for all it is worth, including attempting to silence their direct competitors, such as Parler, a twitter-like platform that prides itself on censoring no one.

It is also very important to recognize that this isn’t being done only by the big corporate bosses. No, sirree, this censorship of conservatives and Republicans is fully endorsed by the workforce at these companies. Today’s young generation, properly indoctrinated in leftist-controlled universities to hate conservatives and view them all as white supremacists, have been eager to do this for the last two years, and have actually been held back by their corporate bosses. The reins are now off, and their modern culture of oppression and intolerance has moved to the forefront. Persecution is now cool!

This is only the beginning. Even as I wrote this post more links appeared at Rantingly of more examples of censorship.

For myself, because I for years refused to do business with corrupt companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter, there is not much they can do right now to hurt me. But these actions today point to the future, and I am not confident my immunity will last very long. The leftists doing this have the power and the willing support of a large percentage of the population. They will use that power and support to jam their boot into every one of their opponent’s faces, given time.

The worst part of this horror is that the people who should read it and learn from it, the low information Democratic Party supporters who really don’t understand how evil that party has become, will never see it. My readers generally agree with me. Those that do not generally fall into two categories, those who are strongly partisan and will deny these facts whole-heartedly, or hacks working for the Democratic Party who come here merely to spread misinformation and lies.

The decent and moderate people who are knee-jerk Democrats and who desperately need to read this and to see the intolerance spreading across America from the party they support are just not interested. They will turn away, dismissing what I write with a wave of the hand. This can’t be true! It must be some mad conspiracy claims of the racist alt-right! And maybe those sites are bad and should be silenced!

And I write this from direct knowledge. I have been surrounded by these people my entire life, being a secular Jew who has also been a college teacher, a film maker, and a science journalist. All these communities are dominated by low information Democrats. I have known them all and have I spent my life trying to get them to wake up, all to no avail.

They will not see. They will not hear. And they will not speak up. And so, worse is coming. We no longer live in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Soon, it will be a land of oppression and murder and genocide, all because too many Americans decided to close their minds and do nothing.

136 comments

Rover update: Curiosity on the shore of a sand sea

1:24 pm

Curiosity stops on the shore of a sand sea, while Yutu-2 continues its journey west away from Chang’e-2. On the way: Perseverance and China’s first Mars rover on Tianwen-1.

A sand sea on Mars
Click for full image.

Curiosity

The photo on the right, taken in late December, shows the large sand lake the science team has labeled “the Sands of Forvie” that the rover has been working its way uphill to reach since it left the Mary Anning drill site back in November.

Since they arrived there, they have used the rover to roll across the sand, cutting into a ripple to expose its interior, followed by high resolution close-up images. They have also used the rover to analyze the chemical composition of the sand’s grains, from that interior section, from the top of several ripples, and from the troughs in between.

Once finished here, the rover will be turned east again to continue its journey around this sand sea to the very base of Mount Sharp. The overview map below shows the planned route.
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Sunspot update: December sunspot activity once again higher than predicted

1:11 pm

The uncertainty of science: It is time to once again take a look at the state of the Sun’s on-going sunspot cycle. Below is NOAA’s January 1, 2021 monthly graph, documenting the Sun’s monthly sunspot activity and annotated by me to show previous solar cycle predictions.

The ramp up to solar maximum continued in December. Though there was a drop from the very high activity seen in November, the number of sunspots in December still far exceeded the prediction as indicated by the red curve.

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Is the ultimate Republican Party failure theater about to happen?

12:30 pm

The dead Constitution

For the past thirty years the Republican Party has been amazingly consistent in almost every political battle put before it by the increasingly leftist and radical Democratic Party. Almost every single time, the leaders of this so-called conservative political party have put on a big show of resisting the leftist and radical proposals put forth by Democrats, only in the end to back down, making a deal that allows those policies to take effect in some manner or another.

I am not sure who originally coined the term, but in recent years this incompetence has often been called “failure theater.” The Republican Party justifies its failures by citing the big theatrical fight they put on. They then promise they will fight harder next time, only to fail again. And again. And again.

This failure theater has been going on repeatedly for decades, since Ronald Reagan was president. Then Donald Trump came along. Unlike the establishment Republicans who ran for president since Reagan (Bush Sr., Dole, Bush Jr., McCain, Romney), Trump generally does not back down easily. He does not participate in failure theater. When he fights he fights to win, which has made the corrupt leadership in the Republican Party very uncomfortable for the past four years.
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The state of the global rocket industry in the 21st century

12:23 pm

With the year of 2020 coming to an end, it is time to look back to see how the world’s rocket industry fared in what was a truly difficult year for most. And with the 21st century now one fifth over, it is also time to take a wider view, to see what the trends have been for space exploration during this new century, and to see where those trends might lead.

Below is my annual updated table showing all successful orbital launches by every nation and company, beginning in 2000. While the table in my 2019 report last year had gone back to 1990, I decided to shorten the graph to just the 21st Century, in order to better focus on that century in particular.

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