Category: Essays And Commentaries

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

There is no diversity in American academia, none at all

4:51 pm

Banned on campuses nationwide
Banned on campuses nationwide

The modern academic racist bureaucracy that is usually called “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) attempts over and over again to gaslight us into believing its goal is to welcome everyone. For example, on Yale’s DEI webpage is this statement in outlining its “Belonging” program:

Advancing Yale’s mission in vibrant community life, in which members encounter and appraise a broad array of ideas, are treated with dignity and respect, and feel welcome to make their voices heard;

Nothing about Yale’s belonging program however encourages free expression, and in fact it works agreesively to discourage it. On a related DEI webpage, it states the following about free expression:
» Read more

14 comments

Despite big bucks from the U.S., the stalemate in the Ukraine continues, with only minor Russian gains

1:32 pm

With the passage by the Senate yesterday of a major foreign aid bill that includes $60 billion in aid to the Ukraine war effort, despite strong public opposition and a House Republican leadership unwilling to approve it, it seems that this might be a good time to look at the actual situation on the ground in the Ukraine. Have the front lines changed in any major way since my last update on the Ukraine war in September, 2023? And will that aid make any difference, should House Republicans break their word and approve it in the end?

Based on what has happened in the past six months, the answer to these questions is “Not much”, and “No”. Note the map below, adapted from maps produced by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), comparing the territory occupied by the Russians in November 2022 with what it presently occupies in February 2024.
» Read more

21 comments

Are decent ordinary Democrats finally recognizing the terrible power-hungry corruption of their political party?

2:32 pm

The Democratic Party: Fostering election tampering everywhere
The Democratic Party

I have been hoping and praying for more than three decades for ordinary and decent Democratic Party supporters to recognize the rot that has permeated that party since the 1990s, all to no avail. Beginning with Bill Clinton, a Democratic Party politician could commit perjury, accept campaign donations illegally from hostile foreign powers, lie, cheat, and do all sorts of criminal acts, and ordinary Democrats would routinely and nonchalantly look the other way. “That can’t be true!” they would insist if you tried to point out any of these facts. Others would be even more closed-minded. “Democrats stand for equal rights and the poor! Republicans are fascists!”

In recent days however some anecdotal evidence, along with more firm survey data, suggests that ordinary Democrats (and some not so ordinary) might finally be opening their minds to other possibilities. Maybe Republicans (and Donald Trump) aren’t so bad after all. Maybe there is real corruption and bad policy coming from Democratic Party politicans.

For example, on the afternoon after the Supreme Court had listened to Colorado’s case trying to ban Donald Trump from the November presidential ballot, Justice Elena Kagan participated in a public event at the Library of Congress. During the morning court session it had appeared that all of the judges (including the judges appointed by Democrats) were very skeptical of Colorado’s case, with many legal analysts thinking their questions and comments suggesting they would rule against Colorado by a large majority, possibly unanimously.

At that afternoon public event, Kagan expressed these thoughts:
» Read more

24 comments

Pushback: 9-year-old slandered by left goes to Super Bowl wearing face paint

12:13 pm

Holden Armenta on his way to the Superbowl
Holden Armenta in face-paint and headdress,
on his way to the Superbowl. Click for video.

Bring a gun to a knife fight: Though this will the third time in less than a week I have devoted my column to this story, this update today is absolutely essential, because it might be the happiest and most hopeful story I have reported in years.

The screen capture to the right was taken from a short X video posted by one of the two podcasters who had started a GiveSendGo campaign to send Holden Armenta to the Super Bowl. Armenta had been slandered falsely by Deadspin senior writer Carron Phillips, who claimed the boy was a racist because he attended a Kansas City Chiefs game in blackface, when all the boy did was put on facepaint of the team’s colors to cheer them on, like any ordinary 9-year-old boy. Worse, both that news outlet and Phillips compounded the false slander by refusing to correct their error when it was clearly documented it was false. That defiance was made even more disgusting when it was revealed that Armenta and his family are actually American Indians themselves.

Even though the fund-raising campaign fell short of its $22,000 goal, raising about half that, it appears that the podcasters decided to take Holden and his family to the game anyway. Kudos to them!

The video of Holden is joyous in numerous ways. » Read more

3 comments

Pushback: Fired by Disney for noting Nazis killed Jews, actress sues, her lawyers paid for by X

2:24 pm

Gina Carano's tweet about the Nazi genocide

Bring a gun to a knife fight: Back in February 2021 my daily blacklist column focused on the horrible blackballing of actress Gina Carano by the Disney corporation. It had fired her because of the tweet to the right, in which she had stated some undeniable facts about the Nazis and their compaign to murder the Jews. As a company spokesperson stated falsely at her firing,

[H]er social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.

It was the company’s false and slanderous position — as demonstrated by numerous other actions at the same time — that Carano’s conservative positions on many issues was the equivalent of “denigrating” the queer and black communities, like a Nazi. To Disney, her effort to retell the history of the Holocaust in order to prevent it from happening again was unacceptable, and so it fired her.

Carano is now suing Disney and Lucasfilms for that firing and its subsequent smear campaign against her. You can read her complaint here. It is easy reading, and outlines in great detail the very reasonable positions taken by Carano in public, and the campaign of slanders against her that followed from Disney officials as well as advocates in the BLM and queer communities. Repeatedly Carano made it clear she was not attacking any particular group, and that her goal was to outline actual facts and defend the free speech rights of everyone. The response from Disney and the activists in the BLM and queer communities were slanders, lies, and falsehoods. Her case is strong, as she is suing under California law, which states that
» Read more

21 comments

The failure of the COVID jab and the people who pushed it

2:42 pm

Sudden collapse
One of many sudden public collapses.
Click for full video.

I think it is time to do an update on the recent research outlining the disaster that the mRNA COVID jab has brought to humans worldwide. The news has generally been bad, though sadly none of it has been a surprise to anyone paying attention since 2021 and 2022.

Note to that no where in any of my reporting do I ever call these shots “vaccines.” In the past, when you got a vaccine it protected you from the targeted disease. The jab does not do that. It is not even clear that it reduces your chances of catching the disease, with significant evidence actually suggesting it increases your chances.

We begin with a study published in August 2023 that found that the jab appeared to damage the immune system of children.

Kids who got Pfizer’s mRNA Covid jabs had a weakened immune response to other viruses and bacteria, Australian researchers reported in a study published last week. The diminished response appeared within weeks after the second Pfizer dose, the authors found. Blood taken from the children produced fewer crucial signaling molecules when stimulated with several common potential bacteria and viruses.

Over time, the immune response to bacteria returned to normal. But the diminished response to viruses lasted at least six months, for as long as the researchers collected data.

This study was small, involving only 29 kids, but the data was “troubling” to all researchers involved, and demanded further research.

Then in September a study of health care workers found that getting the jab actually made them sicker.
» Read more

15 comments

A sign of hope and disaster: Students rip out tampon dispenser in boy’s bathroom 20 minutes after it was installed

12:18 pm

Marc Belanda, principal of Brookfield and leading the way to a queer future!
Marc Belanda, principal of Brookfield HS,
leading the way to a queer future!

Last week a story made news when administrators at Brookfield High School in Connecticut installed a woman’s tampon dispenser in the boy’s bathroom, as now required by an insane law passed by the state legislature in 2022.

A bill passed in the 2022 legislative session requires public school Boards of Education to provide free menstrual products to students in all girls restrooms, in any all-gender restrooms, and in at least one boys restroom. According to Connecticut’s Department of Public Health (DPH) “The intention of the law is to address period poverty, meaning the struggle to purchase period products due to lack of income.”

It wasn’t however the installation that made news, but the fact that only twenty minutes after the dispenser was installed students at the school (likely teenage boys) ripped it out.
» Read more

12 comments

Sunspot update: The Sun in January acted like solar maximum is here

11:11 am

In my monthly sunspot update at the start of January, I asked in the headline “Are we now in the next solar maximum?”

The Sun’s sunspot activity in January since then has apparently answered that question. NOAA this week posted its monthly update of its graph showing solar sunspot activity on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere, and as I do every month since 2011, I have posted that graph below, with annotations to provide a larger context.
» Read more

11 comments

The FBI must be wiped clean, or wiped out, on Day One of the next Repubican administration

1:05 pm

Christopher Wray, the world's most powerful mobster

Should Donald Trump become president in 2024 and the acts to make major changes within the federal executive bureaucracy, cleaning house from top to bottom with major firings and layoffs (something he should have done in his first administration and failed to do), without question the first agency he must attack mercilessly is the FBI.

There are numerous documented examples in the past decade where the FBI has been weaponized against conservatives and Republicans, investigating, harassing, and even arresting people because they held beliefs that opposed the agenda of the Democratic Party. In some cases the individuals attacked were simply religious Christians who opposed abortion. In other cases the victims were ordinary Americans who simply made public their support of Trump.

Nor were just everyday Americans attacked. The FBI has arrested Republican candidates for office. Its officials have altered evidence to justify illegal seach warrants against Republicans. Its management also targeted and framed Trump officials it did not like. Officials there also abused the FISA court, submitting error-filled applications that were used to get warrants to spy on Americans. It redacted information to hide its misbehavior, claiming dishonestly that the redactions were for national security reasons.

This list is only a very small selection of the many such stories reported in the past decade. Any one of these corrupt actions would justify firing everyone at the FBI and zeroing out its budget as quickly as possible. Last week however the Ninth U.S. Court of Appeals provided us another reason: It ruled that FBI agents literally committed theft in rummaging through hundreds of security deposit boxes at a bank in wealthy Beverly Hills, confiscating millions of dollars it had no right to grab, simply because the cash was there and the agents and the agency wanted that money for their own pockets.
» Read more

20 comments

African lawfare to take control of space

12:57 pm

Modern academia: Marching with Lenin!
Modern African academia, proudly marching with Lenin!

It appears that a growing cadre of African lawyers are working within international organizations such as the UN and the International Astronautical Union (IAU) to use the Outer Space Treaty as a wedge to take control of space, wresting it from the hands of private commerical companies.

I make this assessment based upon a long article about this new lawfare published today in Wired, describing the training and political goals of a number of young African layers in the field of international space law.

[S]ome players in the global south are gearing up for the orbital future not just by scrambling to launch satellites, but by building up skills in outer space law—the evolving area of international jurisprudence that introduced the “province of all mankind” concept in the first place.

Though the Outer Space Treaty is still the cornerstone of space law, other international agreements have built up around it over the years—and more still are desperately needed to regulate today’s realities in space. “This is an area of rulemaking where they’re just setting up the rules for the future, so you need to have a perspective now,” explains Timiebi Aganaba, a British-Canadian-Nigerian professor at Arizona State University who has been instrumental in driving African interest in space law. “If the system gets built without you—if you come in later—people will start quoting laws to you.”

In 2011, Aganaba helped organize the first teams of African law students to enter something called the Manfred Lachs Space Law Moot Court Competition. The global tournament, named after an architect of the Outer Space Treaty, uses fictional court cases to train young lawyers how to think through the plausible conflicts that could soon arise beyond the atmosphere—and it is far and away the most important professional conduit into the field of space law. Students who make it to the final round of the competition argue their cases before actual judges from the International Court of Justice—the world’s highest forum for legal disputes between countries. And since 2011, teams from Africa have become a force in the competition. In 2018, South Africa’s University of Pretoria won the international championship.

If Aganaba’s name rings a bell to my readers, it is no surprise. » Read more

9 comments

All climate models continue to be wrong, overstating warming to significant degrees

12:24 pm

Climate models versus data
Click for full resolution graph.

According to a new analysis comparing actual satellite observations of the climate since 1979 with all the climate models used by the IPCC and global warming activitists, it appears that every single climate model continues to overstate significantly their predictions of warming, with that error increasing with time. From the paper’s abstract:

Warming of the global climate system over the past half-century has averaged 43 percent less than that produced by computerized climate models used to promote changes in energy policy. In the United States during summer, the observed warming is much weaker than that produced by all 36 climate models surveyed here.

While the cause of this relatively benign warming could theoretically be entirely due to humanity’s production of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning, this claim cannot be demonstrated through science. At least some of the measured warming could be natural. Contrary to media reports and environmental organizations’ press releases, global warming offers no justification for carbon-based regulation.

The research was done by Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, who has also been the principal investigator on one climate satellite. The graph to the right, chart 2 of his paper, shows the error of every single climate model, with some models so wrong they are essentially useless to predict anything.

What is significant about this research is not that these models are wrong, it is that they are all wrong in the same direction. If the climate science community was approaching this work honestly with an effort to be unbiased, we should should expect some models to predict too little warming, and others too much. That all predict too much warming suggests that every single one of these models is tainted by politics and confirmation bias. The people who write the models want global warming to occur (almost certainly for political reasons), and so their models always lean in that direction.

What is even more disturbing is that Spencer’s work shows that the difference between the models and observations is growing, as indicated by chart 3 from his paper, below.
» Read more

19 comments

Six questions too many Democrats refuse to answer

1:26 pm

The Democratic Party: What does it really believe in?
The Democratic Party: What does it really believe in?

Today at the Washington Examiner journalist Elizabeth Stauffer has written a fine essay describing in general terms the inability of Democrats to discuss the issues today with any rationality.

The Democrats have settled upon their 2024 campaign message: “Former President Donald Trump poses a threat to democracy and must be stopped. He has openly admitted he will become a dictator on day one.”

Liberals make these statements about Trump and so-called MAGA Republican “extremists” because they know if they are repeated enough, they will stick. And they’re right. No evidence is required because the Democrats know they will never be called upon to support their claims by their comrades.

When questioned by conservatives, however, they simply hold fast to their lies.

Democrat Congressman Dean Phillips (D-Minnesota) — who is also running for the Democratic Party nonimation for President and got 21% of the vote in New Hampshire yesterday — put it more bluntly on January 22, 2024 on CNN:

“My party is completely delusional right now.”

Stauffer then lists six questions that every Democrat should be repeatedly challenged to answer, as follows:
» Read more

20 comments

More evidence that smart phones are destroying minds

12:58 pm

The smart phone: Bad for kids
The smart phone: Proven very bad for kids

Link here. The article is a detailed look at the growing body of evidence that now strongly suggests that the use of smart phones by young children is very bad for the development of their brains, and leads to numerous mental and physical issues later in life.

The article describes numerous studies that have tracked a sudden rise in childhood behavioral problems, beginning in the early 2010s, when smart phones started to be ubiquitous. For example,

In 2008, psychotherapist Tom Kersting, who worked as a school counselor for 25 years, saw a rise in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses in children over age 8. ADHD tends to be detected in early childhood after a child starts school. However, he has witnessed increasing diagnoses in teenagers and adults. While it could be possible that some of these teens were missed by clinicians when they were young, Mr. Kersting suspects that some developed symptoms of ADHD due to screen use.

Around 2012, when 30 percent of teenagers had a smartphone, he started to see rebellious behavior and anxiety disorders becoming more common among children. Young adults and teenagers growing up now also tend to be more antisocial and have reduced emotional resilience, which may be related to insufficient in-person socializing due to spending most of their time behind screens. “It’s not just the amount of time spent in the cyber world,” Mr. Kersting told The Epoch Times, “but also what they missed out on: outside play and social learning.”

Other studies have found similar rises during this same time period in childhood depression, anxiety, autism, and an inability to control their emotions.
» Read more

14 comments

The lawless left

1:27 pm

Nazi brown shirts destroying Jewish businesses on Kristallnacht
Nazi brown shirts destroying Jewish businesses on Kristallnacht

While there remains a shrinking percentage of Democrats who strongly believe in the law and the Constitution, the leadership of that political party is largely now controlled by those who believe otherwise.

Two incidents the past week illustrated this fact most starkly.

First a pro-Hamas protest in front of the White House on January 13, 2024 became so violent that many staffers inside the building were evacuated for their safety.

“During the demonstration near the White House complex Jan. 13, a portion of the anti-scale fencing that was erected for the event sustained temporary damage,” the statement read. “The issues were promptly repaired on site by U.S. Secret Service support teams.”

The U.S. Secret Service told Fox News Digital that some fences were damaged outside the White House, and that staff members and journalists were “relocated” as a result. “As a precaution, some members of the media and staff in proximity to Pennsylvania Avenue were temporarily relocated while the issue was being addressed,” the statement continued. “The Secret Service made no arrests associated with the march and there was no property damage to the White House or adjacent buildings.”[emphasis mine]

You can see video of these attempts to break into the White House here. Though the White House grounds were never penetrated, the violent self-righteous attitude of the mob is quite clear: They have the right to break in, because their cause is just. The law does not apply to them.

The highlighted words in the quote above provide a further explanation as to why this violence happened. » Read more

33 comments

Toxic and incompetent academia

2:21 pm

Coca-Cola's bigoted company policy
Examples of the DEI materials from Coca-Cola,
developed in academia and now used in corporate America

The effort nationwide in many legislatures to end the very racist “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) departments that now poison universities everywhere are not only failing, they are illustrating the emptiness of most of that effort.

In Georgia, for example, political pressure on the state’s university system forced it last year to ban DEI statements from any applicants for teaching positions. The university system was also required to “…eliminate references to ‘diversity’ and ‘diverse’ from the standards and replace them with the terms that are allegedly easier to understand.”

These mere semantic demands were quickly warped by the universities, which instead of eliminating such bigoted programs, which create quota systems that favor the hiring of some races over others, the universities simply renamed the statements and the DEI programs to meet the letter of the ban, but not its spirit.
» Read more

One comment

Can the shift in black vote to Trump overcome the Democratic Party’s vote tampering?

12:50 pm

The Democratic Party: Fostering election tampering everywhere
The Democratic Party

Today JJ Sefton in his daily morning report (also available here) included some excellent commentary about the growing polling evidence showing the black vote shifting rightward to Trump, in numbers that are unprecedented in more than a half century.

Whatever one thinks of polling especially this far out (or near, since elections are either light years away or right around the corner depending upon one’s perspective!) is an eye-opener. In normal, non-rigged elections, if Dem support from blacks drops below 93%, that is a major alarm bell for the former. What this aggregate poll [21.9% of blacks for Trump] shows is a potential disaster. Even if as we can all assume the key swing states which have large urban areas that will be rigged for Biden, the amount of cheating will have to be so massive that it would be even more obvious than what we witnessed four years ago. [emphasis mine]

I want to focus on the highlighted sentence, and try to bring some reality to it. Only by doing so will the Republican Party and Donald Trump have any chance of winning.
» Read more

14 comments

Democrats get a taste their own vicious swatting tactics

2:43 pm

The first amendment: no longer honored
No longer honored.

For more than a decade anonymous leftists have used the ugly tactic of swatting to strike fear into the hearts of anyone who opposes them, with the hope that in some cases it might even cause the attacked person or someone in his or her family to be killed.

For those still unaware of what swatting is, let me explain. The attacker simply calls the police and reports falsely a dangerous gun-related crime in progress at the victim’s home, often suggesting there are hostages involved. The police then respond in full force, guns drawn and in large numbers. The victims, who are often asleep at the time, are suddenly faced with a military style attack by SWAT teams, at their home with their family (including children) present, with the real chance that someone will make a mistake, overreact, and begin firing.

The left has been doing this to conservatives both in and out of the political world for years (for a few specific examples going back to 2012, go here, here, and here). In some cases the perpertrators have been caught (with many being teenage boys reacting to the leftist press and thus acting out stupidly), but usually the evil-doer is not identified or punished.

Without question however this tactic has become increasingly popular on the left, which in itself has become increasingly radicalized and intolerant of any opposition.

It now appears the left is beginning to reap what it has sown. In the past few weeks a number of very prominent Democrats have been swatted themselves.
» Read more

15 comments

Proposed removal of William Penn statue proves the Democrats really are anti-American

12:33 pm

The William Penn statue in Welcome Park
The William Penn statue in the center of
Welcome Park. Note the panels on the wall
behind, describing the achievements of his life.
The park service was also planning to “rehabilitate”
this as well.

Though the Biden administration and the National Park Service immediately backed down from its proposal to remove the statue of William Penn from the Pennsylvania park dedicated in 1982 to honor his memory, the very proposal proved without doubt how much the Democrats who dominate our government truly hate America, its founding, and everything it stands for.

First, let’s review the proposal that has now been dumped. According to the National Park Service press release issued on January 5th,

The proposed rehabilitation of Welcome Park includes expanded interpretation of the Native American history of Philadelphia and was developed in consultation with representatives of the indigenous nations of the Haudenosaunee, the Delaware Nation, Delaware Tribe of Indians, the Shawnee Tribe, and the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma. The reimagined Welcome Park maintains certain aspects of the original design such as the street grid, the rivers and the east wall while adding a new planted buffer on three sides, and a ceremonial gathering space with circular benches. The Penn statue and Slate Roof house model will be removed and not reinstalled. [emphasis mine]

In other words, a park built at the site of William Penn’s pioneer home and designed expressly to honor his achievements as the founder of Pennsylvania as a religious haven for all people was to be redesigned instead as a memorial to the primitive stone-age Indian tribes that once lived there, focusing instead on how Penn and the Quakers oppressed them by coming to America. And to rub salt in the wound, this change was to be done in connection with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026.

As I said, the Democrats who dominate our federal bureaucracy as well as academia are our enemies. They truly intend to wipe any positive mention of America from every history book or place, and replace it with Marxist icons and false anti-American propaganda.

Very quickly there was an uproar against this plan. » Read more

11 comments

ULA’s Vulcan rocket successfully places payload in orbit on first launch

1:10 am

Vulcan at liftoff.
Vulcan at liftoff.

After four years of delay, mostly caused by delays at Blue Origin in delivering the two BE-4 engines used in the first stage, ULA’s Vulcan rocket finally completed its first launch early on January 8, 2024, lifting off from Cape Canaveral and successfully placing Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander into orbit.

As of posting the upper stage had just deployed Peregrine, which will leave Earth orbit in about four days using its own engines. The upper stage has one more burn to send it into solar orbit, carrying the ashes of numerous people for the company Celestis.

The 2024 launch race:

3 SpaceX
1 India
1 China
1 ULA

For ULA, this launch is a very big deal. It is the first of two required in order for the Space Force to certify the rocket for future military launches. It also positions the company to begin the many launches that Amazon has awarded it to place into orbit a large percentage of that company’s Kuiper internet satellite constellation, assuming of course Blue Origin can deliver on schedule the many BE-4 engines that ULA will require.

This launch will also likely lead to the sale of ULA. » Read more

10 comments

Can the Democrats offend enough people to make even their aggressive election tampering impossible?

3:24 pm

Are Americans finally waking up and emulating their country's founders?

I normally pay little attention to polls, since for the last two decades they have not only been unreliable but generally weighted unfairly against Republicans. More often than not they have been used not to give us a sense of the state of the political campaign but to make us all believe a Democratic Party victory was inevitable.

However, a poll this week was so astonishing that I think it deserves some discussion. According to a national USA Today-Suffolk University poll published on January 2, 2023 by USA Today, large numbers of blacks, Hispanics, and young voters are now willing to abandon the Democratic Party, and do so in numbers that are shocking and unprecedented. As noted in this article about the poll,
» Read more

23 comments

National Labor Relations Board files complaint against SpaceX

9:51 am

Elon Musk, a target for destruction by Joe Biden
Elon Musk, a target for destruction
by Joe Biden

The Biden administration’s continuing legal harassment of SpaceX and Elon Musk was escalated yesterday when the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed a new complaint against the company, accusing it of firing eight employees illegally for writing a public letter criticizing the company in 2022.

The letter, circulated in 2022, criticized Musk’s actions and the allegations of sexual harassment against him, claiming they were negatively contributing to the company’s reputation. The letter also said the company was failing to live up to its “No Asshole” policy and its policy against sexual harassment.

The letter, whose authorship was not known at the time it was first reported, called on SpaceX to “publicly address and condemn Elon’s harmful Twitter behavior,” to “hold all leadership equally accountable” for bad behavior, and to “clearly define what exactly is intended by SpaceX’s ‘no-asshole’ and ‘zero tolerance’ policies and enforce them consistently.”

According to the NLRB, one SpaceX employer held interviews to determine the writers of the letter, after which they were fired. The case will go before the NLRB in March.

Is this another case of blacklisting, similar to the numerous stories I’ve reported for the last four years where someone was fired for having political opinions? I don’t think so, though some could argue otherwise. In those many other cases, the opinions expressed were generally political in nature and unrelated to the work environment itself. If a company is demanding you bow to critical race theory and admit you are racist simply because you are white and fires you when you refuse, that is not the same as writing a letter accusing your employer of sexual harassment and creating a hostile work environment, and then soliciting signatures from the entire workforce before releasing it publicly. The first case is a direct slander against the employee and is an unreasonable demand. The second is a concerted effort to foster a workplace mutiny, something unacceptable to all employers. It seems the company would have the right to remove such malcontents from its place of business.

Gywnne Shotwell, SpaceX’s CEO, made these facts very clear at the time the letter was published.
» Read more

12 comments

Sunspot update: Are we now in the next solar maximum?

9:57 am

Time for my monthly update on the Sun’s sunspot activity has it proceeds through its eleven-year sunspot cycle. NOAA has released its update of its monthly graph showing the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere, and I have posted it below, annotated with further details to provide a larger context.

In December sunspot activity increased slightly for the second month in a row, but only by a little bit. The number of sunspots for the month was still significantly below the highs seen in the summer, and continue to suggest that the Sun has already entered solar maximum (two years early), and like the previous two solar maximums in 2001 and 2013, will be double peaked.
» Read more

11 comments

The global launch industry in 2023: A record third year in a row of growth, with dark clouds lurking

10:37 am

In 2023 the world saw a continuing rise in the global launch industry. As happened in 2021 and 2022, the record for the most launches in a single year was smashed. In 2023 nations and companies managed to complete more than 200 launches for the first time ever, with the number of launch failures so small you could count them on one hand.

Furthermore, if the predictions by several companies and nations come true, 2024 will be an even greater success. These predictions however all depend on everything continuing as it has, and there are many signs this is not going to be the case. More and more it appears the political world will act to interfere with free world of private enterprise, in some cases intentionally, in others indirectly.

Let us begin by taking a look at 2023.
» Read more

22 comments

Republicans propose another deep state bureaucracy to enforce civil rights laws

12:10 pm

Failure Theater!

Failure theater: In their typically impotent attempt to fight the leftist movement that is imposing a new racial bigotry across America, several Republicans in Congress have proposed a new special government office in Washington that will be specifically assigned the job of preventing racial discrimination at universities.

The College Admissions Accountability Act, introduced by Sen. J.D. Vance (R., Ohio) and Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), would establish a special inspector general within the Education Department—separate from the Office of Civil Rights—to probe potential violations of the colorblind standard set forth in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ruled that race-conscious admissions programs violate the 14th Amendment. The bill would also bar schools that flout the decision from receiving any form of federal aid.

…The bill, which appropriates $25 million for the new role and is cosponsored by Sens. Ted Budd (R., N.C.), Mike Braun (R, Ind.), Josh Hawley (R., Mo.), Eric Schmitt (R., Mo.), and Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), does include a sunset clause that would terminate the office after 12 years. Republicans seem to be betting that recalcitrant universities will, after a decade of robust enforcement, throw in the towel and evolve colorblind norms.

These senators and congressmen, along with several conservative think tanks, think naively that this office will the place for anyone of any race to go to get justice should a university receiving federal funds create a program that specifically excludes them solely because of their race. The aim will supposedly be to target specifically the new Diversity-Inclusion-Equity programs at universities and in governments that are imposing this new discrimination against whites, Asians, and Jews.

The foolishness of this plan is hard to measure. » Read more

10 comments

All I feel is fury at the bankruptcy of academia decades ago

1:55 pm


A modern Ivy League education: “But Brawndo’s got what plants crave.
It’s got electrolytes!”

Recently Bari Weiss, former New York Times journalist who it blacklisted because she refused to follow the leftist narrative when the facts said otherwise, wrote a heart-wrenching column about the fall of American academia. She began as follows:

Twenty years ago, when I was a college student, I started writing about a then-nameless, niche ideology that seemed to contradict everything I had been taught since I was a child.

…What I saw was a worldview that replaced basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Color blindness with race obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob.

People were to be given authority in this new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments, or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical ideologues. According to them, as James Kirchick concisely put it: “Muslim > gay, black > female, and everybody > the Jews.”

I was an undergraduate back then, but you didn’t need a PhD to see where this could go. And so I watched, in horror, sounding alarms as loudly as I could.

I was told by most Jewish leaders that, yes, it wasn’t great, but not to be so hysterical. Campuses were always hotbeds of radicalism, they said. This ideology, they promised, would surely dissipate as young people made their way in the world.

It is essential to repeat her second paragraph again to understand the utter bankruptcy of this new “philosophy.” It was…

… a worldview that replaced basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Color blindness with race obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob.

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The violent animals on the left who support Hamas

12:20 pm

Hamas protesters threaten blind children
Hamas protesters threaten blind children

I am in no mood this day to be polite or diplomatic. The ugliness exhibited in the past week by pro-Hamas demonstrators — using the violent techniques of Antifa and BLM and copying Nazi storm-trooper tactics — deserve no politeness. They are no longer acting like civilized rational human beings, but mere animals eager to kill and only held back from that goal by the last few shreds remaining of civilization’s rule of law.

Thus, at this moment they only attack innocent people in ugly ways, not intending to kill but clearly hoping to intimidate and strike fear into the hearts of everyone else. Some examples from the past three days:

The last story in this list is especially egregious. The screen capture above shows two demonstrators on stage. In the video at the link they are screaming and yelling, with the one on the right charging at the children in a threatening manner. Remember, this is a fund-raiser for blind children. Those kids cannot see, so all they know is that someone unexpected has appeared on the stage and is screaming at them, and their helpers are desperately trying to get them to safety.

This behavior illustrates perfectly the hatred and viciousness of all these pro-Hamas demonstrators. » Read more

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Repost: The real meaning of the Apollo 8 Earthrise image

11:19 am

I wrote this essay in 2018, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission to the Moon. I think it worth reposting again, especially because stories about Apollo 8 still refuse to show the Earthrise image as Bill Anders took it.
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Earthrise, as seen by a space-farer
Earthrise, as seen by a space-farer

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the moment when the three astronauts on Apollo 8 witnessed their first Earthrise while in orbit around the Moon, and Bill Anders snapped the picture of that Earthrise that has been been called “the most influential environmental picture ever taken.”

The last few days have seen numerous articles celebrating this iconic image. While all have captured in varying degrees the significance and influence of that picture on human society on Earth, all have failed to depict this image as Bill Anders, the photographer, took it. He did not frame the shot, in his mind, with the horizon on the bottom of the frame, as it has been depicted repeatedly in practically every article about this image, since the day it was published back in 1968.

Instead, Anders saw himself as an spaceman in a capsule orbiting the waist of the Moon. He also saw the Earth as merely another space object, now appearing from behind the waist of that Moon. As a result, he framed the shot with the horizon to the right, with the Earth moving from right to left as it moved out from behind the Moon, as shown on the right.

His perspective was that of a spacefarer, an explorer of the universe that sees the planets around him as objects within that universe in which he floats.

When we here are on Earth frame the image with the horizon on the bottom, we immediately reveal our limited planet-bound perspective. We automatically see ourselves on a planet’s surface, watching another planet rise above the distant horizon line.

This difference in perspective is to me the real meaning of this picture. On one hand we see the perspective of the past. On the other we see the perspective the future, for as long humanity can remain alive.

I prefer the future perspective, which is why I framed this image on the cover of Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8 the way Bill Anders took it. I prefer to align myself with that space-faring future.

And it was that space-faring future that spoke when they read from Genesis that evening. They had made the first human leap to another world, and they wished to describe and capture the majesty of that leap to the world. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

Yet, they were also still mostly Earth-bound in mind, which is why Frank Borman’s concluding words during that Christmas eve telecast were so heartfelt. He was a spaceman in a delicate vehicle talking to his home of Earth, 240,000 miles away. “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.” They longed deeply to return, a wish that at that moment, in that vehicle, was quite reasonable.

Someday that desire to return to Earth will be gone. People will live and work and grow up in space, and see the Earth as Bill Anders saw it in his photograph fifty years ago.

And it is for that time that I long. It will be a future of majesty we can only imagine.

Merry Christmas to all, all of us still pinned down here on “the good Earth.”

12 comments

The Biden war against Musk is a war against America

1:33 pm

How the modern Democratic Party has evolved madly to the left, according to Elon Musk
How the modern Democratic Party has evolved
madly to the left, according to Elon Musk

In 2022 Elon Musk essentially completed the long process of going from what he described as a moderate who had previously voted overwhelming for Democrats to a Republican voter strongly hostile to the present Democratic Party.

He announced this shift in a tweet on May 18, 2022, in which he said the following:

In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party.

But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.

Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold. [emphasis mine]

In the almost twenty months since Musk made that statement, his prediction of a “dirty tricks campaign” by the Democrats has become quite evident and true. Numerous federal agencies under the control of President Joe Biden began taking strong actions to stymie Musk’s companies, sometimes abusing the law in what appear to be legitimate ways, and sometimes abusing power in ways that are absurd. Below is a short list, many of which have been repeatedly reported here at Behind the Black:
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What makes a Nazi?

1:10 pm

The user's manual for today's pro-Hamas demonstrators
The user’s manual for today’s
pro-Hamas demonstrators

If you have any doubts that we live in a revised version of 1930s Germany, you need only open your eyes for only a few seconds and read these stories below. The list is hardly comprehensive, as it only provides a small sampling of the vicious, violent, and hateful demonstrations, riots, and violence that began after October 7th in support of the rape, torture, and murder by Hamas of more than 1,400 Israelis, many of whom were women and children, and have since morphed into an anti-Jewish compaign designed to intimidate and oppress Jews everywhere, merely because they are Jews.

The mob in front of the Israeli embassy in the third link above made very clear, in blunt chants, what all these pro-Hamas demonstrators want, as well as who they are:
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Is the pushback against the bigots in academia finally and actually becoming real?

2:04 pm

The Liberty Bell
“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all
the inhabitants thereof.” Photo credit: William Zhang

To end this week on a positive note, a plethora of stories in the past few days strongly suggest that the bigoted status quo in most universities in America is finally facing some real pushback, pushback that includes the arrests of lawbreaking protesters, actual budget cuts to universities for having racial quotas and promoting race hatred, and the passing of new legislation to better enforce the civil rights laws that have been on the books since the 1960s.

First we have the news out of Pennsylvania. Yesterday the state legislature, led by the Republican caucus, voted down a $33.5 million budget item for the University of Pennsylvania’s veterinary school, doing so expressly because of that university’s apparent toleration of anti-Semitism as well as its extensive Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) program.

Annual state aid for Penn’s veterinary school normally draws strong bipartisan support in Pennsylvania’s Legislature and, earlier Wednesday, had won overwhelming approval in the Republican-controlled Senate.

However, it failed late Wednesday night in the House after the Republican floor leader spoke against it, saying Penn must do more to make it clear that it opposes antisemitism. “Until more is done at the university in terms of rooting out, calling out and making an official stance on antisemitism being against the values of the university, I cannot in good conscience support this funding,” GOP House Minority Leader Bryan Cutler said during floor debate.

Though the funding bill was supported by the entire Democratic Party caucus (whose base pushes these bigoted policies and so at heart so do the Democrats) as well as about 25% of the Republican caucus, it failed to gain the needed two-thirds majority to pass.

While this vote is a start, it hardly does enough. The state government still funds UPenn’s racial quota program, which includes programs that give favored treatment to women and minorities while discriminating against others, merely because of their sex or skin color.

Meanwhile at Brown University in Rhode Island, college officials called the police to have forty-one pro-Hamas students arrested for occupying a building.
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