John Wilder: A Quick Post On The Decline Of The West

“I don’t care about what anything was designed to do, I care about what it can do.” – Apollo 13

Why did NASA use numbers instead of letters for the Apollo missions?  No one wanted to ride on that sorry mission, Apollo G.

The evening got away from me.  I’d love to tell you that I was doing something productive, but I was really just goofing around.  I felt a bit blah (not sick, mind you, but blah) all week.  So, I decided to goof around.  If today’s thoughts are a bit shorter than usual, that should explain it.

When I was a young adult, I read Atlas Shrugged.  Now, I said, I read it, but when it got to the part where John Galt hacked into the radio to give a (what seemed like to me) 700-page speech that was just reiterating every point Rand had already made in the book, but this time with crayon, I skipped it.

So, I read most of it.  Except 90% of the speech.

One thing that stuck with me about the tone of the book was that it took place in a world that had moved on.  Stuff just didn’t work.  I seem to recall a broken clock, and broken rails, and the image of a society that had done great things but was no longer capable of them.

The mission of NASA used to be to send people and things up into space.  The goal was to learn more about the Solar System, the planets, and the Universe beyond.  The other part of the goal was to make man an interplanetary and, hopefully, an interstellar species.

I got my medical degree online, from a place called Google® Docs™.

NASA was doing one of the hardest things that had ever been done – inventing technology at the very edge of what humans were capable of, and then using it.  It was one of the grandest adventures of the 20^th Century.  It was also staffed by young people.  Gene Kranz, the “Failure is not an option guy” was the Flight Director for several Apollo missions, most notably Apollo 13.  When Apollo 13 happened?  Kranz was 36.

Our nation at that point had failures, sure.  But now it seems like that’s the definition.  And the things we’re failing on aren’t even new tech.  East Palestine (The Mrs. told me, “It’s pronounced Palesteen, Froderick”) Ohio is suffering from one of the biggest failures of tech that is nearly 200 years old.

Then there was a fire at Oak Ridge involving uranium.  Normally, one tries to avoid burning radioactive things.  I mean, it’s not like this is Russia and all of us are protected from radiation via the consumption of massive amounts of vodka.

There are others, of course.  The Jackson, Mississippi water plant appears to not work (sometimes) because the people running it don’t know how to run it.  I could go on and on.

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