Day 1185 Christmas Eve and My Special Gift
Tuesday December 24, 2019
320 Days until the 2020 election and 401 days until the Inauguration
If I have any special talent it seems to be the ability to see patterns in very disparate pieces of information. A shortcoming I may have, if I have any, is that I forget, or don’t think, to explain to others what it is that I see that seems obvious to me, but not to them. I mean I don’t want to insult someone’s intelligence (well, okay, sometimes I slip) by explaining the obvious. So if this seems obvious to you – my apologies, but just in case:
The Fall of the Roman Empire,
The Fall of Constantinople,
The decline of NASA,
The end of Perkin-Elmer,
Alexis De Tocqueville and his thoughts on America,
Isaac Asimov and his thoughts on America,
Niel Degrasse Tyson and his thoughts on science,
the measles outbreak in the U.S. & Samoa,
and whoever that guy was on the 4pm show yesterday and his plea.
Let’s begin at the bottom of the list. On the 4pm show one of the commentators made a plea for science and education. Period. full stop.
Then there’s the measles outbreaks that have been occurring. Why? People aren’t getting vaccinated. Why? Well, they don’t “believe.” Let me ask those nonbelievers, “do you think measles cares?” The answer is no. It’s gonna get you if you aren’t vaccinated and exposed to it.
Tyson and others have said, in various ways, science is the study of reality. If you choose to accept some other way of looking at the world that’s up to you, but the chances of understanding and success are better with science and the study of reality than with any other system – like religion (that last part is mine).
Issac Asimov, I was told, said that America is anti-intellectual and that will be its downfall. I think he’s right and I hope he’s wrong about America.
De Tocqueville said a lot of interesting things about America after his visit. Look him up for extra quotes. But the one I like was quoted by James Burke at the end of his fabulous series “Connections*.”
*”An interdisciplinary approach to the history of science and invention.”
In that last part Burke quoted De Tocqueville as saying America is in a competition between its greatness and its decadence. (I forget the exact words.)
It seems decadence is winning right now. Call it stupidity, or hyper-paritsanship, or ignorance, or anti-science, or right wing conservatism or Christianity but whatever it is it ain’t good for the overall good of us.
Now let me talk briefly about the end of my father’s company that he worked for over 35 years Perkin-Elmer and the fall of NASA and “the king has no clothes.” “Pride Cometh Before the Fall” is one of those catchy little phrases, or as I like to think of it – once you start believing your own PR reports you’re in trouble. I think that happened to NASA and to PE. NASA is surviving; Perkin-Elmer did not. (Well, there’s a company by that name, but it’s not the old PE. They sold off the name and the underlying business.) What happened? It’s hard to put your finger on it exactly but I think I can sum it up when I asked my dad about the Hubble telescope. Perkin Elmer ground the lens for the Hubble. When it got up in space they realized that it was out of focus. That means the lens was mis-ground. It was my Dad’s old group that had done that job. My dad was so distraught that he called Gladys Perkin, the founder’s widow and apologized to her. My dad had bee retired for 20-30 years, but he felt that strongly. I asked my dad what he would have done differently. He said simply, “I would have taken the roof off the building (where the telescope was housed for a year and a half waiting for launch) and looked at a star.” One astronomer, one star, and one end-to-end test and they wouldn’t have launched without correcting the lens. It seems incredible that no one looked through that telescope before launch but that’s what happened.
After the Challenger blew up. I listened to the proceedings live on CNN. I was in Hawaii and caught the afternoon hearings as I was getting up. I still remember the Morton Thiokol engineer testifying. He was the one in charge of the engines. He said, “I told them not to launch.” Senator Sam Rayburn was in charge of the hearing. He had big bushy eyebrows. When the engineer said that Sam’s eyebrows twitched like crazy. Senator Rayburn in his polite slow Southern drawl said, “Excuse me (son), what did you say?”
“I told them not to launch.”
Sam’s eyebrows went crazy – again.
The engineer went on to explain that he didn’t have data to back up his statement because they had taken away his funding to do the tests, but he knew as he put it that the colder it got “the more you moved away from goodness.” They launched, the Challenger blew up. It was NASA’s first big defeat.
When the engineer was pressed as to why he didn’t say more he responded, “I did everything in my power short of jumping up on the table and telling them not to launch.”
What happened? The engineer got screwed. The guy in NASA who made the call to launch got reassigned. In other words, the idiots won.
This brings us to The Falls, of Rome and Constantinople. Both fell for different and disparate reasons, but similar. Constantinople fell for two reasons: one) a man came up with a cannon, two) none of it’s supporters outside the city believed it would fall to the Turks because it had never fallen before*.
*That last bit of logic is why Notre Dame burned. They didn’t put in a fire suppression system because they had never needed one before.
Rome? It fell because of carelessness. Okay, that’s a joke a guy used to tell on Ed Sullivan. He was supposedly a school teacher and he said that was an answer on an exam. How can you mark that student wrong? He’d argue.
There are a number of steps to the fall of Rome. Rome was a republic, until it wasn’t. No one at the time believed the republic would go away because “it had always been there.” Until, it wasn’t. What happened? A strongman took over and the system of government they had wasn’t functioning well, and it had become corrupted. The strongman, Julius Caesar, taking over didn’t change the situation. It was still corrupt and not functioning well.
This gets us back to De Tocqueville who said that the American Republic can stand until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.
Tomorrow, or the the next day, or whenever I write again. I’ll sum it all up as to what this portends for our nation now.
Until then. Merry Christmas to al the Jews, Muslims, and Chinese restaurant owners. (If they’d all just believe in Santa Clause we’d have no more problems in the world. Jesus, is that so hard to understand?)
320 Days until the 2020 election and 401 days until the Inauguration
PS Bryce Holliwell, Rick Kinnaird’s alter ego, man of action and adventure. Atop ancient Mayan pyramid. He had to hack his way through the jungle*, avoid the dreaded Fer-De-Lance snake**, and vendors selling jaguar whistles and made in China trinkets (“You look. Good price.”)
*He got off the bus and stepped on brush.
** I’m told they exist. Never seen one.
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