Another American Sunset

 

 

Last flight of Space Shuttle Endeavor, preparing to land at LAX 

 

There was a time when a photograph like this would be thrilling to me, but today it brings nothing but a bit of sadness and a slight churning in my stomach.

This photograph shows a lot to those whose who can see beyond the tips of their noses.

In the photo are two multi-million dollar American fighter aircraft,  a modified Boeing 747, the city of Los Angeles and the shuttle itself.

The Boeiug  747:

A heavily modified version of a fifty-year-old design.

Boeing once had the plans - and a mockup - of what would have been the world's largest and fastest supersonic passenger aircraft, much larger and faster than the Concorde. Instead of having a fleet of the worlds' finest SST's, we have a collection of aviation's version of the model T.

The two fighter aircraft:

High-flying examples of squandered money.

These two 50-million-dollar(each) aircraft were designed to fight an enemy that does not - and never did - exist, in a war that will never happen. So, they spend their useful airframe lives painted out in eye-catching colors as chase planes for a relic of a canceled space program.

The city of Los Angeles:

A classic example of American decline and decay.

Los Angeles, almost more than anywhere else, is demonstrating what happens when an unquenched flow of illegals are allowed to takeover. The city, chock full of illegals and minorities of all stripes, shows what happens as non-working, non-tax-paying welfare leeches and their progeny become the majority. 

The Space Shuttle Itself:

Shown headed for a museum in a collapsing American city in a bankrupt American State. One of the few remaining relics of a once-dynamic space program,  it will sit someplace relatively undisturbed for the next hundred years, unrecognized and unappreciated by the barbarians that will pass it by.

So there you are... What I see in the above photograph.

It' a damned shame that the last flight of the American shuttle - a conflicted example of both great progress and needless decline - was as sad as this.

Addendum:

Approximate representation of the U.S. grade level needed to comprehend the text :

Coleman Liau Index: 9.76
Flesch Kincaid Grade level: 10.29
ARI (Automated Readability Index):9.92
SMOG :11.85
Flesch Reading Ease :55.69

No doubt a lot of Southern California's denizens will not understand any of the above, but I'm not going to dumb it down any further than it already is.
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