Another SpaceX rocket explodes before it gets off the ground: NAJ screen shot

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. – It’s four in the morning and I just woke up with a start after an intense session of REM sleep. The dreams were realistic and in vivid color. I was hiking with a friend somewhere out West when some idiots who should not have been there came down a slope with a wolf pup tied to a rope.

The pup was not cooperating with her captors, so they were dragging it along, claiming they were trying to rescue the wolf, which they thought had been abandoned by her parents. Dumb.

About that time a male and female adult wolf couple came over a ridge, growling and baring their teeth. As they attacked the hunters, then men raised their weapons and shot and killed them both. “No choice,” they said.

A group of experienced back country hikers surrounded the hunters and convinced them to relinquish control of the pup. But rather than turning the horrified young wolf loose to mourn the cruel and unnecessary loss of its parents, they too decided to continue hiking out of the backcountry with the pup in tow, to “rescue” it.

When reaching a National Park Service outpost, they presented the wolf to park rangers, telling them the story of the hunters who had captured the pup and then killed her parents. They had hiked off in a different direction.

But the new rescuers were admonished by wildlife officials for intervening in nature, and were threatened with legal action and fines if they did not release the wolf. Out in the wild, they explained, you do not interfere with Mother Nature.

By this time it was almost dark. The incident delay had prevented my friend and I from reaching our designated campground, where my camper van was parked. In fact we discovered we had taken a wrong turn on the trail, and found ourselves in a newly opened area of the wilderness. It began to snow.

As we checked out the new visitor center, we found out there was a new campground not far up the trail, and my friend wanted to head there for the night. We asked around, but discovered it was too far to hike back to our designated campground for the night.

But I was not prepared for back country camping, since we had planned to do the hike and make it back before dark. At first it sounded exciting, to get snowed in overnight in such a beautiful new section of the park. But I had no tent on me, no sleeping bag, not even thermal underwear, and simply could not risk this. The friend got mad, and became adamant. But I refused, so he stormed off.

As we hung around and socialized with the other park visitors, and took in a ranger program on the new area, we found out our only way out was to wait until closing time, when we could catch a ride out with park staff. While we waited, we experienced a series of incidents that demonstrated how mean and cruel people can be, even in such a beautiful place. My memory is a bit fuzzy on all of this, but I was told I could not urinate outside, then was admonished for doing it anyway.

I just kept thinking, why do so some people, even on the left, have to be such bureaucrats? Why can’t we all just be nicer to each other, and not so strict about trying to enforce the damn “Rules.” This is one of the reasons people have come to hate the federal government and Washington, D.C.

That was about the end of it, and I never found out if we made it out or what happened to the wolf pup, because about that time, I woke up and had to pee. Yes, that’s all very funny. Yet not so much.

Before that dream, there were others I remember less well, including one about the explosion of a rocket even before it got off the ground. As you have probably heard by now, the latest SpaceX rocket exploded when a hydrogen storage tank blew up, at least according to Elon Musk, who has been fantasizing for some time about humans making it to Mars.

But of course he’s so hyped up on Ketamine that it is a mystery why he still has billions in federal contracts from NASA. He’s supposed to be building a powerful rocket that can be reused rather than lost at sea every time we send astronauts to the international space station, and also on a new manned mission to the moon in preparation for a larger mission to Mars. But it’s not reusable if it blows up on the ground before taking off or even in space.

That’s not working out so well, so it is a wonder why President Donald Trump has not already canceled his federal contracts, considering how he and his DOGE team of hackers so misread the data on Social Security and claimed they saved billions in “waste, fraud and abuse.” It’s beginning to look a lot more like Musk’s own contracts are “waste, fraud and abuse.”

What a nightmare.

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