Political idiocy is going to make us, well, idiots

Washington Post

2 days ago

In today's edition:
You walk into the pharmacy in Idaho and pick up the pamphlet that says 'Ivermectin and You.' You open it. Instead of information, loose pills simply tumble out. You ask the pharmacist about vaccines, and she pretends she hasn't heard you. This, my friends, is medical freedom.
Leana Wen's latest column is a case study of the right's antipathy toward the medical establishment, chronicling how ivermectin — long used for deworming livestock — gained conservative cachet during the covid-19 pandemic and is now being made available over the counter in a bunch of red states; meanwhile, vaccine access is being 'sacrificed on the altar of contrarianism.'
Yes, Leana says, 'proponents hail these moves as a win for the 'medical freedom' movement,' but they are in fact the manifestation of a diseased relationship with public health and science writ large.
To wit: Vice President JD Vance doesn't seem to have a very good grasp on how America's space program happened, Mark Lasswell writes: Vance claims 'American talent' powered the program, with a teeny bit of help from 'some German and Jewish scientists' who came to this country from Europe.
'Some'? Mark entreats us to remember rocketry mastermind Wernher von Braun. Oh, of the Philadelphia von Brauns? Not quite.
True, a lot of those contributors became Americans in the 1950s — but Vance doesn't appear too keen on the whole naturalization thing, either.
All of this pairs very poorly with, as Mark writes, the White House 'working energetically to dissolve arrangements between several research universities and the government.' Max Boot characterizes it even more starkly: 'the suicide of a superpower.'
That's because a lot of progress really has been the result of American ingenuity, which happens to occur largely at universities funded by the government. Examples include: the internet, GPS, smartphones, artificial intelligence, MRIs, LASIK, Ozempic, and drugs that actually prevent and treat covid.
But, years hence, as our adversaries explore the cosmos, the human genome and the limits of generative AI, at least we will be worm-free.
Chaser: Professor Carole LaBonne writes that it's true that colleges have benefited plenty from federal funding, but if we're looking at which way the reliance relationship really goes, it's the government that depends on universities.
From Perry Bacon's essay on the way 'flyover country' conquered this basketball season, with the Indiana Pacers and Oklahoma City Thunder heading to the NBA Finals.
'Is the NBA self-sabotaging? Does the league just have terrible luck?' Perry asks. 'No and no. Teams in fairly small markets will host the championships for a league that craves a massive and even international audience. And that's just fine.'
The league, Perry writes, will have plenty of money no matter how many viewers tune in to this year's finals. What's more interesting is the way the NBA sorta kinda stands athwart the supercity-cization of the United States, by way of its strict rules for how much teams can spend and what Perry calls its 'socialist-y system' for paying players.
It is not just not bad, Perry argues, but actively great that littler cities are able to compete. As coastal megalopolises hoover up whole industries and their workers, we all ought to have it in us to cheer on these finals.
'Courage I know we have in abundance … but [gun]powder — where shall we get a sufficient supply?'
Abigail Adams, I was not familiar with your game! John Adams was, though. The future president once told his wife and pen pal: 'I really think that your Letters are much better worth preserving than mine.'
The powder letter is pretty much exactly 250 years old, exchanged in the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, and the resolve it displays is remarkable, writes historian Joseph Ellis, considering the overwhelming uncertainty still swirling at that point. Britain was the world's hegemon, Ellis writes, yet the Adamses 'were like poker players who were all-in before knowing what cards they had been dealt.'
Even more remarkable is the couple's prescience that their correspondence would be important some day, as John noted. Ellis writes: 'They were not just writing letters to each other; they were writing to posterity — which is to say, us.'
So read up on what Ellis excerpts. Then, in our own era of uncertainty, maybe start writing, too.
It's a goodbye. It's a haiku. It's … The Bye-Ku.
NBA reckons
With remotest finals sites
This side of Oort cloud
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