The biggest play at the University of Miami-Appalachian State University football game Saturday night happened in the stands, where spectators banded together to save a feline fan. Video from Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens showed the cat dangling from an upper deck, where it apparently clung by its claws to some type of fabric on the railing. At least one person reached down to help, but the cat plummeted to the seats below. Thankfully, the careening kitty was caught by fans who held a U.S. flag as a makeshift rescue tarp. The flag belonged to season ticket holder Craig Cromer and his wife, Kimberly, NBC Miami reported. Cromer, a University of Miami facilities manager, told the station that he and his wife untied the flag from the railing when they saw the cat clinging above them.
Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 81. Sunrise is 6:36 AM and sunset 7:01 PM for 12h 24m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 77.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
MADISON — The attorney heading a partisan review of Wisconsin’s presidential election has been consulting with a losing U.S. Senate candidate who appeared in a conspiracy theory-fueled film, falsely claimed a million ballots were destroyed in Massachusetts and recently linked his election doubts to a science-fiction novel.
Shiva Ayyadurai since he lost a 2020 primary for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts has been spreading untrue claims about elections — suggesting last month without credible evidence that more than 4% of Donald Trump’s votes were shaved off his totals. Now, he’s talking to former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman for Gableman’s review of the presidential election.
Ayyadurai’s exact role is not clear.
“They’re indicating they’re going to bring in Dr. Shiva as well to help on the forensic audit,” Reince Priebus, Trump’s first chief of staff, said last month on former Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s podcast.
Ayyadurai and Gableman “have had a lot of conversations,” according to Harry Wait, president of the conservative watchdog group Honest Open Transparent Government. Wait said he speaks to Gableman frequently, including last week.
Biden beat Trump in Wisconsin by about 21,000 votes, or 0.6 percentage points. Recounts in Milwaukee and Dane counties confirmed his victory, as did a string of court decisions.
Assembly Republicans have said they need more review of the election and have tasked Gableman with digging into the issue at taxpayer expense. Gableman, who claimed without evidence last year that Wisconsin bureaucrats stole votes, is supposed to wrap up his review as soon as next month.
There is an insatiability to populist desires: they want what they want, and they will ignore or break tradition, reason, or law to get it. Their first and fundamental position is that
all other contenders for power are fundamentally illegitimate. This is never just a disagreement about policies or even about values, which after all in a democracy is completely normal, ideally maybe even somewhat productive. No, populists always immediately make it personal and they make it entirely moral. This tendency to simply dismiss everybody else from the get-go as corrupt, as not working for the people, that’s always the pattern.
The ineluctable consequence of their belief that all others are legitimate is the populists’ insistence that If You Didn’t Vote for Trump, Your Vote Is Fraudulent.Conspiracy theories about the election stem from this insistence.
They are for conservative populism over liberal democracy, and would rather destroy the constitutional order than live within it.
There are countless officials, including local ones in Whitewater, who will not acknowledge these truths about the populists and their intentions. They’ll say nothing, or prattle about smaller matters, in the hope that the populist threat will pass, or that through silence now they’ll find a comfortable place in a new order should the populists prevail.
There is not even one such official who isn’t a disappointment.
On Wednesday, September 15 at 8:02 p.m. EDT, 00:02 UTC on September 16, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 successfully launched the Inspiration4 mission – the world’s first all-civilian human spaceflight to orbit – from historic Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Approximately three days after liftoff, Dragon and the crew of Inspiration4 will splash down at one of several possible landing sites off the Florida coast.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 76. Sunrise is 6:35 AM and sunset 7:03 PM for 12h 27m 30s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 68.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks & Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.
This day in 1940 sees the climax of the Battle of Britain, when the Luftwaffe launches its largest and most concentrated attack of the entire campaign.
I’m so pleased to inform you that we are making substantial progress towards our university vaccination goals. As of this morning, 64% of students and 83% of employees are fully vaccinated. These are verified records, courtesy of all of you who have submitted your information to the COVID-19 Hotline.
Our ability to maintain in-person classes and activities — a vibrant university experience — is dependent upon a safe and healthy campus community. If you have not yet done so, I strongly encourage you to get vaccinated if you are able, and to report it to UW-Whitewater as soon as possible.
UW System has announced that COVID-19-vaccinated students who attend universities that achieve at least 70% vaccination rates by Oct. 15 will be eligible to win one of 70 scholarships valued at $7,000 each.
We’ve already awarded $18,000 to our Warhawk students in the weekly $500 drawings, which will continue into October. My deepest appreciation goes out to the generous donors who provided funding to the UW-Whitewater Foundation in support of this campaign.
In addition, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services is giving a $100 Visa Gift Card to any Wisconsin resident ages 12 and older who receives their first COVID-19 vaccine from a Wisconsin vaccination provider from Aug. 20 through Sept. 19.
Warhawk family, we’re navigating the pandemic together, and I’m proud of the progress we’ve made to this point. Let’s finish the month strong.
Thank you,
Jim Henderson, Ph.D.
Interim Chancellor
There is more work to do to meet the UW System goal, and UW-Whitewater deserves support and encouragement to do so. Embracing a culture of good public health would both physically protect and culturally uplift the campus.
Whitewater, sadly, is no easy environment in which to advance a vaccination effort, even with the finest vaccines and the most advanced medical science in all the world. A small band in the city, as malicious as it is ignorant, spreads lies, even perversely publishing icons with hypodermic needles in the shape of Nazi swastikas.
These lumpen few are a blight on the community, and proof of how spotty has been our city’s and county’s educational accomplishments. We have done too little, and praised ourselves too much for it.
UW-Whitewater will help itself, and all the city, by looking within and achieving still higher vaccination rates.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 78. Sunrise is 6:34 AM and sunset 7:05 PM for 12h 30m 23s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 57.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1994, the Major League Baseball season is canceled because of a strike.
“We have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within,” Bush said. “There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.”
From there, Bush voiced his dismay at the stark polarization and rigid partisanship of modern American politics. “A malign force seems at work in our common life that turns every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures,” he said. “So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear, and resentment. That leaves us worried about our nation and our future together.”
Bush spoke as if he were just an observer, a concerned elder statesman who fears for the future of his country. But that’s nonsense. Bush was an active participant in the politics he now bemoans.
Bouie is critical of Bush’s policies, and sees those policies as responsible for many of our current divisions. By Bouie’s reading, Bush is no bystander to our present maladies.
It is worth noting, however, that here in the rural Midwest, even acknowledging as Bush did that there are domestic threats to the constitutional order is controversial.
It should not be a controversial claim. The current form of the presidential oath of office expressly contemplates dangers to the American Republic both ‘foreign and domestic’:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.
To say as much draws right-wing populist fury, as they suspect that it is about them that concerns over domestic threats often originate.
They’d draw less concern from others if they did not lie about election results, support violent insurrections against the government, or threaten the use of force in public meetings.
But they do all of these, and so they merit the concern of others.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with scattered thundershowers and a high of 74. Sunrise is 6:33 AM and sunset 7:06 PM for 12h 33m 14s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 45.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
A new report suggests people are buying dramatically more alcohol during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum released findings Wednesday that show revenue from state excise taxes on alcohol during the year that ended June 30 increased almost 17 percent over the $63.3 million they brought in the prior year.
The increase likely will be the largest percentage jump since 1972 if the preliminary data holds.
Between 2009 and 2020, the percentage increase in alcohol tax revenue exceeded 2.4 percent in only one year.
Mark Sommerhauser, Wisconsin Policy Forum researcher, said he and his colleagues suspected alcohol consumption was up during the pandemic. But with bars and restaurants closed for months in 2020, he said he was curious to see what alcohol tax data would show.
“Let’s face it, people were super, super stressed over the last year with maybe their job situation or their kids’ school or day care or who knows what else,” Sommerhauser said. “There’s just kind of a brew of factors, sort of a confluence of things coming together here, that I think are potentially concerning.”
The report shows that during the 2021 fiscal year, which ended June 30, taxes on liquor increased by more than 18 percent over the 2020 fiscal year. During the same period, taxes were up by around 10 percent for beer and wine, while revenues from hard cider sales increased by just more than 16 percent.
Drinking alcohol is — as it should be for adults — legal. (Fall, in particular, is a season well-suited to a good red.) And yet, over-drinking from stress, or taking opioids for stress rather than physical pain, incurs both personal and societal costs.
The U.S. has historically struggled with opioid addiction. Research suggests that 2 million Americans suffered from an opioid use disorder in 2018 — well before the Covid-19 pandemic struck. Synthetic opioids have contributed to a nationwide increase in overdose deaths, which have increased by 38.4% from the 12-month period leading up to June 2019 compared to the 12-month period leading up to May 2020. But this isn’t just a public health problem. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the total economic burden of prescription opioid misuse alone is approximately $78.5 billion a year, including health care costs, addiction treatment costs and lost productivity.
The White House and the CDC recommend a few key interventions that could aid in the mitigation of the opioid epidemic: educating as to appropriate and safe opioid prescribing; expanding safe access to new treatments and innovations, including naloxone use; and improving links between mental health care and substance use treatment services and increasing the safe use of medication-assisted treatment. The issue of drug supply has worsened the opioid crisis during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Here one sees the chronic social condition that many rural communities daily experience: left, right, center, libertarian, or green all live and advocate in places with public-health challenges only some of them will candidly acknowledge.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with occasional thundershowers and a high of 79. Sunrise is 6:32 AM and sunset 7:08 PM for 12h 36m 07s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 34.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1962, President Kennedy delivers his “We choose to go to the Moon” speech at Rice University.
Grady Knox stepped to the lectern at the Rutherford County Board of Education meeting Tuesday to share what was at stake with a mask mandate that the board was considering that evening.
Knox, a junior at Central Magnet High School in Murfreesboro, Tenn., told the board that his grandmother, a former teacher in the district, had died of covid-19 last year because of lax mask rules. He was immediately jeered.
An unmasked woman seen over Knox’s shoulder smirks and shakes her head at his comment as she holds a sign that reads “let our kids smile.” Another person is heard saying “no” as attendees murmur, interrupting Knox. Another voice is heard shouting “shut up,” though it’s unclear whether it was directed at Knox or his hecklers.
Though Young was able to restore order and allow Knox to finish his two minutes of speaking time, the crude reaction to the teen’s story of personal loss drew nationalheadlines. The buzz over the school board meeting underscores how fights over school mask rules and other covid-19 precautions have grown increasingly ugly, even as the delta variant triggers new rounds of quarantines and school closures — and states such as Tennessee see record levels of pediatric covid cases.
In extreme cases, adults angry about health restrictions have physically assaulted teachers, ripped masks off and confronted a principal with zip ties. Despite some of the more high-profile showdowns over health restrictions, an August poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a majority of parents approve of mask rules: 63 percent of parents polled said their child’s school should require unvaccinated students and staff to wear masks. The same poll found that attitudes were sharply divided along partisan lines: 88 percent of parents who identify as Democrats approved of mask rules, while 69 percent of parents who identify as Republicans opposed them.
One should be unsurprised: those without an adequate moral or general formation will not allow someone to speak without interruption, and will be indifferent to any viewpoint other than their own. Right-wing populists for years advanced the slogan ‘fuck your feelings,’ and they live out that declaration in Rutherford County, Tennessee and elsewhere. They delight in the discomfort they cause.
This isn’t a matter of formal education, as anyone properly self-taught would have behaved better than this.
This ilk litters others’ private platforms with their crudities, all the while insisting that they have a right to use others’ property to their ends. No and no again: they don’t deserve others’ property, they have no right to it, and so they may — and should — be denied.
They complain about lawful private employers’ and publishers’ decisions on terms of conduct and service, but in reply they seek to restrict speech through public laws. They insist they have a right to say what they want, but squirm and shout when someone else speaks.
All the while, a group that behaves disreputably demands that it be treated respectably.
While basic rights are accorded equally, respect is earned.
These conservative populists, this selfish and repulsive band, should not be underestimated, in the way that cobras should not be underestimated. One turns away for a moment, and they inflict injury.
One sees all this with clear, cold eyes. Some of us in opposition to them are unmoved: these right-wing populists are neither suprising nor shocking.
They are, instead, what many of us said they were.
This Tuesday, September 14th at 1 PM, there will be a showing of Queen Bees @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Comedy/Drama/Romance
1 hour, 47 minutes
Rated PG-13 (2021)
After reluctantly agreeing to move into a seniors retirement home, Helen (Ellen Burstyn), an independent widow, learns it’s
much like high school — full of cliques and flirtatious suitors.
The cast includes Jane Curtin, Ann-Margaret, Christopher Lloyd, and James Caan.
If vaccinated, no mask is required. Reservations are no longer required. Free popcorn and a beverage!
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 90. Sunrise is 6:31 AM and sunset 7:10 PM, for 12h 38m 58s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 24.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day twenty years ago, a series of coordinated terrorist attacks kills 2,977 people using four aircraft hijacked by 19 members of al-Qaeda. Two aircraft crash into the World Trade Center in New York City, a third crashes into the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia, and a fourth into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
SHANKSVILLE, Pa. — When the plane crashed in the empty field north of town, the schools let out early. Katlin Rodriguez, 11 at the time, waited in a cafeteria full of crying and shocked classmates for her mother and stepfather to come and take her home. When they showed up, they had brought along a family friend. “Don’t worry,” said the friend, a teenager who announced he had just enlisted. “We’re going to get them. We’re going to get the ones who did this.”
On a muggy Friday morning 20 years later, Ms. Rodriguez, now the wife of a Marine and the mother of a 6-year-old girl, was planting American flags in a small field not far from where Flight 93 went down outside Shanksville, Pa. About a dozen people were with her, each flag they planted representing one of 7,049 U.S. service members who had died in the wars that were waged since that late summer morning in 2001.
“A lot of the kids I went to school with, they enlisted,” Ms. Rodriguez said, looking out across the field. “It made a lot of us feel more connected to the larger world.”
By the time that the plane went down in Pennsylvania, the larger world was already reeling. The streets of downtown Manhattan were filled with dust clouds and terror, as the South Tower of the World Trade Center had just collapsed. In Washington, federal officials and city residents were bracing for more attacks as flames poured out of the western side of the Pentagon. People across the country sat in shock in front of their televisions, waiting to hear what institution might be hit next.
Unlike the Pentagon or the World Trade Center, Somerset County, Pa., was not a target on Sept. 11, only a place that Flight 93 was passing over on the way to the terrorists’ grim objective in Washington. People did not live in Stoystown or Friedens or Shanksville, a tiny town without a traffic light, because they wanted to be near the levers of global power.
But when the passengers and crew of United Flight 93 attempted to seize control from their hijackers and the plane went plummeting into the Pennsylvania countryside, Shanksville suddenly became a battlefield in an international conflict. Once unthinkable new duties were now thrust upon the Fire Department, the county coroner, the nearby state troopers, the local historical society, the neighbors living near the crash site and, all across the country but here especially, the young people who suddenly found themselves coming of age in a time of war.
Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 81. Sunrise is 6:30 AM and sunset 7:12 PM, for 12h 41m 50s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 15.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1846, Elias Howe is granted a patent for the sewing machine.
People who refuse to comply with a federal mandate that requires them to wear masks in airports, and on trains, buses and in other public transportation settings will face stiffer penalties, Biden administration officials announced Thursday.
Beginning Friday, the fine for refusing to wear a mask will increase to a range of $500 to $1,000 for first offenders. Penalties for a second offense will range from $1,000 to $3,000.
“TSA will double the fines on travelers that refuse to mask,” President Biden said Thursday. “If you break the rules, be prepared to pay. And by the way, show some respect!”
The stiffer penalties are part of aggressive new actions the administration is taking to combat the spread of the coronavirus. The highly contagious delta variant has fueled a sharp uptick in infections this summer and is causing more than 1,500 daily deaths, chiefly among those who have not been vaccinated. More than 655,000 people in the United States have died of the virus.
One hears so often that the conservative populists insist they are a people of ‘common sense,’ that it is somehow others who are hysterical or afraid. And yet, and yet, in public scenes across America, it is the populists who tantrum while shaking their heads, raising their arms, and screaming what, what, what? in reply to simple public-health requests.
And so, a question: Who rampaged better, an ape in an old television commercial or present-day anti-maskers in airports?
A team of geneticists reported Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications that it had identified a gene in domestic cats that plays a key role in creating the traditional tabby stripe pattern, and that the pattern is evident in embryonic tissue even before hair follicles start to grow.
The inheritance of cat coats — how to breed for this or that pattern — is well known. But how patterns emerge in a growing embryo “really has been an unsolved mystery,” said Dr. Gregory S. Barsh, an author of the new report.
….
From more than 200 prenatal litters, Dr. [Kelly] McGowan looked for patterns in the tissue at the different stages of growth in the embryos. She found a pattern of what she described as thick and thin areas of tissue in the top layer of the embryonic skin, never before reported. The regions, she said, “mimic what’s going on in the adult cat pigmentation patterns.” The same patterns that will appear in an adult cat’s coat as stripes or blotches appear first in the embryo before there is any hair or even hair follicles.
The team then looked for genes that might be active at that period in early embryonic growth.
When Dr. Kaelin looked at the tissue that showed the thick and thin tissue pattern that was the precursor of stripes, he said, “the one molecule that stood out from the rest was this Dkk4.” The full name of the protein and the gene is Dickkopf 4: The name is German for “thick head,” a characteristic the gene produced in frogs.
Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 75. Sunrise is 6:29 AM and sunset 7:14 PM, for 12h 44m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 7.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
As the number of people hospitalized in Wisconsin with COVID-19 remains at heights last seen in January, available intensive care beds are in the single digits in much of the state.
In the northeast region, which includes Green Bay, seven ICU beds were open. In the northwest region, one ICU bed was open; in the western region, three were.
The number of COVID-19 patients in the state, as well as those in intensive care, has risen rapidly over the last month or so as the delta variant causes a surge in cases.
Wednesday was only the third time since mid-January that the state recorded more than 1,000 hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The first two times were Sunday and Tuesday.
I’ve no estimate, no projection, about the path of the pandemic through Wisconsin. One needs no projection, however, to read and grasp that increased ICU usage is a personal (for patients) and social (for all of us) cost. COVID-19 vaccines reduce the likelihood of hospitalization.
The populists insist that others should be practical. Well, here’s practicality: hospital space is not free, for those who occupy it or those who might have trouble finding nearby ICU space for care for other illnesses (heart conditions, etc.).
Anti-vax populists are costing America vast, needless expense and disruption for their ignorance. These conservative populists want to be taken seriously, but they neither think nor behave seriously.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 75. Sunrise is 6:28 AM and sunset 7:15 PM, for 12h 47m 32s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1966, the landmark American science fiction television series Star Trek premieres with its first-aired episode, “The Man Trap.“
Nearly all the Afghans at Fort McCoy are accepting COVID-19 vaccines and the first refugees will likely leave the military base this weekend, according to Democrats in Wisconsin’s congressional delegation who toured the facility Tuesday.
Rep. Mark Pocan of Dane County said just one person at Fort McCoy had refused the coronavirus vaccine.
“I wish we had anything like that in our country right now,” Pocan said, alluding to the large numbers of Americans who have declined to get vaccinated.
The Democrats spoke outside Fort McCoy after a visit there. They did not say what version of the COVID-19 vaccine the Afghans are receiving. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine requires one shot, while other vaccines require two shots that are given weeks apart from each other.
The native-born, conservative populists often insist how sensible they are, and yet, and yet… refugees from Afghanistan have a better appreciation of the benefits of American vaccines.
Here one sees the populists’ problem: they may be native-born, but too many of them lack the acculturation (both moral or general) that many of their fellow Americans (and migrants from the other side of the world) possess.
The populists’ ‘common sense’ looks more like a rationalization for their own lack of serious reading and reflection.
Only a generation ago, it would have been conservatives who would have told those like today’s populists to try for a higher standard than conspiracy theories and excuses. Yesterday’s conservatives would have been right: those who want to be respected need to act respectably.
If it should be too hard for these conservative populists to reach proper acculturation by their own lights, they need only look for inspiration to the higher standards of Afghan refugees now arriving in America.
A pair of squawking, thrashing, bald and violently pink twins arrived in the world in Madrid on Sunday, much to the relief of their mother and all those working to ensure the giant panda population continues to claw its way back from the brink.
Tuesday in Whitewater will see morning thundershowers with a high of 78. Sunrise is 6:27 AM and sunset 7:17 PM, for 12h 50m 22s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1776, according to American colonial reports, Ezra Lee makes the world’s first submarine attack in the Turtle, attempting to attach a time bomb to the hull of HMS Eagle in New York Harbor.
In the abstract, it always seemed incongruous to refer to Donald Trump as “anti-elite.” The guy had billions of dollars and lived in a spacious penthouse suite in Manhattan at the top of a building that bore his name. But that’s not what “elite” meant in the context of Republican politics in 2015. What “elite” meant was that there was a party establishment that remained tethered — however shakily at times — to certain views of policy and politicking that followed from tradition and a shared sense of reality. What “anti-elite” meant was that someone was willing to chuck all of that, to treat the unserious complaints that filled hours of coverage on Fox News and hundreds of words on Breitbart as accurate and actionable. “Anti-elite” didn’t mean that someone had no power, it instead meant that the person was willing to elevate inaccurate, exciting and dangerous popular views over staid, boring and unexciting realities.
There’s not much use in spending a lot of time articulating how Trump manifested this particular sense of anti-elitism. The Washington Post’s fact-checking team spent years doing so. Trump would say and do things that his base wanted before he would say or do things that they didn’t, even if the latter was real and the former wasn’t. In doing so, he made it increasingly difficult for others in his party to do anything else. No one wanted to be the Republican telling the base uncomfortable truths when Trump was energetically telling them comfortable falsehoods.
Trump’s success was rooted not only in his willingness to say things that other Republicans wouldn’t but in the fact that the base of his party had been conditioned to treat establishment and expert opinions with suspicion. The pre-Trump GOP was walking a tricky path between casting the government as untrustworthy and unworthy of respect even as it often controlled all or part of that same government.
….
What he did, really, is create a system in which individual assessments of the pandemic are given primacy over actual expertise. His reinforcement of the idea that the experts had nothing more to offer compared with someone’s Facebook feed tied his own hands in an uncomfortable way: He would love to get credit for the vaccines that could contain the pandemic but, as he showed at a rally this month, is unwilling to tell his followers that the urgency of protection outweighs their interest in feeling as though they are smarter than medical professionals.
Some level of formation, of structure and learning, is needed to make sense of a difficult subject.
Come now the conservative populists, who are convinced that there is no field, no topic, that requires more effort than their own ‘common sense.’ They ask — they demand — that others who have committed years of formal or self-study recognize unconsidered or ill-considered populist opinions as valid as any other opinion.
They sometimes simply don’t know what they don’t know. Their ignorance of substantive study is matched by their arrogance in insisting that substantive study doesn’t matter. Someone might tell these conservative populists that arrogance invites Nemesis, but it would take some reading for them to make sense of those cautionary words.
Modern medicine, architecture, or materials science requires dedicated study. Anyone, in any era, might have said he or she possessed ‘common sense.’ And yet, and yet, those people from those earlier times often lived short lives in filth and misery.
The conservative populists enjoy lives in an era of technological and scientific accomplishment dependent on the efforts of the very experts they denigrate.
When common sense fails for these populists, when they misread medical texts and legal documents, they make the excuse that the topics were too hard or too confusing for anyone to understand. No and no again: the texts and documents were too hard only for those who had not committed the proper amount of study to the topic.
The lack of formation —of a learned foundation in politics, history, science, or even ordinary English usage — leaves the conservative populists unimpressive to anyone outside their circle.
