In the 1980s, the majority party in Congress saw demography claims that people with college educations made more money than those without.  Universities began to lobby for student loan changes. Many smaller private schools were facing funding crunches and people going to college would fix that.

The drumbeat for equitable treatment for the poor got louder and as part of other governance, Congress included changes that made so student loans, which originated thanks to President Johnson in 1965, were now unlimited. Because governance is governance, a Republican president signed it over the objections of those who said it was turning a Bachelor's degree into the new high school diploma. Nearly everyone would have one, except with debt.(1)

Every day we read a new headline warning us that American leadership is about to erode because of budget cuts to 'science.'

We have been told tuberculosis was about to be eliminated by a vaccine but a grant got cut and, gosh darn it, now Republicans ruined it. We have been told we'll be set back for generations. 

A new paper from Ohio State University can be considered a giant endorsement for yogurt that makes you poop - but unfortunately for giddy food corporations hoping to gain some scientific credibility it is only in mice, and therefore EXPLORATORY.

Because mice are not little people.

You just wouldn't know that from the school's press release, which alleges pesticides are ruining your microbiome and probiotics may save us, a leap so far beyond the scope of the study we have to wonder if the academics involved are about to launch a new line of supplements.

In the modern era we can detect anything in anything. Being able to detect in parts per billion, trillion and even quadrillion means that if an epidemiologist can "correlate" a chemical to harm in a spreadsheet, someone raising money opposing science can weaponize the result.

A new paper finding that they can detect chemicals linked to harm in rats with the urine of 201 preschool kids is a new battle in the War on Moms that activists continually wage, but there is no reason for parental concern. Unless you believe in homeopathy.

If you need any new evidence that science is just another arm of politics, look to the switch in the Republican party once President Donald Trump embraced former Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer, friend of Obama, and anti-science zealot Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.(1)

In 1915's The Temperance Program, Thomas F. Hubbard et al. laid out the progressive case for why alcohol needed to be banned so convincingly that in 1917, with Democratic control of both houses of Congress and the White House, they got the 18th Amendment to the Constitution out of Washington, D.C. and into voting by the states.(1) Because people irrationally sided with elites then as they do now, Democratic states immediately ratified it and it raced to the 36 needed so quickly that the two Republican-controlled states that voted it down, Connecticut and Rhode Island, were irrelevant.