THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: You’re just too stupid to live.

This is the National Academy of Sciences, of course, so they’ve got scientific evidence of our stupidity. Like, for example, the Center for Disease Control gave more than four thousand people in St. Louis special antibiotic medkits to hold for an emergency. Months later, they went back and collected them. They counted the people who had engaged in “inappropriate use in routine settings.” And they found, uh, four. Not four percent, four people. That’s one-tenth of one percent, last time I looked.

Apparently we weren’t as dumb as the National Academy of Sciences would like to think, so they declared that this science wasn’t settled, in fact it wasn’t even worth thinking about. Why? Because participants were promised a $25 gift certificate if they completed the study. According to the National Academy’s report, this promise of a gift card so tantalized the unwashed masses that they pretended to be less stupid than the scientists know we really are. So the study didn’t count.

Once all that nasty unpredictable science was out of the way, the National Academy of Sciences was free to say what it wanted to say all along: No antibiotics for you.

Read the whole thing. Including this cruel twist of the knife: “Of course you’re supposed to persuade your doctor that you’d ‘lack access to antibiotics via other timely dispensing mechanisms.’ I suggest reading him the part about how the Postal Service will carry out the distribution. If that doesn’t convince him, maybe you need a smarter doctor.”