Houston, we have Hubble Trouble

In professional sports, tanking means losing on purpose this season to gain a top draft pick next year. Although it disgraces the integrity of the game, some teams try to lose in order to win.

From ancient Mesopotamia forward, man accepted the divine right of kings: hereditary autocrats who ruled by decree. A proper king doesn’t answer to aristocrats, courts, or parliament; certainly not to the peasantry. He derives his power straight from God.

The fleecing of America: boondoggles, overbudget, behind schedule, cost over-runs. Government contractors wasting taxpayer money. A commonly-told folly is NASA’s million-dollar space pen. Have you heard this one? Author Gary Goodman says: “Astronauts didn't have a pen that could write [in zero-gravity.] NASA invested upward of $1 million to devise a pen that could. [The Russians] faced the same problem, but … solved it for less than a dollar. They decided to use a pencil.” But the million-dollar space pen is not today’s dumb idea. What’s dumb is that this entire story is a myth.

Scotland was once a sovereign nation. How did they lose their independence? Because of a dumb idea.

Charles Darwin's evolution by natural selection is the unifying theory of biology, with powerful explanatory value. Unfortunately, it was coopted soon after its debut in 1859. The problem is called social Darwinism.

The French Revolution remains one of the most talked-about episodes in world history. A republic was declared after the overthrow of despot Louis the Sixteenth. To thwart counter-revolution, the new regime waged a Reign of Terror across France. Historian Marisa Linton says, “For the first time in history terror became … official government policy.”

Many of our dumb ideas have a common theme: short-term thinking. The grandaddy of them all may be China’s one-child policy.

America never loved communism. Party membership peaked in 1947 at just 75,000. That same year the House Un-American Activities Committee interrogated Hollywood writers, directors, and actors about their rumored associations.

Slavery helped build America and remains one of its worst sins. Dr. Joyce Hope Scott calls it the “greatest crime of all time, the theft of humanity and personhood which resulted in a permanent state of dispossession, exile, and homelessness.” African-Americans were bought and sold here for 246 years, which still comprises 60% of the history of English settlement.