Whoever controls Biden’s teleprompter has announced that she’s letting him do his “cancer moonshot” speech. This is one of those things that are so ridiculous that you know they authentically come from Biden. Obama let Biden do his cancer moonshot thing. Now the Obama and Warren staffers who run the White House are humoring him again.

Not long after his fascist Philly speech, Biden will once again promise to “cure” cancer with a “moonshot” project. The only thing this shows is that Biden doesn’t understand how cancer or the space program work.

Getting to the moon is an engineering problem. The Apollo program was in some ways very crude, but it was a brute force solution to the problem. Given the funds and some good engineers, we got to the moon. If we had wanted to get to Mars, we could have done it too back then. Even the outermost planets. And probably even more ambitious things than that.

That’s very different than a complex interaction between genetic, environmental and various unknown factors. Cancer is not COVID. There’s no Operation Warp Speed that’s going to solve it. Putting more money into cancer research is probably helpful, but considering the state of play these days, half of that money will go to “equity” and addressing higher rates of particular cancer rates in the black community through drag queen story hours promoting black joy. And affirmative action in triage. Another 40% will go toward administrative overhead.

We cured major diseases long before health care was a government project because there were innovative scientists who did not give up. And they were mostly dead old white men. Back then they would have killed for a small percentage of the billions of dollars that Biden will waste on the problem. And that will achieve nothing.

A culture’s ability to solve problems isn’t as great as its wealth, but as great as its culture. Our current culture is asexual crybabies demanding student loan forgiveness while practicing self-care by binge-watching the latest Game of Thrones. It would take a moonshot to fix our culture so it can cure cancer or do anything else.