Meanwhile, in Afghanistan…

The US military has dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat on an Islamic State group tunnel complex in Afghanistan, the Pentagon says.

The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB), known as “the mother of all bombs”, was first tested in 2003, but had not been used before.

The Pentagon said it was dropped from a US aircraft in Nangarhar province.

The news came hours after the Pentagon admitted an air strike in Syria mistakenly killed 18 rebels.

…

The 21,600lb (9,800kg) bomb was dropped in Achin district on Thursday evening local time, the Pentagon said. It is more than 9m (30 feet) in length.

“We targeted a system of tunnels and caves that ISIS fighters use to move around freely, making it easier for them to target US military advisers and Afghan forces in the area,” White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said, using another name for IS.

Headlines say the stock market has fallen.

Terry Gross did an interview about for-profit colleges a couple of weeks ago that I kept meaning to blog if only Trump would shut up for one second. Her guest was Tressie McMillan Cottom, who has written a book about them called Lower Ed.

She worked as an enrollment officer for two for-profits at opposite ends of the spectrum – a cosmetology career school and a large college that offered associate’s, bachelor’s and graduate degrees. She left after fearing that instead of helping the students she recruited to improve their financial future, she was leaving them with large student loan debt they’d never earn enough to repay.

When she left the for-profit college sector, she returned to college, completed her B.A. and went on to earn her Ph.D. from Emory University. Her dissertation was a study of for-profit colleges. Cottom is now an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University.

When she worked for them she didn’t realize right away how exploitative they are.

While for-profit colleges have existed for a long time, we have not always had corporate for-profit colleges. Now for-profit colleges, starting around the mid-1990s, are no longer owned by, like, mom and pop local chains. Increasingly, they were owned by shareholder corporations, so they had become a financial vehicle. Because they are a financial vehicle, the way they operate and their relationship to profit and education had shifted.

It’s no longer a matter of “make a basic profit by providing a good service” but one of “make an ever-increasing profit because that’s what shareholders demand.”

They’re thriving in the current economy because jobs keep demanding new skills and credentials.

GROSS: So you’re suggesting that in the world we live in now, in a lot of professions, you have to keep going back and get further training or further accreditation and that it’s often the for-profit colleges that provide that.

MCMILLAN COTTOM: That’s right. For-profit colleges, in many ways, are providing the job training that employers once did but no longer do.

GROSS: So you’re suggesting now that you used to be able to get that on the job, but now you have to pay for it.

MCMILLAN COTTOM: Correct.

Which is probably not so bad if the job pays well enough, but if it doesn’t…it is so bad. The for-profit ones tend to be expensive.

GROSS: So this creates a situation where it’s typically people who don’t have a large income, often people who are people of color, single-working parents who end up in these schools, but they cost a lot of money. So you have people, you know, without a lot of income paying really large fees for tuition. So what kind of situation does that create?

MCMILLAN COTTOM: The situation that that creates is that because of how we finance higher education in this country because we rely so much on student loans – that are what we call means-tested, meaning you can qualify for more money the less money you have. Well, we designed it that way so that those with the least amount of resources could increase their educational choices and options because they could borrow more.

Well, the problem in the for-profit college sector is that means that the poor students can borrow the most. Well, that creates an incentive for for-profit colleges to recruit students who will qualify for the maximum amount of student aid. Well, those happen to be the poorest among us, and because of how our society is set up, the poorest among us tend to be women and people of color. So the indirect effect of this is that women, especially women of color, are the most vulnerable to the incentives that have been set in place for revenue and profit-taking among for-profit colleges.

Tragic, isn’t it. Poverty=you can borrow a lot to get training / a credential – but borrowing a lot costs a lot, and costing a lot is especially hard on poor people. Not surprisingly, a lot of people drop out and are stuck with this terrible debt.

GROSS: So these college are supposed to be the education that offers people a path to a better job, a better life, a higher status.

MCMILLAN COTTOM: Right.

GROSS: But if you end up having to default on a loan or if you end up being, you know, in debt because of a loan, what happens?

MCMILLAN COTTOM: Your options for education are pretty much foreclosed upon. Debt has made our choice of higher education options far riskier than they were 20 or 30 years ago. And in the for-profit college sector, that’s especially acute because those students are more likely to be poor or low income or sort of dancing along the line of poverty, as I say it. Right? Even if they’re not poor at the moment, they have a lot of risk factors for dropping below the poverty line.

Because of that, for-profit colleges really aren’t set up to transform these students’ lives in the way that we think higher education is supposed to do. And so for me, the consequence of that is this system that we’ve come to rely on to increase access to higher education to the most vulnerable among us really only compounds their poverty and their risk factors. Well, that’s the exact opposite of what higher education is supposed to do.

And DeVos is undoing the regulations that were an attempt to mitigate that awful situation.

In a further irony, the for-profit system depends on the Federal Student Aid program.

GROSS: Do most of the student loans that are taken out for for-profit colleges come from the government? Are they government loans?

MCMILLAN COTTOM: Yes, 97 percent of the students who attend a for-profit college rely on the student financial aid system.

GROSS: So does that mean that the for-profit colleges are very reliant on government loans?

MCMILLAN COTTOM: Almost entirely reliant on the student aid system. We don’t have a for-profit college sector were it not for the Federal Student Aid system and the fact that they have access to it. Almost all of their profits – so whenever you hear one of these staggering statistics about how much profit some place like the University of Phoenix has made in any given year, just assume that the majority of that has come from Federal Student Aid dollars, and you will almost always be right.

Tax dollars to enrich shareholders in for profit colleges while trapping poor people in debt. Awesome.

Was Trump “University” one of these scams?

MCMILLAN COTTOM: No, no, no. In many ways, Trump University is even more cynical (laughter) than the for-profit colleges that I talk about and write about. And this is what I mean by that. Trump University didn’t even pretend to set up an actual school. What Trump University really did was it traded on the public’s faith in the word university and used the word university as part of its brand.

But there was no campus, for example. They never pursued any license to actually operate as a school. One of the best ways, actually, to think about Trump University is that it was a lot like a timeshare sales organization than it was an actual school. But what I think that Trump University does tell us about this administration is sort of how cynical they are about higher education. It tells us something, I think, about their position on public higher education. I think that they have signaled pretty strongly that they are not interested in defending public higher education as important to democracy and the public good. And I think this president’s experience with sort of using the word university, trading so cynically on the public’s faith in the word university – kind of gives us an indication of how he views higher education.

Along with his utter contempt for the very concept of knowledge, which is particularly evident in his way of regularly saying he knows more about X than anyone else, when he very obviously knows nothing at all about X.

There’s a very sad (and enlightening) bit about why the for-profit colleges mostly can’t do what they claim to do.

MCMILLAN COTTOM: It’s different because what we rely on for that to work. So if we just think about when we apply for a job for those of us who’ve attended college, how rare it is when we apply to – for a job for them to actually sit us down to demonstrate that we know the skills that we say we know. What we rely on instead usually in that process is for someone on the other side, usually the hiring manager, to look and say, oh, this person has a good degree from a good school. And we trusted that means this person is generally knowledgeable and can be trained in the specifics of this job.

Well, all of those assumptions, those good faith assumptions about our degree have not been proven to be true of the degrees that students were earning from a place like the technical college. The question was is the labor market, are hiring managers looking at the Bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from the for-profit technical college with the same good faith that they are extending to traditional degrees? And what we have found – the numbers don’t bear out that they are.

Well, if that’s the case, then the students who are assuming that they are getting a degree that will operate just like any other degree really aren’t, and the schools because they are not – they don’t have any incentive to tell the students differently – are not encouraging the students to know about that difference when they choose to enroll in a place like the technical college.

It’s a bit crushing. The hiring manager is never going to “look and say, oh, this person has a good degree from a good school. And we trust that means this person is generally knowledgeable and can be trained in the specifics of this job.” For that step you need a good school, and the for-profit ones aren’t that.

One thing the interview didn’t get into, that I would like to know something about, is why people don’t just bypass the for-profit schools in favor of community college. The answer is probably marketing, but I’d like to know more.

I saw this tweet from Elizabeth Warren

In the choice between students & student loan companies, Betsy DeVos made clear she stands with companies that cheat & squeeze borrowers.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) April 12, 2017

so I went to the Google to find news coverage. The Times has an editorial.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is inexplicably backing away from rules that are meant to prevent federal student loan borrowers from being fleeced by companies the government pays to collect the loans and to guide people through the repayment process.

On Tuesday, she withdrew a sound Obama administration policy that required the Education Department to take into account the past conduct of loan servicing companies before awarding them lucrative contracts — and to include consumer protections in those contracts as well.

These companies aren’t the loan companies, they’re the collecting agencies – one of those carbuncles of capitalism that are such nice little earners for people whose only talent is carbuncling.

The department is doing the loan industry’s bidding at a time when student debt has crippled a generation financially and the country’s largest loan servicing company, Navient, is facing several lawsuits accusing it of putting its own interest before that of the borrowers it is supposed to help.

A suit brought by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau claims that Navient saved itself money by steering borrowers into costly repayment strategies that added billions in interest to their balances.

See there? That’s carbuncling. The goal of the federal student loan program should not be to make repayment more expensive in order to enrich the “loan servicing” companies.

And, the Times goes on, it’s even worse in the case of Sallie Mae.

The Illinois and Washington attorneys general argue that Sallie Mae engaged in predatory lending, saddling people with private subprime loans that the company knew in advance were likely to fail because borrowers would not be able to repay them. The two attorneys general — part of an investigative coalition of 29 states — argue that borrowers deserve to have these tainted private loans forgiven.

Oh um – private subprime loans that the company knew in advance were likely to fail because borrowers would not be able to repay them – that sounds so familiar. What does that remind me of, hmmmmmm…

The scenario outlined in the court documents bears a frightening resemblance to the subprime mortgage crisis of a decade ago — when mortgage companies caused millions of borrowers to lose their homes by steering them into risky, high-cost mortgages they could never hope to repay.

Poor people. People with less money than rich people and middling people. They get the high interest loans because of the risk factor, so they get fucked over when it all goes smash. Apparently this is what we do here – we look for ways to make poor people pay extra for being poor, and then we gaze very hard in another direction when the poor people are left penniless and in debt and with nowhere to live.

The Illinois and Washington lawsuits argue that Sallie Mae used subprime private loans to build relationships with exploitative schools that then helped the company make more federal loans to their students. Those loans were the jackpot for the company, the lawsuit argues, because they were guaranteed by the government, which steps in to reimburse the lender when a borrower defaults.

This is what profit-making “universities” do – it’s what they’re for. They provide basic vocational training at inflated prices to students who take out federal loans…and then end up ruined when they can’t pay the loans back. It’s a systematic con game, and it’s disgusting.

And DeVos is undoing Obama administration efforts to rein all that in. More power to the carbuncles!

Eric Alterman in The Nation on “thought leaders” via a new book by Daniel Drezner. He says Drezner doesn’t pay enough attention to “the power of money to corrupt and control literally everything with which it comes into contact—most particularly intellectual culture.”

Drezner by no means ignores the issue. Early on, he makes a crucial distinction between old-fashioned “public intellectuals” and the now-trendy “thought leaders.” The latter model is one that sells itself less to an identifiable “public”—something that has become increasingly difficult to define in a society continually segmenting itself according to ever-more-narrow criteria—than to plutocratic patrons…

Today, our most famous purveyors of ideas sell themselves to the wealthy much like the courtiers of the Middle Ages. Drezner notes that these ideas are therefore shaped by the “aversion” that plutocrats share toward addressing the problems we face. Inequality? Global warming? Populist nihilism? An explosion of global refugees? From a Silicon Valley perspective, Drezner notes, such things are not a failure of our system but rather “a piece of faulty code that need[s] to be hacked.” Examining data from a survey of Silicon Valley corporate founders, Drezner notes their shared belief that “there’s no inherent conflict between major groups in society (workers vs. corporations, citizens vs. government, or America vs. other nations).”

“Intellectuals who wish to cater to this crowd will find it difficult to contradict the narrative of meritocratic achievement,” Drezner explains. His discussion of the function of the TED phenomenon is especially cogent: “TED talks are designed for thought leaders to appeal to plutocrats.”

These are the progressives, Alterman emphasizes.

That money demands compromises from culture is not exactly breaking news. But its effect on progressive politics has been devastating, and here, Drezner’s account fails to do the problem full justice. The labor movement long ago lost the ability to compete with corporate America and individual billionaires for the funds needed to make ideas meaningful in the real world, so liberals and progressives must now drink from the wells of wealth.

He quotes a passage from Obama’s book about being drawn into that web – nice, progressive, thoughtful people, but rich and with views that rich people do tend to have.

After spending so much time with donors, Obama admitted, he found himself “avoiding certain topics during conversations with them, papering over possible differences, anticipating their expectations…. [A]s a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population—that is, the people that I’d entered public life to serve.”

That’s what happened to both Clintons, except that they embraced it more enthusiastically than Obama did.

The primary talent demonstrated by the “thought leaders” who rise to the top of this stew—people like Thomas Friedman, Niall Ferguson, and the heavyweight champion, according to Drezner’s own poll (in which I participated), Henry Kissinger—is to somehow flatter great wealth even as they pretend to challenge it. Should they pull it off, they get to feel good about themselves as enormously well-remunerated and highly respected public servants. The truth, however, is that by comforting the comfortable, they end up further afflicting the afflicted. It’s no wonder that not only Donald Trump but the entire Republican Party and its supporters now feel that they can ignore the arguments of this class. It was they who built this city: this city of ruin.

He’s not wrong.

How ludicrous it is that what Adam Frank says needs to be said:

The attack on expertise was given its most visceral form by British politician Michael Gove during the Brexit campaign last year when he famously claimed, “people in this country have had enough of experts.” The same kinds of issues, however, are also at stake here in the U.S. in our discussions about “alternative facts,” “fake news” and “denial” of various kinds. That issue can be put as a simple question: When does one opinion count more than another?

By definition, an expert is someone whose learning and experience lets them understand a subject deeper than you or I do (assuming we’re not an expert in that subject, too). The weird thing about having to write this essay at all is this: Who would have a problem with that? Doesn’t everyone want their brain surgery done by an expert surgeon rather than the guy who fixes their brakes? On the other hand, doesn’t everyone want their brakes fixed by an expert auto mechanic rather than a brain surgeon who has never fixed a flat?

To put it more broadly, doesn’t everyone grasp that people who know more about X know more about X than people who don’t know more about X? It’s tautologous because what else can it be? If you’re dissing expertise you’re saying there’s no value in knowing more about X no matter what X is, and that’s just bonkers.

(I know this because I’m an expert in spotting when things are bonkers.)

Every day, all of us entrust our lives to experts from airline pilots to pharmacists. Yet, somehow, we’ve come to a point where people can put their ignorance on a subject of national importance on display for all to see — and then call it a virtue.

Bonkers.

There are non-bonkers reasons for wanting things like fresh perspectives, people with no vested interest in X, outsiders, rebels, and so on…but there are no non-bonkers reasons for just opposing expertise as such, or for pretending ignorance is a virtue.

How did we reach this remarkable state of affairs? The answer to that question can be found in a new book by Tom Nichols titled The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. Nichols is a politically conservative professor of international relations at the U.S. War College. (He’s also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy! champion, so you don’t wanna mess with him.)

First, it’s important to note, Nichols is not arguing for a slavish adherence to anything that comes out of an expert’s mouth. In a wonderful essay that preceded the book, he tells us: “It’s true that experts can make mistakes, as disasters from thalidomide to the Challenger explosion tragically remind us.”

But it wasn’t the experts who made the mistake that caused the Challenger explosion. Quite the opposite: it was management who overruled the experts. NASA management overruled the engineers who said it was not safe to launch when the temperature was too low. The engineers had the relevant expertise and the management simply said but we really really want to launch so we’re going to ignore the engineers. That didn’t go well.

National Geographic reports on the work of photographer Poulomi Basu.

“As I grew up, I realized how customs and traditions are used as forces to bring women to subservience and control them,” and this includes the use of color, she says.

With her series, “A Ritual of Exile,” Basu studies red as related to the blood of menstruation. Her long-term goal is to help end the entrenched Hindu practice of Chaupadi, which pushes menstruating women into isolation and into a normalized cycle of violence perpetuated by custom, tradition, and religion.

Jeez, you turn your attention away for a few hours and look what happens.

Spicer happens.

In criticizing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Tuesday that even Adolf Hitler did not sink to that level of warfare, despite Hitler’s use of gas chambers to kill millions of Jews.

When given the chance to clarify his comment — uttered during Passover, the most celebrated Jewish holiday in the United States — Spicer then said Hitler took Jews “into the Holocaust center” but that Hitler “was not using the gas on his own people in the same way that Assad is doing.”

So I guess he doesn’t know that Zyklon B was a chemical weapon, and that it killed by suffocation. I guess he doesn’t know that the people killed by it died choking and convulsing just as the people in Idlib died. I guess he doesn’t know anything.

Later in the briefing, a reporter read Spicer’s comments back to him and gave him the opportunity to clarify. Spicer’s answer only added more confusion.

“I think when you come to sarin gas, there was no — he was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing,” Spicer said, mispronouncing Assad’s name. “I mean, there was clearly, I understand your point, thank you. Thank you, I appreciate that. There was not in the, he brought them into the Holocaust center, I understand that. What I am saying in the way that Assad used them, where he went into towns, dropped them down to innocent, into the middle of towns, it was brought — so the use of it. And I appreciate the clarification there. That was not the intent.”

Ah yes the Holocaust center, right next to the town hall and across from the movie theater.

Before the briefing was even over, White House press aides had realized the magnitude of his mistake — and were working on a response to clarify it. Shortly after he stepped away from the lectern, Spicer put out a statement trying to explain what he meant.

“In no way was I trying to lessen the horrendous nature of the Holocaust,” Spicer said in the statement. “I was trying to draw a distinction of the tactic of using airplanes to drop chemical weapons on population centers. Any attack on innocent people is reprehensible and inexcusable.”

Dude. The fact that it comes from a plane or a missile doesn’t make it worse than if it had come from an SS man or a kapo dropping it down a slot in the roof.

In January, the White House released a statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, that made no mention of Jews or the anti-Semitic views that fueled the Holocaust. At the time, White House spokeswoman Hope Hicks said the omission was intentional because the White House staff is an “incredibly inclusive group, and we took into account all of those who suffered.”

She did say that. I remember it.

https://twitter.com/AnneFrankCenter/status/851872982406283264

A demonstration against Orban in Budapest on Sunday:

Oh god damn them all.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered Justice Department officials to review reform agreements with troubled police forces nationwide, saying it was necessary to ensure that these pacts do not work against the Trump administration’s goals of promoting officer safety and morale while fighting violent crime.

In a two-page memo released Monday, Sessions said agreements reached previously between the department’s civil rights division and local police departments — a key legacy of the Obama administration — will be subject to review by his two top deputies, throwing into question whether all of the agreements will stay in place.

He’d withdraw the 13th Amendment if he could, the smirking piece of shit.

Since 2009, the Justice Department opened 25 investigations into law enforcement agencies and has been enforcing 14 consent decrees, along with some other agreements. Civil rights advocates fear that Sessions’s memo could particularly imperil the status of agreements that have yet to be finalized, such as a pending agreement with the Chicago Police Department.

“This is terrifying,” said Jonathan Smith, executive director of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, who spent five years as the department’s chief of special litigation, overseeing investigations into 23 police departments such as New Orleans, Cleveland and Ferguson, Mo. “This raises the question of whether, under the current attorney general, the Department of Justice is going to walk away from its obligation to ensure that law enforcement across the country is following the Constitution.”

Yesterday Sessions moved to have less science in criminal investigations.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions will end a Justice Department partnership with independent scientists to raise forensic science standards and has suspended an expanded review of FBI testimony across several techniques that have come under question, saying a new strategy will be set by an in-house team of law enforcement advisers.

In a statement Monday, Sessions said he would not renew the National Commission on Forensic Science, a roughly 30-member advisory panel of scientists, judges, crime lab leaders, prosecutors and defense lawyers chartered by the Obama administration in 2013.

Yeah, let’s go back to the Good Old Way of using techniques that have no scientific basis.

Barack Obama, a constitutional law scholar, had championed changes to forensic science.

In September, a White House science panel called on courts to question the admissibility of four heavily used techniques, including firearms tracing, saying claims about their reliability had not been scientifically proved. The Justice Department last year also announced a wider review of testimony by experts across several disciplines after finding that nearly all FBI experts for years overstated and gave scientifically misleading testimony about two techniques the FBI Laboratory long championed: the tracing of crime-scene hairs based on microscopic examinations and of bullets based on chemical composition.

Wouldn’t you think the Attorney General would want good science behind forensic techniques? So as not to convict innocent people and fail to convict guilty people? Wouldn’t you think?

Even before the announcement not to renew the national commission, several commission members from outside the Justice Department warned against ending its work, saying the Trump administration has made several moves to reduce the role of science and independent scientists in policymaking.

In a letter Thursday, six leading research scientists on the panel urged re-upping the commission for an additional two years, saying, “for too long, decisions regarding forensic science have been made without the input of the research science community.”

…

In suspending reviews of past testimony and the development of standards for future reporting, “the department has literally decided to suspend the search for the truth,” said Peter S. Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, which has reported that nearly half of 349 DNA exonerations involved misapplications of forensic science. “As a consequence innocent people will languish in prison or, God forbid, could be executed,” he said.

Because the Good Old Techniques turn out to be bunk when they’re actually tested.

Although examiners had long claimed to be able to match pattern evidence — such as with firearms or bite marks — to a source with “absolute” or “scientific” certainty, only DNA analysis had been validated through statistical research, scientists reported.

In one case, the FBI lab in 2005 abandoned its four-decade-long practice of tracing bullets to a specific manufacturer’s batch through chemical analyses after its method were scientifically debunked. In 2015, the department and bureau reported that nearly every examiner in an elite hair-analysis unit gave scientifically flawed or overstated testimony in 90 percent of cases for two decades before 2000.

The cases include 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison.

Separately on Monday, the national commission heard from Keith Harward, an ex-Navy sailor exonerated last year after serving 33 years of a life sentence for rape and murder in Newport News, Va. Harward was convicted after six experts, including a leader in the field, concurred that bite marks on a victim matched his teeth to a “medical certainty.” DNA testing identified a different sailor as the perpetrator. No court in the United States has barred bite-mark evidence, despite 21 known wrongful convictions, a proposed moratorium in Texas and research showing that experts cannot consistently agree even on whether injuries are caused by human teeth.

I get that we can’t expect Sessions and people like Sessions to care when innocent people are convicted – but you’d think they’d care that that means guilty people are not convicted. From that angle you’d think they’d want to get it right.

God damn them all.