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.

Fly the friendly skies of United.

https://twitter.com/Diane_7A/status/851525530134491137

@united "Fly the Friendly Skies" #united pic.twitter.com/ENxSZPiLEK

— Dark Night (@darknight2107) April 10, 2017

https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/851462245561229313

united's list of special in-flight deals makes a lot more sense now pic.twitter.com/UvkRVFppKz

— Bob Vulfov (@bobvulfov) April 10, 2017

https://twitter.com/metsFanscotty/status/851515669061545984

Here’s a thing you can do. George Szirtes writes:

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT – please sign if you support it.

“Dear Mr Tajani,

I see my fellow Booker Prize winner, the translator Ottilie Mulzet has already written to you about the disgraceful law intended to close the Central European University in Budapest. The law, intended for this one specific purpose, is the latest of steps taken by Viktor Orbán to close out democratic institutions in the country, including press, media and NGOs. Please note I do not say opposition institutions since the CEU is in no way a political opponent of the government. It is simply an independent university.

This evening the president of the country, János Áder, has signed the law and for the second night students are out there, protesting. They are the last bastion against the establishment of a prospective authoritarian one-party state.

It will be a serious blot on the EU’s conscience to permit this act of the Orbán government to pass without response. It reduces Europe. It weakens it. It takes it one step further to the edge of disintegration.

We can watch and hear the students on YouTube as I write this. We implore you to address this matter with the seriousness due to it.

George Szirtes FRSL,FEA

From the ACLU:

Just a week after the Republican Party’s Affordable Care Act repeal bill was dramatically pulled from the House floor, the Senate advanced legislation that will have serious consequences for the reproductive health and family planning abilities of millions across the country. It’s now awaiting President Trump’s signature — and we have his vice president to thank.

On March 30, the Senate passed H.J. Res 43, but only because, without sufficient support, Vice President Mike Pence cast the tiebreaking vote – a constitutional authority he holds as president of the Senate. He voted in favor, with a smile and a wave.

Here’s why that’s so disturbing: H.J. Res 43 would eliminate a regulation that enables Title X family planning grants to go to the most qualified health care providers. The regulation prohibits states from preventing providers from receiving federal funds for reasons that are unrelated to their ability to provide healthcare services. In other words, if a healthcare provider delivers high-quality care, it’s eligible to receive Title X money.

Why is this critical?

Title X providers offer vital services — such as birth control, cancer screenings, and testing for sexually transmitted infections — to 4 million people, regardless of economic status. It’s a publically funded safety net for those who can’t simply go elsewhere. And it works because the network is diverse and includes reproductive health providers, which are often the most qualified and best-equipped to provide this care.

Ahhh yes, but what else are they? Besides the most qualified and best-equipped to provide this care? Likely to provide abortions, of course. Uh oh uh oh. Must prevent, must terminate.

By law, no Title X funds can be used to provide abortion services. But, in more than a dozen states, politicians have moved to block healthcare providers who also provide abortion, like Planned Parenthood and others, from receiving Title X funds.

Because abortion cooties.

But no; really it’s because let’s punish abortion and the women who need abortion. Let’s use our power to do our best to force all pregnant women to stay pregnant whether they want to or not…except of course in the case of poor women who need pre-natal care. They can just die or miscarry, but those sluts who want to stop being pregnant – they have to be forced to stay pregnant.

By law, no Title X funds can be used to provide abortion services. But, in more than a dozen states, politicians have moved to block healthcare providers who also provide abortion, like Planned Parenthood and others, from receiving Title X funds. That’s discrimination, and the courts agree. Excluding qualified providers does nothing to help public health. It actually hurts access to needed care.

The Obama administration recognized this, and in December of last year, the Department of Health and Human Services issued its regulation to protect against this discrimination. But the Congressional Review Act gives Congress the authority to simply undo regulations passed late in the previous administration. It used to be an extremely rare move. That’s no longer the case.

Prior to 2017, it had been used to overturn a rule just once. But with Republicans in control of Congress and the White House, the process has become far more common: As of April 3, the president has signed 11 resolutions to overturn Obama-era regulations, with more headed to his desk. That’s how we ended up overturning Title X family planning protections by a margin so narrow — there was bipartisan opposition in the Senate — that the vice president had to step in.

It was a striking moment. Pence ascended the Senate dais, grabbed the gavel, and calmly, proudly, gleefully even, voted in favor of a resolution that will interfere with health care for millions of low-income women and insert ideology into reproductive health care.

Of course he did. There’s just nothing more gratifying than punishing those sluts who want to stop being pregnant.

The CEO of United Airlines says it’s all rather upsetting. To them.

Videos of a United Airlines passenger being forcibly dragged from his seat on a Sunday overbooked flight at O’Hare International Airport have been viewed more than 1 million times, and the airline’s CEO on Monday called the incident “an upsetting event to all of us here at United.”

Well that’s sad and everything but what about that doctor they beat up? What about his patients in Louisville who had appointments to see him today?

Another passenger on the flight, Audra Bridges, told the Louisville Courier-Journal that United asked for a volunteer at the gate to take a later flight, offering $400 and a hotel stay. Bridges, of Louisville, told the Courier-Journal that passengers were then allowed to board the flight.

Once the flight was boarded, passengers were told four people needed to give up their seats for stand-by United employees that needed to be in Louisville for a Monday flight and the plane wouldn’t depart until they had volunteers, Bridges said. United increased the offer to $800, but no one volunteered.

So they should have kept going.

Instead they said the computer would select four people to throw off. A couple left reluctantly, but the passenger who said he’s a doctor said he’s a doctor and refused. (So far it’s only his word that he’s a doctor.) Security came along to talk to him, and he still refused. So United called the cops, who got violent with him.

“After our team looked for volunteers, one customer refused to leave the aircraft voluntarily and law enforcement was asked to come to the gate,” United spokesman Charlie Hobart said in the statement. “We apologize for the overbook situation.”

But not for the calling the cops situation or the beating a guy up situation or the dragging a guy bleeding up the aisle of the plane situation.

Travel industry analyst Henry Harteveldt questioned why United didn’t simply offer a larger sum.

“Everybody has their price. If they had allowed the agent to offer a higher incentive, we may never have heard about this,” said Harteveldt, founder of Atmosphere Research Group.

Hobart said United tries to come up with a reasonable compensation offer, but “there comes a point where you’re not going to get volunteers.”

At that point, United’s contract of carriage says the airline can select passengers to bump to a later flight, based on a priority system that can take into account how much passengers paid, how often they fly, whether missing that flight could affect a connecting flight and how early they checked in. People with disabilities and unaccompanied minors are generally last to be bumped.

Usually, passengers — however angry — comply with the airline’s orders. But even if it’s an unusual situation, it raises questions about what rights passengers have when being removed from a flight against their will, Harteveldt said.

Yes, yes it does.

I know it’s very first world problem and all, but the high-handedness and casual violence of it grabbed my attention.

Seriously?

Videos showing a man being violently removed from a United Airlines flight have provoked a public outcry on social media.

The footage taken from inside the airliner shows a man being violently pulled out of his seat and dragged down the aisle as passengers prepared to take off from Chicago to Louisville on Sunday evening.

Well there must be a reason. It may be a bad or mistaken reason but there must be a reason – they think he harassed the person next to him, or someone thought he was A Terrorist, or something.

But no.

The airline in question – United – has acknowledged that the man’s only apparent crime was that the flight was overbooked and he refused to leave voluntarily.

Erm…that’s not a crime.

And, in fact, isn’t it a crime to refuse to deliver a paid-for service and then assault the paid-up customer? That sounds criminalish to me.

Jayse D Anspach, who posted the footage, tweeted: “#United overbooked and wanted four of us to volunteer to give up our seats for personnel that needed to be at work the next day.”

“No one volunteered, so United decided to choose for us. They chose an Asian doctor and his wife.”

“The doctor needed to work at the hospital the next day, so he refused to volunteer,” Mr Anspach added.

“Ten minutes later, the doctor runs back into the plane with a bloody face, clings to a post in the back, chanting, “I need to go home.”

What???

Another passenger Audra D. Bridges, who posted a video of the incident on Facebook, that has been viewed over 400,000 times, wrote: “Please share this video. We are on this flight. United airlines overbooked the flight.”

“They randomly selected people to kick off so their standby crew could have a seat.

“This man is a doctor and has to be at the hospital in the morning,” she added.

“He did not want to get off. We are all shaky and so disgusted.”

The Washington Post has more details, which only make it sound even worse:

United Airlines says a man wouldn’t give up his spot on an overbooked flight Sunday.

So, according to witnesses and videos of the incident, he was pulled screaming from his seat by security, knocked against an arm rest and dragged down the aisle and back to the terminal at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

United refused to answer questions about the incident, which horrified other passengers on the Louisville-bound flight. An airline spokesman only apologized for the overbooked flight, and said police were called after a passenger “refused to leave the aircraft voluntarily.”

But why do they get to call police on passengers who “refuse to leave the aircraft voluntarily” when it’s the airline that’s at fault? Surely what they should be doing in that situation is offering bribes until they get the necessary number of volunteers? Genuine volunteers, not “volunteers” dragged screaming from their seats.

Tyler Bridges recalled trouble starting almost as soon as he and his wife boarded.

An airline supervisor walked onto the plane and brusquely announced: “We have United employees that need to fly to Louisville tonight. … This flight’s not leaving until four people get off.”

“That rubbed some people the wrong way,” Bridges said.

I should think it would. What happened to that whole “thank you for flying with us today” thing? Not to mention that the respectable way to try to get people to do you a favor you need because you fucked up is to ask them very nicely – not to start with a threat. “Hey, I made a mistake, so we’re not going anywhere until you fix it for me.” <— No.

Then there’s the video, which I just watched. It’s unbelievable. It’s horrifying.

What is wrong with us? Is this some kind of Trumpvirus spreading to everywhere?

In another video, the man runs back onto the plane, his clothes still mussed from his forcible ejection, frantically repeating: “I have to go home. I have to go home.”

“He was kind of dazed and confused,” Bridges said. He recalled a group of high school students leaving the plane in disgust at that point, their adult escort explaining to other passengers: “They don’t need to see this anymore.”

The airline eventually cleared everyone from the plane, Bridges said, and did not let them back on until the man was removed a second time — in a stretcher.

This whole “human beings” thing has been a mistake.

Speaking of systemic obstacles thrown in the path of women in STEM – Google does its part.

Google has discriminated against its female employees, according to the US Department of Labor (DoL), which said it had evidence of “systemic compensation disparities”.

As part of an ongoing DoL investigation, the government has collected information that suggests the internet search giant is violating federal employment laws with its salaries for women, agency officials said.

“We found systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce,” Janette Wipper, a DoL regional director, testified in court in San Francisco on Friday.

Stay in STEM, girls – and if they pay you less than they pay the boys, just stay later and arrive earlier.

Reached for comment Friday afternoon, Janet Herold, regional solicitor for the DoL, said: “The investigation is not complete, but at this point the department has received compelling evidence of very significant discrimination against women in the most common positions at Google headquarters.”

Herold added: “The government’s analysis at this point indicates that discrimination against women in Google is quite extreme, even in this industry.”

Google denies it.

Google is a federal contractor, which means it is required to allow the DoL to inspect and copy records and information about its its compliance with equal opportunity laws. Last year, the department’s office of federal contract compliance programs requested job and salary history for Google employees, along with names and contact information, as part of the compliance review.

Google, however, repeatedly refused to hand over the data, which was a violation of its contractual obligations with the federal government, according to the DoL’s lawsuit. After the suit was originally filed, a company spokesperson claimed that Google had provided “hundreds of thousands of records” to the government and that the requests outlined in the complaint were “overbroad”, revealed confidential information, or violated employees’ privacy.

I’m surprised Trump hasn’t told the DoL to drop the case.

Google is not the first tech company to face legal action from the labor department over employment practices. In September, the DoL filed a lawsuitagainst Palantir, the Palo Alto data analytics company, alleging it systematically discriminated against Asian job applicants in its hiring process. Palantir has argued that the DoL’s analysis was flawed and the company has denied the accusations.

In January, the department sued Oracle, another large tech company, claiming it paid white men more than others, leading to pay discrimination against women and black and Asian employees. Oracle claimed the case was “politically motivated” and said its employment decisions were based on merit and experience.

In recent months, there has been uncertainty about the future of these kinds of aggressive DoL enforcement efforts under Donald Trump. The president has rolled back Obama-era protections for female workers, and some DoL staffers have raised concerns that the new administration will not embrace the agency’s core mission of supporting workers’ rights. An Oracle executive also joined Trump’s transition team, and the president’s close adviser Peter Thiel co-founded Palantir.

Any bets on how long it will take the Trump gang to shut that whole thing down?

Robert Reich – Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, don’t forget – said this:

When I visited Google several weeks ago, several women took me aside to mention how badly they were treated in terms of pay and promotions.

Shame on Google. It ought to be a model of equal opportunity for women rather than a model of gender bias. (By the way, I hope Trump’s new pick for Labor doesn’t stop this lawsuit.)