HIT & RUN BLOG

cellphone footagePolice monitoring apps are getting better and better at keeping an eye on officialdom. But some now aspire to reduce the need for police at all.

J.D. Tuccille writes:

In a world in which police don't just bristle at recordings of their activities, but also threaten curious bystanders and delete inconvenient evidence, a new generation of mobile apps is making it easier for people to work together to monitor the cops—and maybe even replace them.

The official line may be that it's all "standard procedure," but I'll take a wild guess that Fort Collins, Colorado, police are not entirely thrilled about a video of one of their "progressive and professional" officers slamming a woman to the ground during a dispute outside a bar. Nor are Chicago cops delighted to have to explain in court a video of one of their officers shooting a teen in the back. And North Miami police have their hands full with a hard-to-fathom recording of a cop shooting the unarmed caretaker of an autistic man.

Such recordings are sufficiently awkward that police often refuse to use officially issued recording equipment to capture their interactions with the public—Los Angeles officers are habitually forgetful when it comes to using the cameras that are strapped to their bodies. Denver has had a similar problem, along with the sheriff's department in Alameda County, California, and agencies elsewhere.

And when citizens record them, police have a bad habit of illegally ordering them to stop, and even seizing devices and deleting inconvenient evidence.

There's not much the average person can do about cops who disable or damage cameras they've been issued. But private recordings are increasingly ubiquitous, and a bit more resistant to policy or police action.

• Gage Skidmore / Flickr.comThe Trump administration still has hundreds of important vacancies to fill throughout the federal government.
• North Korea says it is "ready" for "any mode of war" in response to U.S. ships heading for the waters off the Korean Peninsula.
• Secretary of State Rex Tillerson: "We want to relieve the suffering of the Syrian people. Russia can be a part of that future and play an important role. Or Russia can maintain its alliance with this group, which we believe is not going to serve Russia's interests longer term."
• The suspect in last week's terrorist attack in Stockholm is expected to plead guilty.
• "Inside the sexting scandal that cost outgoing Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley his job and put him in jail."
• Rep. Justin Amash on House Speaker Paul Ryan: "We need either a change in direction from this speaker, or we need a new speaker."

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Phil Masturzo/TNS/NewscomThe latest wrinkle in the United debacle is that the airline's CEO, Oscar Munoz, sent a letter to company employees laying most of the blame on the victim: the doctor who was dragged off his flight by Chicago aviation police. This passenger "defied" officers after being "politely asked to deplane" and became "disruptive and belligerent," according to the letter.

Munoz struck a similar tone in his public statement, which claimed that United personnel were merely trying to "re-accommodate" the passenger—an example of Orwellian doublespeak if ever there was one.

In the wake of the incident, United has been met with something approaching universal condemnation—and it's well-deserved, writes Reason's Brian Doherty: "Shame on both United for calling the cops on a passenger to make the lives of their employees and business easier, and shame on the police for having any part of it."

He's right, of course. But while United's treatment of the passenger in the video was stunning and uniquely awful, let's not forget that the entire airport experience is oriented toward misery—and that's the fault of government policies that treat every passenger like a potential security threat. Paying customers aren't people with rights and dignity, according to this model: they are nails to be hammered into place.

We live in an age of transportation security theater, and the party responsible for much of the flying-related misery is the Transportation Security Administration. Created in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, this federal agency is solely responsible for screening passengers for contraband and dangerous items as they enter airport terminals. In practice, this means subjecting people to intrusive pat-downs and body scans while rifling through their personal items. There is no boundary too private for the TSA to cross. That this incredibly inconvenient, dehumanizing system routinely fails to prevent illicit items from actually entering the airport is almost beside the point, since the TSA provides little actual security. Indeed, the dirty secret of airport safety is that the materials necessary to construct an explosive can be found inside the terminal, beyond the security checkpoint.

Making matters more frustrating, the TSA habitually touts its own importance—even though, as Reason's Ron Bailey and C.J. Ciaramella, and Vox's Dylan Matthews, have argued, its complete abolition would put no one in danger and might actually save lives. As customers wait in endless security lines, TSA agents incessantly claim that the extraordinary measures are necessary precautions. Constant reminders to remove shoes and belts, empty pockets, and separate laptops from backpacks are justified on grounds that they make everyone safer, even though this is a lie.

United's claim that assaulting a passenger and dragging him out of a seat he paid for constitutes mere "re-accommodation" is a clear continuation of this approach. Agents of the state make similar re-accommodations all the time. For your safety. You are welcome.

United is not the TSA. And many airlines have better customer service track records than United. But it's no accident that flying has become one of the most stressful and uncomfortable recurring experiences for millions of Americans. It's the result of policy choices, enacted by government agents, and propelled by overwhelming safety paranoia. Until and unless some basic level of sanity prevails, customers should expect further "re-accommodations" at the hands of overzealous police officers and security officials, no matter which airline they fly.

Flemming Rose Tor Birk TradsNick Gillespie interviewed Muhammad cartoon publisher Flemming Rose about immigration, free speech, and toleration, in the May issue of Reason.

Gillespie writes:

In 2005, while an editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, Flemming Rose commissioned a series of cartoons about the prophet Muhammad. His goal was to highlight the dangers of self-censorship in an age of political correctness. The response was explosive: Islamic terrorists greeted the cartoons with violence, riots, and attacks on western embassies that left at least 200 dead, according to The New York Times. Rose has been under threat ever since, frequently traveling with bodyguards. Yet he remains one of the planet's most committed and articulate defenders of free speech, the open society, and the enlightenment values of tolerance and universal rights.

The historical evidence in favor of "free minds and free markets," is there for everyone to see.

Marian Tupy writes:

Considering that Homo sapiens only emerged as a unique species of hominids some 200,000 years ago, our experience with prosperity is incredibly short, amounting to no more than 0.1 percent of our time on Earth. The remarkable novelty of our present abundance may, perhaps, explain our unease with it ("all good things must come to an end") and our eschatological obsessions ranging from overpopulation to out-of-control global warming.

Continued human progress does, of course, depend on maintaining policies, institutions and ideas (intellectual enlightenment, classical liberalism and free exchange) that made it possible in the first place.

Gale Verhague / Dreamstime.comJerry Kimball said he thought it was a joke when a Sioux Falls, South Dakota, animal control officer cited him for allowing his pet snake to slither freely at a local park. "He was literally asking me to put a rope around my snake," Kimball said. Animal Control Supervisor Julie DeJong said a city ordinance requires all pets to be leashed or restrained in public.

Genetic testing company 23andMe received FDA approval this month to resume telling customers about their predisposition to various syndromes and illnesses. Reason's Ronald Bailey, a longtime 23andMe user, is happy, though he'd be happier still if the FDA got out of the genetic information-policing business altogether.

The Mayo Clinic's Dr. Michael Joyner, meanwhile, responded to the FDA's announcement with skepticism. His beefs, in order:

1. Genes are not destiny: "For example, people at increased genetic risk of cardiovascular disease are not at all destined to die from cardiovascular disease. Importantly, they also are at much lower risk if they follow a healthy lifestyle."
2. Genetic info is not a necessary prerequisite for minimizing risk: "When I hear anecdotes about someone becoming more active and losing weight because they found out they are at mildly increased genetic risk for something like type 2 diabetes, it always makes me wonder why that motivated them more than all the important things we already know a healthy lifestyle can help with."
3. Genetic testing can freak people out: "First, some people who get a score back suggesting they are at increased risk might become fatalistic and figure there is nothing they can do. Or, some people who get a score back suggesting they are at decreased risk might become cavalier about their risk and assume they are protected no matter what they do."
4. There are cheaper tests that tell us far more about our health: "when the topic of gene scores comes up, I like to mention what I call the 'bathroom scale score.' It turns out that for many common chronic diseases, body weight, BMI or waist circumference are more predictive of future risk than a gene score."

When reading doctors on direct-to-consumer health care technology, I get the sense many of them perceive all this stuff to be a profound misallocation of resources. Yes, we are entering a truly incredible age of self-assessment on demand, and yes, those technologies have made healthy people even healthier. But middle-aged, lower-middle-class white Americans are living shorter lives and 86 million Americans have fasted glucose levels that suggest type II diabetes is not far off. What are these new technologies doing for them?

These folks currently have access to mundane technology that will tell them far more than a 23andMe report: the bathroom scale, the free blood pressure machine at the pharmacy, the fasted glucose and cholesterol panels their doctors have ordered; all these diagnostic devices are telling them they have problems right now, and should eat less, eat better, and move more. If those inputs don't inspire change, why would a genetic test--alluding only to diseases they might get--be any different? It might not be!

Genetic testing could be more like broccoli sprouts than broccoli: Broccoli sprouts are a hot "super food" right now, but most of us could stand to just eat more broccoli, the way most of us should be taking advantage of simple health assessment tools. Then again, the fact that getting people to eat more vegetables--of any kind!--would go a long way toward improving American health-care outcomes is no reason to condemn, or ban, bougie super foods (or genetic tests).

As someone who treated his body like a Superfund site for the better part of two decades, but now takes his health very seriously, I like the prospects of the direct-to-consumer healthcare market. Like many folks, I waited for a "medical trigger" to take stock and make changes. Some people don't need to develop chronic high blood pressure or sleep apnea to take their health seriously, other people don't take their health seriously until they develop one or more of those things. People in the latter category could benefit from more warning signs, particularly earlier in life. I just don't see the downside, particularly in light of what we're learning about reversing negative health trends at the individual level. As The New Yorker's Rivka Galchen reported in a piece on bariatric surgery last year, even though losing weight is literally as simple--for the vast majority of people--as "calories out must exceed calories in," rerouting the digestive tract is now considered the most effective means for treating obesity and the diseases that frequently accompany it. "I'm a dyed-in-the-wool behavioral psychologist," U. Penn's Tom Wadden told Galchen, "and even I will tell you that there's no question that bariatric surgery is going to provide a larger and more durable weight loss than life-style modification, medication, or even a combination of the two."

If genetic testing is just bigger, brighter signage warning us about the road ahead, maybe that's enough.

Reason's Lisa Snell sat dwon to talk with these two charter school advocates during Reason Foundations annual retreat, Reason Weekend. The event allows for liberty minded people to gather and talk about free minds and free markets.

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Bombing Syria was the type of "foreign policy idea Donald Trump was railing against all through the campaign," says historian Thaddeus Russell, "but clearly the [Steve] Bannon and Steven Miller faction is waning or being pushed out, and now it's a return to the good old days of Wilsonianism: killing people in order to save them."

On today's podcast, Russell joins Reason editors Nick Gillespie and Katherine Mangu-Ward to talk about the Syria bombing, why "presidents become more warlike over time," how the Trump Administration's divide over foreign policy is reminiscent of a similar split in the Reagan White House, Reason magazine's cover story on "Why the Wall Won't Work" ("a fine summation" according to the New York Times' editorial board), and the subtext of U.S. Army Gen. (Ret.) Stanley McChrystal defense of federal funding for public broadcasting on the grounds that PBS makes kids better good soldiers.

"[McChrystal's] argument is precisely [the argument] cold war liberals were making in the '50s, 60s, '70s, and '80s," says Russell, "which is that we need a single, unified culture that makes everyone identify as Americans before identifying as individuals."

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Photo Credit: S. Craighead/U.S. Navy/SIPA/Newscom

Richard Ellis/ZUMA Press/NewscomDespite criticism from some longtime supporters, President Trump has found new champions on the right and the left for his decision to launch airstrikes in retaliation for a chemical weapons attack he has blamed on the Assad government.

Before a meeting of G-7 leaders in Italy, where forging a unified front on Russia and the Assad regime in Syria will be one of the chief goals, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. would hold accountable "any and all who commit crimes against the innocents anywhere in the world."

The only thing "impressive" about this is how the volatile, unpredictable, intellectual light-weight, easily manipulated by the media has garnered this support for such a stunningly incoherent position.

Trump's embrace of the U.S.'s role as a world's policeman has led some erstwhile never-Trumpers to offer full-throated support for the president and to attempt to push his administration further in a direction they support.

"Punishing Assad for use of chemical weapons is good," Bill Kristol tweeted. "Regime change in Iran is the prize."

Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), some of Trump's most vocal critics during the Republican primary, the general election campaign, and since the election, both applauded Trump's decision to bomb Syria. Members of the establishment media like CNN's Fareed Zakaria and MSNBC's Brian Williams applauded too, as Mike Riggs noted last week.

Ian Dunt, an editor of Politics.co.uk, expressed an opinion emblematic of many on the anti-Trump establishment left. "Feel like I should wash my mouth out with soap but this was an impressive decision by Trump," Dunt tweeted, following up with: "Concerns me that volatile military situation now exists w president who can't tie his shoelaces, but red line needed to be maintained here."

Hillary Clinton herself called on airstrikes against Assad last week and praised Trump's decision while calling on him to do more to "end Syria's civil war, and to eliminate ISIS's stronghold on both sides of the border." Trump has already ramped up the global war on terror he inherited from Obama.

Trump supporters attracted to him in part because of the perception that he would limit U.S. use of military force to enforce international law have been critical of him in a way supporters of his predecessor weren't. Former President Obama ran as a war skeptic and became a warmonger. The pro-Obama left said little about the far more intrusive Libya intervention.

Some populist supporters of Trump have been highly critical of the decision to order airstrikes against Syria. White nationalist and Trump supporter Richard Spencer organized an anti-war protest in front of the White House, and was attacked by "anti-fascist" (antifa) activists.

Mike Cernovich, a self-described American nationalist and an early Trump supporter suggested the chemical weapons attack was a setup to frame Assad and draw the U.S. into regime change in Syria. Yet it's possible to believe both that Assad is a murderous dictator and that it is not the U.S.'s role or responsibility to remove him from office.

Other Democrats have rediscovered the importance of Congressional approval of presidential war actions. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) never really pressed the Obama administration to get authorization for military force (AUMF) and answered a question about a potential AUMF in 2015 by urging regional powers to do more in the campaign against ISIS. This week she stressed the importance of Congressional approval.

"Expanded military intervention in Syria requires action by Congress," she said, according to Military Times. "If President Trump expects such an authorization, he owes the American people an explanation of his strategy to bring an end to the violence in Syria. We should not escalate this conflict without clear goals and a plan to achieve them."

Warren missed the point spectacularly—the U.S. arguably had strategies when it invaded Iraq in 2003 and when it intervened in Libya in 2011, but the presence of a strategy on paper does not reduce the risk of unintended consequences, and wouldn't do so here.

In 2011 when President Obama drew the U.S. into the Libyan civil war, he did so without Congressional authorization, and Congress failed to do anything about it, setting a precedent the Trump administration exploited to avoid seeking authorization for the Syria air strikes. Congress' ongoing failure to respond to Trump's decision to strike Syria makes that precedent even stronger.

Congress authorized the use of military force against Iraq in 2002, not skeptical of the Bush administration's claims. Despite many of the assumptions under which the U.S. invaded Iraq turning out to be less than true, skepticism about Trump's Syria strikes seem to be being met with as much resistance as Iraq critics were.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) expressed skepticism about whether the Assad government was responsible for the air strikes. There has not been much evidence one way or the other on responsibility. In the aftermath of the chemical attacks, the idea that the bombed warehouse may have been the source of the nerve gas that killed and injured Syrian civilians was dismissed as preposterous because that's not how sarin works.

Yet in the aftermath of the U.S. airstrikes on Syria, Trump's national security advisor, H.R. McMaster, said the U.S. was careful not to target Syria's sarin stockpile so that they would not be "ignited and cause a hazard to civilians or anyone else."

There are no rational explanations for why Gabbard, a veteran of the Iraq War, shouldn't be suspicious, other than emotion-laden demands from other Democrats that she face a primary challenger. Howard Dean, who launched his 2004 presidential campaign as a committed opponent of the Iraq War, and Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, condemned Gabbard's skepticism.

Tanden also attacked Gabbard for daring to meet with Assad. When Nancy Pelosi met with Assad in 2007, when he was already known as a "murderous dictator," she was never challenged by the left. Pelosi has called for an AUMF vote on Syria, as have members of Congress who have long called on Congress to reassert its constitutional role in U.S. war-making.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) pointed out on Twitter it was not too late for Congress to consider a bill he submitted in 2013 to "restrict funds related to escalating U S military involvement in Syria." Other members of Congress, like Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), the lone vote against the 2001 post-9/11 AUMF now used to justify military action across the Muslim world, have also called on Congress to vote on a Syria AUMF.

Speaker Paul Ryan does not appear to agree, signaling that the Trump administration's informal consultations with Congress sufficed. He called the strikes "appropriate and just" and said he looked forward to "the administration further engaging Congress in this effort."

The airstrikes against Syria were a response to reports that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons against its own people, in contravention to the Chemical Weapons treaty Syria signed in 2013. The Syrian government stood accused not just of committing "crimes against the innocents" but of violating a specific international law.

Tillerson is staking the U.S. in a far broader position, that of being the world's policeman when it comes to government's mistreating its own people. It is a repudiation of one of the few consistent messages Donald Trump had on the campaign trail—that the U.S. could not afford to continue acting as the world's policeman. But it still can't.

• Polaris/NewscomNeil Gorsuch is now officially Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch after his swearing in ceremony today.
• A former U.S. ambassador to Syria believes President Bashar Assad will attempt additional chemical weapon attacks, which means more people arguing for more intervention in the country, no doubt.
• Sources say the governor of Alabama will be announcing his resignation over his impeachment and sex scandal.
• Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof has pleaded guilty to the state-level charges of murder, which avoids another trial and potential death sentence. He has already been found guilty and sentenced to death in federal court.
• So the buzz on social media today is all about how United airlines attempted to "re-accommodate" a man from an overbooked flight by having him violently and forcibly removed by Chicago police.
• A Cook County judge was shot dead outside his Chicago home early this morning and a woman was wounded. Police say they're pursuing "multiple leads."
• New York will become the first state to offer free four-year college tuition to families with annual incomes of less than $125,000.
• Two adults are dead in an elementary school shooting in San Bernardino, California. Officials believe it may have been a murder-suicide. Two children were also injured.
• Pulitzer Prizes were reporting and books from 2016 were handed out today.

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BILL GREENBLATT/UPI/NewscomU.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions will disband a commission dedicated to reviewing forensic science standards, raising concerns from some members of the commission that bad science will continue to make its way into courtrooms and innocent people will continue to go to jail.

Sessions announced in a statement Monday that the Justice Department will not renew the charter of the National Commission on Forensic Science, an independent panel of scientists, law enforcement, judges, and defense attorneys created by the Obama administration in 2013 to review the reliability of forensic science used in trials.

In its place, Sessions will appoint a yet-to-be named senior forensics advisor to the Justice Department. A subcommittee of a Justice Department task force on violent crime—part of President Trump's so-called "law and order" efforts—will also study the issue. The department is also opening up a public comment period for recommendations on future forensic science efforts.

"The availability of prompt and accurate forensic science analysis to our law enforcement officers and prosecutors is critical to integrity in law enforcement, reducing violent crime and increasing public safety," Sessions said in a press release Monday. "As we decide how to move forward, we bear in mind that the Department is just one piece of the larger criminal justice system and that the vast majority of forensic science is practiced by state and local forensic laboratories and is used by state and local prosecutors."

The announcement came as the commission was holding its final scheduled meeting, where Keith Harwood, who spent 33 years in Virginia state prison for rape and murder before being exonerated by DNA evidence, testified.

A jury convicted Harwood, then a Navy sailor, of the 1982 murder of a Newport News, Va. man and the rape of his wife. Harwood's conviction was based largely on the testimony of two forensic dentistry "experts," who said bite marks on the victim's legs matched Harwood's dental record. Decades later, DNA testing of the rape kit in the case produced a single match: one of Harwood's fellow sailors, who in the meantime had been convicted of an unrelated kidnapping and died in an Ohio prison.

"The important victims of this," Harwood said at the commission hearing, his voice breaking, "were my parents. The only time I ever saw my father cry was when he was up there begging for my life. I was spared the death penalty. My parents were not. Every day they had to deal with it, and it killed them. Just because these odontologists made up stuff to stroke their egos and get a conviction."

Terry Zeferjohn/FacebookAs a teenage runaway being threatened by a violent older pimp, Hope Zeferjohn should have been saved when Topeka police arrested the man for human trafficking. Instead, she was cast as a conspirator in his schemes and now faces more than a decade in prison.

The situation stems from their 2015 attempt to recruit a 14-year-old girl to live and work with them. Zeferjohn met the younger girl earlier that year at a church youth camp and they became friends. But the girl told Zeferjohn and Anthony "Angel" Long, then 26, that she wasn't interested in their arrangement and then told her parents, who called the police.

The 14-year-old never met Long in person—contact was confined to Facebook chats and text messages. She was never abducted or physically harmed, though Long did threaten her, police say. The girl was never advertised for commercial sex, nor did she ever engage in prostitution. And even Long, who accepted a plea deal in February, was only convicted of attempted aggravated human trafficking, a third-degree felony. Yet somehow Zeferjohn—someone who was unquestionably underage at the time of the alleged offenses and is, by multiple accounts, an abuse and exploitation victim herself—has wound up on the hook for aggravated human trafficking, a felony in the first degree.

'She Tried to Get Away From Him Everytime She Came Home'

"By no means do I condone any wrongs Hopie has done in this mess—she was 17, and has a good head on her shoulders for the most part," Stacey Duckworth, Hope's Godmother, tells me. But "she doesn't deserve the treatment she's getting, and had she had parents that were more involved and financially stable, I don't think she'd be facing the charges she is."

Hope was just 15 when she first met Long, who was nearly 10 years older than her. Long had a reputation around the area as something of a creep and a criminal record to back it up: domestic battery and violating a protective order against his ex-girlfriend in 2013, threatening to assault a child-services worker in 2015. Still, Long was initially a welcome guest around the Zeferjohn's Topeka, Kansas, home. Hope's parents were busy with four younger children and, according to relatives and neighbors, never ones to provide a lot of parental supervision anyway.

"Angel groomed this family for a long time," says Duckworth. "He used to come into the home as a friend of the oldest daughter. There's five girls in this family." In August 2014, when Heather and Hope were both pregnant, the "family suspected Angel was father to both," though DNA testing later ruled it out for Hope's son. That same summer, 18-year-old Heather moved out into her own apartment and the rest of the kids were removed from the Zeferjohn home by the state's Child Protective Services (CPS). Three of the younger children went to live with Duckworth, and Hope was placed with a family in nearby Salina.

Hope's CPS case managers also managed to get a restraining order against Long.

According to Duckworth, Hope "was doing awesome in her foster home. Her baby came, she graduated [high] school, started a job, took college classes. Bought a car."

By mid-2015, most of the Zeferjohn children had been reunited with their parents (earning them a photo with Gov. Sam Brownback in a Department of Children and Families press release). Hope continued "excelling," in foster care, says Duckworth. "Then Angel found her."

Facebook comments on Topeka Capital-Journal article about Anthony LongIn violation of the protective order, Long got in contact with Zeferjohn, and relatives say he used more than just sweet talk to persuade Hope back to him. "He beat her, made her miscarry 2 different times," Heather Zeferjohn, 19, wrote last week on Facebook in response to commenters who said Hope deserved harsh criminal treatment. According to Heather, Long told Hope "her son would die if she didn't do what [Long] said" and "held her at gun point when she didn't do what he told her to."

Hope "herself was sex trafficked," Heather wrote.

Jacek ChabraszewskiClemson University's $25,000 diversity initiative asks professors to endorse a novel opinion about punctuality: it's wrong, and probably colonialist, to expect people to show up to a meeting on time.

The administration at the public university in South Carolina has encouraged all faculty and staff members to complete an online training course, "Diversity Benefits for Higher Education," which is produced by a company called Workplace Answers.

The training presents faculty members with several hypothetical scenarios. In one scenario, a fictional character named Alejandro schedules a 9:00 a.m. meeting for visiting professors and students (one assumes these people are foreign). Some arrive early, others arrive 10 minutes late. What should Alejandro do? Participants are given three options:

Politely ask the second group to apologize

Explain "In our country 9:00 AM means 9:00 AM."

As the meeting organizer, he should recognize cultural differences that may impact the meeting and adjust accordingly.

The third answer, evidently, is the correct one—at least from the perspective of the training module—according to Campus Reform.

"Alejandro should recognize and acknowledge cultural differences with ease and respect," the module asserts. "Time may be considered precise or fluid depending on the culture."

The training module then asks participants to consider that Alejandro's "cultural perspective regarding time is neither more nor less valid than any other."

Time. It's all relative, man.

Note that Clemson would never actually endorse an across-the-board policy that all cultural traditions were equally valid. In some cultures, it's common to smoke indoors: would Clemson ever consider relaxing its total campus-wide ban on tobacco products in the name of diversity and tolerance? I thought not.

Hypocrisy aside, it's frankly bizarre to watch a university decide that it's faculty shouldn't be making any judgments about different cultural traditions. Obviously, punctuality is more socially desirable than tardiness, and a professor has every right to endorse a culture that prefers the former to the latter.

The training also presents a scenario where a person, "Maxine," expresses skepticism about diversity training, likening it to political correctness run amok. The correct answer here is to challenge Maxine and assert that diversity training is valuable and necessary, according to the module (which is awfully convenient and seems like a conflict of interest on the part of the training's creators).

Another portion of the training explains that freedom of speech and academic freedom have limits—and those limits involve language that hurts other people, particularly members of protected groups.

Clemson Chief Diversity Officer Lee Gill—who was paid $185,000 last year, according to The Tiger Town Observer—did not respond to a request for comment.

A public university can make diversity training available to its staff members. But it shouldn't require them to endorse opinions they might not agree with. It certainly shouldn't instruct them to ignore students who are routinely late to class as part of some misguided attempt to never offend anyone. Sometimes, objective reality sort of matters.

via The Big Lebowski

The world is rightly abuzz over an awful incident yesterday in which a man was beaten and dragged off a plane by police at Chicago's O'Hare airport for the crime of wanting to use the seat he's paid for on a United Airline flight getting ready to leave for Louisville.

Twitter

The man claimed to be a doctor who had patients to see the next morning, explaining why he neither took an initial offer made to everyone on the plane to accept $400 and a hotel room for the night in exchange for voluntarily giving up his seat nor wanted to obey a straight-up order to leave, in an attempt on United's part to clear four seats for its own employees on the full flight.

No one considered even the $800 that was offered after everyone had boarded enough for the inconvenience, so United picked four seats and just ordered those in them to vacate. But the one man in question was not interested in obeying. (Buzzfeed reports, based on tweets from other passengers, that the bloodied man did eventually return to the plane.)

While United's customer service policies in this case are clearly heinous and absurd, let's not forget to also cast blame on the police officers who actually committed the brutality on United's behalf. NPR reports that the cops attacking the man "appear to be wearing the uniforms of Chicago aviation police."

While there may be something to be said for the ability for private businesses to summon the help of the police to remove people from their premises if they refuse to leave peacefully and their presence is unwanted, there is no excuse for the police to cooperate when the reason their presence is unwanted is not "causing a disturbance" or being violent or threatening to other customers, or stealing goods or services, or doing anything wrong at all, but rather wanting to peacefully use the service they legitimately paid for.

Shame on both United for calling the cops on a passenger to make the lives of their employees and business easier, and shame on the police for having any part of it.

[UPDATE: According to A.P., others may agree with the above; "Chicago aviation department says officer involved in dragging man off United flight placed on leave," A.P. tweets.]

Buzzfeed News reports an interesting tag team of evaded responsibility as they tried to report on whether this was standard operating procedure.

When asked why the airline had the man forcibly removed, and whether that was standard procedure in cases of overbooked flights, United refused to comment.

Instead they told BuzzFeed News all further questions should be referred to Chicago Police. BuzzFeed News contacted Chicago Police and were told to contact the Chicago Department of Aviation. When BuzzFeed News contacted the Chicago Department of Aviation they were transferred to a TSA message bank. A TSA spokesperson later told BuzzFeed News they were not involved and to contact Chicago Police.

It is not surprising that the wonderful and, if the price offered goes high enough always effective, voluntary means to get passengers to surrender an overbooked flight was developed by a fascinating economist from the libertarian movement thoughtworld, Julian Simon, whose role in the wonderful, rights-respecting, and economically efficient policy is detailed in this 2009 story from the Illinois News Bureau:

Thirty years ago, U.S. airlines stopped arbitrarily grounding passengers on overbooked flights, instead offering rewards if travelers give up seats to make room for hurried fliers who need to touch down on time.

Economist James Heins says the seemingly subtle switch has provided a $100 billion jolt to the U.S. economy over the last three decades - allowing airlines to run fuller, more profitable flights that in turn has trimmed air fares and increased tax revenue.

Now, he hopes the milestone anniversary finally yields much-due credit for the late Julian Simon, a fellow economist well known for slaying gloom-and-doom population growth forecasts but overlooked for the seminal contribution to aviation he developed as a professor at the University of Illinois.

"People know about the system, but they don't know where it came from," said Heins, who worked with Simon for more than a decade at the U. of I. "I think they should. There are a lot of important research breakthroughs on campuses, but few generate $100 billion in savings to the American economy."...

...Simon proposed seeking volunteers instead, offering rewards such as free airfare for a future trip if passengers agreed to wait for a later flight. He maintained that the incentive would free enough seats for travelers with a deadline, and also eliminate any negative public relations consequences.

See that, United? Offer enough incentive, eliminate negative P.R.? Seems like that might be worth it today, no? And offering the incentive means you have got to keep raising it until you find a taker, not make two offers then start cracking skulls.

Despite how much sense Simon's idea makes for airlines and passengers:

it took more than a decade to sell the idea, which finally clicked in 1979 when Simon made a pitch to Alfred Kahn, who oversaw deregulation of the airline industry under President Jimmy Carter.

"I was shocked along with everyone else when Julian actually sold it," Heins said. "Even good ideas are often a tough sell with government, probably for reasons of inertia. It's just easier to do things the way they've always been done."

Reason clips on Julian Simon, who also did great intellectual work defending and explaining the value of more humans for either a given country or the world, and fought intellectual battles against resource and environmental doomsayers.

Simon's academic paper on the auction idea for getting volunteers on overbooked flights, from the Journal of Transport and Economics and Policy in 1977.

Some video of yesterday's incident, not for the faint of heart or those waiting for their flight to take off: