Who do you trust?

Evidence used to be kind of important. Not any more.

At least it seems that way. An awful lot of people will believe anything they hear from their favorite experts and pundits and refuse to believe anything from the experts and pundits they don’t like.

Admit it — we’re all guilty of this to some degree.

It’s also getting harder and harder to be an authority. Everyone seems suspect to someone.

I note this in light of a lawsuit filed in federal court in New Jersey by LTL Management LLC, the maker of Johnson’s Baby Powder and Shower to Shower, against a trio of experts who claimed that asbestos in those products can cause mesothelioma in patients who had no other asbestos exposure.

LTL said the claims were false and the experts knew it or “recklessly disregarded substantial evidence to the contrary.”

I don’t know if these experts fudged their findings or not, but I wonder if it’s possible — just possible — that experts paid by large corporations might be a tad biased, too.

One little snowball can start an avalanche. There will soon be lawsuits against every kind of expert.

I look forward to suits against experts hired to testify against other experts.

Evidence, schmevidence. My favorite line from the indictment last week of Donald J. Trump: “When the Arizona House Speaker again asked Co-Conspirator 1 for evidence of the outcome-determinative election fraud he and the Defendant had been claiming, Co-Conspirator 1 responded with words to the effect of, ‘We don’t have the evidence, but we have lots of theories.’”

Can you believe that didn’t work?

There’s also this snippet from a quote attributed to a senior campaign adviser: “it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.”

Mothership?!?

Trump being an alien could explain a lot.

X filing. Speaking of “theories,” a federal lawsuit filed last week in San Francisco on behalf of X Corp., the company that used to be Twitter, described a pair of defendants as “activist organizations masquerading as research agencies, funded and supported by unknown organizations, individuals and potentially even foreign governments with ties to legacy media companies.”

It’s amazing how much evil is caused by unknown people and potential government plotters.

I don’t know what to make of the rest of the lawsuit. It claims that the U.S. and U.K. versions of Center for Countering Digital Hate published reports on hate speech and misinformation that cherry-picked and/or failed to provide context for data. The reports were then criticized by a “major social media platform.”

Yet another mysterious actor. What could this platform possibly be?

X Corp. is claiming tens of millions of dollars in damages due to advertising loss. Discovery on why advertisers are leaving X should be fascinating.

Problem solved. Now that the Supreme Court has outlawed race-based affirmative action, and the U. S. Department of Education is investigating legacy- and wealth-based affirmative action, what’s next?

Clearly no kind of affirmative action is safe. What is a top-flight university to do?

I have the answer: random admissions. Just put all student applications into a hat — preferably not a sorting hat because that’s definitely a form of affirmative action — and randomly draw out your admittees. It’s a complete lack of affirmativeness and yet might give you a diverse class.

Problem solved. You’re welcome.

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