In the Black Mirror production of Nosedive, based upon a short story by Charlie Brooker, a young woman named Lacie lives in a world in which social media approval metrics determine social, economic, and political opportunities. Every interaction is graded on a scale from one to five. Lacie’s approval rating is slipping, thus jeopardizing her participation in her friend’s wedding, and she is determined to improve her rating. She tries her best to be “nice,” and then enlists a ratings coach, but her efforts cannot stop her approval rating from its nosedive. Perhaps if Lacie had greater financial resources, she could have improved her ratings by paying people to like her on social media.

Would people really pay for the appearance of social approval? “Celebrities, athletes, pundits and politicians have millions of fake followers,” and they paid for them. Thus announces the New York Times in an exposé of the practice of paying for followers on social media.¹ Perhaps even the President has paid for fake followers who are mere bots. Maybe bots are the only friends he has.

Although I am skeptical of the utility of Facebook and Twitter, I have come reluctantly to admit that these and other social media – even blogs – have some utility if properly used. The business of buying followers, however, is just plain sick.

Finally, Eric Schneiderman has announced an investigation into an issue of some importance. He is investigating Devumi, a company that he claims sells fake followers on social media. The company is alleged to have created over 55,000 bots based upon living people and their identifying features.²

Stealing identities and selling fake followers is deplorable, and Scheiderman’s crusade is a laudable exercise of prosecutorial discretion. But so is buying fake followers to lard up one’s social media metrics. The crime involves two separate criminal acts, and we should not lose sight of the fraudulent nature of the representations about inflated number of followers. It takes two parties to enter the contract to defraud the public. Devumi’s clients may well be in pari delicto.

Let us hope that when Schneiderman opens the books at Devumi, he will have the fortitude to tell us which “celebrities, athletes, pundits, and politicians” have been juking their stats. Schneiderman’s investigation has the promise of making Eliot Spitzer’s commercial transactions look like child’s play. Inquiring minds want to know who would buy a friend or a follower.

All right, this has nothing to do with law, evidence, or statistics, but what a great day for New York and the Upper Eastside. Today, the “Second Avenue Line,” an extension of the Q subway line opened for business.

The local radio stations announced that the MTA would give away free subway day passes at 11 a.m., at the new 86^th street station. Even before the hour, a queue formed of locals eager for a free first ride on the Second Avenue line. At 11:15 a.m., Congresswoman Carolyn Mahoney arrived. She did not greet anyone in the queue; rather, she planted herself in front of TV cameras to which she made kissy faces and self-congratulatory noises. Of course, the MTA has little or nothing to do with the federal government, and the rationale for her presence was curiously absent. Mayor DeBlasio, who lives but four blocks away in Gracie Mansion, however could not be bothered to show up. No doubt he was still in bed, and nursing a hang over.

Not only did Mahoney did speak to anyone in the queue, going to the Q, her remarks for the TV and radio media were whispered into microphones. Standing about four feet away from her, I could barely hear a word she said. Surely no one behind me heard her, and she clearly did not care. Mahoney had greater audiences in mind, and no apparent interest in actually interacting with her constituents. Perhaps she was hung over from New Year’s Eve festivities.

With Congresswoman Mahoney were her minions, who started to hand out the coveted free passes, but not to the people who had peacefully assembled and patiently waited in line. Because the TV cameras set up around Mahoney, her minions had to hand out cards close to her and to the cameras so that the TV audiences would see the handouts as Mahoney’s largesse. There was a visually impaired woman at the front of the line, with her guide dog, Kudo, but they were ignored by Mahoney and her aides, as well as by the media. Finally, in a Bonfire of the Vanities moment, as Mahoney started to drift away, a boisterous woman pushed her way in front of the cameras, while exclaiming that she wasn’t being pushy, because, after all, she had bona fide press credentials. So the TV cameras shifted to her, and she, a media person, was then interviewed by the media. Where was Tom Wolfe to capture this wonderful New York moment?

Guide Dog Kudo Leads the Way as First Dog Rides the Second Avenue Line on New Year’s Day, 2017

Finally, at noon, the police tape was unceremoniously pulled away, and the Second Avenue line was opened to the hoi polloi. The subway cars were not new, but were appropriately clean for the occasion. The first downtown train today on the new Second Avenue line left from 86^th Street, amid great fanfare and cheering. When the subway reached 72^nd Street, the conductor held the train for almost 15 minutes due to traffic on the line. Huh? I suspect that the conductor wanted the passengers to have that real MTA experience.

The subway stations at 96^th, 86^th, 72^nd, and 63^rd streets all had that wonderful new subway station smell, almost as good as a new BMW. And each of these four stations has become a wonderful museum of public art, each worth an MTA card for the price of admission. See Muoio, “New York’s long-awaited Second Avenue subway features some incredible artwork” (Dec. 30, 2016). I will leave the exhibits for the art critics to describe, except to say that the 86^th, 72^nd, and 63^rd street stations have become outstanding artistic tributes to New York City and its residents. Thankfully, there was no sign of any likeness of Donald Trump.

A hundred years late, the Second Avenue subway has arrived. It does not go as far as it should, but perhaps Governor Cuomo will take a page out the Robert Moses playbook and use the stub as leverage to get the whole thing done. The Governor seems to have the right stuff to get infrastructure programs completed. If infrastructure were up to Mayor DeBlasio, we would still be waiting for the Second Avenue line along with the resurrection of Robert Moses himself.

Michael Mann’s lawsuit against the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) for defamation is an interesting case.  See “Climategate on Appeal” (Aug. 17, 2014). Whatever you think of Mann’s research, the charges of the CEI, calling Mann’s work fraudulent were outrageous. Mann may have a political agenda, and his scientific work may be flawed and invalid, but that does not make it fraudulent. If the CEI has evidence that Mann fabricated or falsified data, then the charge would be appropriate, but so far, nothing to support the charge has emerged. In its pleadings, the CEI averred that it used “fraudulent” as a metaphor or something like that.

The excesses of the CEI are not unique to the climate change debate. One website features an interview with Mike Papantonio, an attorney for the litigation industry, about claims that the Weinberg Group spreads scientific disinformation. “Scientists for Sale” RT Question More (Sept. 17, 2014). The Weinberg Group describes itself as providing

“biotech, medical device and pharmaceutical consulting services to companies of every size on every continent, supplying them with viable and efficient drug development pathways and compliance solutions.”

Weinberg Group Website. According to Papantonio and his media facilitator, Thom Hartmann, the Weinberg Group is a group of “professional liars and huxters,” who will “cook the books,” to show that chemicals or tobacco do not cause cancer. Papantonio, however, never delivers any evidence that the Weinberg Group has falsified or fabricated evidence. He, Papantonio, does not like the Weinberg Group’s interpretation of scientific evidence in his legal cases, and its persistence in revealing the weaknesses of the litigation industry’s litigation and regulatory claims.

A shortened version of Papantonio’s irresponsible name calling can be found on YouTube. Hartmann & Papantonio, “C-8 and the Business of Misinformation” (Sept. 16, 2014). Papantonio appears to have used his media appearances to advance the litigation industry’s cause in MDL 2433, In re E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company C-8 Personal Injury Litigation. This MDL aggregates cases of claimed health effects from exposure to perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), also known as C8, which is used in making du Pont’s Teflon.

Papantonio’s rants and defamatory screeds illustrate some of the litigation industry’s rhetorical strategies:

1. dichotomize the world into safe and harmful;

2. by semantic fiat, declare anything not proven safe as harmful;

3. assert that the defense of any substance, exposure, drug, etc., which is not proven absolutely safe, is deliberate infliction of harm upon the public; and

4. reclassify any statement that a substance, known to cause harm under some circumstance, doesn’t cause harm under every other circumstance as “fraudulent.”

Like the CEI, Papantonio stretches the English language and common decency beyond its ultimate tensile stress. Certainly, scientists should participate in litigation and regulatory proceedings, and their views should be given close scrutiny. Papantonio’s interview statements, however, exemplify a pathology of thought and expression that also exceeds our tolerance for discourse in a free society; it is slime and slander.

Earlier this year, January 15, 2015, would have been Irving J. Selikoff’s 100th birthday. Selikoff left a lifetime legacy of having improved public health awareness, with a shadow of some rather questionable opinions and conduct in the world of litigation[1]. Given Selikoff’s fame and prestige among public health advocates and labor union activists, it is remarkable that now, over twenty since his death, there are no major biographies of Selikoff. Even Selikoff’s Wikipedia page[2] is skimpy and devoid of many details of his activities.

There are some comical aspects to the Selikoff wikipedia page, some of which revolve around someone’s anonymous disparaging of my writing about Selikoff::

“Part of the contrary perspective was presented by a Nathan A. Schachtman, an adjunct lecturer at the Columbia Law School. He suggested that Selikoff and his supporters may have organized ‘a lopsided medical conference, arranged for the conference to feature defendant’s expert witnesses, set out to give short shrift to opposing points of view, invited key judges to attend the conference, and paid for the judges’ travel and hotel expenses’. This quote from Schachtman came from a web site he maintained, unlike the quote from McCulloch and Tweedale, whose comments were published only after being accepted by reviewers for a refereed academic journal.“Nathan A. Schachtman”. www.law.columbia.edu. Columbia Law School. Retrieved September 16, 2013.”

Make no mistake about it; I wasn’t “suggesting”; I was stating a fact. As for the reviewers who “refereed” the journal article by McCulloch and Tweedale, I have shown that this peer review was not worth a warm bucket of spit[3].

One of the disturbing aspects of Wikipedia is that contributors can hide behind I.P. addresses or pseudonyms. Whoever attempted to quote my blog posting distorted my meaning by selectively and incompletely quoting me to suggest that the conference featured defendants’ experts. I can understand that the dumbot wanted to remain anonymous to mislead in this way, but what I wrote was:

“One can only imagine the hue and cry that would arise if a defendant company had funded a lopsided medical conference, arranged for the conference to feature defendant’s expert witnesses, set out to give short shrift to opposing points of view, invited key judges to attend the conference, and paid for the judges’ travel and hotel expenses.”

The counterfactual point, obviously, was that if defense counsel had conspired with defense expert witnesses, to hold an ex parte conference with sitting judges, to feature the work of defense experts, there would have been acrimonious denunciations from the public health community about the evils of corporate influence. In the Wikipedia article, the only reference to Selikoff’s participation in the conspiracy with the litigation industry was an attack on my writing, and a distortion of my posting by incomplete citation. But the misquotation was welcomed in motivating me to register with Wikipedia to correct the misattribution.

There are two document archives of Selikoff documents, one at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York[4], and the other in St. Louis[5]. Jock McCulloch described Selikoff as having “avoided litigation” and having “fought to keep his papers away from the legal arena.”[6] The first part of McCulloch’s description is demonstrably wrong, but the efforts to suppress access to his papers, and data, is sadly all too true. The accusations of “cover up” flow so freely against industry, but why the cover up of Selikoff’s papers? And who would trust the Mt. Sinai custodians?

The Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO) claims to be an “independent asbestos victims’ organization,” started in 2004. Its website points out that the ADAO is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, which “does not make legal referrals.” The ADAO posted a kind memoriam to the late Dr. Selikoff: “Dr. Irving Selikoff: Clinician, Researcher, Public Health Advocate and Occupational Health Pioneer (1915 – 2015)” (Jan. 15, 2015).

For almost ten years, the ADAO has been recognizing “exceptional leaders” with the Dr. Irving Selikoff Lifetime Achievement Award, for the recipient’s efforts to increase awareness and prevention of asbestos-related diseases.

Remarkably, many of the “exceptional leaders,” in the eyes of the ADAO, are (or were before their deaths) regular testifiers for the litigation industry:

Paul Brodeur 2006

Yasunosuke Suzuki 2006

Michael Harbut 2008:

Barry Castleman 2008

Stephen Levin 2009

Arthur Frank, 2012

Richard Lemen, 2012

Celeste Monforton 2013

David Egilman 2014

Brodeur, of course, did not testify; he wrote for the New Yorker, including a series that became the book, Outrageous Misconduct: the Asbestos Industry on Trial, This book became an important lobbying tool for plaintiffs’ counsel with judges and legislatures. His subsequent book, The Great Power-Line Cover-Up: How the Utilities and Government Are Trying to Hide the Cancer Hazard Posed by Electromagnetic Fields (1993) revealed his aptitude for overinterpreting studies and failing to appreciate validity concerns. See Sander Greenland, Asher R. Sheppard, William T. Kaune, Charles Poole, and Michael A. Kelsh, “A Pooled Analysis of Magnetic Fields, Wire Codes, and Childhood Leukemia,” 11 Epidemiology 624 (2000).

Harbut was the proponent, in the silicone gel breast implant litigation, of a half-baked theory about a role for platinum in causing autoimmune disease among claimants. The FDA and The Institute of Medicine easily dispatched Harbut’s theory. Suzuki, Castleman, Levin, Frank, and Lemen testify (or did testify when alive) with some frequency and regularity in asbestos litigation, on behalf of the litigation industry. Egilman to his credit is perhaps the lone recipient who has spoken out[7], on one or more occasions against the depredations of the litigation industry’s unethical[8] and unlawful screenings, but he has openly acknowledged his bias against corporate industry (although not against litigation industry). See David S. Egilman, “Corporate and Government Suppression of Research” (2004). And Monforton was one of the movers and shakers in establishing SKAPP[9], which misrepresented its funding sources, while lobbying against the legal requirements of reliability and validity for scientific expert witness opinion testimony.

[1] See “Selikoff and the Mystery of the Disappearing Testimony” (Dec. 3, 2010); “Selikoff and the Mystery of the Disappearing Asbestosis” (Dec. 6, 2010); “Selikoff and the Mystery of the Disappearing Amphiboles” (Dec. 10, 2010); “The Selikoff – Castleman Conspiracy” (Mar. 13, 2011); “Irving Selikoff and the Right to Peaceful Dissembling” (June 5, 2013); “The Mt. Sinai Catechism” (June 7, 2013); “Historians Should Verify Not Vilify or Abilify – The Difficult Case of Irving Selikoff” (Jan. 4, 2014); “What Happens When Historians Have Bad Memories” (Mar. 15, 2014); “The Last Squirmish Between Irving Selikoff and Sir Richard Doll” (Sept. 9, 2014); “Irving Selikoff – Media Plodder to Media Zealot” (Sept. 9, 2014); “Scientific Prestige, Reputation, Authority & The Creation of Scientific Dogmas” (Oct. 4, 2014). See also Cathleen M. Devlin, “Disqualification of Federal Judges – Third Circuit Orders District Judge James McGirr Kelly to Disqualify Himself so as to Preserve the Appearance of Justice under 28 U.S.C.§ 455,” 38 Vill. L. Rev. 1219 (1993); W.K.C. Morgan, “Asbestos and cancer: history and public policy,” 49 Br. J. Indus. Med. 451, 451 (1992).

[2] Wikipedia, “Irving Selikoff” (last visited March 6, 2015).

[3] “Historians Should Verify Not Vilify or Abilify – The Difficult Case of Irving Selikoff” (Jan. 4, 2014); “Scientific Prestige, Reputation, Authority & The Creation of Scientific Dogmas” (Oct. 4, 2014).

[4] 83 Am. J. Pub. Health 609, 609 (1993)(describing the Irving J. Selikoff Asbestos Archives and Research Center holdings of Dr. Selikoff’s research documents).

[5] http://beckerarchives.wustl.edu/?p=collections/controlcard&id=6725

[6] Jock McCulloch and Geoffrey Tweedale, Defending The Indefensible: The Global Asbestos Industry and its Fight for Survival 271 (Oxford 2008) (describing how even after his death, the Selikoff papers have still not been made generally available, but thanking Valerie Josephson, Philip Landrigan, and Stephen Levin, for helping McCulloch gain access to the papers).

[7] David Egilman & Susanna Rankin Bohme, “Attorney-Directed Screenings Can Be Hazardous,” 45 Am. J. Indus. Med. 305 (2004).

[8] Nathan A. Schachtman & Cynthia J. Rhodes, “Medico-Legal Issues in Occupational Lung Disease Litigation,” 27 Sem. Roentgenology 140 (1992).

[9] “SKAPP-A-LOT” (April 30, 2010); “Conflicted Public Interest Groups” (Nov. 3, 2013).

When a Wall Street Journal opinion piece stated that “the plaintiffs bar is all but running the Senate[1],” Frederick Martin (“Fred”) Baron, former president of the litigation industry’s Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA), reportedly quipped that “I really, strongly disagree with that. Particularly the ‘all but’.” Baron, affectionately known as “Robber Baron” for his aggressive advocacy for uninjured asbestos claimants and questionable deposition coaching tactics, was the ultimate Democratic party insider. He was the finance chair of John Edwards’ ill-fated presidential campaign, and the sugar daddy for Rielle Hunter, the mother of Edwards’ out-of-wedlock child. You cannot get more “inside” than that.

Robber Baron died in 2008, but his legacy is a reminder of the hypocrisy of those who decry the Citizens United[2] opinion, which held that corporations and unions have first amendment rights to speak in ways that might influence the outcomes of elections. While many fuss over “corporate” speech, the litigation industry has operated largely without constraint. Last year, for example, plaintiffs’ counsel, Edward F. Blizzard, and representatives of the litigation industry’s ATLA, now operating under the self-serving name, American Association for Justice (AAJ), met with Food and Drug Administration officials to influence agency policy on generic medication warnings. This week, the Times featured front-page coverage of how the litigation industry has co-opted the policies and agendas of the States’ attorneys general, and directed their targeting of corporations. See Eric Lipton, “Lawyers Create Big Paydays by Coaxing Attorneys General to Sue,” New York Times (Dec. 18, 2014).

The litigation industry makes its presence felt in many ways, sometimes as an omnipresent threat that influences business and professional judgments. President Obama criticized Sony’s decision to pull down The Interview, as an undue concession to terrorists. See “Sony’s Decision to Pull Movie Is a ‘Mistake,’ Obama Says.” Obama went so far as to express his wish that “they’d spoken to me first.” But would Obama, or anyone, have been able to control the litigation industry’s second-guessing of Sony’s or any individual theater owner’s decision to show the movie?

Lipton’s article is a vivid reminder that the plaintiffs’ trial bar remains the largest rent-seeking lobby in the United States.

[1] John Fund, “Have You Registered to Sue?” Wall Street Journal (Nov. 6, 2002).

[2] Citizens United v. Federal Election Comm’n, 558 U.S. 310 (2010).