You know how sometimes when a dictator comes to power, the previous leader of the nation is “disappeared” from sight, not just physically but even airbrushed from photos? Not only can people be scrubbed from history but so can truth.

If you look at the front page of the Huffington Post right now, you’ll see a headline that reads:”The View Makes Extremely Controversial Choice,” which refers you to a story by Katherine Fung about Jenny McCarthy being hired as a new talking head for Barbara Walters’ show. The brief piece contains the following sentence:

“McCarthy has guest hosted the show eight times. Her appointment, though, is not without criticism about her controversial views on vaccinations and autism.”

What the story unfortunately doesn’t mention is that the Huffington Post played a large role in McCarthy having a platform to disseminate her fearmongering. In fact, there was a time when McCarthy was all but the de facto medical writer for the site, using bad science and no science to repeatedly frighten parents from immunizing their children. When the main research she was using for her theories was proved to be falsified bunk, the Huffington Post even allowed McCarthy a rationalization of an exit story which she didn’t deserve.

I’m not accusing Fung of purposely omitting this vital fact. She’s probably a very young person who hasn’t been working for the Huffington Post for long and likely has no idea about the link. But there must be management people who have institutional memory and should not allow the publication a divorce of convenience from the facts. Similarly, the second link, which takes you to a story at Salon about McCarthy’s past, doesn’t mention the HuffPo role in the debacle. I’m not saying Salon purposely elided the connection because of what seems to be a working relationship between the two sites, but it is reason to pause. (Scroll down to the bottom of that very Salon page and you’ll see all manner of Huffington Post editorial links.) Salon did at one time call out the Huffington Post on such things.

I’m not someone who hates Arianna Huffington. I think she’s basically a good person. But she and her management team made a terrible mistake in allowing McCarthy to publish her pseudo-science and the Huffington Post shouldn’t “forget” its role in that sad campaign.•

From “Culturalism, Gladwell and Airplane Crashes,” an Ask a Korean! essay which pushes back in general at the idea of blaming plane crashes on the ethnicity of the pilot and specifically on Malcolm Gladwell’s ideas on the topic:

“Gladwell’s Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes goes like this: in landing an airplane, especially in tough circumstances (such as bad weather, older aircraft, etc.,) communication within the piloting crew is critically important. When signs of danger appear, at least one of the two or three pilots in the cockpit must spot such signs and alert the others. Certain cultures, however, have characteristics within them that make such communication more difficult. For example, some culture expects greater deference to authority than others. This leads to a situation in which a lower-ranking pilot hesitates to communicate the danger signs to the higher ranking pilot. Some culture employs a manner of speech that is indirect and suggestive, rather than direct and imperative. This leads to a situation in which one pilot merely suggests the danger signs to another pilot, when a more urgent approach may be necessary.

From a Nick Bilton blog post at the New York Times, which wonders how urban spaces could be reimagined in a time of driverless cars:

“Imagine a city where you don’t drive in loops looking for a parking spot because your car drops you off and scoots off to some location to wait, sort of like taxi holding pens at airports. Or maybe it is picked up by a robotic minder and carted off with other vehicles, like a row of shopping carts. 

Inner-city parking lots could become parks. Traffic lights could be less common because hidden sensors in cars and streets coordinate traffic. And, yes, parking tickets could become a rarity since cars would be smart enough to know where they are not supposed to be.

As scientists and car companies forge ahead — many expect self-driving cars to become commonplace in the next decade — researchers, city planners and engineers are contemplating how city spaces could change if our cars start doing the driving for us. There are risks, of course: People might be more open to a longer daily commute, leading to even more urban sprawl.

That city of the future could have narrower streets because parking spots would no longer be necessary. And the air would be cleaner because people would drive less. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 30 percent of driving in business districts is spent in a hunt for a parking spot, and the agency estimates that almost one billion miles of driving is wasted that way every year.”