Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

Back in my conspiracy theorist days I knew the FEMA conspiracy theory. This was the theory that FEMA the "Federal Emergency Management Agency" could suspend civil rights at any instant for whatever reason it wanted. The reason, according to the increasingly extremist NRA magazine "American Rifleman" (I was reading in the 1990s before they called all federal law enforcement 'jack-booted thugs' causing President George HW Bush to turn in his membership in protest), would be to seize all the American guns. This was inevitable and it was always just about to happen. I know this theory, what I didn't know (or perhaps I have forgotten) is where the headquarters of FEMA was, luckily Cooper is going to remind us, " Just outside of a sleepy little town called Bluemont, Virginia, about 46 miles west of Washington D.C., in an area of wilderness covering what has been called the toughest granite rock in the eastern United States. The area is surrounded by signs...

Last week Cooper declared that George HW Bush was the King of America because SB 2834 gave him more liberality in directing funds toward covert actions. It only did this provided that the president did not direct already allocated funds somewhere else and if it were provided in writing what the funds were for. The reason for SB 2834 was to prevent the president from selling weapons to hostile foreign states in order to fund illegal wars in South America. It's a legitimate conspiracy that the bill was attempting to stop, it's a bit curious that Cooper does not focus on Iran-Contra more than he does. I'm not trying to cast aspersions on him, this isn't like how Alex Jones ignores all of the rules/laws that Trump broke/alleged to have broken, it's just weird that he does not concentrate on it more.  Cooper is going to continue with his grand mistake. His mistake, I should be clear, is that he is going to attempt to understand a law while lacking the legal knowledge to ...

Mark Twain is one of the best American writers in our nation's history. It's really hard to beat his sarcasm and wit, especially for the time he was writing. He's also one of those people in history that gets misquoted quite frequently, so when I saw a Twain quote to open chapter 5 I immediately went to the internet to find out the real quote. Here is the quote as Cooper presents it,  "It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress."  The line, presented without attribution, is correct. Cooper claims Twain wrote this in 1885, but that's an error--Twain wrote the book the line in " Following the Equator " as a follow-up to a trip he took in 1895. The book was first published in 1897. Even in the book, its presence is abrupt. It opens a chapter that discusses Twain's encounter with the fauna of Australia. It's about as non sequitur as one can get, even for Twain this is...

Sometimes, when looking at student papers I'll find some strange things. Usually, the problem is that a student feels the need to write to the minimum length so they'll add whatever they can to their work. As long as it stays on the subject, it's fine, but I'll still deduct for what is often irrelevant commentary. The problem is that most of my students are taught in high schools that they need to write for length. I don't know why this lesson is drilled into them, because, as a college instructor I don't grade on length. The lengths that I assign are general guidelines. If the assignment says 1000 words, I'll take an 800-word essay if it is good.  My colleagues are like this as well, there's no hard and fast rule.  This is even less the case with a work like Cooper's. There is no minimum word count for a book. Sure, there are definitions: a novel is a certain length (around 40k words) and a novella is between 10k and 39k. These aren't definition...