Junk e-mail, junk e-mailers, junk thinking and junk defensiveness

I can’t really do anything about spammers and bots sending me e-mails about Viagra, hot stocks or Christian home loans, other than raising the security level on my various e-mail accounts and programs.

I can, though, respond to real people who send me junk e-mails of various types. That includes urban legends, today is so terrible compared to the 1950s or similar types of shinola.

And I do. It vents my frustration with such people as well as giving me positive pleasure to exercise my powers of memory and logical reasoning, depending on whether I more refuting non-factual statements the e-mailer uses as argument warrants, or illogical connections.

And I hit the Send All command.

I don’t care if people up the chain get bitchy with me. That includes today, when I got a “good old days” e-mail at the office that was bloated with myth, including:
1. People drank while they were pregnant back then and nothing happened;
2. We drove kids in cars without seat belts and nothing happened;
3. We had lead all around, with our children exposed, and nothing happened, etc.

I responded:
1. I grew up near the Navajo Reservation — I’ve seen the results of fetal alcohol syndrome.
2. My sister needed facial stitching after my mom had a fender-bender while driving a 1965 Rambler;
3. Poor children across the country were damaged with reduced IQs by exposure to lead paint, more concentrated exposure to leaded gasoline, and as here in Dallas, living next to a lead smelter.

Anyway, the person in the first link of sending the e-mail in the first place, three levels of response above where I got it, eventually got it back, as somebody did send it up the chain to him.

He then e-mailed the original sender and CC’ed me, calling me a nutjob and accusing me of wasting company e-mail privilege and time, while asking if my boss knew of this.

I first pointed out that his friend was the nutjob for sending it in the first place. I then observed that both his e-mail address and his friend’s were on company e-mail. I third pointed out that as a newspaper editor, it’s part of my job to get facts straight. I added that I take personal pleasure in doing so with urban legend-type e-mails as well as it being part of my job.

In light of things like this, I’m tempted to have something like the following as my e-mail signature, on office as well as personal e-mail. It would go out the first time I ever e-mail back to a first-time contact person.

Do not send me junk e-mail. By that, I do not mean ads for Viagra, etc. I do mean urban legends e-mails, “America was better in the good old days” e-mails, conspiracy thinking e-mails or political conspiracy e-mails. Given that I am a newspaper editor, please note that any political e-mail, if it lacks factual basis or is grossly illogical, falls under this category.

“Path to 9/11” not all wrong, either

Harper’s blogger Ken Silverstein says
Clinton does have a share of blame for the failure to nab bin Laden in particular and fight terrorism in general.

And I would tend to agree. Other than the fact he got elected as Democratic president, I’ve never been able to understand Democrats’ romance with the Big Hog Dog.

Of course, that’s what you get when you have non-ideological party battling a selectively ideological party in a non-parliamentary system, as part of the problem.

This is ridiculous — musical self-censorship over Islamic fears

The Deutsche Oper won’t do Mozart’s ‘Idomeneo’
oout of Islamic terrorist fears. The opera has a scene featuring the severed heads of Jesus, Buddha and Muhammed.

And, it’s had that same scene for well over 200 years.

What next? Stop performing Shakespeare’s Othello? We don’t have Jewish terrorists rising up over “Idomeneo,” or The Bard’s “Merchant of Venice,” for that matter. Nor have Christians protested the “Idomeneo” scene.

There’s TWO NIEs for Iraq, Bush won’t even fully disclose the first

The April National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq and the Iraq invasion/occupation increasing terrorism has become a hot-button foreign policy issue since The New York Times ran an in-depth story last week based on a leaked version of the document.

Under political pressure, President Bush finally announced he would release this NIE. But it turns out
Bush is an Indian giver. Because of “national security,” he’s only going to release sections of it. And those sections, even, won’t be released until the Guatamalan Scrubber, John Negroponte, is done with them.

But, it turns out there’s ANOTHER NIE, a newer one. However, Bush won’t call it an NIE yet, apparently so that the House and Senate intelligence committees can’t get a peak at it.

Why does this not surprise me? Bush gets the big PR for calling for release, then is an Indian giver, and flying under the radar screen as part of this as the heat dies down.

Question: Are hardcore GOPers, like Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, chair of the intelligence committee, getting sideswiped on this, or have they been in on the whole plan?

Mark Kleiman suggests some real learning for journalism students; I go one better

With all due respect to Mark Kleiman and his proposal to better educate college journalism students, I believe his focus on journalism students is too narrow and on college students is too late in life.

Mark Kleiman suggests some real learning for journalism students; I go one better

1. Informal logic/critical thinking skills. Students need to be able to recognize fallacious arguments, types of fallacies, and good logical reasoning skills, in today’s mix of mass media, mass entertainment and government misspeak bombardment. Textbook: “The Skeptic’s Dictionary”* by Robert Carroll. No Aristotle or other dead ancients needed.
2. Numeracy skills and logical reasoning. Learning how to understand false positives vs. false negatives in medical tests, correlation vs. causation, and ways of better understanding probabilities, indeed better visualizing them. Textbook: “Calculated Risk” by Gerd Gigerenzer.
3. Philosophy of science. How can high school students understand a biology class, let alone understand how creationists and intelligent design touters deliberately distort findings of evolutionary biology, if they don’t understand what science is and how it is done? A fun secondary textbook, for use near the end of the course: “A Glorious Accident”* by Wym Kayzer. Picture about 10 of the world’s greatest scientists, one of the top philosophers of science and another important cognitive philosopher, all sat down at a Platonic symposium. Better yet, watch the PBS video.
4. Financial planning. How better to stop predatory lending practices by banks, credit card companies and other financiers to educate students about it before they reach the age of majority?
5. Political science without American Exceptionalism bias. Textbook: No question but that it’s “The Frozen Republic”* by Daniel Lazare.

Now, where to teach some of these classes? Philosophy of science would be one semester of a ninth-grade introduction to science curriculum. The informal logic class would a half-semester, followed by the numeracy skills.

The financial planning would be part of a half-semester, or semester, course on macroeconomics. The political science would be the half-semester at the first half of the traditional junior-year American history class. To get it in, if necessary, U.S. history gets one “lab” day or double-scheduled day a week in a block scheduling system, if necessary.

That said, here’s a summary of my original online comment to Klein’s blog post:

I am a left-liberal who finds the body of the Constitution archaic and anachronistic. (See Daniel Lazare's "The Frozen Republic" for more on this line of thinking.) I want the "separation of powers" taught ONLY if contrasted to a parliamentary government - and that system's pluses.

Cost-benefit analysis? Depends on who's teaching the class. You want Newt Gingrich or some clone indoctrinating students?

Cost-bennie analysis assumes that all things can be monetized. Cost-effectiveness assumes that we make decisions in a moral vacuum, as does cost-bennie analysis. No way to teach those two issues WELL without the moral dimension.

Eric's right. Much of this is neoclassical economics. Given Adam Smith's "invisible hand" is a relic of Enlightenment Deism and its' god-winding-up-the-clock-and-sitting-on-his-perfect-world-LazyBoy diety.

Mark left out: A class in informal logic/critical thinking. That way, the "ideas" of people like American Hawk would immediately be seen to be intellectually underfunded.

* = Amazon reviewed by me

“Some of the abuses” — McCain knows he caved on torture bill

On “Face the Nation,” the Schmuck Talker said:

I am confident that some of the abuses that were reportedly committed in the past will be prohibited in the future.

SOME? SOME?

There you have it. McCain is supposedly against Torture Light (which, having been used by the Gestapo, NKVD and KGB, isn’t actually “Torture Light” at all) but Torture Extra Light? Schmuck Talk John is all OK with that.

And people still continue to praise the Schmuck Talker’s alleged honesty, and moral probity. Why, David Broder, why?