'The Joneses are proud to announce their first murder-suicide.'

It still tickles me when I see stories like this, which contain lines like "so-and-so are expecting their first baby, and are now engaged." And yet in a more serious vein, I have to think that stories like that are also, too often, responsible for stories like this...which, of course, do not tickle me at all. There is no moral judgment implied or intended here; my skepticism about all this out-of-wedlock parenting is purely a matter of pragmatics.

When children are brought into the world in the absence of the emotional and financial infrastructure that should be there, heartache/tragedy of one sort or another is a too-common result. At the very least you end up with a lot of daycare, a lot of latchkey kids. Maybe a downbeat outcome isn't so inevitable in Hollywood, where there's enough money to buy a workable support network. But for those of us in the real world, the whole thing strikes me as sad, if not downright scary.

A cautionary tale that speaks for itself.

Or, perhaps, a modern morality play in five acts...each of them a gunshot.

Goodbye, Michael... Hello, Paris!

It's a terribly cynical question, but one that, I think, cannot be avoided in light of the events of the past 24 hours, and the media/public's response to same:

How long before they make an industry out of the three Jackson kids?

(And God I hope that 20 years from now, we're not asking questions about what's going on with Prince Michael Jr.'s nose...)

Non-Lord, deliver us from the negative certitude of the true un-believers.

Events on SHAMblog in recent times have me mulling the whole point of discussion and "intellectual engagement," if you will. Or let me be more direct: What is the point? (That's not rhetorical. I'm honestly asking.) Do we really want to have our assumptions challenged, tested? Or do we just want all of our personal truths confirmed, so that we sense the ground a bit firmer beneath our feet when we leave the house each day, and feel that much more secure in our beds as we pull the covers over us each night? Is that why some people refuse to watch Keith Olbermann ooze his special brand of left-leaning sanctimony on MSNBC...but are perfectly comfortable watching Sean (DMoTV) bluster and bloviate from the starboard side on FOX? Is that why many of us have a welter of issues that we simply declare "off the table" when it comes to debate?

Come on, Salerno. There are certain things that all civilized people can agree on. For instance, we all agree that murder is wrong.

Is that so? What about abortion? What about capital punishment? What about war?

That's not murder.

Who says?

Well, that's not murder as I define it.

Ahhh, as you define it. Well, some people define it differently. Pro-life groups, for example. Or ask the Catholic Church or Amnesty International about capital punishment. For that matter, ask the Japanese about Hiroshima, or ask the Taliban about our actions in Afghanistan, or...

But we're Americans!

Yes. And they're not. Where is it written that "American truth" is The Truth for all of mankind?

Dammit, Steve, you're contradicting yourself again. You yourself said we should consider "taking out" the regime in North Korea!

Yes, and I'm an American, aren't I? If I were Kim Jong-il, I'd see it differently. There's nothing contradictory about it....

See the problem? We don't know what the universal constants are—assuming any exist in the first place. Further, as soon as you're allowed to parse these concepts, creating exclusions and conditions and amendments, so am I. So are Islamic terrorists. So is everyone else. And murder is an issue on which the largest number of us would probably agree. Imagine trying to find any degree of unanimity on the lesser concepts!

So then, how should we go about deciding which Givens are universal constants and which aren't?

What most people believe?

Well, most people once believed in slavery. Most people once believed in male-only voting. They still do in some other cultures. People in China and other parts of Asia think it's OK to abort, even kill, the female children.

What most right-thinking people believe?

I hope the flaw is obvious on that one.

What science shows us?

Science reverses itself all the time. Besides, science is amoral. There are many things that are "true" in science that we might not want to implement in daily life. Science marches on, oblivious to its coincident impact on mankind: It gave us both amoxicillin and the hydrogen bomb. You can't trust science (or anything overseen by men); it can be perverted to opportunistic ends.

Well then, how 'bout what your religion tells you?

Sorry. I'm not obliged to recognize your religion's catechism or its overall lens on life. I'm not obliged to recognize any religion. I'm not even obliged to recognize the idea of a Supreme Being. Your belief in the Ten Commandments is no more inherently valid than someone else's non-belief. Maybe I climbed a mountain and came down with a tablet that says "Thou Shalt Kill." And lest you think I'm being purposely asinine, let me remind you that there's a section of the Qur'an that comes darned close to saying just that.

The only approach that makes sense to me, then, is to take all the Givens off the table. To assume that everything is up for discussion. Every last thing.

*********************************

Something else that occurred to me recently is that you'll get some of the most close-minded, intolerant feedback from those who regard themselves as skeptics, cynics, "free thinkers." Several times on this blog I've alluded to Barbara Ehrenreich's wonderful piece for Harper's, "Pathologies of Hope," in which she chronicles and laments the fury of the true believers. But the true un-believers strike me as being just as bad, if not worse. They won't give an inch, either. They're as entrenched in their disbelief as the other side is in its belief. As a class, in fact, they much remind me of the aforementioned Hannity, who seems unable to give an iota of credit to Barack Obama or the Democrats, no matter the topic or situation. If Obama were to walk out onto the White House lawn today and announce that he loves his daughters, Hannity tonight would (a) try to refute it, and (b) link it to some covert plot to put U.S. military forces under the thumb of the UN.

This actually speaks to a common, and ironic, human foible. Even those who consider themselves rebels, revolutionaries and groundbreakers often get stuck in the revolutions they start, such that they're incapable of further growth and eventually become the very mainstream that subsequent generations of rebels must rebel against. A fair number of the same musicians who got (and gleefully accepted) the credit for innovating "bop" could not, a decade or so later, bring themselves to admit the aesthetic legitimacy of John Coltrane. At least not at first. "But the cat doesn't play music!" they complained of Trane's so-called "sheets of sound." Apparently they felt that the leading edge of the modern-jazz vanguard extended only to them, and not one grace note beyond.

Look, I have my beliefs, and some of them are quite strong. One of those beliefs is that most self-help is worthless, if not damaging. I think the empirical evidence is on my side; a few years ago, that evidence took the form of a book, which is the whole reason why we're here today. But I recognize that there's a difference between my beliefs and Universal Truth. I recognize that my beliefs are valid only for me, and only in the immediate moment when I'm believing them. As for the next moment, all bets are off. As an example, I cannot imagine that the Law of Attraction is the solution to any of life's problems. It seems absurd; indeed, it seems borderline-insane. If, however, I one day awaken to the notion that the LoA really is the solution, I'll have committed no crime in doing so. I will not have transgressed either legally or morally. I will have simply changed my mind. (Or, to be more precise, my mind will have changed itself.)

Or maybe that will indicate that I've finally gone insane. Who knows?

I can be a bit slow on the uptake, folks, but I'm learning that there may be no more inflexible a creature alive than the evangelical skeptic. He has all the non-answers. He's not the least bit unsure of himself. And if you call him on it...watch out.

Rick Ross tri-dux. The finale.

I had really wanted to move on, but another aspect of this topic has come up that probably deserves to be addressed, if only because its implications go far beyond our little melodrama here.

If I refuse to allow laypeople to come forward with damning charges against this or that SHAMblog contributor, it isn't because I'm protecting anyone or I'm simply "too fond of" so-and-so and don't want to see him (or her) hurt. The reason I won't permit readers to initiate mud-slinging campaigns against others who post here (or against gurus and/or other public figures who have never posted here, for that matter) is simple, really: I don't want my blog to become a vehicle for private-label character assassination and other reckless "fact-finding" from those who haven't done enough homework...and whose own motives may not always be as apparent or as pure as they appear.

This may not have occurred to anyone, but I take my journalism seriously.* In fact, that's the principal reason I haven't yet gone after Byron Katie in this space, as I've explained several times already. If you're going to attack a public figure in a (reasonably) visible venue like SHAMblog, it shouldn't just be 500 or 1000 words of clever, lively snark; it should be a fully researched piece of journalism that could stand up to formal scrutiny, if it had to. I don't trust the average person to do the necessary legwork. Or to even know how. In recent years I've watched almost all of the pillars of structured journalism that I once helped teach at Indiana University fall by the wayside amid the twin imperatives of immediacy and impact. It has to be fast and it has to be hot.

Leaving aside the navel-gazing, self-promotion and other horribly self-absorbed stuff (e.g. like much of what one finds on Twitter), there are many wonderful aspects of the blogosphere/so-called "Web 2.0." But one of the profound sins of cyberspace is that it has incentivized two highly regrettable notions, and facilitated their translation to reality:

REGRETTABLE NOTION 1: Anyone can say anything about anyone else at any time.

REGRETTABLE NOTION 2: Anyone can be a journalist.

The blogosphere feeds into that unfortunate cycle of raw, 24/7 news that I've written about at length for Skeptic. Not only do people think they're journalists, but investigative journalists to boot—all qualified to render final judgment on this or that. So you have this endlessly flowing slog of unedited (often jaundiced) material dispersing itself through cyberspace, and the prevailing sentiment seems to be, "Hey, if we get it wrong, no biggie. We can fix it later." Concepts like libel and defamation of character—important concepts that are still technically valid, and should give pause to anyone who presumes to join the world of media—have lost their real-world meaning for media types and targets alike. The average person who can't afford O.J.-level legal representation is SOL.

Is SHAMblog "journalism"? No, not always. Not even mostly, I would say. Some of it is discussion and some of it is sarcasm and some of it is nothing but some wacko quasi-philosophical musing that occurred to me one night when the meds weren't working and I couldn't sleep. But if I'm going to actually try to take somebody down in a major post or series of posts, I'm going to do a journalistically competent job of it. I'm going to observe the rudiments of proper (multiple) sourcing, I'm going to perform an analysis of public-record material, I'm going to check credentials (e.g. call the school that is listed as having issued so-and-so's degree to make sure it's not a lie and the school itself is accredited). I'm going to find out, to the best of my ability, how the person earns his income. Not just the evident ways, but the not-so-evident ones.

Why? I'll give you a pointed example. Let's say Joe Jones is a regular contributor to SHAMblog. And let's say Jack James comes to me with a comment that accuses Joe Jones of being a SHAM guru in his own right. And let's say that Jack James even presents a certain amount of documentation that appears valid. Now how do I know—without looking into it—that maybe Jack James isn't himself a shadow investor in a company that competes with Joe Jones?

How do you know?

That's why I've decided, as a matter of principle and policy, that I'll be the one who calls the spades spades around here. If others have more to add after I set the tone for such discussions, I'll (generally) be happy to post what they say. I'm just not going to let contributors walk into the room and begin firing wildly, leaving blood all over the Comments section and possibly hitting any number of innocent bystanders in the process.

Does this mean I consider myself the world's best journalist? Not at all. But I am a journalist, and a proven one. Moreover, this is my ballgame, and I'm willing to take responsibility for my actions as a journalist. If I savage a person that's one thing. I know what informed that decision. That's my call and no one else's. To be blunt about it, I'm not going to allow people to be tarred and feathers by a bunch of amateurs, some of whom see all this purely as blood sport.

In the meantime, readers should rest assured that no one is off limits. No one is "untouchable." Without going into any great detail, several of the top figures in the SHAMscape attempted to bully us into backing away from SHAM prior to its 2005 release; they repeated their attempt at intimidation a second time when the paperback was about to ship. We didn't cave then, and I wouldn't cave now, as long as I know I've got solid ground beneath my feet.

So that's that. Please don't try to tantalize me or provoke me via email, because I'm done.

* And now, having said that, I'm sure that some armchair Matt Drudge or Harvey Levin will have to go hunt down some minor error of fact in something I once wrote so he can yell Gotcha!

Rick Ross redux.

Because the private messages and attempted comments continue to flow in, I'm going to take one last stab at putting this Ross imbroglio behind us.

Am I telling this from my perspective? Yes, obviously so. It's the only perspective I've got, and I'm sorta stuck with it.

Here we have a case where I got drawn into a situation and I accepted the challenge, i.e. to explain a few things about my blog and clarify a few possible misconceptions that I deemed subtle yet important, as they went to the heart of my credibility and professional integrity. Even if the comments on the Ross board weren't always skeptical of me, per se, I didn't like the implication that SHAMblog was being manipulated or used as a tool by people of evil intent. I don't see how that's the case at all. Then I got my hand slapped in what I felt was an unfair way, so I begged off in a private message to the Ross moderator; it was never published. Incidentally, if you look at the hand-slap (the comment to me that inspired my departure), there was no reason for him to be that curt or provocative even then: "Forget your stupid blog, Salerno. Stick strictly to the topic or we'll kick your ass outta here." No, he didn't use those words, but I defy any reasonable person to read what he actually did write and tell me that wasn't his point. For crying out loud, it was my second full day on the forum; I'd said nothing inflammatory or weird, and was simply trying to expand people's understanding of the way I run my blog and why I like to keep it open to a diversity of thought. It was relevant to the thread, because I was explaining why certain people who do not seem to be very well-liked on that forum, and whose names had come up just a few comments prior, are nonetheless welcome on SHAMblog. And already he's talking about banning me!? Confronted with that mentality, I walked. (I do have a right to withdraw from a forum, don't I?) That should've been the end of it.

But no. The forum moderator decided that he couldn't let it go at that. He had to have his little say. If we're going to talk about being provocative, look at it this way: The moderator could've sent me an email informing me that I was banned, and he could've included as many denunciations as he cared to. I would've answered him in my special snarky way, maybe we would've gone back and forth a time or two, one of us would've invited the other to a dark alley, and that would've been that; all of it off-stage. Worst-case, if he felt he had to put something on the board itself, it could've been a simple advisory explaining that "iwrotesham is no longer a member of this forum." This guy, though, had to get in his zinger, his parting shot. Not only that, but it was a parting shot that attributed ulterior motives to me and impugned my very reasons for coming to the Ross board, almost as if to lend credence to the skepticism that caused me to seek out the board in the first place!

And I'm the heavy here, in certain people's minds?

Sorry, folks. Life isn't that neat.

Besides, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Ross moderator an anonymous entity? I don't know the answer to that. I'm just assuming. I could be wrong. But if I'm right, then between the two of us, who's the only one who's publicly known in this teapot tempest? Point being, even if I posted all sorts of nasty things about the moderator's mother, can you really have an ad hominem attack where there's no...hominem? I'm just askin'.

Maybe the Rick Ross people take a Hypocritic Oath?

Last week, and unbeknown to me at first, I got dragged into the discussion on the Rick Ross Cult Education Forum. Apparently people on the board were uneasy about some of our regular contributors. It was implied that maybe I'd been duped somehow, put under the spell of the covert Byron Katie loyalists here on SHAMblog. Perhaps I'd even been conscripted into the service of cult interests by people who'd used their advanced neurolinguistic skills with surgical precision to bypass my usual defenses; presumably they'd reached deep into my subconscious and ingratiated themselves with me, thereby softening my skepticism about BK in particular and psycho-charlatanism in general. To some people on the Ross board—reading between the lines—this concern was further magnified by the fact that I'd never delivered on my long-ago vow to blog about Katie. (I mean, clearly, if I don't blog about someone, what other conclusion could there be except that I'm now a boot-licking sycophant, right?) If nothing else, the suggestion seemed to be that I wasn't doing a very good job of policing my blog or protecting my dumb, gullible readers from the evil intentions of the BK riff-raff.

In fairness, it was also theorized—in my defense, I guess—that I might be quietly preparing a book on Katie, or at least a major magazine piece.

Given all this armchair speculation (to which I was finally alerted by another of our regulars), I thought it was time for me to appear in the flesh on the Ross board and set the record straight about (a) my blog and (b) my approach to blogging/intellectual discourse in the first place. And yes, I'll admit, I figured I was entitled to do so as well as to offer my 2 cents on some of the attendant issues. And in light of the nature of some of the remarks on the Ross board, I figured I'd be allowed some leeway in making my point.

I figured wrong.

You can read the evolution of the thread yourself by clicking here,* but the upshot is that I ended up recusing myself from the board—and then being banned—after I committed the unforgivable sin of trying to (a) point out that I value fairness and the free exchange of ideas, and (b) bring in some contextual examples that I thought helped clarify the point. Evidently that kind of heretical thinking is unwelcome on the Ross board. I got the impression that if you're not there to witch-hunt, to participate in a gleeful savaging, well, don't bother.

But here's the best part. Not content to simply ban me privately or at worst to post some generic notification that I'd been banned, the moderator felt compelled to chastise me (on the board itself) for being too self-centered, implying that I'd come to the board for the purposes of "self-promotion." As exhibit A in this line of reasoning, he offered this gem:

"Count how many times he used the word 'I' in his last post.

Very telling."

Naturally I was not allowed a rebuttal, as that would've been the fair-minded thing to do.

I've said it before, but I'm always amazed that those who cry the loudest about "brainwashing!" are often the most philosophically tyrannous in their own activities, insisting on absolute and unwavering loyalty to their point of view. Free speech begins and ends with them.

Anyway, I thought my final comment to the moderator—which, of course, will never see light of day—was worth including here, unedited. Yeah, I was angry. But I basically stand by it nevertheless:

Hey...dickhead...first of all, I use "I" because, unlike some people, presumably including yourself, who have the apparent benefit of being omniscient, I like to introduce my opinions as my opinions, not universal truths. Secondly I do happen to have some bona fides in the field as a result of the years of research that went into SHAM, so I think I can say certain things on my own authority without having to footnote them. Thirdly I never viewed this board as "self-promotional." I got dragged into it by people who suspected that I (oh, damn, there's that offending word again!) was being "duped" by some of the folks who post on my (am I allowed to use my?) blog. (Wait, let me amend that: "...some of the people who post on Steve Salerno's blog." There; that better now?)

Bottom line, maybe you think you're very clever to allow yourself that coup de grace in explaining my banning from the blog [sic], but I've been dealing with pompous assholes like you my whole life—people who present themselves as "reformers" or "truth seekers" but in fact are every bit as didactic and closed-minded as their philosophical targets, the only difference being that they come at the subject from the other pole in the discussion. So go ahead, have some fun at my expense. Maybe it'll make you feel a little bit less inadequate (i.e. the equivalent of rhetorical Viagra)?

P.S. I think I'm going to take this up with Michael Shermer, too—"the tyranny of the reformers....", i.e., how skepticism sometimes gets perverted to an agenda all its own. I don't know how he'll feel about it as an overall topic, but maybe there's a good article in it, if I can frame it properly.

* Scroll down to the first comment from "iwrotesham," which is me, then go forward from there. The whole thing unfolds over just two pages or so.

Attention Walmart shoppers!

I find this remarkable. I dare say it stopped me in my tracks.

If the financial crunch has taught us nothing else (or should have), it's that maybe we ought to stop squandering money on overpriced and/or name-brand items whose only advantage is rooted in narcissism or some ill-formed perception of intangible "worth." And maybe we should stop making all those purchases in today's precious lifestyle malls, as they're known, where one drives on cobblestone esplanades into an ersatz "town square"...and everything is marked up an extra 50 percent to cover the added cost of ambiance.

And now credit issuers are going to penalize people for being frugal? For buying the items they need in their most stripped-down form, at budget retailers?

Question: How much longer, do you think, before America gets repossessed by China?

==============================

I am informed that the latest Skeptic, containing my long article, "Criminal Injustice: The Flaws and Fallacies of the American Justice System," should now be arriving at a bookstore (perhaps in a lifestyle mall?) near you. Check it out...especially if you found the other day's blog, on pedophiles, provocative. You'll find some interesting perspectives from some of the nation's top legal minds, as well as an illuminating quote or two from former New York police commissioner Bernie Kerik.

WARNING: Read this on your most open-minded day.

This post will infuriate some readers. Perhaps it will infuriate all readers. I ask only that you try to read what I have to say without prejudgment. Consider this a "check your preconceptions at the door" item.

I have three granddaughters and a grandson. (Pictured here is my sweet little Ava, the youngest of the four, playing without a care in the world—as all children should—in the garden behind my son's house.) Not unlike any grandparent, I adore them all. I have alluded a number of times on this blog to my profound melancholy over my daughter's decision to move to Las Vegas with my grandson, Jordan. They had lived here, never more than five minutes away, from the time Jordan was 2 till the time he was 5, and I'm quite sure that at the end of it all, in those final reflective moments before everything goes black, I'll remember our daily excursions—to the park or "the rocks" or "the river" (where we'd spend hours getting ourselves gleefully soaked)—as some of my life's most joyful, least stressful moments.

Also like any grandparent, I am extremely protective of my grandchildren. I cannot imagine how anyone could knowingly harm a child. And if someone were to harm one of my grandkids, I know I'd want to kill that person with my bare hands. I'd probably try to, if I could get to the person somehow. That is my visceral, gut reaction, and it's probably one shared by about 98.7 percent of parents and grandparents on earth.

All that said—and less viscerally speaking—I think our national approach to pedophilia is misguided and wrong. Policy isn't supposed to be rooted in irrationality and vengeance. It should be rooted in logic and pragmatism. The government's actions should never be as ugly and emotional as those of the criminal himself. If, as we're often told nowadays, sexual orientation and behavior are preordained at birth, or at least are firmly established by the time a person reaches puberty, then what's true for both straights and gays (and has been a major factor in the latter group's struggle for social acceptance and civil rights) is equally true for pedophiles. They're sexually drawn to kids. That is the nature of who they are and what they'd like to do, left to their own devices. They cannot help who and what they are. Therefore, I'm thinking that maybe the law should protect them from the raw fury of vengeful people like me.

Does that mean we should just let them run around having their way with our kids? Molesting and possibly torturing, say, my granddaughters or my grandson? Of course not. But at least to my mind, it probably does mean that our policies in that area should be rooted in resignation, not retribution; that the national dialogue on the subject should bespeak a level of understanding and yes, even a certain acceptance, rather than judgment per se.

It makes no sense to me to incarcerate someone for molesting a child. Not unless you're going to incarcerate the person for the rest of his life. Because when that person emerges from jail, in 16 months or 16 years or whatever the sentence was, he's still going to be a pedophile. This isn't a case of "correcting unacceptable behavior." This is a case of asking people, expecting people, to be something different from what they essentially are; like asking a tiger to stop being a tiger. So when the pedophile leaves jail at the end of his sentence, given the general risks and inherent indignities of prison time (especially for pedophiles), do you know what you now have on your hands? An angry, possibly homicidal pedophile. Hey, there's a plan.

Look at it this way: If you're a heterosexual male reading this, and you somehow got sentenced to five years in jail after being caught having sex with your girlfriend...would you be anything other than heterosexual when you got out? (We'll leave the expediency of "prison sex" off the table for now.)

So I'm open to suggestions about how we should handle all this. One idea that strikes me as workable is that we implant GPS-type devices on all pedophiles, once they're identified as such, so that we can always track their movements. That's not a panacea and has obvious drawbacks, but maybe it's a start; maybe as technology improves we'll find better ways of keeping tabs on pedophiles and preventing them from doing harm before we find them. I think that someone should also make a definitive determination about the effect of child porn on pedophiles: Does it help or hurt? Does it defuse their natural desires by giving them an outlet? Or does it inflame those desires? If the latter, I guess we should continue to pursue current policies that criminalize its use. But if the former, maybe we should encourage pedophiles to look at even more kiddie porn, in a controlled setting. (Relax, people. There's already plenty of it out there. Billions of photos' worth. No new children need to be conscripted into the cause.)

Of course, the other, probably more popular solution—picking up from something implied a few graphs back—is to just lock them up and throw away the key. First offense = life in prison without parole. Or even death, if you're a fan of that particular recourse. But really, if you accept the basic plausibility of the arguments I make above...is such treatment fair? I'm just asking.

Finally, to those of you who have privately (sometimes not so privately) wondered why I so often take such bizarre and unpopular positions on controversial issues, I can only say that it's easy to embrace the conventional, "authorized" view. It's the comfortable way of waltzing through life. There are times when we owe it to ourselves to challenge our assumptions; to be a little bit...uncomfortable. Even the Ten Commandments, as far as anyone can prove, are just some words on a tablet.

* And please, I intend to implicit judgment/criticism of gays by that remark; nor are any subtle parallels being drawn between gays and pedophiles. I'm just making a point that strikes me as true.