Poison pill?*

UPDATE, November 3. And apropos of this theme, here's my son's short, comedic cinema verite treatment of the Occupy Movement. Look for his brief "interview" of the guy with the question mark sign. Worth the price of admission alone. ;)

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Apropos of Occupy Wall Street and related themes, I thought I'd remind faithful SHAMbloggers that back in November 2009, I wrote a very controversial piece for Skeptic in which I posited, among other things, that major white-collar criminals are far more deserving of the most serious penalties than, say, murderers. As regulars know, I'm not a huge fan of capital punishment, but if we're going to apply that extreme sanction, it should be based on the magnitude of a crime's overall impact on society. By that standard, a Ken Lay or Bernie Madoff—or any of several execs at Goldman Sachs—would move to the head of the line before even a guy like Charles Manson. And before anyone asks... Yes, I'm really serious, and yes, I truly believe this. The general hierarchy of criminality presented in the likes of the Ten Commandments, then passed on down through the generations in the form of the Judeo-Christian lens on criminal justice, was never all that commonsensical, in my view, and surely is out of touch with the havoc that today's financial crimes can wreak.

Understand, this is not about classism or "pension envy." This is about offenses that tear at the very fabric of society and, indeed, pose a threat of undoing civilization as we know it. A murder, in general, devastates a family or two. Although it is a horrific crime, as a rule the damage is contained. But Enron? Insider trading? The kind of greed-driven corporate shredding that occurred at the late-80s height of KKR-mania?

Something to think about, anyway.

Interesting, incidentally, that Bernie Madoff and his wife (who, of course, knew nothing about her husband's scheming; nothing at all) couldn't even pull off a good suicide.

* Those who don't follow business that closely may be unaware that poison pill is a term used for a particular type of counterattack against a hostile takeover. Such strategies were much in the news at the height of the wheeling and dealing of the aforementioned KKR.

Sour Apple? My deer wife?

First of all, brief but still nice (and relevant) mention in HuffPo today. Be sure to read the column if you're a woman and you're feeling...overextended.

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One of our regulars tipped me to the fact that in the new bio on Steve Jobs, which will debut Monday as Amazon's No. 1, his biographer, Walter Isaacson, reports that Jobs passed up early cancer intervention that "might have saved his life" in order to focus his healing energies on, well, healing energies: magical thinking and the rest of it. I guess Jobs was impressed by how well positive thinking worked for Lynn Redgrave and Randy Pausch.

I may have more to say on that score in time.

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Today I am mindful of that Cure Auto TV spot emphasizing that they base their rates on your driving history, not your credit score. I deem that a splendid idea, and though I realize there is probably some established actuarial reason for the widespread insurance-industry practice of linking credit scores and insurance rates (any actuaries out there who want to set the record straight?), I still think there's something inherently unfair about it. I mean, suppose some figures were to come to light suggesting that a certain unusual percentage of people who'd died in house fires also had azaleas in their gardens... Would it be fair for insurance underwriters to canvass suburban neighborhoods, slyly snapping photos of homeowners bent over shovels and bags of mulch in order to reprice their homeowner's and life-insurance policies?

Getting down to cases, the reason I am mindful of the issue today is, I just discovered that my wife's so-called "insurability score" is a dozen-or-so points higher than mine. I can only assume that's because my wife's credit score is a dozen-or-so points higher than mine. Both of our respective credit scores are pretty solid; not absolutely A-1, but solid. (I don't know too many long-time freelance writers whose credit scores have remained pristine and blemish-free through, say, three decades of writing.) But here's the thing: Over the past five years, my wife has done varying degrees of damage to two inorganic objects (a bumper, a fender) as well as permanent and irrevocable damage to one decidedly organic object (a deer, in this incident). She also received a ticket for doing 84 in a 65 while on her way to Syracuse to visit an old friend.

In that same time period, I have had NO accidents and NO tickets.

How is this fair?

'Science shows: You can do anything you're capable of!'

They're at it again.

Like most alumni of The Secret, John Assaraf was laying low for a while after his pal and co-conspirator James Ray parboiled a trio of New Age acolytes in Sedona. Then, and also like the rest of the clan, Assaraf sought to reinvent himself with post-Secret insights. Lately he's been tweeting about this stuff.

I'm not going to get too deep into the particulars of that site, which is premised on the supposedly magical powers of the precuneus and your ability to harness same (with a little ongoing help, that is, from your friends in the New Wage community, as our friend Connie likes to call it). You're fully capable of reading the advertorial for yourself and drawing your own conclusions. But as a general matter, this is what self-help hucksters do: They take a snippet of science (usually so-called "emerging" science), combine it with a pinch of philosophy, a useful aphorism or two from someone with high name recognition, some ever-ready boilerplate about Empowerment and Positivity and blah-blah-blah, and presto...a hot new product line*. It's like the old wedding prescriptive: "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" (to which I would append, "helps them separate your cash from you").

I've said this before, but it's important to expend a few more words from time to time so that some readers who are inclined to dismiss me as a curmudgeon—or worse—fully understand the argument I'm making. I do not dispute that you can make yourself obsess about things that you want, or want to happen. We all know people who do that even without trying. What I dispute is the existence of a push-button link between that level of obsession and the attainment of whatever it is you want, or want to happen.

I do not think that positive mental attitude is irrelevant in life. Such a stance would be ridiculous. When people get down and hopeless, they no longer even try, and it seems logical that more often than not, you must try in order to succeed. (There are, of course, powerful examples of accidental success. See under "Fleming" and "penicillin.") Positivity is all the more important (if not downright essential) in any enterprise that plays out largely in the human heart or mind: like love. If you and your partner are not positive about your love, you will likely not be happy in that love, and the love strikes me as far less likely to last, ipso facto.

But the more important point is that in other real-world enterprises—that is, where we must interact with our environment and, to some degree, conquer it—there's plenty of pointless, useless trying and hoping. Since talk of personal reinvention is all the rage these days, let me stipulate for the record that I would love to reinvent myself as a pitcher/outfielder for the New York Yankees. I really would. And if I thought I had half a chance, I'd be sitting here obsessing and attracting and dispatching positive energy into the ever-obliging universe 24/7. But it ain't gonna happen for me. Not at 61 with two bad knees. In fact—and this is the more pertinent fact—it isn't even gonna happen for the vast majority of 20-somethings who are signed and drafted out of high school or college. These are kids who have obsessed about baseball; they have organized their entire lives around success in the realm. They've hit until their hands bled, worked with the best coaches, attended all the most renowned camps and clinics. It's just that statistically, there isn't room for all of them in major league baseball. End of story, end of dream.

Sorry, folks. PMA is not a bush-putton panacea for what ails you.

The bottom-line problem with the self-help movement is its lack of nuance, its near-total disinclination to parse language in the way that it must be parsed in order to have any real-world relevance. Marketing dictates call for communicating a clear and unambiguous message, thus SHAMland finds it necessary to take highly complex (and individualized) topics like "What are the ingredients of success?" and distill them down to absurdly simplistic bullet points that offer about as much true instruction as my telling you to "go out and enjoy life." (OK, glad we've got that settled.) You cannot get a deal for a realistic book, a book with a title/premise like "Maybe you ought to try harder because it probably increases your odds of success a bit more, though in truth you can't really count on that..."

At least that's what my precuneus is making me conscious of, this morning.

* Translation: scam.

"Johnny, that was a most excellent 'fuck-you'...!"

In my local paper is a story about the Allentown School District's latest bright idea for improving attendance, test scores and general morale among the district's notoriously troublesome and unmotivated high school population. (As background, also in the paper is a separate story about how Allentown has the highest percentage of high-school dropouts in the Lehigh Valley, the umbrella region in which I live.) Apparently in the old unenlightened days, teachers faced with a student who told that teacher to "fuck off!" might have have sent said student to the principal's office, where he might be likely to receive a suspension. But that would cause the student to miss work, which, in the end, just further handicapped the student in his [non]effort to get a good education. (See the reasoning here? The penalty caused the student to miss work. Not the offense.)

The new Allentown policy, says the article, is an outgrowth of a national scholastic movement known as "School-wide Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports, which began in the special education realm more than two decades ago and spread to all sectors of public education." The article goes on to outline the thinking behind the initiative:

The theory is that if educators collectively and enthusiastically set up and enforce a schoolwide system of recognizing and rewarding students for good behavior, they will change into law-abiding pupils with better grades. Students' good behavior is tracked through a point system, and at the end of a week or month students get some sort of prize if they reach certain goals that show constant or improved behavior....

Sound eerily familiar? Like a repackaging of the same, tired "self-esteem-based" model of learning, except this time adapted for a student body that likes to carry guns to school? The net result is that in practice, teachers have effectively ended up rewarding kids for negative behavior, as the code is difficult to understand and even more difficult to apply. Hell, I found even the newspaper article confusing and inconsistent.

Anyway, the piece continues:

But almost all studies on whether the positive-behavior method works are done at the elementary level... Little or no research exists on its effect in high schools, especially in urban settings....

That should ring a bell, too, especially to anyone who's read SHAM. These new experiments in positivity, like the self-esteem movement as a whole, were conjured and embraced based on...well, nothing. Someone with a PhD got a bright idea rooted in a vague, touchy-feely notion of how the world ought to work, began selling that idea to his colleagues, and the rest is history. Nary a thought was given to pragmatics, the wider social implications, the law of unintended consequences, etc.

Although the early Victimization movement, as described in my book, has mostly given way to self-help's Empowerment wing in our post-Oprah/post-Secret culture, some of these "reinforce-my-victimhood" ideologies are tough to root out, notably in education. (It bears noting that policy infected with self-esteem-based flaws has now found its way to American colleges. That was, of course, predictable: How else were colleges going to handle this influx of poorly prepared freshmen?) No, we don't want to just write off "urban" students. And I do believe that rewarding positive behavior and achievement is a very, very good thing. But if in practice it means that we look the other way when kids mouth off, act the fool, set a horrible example or even potentially endanger their fellow students, that just undermines the educational mission as a whole, and heightens the odds that another generation of hooligans will be unleashed on society after graduation, if they make it that far.

Playboy gets clubbed.

You heard it here last: Your host will pat himself on the back for predicting (to himself) that NBC's much-promoted new show, The Playboy Club, would fall on its bunny tail and become road kill. The show was axed after just three episodes. As you might imagine, feminists and boycotting Christian groups took credit for its demise, but I really think that what killed this particular period piece (and why does that phrase sound funny/tacky in this connection?) was not moral outrage but rather something closer to moral ennui—which, and not coincidentally, is the same thing that's killing Hef's beloved magazine. In an era of sexting, booty calls, libidinous lady teachers and rampant hooking up (my kids tell me the latter phrase is somewhat passe by now)—in an era when even stuffy SEC staffers are sitting at their desks watching internet porn (instead of watching out that Goldman Sachs isn't stealing its investors blind)—nobody finds the idea of gals running around in bunny costumes that scandalous or even titillating (which is another word that sounds funny in this connection). Here in my neck-o'-the-woods, which is probably not that different from yours, kids are trading naked pics of themselves like we of my generation once traded baseball cards. And grown-ups who want glitz and/or glamor and/or sex can simply download any rapper's latest vid from iTunes or sign into YouTube and see what's trending in the adult section.

So who was going to watch this show?

(Pictured, btw, is prototypical feminist Gloria Steinem during her bunny days.)

'Steve knew that NCCAM had wasted an awful lot of taxpayer money...'

As regular readers are aware, this is the kind of stuff that makes me positively apoplectic. And since the word apoplectic, in its most literal sense, has to do with the occurrence or causation of a stroke, it is not a very good thing when (so-called) health information would put you in that state.

So far as I've been able to determine, my local paper, The Morning Call, is not presenting this material as a "special advertising section." Nor is it designated as "opinion writing." Nor does it includes meaningful disclaimers. In short, the reader is being asked to accept this material, "Healing Mind, Body, Spirit"—which has been given a special section all its own—as straight news, or honest-to-goodness health reporting. Even though you can read for yourself, I'm going to quote the lede here, so you can readily perceive the nature of my gripe:

When Connie Konnick was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004, she knew she would need more than surgery and radiation to heal.

The disease affected her in ways that transcended the body. It shook her emotions, influenced her thoughts and forced her to confront her mortality. She had faith that her doctors would do everything in their power to wipe out the tumors, but the rest was up to her.

A Tai Chi practitioner, Konnick was aware of the connection between mind, body and spirit. She believed that if she nourished her body, monitored her emotions and kept her mind thinking positive thoughts, she would be more likely to defeat this aggressive disease. So she attended all of her Tai Chi classes, especially during those weeks when she underwent radiation treatments five days in a row....

She "knew" she "would need more than surgery and radiation"? The doctors "would do everything in their power," but "the rest" was up to her? She was "aware of the connection between mind, body and spirit"? What I'm asking you to notice here is the total lack of objective distance between writer and subject. When a journalist writes that a person "knew" she would need more than surgery, or that "the rest" was up to her, that writer is tacitly vouching for the information. It's exactly as if I wrote, "Joe knew that the Earth is round, so he decided..." In a journalistic setting, when I write that, I am also writing that I know the Earth is round, and that you, the reader, should know it too.

Only in one instance in his lede—where the writer, Milton D. Carrero, has Connie "believing" that her positive thoughts would help her beat cancer—is there any journalistic lens between Carrero and Connie Konnick. But by that time, it's already too late. The spin is established. We've met Mr. Carrero before, by the way, and in a similar connection. So I'm not surprised that the paper gave him the job here.

What I've highlighted above is a very small portion of a six-page section that features quotes like, "If you have positive energy, that's going to help you heal everything" (also quoted uncritically, as if we're to accept it on faith). I don't want to belabor the point because I've already written ad nauseam about alternative medicine; I devoted an entire chapter to alt-med in SHAM. But maybe the simplest and most telling rebuttal is this: Despite well over $1 billion dollars in budget authority, and 20 years spent trying*, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) hasn't been able to clinically validate a single alternative/New Age methodology. Not one. (Read especially the tenth paragraph of my controversial Wall Street Journal piece on the subject.)

So why the hell do we continue writing (and lecturing) about this stuff as if we all "know" it works, or even helps? (And why is it considered so horribly impolitic to say otherwise?)

Look, if you're saying it makes you feel better to meditate or get hypnotized (two of the alternative "treatments" suggested in the section), then by all means go for it. We all want to feel better...even when we're not challenged by cancer. But for God's sake, don't present it as a "treatment model" or imply that it's not just helping you feel better but is actually healing you in the medical sense of the term! And for those who face serious health challenges, or have faced them in the past, I'd like to ask you this: If it came down to a choice, would you rather see a health professional who treated you with utmost care and sensitivity but didn't fix the problem? Or a doctor who's a complete SOB, such that you leave his office every week in tears, feeling hopeless...but also manages to cure you?

Speaking of "curing you," here's the most interesting line in the entire section, to me. It appears as almost a throwaway phrase four short paragraphs from the end of Carrero's very long piece:

Keeping up her with Tai Chi practice helped Konnick after she developed breast cancer again in 2009.

So wait, let me get this straight: She "developed breast cancer again"?

Is the writer really saying that maybe Connie Konnick never got rid of her cancer the first time around? Despite all that healthful, mind-body energy she applied? What a shocker!

* I'm including the early activities of NCCAM's previous incarnation, the Office of Alternative Medicine (1991-1997).