The North West Passage

In no particular order. And subject to change.

– Finish writing my history of pagan philosophy book, before the end of March. (Also, think of a good name for it.) My publisher has been very patient, and I am grateful; but they shouldn’t have to wait forever, and neither should the readers.

– Start writing a third novel. Because if I had to decide whether I wanted to live in Rivendell, or in Hogwart’s Castle, or in the Tardis, I would choose to live in Fellwater Grove.

– Start writing the next big nonfiction project. I’ve already begun assembling notes. Here’s a hint: I’ll be back to my old favourite topics, environmentalism and social justice. And adding cosmology!

– Finish the Expanded edition of “Clear and Present Thinking.”

– Assemble a team and raise funds to make a computer-based version of my tabletop strategy game, Iron Age. That team will include programmers (obviously), but also artists, musicians, designers, and marketing specialists. I may need to raise a six-digit figure. I smell another crowd-funding campaign!

– Find a better strategy for marketing my books. I’m doing almost everything that was recommended by all the marketing advisors I’ve read or consulted. But the “30,000 copies sold” promised to me by those advisors, including a few who I count as friends, has not happened.

– Attend Druid Camp 2013, in the Forest of Dean, United Kingdom.

– Create a PPE program at my college.

– Begin the process of getting my college certified as an IB World School.

– Get more exercise. Maybe shed around 10 pounds or so.

– Visit friends and family in southwestern Ontario more often.

– Learn more dinner recipes.

– Purchase land on which to design and construct a temple. (Actually, that is a 20-year goal of mine.)

– Learn to speak French. Much as I’m reluctant to agree with something uttered by a PQ politician, Premier Pauline Marois is basically correct when she says that people who live and work in Quebec should learn to speak French.

– Visit some part of the world where I’ve never been before, on holiday, if funds permit. (Preferably Europe, where I love the landscape and architecture.)

– Improve my guitar technique, and compose more songs. Learn to play 12-string (in Standard Tuning!). Purchase an Irish Bouzouki and learn to play that too.

– Be a better friend to those whom I care about.

This little essay forms the last few paragraphs of “Clear and Present Thinking”, my free-to-the-world logic book. Let me know what you think of the argument here, before I send it to the printers. -Bren

Why is there so much conflict, fear, and hate in the world? Why can’t people just get over it and be friends? These are, of course, among of the oldest and most difficult of moral questions. There are hundreds of answers, and none of those answers were easily discovered. It might be that there’s just not enough of the good things in life for everyone to have as much as they want. So as people discover this they end up distrusting each other, and they compete with each other to get as much of those things as they can. Or so Thomas Hobbes argued. It might be that most people cannot stand the presence of others whose thinking and reasoning is radically different from their own, as David Hume once claimed. Perhaps it is as Plato said, that as people grow accustomed to pleasures and luxury goods, so they eventually become unable to restrain their appetites. Therefore, like “a city with a fever”, they turn to their neighbours, to take by stealth, or even steal by force, what they think they need to satisfy their feverish demands. Or, it might be that some people are just naturally, inexplicably evil. “Some men just want to watch the world burn,” as Alfred said to Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight (2008), although that answer always seemed to me too superficial, too quick, and too easy. People have reasons for doing things – reasons that are irrational, faulty, silly, or perhaps demonstrably insane – but they have their reasons, nonetheless.

Let’s re-phrase the question a little bit. What must people do to have at least a chance, even if only a small one, to get along with each other? That I think I can answer: we have to talk to each other. There is a logical disjunction between speaking and hating; there’s a gulf as wide as the ocean between dialogue and murder. You might want to ‘send a message’ to someone (as the euphemism goes) by beating him up, or depriving him of his rights or his dignity, or even by killing him. But the recipient of that kind of message is never in a position to hear it: the very means of delivery itself logically ensures that. Think of old Lucretius here, who taught us to have no fear of death because “While one lives one does not die; when one dies there is no one there for death to claim; thus death never reaches you.” In the same way, a message whose means of delivery kills the recipient finds no one at the point of delivery able to receive the message at all. It’s almost the same for a message delivered by shouting, threatening, bullying, stealing, hating, or any other oppressive act short of killing. The message whose means of delivery oppresses the recipient quickly finds no recipient with ears to hear.

But if we talk to each other, without threats, without violence, and without oppression, we acknowledge each other’s humanity. This is because to speak to someone is to assume that the other person can hear and understand what you are saying, and to assume that the other person is capable of responding to you. That ability to understand and respond, so it seems to me, is an important part of what it is to be human. Even to criticize and to disagree with someone is still to treat that person as a human being with a mind of her own. (Thus to disagree with someone is not the same as to silence that person. But I digress.) While we are speaking to each other, we might also be confronting, competing, distrusting, negotiating, manipulating, dominating, or even lying to each other. But we are not killing each other. And that, it seems to me, is no small thing. It introduces a moral dimension into the very structure of logic itself. This moral dimension appears on a scale of intensity: the less fear and hate there is in our dialogue with each other, the more humanity there is. And if talking to each other does not guarantee that we will get along with each other, at least it opens that possibility. And that is something which violence and the threat of violence cannot do.

This textbook was written during the volunteer hours of its contributors, and financially supported by volunteering donors. I hope that all of them believe, as I do, that a world in which people can think and speak rationally is a better world. I’ve made this textbook available to the world for free, to everyone, in the hope that it will help people understand each other, solve their problems, and get along with each other.

Now, go ahead and examine the argument I’ve just laid before you in these few lines, and decide for yourself if it’s sound. Notice that even if you decide that it is unsound, we will be speaking to each other and not killing each other… and there it is.

Since the year 2012 felt like it sucked in a lot of ways for me, I thought it might be helpful to remind myself of the real accomplishments and joyful moments. So here are my twelve personal highlights of 2012.

– Publishing “Circles of Meaning, Labyrinths of Fear“, my longest and perhaps most eclectic and practical of my nonfiction books. Filming a promo video for it with Nadiya Shah.

– Visiting Nova Scotia, where I got to know my sister’s children a bit better, and attended AEGIS Fest, and made lots of music with Mj.

– Attending the Western Gate Samhain Festival in Kelowna, BC, and meeting some truly wonderful new friends, and also reconciling with another older friend.

– Publishing Fellwater, and then writing and publishing Hallowstone, my first ventures into nonfiction since I was a drama student at Guelph.

– Successfully raising almost $17,000 via Kickstarter to write “Clear and Present Thinking“, a college textbook on logic and critical thinking.

– Participating in the Burning of the King ceremony at HarvestFest.

– Covering 1,000 kilometres in the Gatineau Hills National Park, by walking the trails and paths every day for six months.

– Performing a concert with Greg Currie (again) and Ja Sonier at Hamilton PPD.

– Publishing “Iron Age ~ Council of the Clans“, a tabletop political strategy game which began as an exercise for my Social Justice students, and turned into something much bigger.

– Performing a concert with Greg Currie, Rikki LaCoste, Jennifer Robert, and J.D. Hobbes at Toronto Gaia Gathering. Also the pub night which followed, where I learned I have a twin living in Winnipeg.

– A relationship with a very interesting, very beautiful person, who I shall not name (she knows who she is), but which was, alas, all too brief. A bittersweet highlight, so it is.

– Visiting London, Toronto, and Elora for Yule and Christmas: a highlight of 2012 that is yet to come!

And what are some of your 2012 highlights? 🙂

One of my guilty pleasures (well, actually, I don’t feel guilt about any of my pleasures) is playing a computer RPG called Skyrim. About once a week, for two or three hours, I enjoy a little bit of healthy escapism that way. In fact I often ignore the named quests and just explore the landscape randomly, looking for ‘interesting’ places and discoveries. But lately I find that the idea of designing a game appeals to me more than playing one. And as I play Skyrim, and its predecessor in the series, Oblivion, I think of ways that games could be more interesting. I’ve long felt that gaming could be used for pedagogical or cognitive purposes: I recently invented one with that very purpose in mind. And I don’t see why a popular video game couldn’t be used for that purpose too.

But that aside, here are some random notes I’ve jotted down over the last few months of things I’d like to see in the next Skyrim DLC, or the next installment of the Elder Scrolls franchise.

– I’m glad to see the carriage drivers in the major cities, and in the Hearthfire DLC. Although I’m sure most players would balk, but I’d like to see the carriage drivers completely replace fast-traveling by map. Boats, and boatmen who can take you to the various docks on the rivers and coasts and islands, could be added here too. For that matter, I’d like to see boats that you can buy and sail yourself, much like the way a player can buy a horse.

– I’d like to be able to buy any house in the game. Or, as an alternative, every city should have two or three houses available for sale: one cheap and small and simple, another large and posh and expensive. I’d also like to be able to buy houses in outlying settlements, not just in cities. It should be possible to buy houses directly from the owners; perhaps not just for the right price, but also if the owner “likes” the character well enough. It should also be possible to buy from the civic authorities a house whose owner has died. And the civic authorities should also sell the bandit camps and outdoor locations, so that players could use a camp as a home instead of a house, if they wish. Not everyone wants to role-play a landlord. Taking a bandit camp as a home could be connected to minor quests to get rid of the bandits presently occupying the site, of course; and it should be possible to buy chests or containers or nicer bigger tents to set up at the site.

– I’d like to design the interior of my house more personally: for instance, I’d like to directly choose the types of tapestries, paintings, etc. The more customization an RPG offers, the better. That is what makes RPG’s interesting.

– Part of the reason for suggesting extra stuff to spend money on is because I find that when I reach level 20 or thereabouts, my character has so much gold that there’s no reason to collect more. My current character, who is above level 50, has more than 130,000 coins and there’s simply nothing left to buy. I’ve got all the houses, all the weapons and armour sets, and all the materials for crafting, and I’m still rich. And there’s no challenge.

– If I rent a room in an inn, I should be able to eat the food laid on the table in the room itself. After all, I’ve paid for it.

– I’d like to be able to buy lamps or light-emitting objects to brighten up dark houses, caves, etc.

– Upon attaining the leadership of a faction, such as a guild, I’d like to see the budget. I’d like to see what the income is, and also manage how it is spent. For instance, if I am the master of the Mage’s guild, I’d like to be able to decide how many magic teachers to hire, and see a few days later what the consequences are of hiring too many or too few.

– Cyrodiil, in TES:4, had rather a lot of NPC’s. The game marketing info boasts of over 150 named NPC’s. Where are all the farms that feed those people? The game map included relatively few farms. It’s the same in Skyrim: although Skyrim does better on this count, with more farms (although they are all still small), and more hunter’s camps. Not all of the landscape in a mediaeval setting, even a fantasy one, will be wilderness populated by monsters and punctuated by the ruins of ancient societies. Also: if there are not enough farms, then where are the warehouses of imported food? A large empire would have had regular trade routes.

– I’d like to see a “Merchant’s Guild” quest line. Right now, the four biggest quest lines other than the Main Quest involve fighters, mages, thieves, and assassins. These are, of course, the mainstays of fantasy roleplaying since Dungeons and Dragons (which I’ve played for over twenty years). Yet a functioning society has more occupations than these. Skyrim has references to a thing called the East Empire Company (a tip of the hat to the East India Company, I surmise). Why not create a quest line for the company, in which one undertakes trade missions, negotiates with buyers and sellers, hires scouts and investors (and perhaps mercenaries, thieves, and assassins!), eventually to become head of the company?

– Similarly, there should be a quest line for each of the nine holds of Skyrim which result in the player becoming jarl of that hold. Presumably they would be exclusive quests: starting one makes it impossible to start any of the other eight. But that’s not different from choosing the Empire / Stormcloak quests. And then, after that, the quest line could end with the selection of Skyrim’s High King. (Postscript: For TES:6 let’s go to TWO countries on the continent, not just one. High Rock and Hammerfell, perhaps?)

– There should be a “fast outfit change” mechanism in which players can have two or three pre-set “outfits” that they assemble themselves, such as a armour outfit for adventuring, and a clothing outfit for going about town on social or commercial errands. It would save players a bit of time when they need to change outfits, and it would potentially eliminate the absurdity of of a character wearing heavy steel plate mail to go shopping for gifts for his children.

Dear Bethesda: You need to hire me to help you design your next Elder Scrolls game. As a professional philosopher I know about logic, and about narrative storytelling, the two essential features of computer role-play gaming. I also know how give the stories and quests more challenging moral choices, and a larger, more philosophical frame. And if you set the game in High Rock, the Celtic-influenced area of Cyrodil, I can help there too. I’ve written books about Druids and Celtic philosophy, as you can see by those links. And I teach college courses on political science and social justice, so I know about conflict, war, peace, and the many different forms of power – another mainstay of epic RPG storytelling. Contact me, and let’s talk.

How five unpersons kept me guessing for months, and are still doing it to others.

Here’s a new word for you to learn: “Affinity Scam”. This is a kind of scam in which the con artist poses as a member of a tightly integrated small community of some kind, such as a church, or an ethnic enclave in a large city (“Chinatown”, or “Little Italy”, etc). The con artist ingratiates himself to the leaders and prominent members of the group in order to improve his credibility among other members.

Some time in 2011, I met “Greta Forrester” that way. She was on my FB for a few months before I interacted with her in any meaningful way. When she first joined my list, I saw that she already had a number of local people I knew on her list, so I thought it was a safe bet that she was for real.

At some point in the fall of last year I started interacting with her a bit more – she was usually the first to post a response to any political comment I would make which was in any way critical of capitalism, or which was centre-left in its political orientation, even if not especially confrontational. She would state the business or corporate point of view in response, and she would to claim to be very rich, and therefore in a position to know what she was talking about. And she claimed to have a lot of time to play on the internet, being bedridden with an exotic disease acquired from an insect bite, while on an archaeological dig in Iraq.

In the weeks that followed, several other members of her family added themselves to my list. “Bob Folts”, “Fran Folts”, and “Angie Forrester”, and much later, “Kayla Van Duyn”, who claimed to have read and enjoyed one of my books.

I had a lot of private correspondence with Angie, who claimed to be responsible for the family’s finances, which was a very, very large trust fund. Large enough, so it was claimed, to put her and the members of their family into the 0.01%. Larger and larger stories were told about how she was personally involved in highly publicized events, like the negotiations for the IMF bailout of Greece. She also claimed to be personally rescuing people from Syria, when the civil war began there about a year ago. And, after months of daily private correspondence, I was given the impression, through subtle comments from Angie and others, that Angie might be interested in a romantic relationship with me. Angie even told me that in the summer of 2012 I would be invited to visit them in their family ancestral home in Belgium, a place called the Vanderhoven Estate, a place which had been in their family since Roman times.

All these little stories, unlikely-but-possible, just added up and added up. I went along with it mainly because I enjoyed the attention. I had doubts about the truth of their claims, but I mostly set them aside, until a friend pointed out to me that he searched their profile photos using Google and discovered that numerous photos in their profiles were stolen from other people. Did you know that you can drag-and-drop pictures into the search bar of Google Images, and do an internet search that way? Before that day, I didn’t either. So I, and a few others, searched as many of the photos as we could, and found a lot of them in their original sources. A schoolteacher from Indiana. A dead Vietnam war veteran. An American couple on holiday in Italy. A photo of Bob’s girlfriend “Steffania”, which he said was shot in Rome, but which I recognized as shot in Florence. The square in the centre of the city, with its ancient town hall, is very distinctive, and just about anyone who has studied European art history (as I have) should recognize it. We discovered a real person named Fran Folts, who was not deathly ill. And lots and lots of photos like that which came from other sources.

We could also find no evidence whatever of the existence of a place in Belgium called Vanderhoven Estate, nor of a company called Robosolutions, which Angie and Bob supposedly owned.

So I decided to confront them with the evidence, and also to warn everyone I knew who had them on their FB lists. Shortly afterward, two friends of mine and I stayed up late at night, arguing with Bob, about the evidence we had uncovered. All he did was deny and redirect and counter-accuse: the standard strategy of a cornered con-man who won’t admit his lies. I even offered him a way out: he could phone me. I gave my number. But he didn’t call, citing “security” reasons. He wouldn’t even pick up an ordinary untraceable burnable cellphone, if he was worried about me calling him back. This seemed absurd since FB is much less secure than the phone system. He was like an angry teenager, really, in his belligerent counter-accusations of how we invaded his privacy to search the photos he had (publicly) posted to FB – and which are stored in the cache of your browser anyway. He even threatened us with visits from security intelligence agents.

But nothing happened. There were no visits from foreign intelligence agents. None of the threats they issued were carried out. It really ended not with a bang but a whimper. I got one last minute note from “Bob” the following morning, in which he stated his grievance against me one last time, for not believing him, for downloading his FB photos and thus “invading his privacy”, and for not talking it over with him first before telling 20 others. But by then he had blocked my FB profile and it was impossible for me to reply. It reminded me of the “last word” that petulant spoiled children sometimes demand. And that was it.

I saved the whole conversation to my hard drive, as well as all the private correspondence with Angie, and all the photos that I could. They’ve blocked me on FB but as of November 2012 I know they are back again, and stupidly using the same photos and the same fake names and backstories.

The only really good thing that can be said about them is that all they seemed to want was attention. As far as I know, they never asked anyone for money or favours. But they liked to keep things dramatic, and keep themselves at the centre of things. They were fun, I have to admit. But they manipulated my emotional life for months, and expressed absolutely no remorse for it. The distance of the Internet allows them to escape having to face the real human emotional consequences of their actions.

So I won’t have them back now, unless they own up to their identity thefts, and come clean with who they really are. In fact I think it’s one person, using five or six accounts. For the writing style is the same in every case.

They also had another effect on my private life. For one thing, as someone trained in logic and critical thinking, I feel quite disappointed in myself, even ashamed, for being sucked into the charade. I got sucked into it because I live alone, after all, and I have very few friends living in the same city as me. (There, I admitted it: I’m a perfect target for this kind of internet scam.) Also, in January of 2012 I went on a date with a really wonderful local woman, who I really liked a lot, and who I let go, because I had invested months of my time and emotions into building a friendship with “Angie”. So I’m very confident that my life would have gone differently, and probably have been happier, without them.

The Trolls (in the sense of internet trolls) of Vanderhoven (their fake ancestral home) often claimed they joined Facebook as an experiment in meeting and getting along with ordinary people. I think the truth is that all five fake profiles are run by one person, someone probably lonely, and who gets a kick out of riling people up, and who enjoys feeling superior when others believe the story. Perhaps he enjoys the fantasy of being rich, and enjoys being treated like a rich man, when he interacts with people on FB. On the internet, real people’s lives are often indistinguishable from characters in a movie or a television show, and many of the moral and psychological resources which restrain people from hurting others do not engage. This allows people to sit back and view the struggles and frustrations of other people as a source of entertainment. I think the true experiment, then, was to see how tall a tale he could tell before he got caught, and to see how gullible people can be. Especially when the story features beautiful women and large sums of money.

As an aside, I suspect that one of the fake profiles used photos of the real person behind it all, but I don’t know that for sure.

The moral of the story, if there is one, is this: whenever you hear a tall tale about someone’s life, always remember to invoke your sense of reasonable doubt. It might be true, it might not be true. But “extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence”, and “all other things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be the truth.” So if someone on your social media streams claims to be personally acquainted with Warren Buffet, it’s best to assume the claim is false.

===

The following is the complete and unedited text of the FB email that I sent to the five fake profiles on 9th March 2012. Although the link to the teacher at the school in Indiana now shows a different photo than the one which, at the time, was being used by “Kayla Van Duyn”, it’s clearly the same woman. The other links still show much (but not all) of the evidence of identity theft committed by whoever was behind the fake profiles.

The time has come, I think, for me to pose some very serious questions to you.

Recently, as you know, I discovered that your photo of Steffania was shot in Florence and not in Rome. It struck me as odd that a former military man would make such an elementary mistake about where he went on a date with a girlfriend. And began to think of a few other little incongruities and inconsistencies in your backstory, which I overlooked at first because I was enjoying the conversation.

So I started paying very close attention to some of the photos that you’ve been posting over time. And I started sharing my suspicions with around twenty local friends of mine who you have befriended.

We discovered that Fran Folts is using several stolen photos of a young couple on holiday in Italy, and passing them off as if they are pictures of herself.
http://groups.physics.umn.edu/mmc/personnel/pete/Travel_pics/Pete_and_Amanda_in_Italy[Jul-Aug_2003]/Italy.htm

When Kayla joined Facebook, we quickly discovered that she stole a photo from a school teacher from Indiana, named Stephanie Graves.
http://www.lafayettechristian.org/faculty/graves/?from_faculty_listing=1&l&u&f

and that Greta is using a fake photo too:
http://www.lasplumas66-70.com/class_classmates.cfm?year_id=1970&sort1=0&sort2=0&f3=c&yp=y

and that’s an interesting one since the actual person depicted in the photo here is in fact named Greta, and that there’s someone named Forrester a little further down the page.

Also, we found that Bob’s sitting room in Fiji is actually in California:
http://homgroup.com/Encinitas/

and that the photo of the British soldier that Greta claimed to have met in Iraq actually came from this web site:
http://www.hobotraveler.com/123_07baghdadistanbul01.shtml

and the list goes on.

As of this moment, I’m 99% convinced that the five of you are actually one or two people, not five, and that you are con artists and liars.

Really, the only good thing that can be said about you is that you haven’t asked anyone to send you money.

Given the nature of the friendship I was building with Angie, I’m feeling profoundly betrayed, and very angry.

We in the pagan community have had to deal with con artists and troublemakers before, up to and including evangelical christian missionaries making death threats. A lot of people here are feeling very suspicious of your true intentions, and even a little fearful.

Now if you have an explanation for this, I’d like to hear it. But it had better be very, very good. I will not accept dismissals or red herring arguments. I want clear, unambiguous, direct, and convincing evidence that you are who you say you are.

This identity theft you have committed is very seriously morally wrong, and we can’t trust anyone who could mislead people this way. So come clean about who you really are. Or leave us alone.

Remember that social media experiment I did a few months back, in which I measured the “Diversity Quotient” of my social media feeds?

Well, this afternoon I went back to my original dataset, and this time counted up all the “memes” which were spread around for pure entertainment, and not just for supporting social, political, or moral values.

The biggest category of messages was general encouragement and motivation. But the second biggest category was humour involving cats and kittens. There were more than double the number of the third-highest group. And almost ten times more cat and kitten jokes than there were jokes about sex! I almost put the cats in a class by themselves. I’m not sure what explains this: perhaps it’s because the proportions of kitten’s faces are very close to the proportions of infant human faces. Or maybe it’s because I love cats, I love every kind of cat – sorry I’m getting emotional – and I just want to hug all of them but that’s crazy because you can’t hug every cat…

Nevermind. Here’s the tally.

Total “Inspirational”: 110.

General encouragement, motivation, morale-boosting = 53
included a scientific claim =3
reference to a historical figure = 9
reference to a pop culture celebrity = 6
statement about love, trust, and friendship =11
statement about friendship with animals = 3
birthday greetings = 2
promoting good behaviour = 9
grieving the death of a loved one = 1
statement endorsing some kind of nonconformity = 13

Total Humour: 225

Humour involving scientific or historical facts = 7
Humour involving coffee = 2
Humour involving roller derby players = 1
Humour involving cats or kittens = 39
Humour involving dogs or puppies = 5
Humour involving sex = 4
Affirmations of [one’s own] bad behaviour = 8
Criticism of [other people’s] stupidity or bad behaviour = 17
Criticism of pop culture = 4
Criticism of religion = 9
Humour / insults or put-downs = 4
Political satire = 1

Humour involving a pop culture reference: 44
Of which:

Humour involving actor / singer / pop celebrity = 4
Star wars = 10
Douglas Adams = 8
Star Trek = 4
Firefly = 3
Lord of the Rings = 3
Terry Pratchett = 1
HP Lovecraft = 2
Dr Who = 3
Avengers = 1
Calvin & Hobbes = 1
Harry Potter = 2
Probably a pop culture reference but I couldn’t identify it = 2

Here’s another short selection from the first draft of “Clear and Present Thinking”. It comes from the chapter on Reasonable Doubt, and concerns how to recognize scams, frauds, and confidence tricks.
…

An associate of mine once saw a job listing on craigslist, in which the employer was looking for a mystery shopper (a person who poses as a normal customer at some business, and then reports about his or her experience back to the employer.) My associate was sent a cheque for $3,000 and then asked to wire-transfer the money to an address in a foreign country, and then report about her experience with the money transfer service. But when she brought the cheque to the bank, she was told that the cheque had the wrong signature, and would not be cashed. Had she deposited the cheque using an ATM, or a cheque-cashing service, then she would have transferred the money to the destination, and then the bank would have eventually discovered that the cheque was bogus and cancelled it. The result would have been that my friend would have lost $3,000 of her own money.

Another associate of mine described a very clever scam involving the distribution of pornography. Unsuspecting men purchased a package of pornographic videos featuring celebrities, to be delivered by mail. Later, they received a letter in the mail stating that the distribution company had just gone bankrupt, and a reimbursement cheque was included in with the letter. However, the reimbursement cheque was drawn on a company with a very embarrassing name: “Triple-X Bondage Fetish Babes Inc.” or something ridiculous like that. Most men were too embarrassed to bring the cheque to the bank, and they just accepted the loss of their money. Other men who did bravely try to cash the cheque found that it was bogus, and they still lost their money.

All scams and confidence tricks depend on two main factors for success: the victim’s self-interest (especially his or her desire for money, sex, and social prestige), and the victim’s gullibility. They are successful when prospective victims want something desperately enough, and they accept what they have been told or shown, and don’t ask too many questions. Scam artists and con men tend to be creative, persuasive, and original; they constantly change or improve their strategies, so that their scams become harder to detect, and of course more successful. Yet all cons depend on a fairly small number of basic strategies. Here’s a few of them:

Deception. Effective con artists use lies and half-truths to make themselves, or their situation, appear to be other than what it really is. Almost all confidence tricks rely on some amount of deception. They might dress in some kind of costume or disguise, for instance to appear very rich or very poor. They might pretend to be a professional in a field they actually know nothing about. They might set up a web site to make themselves look like a legitimate business.

Distraction. Con artists keep your attention focused on something unrelated, while they or an accomplice steal from you when you’re not looking. Think of the person who steals your purse or your wallet while pretending to accidentally trip and knock you down, then help you to your feet again.

Research. Some con artists will research their victim’s history, and find out things like what the person wants, what their weaknesses are, what events in their past cause them shame or anger, and so on. These facts are then used to manipulate the victim later.

Flattery. Con men often open their game by being friendly and amiable, and quickly become admiring and deeply respecting. Some con men might pretend to fall in love with their intended victim. Since most people enjoy being praised and admired, this strategy helps make the victim more receptive and agreeable to the con man’s claims and requests.

Time pressure. People who have been lead to believe that an important decision must be made in a very short amount of time tend to make bad decisions.

Obedience. Most people still defer, at least partially, to lawyers, judges, police officers, professors, priests, rich people, and just about anyone who looks like they possess some kind of social authority or power. This is true even in societies that claim to be democratic and equal. Con men exploit people’s willingness to defer to authority to trick them.

Conformity. Taking advantage of the fact that most people will do what they see lots of other people doing, the con artist and accomplices will do something in order to make it easier for their victim to do it too. Think of people who start crossing a road before the lights have changed because two or three others have already started crossing ahead of them.

Although all cons involve those basic psychological strategies, some specific applications of those strategies have been so successful that they have been given names. Here are a few of them.

“Big Store”, named after the Marx Brothers movie, involves renting out a large building, such as a storefront or a warehouse, and filling it with furniture and people to make it appear like a well established business.

“Phishing”, the con artist sends an email that looks like it comes from a legitimate business, bank, or government agency. The message asks the victim to ‘verify’ or ‘confirm’ personal details that may have been lost or subject to a computer virus attack, such as email passwords and bank account numbers.

“Shell game” and “Three Card Monty” is a sleight-of-hand trick in which a coin or other small object is placed under one of three cups or shells or similar objects. The position of the cups is then mixed up at random by sliding them across the table quickly, and then the victim is asked to bet some money on which cup has the coin. What the victim does not normally see is that the coin has been hidden separately, and is hiding elsewhere, such as in the con artist’s palm.

“Bait and Switch”: This is a con in which a victim is offered a chance to buy something, or must do something to get something else in return. They might be shown the product or the reward that they have been offered. But once the money changes hands or the service is performed, the product or reward turns out to be something very different, and not what was promised.

“Honey Trap” is a very aggressive kind of scam in which a sexually attractive person lures the victim to a private location with an expressed or implied promise of sexual intimacy. Once the victim has been lured to the private place, he or she might be robbed, blackmailed, held captive, photographed in a compromising position, kidnapped, harmed in other ways, or even killed.

“Ponzi Schemes” are types of financial investment frauds. A con artist posing as a businessperson will offer to prospective victims a chance to invest in some low or medium risk enterprise, and offered an excellent return of investment rate. But in reality there is no enterprise. The con artist uses money from his second investor to pay his first investor. Then he uses money from his third investor to pay the second one, and so on. (In a variation of this scam called the Pyramid Scheme, the con artist freely admits that there is no enterprise to invest in, and promises to pay earlier investors with new money from subsequent investors.) This procedure can be very difficult for victims to spot, since at least some investors think they are getting their money’s worth. A successful pyramid scheme operator can eventually become exceedingly rich, if he’s careful. But the system depends on a constant flow of money from new victims to keep working. If the flow of new investment should slow down or stop, the scheme collapses.

“Psychic Scams” involve a con artist who claims to possess magical powers. For instance, he might say he can communicate with the dead, or with angels or other supernatural beings, or with aliens, or even with God. For a price he will convey to the victim messages from a recently deceased person (or animal!). Or he might be claim to be able to detect and remove curses. Or he might offer to cast spells intended to bring the victim money, good heath, love, or some other kind of worldly benefit. Leaving aside the question of whether there might ‘real’ psychics or mediums, the fraudulent medium exploits the victim’s belief in the paranormal to part him from his money.

“Advance Fee Fraud”. In this type of scam, a person is asked to do something and is promised a large sum of money as the reward, but must pay the con artist a small sum in advance as part of the deal. A common version of this is called “Nigerian Money Scam” or “419 Scam”, named for the section of Nigerian criminal law which covers fraud. In this type of scam, the con artist sends an email message to hundreds of people, in which he poses as someone from a foreign country, and asks for your help opening a bank account in your country. He’ll say this is needed to transfer a very large sum of money as part of an inheritance, or tax-avoidance plan, or similar deal. You are also offered a share of that large sum of money. But once you open the account, you will be asked to make deposits to keep the account ‘active’ or ‘viable’ or something like that. And your share of the big sum never arrives. Another variation, going back to the 19th century, is called the “Spanish Prisoner”. In this scam, a person asks for help transferring money to an individual who will help break a rich friend out of a jail (in Spain). The con artists ask for some money in advance in order to bribe the guards, and promises a share of the money that the rich prisoner will surely pay as a reward when he is free. A more recent variation is the “Casting Agent” scam, in which the scam artist poses as a talent scout for a film studio or modeling agency. The con artist asks for large up-front fees for professional photoshoots, and promises the victim that well-paying jobs will soon follow. The photos for the victim’s portfolio might arrive, but the jobs never do.

Yes, this is for real. To help promote my ninth book, “Hallowstone”, I am giving away a Kindle Fire HD. Or a Kobo. Or a Nook. Or whatever your favourite e-book reader device might be. I’ll buy you the device that’s at the top of its line. Or I’ll give it to a friend of yours as a Christmas present. AND I will throw in a signed print edition of any of my other previous books which you choose.

Here’s how you enter.

1. Pick up a copy of “Hallowstone” from the Amazon Kindle Store.

2. Share this blog post on Facebook, G+, Twitter, your blog, or your favourite social media.

3. Write a review, and post it to the book’s page on Amazon, and to your blog, your FB, or your favourite social media.

4. A winner will be selected at random from the first 25 reviews posted there before 11:59pm (EST) on 20th November 2012, as seen on my computer.

5. If more than 50 reviews appear on the book’s Amazon listing before that time, I will select two winners! So spread the word!

Good reviews (4 or 5 stars out of 5) are welcomed, of course: but an honest review, posted on Amazon and on your favourite social media, is all I will ask for.

And for those who want to know what the book is about first: here’s the cover copy:

Fiction: Modern fantasy / adventure.

As Eric mourns Katie’s death, a flamboyant stranger draws him into a conspiracy to destroy a magical well.

Katie’s death left Eric grief-stricken for months. So when the smooth-talking Heathcliff claimed to have spoken with Katie’s ghost, Eric wanted to hear more. He followed Heathcliff to Hallowstone Castle, where a seer told him that Katie had been murdered. Meanwhile, a magical well in Fellwater Grove comes under attack. Eric volunteers to help investigate the attackers, but the more he learns about the true nature of the well, the more his loyalties are put to the test, and the deeper he falls into danger. Without knowing who to trust, and without time to heal his grief, Eric must find Katie’s killer, and face a momentous choice.

As the second installment of “The Fellwater Tales” series, “Hallowstone” fills in more of the background for the Brigantians and their ancient rivals, and reveals more of the conspiracy against them. Hallowstone is adventurous, thoughtful, and imaginative.

More information, including some options for those who don’t already own Kindles, can be found here.

Enjoy! And thank you for your support.

Friends, I hereby announce the official publication of “Hallowstone”, my ninth book, today!

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009WEHR38

Fiction: Modern fantasy / adventure.

Here’s the cover copy:

As Eric mourns Katie’s death, a flamboyant stranger draws him into a conspiracy to destroy a magical well.

Katie’s death left Eric grief-stricken for months. So when the smooth-talking Heathcliff claimed to have spoken with Katie’s ghost, Eric wanted to hear more. He followed Heathcliff to Hallowstone Castle, where a seer told him that Katie had been murdered. Meanwhile, a magical well in Fellwater Grove comes under attack. Eric volunteers to help investigate the attackers, but the more he learns about the true nature of the well, the more his loyalties are put to the test, and the deeper he falls into danger. Without knowing who to trust, and without time to heal his grief, Eric must find Katie’s killer, and face a momentous choice.

As the second installment of “The Fellwater Tales” series, “Hallowstone” fills in more of the background for the Brigantians and their ancient rivals, and reveals more of the conspiracy against them. Hallowstone is adventurous, thoughtful, and imaginative.