Must love Swindlers

I started reading Robert Greene's The 48 Laws of Power sometime in my sophomore year in college. It was incredibly enjoyable - perhaps 60% nonsense, 20% fluff, and 20% good stuff, all wrapped in a pleasantly pretentious package. Most importantly, Mr. Greene introduced me to Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil, one of America's most famous con artists. I read his biography and learned how he only took advantage of those looking for a quick, dishonest buck, plying his trade most often at the horse races. Something about swindler's has always tickled me - I remember being a child and gasping inwardly the first time I heard someone described as the kind of person who could "sell ice to an Eskimo". Thus, I'm a little surprised that I've never delved more into the life of Frank Abnagale, author of Catch me if you Can, (which was turned into the movie with Leo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks). Nevertheless, that unconscious fascination continues - while in between patients at one of the OB doc's offices, I picked up a copy of Kevin Trudeau's The Weight Loss Cure. I first became acquainted with Mr. Trudeau through his late-night informercials for his other book Natural Cures They Don't Want You to Know About. My mother was given a copy, and so, since it was just lying around the house, I thumbed through. In it, he bashes the medical profession, big pharma, and goverments large and small, liberally sprinkling his scare-mongering with enough truth and fact to be plausible. I didn't finish it, but I did thumb through The Weight Loss Cure, just to see what he said. Once again, he's bashing medicine and the food industry (which, by the way, is fascinatingly evil - just check out Eric Schlosser's Fast food Nation). While his vilification of prescription drugs and medical doctors is laughable at the least and downright lethal at the most - when scared, sick, hypertensives, diabetics, and cancer patients are convinced to eschew proven, life-saving treatment in favor of St. John's wort - enough of it was pure and simple logic (eat more organic food, work out more, don't eat fast food), that I kept on reading. And then I found this:

I KNEW there was a reason I liked this guy - he's the most successful modern scam artist!