Subject: A brief answer to a gentleman who emailed me a kind offer of a distributorship selling a herbal compound which reduces obese Americans into model-like or Wall Street-like stunning, seductive personalities. He was answering an advert I placed in the International Herald Tribune, Paris seeking consulting assignments in my field, Risk and Loss Management Consulting. He was the third American so contacting me to sell something. The first asking to help distribute a ginseng and orange pill that guaranteed one did not get drunk from alcohol; the second offering a way for me to use all my contacts, clients, friends and family to sell them investment through the Internet. What they all had in common was that they were sure an experienced man like me would become a millionaire in short order. No other response to my advert was of such nature, and I guess that's why everyone in America is so rich in stock market landslides of wealth. Poor Europeans, and others, they just do not understand the American pursuit of happiness.

The following answer was to the diet seller, who said he was helping people make a lot of money, and in an ethical way besides. Maybe he is, for all I know about ginseng taking fat off, but I matched his financial dreams to my views on many similar 'deals' seen over the years..., to give him the final answer. Dear Mr. B,

"Life's a circle, my dear man, and your type of op has been there for hundreds of years and undoubtedly one could trace it back to the Roman circus and probably even back to the poison administered to Alexandre by his tired soldiers to rid him of any further illusions about civilizing the ignorant in further Eastward adventures. And it was all transferred to America when the snake oil salesmen convinced the first poor, dispirited, usually drunk, Native to forget the genocide of his race by standing sphinx-like next to the covered wagon as the naive would-be customers were convinced that although the gods had abandoned them the Spring like, fragrant snake oil was going to save their bodies and probably their souls.

As then, there are now thousands of aims to help those fat with naivete, to lose the weight of unbalanced living so the unbalanced living can soon return the weight so the snake oil can take it off again..., ad infanitum.

Ethics, dear sir - as the former assistant director of the CIA was laughed to me in DC not long before his rotund potbelly psyche gave up the black ghost preaching fantasies and images to the public to find its peace in a brass encircled box, while his lamentable colleagues continued conning the citizens as to how superior they were at saving inferior natives throughout the 3rd World - has been veritably as much of a non-issue in America as long as the composition of snake oil. and like salves for unbalanced lies continuously adding fat to the Corpus Americanus, have been hawked from those buckboards as quickly as possible so to escape town before the salesman and his wooden Indian were tarred and feathered.

That is to mean, selling all concoctions to the spiritually neurotic and mentally unbalanced is as never ending a joke as is our presidential election an exercise proving one lives in the greatest democracy and most Christian of countries extant.

Yes, it is something like that, I mean, and the meaning will remain forever so, or at least until some salesman teaches the public the definition of ethics and how to include it in a balanced diet.

But due to the courteous nature of your kind response, I must stress that I find no fault with you personally being convinced at the contemporary honesty of your endeavor, for being part of the main, as Twain tried to teach us, is no more neurotic or immoral than seeking vengeance upon the White Whale."

Regards, richard manning