"I follow your blog daily, like the Holy Grail. I have made investment decisions based on your advice. Today, I forwarded to numerous friends and colleagues your blog on the German prostitute. More than one immediately responded with "you have been duped" -- including my spouse and my closest colleague. All I can say is that I must now hide my head in the sand. Embarrassing? Beyond!!! This certainly gives me cause: why am I listening to you about anything?!? I don't get it. Why did I take this as truth, and people closest to me know it was propaganda? More important, are the people closest to me more in tune with reality than you are? Should I be listening closer to home??? You must devote a posting to retracting this story. I think your excuse so far is lame! How is it that you were duped? This would not have happened to my spouse and colleague, so how in the world did it happen to you? And, as a result me?" /carencn

Dear carencn,

Herewith my reply to my readers who directly and by way of comment made an immediate negative reaction to my article:

Thanks for immediately bringing this to my attention. I followed up with some additional notes. I regret to have unwittingly gotten into some possibly fraudulent media matter. I don't go looking for trouble. As you know, I am serious about what I do, how I live my life, and so forth. I blog to help people, not hurt them. I am concerned about the degradation to the social fabric of our world, however. Best regards, /Bill

The fact is I have written to the Telegraph U.K. twice today, so far without response. Tomorrow, I will follow up with a telephone call to London.

I know The Daily Telegraph as a high quality newspaper with a subscription of almost 1 million. I accepted their editorial content as truthful, as much for example as I would of the content written by journalists of the Wall Street Journal or the Toronto Star.

If the editor of The Daily Telegraph responds that they were duped and made a subsequent public apology, then I will pass that along together with my own apology. But beyond a few sources who believe the story to lack credibility, and who may be, let me say, of less reputation than The Daily Telegraph, I have no reason yet to apologize to anyone.

If you re-read the article you will see that all but a paragraph cannot be questioned. Prostitution in Germany is legal; brothels advertise; and employees pay tax and health insurance. I personally believe that this particular law is a bad one, but that is not the point.

You will also see in my blog that I wrote that the incident of a young woman fearing the elimination of health benefits by rejecting such a job "appears" to have happened. I accepted the credibility of a well-written newspaper article, but I had no collaborating evidence, so I used the words "now it appears".

Now about your letter, I have a few comments myself.

I couldn't ask more from any reader than to write publicly that you read my blog "daily, like the Holy Grail", so I do not wish to bear you any more grief. However, why do say you must hide your "head in the sand" because I made a singular reference to a mainstream media article that may have been a distortion of fact, and why on the basis of this one paragraph among possibly 5,000 pages of worthy material in the past 13 months from me would you say I lack personal credibility? If, after sleeping on it, you still truly feel this way, then really I have nothing more to add.

I cannot do better for free than what I already do. If you do feel that I am not "in tune with reality," then there are other writers who are available to you. In terms of your apparently having "made investment decisions based on (my) advice", I think you have that wrong. I happen to make commentary about capital markets and social equity. I am not a licensed advisor. Mine is a personal blog, which is free for anyone in the world to read or not to read. Apparently you have read it, considered the commentary and then made your own decisions about matters of which I have no knowledge, nor was compensated in any way.

I haven't retracted the blog article because I have insufficient reason to do so yet. Tomorrow may prove otherwise. If that happens to be the case, you will be among the first to know.

As I wrote to a couple other readers today, I am not here to hurt anybody. I am not a member of any political party or religious organization, so I have no agenda to push. I am however known as someone who is not easily duped.

Finally I can say that, every day, I stare reality in the face of two dying parents, and it's a grim picture you possibly have yet to face. And if, as and when you do, I would like to have the opportunity of helping you deal with it.

I hope you stay as a reader, but I understand that readership, like life, is fleeting.

Sincerely,

/Bill