Free Republic

Beck is good. He's the classic, down-home guy who is usually kind to his guests but who can look them in the eye and say "B.S." (in polite terms, of course) when they deserve to be called on stupid statements or positions. He also has a good sense of humor. I consider him a reality check on the usual "expert" claptrap.

I wonder how they rated Soledad O'Brien, who strikes me as Katie Couric without the perky.

Maybe they should label this stuff "faker news" to differentiate it from the usual day-today fake news.

Remember global cooling? It was the scare of the day a few decades ago, when Time magazine made it a cover story calculated to make us all buy heavy underwear or move to the Equator.

Second-rate scientists tend to grab whatever slice of data suits their purpose. Look at the latest "studies" showing that global warming has made our hurricane seasons worse and you'll note that they use data dating back to 1970 -- when the latest high-storm cycle began to crank up. There were really strong hurricane seasons in the 1930s and 1940s, and earlier in the 1890s and 1900s, but ... well, those don't count.

But nobody can beat the news media for hyping global warming on dubious or even false "evidence."

Remember the South Pacific islands that claimed they were being drowned by a rising ocean due to global warming? Well, duh, if the ocean was really rising several feet don't you think Florida and California would have noticed? Of course, the news media that bit for this piece of nonsense must never have heard of land subsiding, just as it has for two thousand years in Venice, which was built on a soggy swamp.

Or recall the "global warming" in Alaska, where the temperature in some places was rising by four or five degrees? Some of the media loved that one. They never stopped to think that global warming includes the word "global," and that no other areas were reporting such increases. Could it have been a shift in currents in the ocean adjacent to the warmed-up areas? Gee, maybe so.

Then there are the folks who say changes in the feeding or mating grounds of insects and small mammals prove that there is global warming. Could be -- or maybe it was a cyclical change in the places where the creatures they feed on were to be found, or maybe there was a local or regional change in rainfall. It's doubtful that Nature has kept her creatures anchored to the same places indefinitely. In fact, if that were the case there would be no spread of species from one area to another, and we know that's not so.

Priests of the global warming faith, such as Al Gore, seem to think that human beings are responsible for every change in our environment and that we can control our climate.

What would they have thought (if humans existed then) when the ocean was 30 feet higher than it is now, and the coastal regions (and most of what is now the state of Florida) were under water? It certainly couldn't be blamed on SUVs or coal-burning power plants.

No, the truth is that human beings are just tiny mites on a huge and quite impersonal chunk of iron and silicon and other elements. And if we disappear, the planet will go happily along, still going through ice ages and warm spells -- cyclical global warming, if you will.

On a recent visit to my home town, Fort Lauderdale, I saw a zany variation on the theme:

People there are tearing down small, 50-year-old cottages and replacing them with McMansions that cost more than $1 million. It doesn't bother them that they are surrounded by much cheaper places on the same block, because after all "everything is going to go up" and no doubt the rest of the little houses on quarter-acre lots will also be replaced by McMansions..

It reminds me of the morning of the Great Crash, when pundits in the newspapers were proclaiming that stocks were headed ever higher.

Sooner or later, the supply of bigger fools will run out.

Most of the world seems to be content to sacrifice Israel rather than confront the long-term push by Islamic radicals to wipe it off the face of the earth.

But consider two things: Israelis remember when Jews tried to deal with oppression by getting along, and as a result were marched into death camps by the millions.

And they have a nuclear arsenal.

Would Israel, if threatened with being invaded and overrun by radical armies that would surely march its citizens into new death camps, use the bomb?

You bet it would. Under similar circumstances so would France, Britain, Russia, the U.S. and other countries that continue to urge peace and cross their fingers.

Low inflation is good news, but when they say that food costs have dropped my BS detector tends to go off.

Perhaps the cost of food dipped a bit in the latest month reported, but long-term this indicator is highly suspect. It is based partly on "equivalents," meaning that if you can buy a second-rate product cheaper than a quality product, the lower-cost item sets the standard.

And has anyone noticed that while the price may be the same, the quantities of some products tend to shrink. For example, potato chips that used to come in six-ounce bags shrank to five and a half ounces, and now some are five ounces.. Of course, the "pound" bag of coffee long ago went to 12 or 13 ounces.

I wonder if the economists who prepare the numbers ever go into a supermarket to shop.. Maybe they send their maids to do it.

You hit the nail on the head. Clinton was always about style, never about substance. It seemed most of the time that he was playing the role of president on a bad television show.

As for Stephanopoulus: It is so obvious that he is still a shill for the Democrats, the network should be embarrassed to put him forth as a supposedly objective host.

I watched just one program after he took over the top job. He interviewed Condoleeza Rice and kept interrupting her every 10 or 15 seconds. She was the lone Republican she interviewed that day. Then he had three Democrats on, and let them ramble on extensively without interruptions. One guy, I forget his name, actually made a self-serving speech for a minute and a half while Stephanopoulus smiled approvingly and didn't open his mouth.

This travesty of what used to be a good political show is disgusting. But then, it is probably produced by someone who is part of the Hollywood/New York liberal establishment that thinks the New York Times is a centrist newspaper.

We shouldn't start bombing Zimbabwe (and I wonder if the orginal post suggesting we do so was unmarked sarcasm), but that said, there was less reason to bomb Serbia and Serbian troops in Kosovo than there would be to target a truly genocidal regime in Zimbabwe -- and half a dozen other African countries.

Glassman writes: "On Aug. 13, 1982, the Dow closed at 777. Even today, after the second-worst bear market of the
post-World War II era, it has risen 11-fold without counting dividends. "

There are several things to be noted here:

First, Glassman was careful to choose the most favorable time period he could find to show how the Dow has shot up. He does not mention that the Dow had closed a bit above 1,000 early in 1973 -- so on his baseline date of 8/13/82 it was a little more than 25 percent below where it had stood -- nine years earlier. The Dow didn't get back to its old 1973 high until 1983 or 1984. In fact, his baseline comes just before the market started climbing, after being stagnant for more than a decade.

Timing is important when you look at comparisons. In this case, the time involved from when 777 was FIRST reached to where the Dow is now is actually about 10 years more than he indicates, back to sometime in 1970. It's a 32-year stretch to today , not 20.

Also, he assumes that the Dow's level today is at or near the bottom. Who knows, really? If the 1973-74 bear market is repeated, certainly not a given but entirely possible, the Dow still has nearly 3,000 points down to go.

Glassman also neglects to talk about time periods as a real-life factor for individuals who don't live forever. . If someone had bought stocks in 1970, at about 770, the Dow would have gone up to 2000 in 1989. A rise of 160 percent isn't bad, but that would have been over 19 years, and the climb wouldn't have beaten inflation by much. An investment in a single family house would have done much better.

If a person bought in 1970 planning to retire, his portfolio (based on the Dow) would have been dead even in 1982, 12 years later. It would have doubled around 1987, after 17 years. As noted above, it would have been up 160 percent in '89, as momentum began building toward the once-a-generation bubble of the late 90s. Of course, a person around age 65 when it started would then be 84 years old.

This last frenzy was indeed a once-a-generation phenomenon. Market bubbles took place in the late 1920s, the early 1970s and the late 1990s. There might have been another one in the 1950s, but the boom after World War II was unusually solid because of pent-up demand from the war, low levels of debt through most of the boom, a technology revolution and millions of GIs learning new skills through the GI Bill. Notably, price earnings ratios stayed reasonable in that period and people still looked at the fundamentals of a company before buying its stock.

Of course, Glassman et al are right that the market will hit 36,000 -- and a cup of coffee will cost $50 at some point. There's an old story from Wall Street, about a guy who discovers cryogenics and has a wonderful idea. He puts everything he has into a portfolio of solid stocks, leaves it with a broker with instructions to sell and pay the proceeds to anyone who supplies a secret code number, and then has himself frozen. Decades later, he is thawed, wakes up, goes to the brokerage office and gives the secret number. They had him a cashier's check for $20 million. Excited, he goes around the corner to a bar and orders a Martini. When the check comes, it's for $10,000.

You're right that anyone who warned that the bubble would burst was ridiculed on this forum as a lunatic or gloom-and-doomer.

In late 1999 and early 2000, I posted to this forum and the New York Times stock market forum more than a dozen times that the "irrational exuberance" couldn't last much longer and the market was headed for big trouble. When Henry Blodgett and his ilk told stock buyers that companies selling for 200 times (eventual) earnings should go for 300 or 400 times (eventual) earnings it was obvious that people were caught up in a mania.

After being ridiculed every time, I just shrugged and moved on to other forum topics. This is my first post on the stock market in more than two years.

I had seen it all before, in the 1973-74 bear market, which I observed as a business writer. The runup, the analysts' irrational exuberance, the buy-now-or-lose philosophy, the mocking of anyone who called for caution, and oh yes, the litany that this was a "new economy" were all seen more than a quarter of a century earlier.

What made this bear market potentially far worse was that many of the safeguards built into the market back in the 70s were gone by the late 90s. In the earlier period, analysts were not permitted to have any financial stake in investment banking deals. Companies that tried to play games with their books found that accounting firms would rarely play along. Day traders were checked carefully to make sure they could afford to lose all of the money they had at risk in an extremely risky business, and their accounts were monitored by brokerage branch managers to make sure they were't heading into a death spiral. (If your trading looked too wild, you were asked to sign a document saying you clearly understood the risks, and could afford a wipeout in your account.)

You weren't allowed (legally) to borrow money to buy stock except from a broker, in a margin account that was regularly checked by compliance officers. (Oh yes, in the days when you had to buy stocks in an account where your goals, assets, risk factors, etc. were set down in writing when the account was opened, every brokerage house had compliance officers who visited branch offices and pulled account records at random for review, much as bank auditors or the military inspectors general do.)

Even those tougher safeguards couldn't prevent the 70s bubble-and-bust, although they limited the damage by, among other things, preventing most people who could't afford it from gambling away their life's savings.

Those who were watching the market in the 70s should have a definite feeling of deja vu now. If they also have some human charity, they will resist saying "I tried to tell you, but you just laughed."

I will not venture another warning, but would add this observation: After the collapse of the earlier market, it took nine years for the averages to regain their old highs -- and then another dozen or so years for the market to start really flying again. If history repeats, the next bubble will start somewhere around 2024.

But I guess many will ridicule this posting, too. So it goes.

Does anyone else here remember when the United States bombed Moammar Ghaday's home in Libya while his family was there? At least one of his children was killed by the surprise bombing attack, as I recall. We also bombed some of Saddam Hussein's palaces, although I don't recall if any of his family or friends were killed in those attacks.

Israel could just say, as our military has in Afghanistan, that the killing of innocent civilians is regrettable but "these things happen" when you're launching missiles or bombs from the air to kill terrorist leaders.

The only difference is -- Israel got its man.

The way things are going, the UN may be able to leave Kosovo around the year 2075.

Since the age of death line and the retirement age line converge somewhere around 67, obviously those who retire after 67 are dead before they leave the job. Must be a real problem for productivity.

I know my eyes are not as sharp as those of many younger readers, but I have to squint to see the lead sentences beneath the "headline" of the postings. If the type were the same font and size as that in the stories themselves, I'd be comfortable. Otherwise, the new interface is fine.

If you think it's OK to destroy an ethnic group in retaliation for terrorist attacks, then I assume you would support wiping out the Palestinian people. Also some groups in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Spain, Ireland, Puerto Rico, etc. Since most of the 9/11 attackers were from Saudi Arabia, obviously we should start there, right?

This comment that friendly forces wouldn't fire at U.S. planes brings to mind an incident only a week or so ago, when our warplanes bombed some friendly forces when they saw flashes of light coming from them. It turned out they were firing rifles in the air, in the "traditional" Afghan gesture of triumph or welcome, and the lights were muzzle flashes. Looks like we need more training in the ways of tribal warriors.

There's a wonderful irony to this.

When Ollie North was being grilled by a Senate committee during the Iran-Contra hearings about 15 years ago, one of the things they tried to trash him with was his purchase of a $60,000 security system for his home, with federal money.

"Isn't that a bit excessive?" one senator asked.

No, said North, because a terrorist had threated to kill both him and his family.

"What terrorist could possibly scare you that much?" the senator asked, looking around for a laugh from the audience.

"His name is Osama bin Laden," North replied.

When the senators asked North what he would reccomend doing to bin Laden (long before the attacks on our embassies, and before anyone was preparing the 9/11 attacks), he said he would hunt him down and kill him.

The senators and others in the audience were appalled by such a "brutal" idea.

I wonder if Biden and Hagel were in that audience.

Oh boy, we'll just keep on going against terrorists, like the Energizer Bunny. Let's see... Next come ... the Basque separatists in Spain, the Muslim militant movements in the Phillipines and Indonesia, the militants in Sri Lanka, the Muslim militants in Chechnya, the IRA (if it resumes bombings), the terrorists in Colombia, and -- wait a minute -- there's the UCK in Kosovo. But hey, aren't some of these guys our allies and/or friends?

It would be nice to simply cook the Taliban in their caves, but not practical when you have to get the bulldozers up steep mountainsides to get where many of the caves are.

In Vietnam they had similar caves (with several exits) dug into flat or only slightly rolling terrain, and we still often had to crawl into the caves to get the Viet Cong.

Afghanistan presents some of the same challenges as Vietnam, except that instead of hiding in the jungle your enemy hides in caves or niches in the rocks. In both cases, he is used to living and fighting with not much more than he can carry on his back, and will fade away when confronted with superior firepower only to re-emerge for a surprise attack when the odds look better.

We had most of the advanced ground-fighting equipment in Vietnam, including infra red sensors, laser gun sights, fuel-air bombs, carpet bombing, etc. and were still fighting after years.

A ground war is not a good idea. If all of the current bombing, a Northern Alliance assault, plus attacks by various special forces groups works, and we take Kabul, Kandahar, Herat and all the other cities, and have regular armored patrols on the highways -- we will be at the same point as the Russians, and it didn't turn out well for them because the hard-core Afghan fighters will play hide and seek for years and not be concerned about dying if they can pop out of some rocks and kill a few "infidels".

I hope we do get all of the terrorists and make them pay, but it is not going to be fast and easy. Afghanistan is no Iraq, which was the perfect place to fight a war with high-tech weapons and air power.