Conventional wisdom — how often it’s wrong
Bookworm on Jun 01 2010 at 8:13 am | Filed under: Economics
My husband is hoping that I can put my prodigious knowledge of the news to work by predicting movement in the stock market. I keep telling him that the fact that I know what’s happening in the world is entirely separate from my understanding what’s going to happen in the markets. For example, I know that Greece may give up the Euro (as may other smaller, economically sick countries), but I have no idea whether that will cause the Euro to self-destruct, or if it will become stronger with the deadwood gone. Knowing the facts doesn’t lead to economic understanding.
You can understand my dilemma.
There are some things I do know, though, one of which is that conventional wisdom is often proven wrong. A case in point is a recent New Yorker article talking about the fact that world politics have an effect on the market. (I would have thought that’s obvious, but it seems like a new idea to author James Surowiecki). Surowiecki is sanguine about the fact that governments intentionally manipulate the market, despite the fact that, as his lead example of Merkel and the Greek Euro shows, they often do so ineptly and damagingly.
Most of Surowiecki’s article simply states the obvious, but it also states the wrong, as when it says this (emphasis mine):
The economic downturn and the debt crisis have given us instead a world where governments are among the most important players in markets—injecting money into economies on a colossal scale and routinely propping up, or even nationalizing, troubled companies.
As a result, investors have a vast range of new things to worry about, like voter sentiment in Westphalia. They have to try to figure out whether policymakers will do things they shouldn’t, like slash spending during a downturn, and not do what they should, which is to intervene promptly when systemic crises appear.
In other words, Surowiecki is saying that the best way to prop up a falling market is through “stimulus” plans — that is, increasing, or at least maintaining, high government spending. That’s a Keynesian truism that’s guided liberals for decades — except that it’s wrong.
To the surprise of everyone in the Ivory Tower, actual real world data shows that, the more government spends, the more businesses retrench rather than joining the spending party. Business people understand what liberal policy wonks don’t: all that spending has to be paid for by taxes; all those taxes suck money out of the economy; and an economy with no money is a perilous business environment. The best way to keep a falling economy stable is to give money back to the people, not suck it further into the government’s maw.
I’m not a gambler by nature, and playing the stock market, as opposed to investing in it for the long haul, strikes me as the biggest gamble of them all — especially when the movers and thinkers aren’t moving or thinking very well.
Related posts:
- Conventional wisdom versus facts
- Bumper Sticker Wisdom
- A microcosm of everything that’s wrong with too much government
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I propose that another way to put it is that businesses know we are deep, deep into “Black Swan” territory because government interventions and political mishaps have vastly increased the risk factors in the economy. These are very dangerous times.
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp/1400063515
My husband is hoping that I can put my prodigious knowledge of the news to work by predicting movement in the stock market.
I hope he will soon acknowledge that is why you became a conservative!
A book I read a long time ago – and seem to have loaned and lost – was “Heads You Win, Tails You Win”. It proposed a method of investing that was based on buying stocks in companies when the price earning ratio* was acceptable and holding them. As the company grew, the value of your stocks grew. He considered buying and selling as reliable as Las Vegas casinos. In choosing your companies, you should be able to evaluate the company’s product based on your own personal knowledge and expertise. Your knowledge can be based on what you work with, or a hobby, or some other particular interest, but you should know the product. Then you need to learn about their management. If they have good management, then you invest, if not, then you avoid. If the product is sound and if the company is sound, then if the stock drops, you buy more of it. If problems develop in either product or management, then you sell. You also sell if the stock reaches a target price that you have established – usually determined by the price/earning ratio.
It isn’t fast, but it’s usually steady. If your husband wants fast growth, fine – but it comes with a price! All you have to do is watch some of the blogs that specialize in stocks to get an idea of how big a price that can be!
The father in law of one of my sons is retired and apparently doing what amounts to day trading. My son says he seems to be doing well at it. That’s great – but from what he says, it’s a full time job. Who’s going to taxi the kids around for you!!!
Another interesting method/book is “Dogs of the Dow”. You might find that worth considering. It’s also a website, but the website doesn’t give you much info about the method. The book isn’t very thick – and actually could be even thinner – but I guess they figured a 3 chapter book on how to invest wouldn’t really sell too well!
*Price earning ratio he recommended for buying was no more than 4/1 (price of stock was 4 times what the company earned on a per share basis). That’s _way_ out of line with what stocks are doing today. I don’t even know if the method would work today – the prices are so out of line. That tells you something, but unfortunately, I don’t know what. It does, however, give you a single measuring stick to consider when you contrast and compare.
Amazing what a grip Keynes has on the leftist imagination. I suggest a new conventional wisdom: be suspicious of any economic policy that justifies self-indulgence.
See if you can get him to read this:
http://market-ticker.denninger.net/archives/2362-Amusing-Nonsense-Speculation.html
It will likely send him into the basement – if you have one – to start digging a safe hole in which to hide what you still have!
John Maynard Keynes was certainly a genius – Churchill thought his brain was absolutely gigantic (and he intimidated the hell out of Churchill – no small feat in itself) – but there was, and is, one problem with what came out of his mouth, and with what has become known as Keynesian thought: it flies in the face of reality; he was hardly ever right; and his devotees since have hardly ever been right.
But as Keynes was a gigantic intellect, so he was also a gigantic ego. Being incorrect never seemed to bother him, just as it has apparently never bothered (or shut up) any of his acolytes since his death. He was the originator, and this is the original ‘to hell with your facts!’ crowd. (Think Linus and Lucy.) Sadly, Churchill fell for the economist double-talk, agreed with him that he was brilliant, and the two of them put the British Empire in its grave. So, what history teaches us is that while the two of them may not have been watching what was going on, someone was certainly watching what was actually transpiring in the real world. Bye-bye, Rule Britannia.
Surowiecki is a good example, and is plainly an avowed Keynesian. (At least, to whatever extent he understands Keynes – probably not very far – he is.) He gets the main point: government runs everything, though I suspect he cannot tell you why Keynes said that should be so. He agrees completely that government should spend more rather than retrenching in a time such as this. He says this (so did Keynes) despite the plain evidence right in front of his eyes that the ‘stimulus’ and other related government spending is not working, has not worked, shows no signs of working, and historically has never worked. (To such an extent that even other economic geniuses like Reid and Nutsy from the Bay Area have noticed it didn’t work, so their solution is to have another ‘stimulus,’ do it again – only bigger. That’ll do it!)
The issue that these geniuses all forget is that government has no money. It can only get money in three ways: it can print more – to the point where it’s devalued and worthless; or it can steal it from the citizenry via taxes; or it can find some suckers and borrow it. Governments do not originate a cent of their own, their nature is parasitic. Therefore, when a genius such as Keynes opines that government should be spending more when the economy is producing less, and money is harder to come by, the immediate question that leaps to mind (or ought to leap to mind, [but we'll except Surowiecki, demonstrably an idiot]) is: ‘where ya gonna get it?’ You can print it, which lowers its value – and which we’ve been doing. You can steal it from the people, far too many of whom are already in trouble themselves (as it is, 10% of the people pay 95% of the taxes – something democrats seem never to understand), and which we are preparing to do by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire; or you can sell yourself to someone else. (In our case this would be China – in Britain’s case it was us.)
Britain, under the guidance of the two geniuses Churchill and Keynes, went in one generation from being the world’s banker to being buried under their own debt. The two of them guided the British Empire straight into the ground – a somewhat oversimplified but awfully hard to disprove statement.
Could make you – not if you’re a Keynesian, of course – begin to wonder about what the hell we’ve been doing to ourselves, and how different our path is looking. There are of course many differences between the British Empire and our own – a big one being that we tend to control by means other than marching in and physically taking over, which was how colonies were acquired in the 1700s – but a map of American bases around the world would not – and does not – look fundamentally different than a map of British bases and coaling stations around the world from the 1890s.
And of course not that long ago we were the world’s banker. And now…?
Before you think about the return ON your money, you must ensure the return OF your money. In normal times, you are pretty much assured the return OF all or most of your money in sound investments. But, these are not normal times. Not when you have the national government nationalizing huge companies, and telling bond holders “tough.” IMO the only sane thing to do was get out of the market until reason, and law returns, and I did.
Keynes looks fine on a blackboard. Govt takes money from A, and spends it with B. B spends it again with C & D, who spend it again with E, F, G, H, & I, and so on, with each transaction giving the economy a little boost. They call it the Multiplier Effect.
But there is one, HUGE problem with it. It assumes that A stores his money in shoebox on the shelf of his bedroom closet. That is, Keynes assumes that his money isn’t doing anything.
But, it IS. A’s money is already IN the economy! It’s being spent on A’s groceries, or it’s in his checking account being lent out by A’s bank to other people who will ALSO spend it! ALREADY!!!!
Studies have already shown that such Keynesian govt spending is a net DRAG on the economy, because the govt is so inefficient (duh!). It pays people to shuffle the money around the bureaucracy which produces no economic benefit — simply a transfer — so there is a multiplier effect alright — a NEGATIVE one.
Doing this is like trying to replenish a lake in a drought. You take a bucket out to the end of a dock where the water is still deep, fill the bucket, walk back toward the shallow end — spilling some water on the dock which evaporates — and then pouring the water into the dried mud at the edge of the lake. At Harvard they think this is filling up the lake.
The money TAKEN from A is money that WOULD have been spent and multiplied ANYWAY. The govt taking it and spending it instead has NO net effect in an ideal system, and a net NEGATIVE effect in the real system. A can’t spend it + govt spends it = 0 gain in an ideal system.
The only thing that WILL fill up the lake is the real magic of Capitalism — profit — which is NOT stealing, or over charging, but rather a measure of efficiency: I am happy to pay you a profit to grow my food, so I am free to drive my truck — which you are happy to pay me a profit to do — hauling your produce to market. We both profit, and that is in real money, because that money represents REAL VALUE, not toy money. You can grow more food, because I haul it, and I can spend all my time hauling it because you grow it. We pay each other a profit, AND we’re both better off.
That’s what they don’t get at Harvard. Or, it’s what they don’t like, because they can’t control all that free enterprise. All those dumb yokels out there making the country work. Absolutely shocking.
Another footnote:
http://bisonrma.blogspot.com/2010/05/counterfeits.html
It will likely send him into the basement – if you have one – to start digging a safe hole in which to hide what you still have!
Basement. I am considering a bunker.
Can’t decide if this is on or off topic, it is certainly ‘off’ the wall.
“It’s time for the federal government to put BP under temporary receivership, which gives the government authority to take over BP’s operations in the Gulf of Mexico until the gusher is stopped”.
http://robertreich.org/post/650145579/why-obama-should-put-bp-under-temporary-receivership
Oh right. What a wonderful idea! Right now, BP has more or less…complete liability. But let’s get the government to take over so that the Feds can get in on sharing liability. And of course, the Feds have all sorts of experts in deep sea oil drilling just standing around waiting to get their hands on this.
By the way… There was apparently a worse spill some years ago. Mexico never paid damages for that one… (there’s a link imbedded to the Ixtoc spill)
http://sweetness-light.com/archive/obama-might-not-plug-hole-until-august
the Feds have all sorts of experts in deep sea oil drilling just standing around waiting to get their hands on this.
Federal officials are hoping Cameron can help them come up with ideas on how to stop the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, officials said today.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/bp_engineers_prepare_for_next_bid_jLKPp5hCT2AWvVNl6Byv7N#ixzz0pe4cOvGT
You can almost see the marquee: Plug the damn hole !
I disagree with Robert Reich that BP should be put under receivership.
However, the oil spill *is* a disaster that the federal government can take jurisdiction over. According to Reich, the Obama Administration right now is “powerless”, and all power and decisions are in BP’s hands. That, to me, is completely unacceptable. This spill has serious and severe ramifications to our national interests and it is entirely appropriate, to me, that our national government be capable of seizing the power necessary to force solutions.
There is something seriously wrong if our national government completely lacks the capability to step in via some sort of authority mechanism, and demand action. Is receivership REALLY the only possible way to accomplish that? That makes absolutely no sense to me at all. Something is very wrong with this picture.
If you are following the other ‘Gulf’ war -Obama vs BP
I would be remiss not to link this site. I am technically challenged and found the information from reader’s responses, who seem to know what they are talking about, informative.
http://climateaudit.org/2010/05/30/the-bp-oil-spill-response-plan/#comments
Mike: You are, of course, right — except the admin needs the cover of “BP did it,” and ”we can’t do anything because / until whatever” to distance themselves from this mess. With them, the buck stops anywhere but with them.
>>However, the oil spill *is* a disaster that the federal government can take jurisdiction over.>>
I think I disagree with this … I think I’d let BP handle the spill. I’d say “Get out of the way and let them plug the hole. _Then_ let the Feds get busy and see what they can do to help clean up the mess. And send the bill to BP. In fact, they could start cleaning the mess now – but leave BP alone to get the darn thing stopped. I don’t think the Feds have the ability to do that….
Interestingly, Keynes made (and lost and made) a fortune speculating. He was a better investor than economist.
He did utter one eternal verity of investing: “The markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”. That came to mind the other day when I was cleaning my office and stumbled across an essay that I had saved from late 2002, according to the printer’s time stamp. There, in the margins, were my scribbled notations to short the housing stocks: Lennar, KB Homes, Ryland, Pulte, Toll Brothers, etc. Good thing I didn’t: the market didn’t crash for another 4 years. Of course, I didn’t short it much in 2006 either.
Here are a few other general truths to keep in mind:
The function of the market is to distribute money from the many to the few. It has to be that way, because not everyone can get rich. Since most people lose money trading, you have to act unlike most people. Which means that you have to act counter to your own normal human nature — very hard to do consistently. That is the best argument for employing a well defined, systematic strategy — something like Atul Gwande’s idea of a checklist.
The only problem is that no investment formula works all the time. You will certainly miss opportunities. There are few things harder to bear in life than hearing that your brother in-law is making a fortune in internet stocks flipping properties day trading, you name it.
And if your formula does begin to work all the time, beware! The market is about to change. There is a macro-form of the Heisenberg principle at work. Remember Buffett’s maxim: “innovators, imitators, idiots”.
Even buy and hold is suspect due to survivorship bias. How many original Dow stocks are still in the index? (I believe that only GE has persisted.) Yes, American equities as a whole have historically returned about 8% per annum since 1900, but what about Europe? Or Argentina in 1900, which, from an investment standpoint, looked equally promising as the U.S.?
There are no guarantees and despite the necessity of following a formula, there is no escaping the role of judgment — which brings us full circle back to the unchanging vicissitudes of human nature.
Try to make sure that math is on your side: minimize transaction costs and avoid big losses. If you lose 10%, it takes 11% to break even. Lose 25%, and you need a return of 33% to recoup. Lose 50%, and you’ve got to double your money (100%) to get back. Hard to do.
And yet you’ve got to lose money to make money — even more: contra human nature, you’ve got to learn to love taking a loss! Why? Because the attempt to avoid taking a small loss inexorably turns it into the BIG one, the point of no return. Contrariwise, you’ve got to let your profits run, i.e. keep them at risk — very uncomfortable. Getting in is easy, getting out is hard.
And yet…as Mark Twain said, there are two times in a man’s life when he should speculate: when he can’t afford it, and when he can. It is NOT impossible to trade or invest profitably, contrary to the academic fools who believe in the efficient market theory, just damned difficult and filled with perpetual uncertainty.
It sounds like an oxymoron, but there is such a thing as prudent speculation. It begins with a plan. If you can do it, and enjoy it, more power to you.
Since I began with Keynes, I shall end with two quotes by him:
“Even outside the field of finance, Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be; and this national weakness finds its nemesis in the stock market.”
“The game of investment is intolerably boring and over-exacting to any one who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct; whilst he who has it must pay to this propensity the appropriate toll.”
I think ultimately the oil spill will probably not be as bad, long-term, as it looks right now. Oil spills are always immediate disasters, but over time less so, because raw crude is indeed a natural substance, and over the tens of millions of years it’s been around, nature has proved equal to dealing with it.
Which is not to say it’s a good thing, and not to say it shouldn’t be plugged as soon as possible. But it is to recognize that the world is full of natural seeps that have been putting oil on the surface – and in the sea – for a very long time. So far they seem to think about 30 million gallons have spilled in this current mess, which is horrid - but the world spills 250 million gallons into the seas every year through leaks, accidents, etc., and the planet itself burps out another few million in natural seeps. It isn’t good – but it isn’t the end of the world, either.
Ixtoc I spilled a whole lot more than the current Gulf problem, too, as pointed out above. As did the Torrey Canyon, and several other ship disasters, too. (Again, I’m not saying these are good things.)
The federal government’s best response is probably to try and stay out of BP’s way. There is no one in the federal government who knows as much as anyone in any of the major oil companies about handling such a problem, so a non-intervention policy is probably best.
And, maybe, let’s think about letting them drill on land, where this would have been stopped five minutes after it started, or in the shallows, where it would have been stopped in ten. The only difficulty with this is that it’s 5,000 feet down under water, which makes it kind of tricky to even get to, let alone try and solve a problem. We’ve made them work on the absolute outer edges of technology here, and occasionally there’ll be a price for that. Our policy is not terribly smart.
I notice today the government sent Holder and a bunch of lawyers down to Louisiana – that’s certain to be helpful. If that’s their idea of a useful response, then the best thing the government can do to actually solve the problem is shut the **** up, and stay the **** out of the way.
I suspect the European Union is going to break up, and take the Euro with it. At the very least, we’ll see a proliferation of national Euros with different values on the international market (rather the way American, Canadian, and Hong Kong dollars are worth different amounts.)
I’m not at all sure what the impact is going to be, though I have started buying gold.
I’m also keeping an eye on BP, to see how far down its price will get beaten by the oil spill and its fallout. I started buying into Ford last March at $3.70. It’s about quadrupled since then.
Well, all those lawyers probably brought their golf bags, so maybe we can try “plug[ging] the damn hole” with lawyers and THEIR golf balls.
Danny,
As usual, you were there firstest with the mostest. I agree regarding “Black Swan” risk. Taleb, the author, recommends a “barbell” strategy: 90-95% of your investments in the absolutely safest possible asset (for him NOT treasuries) and the remaining 5-10% in way out-of-the-money options to cover wild scenarios.
Thanks, gpc31…you are too kind!
If not short-term treasuries, what’s “safe”? I am totally at a loss here.
I am also betting on a major war happening soon…not because of any particular prescience on my part, but because, as Santayana’s cousin noted, “those who learn the lessons of history are doomed to watch others repeat them”. With Obama in charge, the temptations to those that wish us harm will be too great. They must figure that eventually he will be replaced with a real leader.
If history does recycle human folly, I put us at about 1933.
5-10% in way out-of-the-money options to cover wild scenarios
Headlines are nothing but wild scenarios.
We’re heading into tropical storm season with the BP spill sitting in the bulls eye. Mexico succeeded after their second attempt to plug/cap and that took 9 months. Hopefully, they will succeed in August, but that’s several months away.
Who mops up the mess? What companies stand to profit? Or is it a lose/lose. BP stock has dropped 15%. Gold has increased 20% in the past year.
I am also betting on a major war happening soon
I’d would look into what type of companies which made money during the 1930′s.
Danny, good questions. I really don’t know what “safe” means anymore. I do know that Taleb thinks that treasuries are unsafe for at least two reasons: in the long term, the hyperinflationary implications of our massive unfunded liabilities, and in the indeterminate, bolt-from-the-blue time frame, the risk of a failed auction. We are rolling so much short term debt that it almost inevitable that some random event will trigger a failed auction and cause rates to spike.
So, what to do? Everybody’s needs are different and my opinions are no better than most. Accordingly, file this in the FWIW category.
I think that we are in for more deflation until there is a political collapse and a loss of confidence in the regime, at which point the dam will burst and all those printed dollars will cause hyperinflation. Owning treasuries are good during deflation; horrible thereafter. Can’t predict the timing, so am currently long a mix of treasury maturities and I’m looking for long term puts to hedge those bonds. I would be willing to lose the insurance premium paid for those puts, but with the structure that if rates spike to 10% anytime in the next five years should make 5-10x the cost of insurance.
I completely agree with Sadie that today’s “headlines are nothing but wild scenarios”. Unfortunately I agree with you and Sadie that we are in for war, or at the very least, continued wild geo-political and economic volatility.
Last night I started to type in a long post summarizing “Fiscal Crises and Imperial Collapses” by the historian Niall Ferguson, but my computer crashed. Maybe I’ll retry later today.
Hate to have to say this, Sadie, but everybody except democrats already knows who’s going to fix up, clean up, and generally deal with the spill.
H – is for how HELPLESS, which is the government’s position
A – is for ASININE, the government’s position
L – is for the volume of democrat screaming about it, LOUD
L – another one is for Dick Cheney’s LAUGHTER
I – is for the IDIOCY of making companies try to get oil from miles under water
B – is for the inevitable BLOW-UPS it causes
U – is for USELESS, the government’s other policy, right after helpless
R – is for why Obama doesn’t care about Louisiana, the governor’s REPUBLICAN
T – is for TWERP, either our president or our attorney general
O – is for OIL, what it’s all about
N – is for NOTHING, which is what the government can do, and which is why they’ll have to hire Halliburton to make it better. Looking for a stock?
>>Unfortunately I agree with you and Sadie that we are in for war, or at the very least, continued wild geo-political and economic volatility.>>
Who’s left in this mess who has the resources for war? with what goal in mind? Russia??? Iran?? China? Iran is most likely – but other than a war of threat and destruction – how wide can it cast its army? Of course, the wimp in the White House would probably submit to any threat – but the rest of us? I don’t think so…
Still, the idea of starting over with the technology of about 1900 is definitely not appealing. Actually, it might rejuvenate the nation – but the idea is definitely not appealing.
Volatility – a key word when discussing money and investments.
There are, even in the worst of times, some markets that must and do function. If health care reform is or is not repealed with 2010 or 2012 elections, the growing need to administer to the 57 million baby boomers is a market that can’t be overlooked. I have yet to hear of any pharmaceutical companies asking for a bailout. To the contrary, the House would not shorten the length of time regarding patents to 7 years and if I recall they are valid for 12 years. Shorter than the 17 years, from yesteryear.
As always, investments and decisions to make them are ‘age’ related. If you are younger, you will have time to recover from the roller coaster ride. At this point in life, I have little interest in going to the theme park.
My point above was that the national government can’t possibly be “helpless” in the face of the oil gusher. The fishing industries of four states are threatened or already severely harmed, and that makes it an event at least of “interest”. A decision by the national govt to do nothing, to leave it in BP’s hands, is appropriate; but that’s not the same as being “completely helpless”, in the face of obscure laws. I just don’t see “completely helpless” as reality; they’re passing the buck.
JJ’s #24 is awesome. I loved it!
jj – perfecto post! Can’t ya just hear the howling from the Obama supporters.
Well, as a speculation, I see rails as a good investment this election year. Tar and feathers were looking good but while feathers are still a positive, they are having to pay people to pick up tar.
Current events just aren’t a good predictor of the market other than to scare the herd into running about causing volitility. The thing to remember is that for ever loss someone wins. The money is just moving about in, out and around the market.
My invite must have been lost in the mail. Does anyone here have any feedback following past meetings?
“That is the thing about the Bilderberg group’s top secret meetings: you never know quite what is going on behind the police checkpoints.
Across the world, secretaries to the rich and the powerful have blocked out the next three days in their bosses’ calendars for their annual gathering, this time at the Dolce in Sitges, one of Spain’s most exclusive resorts”.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article7142478.ece
American Thinker has this interesting read (((sigh))) TGIF.
As the economic crisis approaches the two-year point, it is apparent that “this time is different.” Few analysts believe that we are going to recover from this Great Recession in a fashion that resembles prior recoveries. Most argue about how long it might run (Japan’s recovery is now two decades old), and whether inflation or deflation results. Two years into the problem, these issues are still unclear.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/06/worse_than_a_depression.html
“I keep telling him that the fact that I know what’s happening in the world is entirely separate from my understanding what’s going to happen in the markets.”
Look for the most unregulated business around. They’ll be the ones making the most money, Book, in the long term. Martial arts and self-defense, amazingly, are almost totally unregulated.
Sadie, Demoncrats and Moonbats howl. What else are they going to do at night?
What else are they going to do at night?
I have several suggestions, but I’ll reserve my #@%#’s for another time and place ;
You don’t have to give up your anger, Sadie. Just remember to focus all of it right where it counts when the time comes.
Control is always the key factor. Up against the forces of nature, we must control our surroundings as well as our own actions in order to survive.
But we are not just up against an oil spill. We are also up against Obama and his legion of cult followers. They who pride themselves on manipulating emotions as their weapon of choice in war, should never be underestimated. Self control is your only guaranteed defense against their designs.
Control is always the key factor.
Good advice.
Seize the moment at the right time and control those emotional ‘seizures’ the cult is trying to extract. Now repeat 3x or as needed [Sadie said as she mumbled #@%# under her breath].