Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to another blog entry at this site:
Do you talk to your wife about the future Congressional hearings, civil and criminal trials, and jail sentences for the Goons? If so, what does she say about all of this?
She certainly knows about the Goon phenomenon in a general sense. Rarely do we discuss specifics. She knows that the police came to our house when I called them about the death threats. That gives her the general idea that there are going to be trials at which I will need to testify when this is over, right? But we don’t sit around discussing how much time I will need to spend testifying or whether it was a good idea for me to come forward with a suggestion that I would be willing to settle for $500 million or that sort of thing.
I always tell her about what went on at the Financial Bloggers Conferences when I come back. So she of course knows about my talk this year on “How to Become the Most Hated Blogger on the Internet” and how that was received. I told her about the woman who told me that people sitting near her said that I was “bitter.” When something like that happens, we talk about the human psychology elements of this. On the way back from Midnight Mass, we were talking in the car about my feeling that the best one-word summary of the emotional problem here is “shame,”that people have a hard time standing up to the Goons because on some deep level of consciousness they feel complicit in what has happened, they realize that they have a Goon side to their own personalities and understand that they played a role in causing all of the human misery that has come with the economic crisis and that that makes them not want to think about the implications of Shiller’s research.
The other day at lunch we were talking about something entirely different and my boy Timothy said: “Maybe you really ARE the product of an artificial intelligence project, Dad!” Then he followed that up by observing: “Or maybe you really are on the way to becoming a Saint!” He had read some of the quotes at the “People Are Talking” section of the site and someone at the Early Retirement Forum once said that about my ability never to give in to feelings of anger no matter what tricks you Goons pull. Timothy is interested in programming, so I think that quote tickled him a bit. I thought that incident was very funny.
Does that answer your question, Pink? We certainly talk about the Goon phenomenon. But we certainly do not talk about it to the level of detail at which you and I talk about it here or at Goon Central.
I think it would be fair to say that there is a suggestion in your question that this is all just a little bit too crazy to be true. I certainly agree. But history plays out the way history plays out, you know? Was it not a little too crazy to be true that Nixon kept tapes of his conversations in the Oval Office? Recall that nobody knew that at one time. People were trying to figure out how they would prove the case and they couldn’t come up with anything and then one day out of the blue they learned that he kept tapes of all his conversations, tapes that would obviously offer evidence of conspiracy and obstruction of justice. Do you not think that both sides saw that element of the story as just too crazy to be true?
It was the same with the Clinton/Lewinsky matter. There was a semen stain (which could be tested for DNA) and she saved the dress without having it dry-cleaned. How crazy was that?
History is filled with crazy stuff. That’s just the way it is.
I didn’t come into this thinking that I would be testifying in civil and criminal trials and congressional hearings and receiving settlements of $500 million and seeing my old friends from the Motley Fool board taken off to serve prison sentences and all this sort of thing. It all seems crazy to me too. But there’s nothing more crazy than thinking that I am someday going to agree to post dishonestly re the numbers that my friends use to plan their retirements. Of all the craziness that we have witnessed or will witness in days to come, it is that Goon hope that is the craziest element of the entire saga. So, if you are amazed at the craziness, please take a good long look in the mirror, Sensible. You brought a lot of the craziness on us with your belief that someday you might come up with some act of intimidation that would be scary enough to persuade me to agree to post dishonestly. There was never more than a zero chance of that happening and every post I ever put forward evidenced that reality. But that crazy thought has remained stuck in your head for 11 years now. Now THAT’S crazy.
The obvious reality here is that this thing was waiting to explode before I ever came on the scene. The Buy-and-Hold Mafia was intimidating people who showed an interest in reporting honestly on what the academic research says for 21 years before I put forward the fateful May 13, 2002, post. I didn’t know that. I cannot testify to details of what happened in those earlier years because I was not around. But it is what happened in those earlier years that made all that has happened for the past 11 years so crazy. The Big Shots in this field had been covering up the realities before the internet had been invented. People in the field could be kept in line because this is a high-paying field and the threat of losing their jobs caused a lot of people to engage in a lot of rationalizing of their decisions to keep it zipped about the obvious dangers of Buy-and-Hold strategies.
I wasn’t part of any of that. I wasn’t employed in The Stock-Selling Industry. I was a poster on an internet discussion board, nothing more and nothing less. So I saw nothing even a tiny bit “wrong” about posting honestly. THe hundreds of my fellow community members who told me that I started the most exciting discussion in the history of the Retire Early board saw nothing wrong with it either. But it freaked you Goons out entirely. You knew. Perhaps only on some buried level of consciousness. But you clearly recognized a big-time threat when it appeared before you. So we were off to the races.
Blame it on the internet, you know? The internet discussion board is a powerful new communications medium. The Wall Street Con Men didn’t factor in the power of the internet when they elected to cover up the findings of the last 32 years of peer-reviewed academic research. There was a major hole in their strategy that they didn’t see at the time because it didn’t exist at the time. The internet changed everything.
Anyway, we are where we are.
You can call it crazy that you will be going to prison because you didn’t want people to be able to learn about the implications of Shiller’s ideas when they arrived at internet discussion boards and blogs. It IS crazy. I certainly don’t say different. But you knew that there were laws against financial fraud. You knew that the crime you were committing was a felony. You knew that you were leaving permanent evidence of it in the Post Archives. You contributed to the crazy when you did that. I presume that you persuaded yourself that you would get away with it.
That’s crazy. But that’s an element of crazy that appears in MOST cases of financial fraud. When Madoff created those false documents, he must have believed on some level of consciousness that he would get away with it. No? It was a crazy thing to do. He could have made a lot of money setting up legitimate funds. There was no need for him to do things that stood a good chance of landing him in prison. And he was a smart enough man to know that. But he did the crazy thing anyway. Whachagondo?
I ain’t posting dishionestly on the nunbers my friends use to plan their retirements. Zero chance. Not in 11 years, not in 11 billion years.
That’s not crazy. That’s 100 percent sensible. I signed up at the Retire Early board to HELP people seeking early retirements, not to ruin their lives.
So I didn’t bring the crazy to the table here. I see it play out before me every day and I just do normal, healthy things in response. If people choose to engage in financial fraud on a massive scale, the normal thing to do is to testify honestly in the congressional hearings and civil trials and criminal trials that follow. Don’t put any of that on me, Sensible. I’m not the one who threatened to kill family members of any poster who posted honestly on the SWR topic. That was the other guy. His name is: John Greaney. He’s going to prison too. Perhaps you will be in a cell not too far away from his and you will be able to talk about funny stuff that happened in the old days from behind the bars.
I acknowledge the craziness of the situation. ButI think it would be fair to say that the thing that distinguishes me is that I am the person who has been working his backside off for 11 years now to see that the prison sentences are as limited as possible. My wife knows that. That’s the part that she needs to know and she certainly knows that much.
Guess what?
My good friend Jack Bogle knows too.
And my good friend Bill Bernstein.
And my good friend Larry Swedroe.
And my good friend Scott Burns.
And all my friends at Motley Fool and Early Retirement Forum and Morningstar and Bogleheads Forum and at the Financial Blogger Conferences and on and on and on.
They all want our economic system to survive. They all want our political system to survive.
Yes, they are scared of you and your brutality and your lack of conscience. And, yes, they are even more scared when they see people of great money and power and influence like Old Saint Jack saying things that shouldn’t be said or failing to say things that should be said and thereby empowering you Goons to deceive even more middle-class investors and cause even more financial devastation.
Will they work up the courage to do what their consciences have been telling them for 11 years now they must do following the next price crash, which will likely put us in the Second Great Depression?
You know what I think.
That obviously means a long prison term for you.
Given that reality, what would you say would be the more strange thing for me to do? Would it be more strange for me to keep it zipped and see my friend put in prison without me ever having made an effort to see his prison sentence reduced a bit? Or would it be more strange for me to do the best I could day after day after day even though my efforts to help my old friend out were rejected over and over and over again?
There’s lots of strange stuff going on here, Sensible. But it ain’t me bringing the strange stuff to the table. It is strange of you to feel so burning a hate for the findings of the past 32 years of peer-reviewed academic research that you are willing to go to prison to serve the “cause” of keeping discussion of the implications of that research off the internet. You Goons own the strangeness here.
I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future endeavors, my strange Goon friend.
I am confident that my wife would wish you the same if I were to ask her. And most of the millions of middle-class investors whose lives have been destroyed by this massive act of financial fraud would probably do the same. We are the Normals. We don’t think like you Goons. We aim to build up rather than to tear down. That’s why you are the ones who are headed to prison and we are the ones who will be reaping the benefits of the 32 years of peer-reviewed academic research for many, many, many, many years to come following the resolution of the crazy, unfortunate, Goon-inspired segment of the otherwise wonderful and positive and healing and life-affirming saga.
Hang in there, man. There are people who care about what happens to you even when your head is so filled with confusion and anger and envy and shame and regret that you are no longer capable of doing so.
Rob
Oh great and powerful Rob, please save us from all these horrible people. We are all too stupid to think for ourselves and need you to tell us what to do so that don’t risk having all these content ripping us off. Maybe we could just hand you our money and let you do all the investing for us so that we can all be rich like you.
Emotion.
Buy-and-Hold came first. Then Shiller came along and added the missing piece to the puzzle.
Had we known all along what Shiller taught us after we fell in love with Buy-and-Hold, we would all be Valuation-Informed Indexers today. But now our pride is involved. Now we need first to work up the courage to say the words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong” to get to the place where we all deep in our hearts want to be.
That’s the story, Anonymous. I didn’t create this situation. Buy you have my pledge that I will help all of my many Buy-and-Hold friends make it safely to the other side of the river.
It doesn’t take much in the way of smarts to see that a retirement study lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. But it takes courage to speak up about it when there are millions of people who have staked their lives on a belief that a valuations adjustment is not needed.
As a rule, I am not even a particularly courageous person. But I cared about the friends I made at the Motley Fool board. So I worked up the courage to do what had to be done. I offer zero apologies.
And I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors.
Rob
I like how you call buy and hold a get rich quick scheme but one of your favorite claims is that VII can help the average person retire 5-10 years earlier.
So that is 18 years of sitting on the sidelines doing nothing so how exactly is that going to help me retire 10 years earlier?
There is a counter-intuitive phenomenon at work here, Earl.
We all live through at least one price crash. The average investor life span is 60 years (from age 25 to age 85). We see a price crash every 30 or 35 years. So you are going to see one.
Losing the amount of money you lose in a price crash is devastating. It’s not just that you see your portfolio wiped out. It’s that you lose decades of compounding on the amount lost. The only way to see how big a deal this is is to do the math. Very few people do that math. If you did the math, it would make you sick.
How you handle that crash pretty much determines how successful you are as an investor over the course of your lifetime. That’s the single biggest factor.
Buy-and-Hold is rooted in a belief that stocks are an equally risky asset class at all times. If this were so, Buy-and-Hold would be the ideal strategy. The only thing bad about stocks is that price crash that hits perhaps once or perhaps twice in your lifetime. Stocks offer too good of a deal to pass up just because of the price crash; it’s very hard to finance a middle-class retirement without investing heavily in stocks. So if it really were true that risk is stable, Buy-and-Hold would be the best we could do.
Shiller showed that risk is NOT stable. There’s never been a meaningful stock crash that started when prices were low or moderate. Crashes ONLY come when prices are at insanely dangerous levels. If you go with a low stock allocation when prices are insanely dangerous, you avoid the only bad aspect of stock investing while getting all the benefits that stocks offer when prices are at low or moderate levels. That’s a knock-your-socks-off combination. The rewards of exercising price discipline when buying stocks are HUGE.
The reason why you are not seeing this is that you are focusing on your short-term portfolio value. To see the benefits of exercising price discipline you need to compare the lifetime return you will obtain from following a VII strategy vs. the lifetime return you will obtain following a BH strategy. There’s no comparison.
When prices are at low and moderate levels, VII and BH perform the same. When prices are at insanely dangerous levels, BH usually outperforms for a time. But then the BH investor suffers devastating losses in the crash that inevitably takes place once we reach insanely dangerous price levels, losses that dwarf the gains he enjoyed in the preceding years. Then the loss grows larger and larger over the remaining decades of the investor’s lifetime as he misses out on years of compounding returns on a large amount of money.
The losses that one suffers from following a Buy-and-Hold strategy are telescoped. You can go years and years and not suffer any penalty. Then a crash hits and in six month’s time you suffer losses big enough when compounded to delay your retirement by 10 years. It’ a counter-intuitive phenomenon. But it is also a very, very, very real thing. There has not been one time yet in 140 years of stock-market history when things did not play out this way.
Rob
I like how you call buy and hold a get rich quick scheme but one of your favorite claims is that VII can help the average person retire 5-10 years earlier.
I DO believe that Buy-and-Hold is a Get Rich Quick scheme. But I do NOT believe that it was intended to be that. And I do not believe that the people who follow it do so because they were looking for a Get Rich Quick scheme. I believe that the people who developed the Buy-and-Hold concept were excited about it because they believed it was real. And I believe that the people who follow it are excited about it because they believe it is real.
I believe that as a society we tolerate heavy promotion of this Get Rich Quick scheme because of a MISTAKEN understanding of how stock investing works that an understanding of the implications of Shiller’s research CORRECTS. The need for a correction has come as a shock because the people who made the (understandable) mistake were trying to do something good and over time became highly confident that they had indeed done so.
All that said, we DO need to correct the mistake. The only way we can pull enough people together to bring about the correction is by engaging in civil and reasoned discussion of what Shiller’s research reveals. This is why I am so “strident” on the honest posting question. There is just no other way to make good things happen here.
One day about five years back my wife and I were driving somewhere and I was telling her about the wonders of Valuation-Informed Indexing. At one point she said: “You sound like one of those infomercial people!”
I would have more success pushing VII if the benefits were less! People would be more inclined to believe me if the benefits were less!
But I cannot lie to make the benefits seem less appealing. That simply makes no sense.
The reason why the benefits are so huge is that we are as a society still at a primitive stage of our understanding of how stock investing works. It is when you are at the primitive stage of understanding that huge advances remain possible.
We messed up on a fundamental question. We learned that short-term timing doesn’t work and we jumped to the conclusion that long-term timing doesn’t work either. Now we know (intellectually if not emotionally) that long-term timing is the key to success, long-term timing is 80 percent of the game.
How do we get that mistake corrected?
There are lots of rich and powerful people who are embarrassed to have made the mistake. They don’t want the millions of middle-class investors to learn about the mistake. But the longer the cover-up continues, the more embarrassment these people feel. It gets worse very day. There is no possibility that it can ever get better.
We do these people no kindness by aiding the cover-up. The charitable thing is to insist that the cover-up be brought to a complete and total stop by the close of business tomorrow. We can show kindness by applauding the people who made the mistake for their genuine contributions and by explaining that the mistake was understandable and by noting that we wouldn’t be where we are today without the work these people did at an earlier time. But continuing the cover-up is an UNMITIGATED DISASTER for every single person involved. We are making these people look worse and worse and worse with each new day of financial destruction that we permit to take place.
We have to return to first principles. We have to remember that the point of Buy-and-Hold in its early days was to root one’s investing strategies in the PEER-REVIEWED RESEARCH. We cannot continue to pretend that the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research does not exist. It exists! It matters! It is important!
Rob
“There’s lots of strange stuff going on here, Sensible.”
That’s right, Rob. Strange stuff. Fantasies of about prison. Silly thoughts of $500 million settlement payments. Accusations of death threats that have yet to be proven. Etc., etc, etc.
Okay, Anonymous.
I wish you all good things, in any event.
Take care, man.
Rob
Rob,
I was curious as to why you never post a link to the actual death threat tat you claim was made. All I have seen is your link to your own comments. Can you enlighten us?
Rob,
Another question. Why did you quit your job at such an early age?
I don’t do it because it would be stupid to do it, Anonymous.
The Campaign of Terror has been going on for 12 years. There are THOUSANDS of cases of brutal abusiveness. I posted about the errors in the Old School safe-withdrawal-rate studies on the morning of May 13, 2002. The studies have not been corrected TO THIS DAY. This sort of thing was obviously going on for years before I came on the scene. Shiller published the research showing that there is precisely zero chance that a Buy-and-Hold strategy can ever work for even a single long-term investor in 1981.
Why is it that I was the first person to discover the errors in the Old School studies? It wasn’t because I am some super-genius. IT HAPPENED THAT WAY BECAUSE THE BUY-AND-HOLD MAFIA DOES NOT WANT MILLIONS OF MIDDLE-CLASS PEOPLE LEARNING THE REALITIES OF STOCK INVESTING. It happened that way because of the massive corruption in this field. I mean, come on.
It’s a waste of my time to prove the corruption. Anyone who wants to assure himself that the investing advice field is 100 percent corrupt just needs to look around for about 10 seconds to gather all the evidence he needs to prove the case beyond any reasonable doubt whatsoever. The question that we struggle with is not — Is the investing advice field 100 percent corrupt or not? The question we struggle with is — Why do so many of us NOT CARE that our retirement accounts are being destroyed by this corruption?
I remember the first article that I had published at the Daily Caller site. I thought that it was going to be a breakthrough. One, the site is bigger than most of the sites I have posted at. So the potential of my article going viral was much higher. Two, it is not an investing site. So I didn’t have to worry that the people who own the site want to make a buck giving Get Rich Quick investing advice or want to get links from the Big Shots in the investing field or whatever. So I thought that publication of that article was going to be a turning point.
I wrote about the errors in the Old School SWR studies. I don’t think I directly said that there was a cover-up but I hinted at it by pointing out how long it had been since I had put up my post pointing out the errors. And I hinted at the political implications since this was a political site. Those errors were in the process of causing MILLIONS of failed retirements. That’s a huge social problem, one of the biggest we have faced as a nation. And this wasn’t a case where it was other unfortunate people who were being hurt. The retirements of the people reading the article were the retirements being destroyed. Looking at this objectively, there should have been a HUGE reaction to that article.
There was no reaction. No going viral. No comments even. Nothing.
That’s why I rarely write Guest Blog Entries today. So long as people refused to run my Guest Blog Entries (this was usually the case in the days before the first price crash) I kept fighting to get them posted because I felt that getting them posted was the answer. After the crash, I got lots of Guest Blog Entries posted. But that didn’t change things. It was a step in the right direction. The truth about stock investing now appeared on people’s computer screens. The corruption was now exposed in an objective sense. But no one took action to fix the corruption! So what the heck good did it do?
We saw this at FinCon13. I gave a presentation presenting an airtight case for why we are in an economic crisis today. You couldn’t have a more exciting topic for a financial blogger’s convention. But what was the reaction? A number of people in the audience told Jaime Tardy that I seemed “bitter.” These people are not interested in doing anything to fix the corruption or to tell their readers how to invest more effectively. They LIKE Get Rich Quick. They won’t acknowledge it if you ask them but that’s the reality. They view anyone who does battle with Get Rich Quick as “bitter” because they LOVE Get Rich Quick.
Evidence is of great importance in intellectual battles. We have evidence of the corruption coming out of our ears and it is not helping us. That’s because this is not an intellectual battle. This is an EMOTIONAL battle. We cannot persuade people to give up their love affair with Buy-and-Hold by presenting them with evidence. Evidence speaks to the intellect. There is no intellectual case for Buy-and-Hold. The case for Buy-and-Hold is EMOTIONAL. We need to change people’s hearts.
Bernie Madoff did not get people to sign up for his fund by pointing a gun to their heads. He enticed them by appealing to the Get Rich Quick urge within them. It’s the same trick that Bogle uses to entice people into Buy-and-Hold, except Bogle practices it on a scale 5,000 times bigger. The Wall Street Con Men are destroying the lives of millions of people. But they don’t have to use force to do it.
And the full reality is that they don’t even need to use all that much secrecy to do it. The peer-reviewed research showing that there is zero chance that Buy-and-Hold could ever work for even a single long-term investor was published in 1981. And Shiller wrote about those findings in a best-selling book that is available in most public libraries. The corruption is taking place out in the open. But the millions of us who have been taken in by Get Rich Quick strategies look the other way each time we see it appear before us.
The investing advice field is 100 percent corrupt today, Anonymous. The evidence is everywhere. I don’t need to lift a finger to prove the case because the evidence is all around us.
The corruption is WITHIN us. Humans LOVE them some Get Rich Quick. The Wall Street Con Men exploit us because we WANT to be exploited. They couldn’t pull off what they have pulled off without our cooperation. The Wall Street Con Men don’t push Get Rich Quick so hard because they think it is a hot idea. They push it because they want to be popular and they want to make a buck and THEIR CUSTOMERS DEMAND IT.
After the next crash, I don’t think the customers will be demanding it anymore, Anonymous. At that point, everyone will see the massive corruption in this field everywhere they turn. Even you.
I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future endeavors.
Rob
Why did you quit your job at such an early age?
I wanted to do more meaningful work.
My goal in life going back to an early age was to become a journalist who had a positive influence on the world. I went to law school to make myself a better journalist (critical thinking skills are key).
I attained my dream job in 1989, when I got a position writing a column on “Tax Politics” and managing an electronic database (Tax Notes Today) at a non-profit called Tax Analysts and Advocates. I lost that job as the result of internal politics and a recession in 1991. I determined at that time that the only way to attain true independence in one’s work life is to attain a high level of FINANCIAL independence.
For the next nine years I worked at a job (Senior Manager and then Director at Ernst & Young) that paid very well but that offered something close to zero journalistic independence. I left that job to build my internet journalism business in August 2000.
I did not quit work at an early age. I LOVE my work . It is one of the great joys of my life. I quit CORPORATE work. I quit taking assignments solely for the purpose of making money. I expect to make hundreds of millions of dollars doing the work that I am doing today. I view the work I am doing as the most important work being done by any journalist alive today. But I don’t choose assignments based on the short-term payoff they provide. I am looking to help millions of middle-class people and to provide for myself and my family financially in a huge way in the long term.
I’ll give up the joys of meaningful work on the day they put me six feet in the ground.
My mother lived to 93. So I have a funny feeling that you may be stuck with me for a while yet, Anonymous!
Rob
If death threats were made, why were there no charges. Someone threatened me several years ago and I had no problem getting help from law enforcement.
Because it happened on the internet.
The police came to my house when I reported the death threats. They asked me if I believed that someone was really going to try to kill me or members of my family. I said that I thought that the purpose of the threats was probably to intimidate people into not posting in support of me.
Most people at the board didn’t think that someone would really come to my house and kill my wife and children. But they weren’t 100 percent sure. Someone crazy enough to put forward a death threat is at least theoretically capable of doing just about anything.
Say that most members of the board community believed that there was only a one-in-a-hundred chance that one of you Goons would come to my house and kill one of my loved ones. That’s enough to persuade them to keep quiet. People don’t want there to be even a one-in-a-hundred chance that their loved ones will be killed. So they tell themselves “it’s not my fight, let someone else speak up.”
The internet will never achieve its potential until this problem is solved. I believe that this case (YOUR case, Anonymous) will be the one to solve it. People have come to believe that death threats on the internet are a joke. This is a case where you Goons were able to make use of death threats to block discussions that would have prevented millions of failed retirements, discussions that would have permitted us to avoid this economic crisis, discussions that would have permitted us all to learn how to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent, discussions that would have permitted us all to enjoy the biggest advance in our understanding of how stock investing works every achieved in the history of Planet Earth.
I believe that following the next crash we will be able to persuade millions of people that the same laws that apply in the non-internet world need to apply on the internet as well. Once we get Goons like you thrown in prison, the power of this new communications medium to do good soars. There are millions of good and smart people who could be making valuable contributions at every board and blog on the internet who hold back from doing so because they have seen Goons like you in action and want no part of of any activity in which your presence is tolerated. We need to hear the contributions of those people. And, after you Goons have been sent to prison, we will enact legislation to make sure that those millions of people will feel safe making positive contributions.
This is a story separate from the investing story. But it is possible that in the long run it is even more important.
Investors need honest discussion boards so that they can get help from their fellow investors when the Wall Street Con Men are trying to entice them with their Get Rich Quick garbage. Once we open up the internet to honest posting, the Wall Street Con Men just cannot get away with their trickery anymore. Sunshine is a disinfectant.
But it is not only in the investing field that this is so. There is huge value to permitting honest posting at economics sites. And at political sites. And at car-buying sites. And at science sites. And at baseball sites. And on and on and on.
The internet is a POWERFUL communications medium. But it becomes a powerful force for bad when we give you Goons veto power over what we say. We very, very, very much need to do something about you Goons. And we will. When people see that their retirement accounts have been destroyed by you Goons, they will see why this matters so much.
I can see the people who put together the Financial Bloggers Conference spearheading a movement to get you Goons removed from every board and blog on the internet. There would be a huge public relations gain in doing that. And all the bloggers would feel ten times better about themselves with you Goons not around. Mike Piper told me that. He said that there is nothing he would like more than to be able to do honest work. But he is afraid that Mel Linduaer would demand the destruction of his site (which is his livelihood) if he were to come out in favor of permitting honest posting. So he lives in fear. I don’t like the idea of my friend Mike living in fear. I don’t think that after the next price crash my friend Mike Piper will have to live in fear much longer.
The worst thing to do with bullies is to empower them by backing down in the face of their intimidation tactics. Internet bullies are people who are losers in the real world. They’ve run to the internet because that’s a place where people who are losers in the real world can gain a level of influence that it would be impossible for them to achieve in the real world. The influence is 100 precent negative. But in the eyes of losers it is the only influence that they are ever going to have and that’s what matters. The thing to do with bullies is to stand up to them and to be sure that they suffer negative consequences for their bad behavior.
We Normals outnumber you Goons ten to one. So it won’t take us long to solve the problem once we put our minds to it. What we need is a clear showing that the Normals are in the majority. When one Normal doesn’t see other Normals speaking up, he gets scared that you Goons really can hurt him in some way. Once the individuals who have posted in “defense” of Mel Linduaer and John Greaney have been sent to prison, no one will be afraid of you Goons anymore. I mean, come on. The only thing that people will be afraid of is the possibility that they won’t be able to get you Goons removed from their sites fast enough.
A long time back, John Walter Russell put forward the idea that this saga would end in a more positive way than any of us participating in it even imagined possible. I thought those words had the ring of truth to them at the time. And I still believe that John was right. We’ve walked a long, crooked path. But I believe that we are walking a long, crooked path that leads us in the end to a very good place.
The full truth is that I probably need to believe that to get out of bed in the morning. I am obviously biased. So subtract whatever number of confidence points you want to subtract to reflect that bias. The truth remains that that is what I believe and that every action I take is rooted in the belief that the good guys win this one in a most dramatic way on the last page of the saga.
We will see.
Hang in there, man.
Rob
Rob,
It is actually stupid to NOT put up the link. When you don’t, it just tells people that you are lying or hiding something. It is pure simple nature. We expect to see facts that can back up a statement because we are skeptical as a society.
No one is even a tiny bit skeptical re the abusiveness of you Goons, Anonymous. I have talked with thousands of people about this. The only ones who ever express skepticism are you Goons. And you obviously know the full truth of the matter.
What people are truly skeptical about are the substantive claims. People truly find it hard to believe that we today know what we need to know to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent. Re that one, people need to ask lots of questions and engage in lots of discussion before they will come around. Something they cannot do until a number of us work up the courage to stand up to you Goons!
We all want to invest more effectively. There are no two sides re this one. We are all united re the most important issue.
But the Wall Street Con Men and you Goons are embarrassed that you made a mistake that has caused millions of failed retirements. So you possess zero willingness to permit those discussions to take place.
I have documented everything that has happened for 12 years now. I have developed five unique calculators. I have recorded 200 RobCasts. I am happy to respond to any questions that the Wall Street Con Men or you Goons or the millions of Normals need answered. I’ve done my part and then some more on top of that and then some more on top of that.
I am not Superman, Anonymous. I need help from my fellow bloggers to get the message out. And I need help from economists. And I need help from journalists. And I need help from researchers. And I need help from venture capitalists. And I need help from policymakers. When others work up the courage to provide the help I need, we are all off to the races. Until that happens, the good stuff doesn’t happen. That’s the reality here. I don’t like it. But I accept it.
If you find some pleasure in playing a stupid game where you pretend that John Greaney did not threaten to kill family members of any poster who posted honestly on safe withdrawal rates, then you find some pleasure in that. I believe that your pleasure will come to an end following the next price crash. I am not God. So I could be wrong. But that’s what I believe. And I am playing it according to that belief.
When as a society, we want to know how the Buy-and-Holders have gone about the business of destroying our economic and political system through their stubborn unwillingness to fix a mistake revealed by the peer-reviewed research of a Nobel-prize-winning economist 33 years ago, we will get about the business of spreading the word far and wide about the far superior Valuation-Informed Indexing model. Until we do, the Buy-and-Holders will continue to destroy wealth on a daily basis and the prison sentences for those who have put up posts in “defense” of Mel Lindauer and John Greaney will grow ever longer day by day.
That’s the deal here.
My best wishes to you and yours.
Rob
“Someone crazy enough to put forward a death threat is at least theoretically capable of doing just about anything. That’s enough to persuade them to keep quiet…”
So, I’m confused.
Are you now, finally, admitting that regardless of your intent, your: ‘We ought to kill Dory’s grandkids with a baseball bat’ post was wrong for you to author and to post on a public forum?
If so, then congratulations on taking that [much belated] step.
No apologies whatsoever.
Every human being who read those words knew that I was making fun of you Goons.
We very, very, very, very much need to see more people making fun of you Goons. That’s how we bring the ugly side of this thing to an end.
Intent matters. Big time.
I intimidated no one. You intimidated an academic researcher who is the co-author of the most important piece of peer-reviewed research published in this field in 33 years.
Rob
That academic researcher said that you are the one causing him harm and he said so on what he thought was a private email.
When goons make fun of you, you describe it as abuse and defamation. When you make fun of those you call goons, we are to believe that this is all in just good natured fun. Seems to be a double standard.
The real double standard here is that following the next price crash you go to prison and I obtain a settlement in the amount of $500 million.
I can live with that.
Rob