How to buy a glider affordably - redux

Tom's advice:

Don't buy Euros in 11/05, instead buy ContraFund (versus
alternative funds, such as an S&P ETF or Euro-based
index) and wait.

Specific Euro prediction: weakening Euro from $1.20
in 11/05 to $1.10 or $1.05.

Actual performance:

Euro has strengthened from $1.20 to $1.25.

What can I say, I was wrong on where the Euro would end up. I also said
you can go broke trying predict currency exchange rates. My stated
philosophy is to wait until the real invested returns allow you to buy
the glider at what you consider to be an affordable price. Exchange
rates WILL cycle; being patient is what it is all about.


ContraFund: up 10.9% or 9.97% after management expenses
S&P 500 index: up 15.1%
DAX (German market) index: up 28.2%

The S&P 500 did outperform ContraFund over the last year, but FCNTX
handily beat it over a (longer) 3 year period. I realize that a lot of
you regard 1 year as long term, but it isn't.

I said it before, but I guess it just hasn't sunk in: I don't "chase"
returns, I find money managers that are in the top quintile (that is
the top 20%) of their peer group over a long period of time. Relative
performance can vary pretty dramatically over a short period of time.
The S&P 500 has outperformed FCNTX for just the last 6 months.




So if you had taken $100,000 for a new glider (pick
your own number, but this one is nice and round) and
invested it in the ContraFund and taken it out yesterday
to buy Euros you would have 87,644 Euros or a 5% return
after adjusting for exchange rates.

If on the other had you had bought Euros a year ago
and put your money in a no-load DAX index you would
today have 107,017 Euros, or 23% more than under Tom's
strategy. In fact buying Euros and investing in a short-term
money market fund would have done better too.


You are, indeed, extraordinally skillful at predicting the past! Again,
short term time horizons amplify differences in investment strategies,
but give us little insight as to what the future will bring.

Personally, I recommend a minimum of 5 high-grade mutual funds for an
adequately diversified portfolio. And this should include international
exposure, which has outperformed U.S. concentrated mutual funds such as
ContraFund (FCNTX). It is a moot point now because FCNTX is closed to
new investors. For a strategy that relies on mutual fund upgrading
(keeping your portfolio in the top quartile or quintile) go to
http://www.fundx.com. They are now recommending a number of ETFs
(exchange traded funds) such as PWV, EZU FEV and IEV. In practice, I
rebalance my portfolio 3-4 times per year. This process led me to
reduce my holdings in FCNTX, which now represents about 3% of my
holdings. My largest holding is AEPGX (American Funds EuroPacific -
notice the "Euro"), which returned 20% in the last year, followed by
Fidelity Diversified International, which returned 17%. I also own one
fund , Fidelity Latin America (FLATX), that returned 45%, but this is
definitely not one for the faint of heart!

My recommendation regarding FCNTX was based on its outstanding
performance over the long haul (10 years), and that, given the
attention span of the typical glider pilot, I had to limit it to a
single pick. I still believe that 10 years from now it will be a good
choice.

Of course there is still a month to go so maybe the
ContraFund will make a big move, but over the past
12 months (and particularly the past 3 months the ContraFund
has significantly underperformend all the major market
indicies.

This was the point about chasing past returns - anyone
looking at the ContraFund performance up to last November
and deciding to invest with an expectation of above
market returns would have been disappointed.

Credit to Tom for putting his money where his mouth
was and making a prediction - many people don't have
the strength of their convictions. He just didn't turn
out to be right on either count up until now.


The principal of compound rate of return will make me right at some
point in the future. FCNTX's historical return of over 11% means it
will double, by the rule of 77s, in 7 years. And FCNTX is STILL in the
top quintile of its peers, which is why I still own it. But you have to
manage your portfolio; if any funds fall out of the top quantile dump
them and replace it with one that is (and has been over a significant
time period).

BTW: my portfolio returned over 17% in the last year.

Tom

Why would anyone bet on the dollar versus the Euro?! With our deficit
spending the dollar will continue to decline!

Craig

On Oct 27, 1:07 pm, Andy Blackburn
wrote:
FROM 11 MONTHS AGO:

Only point was that one would need to know your predictions
for what to do for, say, the past 10-20 years to know
if your 2005 prediction was good or just lucky. Stock
newsletter writers have used 'survivor bias' in market
forecasting for years - trumpet your successful calls
and hide from the rest.

But rather than trying to go back a decade, we can
just start now. For those considering buying gliders
later in 2006, what's your forecast for the $/Euro
rate 12 months from now?Well, I started about 35 years ago, but who's counting?

For the next 12 months I predict that the Euro will
continue its
decline, probably leveling off at a $1.05 to a $1.10.
I would
definitely not hedge the Euro, however. I would - and
will - keep a
substantial portion of my holdings in the ContraFund
(but I also own a
couple of dozen other funds, ContraFund is my largest
holding). And, at
this point, I would put the glider on order (if I were
in the market
for a new glider).

My recommendation is, if you have a glider on order,
hedge the FX rate, but if you think you can out-guess
the market, you're probably only half right.

9BI don't out-guess the market; I find fund managers
who have a proven
track record of doing that. And I monitor there performance
to ensure
that they remain in the top 20-30% of their peers.

Tom
_________________________________________

Soooo, with a month to go on Tom's prediction how are
we doing?

Tom's advice:

Don't buy Euros in 11/05, instead buy ContraFund (versus
alternative funds, such as an S&P ETF or Euro-based
index) and wait.

Specific Euro prediction: weakening Euro from $1.20
in 11/05 to $1.10 or $1.05.

Actual performance:

Euro has strengthened from $1.20 to $1.25.

ContraFund: up 10.9% or 9.97% after management expenses
S&P 500 index: up 15.1%
DAX (German market) index: up 28.2%

So if you had taken $100,000 for a new glider (pick
your own number, but this one is nice and round) and
invested it in the ContraFund and taken it out yesterday
to buy Euros you would have 87,644 Euros or a 5% return
after adjusting for exchange rates.

If on the other had you had bought Euros a year ago
and put your money in a no-load DAX index you would
today have 107,017 Euros, or 23% more than under Tom's
strategy. In fact buying Euros and investing in a short-term
money market fund would have done better too.

Of course there is still a month to go so maybe the
ContraFund will make a big move, but over the past
12 months (and particularly the past 3 months the ContraFund
has significantly underperformend all the major market
indicies.

This was the point about chasing past returns - anyone
looking at the ContraFund performance up to last November
and deciding to invest with an expectation of above
market returns would have been disappointed.

Credit to Tom for putting his money where his mouth
was and making a prediction - many people don't have
the strength of their convictions. He just didn't turn
out to be right on either count up until now.

For reference:

http://finance.yahoo.com/charts#char...;range=1y;comp
are=^gspc+^dji;indicator=volume;charttype=line;cro sshair=on;logsca
le=on;source=

9B

Roger wrote:
Why would anyone bet on the dollar versus the Euro?! With our deficit
spending the dollar will continue to decline!

Craig

Our deficits are now declining and are paid for by the Chinese. Our
unemployment rate is so low that we need to import millions of
"uneducated, illiterate foreigners to do the jobs that Americans don't
want to do", and build a fence to keep them out; and our gasoline
prices are back below $2.00 per gallon. In France gas prices are low
enough that their cars can once again be easily burned by THEIR
uneducated, illiterate foreigners; which is what, $5.00 a gallon? If
they don't get their gas prices back up to six they'll run out of cars.
Why would anyone bet on the Euro versus the dollar?

October 30, 2006
The Dark Ages
Live from the Middle East
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services

The most frightening aspect of the present war is how easily our
pre-modern enemies from the Middle East have brought a stunned
postmodern world back into the Dark Ages.

Students of history are sickened when they read of the long-ago,
gruesome practice of beheading. How brutal were those societies that
chopped off the heads of Cicero, Sir Thomas More and Marie Antoinette.
And how lucky we thought we were to have evolved from such elemental
barbarity.

Twenty-four hundred years ago, Socrates was executed for unpopular
speech. The 18th-century European Enlightenment gave people freedom to
express views formerly censored by clerics and the state. Just imagine
what life was like once upon a time when no one could write music,
compose fiction or paint without court or church approval?

Over 400 years before the birth of Christ, ancient Greek literary
characters, from Lysistrata to Antigone, reflected the struggle for
sexual equality. The subsequent notion that women could vote, divorce,
dress or marry as they pleased was a millennia-long struggle.

It is almost surreal now to read about the elemental hatred of Jews in
the Spanish Inquisition, 19th-century Russian pogroms or the Holocaust.
Yet here we are revisiting the old horrors of the savage past.

Beheading? As we saw with Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl, our Neanderthal
enemies in the Middle East have resurrected that ancient barbarity -
and married it with 21st-century technology to beam the resulting gore
instantaneously onto our computer screens. Xerxes and Attila, who stuck
their victims' heads on poles for public display, would've been
thrilled by such a gruesome show.

Who would have thought centuries after the Enlightenment that
sophisticated Europeans - in fear of radical Islamists - would be
afraid to write a novel, put on an opera, draw a cartoon, film a
documentary or have their pope discuss comparative theology?

The astonishing fact is not just that millions of women worldwide in
2006 are still veiled from head-to-toe, trapped in arranged marriages,
subject to polygamy, honor killings and forced circumcision, or are
without the right to vote or appear alone in public. What is more
baffling is that in the West, liberal Europeans are often wary of
protecting female citizens from the excesses of Sharia law -
sometimes even fearful of asking women to unveil their faces for
purposes of simple identification and official conversation.

Who these days is shocked that Israel is hated by Arab nations and
threatened with annihilation by radical Iran? Instead, the surprise is
that even in places like Paris or Seattle, Jews are singled out and
killed for the apparent crime of being Jewish.

Since Sept. 11, the West has fought enemies who are determined to bring
back the nightmarish world that we thought was long past. And there are
lessons Westerners can learn from radical Islamists' ghastly efforts.

First, the Western liberal tradition is fragile and can still
disappear. Just because we have sophisticated cell phones, CAT scanners
and jets does not ensure that we are permanently civilized or safe.
Technology used by the civilized for positive purposes can easily be
manipulated by barbarians for destruction.

Second, the Enlightenment is not always lost on the battlefield. It can
be surrendered through either fear or indifference as well. Westerners
fearful of terrorist reprisals themselves shut down a production of a
Mozart opera in Berlin deemed offensive to Muslims. Few came to the aid
of a Salman Rushdie or Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh when their
unpopular expression earned death threats from Islamists. Van Gogh, of
course, was ultimately killed.

The Goths and Vandals did not sack Rome solely through the power of
their hordes; they also relied on the paralysis of Roman elites who no
longer knew what it was to be Roman - much less whether it was any
better than the alternative.

Third, civilization is forfeited with a whimper, not a bang.
Insidiously, we have allowed radical Islamists to redefine the
primordial into the not-so-bad. Perhaps women in head-to-toe burkas in
Europe prefer them? Maybe that crass German opera was just too over the
top after all? Aren't both parties equally to blame in the Palestinian,
Iraqi and Afghan wars?

To grasp the flavor of our own Civil War, impersonators now don period
dress and reconstruct the battles of Shiloh or Gettysburg. But we need
not show such historical reenactment of the Dark Ages. You see, they
are back with us - live almost daily from the Middle East.

©2006 Tribune Media Services

Bruce T. wrote:
Roger wrote:
Why would anyone bet on the dollar versus the Euro?! With our deficit
spending the dollar will continue to decline!

Craig

Our deficits are now declining

Unfortunately, the only deficit declining is the projected budget
deficit, and that's still projected to be quite large. Our actual
deficit continues to grow, since we haven't had a surplus a several
years now.

and are paid for by the Chinese.

They are loaning us large sums of money, but I suspect they will want it
all back, plus interest.

So, while betting on currency moves is always a risky business, I'd be
inclined to bet on the Euro by ordering that nifty new glider. I've
owned 5 German gliders, and netted $10,000 on the four I sold. For the
good of soaring in the USA, I hope I don't make any money when I
eventually sell my present glider, because it will mean prices have
risen even higher. That's not good for soaring.

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA
Change "netto" to "net" to email me directly

"Transponders in Sailplanes" on the Soaring Safety Foundation website
www.soaringsafety.org/prevention/articles.html

"A Guide to Self-launching Sailplane Operation" at www.motorglider.org

Our deficits are now declining

Unfortunately, the only deficit declining is the projected budget
deficit, and that's still projected to be quite large. Our actual
deficit continues to grow, since we haven't had a surplus a several
years now.

and are paid for by the Chinese.

They are loaning us large sums of money, but I suspect they will want it
all back, plus interest.

When the Chinese demand all that money back I'll be happy to print up
little green pieces of paper that say $1.00 and give it back to them.
They can either paper their walls or use them to buy something from me.
Maybe they can claim California, tow it across the Pacific and enslave
the illegal immigrants. In the meantime I like my $850.00 Macbook
which was made in China. (After I-pod and printer rebate)
Still waiting to be harmed, mutilated, disfigured, poleaxed, or
enslaved by a sinister government due to the huge deficits run up
during the Reagan administration and drastic loss of civil rights by
the forces of evil in the Bush administration. I may have to sell my
stock in Halliburton, move to France and walk.

www.victorhanson.com

November 03, 2006
Before Iraq
The assumptions of a forgetful chattering class are badly off the mark.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

What is written about Iraq now is exclusively acrimonious. The
narrative is the suicide bomber and IED, never how many terrorists we
have killed, how many Iraqis have been given a chance for something
different than the old nightmare, or how a consensual government has
withstood enemies on nearly every front.

Long forgotten is the inspired campaign that removed a vicious dictator
in three weeks. Nor is much credit given to the idealistic efforts to
foster democracy rather than just ignoring the chaos that follows war
- as we did after the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan, or
following our precipitous departure from Lebanon and Somalia. And we do
not appreciate anymore that Syria was forced to vacate Lebanon; that
Libya gave up its WMD arsenal; that Pakistan came clean about Dr. Khan;
and that there have been the faint beginnings of local elections in the
Gulf monarchies.

Yes, the Middle East is "unstable," but for the first time in
memory, the usual killing, genocide, and terrorism are occurring in a
scenario that offers some chance at something better. Long before we
arrived in Iraq, the Assads were murdering thousands in Hama, the
Husseins were gassing Kurds, and the Lebanese militias were murdering
civilians. The violence is not what has changed, but rather the notion
that the United States can do nothing about it; the U.S. has shown
itself willing to risk much to support freedom in place of tyranny or
theocracy in the region.

Instead of recalling any of this, Iraq is seen only in the hindsight of
who did what wrong and when. All the great good we accomplished and the
high ideals we embraced are drowned out by the present violent
insurgency and the sensationalized effort to turn the mayhem into an
American Antietam or Yalu River. Blame is never allotted to al Qaeda,
the Sadr thugs, or the ex-Baathists, only to the United States, who
should have, could have, or would have done better in stopping them,
had its leadership read a particular article, fired a certain person,
listened to an exceptional general, or studied a key position paper.

We also forget that Iraq, contrary to popular slander, was not
"cooked up" in Texas or at a Washington, D.C., neocon think tank.
Rather, it was a reaction to two events: a decade of appeasement of
Middle East tyrants and terrorists, and the disaster of September 11.
If one were to go back and read the most popular accounts of the first
Gulf War, The Generals' War by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor of
Cobra II fame, or Rick Atkinson's Crusade, or research the
bi-partisan arguments that raged across the opinion pages in the 1990s
following the defeat and survival of Saddam Hussein, certain themes
reappear constantly that surely help to explain our current presence
inside Iraq.

One was shared regret that Saddam was left in power in 1991. No sooner
had the war ended than George Bush Sr. appeared, not joyous in our
success, but melancholy, and then distraught, once images of the
butchered and refugees beamed back from our "victory" in Iraq.
Culpability for thousands of dead Shiites and Kurds, the need for
no-fly zones, and worry about reconstituted WMD were the charges then
leveled.

The heroes? A troubled former Pentagon official Paul Wolfowitz (read
The Generals' War) who almost alone felt tactical success had not
translated into strategic victory, and that we were profoundly amoral
to have let a mass murderer remain in power, while thousands of brave
revolutionaries were butchered just a few miles away from our forces.

We praise the first Gulf War now. Yet, almost immediately in its
aftermath, critics accused us of overkill, of using too many soldiers
to blast too many poor Iraqis. The charge then was not that we had too
few troops, but too many; not that the Pentagon had understated the
need for troops, but overstated and sent too many; not that we had too
few allies, but an unwieldy coalition that hampered American options;
not that the effort was too costly, but that we were too crassly
commercial in forcing allies to pony up cash as if war were supposed to
be a profitable enterprise.

The generic criticism in the 1990s of the United States, both here and
abroad, was that America bombed from on high, and sometimes, as in
Belgrade or Africa, even indiscriminately - its only concern being
fear of losses, not worry over civilian collateral damage or ending the
war decisively on the ground. Indeed, in Europe there was voiced a
certain cynicism that we were cowardly turning war into an antiseptic
enterprise (the "body bag syndrome"), adjudicated only by our
concern not to engage with the enemy below.

There were other issues now forgotten. After the acrimony in the debate
over Iraq in 1990, followed by the successful removal of Saddam
Hussein, Democrats were determined never again to be on the wrong side
of the national security debate. So they supported the present war
because they were convinced that after Panama, Gulf War I, Bosnia,
Kosovo, and Afghanistan, they could regain credibility by supporting
muscular action that seemed to pose little risk of failure. That is why
only recently have Democratic supporters of the war bailed - and only
when polls suggested that any fear of "cut and run" or McGovernism
would be outweighed by tapping into popular dissatisfaction with Iraq.

Realism is much in vogue these days, with James Baker returning as the
purported fireman, and even Democrats demanding talks with horrific
dictators in Iran and North Korea. That was not the mantra of the
1990s. The Reaganism that rejected Cold War realpolitik and risked
brinkmanship to bring down a rotten and murderous Soviet Empire was
considered both the wiser and more ethical stance, as even Democrats
reformulated their opportunistic criticism after the fall of the Berlin
Wall. Mutually Assured Destruction, Kissingerian tolerance for the
status quo, and mere containment - all that was scoffed at in the
afterglow of Reagan's squeeze that popped the Soviet bubble.

Not long ago, abdication - from Rwanda or Haiti, or from the Balkans
for a decade - not intervention, was the supposed sin. There were
dozens of Darfurs in the 1990s, when charges flew of moral
indifference. The supposition then - as now - was that those who
called for boots on the ground to stop a genocide would not unlikely be
the first to abdicate responsibility once the coffins came home and the
military was left fighting an orphaned war.

Apparently all the high-minded talk of reform - Aristotle rightly
scoffed about morality being easy in one's sleep - was predicated
only on cost-free war from 30,000 feet. Now the wisdom is that Colin
Powell - the supposed sole sane and moral voice of the present
administration - was drowned out by shrill neocon chicken hawks. But
that was not the consensus of the 1990s. In both books and journalism,
he was a Hamlet-like figure who paused before striking the needed blow,
and so was pilloried by the likes of a Michael Gordon or Madeline
Albright for not using the full force of the American military to
intervene for moral purposes. That was then, and this is now, and
in-between we have a costly war in Iraq that has taken the lives of
nearly 3,000 Americans.

The unexpected carnage of September 11 explains so much of our current
situation. It has made the realist, neo-isolationist George Bush into
an advocate for Wilsonianism abroad, but only on the calculation that
the roots of Islamic fascism rested in the nexus between dictatorship
and autocracy - the former destroys prosperity and freedom, and the
latter makes use of terrorists to deflect rising popular
dissatisfaction against the United States.

The U.S. Senate and House voted for war in Iraq, not merely because
they were deluded about the shared intelligence reports on WMD (though
deluded they surely were), but also because of the 22 legitimate casus
belli they added just in case. And despite the recent meae culpae,
those charges remain as valid today as they were when they were
approved: Saddam did try to kill a former American president; the U.N.
embargo was violated, as were its inspection protocols; the 1991
accords were often ignored; the genocide of brave Kurds did happen;
suicide bombers were being given bounties; terrorists, including those
involved into the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, were given sanctuary
by Saddam; and on and on.

So it is not those charges, but we who leveled them, that have changed.
Americans' problem with the war is not that it was not moral, but
that it has been deemed too costly for the perceived benefits that
might accrue.

The conventional wisdom was that, after Afghanistan (7 weeks of
fighting) and its postbellum stability (a government within a year), a
more secular Iraq (3 weeks of fighting) would follow the same
timetable. In September 2002, well after the "miracle" in
Afghanistan, I listened to a high-ranking admiral pontificate that war
on the ground was essentially over in the new age of Green Berets and
laptops, that after Bosnia and Afghanistan, air power and Special
Forces were all that were needed.

This did not come from Rumsfeld surrogates, but was a fair enough
reflection of the wild new intoxication before Iraq - that a supposed
"revolution in military affairs" had changed the ancient rules of
war, as if our technology would now give us exemption from hurt. Many
of those who now most shrilly condemn the war had in fact years ago
rattled their sabers for "moral" wars to eliminate dictators -
predicated on just this foolish utopian notion that GPS bombing and
laser-guided missiles had at last given us the tools needed for
removing the tumors with precision and at little cost, as we conducted
lifesaving moral surgery on diseased states.

No, nothing has changed about Iraq other than its tragic tab. Changes
of view are fine, as long as those who now criticize the effort at
least acknowledge the climate in which fighting in Iraq was born, and
the real conditions under which they themselves once supported the war
- and lost heart.

©2006 Victor Davis Hanson

Personally, I believe it's the meek who are behind
all this...

;o)


At 08:31 03 November 2006, Bruce T. wrote:
Our deficits are now declining and are paid for by
the Chinese. Our
unemployment rate is so low that we need to import
millions of
'uneducated, illiterate foreigners to do the jobs that
Americans don't
want to do', and build a fence to keep them out; and
our gasoline
prices are back below $2.00 per gallon. In France
gas prices are low
enough that their cars can once again be easily burned
by THEIR
uneducated, illiterate foreigners; which is what, $5.00
a gallon? If
they don't get their gas prices back up to six they'll
run out of cars.
Why would anyone bet on the Euro versus the dollar?

October 30, 2006
The Dark Ages
Live from the Middle East
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services

The most frightening aspect of the present war is how
easily our
pre-modern enemies from the Middle East have brought
a stunned
postmodern world back into the Dark Ages.

Students of history are sickened when they read of
the long-ago,
gruesome practice of beheading. How brutal were those
societies that
chopped off the heads of Cicero, Sir Thomas More and
Marie Antoinette.
And how lucky we thought we were to have evolved from
such elemental
barbarity.

Twenty-four hundred years ago, Socrates was executed
for unpopular
speech. The 18th-century European Enlightenment gave
people freedom to
express views formerly censored by clerics and the
state. Just imagine
what life was like once upon a time when no one could
write music,
compose fiction or paint without court or church approval?

Over 400 years before the birth of Christ, ancient
Greek literary
characters, from Lysistrata to Antigone, reflected
the struggle for
sexual equality. The subsequent notion that women could
vote, divorce,
dress or marry as they pleased was a millennia-long
struggle.

It is almost surreal now to read about the elemental
hatred of Jews in
the Spanish Inquisition, 19th-century Russian pogroms
or the Holocaust.
Yet here we are revisiting the old horrors of the savage
past.

Beheading? As we saw with Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl,
our Neanderthal
enemies in the Middle East have resurrected that ancient
barbarity -
and married it with 21st-century technology to beam
the resulting gore
instantaneously onto our computer screens. Xerxes and
Attila, who stuck
their victims' heads on poles for public display, would've
been
thrilled by such a gruesome show.

Who would have thought centuries after the Enlightenment
that
sophisticated Europeans - in fear of radical Islamists
- would be
afraid to write a novel, put on an opera, draw a cartoon,
film a
documentary or have their pope discuss comparative
theology?

The astonishing fact is not just that millions of women
worldwide in
2006 are still veiled from head-to-toe, trapped in
arranged marriages,
subject to polygamy, honor killings and forced circumcision,
or are
without the right to vote or appear alone in public.
What is more
baffling is that in the West, liberal Europeans are
often wary of
protecting female citizens from the excesses of Sharia
law -
sometimes even fearful of asking women to unveil their
faces for
purposes of simple identification and official conversation.

Who these days is shocked that Israel is hated by Arab
nations and
threatened with annihilation by radical Iran? Instead,
the surprise is
that even in places like Paris or Seattle, Jews are
singled out and
killed for the apparent crime of being Jewish.

Since Sept. 11, the West has fought enemies who are
determined to bring
back the nightmarish world that we thought was long
past. And there are
lessons Westerners can learn from radical Islamists'
ghastly efforts.

First, the Western liberal tradition is fragile and
can still
disappear. Just because we have sophisticated cell
phones, CAT scanners
and jets does not ensure that we are permanently civilized
or safe.
Technology used by the civilized for positive purposes
can easily be
manipulated by barbarians for destruction.

Second, the Enlightenment is not always lost on the
battlefield. It can
be surrendered through either fear or indifference
as well. Westerners
fearful of terrorist reprisals themselves shut down
a production of a
Mozart opera in Berlin deemed offensive to Muslims.
Few came to the aid
of a Salman Rushdie or Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh
when their
unpopular expression earned death threats from Islamists.
Van Gogh, of
course, was ultimately killed.

The Goths and Vandals did not sack Rome solely through
the power of
their hordes; they also relied on the paralysis of
Roman elites who no
longer knew what it was to be Roman - much less whether
it was any
better than the alternative.

Third, civilization is forfeited with a whimper, not
a bang.
Insidiously, we have allowed radical Islamists to redefine
the
primordial into the not-so-bad. Perhaps women in head-to-toe
burkas in
Europe prefer them? Maybe that crass German opera was
just too over the
top after all? Aren't both parties equally to blame
in the Palestinian,
Iraqi and Afghan wars?

To grasp the flavor of our own Civil War, impersonators
now don period
dress and reconstruct the battles of Shiloh or Gettysburg.
But we need
not show such historical reenactment of the Dark Ages.
You see, they
are back with us - live almost daily from the Middle
East.

=A92006 Tribune Media Services

"Al Eddie" wrote in message
...
Personally, I believe it's the meek who are behind
all this...

;o)

And I say, "OFF with their heads!!!"

sorry,

bumper

In article ,
bumper writes

"Al Eddie" wrote in message
...
Personally, I believe it's the meek who are behind
all this...

;o)

And I say, "OFF with their heads!!!"

sorry,

bumper


Actually, we all know it was glider pilots who were responsible for
Pearl Harbour and 9/11.
--
Mike Lindsay

It's Bush who has taken us back into the Dark Ages, specifically to a time
before Runnymede and the Magna Carta. 900 years was a pretty good run for
the right of Habeus Corpus, the foundation of liberty, but now it's
quaint--like the Geneva Conventions.

I'm working toward a day I can show my daughter the America I once
knew--y'know the one with a Constitution, a Bill of Rights. Those "just a
god damned piece of paper" things as George put it.

Bush. The small man who thinks he's fighting a war and is too damnably
stupid to realize he lost the war when he started taking the rights of
citizens. He lost to his own fears. He has taken from us what no foreign
invader ever could. Damn him.

Sorry for this OT post.

October 30, 2006
The Dark Ages
Live from the Middle East
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services

The most frightening aspect of the present war is how
easily our
pre-modern enemies from the Middle East have brought
a stunned
postmodern world back into the Dark Ages.

SAM 303a wrote:
It's Bush who has taken us back into the Dark Ages, specifically to a time
before Runnymede and the Magna Carta. 900 years was a pretty good run for
the right of Habeus Corpus, the foundation of liberty, but now it's
quaint--like the Geneva Conventions.

I'm working toward a day I can show my daughter the America I once
knew--y'know the one with a Constitution, a Bill of Rights. Those "just a
god damned piece of paper" things as George put it.

Bush. The small man who thinks he's fighting a war and is too damnably
stupid to realize he lost the war when he started taking the rights of
citizens. He lost to his own fears. He has taken from us what no foreign
invader ever could. Damn him.

Sorry for this OT post.

No problem.

And isn't wonderful that you can say this and even give your real name
(if you so chose) without the fear someone will come to your door, take
you away and cut your head off. This is the situation in much of the
Mid-East right now.

Our rights are only as good as our will and ability to protect them.
Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, are you
going to damn him, too?

Tom