SeekingAlpha

I am actually going to have two new posts tonight. This one deals with a narrow subject regarding SeekingAlpha deleting some of my comments because they allegedly contain "insults, obscenities or abusive language"

The second post tonight will be an update of my stock fund portfolio. 

I have actually been actively buying this week, mostly bond CEFs after they hit the latest of a long series of air pockets, sometimes called here at HQ a "black hole event", and will have another long weekly post, most likely to be published on Sunday.  

For those who actually read my comments at SA or in this blog, it is obvious that I am not the kind of person who uses "obscenities" or "abusive language". Even in private conversations, I have not uttered an obscene word in several decades, though I will infrequently use a particular word as an alternative to "complain",  nor do I use "abusive" language. I have had on occasion some readers direct some abuse my way for providing this free service that requires a great deal of effort on my part. 

That leaves "insults" as the probable category supporting the deletion, and occasionally I will direct a  "criticism" at a class of people such as "Masters of Disaster" or "persons" or "investors" who never learned from experience and repeat the same mistake over and over again. Mild stuff actually compared to what I might say to one of the Wall Street wizards in person who helped engineer and magnify the Near Depression for their own personal aggrandizement. I might say to them, in private of course, that tattooing a carton about the prophet and then delivering them buck naked to the most remote tribal area in Pakistan would be a too lenient punishment. Just kidding, I think, of course I am kidding.  

I suppose SeekingAlpha would delete a comment from Edmund Burke who noted a few centuries ago "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it", or the similar comment made by George Santayana that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". That is basically the only "insult" that I made in this comment. 

This is the last comment deleted by SA for being abusive or insulting or containing obscenities or whatever.  Scooter is one of my followers at SA and we were simply having a discussion about the benefits of higher education:

" Scooter: It sounds like you actually learned a trade in college. I become an expert in spinning B.S on the most esoteric subjects. The most successful people in my orbit come from my father's generation and had high school educations. I mentioned to you my father's history for example. He worked for my grandfather without any pay during summers learning to be a roofer as a teenager; married my mother after high school graduation in late November 1941, just in time for Pearl Harbor, borrowing $2 to buy a wedding ring; served in WWII; came back from the war in one piece to work in the construction business; learned new trades such as framing; started his own business with a young man in similar circumstances that he had met before WWII fighting for the southern golden gloves championship in their weight class; and together those two high school graduates built the largest homebuilding company in Tennessee within 20 years. I would add at tax rates far more unfavorable than now with no IRAs, Child Tax credits and the sundry other ways individuals reduce their tax obligations today and still bitch about it, and dividends were taxed at the highest marginal tax rate which was sky high. The nominal and inflation adjusted tax brackets can be downloaded at the TAX Foundation website: http://taxfoundation.org/article/us-federal-individual-income-tax-rates-history-1913-2013-nominal-and-inflation-adjusted-brackets (In 1954, a couple with taxable income over 12,000, equivalent to $100,000 in today's dollars, would be in a 43% tax bracket. Somehow that generation managed to produce a long term secular bull market starting in 1949 and lasting until 1/1/66 that produced over a 14% annualized gain in the S & P 500 adjusted for inflation with dividends reinvested. Thought I would just mention that as an aside) Liberal arts is fine but many acquire that type of education throughout life by reading and studying, and through life experiences, or at least the ones who are open minded enough to learn from experience as so many never do. Investors in the aggregate are in that camp of never learning much of anything and repeating the same mistakes over and over again with boring predictability. Whatever lessons may have been absorbed in a distant market, like the one prevailing in the late 1960s is lost or forgotten or never learned, with the herd repeating the same mistakes in 1999, just as an example."

Possibly, someone objected to the last  two sentences as insulting to them, possibly for a very good reason, such as losing a pile in 1999 buying stocks with no earnings and using some asinine valuation criteria (e.g. 10,0000 times daily eyeball views).  

Or maybe I upset some thin skin person by using the phrase "bitch about" their tax obligations when earlier generations paid more. In that context, the word simply means complain. Complain Synonyms I never heard my father, who passed away in September 2010,  complain about his tax obligations, nor have I yet to hear a complaint from my 90 year mother. I may ask her today whether she wants to complain about it. I hear or read complaints on this subject from others incessantly, and possibly they need to move to another country. 

The remainder of my comments to the article in question, which have not yet been deleted by SA, can be found at Seeking Alpha.