setting $base_url causes redirect loop

I've seen several mentions of this but the issues seem to keep closing so putting here. in my configuration setting $base_url to anything (ie. http://example.org or https://example.org) will cause many pages to fail with redirect error.

Perhaps this is a documentation issue. It can get a bit complicated with $cookie_domain, $base_url, .htaccess combinations for mortals like us who can't quite wrap our heads around all the redirect logic :)