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NEW JANUARY YOUNG INVESTMENTS CLIENT LETTER: What to Expect in 2012 One of the more common mistakes individual and even professional investors make is ignoring or underestimating future events. During the past three years, both the Dow and the S&P 500 posted positive returns. While 2012 could certainly be another favorable year, investors would be well advised to expect continued periods of high volatility. Read more here!
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OK then, for those of you as concerned as Debbie and I are, here is the second in my list of inexpensive, easy-to-order personal survival items. I have owned all for a while, and I will add to my holdings of each in 2012:
(1) Henry U.S. Survival .22 rifle and a large quantity of CCI Stinger 22LR copper-plated 32 grain hollow point varmint ammo. This inexpensive, light (2.5 lbs.), accurate rifle packs up in a waterproof plastic stock and can be assembled and ready to fire in under a minute. Very cool. I love mine and am going to stock up with more for gifts and backup support.
(2) Boxes of Superfood Slam bars by PROBAR LLC. These whole food organic bars, loaded with Omega 3s, provide 380 calories per bar. Order these in bulk on your one-click Amazon account.
(3) My #2 water gathering/storage solution is WaterBrick, manufactured by Custom-Pak (bought through Amazon). You can transport water in lightweight fashion and stack the Bricks for easy storing.
(4) Perfect Food Raw Green Super Food. These organic capsules from Garden of Life are loaded with 34 nutrient-dense RAW greens, sprouts, and veggies. Debbie and I take these daily. You’ll feel as though you’ve been grazing on your lawn. Talk about Green and Chlorophyll. Once again Amazon can fill your order with a single click.
(5) New Chapter whole-food organic multivitamins (Amazon.com). These great multis offer stress, immune and cardio support and are manufactured with cultured whole-foods.
Remember, there is never any risk in being prepared! When the emergency finally hits, how do you explain to your loved ones why you failed to follow Dick Young’s emergency preparation advice?
You had a front-row seat to a sensational block by Boston Bruins MVP goalie Tim Thomas. He chose not to meet the president, reasoning:
I believe the Federal government has grown out of control, threatening the Rights, Liberties, and Property of the People. This is being done at the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial level. This is in direct opposition to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers vision for the Federal government. Because I believe this, today I exercised my right as a Free Citizen, and did not visit the White House. This was not about politics or party, as in my opinion both parties are responsible for the situation we are in as a country. This was about a choice I had to make as an INDIVIDUAL. This is the only public statement I will be making on this topic. TT
Good for Tim Thomas for making the number one political statement of the year on the eve of President Obama’s State of the Union. Talk about putting a wet blanket on the SOTU. Sorry, Obama, but your performance has been so bad that a pro athlete felt it was his duty to boycott a meeting with you. The Stanley Cup MVP sucked the air out of the room. The liberal media are having a fit. The Boston Globe’s Kevin Paul Dupont was livid. He wrote:
Not a lot has changed in the US over the last two years, although it appears the economic picture is brightening at least a little bit, despite those in charge of our various governmental nuthouses. Unemployment has eased some and the Dow Jones industrial average has improved considerably. Politically, our nation is a mess, but the material Property of the People at least seems to be getting better. Not every house in the Lower 48 is up for short sale.
“Not a lot has changed in the US over the last two years.” What planet is Dupont living on? Yet you could hear crickets when Red Sox owner John Henry and General Manager Theo Epstein chose not to meet President Bush. Where was Dupont then?
Thomas said at the start of the NHL all-star weekend: “I followed my conscience. Everything I said in my statement I believed to be the absolute truth … I don’t think I need to revisit something that I stated so clearly.”
I hope he does someday. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts attended the Bruins’ visit to the White House. He didn’t want to miss the photo op. Thomas has hit a nerve that he can use to connect with the middle class: the Federal government has grown out of control, threatening the rights, liberties, and property of the people. Why not run for Senate and unseat Kerry?
Indiana Right to Work
All eyes are on Indiana, but not just for the Super Bowl. Indiana is about to become the 23rd right-to-work state. It will become an island of freedom among the forced-union states of the Midwest. Expect manufacturers to turn their attention to the open-for-business Hoosier State.
A national right-to-work law should be next. Do you really think professional athletes, for example, with their entourage of handlers, need union leaders to negotiate for them? With a national right-to-work law, there probably wouldn’t be a shortened NBA season or an almost-missed NFL season, not to mention past strikes and missed seasons by major-league baseball and the NHL.
Union Pensions in Private Equity
The Wall Street Journal’s Michael Corkery wrote an excellent article titled “Public Pensions Increase Private-Equity Investments” pointing out that public pensions have increased their percentage ownership of the Bain Capitals of the world to fund their retirement. And yet they vilify Mitt Romney. Union leaders are only about reelecting Obama. For leadership, bashing private equity is for the greater good, as long as they are protecting their dues-collecting fiefdom.
Dollar weakness doesn’t work at all for economic well-being. The corollary to the Fed’s policy of manipulating interest rates downward at the expense of savers is declining median incomes. It’s no coincidence that inflation-adjusted median incomes rose in the sound-money booms of the Reagan and Clinton administrations and fell in the weak-dollar busts during the Carter, Bush and Obama years. When the currency weakens, the prices of staples rise faster than wages, hurting all but the rich who buy protection.
The Fed’s weak dollar policy is destroying middle-class savers and those who have been responsible with their money. Malpass continues:
Americans know this is a big problem but can’t stop it. Texas Congressman Ron Paul has created an intensely popular presidential campaign around the need for stable money and limitations on the size (the Fed employs 22,000 people) and power of the Fed.
To arm yourself with more facts, pick up a copy of Paul’s End the Fed.
Mitt Romney won Florida, but he has not collected a majority of the votes in any state yet. Romney needs to explain to voters why he is a better alternative than Newt Gingrich if he wants to put this nomination away. Listen to Ron Paul’s speech from Nevada below. As the race enters the caucus states, we will see if Paul’s strategy of focusing on these states will generate success. In his speech, Newt Gingrich vowed to press on to the convention. Santorum seems to be looking to play advocate for his favorite issues going forward. That could severly reduce Gingrich’s chances of putting together enough votes to beat Romney. Read the full results below.
Take two Sandia National Laboratories engineers who are hunters, get them talking about the sport and it shouldn’t be surprising when the conversation leads to a patented design for a self-guided bullet that could help war fighters. (Click here for a video showing the prototype’s flight.)
Sandia researchers Red Jones and Brian Kast and their colleagues have invented a dart-like, self-guided bullet for small-caliber, smooth-bore firearms that could hit laser-designated targets at distances of more than a mile (about 2,000 meters).
“We have a very promising technology to guide small projectiles that could be fully developed inexpensively and rapidly,” Jones said.
Sandia is seeking a private company partner to complete testing of the prototype and bring a guided bullet to the marketplace.
Researchers have had initial success testing the design in computer simulations and in field tests of prototypes, built from commercially available parts, Jones said.
While engineering issues remain, “we’re confident in our science base and we’re confident the engineering-technology base is there to solve the problems,” he said.
Sandia’s design for the four-inch-long bullet includes an optical sensor in the nose to detect a laser beam on a target. The sensor sends information to guidance and control electronics that use an algorithm in an eight-bit central processing unit to command electromagnetic actuators. These actuators steer tiny fins that guide the bullet to the target.
Most bullets shot from rifles, which have grooves, or rifling, that cause them to spin so they fly straight, like a long football pass. To enable a bullet to turn in flight toward a target and to simplify the design, the spin had to go, Jones said.
The bullet flies straight due to its aerodynamically stable design, which consists of a center of gravity that sits forward in the projectile and tiny fins that enable it to fly without spin, just as a dart does, he said.
Computer aerodynamic modeling shows the design would result in dramatic improvements in accuracy, Jones said. Computer simulations showed an unguided bullet under real-world conditions could miss a target more than a half mile away (1,000 meters away) by 9.8 yards (9 meters), but a guided bullet would get within 8 inches (0.2 meters), according to the patent.
Plastic sabots provide a gas seal in the cartridge and protect the delicate fins until they drop off after the bullet emerges from the firearm’s barrel.
The prototype does not require a device found in guided missiles called an inertial measuring unit, which would have added substantially to its cost. Instead, the researchers found that the bullet’s relatively small size when compared to guided missiles “is helping us all around. It’s kind of a fortuitous thing that none of us saw when we started,” Jones said.
As the bullet flies through the air, it pitches and yaws at a set rate based on its mass and size. In larger guided missiles, the rate of flight-path corrections is relatively slow, so each correction needs to be very precise because fewer corrections are possible during flight. But “the natural body frequency of this bullet is about 30 hertz, so we can make corrections 30 times per second. That means we can overcorrect, so we don’t have to be as precise each time,” Jones said.
Testing has shown the electromagnetic actuator performs well and the bullet can reach speeds of 2,400 feet per second, or Mach 2.1, using commercially available gunpowder. The researchers are confident it could reach standard military speeds using customized gunpowder.
And a nighttime field test, in which a tiny light-emitting diode, or LED, was attached to the bullet showed the battery and electronics can survive flight, Jones said.
Researchers also filmed high-speed video of the bullet radically pitching as it exited the barrel. The bullet pitches less as it flies down range, a phenomenon known to long-range firearms experts as “going to sleep.” Because the bullet’s motions settle the longer it is in flight, accuracy improves at longer ranges, Jones said.
“Nobody had ever seen that, but we’ve got high-speed video photography that shows that it’s true,” he said.
Potential customers for the bullet include the military, law enforcement and recreational shooters.
In addition to Jones and Kast, Sandia researchers who helped develop the technology are: engineer Brandon R. Rohrer, aerodynamics expert Marc W. Kniskern, mechanical designer Scott E. Rose, firearms expert James W. Woods and Ronald W. Greene, a guidance, control and simulation engineer.
“These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us… It’s nice to have friends in high places.” - Warren Buffett
Well, no doubt the all-time authority on the subject was my old friend Clifton Music’s Ronnie Italiano. Sadly, Ronnie has passed away, so I can no longer call him to get his answer for you. I’m in no way looking to cover for Ronnie, but I will tell you that the original Dion and the Belmonts was part of the royalty of the era.
In the following Q&A, you can catch up with Dion and enjoy some great memories from the 50’s music scene.
The Wall Street Journal: You came up when rock ‘n’ roll was still dawning on America, after Elvis and before the Beatles. You rocked the “The Ed Sullivan Show” in a tuxedo. Did you feel torn between two worlds?
Dion: I was the first rock ‘n’ roller signed by Columbia Records. Aretha Franklin was starting there at the same time. They were giving Aretha and me Al Jolson tunes; I was singing “Mammy;” she did “Rock-a-bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody”—they didn’t know what we were about. From the beginning, before I recruited the Belmonts to record with me, [managers] told me to put the guitar down—leaders of groups don’t play guitar. They wanted to give me a nightclub act and book me in the Copacabana. They wanted to put me with corny backing singers—Broadway-trained guys who were great singing “Oklahoma!” but didn’t know from rock and roll. The show business era was — “Hey! How’s everybody doin’ tonight? Hope everybody’s fine!” The rock and roll attitude was —we don’t care how you feel about it; we’re taking you on a trip. “Let’s go!”
[The Wall Street Journal] Your new album, “Tank Full of Blues,” showcases your love for that music. When did you start filling your tank?
Way back at Columbia, John Hammond [the legendary producer who helped launch the careers of greats from Billie Holiday and Count Basie to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen] pulled me into his office. He had this big grin and said “Dion, you seem to have a flair for the blues.” I left there with an armload of albums by Furry Lewis, Leroy Carr, Fred McDowell—and Robert Johnson. I never wanted to imitate those guys like Mick Jagger did—”I followed her to da stay-shun.” I thought if I did that I’d get killed at the Brooklyn Fox where Howlin’ Wolf and all the greats used to play. I met Bo Diddley at the Fox. He scowled at me and said “Where’d you learn to play blues like that?” I thought he was going to kill me. I said, “I listen to records.” He said, “Me, too.”
After discussing with Debbie, Dion’s mention of Muddy Waters, she proudly noted, “I never saw Dion in person, but I did get to see Muddy, Chuck, Bo, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee.” Great remembrances for sure. Enjoy!
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