In Search of the Perfect Investment

Apple dropped. I don’t know why. Maybe someone is worried about the unexcitedness of next week’s new products — bigger screen iPhone, iWatch, and some health monitoring stuff.

Some people are arguing “buy on the dip.” Others are saying it will dip further. I’m hanging onto my modest Apple holdings, but not buying more, for now.

What gets me is volatility of new techie stocks with exciting products — technology — GPRO, DGLY and MBLY and healthy food– LOCO and ZOES. These are speculative stocks and a little belong in our portfolios. Some are already looking up nicely. One or two of them could turn into the Tesla and Chipotle of the future.

Rule with these: Don’t sell on the dips.

Changes in Stocks, ETFs and Funds owned. See right hand column. Virtually all of them are up. The top performing ones for me are (in order) ATK, GILD, PF, VRTV, WWAV, AF,  DTV, HOT, PPG. and HON. It’s been a great run. The Vanguard funds have also done well. I’ve held them a while. Hard to find bargains in today’s market. Still, check out the list on the right.

My favorite backup just got better. It’s Apricorn’s Padlock drive.

You plug it into your computer’s / laptop’s USB port. You punch out your password, hit the “open” button (bottom right) and bingo you have a place to backup all your precious work to. Benefits:

1. It’s password protected. If someone gets their hands on your drive, it won’t do them any good. Moreover, a  “brute force” attack won’t work. It shuts off after 20 fast tries.

2. The internals are protected by 256-bit AES-XTS Encryption — one of the strongest you can get. Even if your thief rips the Padlock apart and gets to the bare drive, he won’t be able to get to any of your material.

To me owning a couple of these things as backups is a no-brainer.  It’s a huge lot cheaper than sending your busted drive to Kroll Ontrack. You can buy a one terabyte Padlock drive with that heavy encryption for $289. Worth every penny in peace of mind. Click here.

The death of Steven Sotloff. I was once a freelance journalist. I visited semi-war places and some of my friends were later killed. They popped their heads up when they shouldn’t have. I watch with much personal interest at the fate of journalists covering the Middle East. This short piece by Dexter Filkins of the New Yorker, caught my eye. Sadly I think he’s right on. It’s truly frightening.

In the final moments before an ISIS executioner beheaded the American journalist Steven Sotloff, the masked man offered up, in an English accent, a message to his viewers: “We take this opportunity to warn those governments that enter this evil alliance of America against the Islamic State to back off and leave our people alone.”

Beheading an American hostage-and a bound, kneeling one at that-hardly seems likely to keep the United States out of the Middle East. Indeed, ISIS leaders couldn’t have made the prospect of American airstrikes more likely if they had sent a video to President Obama begging him to drop more bombs.

Which raises a larger question: What could these people possibly hope to gain from such an act?

Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian historian, told us that war is the continuation of politics by other means. What he meant was, wars are fought to advance political objectives. When the objective is attained, or when an army exhausts itself trying, the war ends. The Clausewitzian rule is true whether a war is noble-going to war to defeat Hitler-or ignoble-sending tanks into eastern Ukraine to set up a vassal state. The point is that, for Clausewitz, violence is an instrument used to secure a political objective.

But sometimes killing trumps politics. During the Iraq War, Al Qaeda in Iraq (A.Q.I.)-ISIS’s parent organization-used to post “greatest hits” videos of its bloodiest suicide bombings. These videos were slick productions, put together by A.Q.I.’s “media wing.” In most of them, the cameraman would drive near the target of bombing a few minutes in advance, roll down his car window, and point the camera. Then, usually, as the seconds ticked down, he’d start saying “Allahu Akbar.” The bomb would explode, bodies would fly apart, people would scream. The compilations usually contained seven or eight such shots. Al Qaeda updated them regularly: “Greatest Hits II,” “Greatest Hits III,” and so on.

What was the point of these videos? Propaganda, perhaps. But consider this: in many of the videos, the cameraman narrated the moments before the blast with palpable excitement, panting and exclaiming as the explosion neared. It’s impossible to watch without concluding that those guys were enjoying what they did-that they were getting off on it. Videotaping a mass murder is not politics; it’s pornography.

One of the most spectacular Al Qaeda bombings came in October of 2005, when a suicide bomber drove a cement mixer filled with TNT into the Sheraton Hotel. The blast set off a dirty mushroom cloud that rose more than a hundred feet into the night sky. I was living in a house down the street, a half mile away, and the waves from the explosion rocked the walls of the house. The truck’s radiator landed in the back yard, still smoking.

The most interesting thing about the attack was the video that was discovered afterward, another production of Al Qaeda’s media section. The video contained an audio recording by the founder of A.Q.I., Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In his early years, in Jordan, Zarqawi was a street thug, bouncing in and out of prison. In Iraq, he found his calling. Zarqawi orchestrated hundreds of attacks on Shiite mosques and other places that drew crowds of innocent people. In the video, Zarqawi gave the usual justifications for murdering innocents. But his political goals-a civil war, in which Islamist forces would triumph-seem secondary to the promise of terrible destruction. He vowed, “If the enemy wins, we will burn everything.”

It’s hard to watch the video of Steven Sotloff’s last moments and not conclude something similar: the ostensible objective of securing an Islamic state is nowhere near as important as killing people. For the guys who signed up for ISIS-including, especially, the masked man with the English accent who wielded the knife-killing is the real point of being there. Last month, when ISIS forces overran a Syrian Army base in the city of Raqqa, they beheaded dozens of soldiers and displayed their trophies on bloody spikes. “Here are heads that have ripened, that were ready for the plucking,” an ISIS fighter said in narration. Two soldiers were crucified. This sounds less like a battle than like some kind of macabre party.

In a lesser-known aphorism from Clausewitz, he says, “Courage, above all things, is the first quality of a warrior.” The executioner in the Sotloff video, as in the video that captured the beheading of the journalist James Foley, is wearing a mask. Is it the mark of a warrior? Or is it the mark of a murderer who knows, deep in his soul, that he should be ashamed?

How we screwed up Iran. Excerpted from an obituary in the latest issue of the Economist on a leading Iranian poet, called Simin Behbahani:

 She was 26 when the Americans and the British deposed Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister. The autocratic rule of the Shah, whom the West found more palatable, sharpened her desire for justice. As the years passed, like many others, she began to dream of revolution-not because she yearned for an Islamic state, but because she wanted an end to repression and the fear of the secret police.

In 1979 the revolution came, in the form of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei and his Islamic Republic. But as the new state began a crackdown of its own, the dream soon soured. Ms Behbahani recalled being unable to bear the sight of lorries full of the bodies of executed prisoners, dripping with blood as they rumbled down the road. But she could still write:

    I can’t look: a corpse lies on the ground,
its horrifying outline punctuated by bullets,
the swamp bubbles that were his eyes
expelled from their sockets,
emptied of all joy and sadness,
separated from all hatred and love.

Then came the long war with Iraq, grinding and vicious. She remembered the sky over her head, blackened with the smoke of missiles, the ground ruined by exploding bombs, and again the lorries full of bodies, this time of dead soldiers being hauled to the cemeteries.

Airline seat horrors. The guy in front of you reclines. Be wary. Doing it quickly, he can smash your laptop’s screen. Solution (from the Wall Street Journal):

A former airline executive did tell me of a surefire strategy he has employed. He asks the flight attendant for a cup of water, then fakes a loud sneeze. On the “Ah-Choo!” he flicks some drops of water over the top of the seat onto the recliner in front of him. The seat will bolt upright instantly.

Gatestone Institute is a non-partisan, not-for-profit international policy council and think tank dedicated to educating the public about what the mainstream media fails to report in promoting. Gatestone head is John R. Bolton whose bio on the site reads:

Before serving as the United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations (2005-2006), Ambassador Bolton was Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security (2001-2005). Bolton also served in the administrations of President Ronald Reagan and President George H. W. Bush. His many accomplishments include the rescission of the UN’s 1975 “Zionism is racism” resolution, U.S. renunciation of the International Criminal Court and the establishment of the Proliferation Security Initiative. Ambassador Bolton is a Senior Fellow with the American Enterprise Institute and a Fox News contributor.

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The Lake.
Paddy had long heard stories of an amazing family tradition. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all been able to walk on water on their 18th birthday.

On that special day, they’d each walked across the lake to the pub on the far side for their first legal drink.

So when Paddy’s 18th birthday came, he and his pal Mick, took a boat out to the middle of the lake, Paddy, stepped out of the boat ….and nearly drowned!

Mick pulled him to safety. Furious and confused, Paddy went to see his grandmother ..

“Grandma,” he asked, “Tis me 18th birthday, so why can’t I walk across the lake like me father, his father and his father before him?”

Granny looked deeply into Paddy’s, troubled blue eyes and said,”Because ye father, ye grandfather and ye great-grandfather were all born in December, when the lake is frozen, and ye were born in August, ya idiot!”

Harry Newton who admits to being obsessed with the middle east. ISIS has the wherewithal to threaten our American homeland. They haven’t targeted us (or Israel) yet. But we, Jews and Christians, are infidels, even worse than the Shiites. ISIS has recruited several hundred Americans, who carry American passports, and can (and will return) to make mischief.