Hello from paradise on the beach in Acapulco,
Christmas and the “holiday season” sneaks up on me every year. Partly because I don't really celebrate Christmas (although having two kids and their incessant talk about Santa Claus now has necessitated my first Xmas tree of my adult life), secondly because I have never participated in the gift-giving aspect of it all (which usually makes me the least stressed and happiest person around Xmas), thirdly because for the last 7 years I've mostly lived in the tropics where it doesn't feel very Christmas-like and fourthly because as a self-employed entrepreneur for the last twenty years I rarely even know what day it is, much less what month or time of year it is because to me there are no weekends or holidays… if I am awake, I'm working.
But, after having the pool mostly to mysef for the last few weeks I awoke to a building and a city teeming with activity… it must be that time of the year and it probably won't stop until the first week of January. That's okay… there are lots of fun times to be had, including various Xmas parties and a New Years party I intend to throw in my condo in Acapulco… we bought about 40 bottles of alcohol too much for the wedding a few weeks ago and I am determined to make good use of them this month!
There were lots of interesting events going on worldwide again this week, including the US Government making it official that they are now no different than any other tyrannical government in history… in fact, in many ways they are worse. But we'll leave those topics for next week and in our upcoming issue of TDV, the January edition, where we look ahead to 2012 and wonder what is next.
360
Technology is amazing. I remember buying my first mobile phone around 1992. It was a Novatel PTR825 (pictured to the right). What that photo doesn't show is that it was about 3 inches deep in addition to its width and height! It weighed about five pounds and was obviously way to big to fit in any pocket so you had to lug-it around in your hand. But, having a mobile phone in 1992 was about the equivalent of having a car in 1893… it was worth it just for the “cool” factor. I remember as I received a call at a movie theatre, my friend nudging me as I lifted up the phone with both hands to my ear, “Everyone thinks you are so cool!” I winked at him knowingly before ending the call as soon as possible… mobile calls back then were about $5/minute!
I actually almost killed my own father with that phone. My dad is a whole other story for another blog, but to give the short story, he is a lifelong gym nut and has freakishly strong arms… particularly forearms. He makes popeye look proportioned. Because of this his trophy case is full of tug-of-war and arm wrestling trophies. Here is a photo of him in his 50s winning another tug of war contest just by using his arm-strength alone!
So, anyway, as he usually does when I go to visit him, he invited me to go to the gym with him. It was a 2 level gym and I went upstairs on the treadmill and my dad was directly below me on the bench press. I placed my 5 pound phone on the treadmill and blissfully jogged away, not noticing that with each step the phone was sliding further and further off to the side. I heard a big crash and looked down… the phone had missed my dad's head, who was bench pressing about 300 pounds, by a few inches and shattered on the floor below.
Of course, as time went on phones got smaller and smaller. Meanwhile, digital cameras came into retail existence in the mid 1990s and I purchased one of the first products, a Casio QV-11. I thought it was the coolest thing… although it was big and chunky and the pictures it took were so grainy and low resolution as to be almost completely useless. But I remember thinking that one day all of these things would be small, high quality and all integrated.
Also in the meantime, I learned how to take photos with two software technologies that really helped to create amazing photos. One technology is simply the ability to paste numerous photos together into a panorama… many different types of software made this easier and easier over the years but it'd still take quite a while to piece a panorama together. And the other technology is something called High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging. Any photo you've seen that seems almost surreally perfect is probably done with HDR. HDR basically enables you to take a number of different photos of the same subject at different exposure levels and then to merge all the best exposures into one photo… essentially giving you the darkest darks while still having the brightest bright parts… you can see 35 great HDR photos here: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/03/10/35-fantastic-hdr-pictures/.
Until recently, taking a good panorama photo or a good HDR photo entailed carrying around a high-end camera and using various software programs and many hours of work to put the final product together. But, no more. Everything described above is all built into the iPhone 4S. The iPhone 4S is the first iPhone with a really high quality camera, making it all possible.
HDR is built into the 4S… and if you want to take amazing 360 degree panorama photos, you can buy an app called 360 for $0.99. It takes about a minute to take the entire panorama (as you spin around like a dufus… but it's worth it). But that beats the hours it used to take to even come close to doing something similar before.
To see a 360 degree view of the Starbucks where you can find me sitting and writing/reading most afternoons in Acapulco, click here. As well, here is another I took from the private pool at AcaCondos/LTGPS this week. And here is another from the main public pool. And here is another taken from one of my favorite beach bars in Acapulco, Playita Santa Lucia.
Thanks to Jim Letourneau's “Big Picture” blog for bringing the 360 app to our attention.
XMAS AND JANUARY
The next two weeks on the blog will be fairly quiet. We'll have a few entries but unless something outrageous happens, we are going to try to blend into the crowd here in Mexico and drink, dance and enjoy many hours on the beach… that's not to say that we won't be working though. We are putting together an epic edition of The Dollar Vigilante due out early in January where we'll take a look back at the last year and, more importantly, look forward to what is in store for 2012. (Plus for subscribers we will have our last Interim Update of the year tomorrow with some great ideas for stink-bids on some stocks that have been way oversold due to tax-loss selling). We are going to re-assess ALL of our assumptions and look at how best to survive, prosper and profit from what will, almost without doubt, be one of the most interesting years since 2001 when still unprosecuted criminals perpetrated the biggest false flag event in human history.
The US Government is tearing at the seems to keep control, Occupy Wall Street has made an initial statement and should see a huge resurgence in the spring, Iraq is erupting into sectarian violence as the US military has now been evicted, the rest of the middle east is engulfed in statarchy (it isn't anarchy… ALL of this is caused by the state), the eurozone is in its final death throes, MF Global has wrung the death knell for the corrupt and criminal COMEX and much, much more.
In short, we are witnessing a revolution. It is the end of the fiat currency, anti-capitalist central banking system and its evil stepfather, the democratic, welfare/police nation-state. How the Mayans managed to pick 2012 as a time for a major upheaval, we don't know. But as I sit here amongst the descendants of the Mayans and Aztecs and as they dance the night away, without much of a care in the world, maybe they know something we don't!
NO REST FOR THE WICKED
I'll also be resting up for another busy month. In January I'll be one of the keynote speakers at probably the biggest investment show on the planet, the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference on January 22-23. The entire TDV team will be there, including myself, Ed Bugos, new addition Vin Maru and manager, Michael Bach. We'll hope you'll come and see us. Here is a Hollywood quality trailer for the show including a cameo by myself. Registration now is free, so register now.
From there I'll be making an appearance at entrepreneur and socialite, Judd Weiss's (of HustleBear.com), famous Bel-Air parties. Recent events have seen Peter Schiff and Adam Kokesh show up… We'll be there on January 25 in the LA area. If you live in LA and would like invites to this private event, email us at TDV@dollarvigilante.com. From there Mike and I will be off to Santo Domingo to check-up on the progress of dozens of dollar vigilantes who have applied for residency, and an eventual passport, in the Dominican Republic with our contacts and contractors there. And then I am off to the Global Financial Summit, run by the same people who do FreedomFest, scheduled for February 1-5 in Nassau, the Bahamas. We'll soon have a link to register for that event… it should be excellent. Speakers include Peter Schiff and David McAlvany amongst others.
In short, we will be enjoying this holiday season to recuperate before a wild and crazy 2012 that may make 2011 look like a walk in the park.
PREPARE FOR EVERYTHING TO CHANGE
It's amazing how fast things change, but when we started The Dollar Vigilante 18 months ago and told people to prepare for the collapse of the US dollar and the western monetary system we were looked at by many to be crazy. Yet now, just a short while later, we don't even need to explain to people why that is the case… it is accepted as being a given. And now, we have banks like UBS, telling people to do the same things we've been advising: to buy gold, canned foods and guns, in preparation. Many people are awakening to what will happen and now we are in demand as speakers and guests to solely explain HOW to make it through the next few years… not why the next few years will happen.
In some ways, with how we are helping Americans and other westerners get second passports and overseas property and bank accounts we are starting to feel like the people who smuggled Jews out of Germany in the early 1940s. We realize this sounds like an extreme statement to some, but given that the US Government is just about to pass a bill basically enabling martial law, all the “legal” paperwork is in place for an extreme event.
We'll be talking more about this in the near future but, as stated above, ALL of the infrastructure is now in place to begin capital controls on Americans – which will spread to most western countries – and anyone who opposes will be taken away by men in a black SUV, probably never to be heard from again.
To take your mind off things, wars will be started throughout north Africa and the Middle East.
I hate to end what started as a fun Weekend Vigilante on such an ominous note… but there are pessimists and optimists… we here at TDV are just realists. We tell it how we see it, no matter how much it might hurt in the short term… because we know that it is better to prepare now and be wrong than to not prepare and be right. It's as simple as that.
In the meantime, spend every moment you can enjoying life and take care of those you love and prepare for turmoil. The more that are prepared, the easier it will be.
It is sad that this whole statist experiment is forcing us all to such a preservatory event… but, as we have always said, if we can get through this and move on to a world with more government, we will all be better off. How many governments, you ask? Ten times more would be better. A hundred times more would be even better. And if we can get to 7 billion governments on Earth then we will live in the closest thing to utopia possible.
Maybe you can call us optimistic realists.
BAD LIP READING
To end on a light note, “Bad Lip Reading” is one of the funnier things we've seen in a while. Here is one they did on Rick Perry:
Here's another funny “Bad Lip Reading” from Newt Gingrich. Newt Gringrich, by the way, just edged Ron Paul by winning 22% of the Iowa Straw Poll versus Ron Paul's 23%. Poor Ron Paul can never seem to win, it's either him or some other guy.
