“What we see as stagflation looming on the horizon in our side-view mirror today, may be full-blown deflation up-close as dollars are hoarded to pay down excessive debt and reduce, reduce, reduce.”

As usual, Gerard Van der Leun at American Digest not only comes up with ‘net gold, but gives wonderful commentary on it as well.

This video is for me more haunting than any of the post-apocalyptic films Hollywood has pushed out. The video itself, a homemade production, was shot back in 1977. There’s a good chance that at least one of the people in the video is dead by now; it will likely only be a few more decades until they all are, along with me — I’m roughly the same age as the players in this film. I’m not bothered by my own mortality, but this video makes me reflect upon that of my entire generation.

And a good Monday morning to you, too.   ..bruce w..

This effort has taken me to Caithness in the north of Scotland twice, the the ancient ancestral home of Knockfin. This has even gotten me in front of the BBC cameras to film an episode of the program “Landward” outlining the research project.

This is more than just a genealogy effort of who begat whom, it is an effort to understand the places and ways that they lived and the role they played, large and small, in history. Since our start a small but growing group have been “collecting cousins”. When we find people in the modern day that connect with the family, we share all of the history and data we have to date, and invite them to participate. Some of them would rather be left alone, and we respect that. Most however are thrilled and in their sharing we are slowly building up a better idea of the events, places and people.

This project is very much an effort of the modern age. With cousins and participants on 3 continents and multiple countries, we share most of our information over the internet. We are also using DNA testing to help define and refine our history, as what we can trace through records ends in the mid 1700s. Our goal is to contact as many descendants of our common “progenitor” as we can, and offer them our shared history, inhopes it will never be lost or forgotten again.

Some random facts from the project:

The Henderson family originates (at least the earliest records we can find) from the Berriedale area of Caithness in the mid 1700s. A croft farmed by William Henderson with his wife Ann Sultherland is listed as “Knockfin, Berriedale” and his sons William, James and Angus. By 1820 or so, but William (son) and Angus are no longer in Caithness, and we assume they left for North America or Australia.

The common progenitors are James Henderson and Mary Sutherland whose croft house at Rhian (now in ruins) was the home to 7 children. His oldest son William is part of the family tree of scottish author Neil M. Gunn. All of the cousins we have found thus far are descendants of this couple.

The family tree includes soldiers who died in every major conflict since 1850, minsters and missionaries, crofters and fishermen. The first to attend college was my great grandfather Reverend Adam C. Henderson who attended the University of Glasgow in 1867 before becoming a minster of the Free Church. There was also a lady named Henrietta Henderson who was a missionary with the China Inland Mission, and spent her life bringing Christ to China. This included 4 years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. After her release she returned to China less than a year later and stood by her work until the Chinese communists finally drove her and the rest of the missionaries from the country through punishment, imprisonment and starvation.

Now I am happy to say that thanks to the help of my good friend Mr Bruce Webster, I have created a separate Blog to track all of our research and work. It’s name: Ramscraigs – A Caithness Story

(Image stolen from American Digest)

We aim to please (most mostly we aim to hit) . . .

MID-MORNING UPDATE: The FBI raids the office of the DC Chief Technology Officer, who is (or was) Vivek Kundra, who is now the new CTO for the Obama Administration. However, it appears that the focus is not on Kundra, but on two other employees who work in that office and who were both arrested by the FBI this morning. Much more of this, and I’ll start feeling sorry for Obama. Hat tip to Drudge.

Preparing for the next great land rush, with a wonderful equation for estimating the market value of located terrestrial planets.

And speaking of land rushes: the English Marsh frog Invasion. With maps and photos.)

The inside story (if one can trust a thief) of one of the greatest criminal heists ever. (Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

Back to our original links . . .

Warren Buffett famously said that “It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.” He was talking about economic issues, but I think it can be applied to the Obama Administration in other ways as well.

Example #1: The Washington Post editorial board weighs in on the failed Chas Freeman nomination to the NIC:

It wasn’t until Mr. Freeman withdrew from consideration for the job, however, that it became clear just how bad a selection Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair had made. Mr. Freeman issued a two-page screed on Tuesday in which he described himself as the victim of a shadowy and sinister “Lobby” whose “tactics plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency” and which is “intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government.” Yes, Mr. Freeman was referring to Americans who support Israel — and his statement was a grotesque libel. . . .

What’s striking about the charges by Mr. Freeman and like-minded conspiracy theorists is their blatant disregard for such established facts. Mr. Freeman darkly claims that “it is not permitted for anyone in the United States” to describe Israel’s nefarious influence. But several of his allies have made themselves famous (and advanced their careers) by making such charges — and no doubt Mr. Freeman himself will now win plenty of admiring attention. Crackpot tirades such as his have always had an eager audience here and around the world. The real question is why an administration that says it aims to depoliticize U.S. intelligence estimates would have chosen such a man to oversee them.

Ouch! That’s got to leave a mark, both on Freeman and on the Obama Administration.

Example #2 — whack! Another mark on the Obama Administration left by David Ignatius in an WaPo op-ed:

We’re still in the Neville Chamberlain phase when it comes to the economic crisis. The government is talking about sacrifice and solutions, but it hasn’t yet made the tough decisions that will put the economy back together. Economist David Smick had it right in The Post this week when he said the administration had a three-pronged strategy: delay, delay and delay. The administration announces a rescue package but doesn’t deliver details; it promises budget discipline but saves the hard decisions for later.

One reason this season feels so political is that Obama has stacked his administration with politicians and former government officials. You might think that with the greatest financial crisis of his lifetime, the president would want a few business leaders with experience managing large organizations in crisis. But no.

As they say, read the whole thing. It’s not like the Ignatius and the WaPo editorial board are conservatives, either. However, the WaPo op-ed page managed to uphold its leftist creds with this piece of economic silliness. The Christian Science Monitor begs to differ.

Finally, example #3: R. Emmett Tyrell says that he misses Bill Clinton as President and that Obama’s disasters may salvage Clinton’s Presidential legacy. The Apocalypse is near, indeed.

Meanwhile, as the New York Times blames the Freeman fiasco “on the Jooooos” (in Ace of Spades’ euphonious phrase), Gail Collins and David Brooks engage in some mutual navel-gazing about how clever they are while ostensibly talking about the Obama administration.

Funny, the mainstream media usually loves polls of experts; I wonder why this one isn’t getting much play outside of the Wall Street Journal.

The mainstream media also loves stories about big corporations suppressing artistic expression, which again makes me wonder why this story has seen so little press coverage.

The State Department and — surprise! — the mainstream media take a “speak no evil” approach to the “reset button” fiasco. As the writer says, can you imagine the media reaction if this had happened in the Bush administration?

Now consider the following:

The men who run these organizations are not a bunch of coked out cowboys slinging their pistols in the air as they party day and night. No, these are intelligent, educated men with the resources to surround themselves with some of the sharpest minds on the planet. They run global, multi-billion dollar businesses that operate around the clock, around the world. They know the power of knowledge. They have the latest in technologies and weaponry, they use satellites for communications and surveillance. They employ their own private armies–fully trained and armed to teeth–in order to protect their operations.

Rusty Fleming, over at Big Hollywood, is describing the Mexican Drug Trafficing Organizations (DTOs) that increasingly are the law and government in areas of Mexico. Go read the whole article. And then consider the Obama Administration’s laser focus on this issue.

Now consider this article by Dan Gerstein over at Forbes.com:

[In the opinions of the people Gerstein talked with, US Treasury Sec'y Tim] Geithner has been a terrible political salesman–at a time when instilling confidence is an essential part of his job. For some–more often political people than finance types–this could eventually become fatal. . . . Nearly everyone started from the same sympathetic vantage point: The Treasury secretary has the hardest job in the world right now. . . . Nevertheless, many [of the people] I heard from seriously questioned whether Geithner was the right man for this largely political task. By far the most common complaint was that Geithner has yet to show he has what it takes to instill confidence in the markets and on Main Street and build the political support to do what’s necessary to stabilize our financial system. . . . One leading communications adviser said Geithner is “apparently incapable of articulating the problems and the solutions. He comes across as weak and lacking confidence–exactly the opposite of what we need.” This [person] went so far as to suggest that Geithner think about resigning at some point because “[his] problems are not fixable.”

And so on. The kicker: these are all Democrats talking to Gerstein.

Look on the bright side: here are eight financial analysts who are optimistic about the future.

I recently re-read Robert Heinlein’s classic The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which (IMHO) is his masterpiece and one of the finest novels of the 20th Century.  The novel came to mind when I read this story about China:

The grass-mud horse is an example of something that, in China’s authoritarian system, passes as subversive behavior. Conceived as an impish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has not merely made government censors look ridiculous, although it has surely done that.

It has also raised real questions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information over the Internet — a project on which the Chinese government already has expended untold riches, and written countless software algorithms to weed deviant thought from the world’s largest cyber-community.

Government computers scan Chinese cyberspace constantly, hunting for words and phrases that censors have dubbed inflammatory or seditious. When they find one, the offending blog or chat can be blocked within minutes.

Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, who oversees a project that monitors Chinese Web sites, said in an e-mail message that the grass-mud horse “has become an icon of resistance to censorship.”

Heh. Calling Simon Jester! Calling Simon Jester! And if you want to know what the foul name actually is, check with the experts at Language Log.

Boy, talk about a blast from the past:

One of my favorite ads as a kid, and I was remembering the dialog about 3 seconds ahead of hearing it. Hat tip to James Lileks at the Bleat.

This chart gets worse each time it’s updated (hat tip to Gateway Pundit):

We're all doomed

And speaking of another blast from the past:

For the Clinton Administration, it’s time to regroup and refocus. The White House seems to have dissipated the good will and political capital built up with the unveiling of Clinton’s long-term economic program. Initially, the President’s courage in looking the deficit monster in the eye, after years of Washington denial, was refreshing. His promise to pare government spending, however modest, was welcomed. An inspired State of the Union address helped boost the President’s poll standings and win congressional passage of his budget resolution in record time.

But now, Clinton’s economic strategy is in serious trouble. The stunning Republican defeat of his stimulus package calls into question the President’s leadership. Health-care reform, wrapped in secrecy, appears to be growing in size and expense. Early business supporters now cower under the drumbeat of new taxes, regulations, and mandates that emanate from every corner of the Administration, from Health & Human Services to the Labor Dept.

What’s wrong? The President has lost his focus. In his first 100 days, Clinton unveiled proposals on gays in the military, abortion rights, the environment, national service, school and labor-law reforms. All the while, his health-care planners were cobbling together a sweeping package that could cost up to $150 billion and require a broad new array of taxes. (Business Week, 5/10/1993)

Possible wars of the future (hat tip to Futuristic):

• The Great Siberian War Of 2030
• The Revival Of Chinese Nationalism: Challenges To American Ideals
• The Future Of Undersea Warfare
• Chinese And Russian Asymmetrical Strategies For Space Dominance (2010-2030)

Headline of the day: “Precision measurement of W boson mass portends stricter limits for Higgs particle.” Glad we’ve got that settled.

The inexorable gravity of economic reality comes to Google:

The accountants have taken over the Googleplex, once a hotbed of amiably unprofitable innovation. The notion that ads would pay the way for everything has been dropped — and “fee” is replacing “free.”

The inexorable gravity of economic reality also comes to Lex Luthor (hat tip to io9.com):

Finally, the Onion sets up the next big blockbuster movie:

Experts Agree Giant, Razor-Clawed Bioengineered Crabs Pose No Threat

Time to go earn my keep, since I can’t keep my earnings.  ..bruce w..

First off, don’t miss Henderson’s analysis of the pending missile shot by the North Koreans.

Opposition within Congress to the cram-it-through legislative approach of the Democratic leadership:

“The process by which these changes have been forced upon this body is so deeply offensive to me, and so deeply undemocratic, that it puts the omnibus appropriations package in jeopardy, in spite of all the other tremendously important funding that this bill would provide,” the enraged son of Cuban immigrants said last week on the Senate floor. Menendez even slapped a hold on a pair of Obama nominees to draw attention to the issue.

Oh, by the way, Sen. Robert Menendez is a Democrat.

Gideon Rachman at the Financial Times has praise for the Obama Administration’s display of respect to other nations. Has Mr. Rachman talked to British PM Gordon Brown lately? And the Obama-snub of Britain couldn’t come at a worse time.

Here’s a list of the next ten newspapers that will cease publishing (going digital or folding altogether).  And speaking of folds — more links after the fold.

The Obama Administration has caused at least one positive boom: an upsurge in ratings for conservative media. Now if the Republicans in Congress can just not misplace their brains and spines again. . . .

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (remember her?) picks an activist female judge for the AK Supreme Court. Not bad for a self-hating conservative troglodyte.

Speaking of which: website-you-should-be-reading-of-the-day is Top of the Ticket. Yes, some good can come out of the LA Times, though don’t tell Patterico.

Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WV) has largely managed to stay out of the press despite ongoing investigations. But like a bad penny, he keeps on turning up.

How to sharpen a pocket knife, from the ever-informative and entertaining The Art of Manliness.

Hillary Clinton indulges in moral equivalency (“We all have room for improvement”), something she knows well about.

As for Arnold, I had such hopes for him back when he first ran for Governor and even sent him money, as did Mark Steyn.

Reversing the George W. Bush Bill Clinton ban on stem cell research.

Left-leaning foundations and non-profits Are Not Amused by the proposed changes to income tax deductions.

I love getting my daily random proverb from contemplate.us, but I remain suspicious of some of the specific proverbs and claimed origins.

Nationalizing CitiBank may not be as easy or clean as some people think.

Yet another move from journalism into politics.

Meryl Yourish weighs in on the curious silence of the mainstream media over the Chas Freeman appointment to the NIC.

The 2nd Amendment still stands.

You know, if Obama is losing Howard Fineman at Newsweek, he’s in real trouble.

Never be too busy sawing to stop and sharpen the saw.

The Sun is blank again, i.e., no sunspots. One tried to form a few days ago, but gave up and went away.

Break’s over; back on my head.  ..bruce w..

Links worth reading:

Democrats try to rebrand earmarks as good government. Not a surprise, since they’re also trying to rebrand trillion-dollar deficits as good economics.

And speaking of good government, Rep. Charlie Rangel responds to direct questions about his tax issues.

Robert Samuelson weights in on Obama’s approach to the economic crisis:

Confidence (too little) and uncertainty (too much) define this crisis. Obama’s double talk reduces the first and raises the second. He says he’s focused on reviving the economy, but he’s also using the crisis to advance an ambitious long-term agenda. The two sometimes collide.

Laura Tyson (former Clinton administration economic advisor), on the other hand, tries to defend the indefensible. Looked at the Dow recently, Laura?

American Express is now the sixth DJIA component to trade below $10/share. Sort of redefines “blue chip”, doesn’t it?

For some saner voices on the continuing crisis, here’s Victor Davis Hanson and Thomas Sowell.

Warren Buffet, in the meantime, notes that the barn door was left open somehow.

The New York Times reports on its own financial struggles. Meanwhile, the Seattle P-I chronicles its own circling of the drain (seriously? the column is titled “Who will speak truth to power”?), and the folks at Ace of Spades could be more gleeful heart-broken. Finally, someone with perspective weighs in.

More diplomatic fallout from the “overwhelmed” Obama White House. Of course, the mainstream media is trying its best to ignore this kerfuffle. And in case you think the snub of British PM Gordon Brown (and his family!) was a fluke, think again. Maybe Obama could use one of these greeting cards. In the meantime, he could certainly use better political advice than he’s been getting. And more people to help him out, as well.

Didn’t we see these in the first Transformer movie? And I think these are showing up in the next film. And maybe this as well.

Today’s site-you-should-be-reading-daily: Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood.

True fact: I lived in Orem, Utah for a few years; in fact, Sandra and I married there. Truer fact: we left Utah a year and a half later and have not lived there since. Wonder why?

I can hardly wait for the very special episode of “Dora the Explorer” on menstruation:

“Girls really identify with Dora and we knew that girls would love to have their friend Dora grow up with them, and experience the new things that they were going through themselves,” wrote Gina Sirard, vice president of marketing for Mattel.

Headline of the morning: It’s Easier to Observe the Failure of Local Realism than Previously Thought. Folks must have been to Washington DC lately. (Seriously, it’s an interesting article.) Still, this other article gave it some strong competition for best headline: Eco-Burial: Not Just For Athiest Hippies Any More.

Is global warming part of a natural cycle? Enquiring minds — at MIT this time — want to know. Here’s a hint (the graph reads right to left):

In the meantime, it appears that Al Gore’s magical ability has rubbed off on new US Energy Sec’y Steven Chu.

It sounds as though some software companies may re-discover the implications of a free market.

Did I mention that when Sandra and I left Utah, we moved to the Santa Cruz area? This quote, in the aftermath of a sonic boom, makes me nostalgic:

The mystery has spurred its share of conspiracy theories. On the Sentinel Web site, readers comments suggested the boom was E.T.’s return, an intercontinental missile that North Korea, or test runs of new, secret U.S. Navy jets.

“It was a chemtrail weather modification program jet making rain for you,” a reader going by the handle “sameold” wrote.

A Connecticut Yankee (well, Redneck Texan, really) visits Stonehenge.

In case you don’t feel sufficiently inadequate: 9 Child Prodigies (Who Actually Ended Up Doing Something).

Remember: March 15th is EATAPETA Day! And speaking of which:

Movie recommendation of the day: “The Lives of Others“. Yes, it’s in German and subtitled; deal with it.

I’ve got work to do. Don’t you?  ..bruce w..

I grew up in a family that always subscribed to Time magazine, and I started reading it at a fairly young age. But when I went off to college in 1971, I decided to conduct an experiment. At that time, the three major weekly news magazines — Time, Newsweek, and US News & World Report — offered cut-rate, nine-month subscriptions to college students, so I subscribed to all three and read all three every week.

All this, of course, was pre-cable, pre-CNN, pre-internet, so your only news sources were typically (a) the big three networks (ABC, NBC, CBS), (b) these three news magazines, and (c) your local newspaper. And unless you lived in a major city (such as New York or Washington DC), it was really just the first two that spoke authoritatively on major national and international issues. Since most families would listen to just one network news show and subscribe to just one of the three news magazines, your source of news and outlook was pretty limited.

So reading all three of these news magazines each week throughout my freshman year of college was an enlightening experience. Though each magazine presented itself as authoritative and objective, it quickly became clear that these three magazines often differed on what they considered important stories, what they considered to be relevant information or even what they considered to be solid facts.

At this same time, I was taking a “Composition & Reasoning” honors freshman English class, in which we had to study syllogisms, logical fallacies, and so on. So the logical weaknesses, loaded language and politicial slants in many of the “news” stories became quickly apparent. By the end of my freshman year, it was clear to me that Time and Newsweek in particular had a liberal slant, while USN&WR had a center-right slant (though USN&WR appeared to make a greater effort to be more neutral in its news reporting).

Notwithstanding all this, I subscribed to Newsweek for decades, simply because I liked the writing and overall coverage in it better, even though its biases became more pronounced over time. However, I abruptly canceled my Newsweek subscription back in 2005 when it falsely reported that a US guard at Guantanamo Bay had desecrated a Koran, sparking riots and deaths worldwide.

All of this leads into Howard Kurtz’s observations on Monday about how Time and Newsweek are, in effect, jettisoning any pretense of objectivitity and speaking with an openly liberal voice:

The rival editors are turning out weeklies that are smaller, more serious, more opinionated and, though they are loath to admit it, more liberal. They are pursuing a more elite audience, in print and on the Web, abandoning the old Henry Luce notion of catering to the masses. It is nothing less than a survival strategy.

Morale in both shops has been devastated as staffers complain about a blurred identity, lack of direction, management snafus and outsourcing to big-name writers that has left them wondering if reporters still have much of a role. . . .

[Rick] Stengel [editor of Time] says his goal is to “make Time lead the conversation, not follow it. To speak stronger with a point of view. To mix more analysis with reporting. Not to ask questions, but to answer them on the cover” — as with this week’s story, “Why Israel Can’t Win.” . . .

The shift toward analysis carries an ancillary benefit: It is cheaper than shoe-leather reporting. Each magazine’s editorial staff — 215 for Time, fewer than 200 for Newsweek — is about half the size it was a decade or so ago. But both editors say even their opinion pieces are built on gathering facts. “If you don’t have new information, break stories, you do find yourself simply commenting on stories other people break,” [Jon] Meacham [editor of Newsweek] says.

Read the whole article. Kurtz points out that US News & World Report no longer has a print edition; I suspect that Time and Newsweek will be gone from print in another 5 years, though — as with Life, a weekly photomagazine that I read faithfully as a kid, but which ceased printing weekly in 1972 — the names themselves may live on for decades. We shall not see their like again.  ..bruce w..

A headline on the Fox News website reads like this:

Obama to End Military’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Policy

I hope beyond hope that this is some nasty trial balloon to judge how huge the backlash against this is going to be. Let me short cut the process for you, you are about to gut the military by doing this.

The text looks something like this

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama will allow gays to serve openly in the military by overturning the controversial “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that marred President Clinton’s first days in office, according to incoming White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.

The startling pronouncement, which could re-open a dormant battle in the culture wars and distract from other elements of Obama’s agenda, came during a Gibbs exchange with members of the public who sent in questions that were answered on YouTube.

“Thadeus of Lansing, Mich., asks, ‘Is the new administration going to get rid of the “don’t ask, don’t tell policy?’” said Gibbs, looking into the camera. “Thadeus, you don’t hear a politician give a one-word answer much. But it’s, ‘Yes.’”

Romantic entanglement, straight or gay, has a detrimental effect on combat effectiveness. I saw this myself first hand in the Corps, and I am sure it is no better today.

I am quite certain that gay people do and have served with distinction since the earliest days of warfare, and they are welcome to serve if their focus is on the mission and their duty to the country.

The US military is not a social experiment for liberal causes. If you want to have a place for flagrant homosexual behavior, don’t make that the service. Don’t ask, don’t tell is the kind of policy that no one likes, but it recognizes that gay people are and can be just as patriotic and mission focused as straights, but it keeps the whole question of sexual orientation out of the equation, where it belongs.

As has been reported elsewhere in the press, reclusive actor Patrick McGoohan died earlier today.

The 17 episode series of “The Prisoner” was transformational in many ways for television. In an age of episodic television, where everything was resolved in 30 minutes and at the end nothing ever changes, McGoohan’s show was one enormous story arc. He wrote it with a beginning, a middle and an end.

As such he paved the way for other television shows that followed a grand story arc, such as Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica.

Personally, watching The Prisoner prompted me to think very carefully about the work I had done for the US government, and examine the notion of what became of people who worked on sensitive subjects once they decided they would move on.

For those of you who have never taken a look at this masterpiece of story-telling, the plot revolves around spy (played by McGoohan) who resigns his post with the government, and awakes the next day on a strange island called “the Village”. The entire place is one giant mind sieve that houses former and current members of the spy community from several countries. The series revolves around the efforts of those that run the place to break McGoohan, who is only referred to as “Number 6″, which he steadfastly refuses.

If you want to learn more about this visionary television series, you can head over to AMC (which is doing a re-make) and view the classic episodes on line.

I would like to say thank you to everyone who reads what Bruce Webster and I post here, and wish every one of you a Merry Christmas.

Even though times are a bit rough and likely headed rougher, it’s important to keep in mind that for christians like myself, we celebrate the birth of our lord, savior and redeemer. Popular culture has done more to belittle the christian faith in the last few years than at any time in my life.

But that should not diminish that it’s important for each of us to remember the simple yet profound lessons of Christ’s life. To treat each other with kindness, compassion and respect, especially those that have the most need.

Jesus did not draw a distinction between age, gender, parentage or nationality. He welcomed everyone to hear is his message of love and tasked each who would follow him to teach others to “Do to others as you would have them do to you”. This simple “11th Commandment” is profound in that it does not require lawyers or a stack of legal documents to describe. Yet in every day life it can sometimes be so difficult to enact.

Merry Christmas all, may you and your families all share a wonderful holiday this year.

=======================

[from BruceW]: What he said.  God bless us, everyone.