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Skorinc
Wilderman
I have a younger brother named Robert that is one of the smartest, fun, and talented guys you will ever meet. He also released a pretty great album today under the name "Wilderman", but chances are, you probably haven't heard of him. And, while I hope the album does well, it's not very likely to be played on top 40 stations. And I think he's pretty ok with that. But, here's the deal… I think there are people out there that need to hear this music, and especially if they knew the story behind this record. Rob is not really the kind of guy that is going to start some blog and tell you some kind of story to get you to buy his record. So I will.
To be clear, the music doesn't NEED a story. It can stand on its own. It's based almost entirely on the 12 bar blues form, and Rob actually manages to innovate within that. That's not an easy thing to do. Also the songs are good. The lyrics and melodies are interesting and they'll get in your head. But there's something behind this music that not a lot of people know about that I think makes it really special.
In short, this music (at least in my opinion) is the sound of Rob's rebirth after a really tough decade of life. Rob hasn't had the easiest go of it in the last several years. Lots of pain, betrayal and struggle that in many ways had left him pretty devastated. Talking to Rob a few years ago, he had become a shell of the person that I knew him to be growing up. Carefree, creative, funny, Rob had become bitter, shamed, and angry Rob.
But then, last year, Rob was freed from a very long-term and toxic relationship, and he started making some changes in his life. He started believing that his life was worth more than some people had led him to believe. He started taking care of himself better. He started writing songs again. And he decided to make an album. I actually wrote about it in my book. Here's a little snippet of a letter he sent me and the rest of the Wilderman band last year:
Dear bros, I want to make my record with you guys. I don't know how it's going to happen, but I really want it to.
I want to go to somewhere in the wilderness bring some analog gear and really pour out our hearts onto tape.
I want you guys on the record because I feel safest with you, and know I can just be totally me and be completely unrestrained.
You guys all understand the "anointing" and what it's like to play together and connect and reach something spiritual.
I'm hoping for seven days (two days setup/fun/connection/spiritual retreat stuff, five days tracking), with all of us there totally engaged, connected, hearts out, sharing fears and doubts and stuff we never feel comfortable enough to talk about with total freedom, only love, no judgment, in the wilderness. As men.
With no ego or want for success, only love and connection and beauty and spirituality. I think you get the point. love, Rob
Hearing Rob, who we all knew had gone through so much shit, speak like this was inspiring. We all immediately said "yes", and the recording process really was pretty incredible.
Ok, so honestly, the whole all analog, no ego, "no judgment" thing probably isn't a great formula for fame and fortune in the music industry. We live in a society that seems to prefer hearing everything perfectly timed and tuned and sung by a 150 pound, 20-year-old boy with amazing hair. This project was not aspiring to that end. Here's an example of how this music went to tape:
David, my other little brother, is a bass player that has often played for Gungor and also has a band called "The Brilliance." He was part of the Wilderman band as well. David has always joked about bass solos while we are recording. He is always playfully wanting to throw bass solos in, because, well, that's ridiculous. So we are in this cabin in the desert, and recording this song. We are all just set up in the same room with all of our mics bleeding into each other and all through only analog gear right to tape. (So what that means is that what happens in that room is what you will hear on the record. You don't get to go fix everything like everybody else does with today's technology. What happens is what happens.)
So David starts joking about putting a bass solo down. And Rob, whose manifesto for this record is "no judgement", "no ego", says "Dave, if you want to play a bass solo, then play a bass solo." We all laugh, but Rob doesn't find it that funny. "Bro, there's no ego here, if you feel like playing a bass solo here, you totally should."
David, overjoyed, begins to work out a solo. David moves from light and childlike to serious as he dips his head and starts trying to figure out some cool lines to play.
"Whoa! No, Dave. If you are going to do a bass solo, you just need to feel it in the moment. No rehearsing that." And that's how this project was made. I had never played slide guitar before. For this album, that's pretty much all I played. Rob never used standard tunings. In fact, we all tuned to these weird chakra frequencies that meant something to Rob, so we weren't even ever in standard A=440. (That's pretty much all you ever hear) From beginning to end, the project was all about heart and freedom and there was no room for plastic or ego. And if you could know Rob and where he has come from, you would know why that is so beautiful.
Rob is a very talented musician. He studied jazz piano at North Texas University. He is a great producer and songwriter. He COULD make a record that sounds pristine and perfect.
But Rob, at least at the time, had spent far too much time trying to work to make himself acceptable to other people. In his toxic relationship, he had constantly been belittled and made to feel that he was not good enough. Rob finally had decided to stop listening to those lies and to be free. Part of that process was this music. This music is the sound of a man coming out of his prison cell and saying "I don't care whether you 'accept' me or not, this is who I am, and I'm going to live my life." I love that.
The way this record was made is very rare and very bold. And while the production is certainly more raw and spontaneous than many people are used to hearing, I think if you really listen to the songs, you will be able to feel the sounds of love, hope, and joy that this album came from. I'm really proud of Rob for spending so much of his own time and money on this project, and I hope some of you will support the work as well. You can check it out here:
http://wilderman.us http://wilderman.bandcamp.com/ https://www.facebook.com/wildermanmusic
Tagged: Music, Record, Rob Gungor, Wilderman
Christian Pizza
An excerpt from "The Crowd, the Critic and the Muse" (Appendix 2):
A typical conversation I might have on an airplane:
Stranger (upon seeing the guitar on my back): Hey, are you gonna play us something?
Michael: Ha ha! Maybe, we'll see! (Note to jokesters: anybody who regularly carries a guitar onto a plane is tired of this joke.)
Stranger: You know, I'm not sure that guitar is going to fit in the overhead . . .
Michael (trying to stay nice): Yeah, it does actually.
I place the guitar in the overhead bin and close it without a problem. I realize my seat is right next to the stranger and sit down.
Stranger: So, what kind of music do you play?
It is here that I have a difficult time knowing how to answer.
If you asked Bill iTunes or John Google this question about Michael Gungor, the answer that you would find would be "Christian and Gospel." There are a number of reasons that this is not the answer I would prefer to give someone, especially a stranger on a plane. It is not because I am embarrassed about the spiritual content of our music. I'm not. It's essentially a language problem.
It actually gets kind of complicated. So to begin, let's take another jaunt back to my fundamentalist days.
Here's how art worked in the religious subculture that I grew up in: If you want to be a painter, and you want God to be happy with your art, you better paint crosses or doves flying around a globe or something. If you want to be a singer, and you want to use your gift for God, you need to sing Christian music. The more JPM's (Jesus' Per Minute), the better.
I loved music. I loved God. So I tried to write Christian music. I wasn't great at it.
I lost my first Christian music competition when I was eighteen. It was a big seminar held in the Rocky Mountains where the winners could win things like Christian record deals.
In the first category, instrumental music, my toughest competition was a blind guitarist. I didn't know how to feel about that. He was a really good player, and I felt bad for him because he was blind and all; but man, there was still a big part of me that wanted to crush that visually impaired acoustic shredder into the ground. No luck there, though. I came in second. I hoped for better luck in the songwriting part of the competition.
I had submitted a song called "What a God" that was a big hit at my church. People would actually start chanting "WHAT A GOD! WHAT A GOD!" at the end of services. This would happen quite regularly. I think it may have had something to do with all of the solos in it. Acoustic guitar solos, sax solos, percussion solos, drums solos . . . it was the late 90s, and people ate solos for breakfast.
The judges told me that the song was trite.
Trite.
Stupid judges. They must not have heard the incredible solos.
In retrospect, the song was trite, but I still felt like I had been robbed, so I came back the next year. This time, I had written a song in a minor key with a 7/8 time signature, and I thought it was pretty amazing. I was confident that the judges would think so as well. They did not. They told me that odd time signatures do not work well in Christian music. They told me that people like Sting might be able to get away with it, but he is not in Christian music.
I tried for a long time to be part of the Christian music industry. I even went to the Dove Awards one time. I sat there in my nice suit, daydreaming about what it would be like to win one of those someday.
So, yeah, there would have been a day that I would have gladly told the stranger on the plane that I played Christian music. But in the years of trying to make it in the Christian music industry, I came to discover how fundamentally fraught with peril an idea like Christian music can be.
First, and least importantly, there is the problem of the idea of genre. This is my first hurdle with the stranger on the plane. He's asking for a genre, and so much about the idea of genres drives me crazy. Genres are all about labeling, marketing, and boxing art into imaginary constructs for the purpose of making money.
Genres are arbitrary. You can't accurately classify art into categories like you can with lizards or different species of ferns. In science, classification works well—"It's got four limbs, some hair, milk for its babies, lungs, and warm blood. It's a mammal." In art, the situation is not so cut and dry.
How many jokes must be included in a screenplay before the drama becomes a comedy? How many bombs must explode before the thriller becomes an action movie? If a rock band decides to start using banjos rather than electric guitars, are they still a rock band, or have they suddenly become a country or bluegrass band?
If musical genres were based on concrete and consistent musical characteristics, the marketers would have to create new genres in the record stores for every new, innovative artist that comes along. That's not what happens. What happens is that the marketers simply categorize the artist's album into the alternative section or the pop section or wherever they think it will have the best chance of selling. A genre is an imagined box that marketers have found to be effective as a marketing channel to a certain type of consumer.
What, for instance, does a typical country music fan look like in your imagination? What is he wearing? How does he speak? Ok, now think of a typical hip-hop fan. Same questions. How do you imagine him?
I doubt that you are imagining both the country fan and the hip-hop fan to be two identical middle-aged Asian businessmen in suits with no discernable differences between them or their lifestyles other than what is playing on their iPods.
Both country music and hip-hop music come out of a certain type of culture. Country music originated in southern parts of the United States in the 1920s. This was the same culture that had given birth to the concept of the cowboy. Country stars often wear cowboy clothing, which is clothing designed to help a person do the job of a cowboy, not sing music on a stage. A cowboy hat is intended to help keep a rancher protected from the weather. Cowboy boots were designed to help protect a cowboy while he rides his horse.
Most country artists aren't riding horses to and from the stage. That's not why country singers wear this clothing. Country music is perceived to come out of a certain lifestyle. That lifestyle has all of its own boundary markers that separate it from other cultures and lifestyles. Country artists wear cowboy hats as social boundary markers for their particular subculture.
The same is true for hip-hop. Hip-hop came out of the lifestyle of poor or working class people living in crowded urban centers. Hip-hop and rap often address issues that are familiar to their urban source—economic pressures, crime, drugs, gangs, violence, and so on. What is odd is that most successful rappers or hip-hop artists do not live in "the hood" anymore. They live in the rich areas. The style of sagging pants that many of these artists wear is believed to have originated in the prisons where belts were not allowed for the fear that the inmates might hang themselves with them. These artists are not in prison, and most of them probably never have been, but crime and a perceived oppression from authority figures is part of the subculture that gives birth to the art, so they've come to sag their pants.
So all of this is my first problem with answering the stranger's question—he's asking for a genre, and I don't want to jump into any of his boxes.
The second reason I am not comfortable telling the stranger that I make "Christian music" is because I believe that this sort of categorization is precisely the kind of destructive separation of the sacred and the secular that is the result of fundamentalism, idolatry, and remnants of Gnosticism. That sort of division between sacred and profane makes for a small and anemic faith that is only relevant to the tiny corners of existence that we allow it to inhabit.
In Velvet Elvis, Rob Bell writes, "'Christian is a great noun and a poor adjective." I agree with him. When the word "Christian" is used as an adjective, the assumption is that the essence of Christianity is something that can be transferred to a lifeless object. If Christianity is simply a set of lifeless dogmas and ideas, then one can certainly copy and paste those ideas onto any other lifeless object and describe it as Christian. As far as I am aware, there is no Christian automobile industry, no Christian mathematics industry, and no Christian airline industry. Most people would probably find it odd if someone tried to start such an industry. Would painting a big red Jesus on the hood of a car make it a Christian car? Would a pizza with dove-shaped pepperonis or cross-shaped sausages be a Christian pizza?
A third reason I'm uncomfortable telling the stranger on the plane that I play Christian music is because it begs the question: What exactly is Christian music?
Is it a musical style? No. Saying that I play "Christian music" says nothing about the actual music. It could mean that I direct a large church choir, sing tenor in a southern gospel quartet, or play electric guitar in a Christian hardcore metal band.
Is it music made by Christians? No. There are plenty of Christians who aren't categorized in the Christian genre. There are also people in the Christian music industry who are not Christians. Our road manager, Heath, recently had a conversation with an artist who is pretty well known in many parts of the world for writing Christian music. Heath was asking her about her life, and asked where she we went to church. She laughed and told him that she wasn't into all of that stuff. She told him that she is not actually a Christian. She just knows how to write the stuff that Christians like to hear.
Most people probably assume that Christian music is categorized as such because of the content of the lyrics. This would be odd, because no other music is categorized by the content of its lyrics. There is no Buddhist or Atheist section of a record store. There is not a "gay" section or a "money" section. The only exception is Christian music, but if Christian music is categorized by the lyrical content, what does it mean for a lyric to be Christian? Singing about Jesus? But there are plenty of mainstream acts that sing about Jesus, and plenty of "Christian" songs that don't mention Jesus at all.
David Crowder Band* was a band that was marketed as Christian, but they sometimes covered songs from different mainstream artists like Sufjan Stevens, Hank Williams or Sinead O'Connor. They didn't change the words of the songs to make them "more Christian" or anything. They didn't put a sermon or a prayer in front of those songs. They just sang the songs. Which leads to odd developments—the Sufjan Stevens' song "O God, Where Are You Now?" was labeled as Alternative when Sufjan recorded it, but when David Crowder Band* recorded it, the same song became "Christian." What's even weirder is that Sufjan Stevens is a Christian.
If the determining factor of what falls into the Christian genre has nothing to do with the music, is not based on the content of the lyrics, and is not based on the personal beliefs of the artist, what could it possibly be? Is it simply that the music is released by labels that call themselves Christian?
Three major labels represent over eighty percent of the market's music: Universal, Sony, and Warner. These labels own most of the other significant labels in the world, including the Christian ones. Pretty much everybody in the music industry ultimately works for the same people. Whether you buy a Michael W. Smith album or a Marilyn Manson album, you are still paying the same small group of executives at the top of the food chain. So does being in Christian music simply mean that you are signed to one of the "Christian" marketing arms of the big three labels?
No, because there are also artists like myself who are not signed to a Christian label, but are labeled as Christian artists. Our band was signed to little indie mainstream label in Atlanta called Brash Music. Brash is not a Christian label. To my knowledge, they don't even have any Christians on staff. Yet, somehow our music is still always relegated to the Christian music industry.
So what is Christian music? I think I can finally answer the question. It's music made for Becky.
Like all genres, Christian music is simply a category that marketers use to reach a certain type of consumer. It is a marketing channel used to reach a very specific subculture.
This is further attested to by the common separation of "Christian" and "Gospel." While "Gospel" actually is a bit more consistent in its musical styles and sounds as a genre than "Christian" is, there is another primary difference between the two terms. For the most part, Christian music is made by white people and Gospel music is made by black people. You don't normally hear black people on "Christian" radio, and you don't normally hear white people on "Gospel" radio. These categories have more to do with subcultures than Christianity or the Gospel.
The subculture that buys Christian music couldn't accurately be called the Christian subculture. A Christian music executive at one of the big labels recently told me that the entire demographic that buys Christian music is only about two million people. Two billion people in the world consider themselves Christians. So only about 0.1% of people who consider themselves Christians buy Christian music.
Christian music is not marketed to Christians so much as it is marketed to a very narrow subculture of a certain type of Christian. For years, Christian music marketers and radio programmers have known who their target demographic is. They actually have personified this target demographic, and her name is "Becky."
If you think I'm joking, ask any Christian radio programmer about her. A lot of stations have very specific information based on reams of market research. One station programmer told me that Becky is a forty-two-year-old soccer mom. She has three kids and she has been married twice. She is an evangelical Christian, but not a radical who watches Christian television or goes to church three times a week. She only attends church once or twice a month. They know what her favorite restaurant is. In fact, they know what restaurant she likes to eat at with her husband on a date and which restaurant she likes to take the kids to. They know the movies she watches and how she spends her money. She is the one who runs her household, the one with her finger on the radio knob, and she wants something positive to play in the minivan as she drives her kids to soccer practice.
Becky is the quintessential Christian radio listener.
Of course, this doesn't mean that everyone who listens to Christian radio fits this description. It simply is the bull's-eye of their demographic. If they aim at Becky, they get the most other people along with her. When Christian radio stations target Becky, they experience a vast increase in their numbers. They get specific in their targets for a reason. For years, they didn't target Becky, and they couldn't understand why they couldn't compete with the bigger mainstream stations. Now they can. This is how the entertainment industry works no matter what sort of categories they use. They target the demographic that will allow them to get the biggest numbers.
I once had a writing session with an artist who couldn't stop talking about Becky. He told me from the beginning that he really needed a song that would resonate with Becky. I asked if maybe we could just write something that felt honest and true to us. He said okay, but he really needed Becky to be okay with it as well.
Every idea I brought up was immediately brought through the Becky filter.
Well, that's cool, but I'm not sure how Becky would feel about that.
Okay, what about this?
Listen, I personally like it. It's edgy and provocative and musical, but I really don't know what Becky would think about that.
I asked him what Becky would think if I shoved my guitar up his…well, not really—I'm not that clever when things get tense. Instead, I just start seething and retreating into my inner world. So that's what I did, and we eventually just gave up and left.
I don't actually have a problem with radio programmers talking about Becky. The stations know who their listeners are and program accordingly. It's smart.
I do have a problem with artists talking about Becky.
When the artist starts talking like the marketers, you know he has stopped listening to the Voice. The Voice doesn't speak in marketing terms, but in terms like truth, beauty, and passion.
The artist ought to listen to the voice inside, not Becky.
When the creator listens to the external voices, those voices will eventually lead her to sell out. They will lead her to put her art in the cookie cutter and cut away all of the dough that falls outside of the edges. But the edges are what make her who she is. The edges are good.
This is why there is so much soulless music in our society. Our artists are listening to the wrong voices. This seems to be especially true in the Christian music industry, which is another reason I feel uncomfortable telling the stranger on the plane that I play Christian music.
Art that is laden with heavy messages can feel like soulless propaganda.
Think of corporate jingles. Would you ever walk down the aisle at your wedding to a full-length version of a McDonald's corporate jingle? If you were to make a playlist for the birth of your first child, how many of the songs would you want to be advertising jingles? Not many? Why not? Jingles are catchy. But most people would never include them in such special occasions, because corporate jingles have no soul.
Folgers Coffee had a competition recently with a big cash prize for anyone who could write a new jingle for them. The song that ended up being chosen is actually pretty cool. It has all the elements of the laid-back indie singer-songwriter drinking a cup of coffee. Pretty melody, nice sultry vocals, warm acoustic instruments. But there's no soul to it. Because it's a freaking Folgers jingle. Who is going to put that on their iPod and just groove to it all day?
A song like that is what I call a musical zombie.
A zombie looks like a human. It eats like a human. It walks and makes noise and resembles a human. But it's a zombie. It has no soul.
Christian music is filled with zombies. The message of the music is predetermined, so we just need a form of music that can carry the message to a broad group of people.
"Well, let's see, hardcore music is pretty popular with the kids right now. Let's insert some Jesus language in that!"
Good music has soul, and the soul matters more than the form. You can't subtract the anger and angst from most hardcore music and still retain the essence of the music. Musical expression is not limited to just the notes and rhythms of a piece. Music is human. And if you take out the human bits and leave just the technical bits to be reproduced as carriers of whatever message you want it to carry, you no longer have a living thing. You have an un-dead thing. You have a musical zombie.
That's why a lot of Christian music feels contrived and lifeless. It's like a Folgers jingle because it has separated the message and the medium into two different things. This is also why much of the Christian industry is behind everybody else by five or ten years. Much of the Christian industry is like a beggar walking behind the rest of culture, picking up the crumbs of her marketing slogans and creativity to be used for our own purposes.
That seemed to work well! Let's try it with our message!
This can make things difficult for artists who enjoy making music about God, but would prefer not to be associated with art that has been bastardized into propaganda for the religious right.
When people hear my thoughts about these things, they sometimes ask, "Well then, why are you part of the Christian music industry?"
My answer to that question is, "What do you mean?"
It's not like you sign up for a Christian music industry membership. I was signed to a mainstream label.
Most musical acts who are Christian have to intentionally distance themselves from the Church in order to have any success within the mainstream. As a result, there are loads of Christians in the music industry who wouldn't dream of performing in a church because of what it would do to their reputation.
This makes it difficult for a lot of bands that work (or would like to work) in the mainstream music industry but don't want to turn their backs on their roots. Many of us love the Church and even enjoy playing in churches sometimes. But this sometimes limits our ability to work with the people who inspire us or to find opportunity beyond the Christian music ghetto.
For our last album, "Ghosts Upon the Earth," I wanted to try to find a producer to work with that I could respect and trust musically. I started dreaming about my ideal producer, and I found some contact info for a guy who has produced a lot of music that I really like. I sent a demo to him with a proposal and a budget, and he responded and told me that he loved it. He said that he had been listening to all sorts of stuff recently and just couldn't find the inspiration to do any of it, but that when he heard my stuff, it just clicked for him. He said that he played it for his friends and they all felt the same. He said he was excited to do it.
The song I sent him was "When Death Dies," which is lyrically ambiguous enough that the listener may not assume that it's necessarily "Christian." But as the conversation progressed, I felt that I needed to confess to him that I am often associated with the Christian industry, because I know that this can be a taboo subject in the music industry at large. So I told him that this had been the genre that our music had been classified in before, but that I really wanted to make a record that would speak to an audience outside of the one we had already reached. I explained that I wasn't interested in trying to get him to operate within any of those confines. I just wanted to make some good art. I put this in a quick email that I thought would serve as a courtesy to avoid any awkwardness in the future.
Suddenly, he was not interested in working with me. Maybe it was coincidence; maybe it wasn't; but that was not the only time that kind of thing has happened.
On multiple occasions, I've had musicians turn down work because they weren't comfortable with the Christian music thing. For instance, we recently contacted an artist whose music I really enjoy. We asked her if she would be open to touring with us. At first, when she heard what we are offering with crowd size, number of dates, and so on, she was very interested. Then she saw the venue list, which included some churches. "Wait . . . so is this a Christian tour?" Her interest was gone.
Imagine if this was the gay music industry, and people were being turned down for work with simply because they were gay. People would be outraged. There would be protests and lawsuits and public outcry. But it's okay not to work with someone because he is associated with the Christian music industry.
If this is the price we have to pay to make music that is meaningful to us, that's fine. Honestly, it's really not that heavy of a price. People have been sawn in half for staying true to their beliefs; I can deal with a few unanswered emails.
All of that said, I do think that some Christian music has an element to it that sets it apart from other kinds of music. I do write within a tradition of music that exists for something more than entertainment or even artistic expression. In this stream, we write music that is intended to make God happen within a community of faith. It is music that is often (though not always) intended to be sung by others. It is prayer. It is a sort of sacrament that allows a community of people to brush up against the future God in present space and time. It is music that intends to become worship. This is a specific artistic function, and for that reason, I wouldn't have a problem with this kind of music being separated into its own category or genre.
Some have called this music "Praise" or "Worship" music. For reasons similar to my disdain for the term "Christian music", I have a problem with this language as well. It imprisons the idea of worship into a very small box. For the Christ follower, worship ought not to be limited to a genre or the singing portion of church services. Worship is a way of life. It is an offering of a person's self in whatever capacity and condition he finds himself in. For Brother Lawrence, washing dishes was his primary method of worship. All good work can become worship. Relationship can become worship. Singing can become worship. But none of these things ought to be named worship in and of themselves for the same reason that marriage shouldn't be named "love." Love can happen in a marriage, but love and marriage are not always the same thing.
For this reason, I prefer terms like "Liturgical Music" or "Church Music." Liturgical music is categorically different than other types of Christian music that are intended to be "alternatives" to mainstream music. If this were a marketing category, there could be different subcategories of actual musical genres like "Liturgical Rock", "Liturgical Pop", "Liturgical Classical"…etc. (Even though I don't like the idea of genres, I realize they may be a necessary evil in the marketplace).
In my perspective, liturgy is a very broad idea. It is not limited to robes, stained glass and incense. Liturgy is simply public worship. Every church is engaged in some type of liturgy. Some use readings and Eucharist; others use fog machines and strobe lights. The liturgical space is a broad and open space for experimentation. In my opinion, there are plenty of mainstream artists that write music that would be appropriate for certain kinds of liturgical space. This space is largely unexplored right now, and there is so much room for creative experimentation.
For instance, there is a need (and plenty of room) in this space for lament. For prophetic railing against the powers that be. There is room for songs, poetry, and artwork that explores doubt, hope, joy, struggle and storytelling. The idea of liturgy is a broad idea, and if it had a category of its own, perhaps it could invite a surge of creativity into that space. I think that would be good for the Church right now.
In my opinion, the non-liturgical music that is currently labeled as Christian should be placed in the genres that are more appropriate to the actual musical style. Rock, Pop, Country…etc. Just because a song sings "Jesus" rather than "baby" doesn't make it categorically different than its musical equivalent. Of course, there are a lot of Beckys out there that do want a positive or religiously infused alternative to the typical bawdy lyrical content of most popular music. She wants music that she can play for her family without worrying about offensive lyrical content. Also, there are a lot of these Christian bands that would not survive the transition to mainstream. Becky is their audience, and she doesn't necessarily want to (or know how to) navigate within the huge rivers of mainstream music to find music that she feels is safe for her kids to listen to. So perhaps another category of "Positive Alternative," "Family," or "Religious" music could be started. Whatever the language, it should not be included in the same category with liturgical music, and it should not be called "Christian". It is a categorically different thing. (And since when was Christianity a safe, positive alternative for the family anyway?)
Of course, iTunes, Amazon, and the three major labels haven't been calling me to ask my opinion on all of this. Most likely, we liturgical writers will just have to grit our teeth and deal with the inappropriate and potentially harmful label of "Christian music." But perhaps if a few more of us started making an effort to secede from the Christian music ghetto in little ways and find ways of cooperating on liturgical experimentation, something could eventually change.
So what do I tell the stranger on the plane? Well, it kind of depends on my mood. I might tell him "Liturgical Post-Rock" and smile at his confused facial expression, or I might just say, "Well, it's kind of hard to explain."
All of my idealistic problems with the language and categories aside, I actually do enjoy being part of the Christian music industry in a lot of ways. There are amazing people in my industry who take their art seriously and have inspired me greatly. People who believe that ordering creation is a sacred task and have acted accordingly. People I'm honored to work with.
Also, I really do love Christians. As weird as we can get, there is something really beautiful about the Church. And I am grateful for the time I've been able to spend singing and making music with people who love Jesus.
The reason I am so passionate about the subtleties of this idea of Christian music is that I think the idea of creating music for liturgical space and spiritual connection is so full of potential. At our best, we are able to see glimpses of what it could be, but I believe that we could be and do so much more. Like all human cultures, we have a lot of weeds to pull. A lot of underlying roots that need to be cultivated and soil that needs tending. In my opinion, that's work worth doing.
Tagged: Christian, Faith, Genre, Music
Relevant Magazine's The Best Musical Surprise of 2011
Gungor opens up about theology, Christian music and their breathtaking new album. When you first listen to Gungor, the full sound belies the fact that the collective is primarily led by husband-and-wife duo Michael and Lisa Gungor. With stirring cellos, driving drums and delicate harmonies, their first album innovated both the sound and the language of worship music as Christians know it today. (If you don't believe us,watch their performance of "Beautiful Things" at RELEVANT Studios last year.) They recently released Ghosts Upon the Earth, which represented a stylistic departure for the band. Gone were the soaring arena choruses, and in their place Gungor put in careful, driving chamber pop. The result is an album steeped in mystery, beauty and, well, spirituality. The band recently sat down with us to discuss the new album, theology and why, just as with God, you can't put worship in a box.
RELEVANT: Your music is very spiritual—much more spiritual than general-market listeners are probably used to, yet you don't want to be labeled as "Christian music." Why is that?
Michael Gungor: Music, to me, was always very spiritual. I pretty much learned how to "do" music in church, playing in the worship band. Music always touched me in a deep place in my soul. Spirituality and faith and all the stuff we write about and worship itself—those are coming from the deepest places in my soul. What I love about music is that it has this ability to get beneath the surface of things and speak from and to the soul. Part of what I don't like about the labels of Christian music is that, first of all, we don't classify other music like that. We don't say "atheistic music" or "humanistic music"—we don't lump that all together as if that is the foundation. If it's art, we're all saying something. To me it's just an odd way of separating it; it's a word game, really.
How has your theology informed the kind of music you make?
MG: It's interesting—it actually has informed it in its entirety, not just the lyric content. The entire idea of what it means to be a Jesus follower in this world has shifted from what it used to mean. It left realms like art, even caring for the poor. You hear Jesus talking about it, but even in the theology I grew up with, it never really made sense to me why Jesus would stress something like that so much. That didn't fit my big story of what it was all about. These kind of philosophical things seem abstract on some level, but for me it really gave me an impetus to create as a sacred act, to bring order into creation. To order creation in a way that is meaningful and sacred. Growing up, I felt like if I wanted to really be selfless and serve God with my gift, then it had to fit into a certain category. You know: "You'd better have enough Jesuses per minute if you really want to write a song and have it please God. If you really want to do a lot with your life, you're supposed to join full-time ministry and work for a church." That was just kind of the mindset I grew up with....
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE
Tagged: 2011, Interview, Music, Relevant Magazine
Gungor, Los Angeles, CA


text:
"""Helpers for using the `attr` library."""

from future.utils import iteritems

def attr_type(type_, subname=''):
  """An `attr.s` validator for asserting the type of a value.

  Essentially the same as `attr.validators.instance_of`, except that it allows
  the provision of a 'subname' to provide a better error message when checking
  a sub-field of the value.

  Args:
    * type_ (object) - The python type object to validate `value` against.
    * subname (str) - Some sub-element of attrib.name; e.g. if checking
      a dictionary key, this might be ' keys'.

  Returns a validator function which raises TypeError if the value doesn't match
  the value.
  """

  def inner(_self, attrib, value):
    if not isinstance(value, type_):
      raise TypeError(
        "'{name}' must be {type!r} (got {value!r} that is a "
        "{actual!r}).".format(
          name=attrib.name+subname,
          type=type_,
          actual=value.__class__,
          value=value,
        ),
        attrib,
        value,
        type_,
        subname,
      )
  return inner

def attr_superclass(type_, subname=''):
  """An `attr.s` validator for asserting the superclass of a value.

  Args:
    * type_ (object) - The python type object to validate `value` is a subclass
      of.
    * subname (str) - Some sub-element of attrib.name; e.g. if checking
      a dictionary key, this might be ' keys'.

  Returns a validator function which raises TypeError if the value doesn't match
  the value.
  """

  def inner(_self, attrib, value):
    if not issubclass(type(value), type_):
      raise TypeError(
        "'{name}' must be a subclass of {type!r} (got {value!r} that is a "
        "{actual!r}).".format(
          name=attrib.name+subname,
          type=type_,
          actual=value.__class__,
          value=value,
        ),
        attrib,
        value,
        type_,
        subname,
      )
  return inner

def attr_dict_type(key_type, val_type, value_seq=False):
  """Helper function for writing attr.s validators for dictionary types.

  Args:
    * key_type (object) - The python type object to validate the dict's keys.
    * val_type (object) - The python type object to validate the dict's
      values.
    * value_seq (bool) - If the dictionary maps to a sequence of val_type.

  Returns a validator function which raises TypeError if:
    * The value is not a dictionary
    * All of it's keys don't match `key_type`
    * All of it's values don't match `val_type`
  """

  def inner(self, attrib, value):
    # late import to avoid import cycle
    from ..engine_types import FrozenDict

    attr_type((dict, FrozenDict))(self, attrib, value)
    for k, subval in iteritems(value):
      attr_type(key_type, ' keys')(self, attrib, k)
      subname = '[%r]' % k
      if value_seq:
        attr_seq_type(val_type, subname)(self, attrib, subval)
      else:
        attr_type(val_type, subname)(self, attrib, subval)

  return inner

def attr_seq_type(val_type, subname=''):
  """Helper function for writing attr.s validators for list types.

  Args:
    * val_type (object) - The python type object to validate the list's values.

  Returns a validator function which raises TypeError if:
    * The value is not a list, tuple, set or frozenset
    * All of it's values don't match `val_type`
  """

  def inner(self, attrib, value):
    attr_type((list, tuple, set, frozenset), subname)(self, attrib, value)
    for subval in value:
      attr_type(val_type, subname + ' values')(self, attrib, subval)

  return inner

def attr_list_type(val_type):
  """Helper function for writing attr.s validators for list types.

  Args:
    * val_type (object) - The python type object to validate the list's values.

  Returns a validator function which raises TypeError if:
    * The value is not a list
    * All of it's values don't match `val_type`
  """

  def inner(self, attrib, value):
    attr_type((list, tuple))(self, attrib, value)
    for subval in value:
      attr_type(val_type, ' values')(self, attrib, subval)

  return inner

def attr_value_is(msg, check_fn, subname=''):
  """Helper function for writing attr.s validators.

  Args:
    * msg (str) - The message to include in the ValueError. Should be
      the quoted part of: name is not '<msg>'.
    * check_fn (callable) - Called with 'value'; should return True iff the
      value is valid.
    * subname (str) - Some sub-element of attrib.name; e.g. if checking
      a dictionary key, this might be ' keys'.

  Returns a validator function which raises TypeError if the value doesn't match
  the value.
  """
  def inner(_self, attrib, value):
    if not check_fn(value):
      raise ValueError(
        "'{name}' is not {msg} (got {value!r})".format(
          name=attrib.name+subname,
          msg=msg,
          value=value,
        ),
        attrib,
        value,
        msg,
        subname,
      )
  return inner

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Q: UCM ClearCase: undo deliver activity that is complete How can I rollback/undo a delivery activity that has been completed in Windows ClearCase 8.0.1?
I tried following this answer but was not able to find cset.pl script any longer.

A: The cset.pl 2005 script is still visible in this web-archived page
The script itself can be downloaded here: greenscar/scripts/clearcase/IBM_Rational_Tools_CSET_ICP/cset_icp.zip, with instructions on how to use it.

A: The most important questions are:
Has the activity been included in a baseline?
Has this activity been delivered?
If either is the case, then you literally cannot delete the activity. In the baseline case, you can after purging the baseline. But delivered activities are irremovable.
If the fees have been changed in follow-on activities, you may want or need to do a subtractive merge to remove the changes before removing the activity.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Tag: Alan Caruba
Destroying America with the EPA's Carbon Lies
Lisa Jackson, Obama's EPA director, has just announced the agency's new auto regulations of gas mileage based on global warming. In addition, the agency asserts the right to regulate carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions under the Clean Air Act.
There is absolutely no scientific justification for this and, indeed, many observers believe the EPA lacks the legal authority regarding its stance on CO2.
There is NO need to limit greenhouse gas emissions because there is NO "global warming."
Greenhouse gases are purported to be the primary cause of this fraud. The EPA, like a dozen other U.S. agencies, has been pushing the global warming fraud for decades. One more lie, even a whopper about CO2, is of little concern to the EPA at this point.
Beyond the issue of scientific fraud, there are the scientific facts that demonstrate that CO2 plays a miniscule role, if any, as regards the Earth's climate. Carbon dioxide is less than one percent of the Earth's atmosphere (386 parts per million).
There is, in fact, no greenhouse effect. The most active element of the atmosphere is the 95% of water vapor that forms a protective layer around the Earth.
The science involved is fairly simple. Clouds have a warming effect because, in order for water vapor to condense back into water droplets, the water molecules must first re-emit the energy they absorbed to become vapor. That latent heat causes the local environment to feel warmer. It is this constant interchange that determines whether wherever you're at right now is warmer or cooler.
The public is rarely, if ever, told that meteorologists have NO idea why clouds act as they do. All they can do is track cloud activity via satellite images, but they can only accurately predict the weather at best for three to four days ahead. This is why, when you watch a televised weather forecast, they mostly just point to cloud systems.
The Earth's oceans contain fifty times the CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere. The Earth's biomass, oceans, near-surface rocks and soils contain 100,000 times the carbon in the atmosphere.
To declare CO2 toxic, the EPA is saying that all that natural CO2, plus the six pounds of carbon dioxide that every human exhale every day is a "pollutant."
How can carbon dioxide be a pollutant when all life on Earth is dependent upon it?
CO2 is to vegetation what oxygen is to human and other animal life. Without CO2, all vegetation dies and then all animal life dies for lack of the nutrients provided by food crops.
The EPA will blame the generation of CO2 on energy use, but 97% of the Earth's CO2 is produced by Nature!
Only about 3% of all the CO2 in the atmosphere is produced by humans via industrial and transport activity. This estimate, in fact, comes from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change! The IPCC's other alleged climate data is subject to serious challenge, but this is not. It falls into the category of common knowledge among climate scientists.
Environmentalists are insanely opposed to all energy use with the exception of bicycles, canoes, and walking. They particularly hate automobiles, but these are the same people, along with the EPA, that have insisted on the inclusion of ethanol, otherwise known as moonshine, in every gallon of gasoline. The immediate result is less mileage per gallon and the production of more CO2!
None of these facts is a secret yet, since 1989, the U.S. government has spent $79 billion in taxpayer's money on "climate change" research. To suggest that the government, using the data generated, has any "control" over the climate is absurd.
The result of all that government funded research has been a public that has been subjected to the massive fraud called global warming. Weather data provided by NASA and NOAA, for example, has had to have been withdrawn due to errors.
Not only has the scientific community learned that the IPCC data was manipulated and that efforts were made to suppress data refuting global warming, but the Earth has irrefutably been in a cooling cycle for over a decade at this point.
The EPA regulatory control of auto mileage and CO2 emissions is a complete fraud and a contemptible lie. In doing so it has become a gangster agency that has abandoned any credibility.
Finally, the Cap-and-Trade Act awaiting a vote in the Senate is based on the global warming fraud and, if enacted, would impose massive taxation on all energy use. It must be stopped.
The EPA's latest move must be stopped.
The fate of the nation's economy literally depends on this.
© Alan Caruba, 2010
Posted on April 1, 2010 January 20, 2018 Tags Alan Caruba, ViewsLeave a comment on Destroying America with the EPA's Carbon Lies
Climate Wars!
By Alan Caruba
Wars come and go, cities are destroyed and rebuilt, monuments are erected, and life goes on. This is the traditional view of war, but right now the world is engaged in the latest battle of a "climate war" that has been going on since the 1970s when the Club of Rome concluded in a report titled, "The real enemy then, is humanity itself", that the world's population had to be reduced.
Whereas wars in the modern era have killed millions and communism as practiced in the former Soviet Union and the early decades of Red China under Chairman Mao killed millions more on a scale with which war could not compete, the advocates of population reduction rival the worst despots to have ever walked among us.
With the revelations from leaked emails between the conspirators who kept the global warming fraud going for many years, the so-called "climate scientists" who, in fact, had created phony computer models and engaged in endless studies to "prove" that global warming posed a threat to mankind, the term "Climategate" was coined to describe their collusion.
Billions are at stake so far as the "climate scientists" are concerned. They have received millions for their research in the United States and in England. Presumably other nations, too, have provided such grants and the result of the research must always be a continuation of the "global warming" fraud. Beyond the scientists are those who profit from the sale of "carbon credits" to permit "greenhouse gas emissions", and the millions that environmental organizations such as Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club, and others rake in.
It is no surprise, then, that those who have been victimized by the fraud will see a coordinated campaign of opinion editorials in newspapers, advertisements, and other means to keep the "global warming" fraud intact. These efforts have been renamed "climate change", but therein lies the utter mendacity of the campaign because the Earth has always passed through cycles of climate change and always will.
On February 15th, the Boston Globe published an opinion editorial by Kerry Emanuel, the director of the Program in Atmosphere, Oceans, and Climate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was filled with the usual "global warming" themes; the repetition of the lie that carbon dioxide and other minor atmospheric gases are causing a huge shift that is warming the Earth. Smoothly, the inaccuracies of climate computer models are dismissed as "uncertainties" resulting in "divergent predictions."
The finest weather-related computer models available are unable to account for the action of clouds, an essential element in weather everywhere, nor can they include the unknown effects of countless undersea volcanoes in the world's oceans that are another contributing factor. At best, if your local weatherman can accurately predict what will occur in the next two to four days, he's doing fine.
Predicting what the climate—not the weather—will be decades and even centuries from now is pure fiction. It is the claim that is central to "global warming" and/or "climate change."
In a rebuttal to Emanuel's opinion editorial, Bill Gray, Professor Emeritus, Colorado State University, noted that "A high percentage of meteorologists and/or climate scientists do not agree that the climate changes we have seen are mostly man-made. Thousands of us think that the larger part of the climate changes we have observed over the last century are of natural origin." He added, "Over 31,000 American scientists have recently signed a petition advising the U.S. not to sign any fossil fuel reduction treaty."
Myron Ebell, director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has just released a statement based on the release of still more emails between desperate "climate scientists" whose careers depend on the "global warming" fraud.
"According to recently disclosed e-mails from a National Academies of Science listserv, prominent climate scientists affiliated with the U.S. National Academies of Science, have been planning a public campaign to paper over the damaged reputation of global warming alarmism."
The emails explored the ways the public could be distracted from the revelations of Climategate and enticed back to believing that "global warming" is based in real science and occurring. Among the suggestions were "Op eds in the NY Times and other national newspapers would also be great."
Referring to this as a climate war is no exaggeration. One email said, "Most of our colleagues don't seem to grasp that we're not in a gentlepersons' debate, we're in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules." One of those rules most certainly is to tell the truth!
What the public has never grasped is that this is not a science-based war. It is entirely political in nature and the Green's enemy has been the resource industries, oil, natural gas, and coal that provide the means by which energy is generated for industrial use and for societies that depend on electricity to function. The subtext of the war is the deliberate destruction of human life on the planet on a mass scale.
That explains why it is especially troubling that President Obama continues to refer to global warming as real and advocates "cap-and-trade" legislation, the largest tax on energy use in the history of mankind. It is the reason he continues to divert millions to "clean energy" and "green jobs", neither of which have ever proven to equal traditional energy sources or provide sufficient employment to merit support.
So now the climate wars shift into a new phase, one intended to obfuscate and confuse the public again in the quest to foist the greatest fraud and attack on mankind in human history
Editor's Note: For further insight, read Dr. Tim Ball's commentary at:
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/20782
To learn why the world's glaciers are not melting and the seas are not rising, click here:
http://www.iceagenow.com/Our_glaciers_are_growing_not_melting.htm
Posted on March 22, 2010 January 20, 2018 Tags Alan Caruba, Global Cooling, ViewsLeave a comment on Climate Wars!
Global Warming Makes the Case Against Global Government
The utterly baseless case for "global warming" is melting a lot faster than the glaciers in India's Himalayas which, by the way, are not melting.
It is time for the Nobel Committee to rescind the Peace Prize given to Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
It is time for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences committee to take back Al Gore's Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth", an alleged documentary that became mandatory viewing for students in the U.S. and around the world. Purporting to "prove" that the Earth was rapidly warming due to the rise in "greenhouse gases", it is a fraud.
In the event the news hasn't reached you, in mid-August 2009, after repeated requests for the Climate Research Unit's raw data from which it calculated global temperatures, the CRU at the University of East Anglia (UK), a key element of the UN's IPCC, announced that it had discarded the data, thereby making it impossible to determine if their assertions of rising global temperatures were accurate and true. Or not.
In October 2009, in the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, it was demonstrated that the IPCC's tree ring data from Russia that showed a cooling after 1961 had been disguised in its report (AR4) that, of course, asserted the Earth was warming.
A month later, just prior to a huge, international Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen, emails from the CRU were leaked, revealing the lengths to which the CRU staff had gone to discredit and suppress any independent studies that disputed the global warming thesis.
In brief, the entire "scientific" basis on which the IPCC "scientists" and global warming advocates like Al Gore made their claims was a fraud. It rendered AR4 "scientifically questionable" in the polite parlance of the worldwide scientific community.
In January, Joe D'Aleo and E. Michael Smith released a detailed report that indicted the U.S. National Climatic Data Center and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Institute of Space Studies for having eliminated many meteorological stations from their data bases in recent years and, to no one's surprise, the stations were mostly in colder climate areas. Without their data, the "warmists" could continue to claim the Earth was in a warming cycle.
None of this came as a surprise to the "deniers" and "skeptics", many of them internationally renowned climatologists and meteorologists, who had attended the Heartland Institute's two international conferences on climate change, participating in seminars and addressing attendees to provide the truth; the Earth has been in a cooling cycle since 1998, any prior warming was a normal and natural cycle following the Little Ice Age that ended around 1850, and the claims of the IPCC and other alleged science-based government agencies were utterly false.
The sheer magnitude of the deception, directed and orchestrated from within a United Nations entity, given support by United States and British agencies, and further supported by multi-national groups such as the European Union, made it difficult for the average person to believe anything other than the elements of the hoax that were constantly proclaimed and then reinforced by the media and Hollywood.
When the global warming dam burst, millions around the world would conclude what they had always suspected; there was no global warming and all the billions spent in the name of "reducing greenhouse gases" or "clean energy" was part of a massive fraud, a set-up to permit new forms of taxation and to enrich the participants.
That is the case against multinational organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union, to name just two. They are, too often, giant propaganda machines whose agenda is to eliminate fundamental concepts of individual liberty and freedom, replacing them with faceless bureaucrats with no obligation to be responsive to citizens anywhere.
A U.S. President, Barack Obama, who attended the UN Copenhagen Conference and would, in the course of his State of the Union speech, claim that there was "overwhelming evidence" of climate change a.k.a. global warming, is part of the cabal that would waste taxpayer's billions on "green jobs", "clean energy", and "biofuels" as opposed to actually encouraging the building of nuclear and coal-fired plants, exploring and extracting offshore oil and natural gas reserves, and maintaining the nation's vital infrastructure.
A rogue government agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, is brazenly warning Congress that it will regulate carbon dioxide if it does not pass the patently false "Cap-and-Trade" legislation intended to limit so-called "greenhouse gases." The EPA must be reined in and a complete housecleaning is necessary to repeal the many regulations and laws based on the global warming fraud.
The U.S. needs a new Congress filled with men and women who want to protect the nation against the frauds perpetrated by its own science-related agencies, to kill legislation that would impose a massive tax on energy use, and bring the global warming advocates within the government to the bar of justice.
The world needs to dissolve the United Nations in the same way it shunted aside the useless League of Nations. The present institution should be broken into units that perform legitimate services, but governance is not a legitimate purpose. No global taxes. No global army. No global propaganda machine.
Nations, worldwide, need to reclaim their sovereignty and then work together for the mutual goal of peace and other worthwhile causes.
Posted on February 2, 2010 January 20, 2018 Tags Alan Caruba, Climategate, IPCC, ViewsLeave a comment on Global Warming Makes the Case Against Global Government
The Hippy Dippy Doomsday Clock
Largely unnoticed was the January 14 announcement by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that they had moved the hands of their imaginary Doomsday Clock back to six minutes from five minutes before the end of the world. Whoopee.
Created in 1945, the clock has been adjusted only eighteen times prior to the latest change. The Bulletin was created in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who had helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project. The Clock was introduced in 1947 "to convey both the imagery of apocalypse" at midnight "and "the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion" in a countdown to zero."
The decisions about the Clock are made by the Bulletin's Board of Directors in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, eighteen of whom are Nobel Prize Laureates. Considering the way elements of the Nobel Prize, particular its Peace Prize, have been totally politicized and degraded with awards to Al Gore, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and most recently to Barack Obama, this latter citation is not encouraging.
Even less encouraging is the utter blindness of the decision in the face of Iran's long quest to create nuclear weapons with which to threaten the entire Middle East, Israel in particular, Europe via long-range missiles, and America with a nuclear device.
The Bulletin further disgraces itself by combining the threat of nuclear weapons with the thoroughly discredited fraud of "global warming", now called climate change. The Bulletin made it clear that the geniuses behind it believe that they are encouraged by the pledges of "industrialized and developing countries alike…to limit climate-changing gas emissions that could render our planet nearly uninhabitable."
It just doesn't get more stupid than that, given the recent UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen that thankfully achieved a big fat nothing and occurred during a blizzard that forced the President and other American delegates to flee before being snowed in or unable to land in the U.S., far across the Atlantic where yet another blizzard was in progress.
Coinciding with the Climate Conference was the revelation that the IPCC's data was largely falsified by the handful of scientists in control of its reports of global warming doom and gloom. It was and is a Big Fat Lie.
So, the nuclear threat, a real one, and the global warming/climate change threat, an invented one, were addressed with the unalloyed optimism of the Bulletin scientists. They literally managed to ignore all the actual facts regarding both.
Perhaps most astonishing about the January 14 announcement was the "man crush" the Bulletin's directors have on Barack Obama.
"A key to the new era of cooperation is a change in the U.S. government's orientation toward international affairs brought about in part by the election of Obama." The elections of Republican governors in Virginia and New Jersey, in addition to Tuesday's election of a new, Republican Senator to represent Massachusetts suggests that even the voters of that most liberal State are not nearly as impressed with Obama. The plunging national approval ratings of the President's performance further confirm this.
Among the comments included in the Bulletin's announcement were those like Stephen Schneider who said "We can no longer prevent global warming…it is upon us." No, it's not. The planet is in a natural cooling cycle that began in 1998. Where Schneider has been since then is anyone's guess. Perhaps on some other planet!
Others like Pervez Hoodboy of the physics department at a Pakistan university said, "We may be at a turning point, where major powers realize that nuclear weapons are useless for war-fighting or even for deterrence." Tell that the Supreme Ayatollah of Iran.
What the Bulletin reveals is the way a PhD in a specific and narrow field of endeavor does not qualify a scientist to comment on anything other than his own sliver of expertise and, even then, you better get a second opinion.
Wishful thinking, sloppy indifference to obvious facts and events, and the conviction that their advanced degrees allow them to pontificate on the end of the world is the hallmark of the Bulletin's Doomsday Clock.
It is time to unplug it and pay attention to what is really happening in the world
Posted on January 21, 2010 January 20, 2018 Tags Alan Caruba, ViewsLeave a comment on The Hippy Dippy Doomsday Clock
Deadly Earth, Deadly Humans
The earthquake in Haiti is a perfect example of the arrogance of environmentalists who are always running around crying "Save the Earth" or making claims that any or all forms of life are going extinct.
For three decades we have listened to these charlatans claim that the Earth was heating up to a point where, if we didn't cut back or replace all forms of energy, oil, natural gas and coal, it would become a vast desert devoid of life.
Then, in 1998, the Sun began yet another of its eleven year cycles of low sunspot activity, a diminution of magnetic storms on its surface, and the completely predictable result was a new, perfectly natural cooling cycle, a prelude perhaps to a predictable new ice age.
When I do radio, I like to remind listeners that Mother Nature has a message for humankind. It's "Get out of the way. Here comes an earthquake, a volcano, a flood, a forest fire, a mudslide, a blizzard, a hurricane, et cetera."
In an excellent book, "Devastation! The World's Worst Natural Disasters" by Lesley Newson, she starts by noting that "The Earth is a rocky sphere nearly 8,000 miles in diameter. It is surrounded by a shroud of gases more than 60 miles deep. Sandwiched in between is a fragile layer, only a few miles thick, where humans are able to survive. It is perhaps not surprising that in this tiny zone of life there are occasional upheavals that make survival impossible."
Haiti is the perfect definition of devastation. As bad as the earthquake's damage has been, the aftermath will be testimony to the way those not killed in the initial quake will fall victim to the diseases that will ravage the area as well as the difficulty to provide immediate medical care. There are an astonishing number of ways humans can die and Mother Nature is utterly indifferent.
What makes matters worse, however, is the indifference of environmentalists who would deny everyone access to the energy sources needed to fuel a complex, technological, global society beginning with the provision of electricity. The Earth is not running out of coal or oil, only the right to mine it and drill for it.
The first thing to go in Haiti was its communications system. The next was the capacity to fuel means of transportation. The lack of a government was nothing compared to the long-standing failure to provide clean water and, worse, the failure to educate Haitians to compete in a world where literacy and modern skills are vital to survival.
Another factor that will kill many Haitian survivors is the spread of disease by insect and rodent pests. Environmentalists have striven to deny Americans and all others access to one of the greatest developments of the modern era, pesticides with which to control the mosquitoes, the ticks, the fleas, the rats and all the other creatures that constantly threaten humanity.
In April 2005, I wrote a commentary, "The Black Plague and its descendants" that was published in The Washington Times. It noted that the Black Death made its way from inner Asia and, in 1347, Yersina pestis arrived in Europe. What followed was the second greatest catastrophe in the human record. By the time it ended around 1352, a quarter of Europe's population was dead.
Only World War II killed more people. And yet, as this is written, millions die of malaria in Africa and Asia because some bureaucrat in the Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT.
History gives ample evidence that the Earth is a dangerous place, in addition to earthquakes, it is ringed by volcanoes and, in the U.S. the beloved Yellowstone National Park is one giant volcanic caldera which, when it explodes, will alter life as well as take it in the hundreds of thousands, if not more.
Scientists track the nation's "hurricane season" and all manner of effort is made to anticipate them and warn residents, but even that was not enough when Katrina hit the Gulf States on August 29, 2005.
It is stupid to politicize this event, blaming former President Bush as if he either caused it or failed to respond effectively. No President and no government are prepared for a Category Five hurricane. It was just as stupid not to flee when told it was coming.
It is not for nothing that we call such events "an act of God", but in reality they are an act of a huge planet, unique among all others in our galaxy because it has spawned all manner of life, including our own.
It is a planet subject to the action or inaction of the Sun. Nothing we do alters that simple fact. It is a planet that must hope to dodge any of the thousands of asteroids that threaten it. It is an Earth whose tectonic plates shift unpredictably. Its interior is unimaginably hot and whose circulation of molten rock carries the heat to the surface, allowing its mantle to keep the core stable.
What I am arguing for is a bit of humility, something that humans are not famous for.
There are six billion of us and the world's intelligentsia scorns us and seeks ways to ensure as many as possible will die by thwarting the development of genetically modified crops to feed us, by stopping the building of more power generation plants, by making war in the name of a misguided belief in the superiority of a religion like Islam, or the evil desire to grow rich and powerful by ruling vast populations.
In Iran, ruled by certifiably insane ayatollahs, the people are in the streets to overthrow a brutal regime that is determined to create its own nuclear weapons and the world is standing by instead of uniting to destroy their means to do so. A so-called international organization, the United Nations, is shot through with corruption and both unwilling and unable to assert the sanctions to stop the inevitable outcome of doing nothing.
And here in the United States, we have fallen victim to a regime so dedicated to the destruction of the nation's economy that we wait on the election process to save us from ourselves.
Posted on January 19, 2010 January 20, 2018 Tags Alan Caruba, Global Cooling, ViewsLeave a comment on Deadly Earth, Deadly Humans
The Next Big Hoax: Ocean Acidification
Just when you thought "global warming" has been put to rest by the revelations of how the computer models supporting the hoax had been deliberately falsified to "hide the decline" in the Earth's temperature, along comes the next Big Lie, focused again on carbon dioxide (CO2).
Wednesday, January 13, has been designated "Wear Blue for Oceans Day" by some coalition calling itself Clean Ocean Action. I don't even care whose funding this scam, but Friends of the Earth is proudly announcing it is part of it.
They are still smarting over the December debacle in Copenhagen despite being "one of the main groups organizing a December 12 march that attracted more than 100,000 participants…" The FOE neglected to mention they all stood out in a snow storm to make their voices heard on the way the Earth was warming.
Perhaps sensing that people might begin to wonder where all the global warming had gone since a global cooling cycle began in 1998, these perpetrators of the fraud turned their attention to the fact that the same CO2 that was supposed to "cause" global warming was nonetheless building in the atmosphere and that means in the oceans as well.
At far back as February 2009, these scare mongers organized an international symposium, the second one actually, on "The Ocean in a High-CO2 World." It brought together "150 marine scientists from 26 countries" who allegedly are "calling for immediate action by policy-makers to sharply reduce CO2 emissions so as to avoid widespread and severe damage to marine ecosystems from ocean acidification."
An article in Science Daily reported that "The scientists note that ocean acidification is already detectable and is accelerating."
What these scientists are more interested in detecting is where the next wasted billions in government and foundation grants can be found.
The oceans of the world comprise some 70% of the Earth's surface. They are like the lungs of the Earth, absorbing and releasing carbon dioxide. They have been doing this for billions of years and a rise in the amount of CO2 is essentially meaningless.
"It is well established among researchers that the uptake of increased amounts of carbon dioxide will make ocean water more acidic as the gas dissolves to create carbonic acid," said the Science Daily article and, to scare you just a bit more, "Ocean chemistry is changing 100 times more rapidly than in the 650,000 years that preceded the modern industrial era…"
The global warming fraud was based on the assertion that, as the Earth encountered greater industrialization, the increased use of oil, natural gas, and coal as sources of energy, the CO2 released was "causing" the Earth to warm exponentially.
The only problem with that "theory" is that it was (1) based on phony computer models and other false interpretations of data, and (2) the latest, perfectly natural climate cycle, is causing havoc around the world by dumping mountains of snow everywhere along with breaking cold temperature records faster than new readings can be taken.
So, please, do not "Wear Blue for Oceans Day" on Wednesday because it will only indicate you are one of the idiots who still believe in global warming and that you are now prepared to further confirm that by thinking the oceans cannot handle a rise in CO2 in the same fashion they have for eons.
For the scientifically inclined, check out
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/07/noaa-ocean-temperatures-june-2009-warmest-on-record.php
Why is it important to know that global ocean temperatures are the warmest since records began in 1880? Because the colder the water, the more carbon dioxide it retains. Warmer oceans would generate less, not more acidification.
Here comes the "ocean acidification" scam, watch out!
Ocean Acidification – Another 'Climate Change' Urban Myth
Oceans love carbon dioxide too, say sea scientists
Posted on January 14, 2010 January 20, 2018 Tags Alan Caruba, Views1 Comment on The Next Big Hoax: Ocean Acidification
Cognitive Disconnect: Cold Equals Warming
Over the course of Obama's first year in office I have become convinced that he and his cronies think you are STUPID.
That's why Nancy Pelosi could say the process by which Obamacare was put together and passed in the House and Senate was "open" and still think that doing it behind closed doors in both chambers while bribing every Democrat vote with public funds went unnoticed by the voters.
She thinks you're STUPID.
It's why Harry Reid may still hold onto his job as Majority Leader in the Senate after saying things about his favorite "Negro" that got Trent Lott removed from the same job in just under a month. We tend to forget that, from FDR to JFK, the Democrats thwarted civil rights legislation until they no longer could.
He thinks you're STUPID.
The latest example of the complete disdain the White House has for the public is a response by press secretary Robert Gibbs who dismissed the worldwide cold snap as just another example of "climate change", the new term for "global warming."
On January 6, the Drudge Report headline links were as follows:
Winter Could Be Worst in 25 Years for USA…
CHILL MAP…
Britain's big snow shuts cities…
GAS SUPPLIES RUNNING OUT IN UK…
Elderly burn books for warmth?
Army drafted to rescue 1,000 snow stranded motorists…
Vermont sets 'all-time record for one snowstorm'…
Iowa temps 'a solid 30 degrees below normal'…
Seoul buried in heaviest snowfall in 70 years…
3 die in fire at Detroit home; power was cut…
Midwest Sees Near-Record Lows, Snow By The Foot…
Miami shivers from coldest weather in decade; Florida Gov Signs Emergency Order …
Cold snap spurs power rationing in China…
It's "cognitive disconnect", a fancy way of saying that the White House and Congress is under the impression that Americans actually believe that "warming" means "colder" and colder "proves" that warming is happening.
As the Drudge headlines then and since reflect, cold weather has historic implications. Indeed, if the Earth had not begun to warm at the end of the last ice age, some 11,500 years ago, the world would be a very different place than it is today. It only took one or two degrees Fahrenheit to bring about the advent of civilization, i.e. the spread of agriculture, the early cities, the movement of people to warmer climes.
The first warming era began around 4,300 BC when the Sahara bloomed with plants and forests spread over Northern Europe and Canada. Then, for a thousand years, cold returned until another short warming occurred around 1,450 BC. Then the cold returned and it wasn't until the Roman Warm Era began in 250 BC that populations began to grow. When it got cold in Scandinavia, the Vikings climbed into their longboats and began to pillage and then colonize warmer southern lands.
There was a Medieval Warm Period that began around 800 AD which was a time of great achievement and prosperity. There was farming in Scotland and Norway. Greenland was colonized. Vineyards bloomed in England, in Prussia and in Norway.
Trouble returned with the Little Ice Age that began around 1,300 AD and brought with it famine and food riots. The Spanish Armada was destroyed by the horrid weather that afflicted Europe. During the frigid years of the Dalton Minimum (1790 to 1820 AD), Napoleon lost most of his army when he attempted to conquer Russia. In America, the Continental Army or what was left of it over-wintered in Valley Forge.
So weather and, in particular, long cold spells can have a dramatic affect on history. It was so cold in the 1970s that the environmentalists were all predicting a new ice age. Warm weather means farming and that ensures enough food. If you look around the world, people tend to congregate where it is warm.
Telling people that it is warming when it is demonstrably getting colder is STUPID. Assuming that people are stupid enough to believe you is a good way to get thrown out of office.
The collapse of the recent Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in the midst of a huge blizzard that hit that city and much of the northern hemisphere should mark the end of the huge fraud of "global warming."
Now the U.S. and Europe has to walk itself back from all the idiotic laws passed that were based on the global warming hoax, not the least of which is Cap-and-Trade that is still waiting a vote in the Senate.
Has it occurred to anyone why President Obama took his winter vacation in Hawaii instead of Wyoming or the Dakotas? It wasn't just because he was allegedly born there.
Posted on January 12, 2010 January 20, 2018 Tags Alan Caruba, Global Cooling, ViewsLeave a comment on Cognitive Disconnect: Cold Equals Warming
The Lies About Green Jobs
"I was impressed as never before by the utter lack of logic of the man, the scantiness of his precise knowledge of things that he was talking about, by the gross inaccuracies in his statements, by the almost pathological lack of sequences in his discussion, by the complete rectitude that he felt as to his own conduct, by the immense and growing egotism that came from his office, by his willingness to continue the excoriation of the press and business in order to get votes for himself, by his indifference to what effect the long-continued pursuit of these ends would have upon the civilization in which he was playing a part."
No, this was not a judgment of President Barack Obama, though the description eerily fits him. It was the view of Raymond Moley, a Columbia University professor and member of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "Brain Trust" who often wrote or helped write FDR's major speeches. FDR's policies extended the Great Depression for ten years. Here are some facts worth considering every time Obama calls for an expansion or intercession of the federal government as an answer to the current financial crisis: Social Security, a cornerstone of FDR's administration, was established in 1935. After 74 years it is on the brink of insolvency because Congress gave itself access to its funds. Fannie Mae was established in 1938 to facilitate home ownership. It has been around for 71 years. Congress has had to seize control of it and of Freddie Mac, established in 1970. Together, they presently own or guarantee about half of the United States' $12 trillion mortgage market. The War on Poverty started in 1964. One trillion dollars has been transferred to "the poor" and it has not worked. The Department of Energy was established in 1977 to lessen dependence on the import of foreign oil. With 16,000 employees and an annual budget of $24 billion, the United States has imported more oil with every passing year while denying U.S. companies access to vast national reserves in ANWR and off our continental shelf. It is an abysmal failure. All of these programs were put forth by liberals, now calling themselves "progressives", initiated by Democrat administrations to advance what they call "social justice." The Obama administration is hell-bent on "health care reform" that will put one sixth of the U.S. economy under the control of the federal government whose interventions in the free market have been the cause of the previous recessions. In 2010, the Obama administration says it intends to relieve the job shortage by creating "green jobs" in the sectors of wind and solar power and biofuels. It has announced a program that will cost $2.3 billion, costing approximately $135,000 per job. "Show me one other industry that requests and receives a nearly 30 percent taxpayer subsidy," says Thomas J. Pyle, president of the market-based Institute for Energy Research. "If the President really wants to create an environment that will foster economic growth and job creation, he need not look any further than the domestic oil, gas and coal industries." In November 2009, a Washington Times editorial said, "'Green energy' is proving to be no miracle solution to the nation's monumental unemployment problems, and it is doing little to help the economy emerge from its deepest recession in decades, economists say." A large part of the administration's $786 billion dollar stimulus bill was devoted to green or renewable energy projects, but the rate of unemployment continues to rise, the cost of gasoline and heating oil continues to rise in the face of the coldest winter on record in decades, and real jobs in energy industries are thwarted by Obama administration restrictions on the exploration and development of our national energy reserves. Similar green jobs programs in Spain, Germany, and other nations that signed onto the UN Kyoto Protocols limiting carbon dioxide emissions have demonstrated that such jobs cost too much to create and eliminate other jobs in the process. Following recent Climategate revelations, it is abundantly clear that so-called greenhouse gas emissions do not cause a non-existent "global warming" which was and is a massive science-based fraud. Despite this, a Cap-and-Trade bill awaits a vote in the U.S. Senate that would impose a huge tax on energy use. At the same time, the EPA is claiming that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that must be regulated. The lies simply do not stop. So-called Green jobs depend on two of the most impractical and unreliable sources of electricity generation. Solar and wind farms require backup by coal-fired and nuclear power sources for the blatantly obvious reason that the sun does not shine full-time, nor do the winds blow full-time. These, plus biofuel producers, are parked on the doorstep of Congress to secure the subsidies they need just to be in business; subsidies that are derived from our taxes Biofuels divert valuable crops like corn to create ethanol, driving up the cost for a gasoline additive that incongruously produces less mileage and increases the cost of the many food products that utilize corn. America, the home to centuries-worth of massive amounts of coal, has a President who has openly declared war on the coal industry that currently provides half of all the electricity used by Americans. By contrast, solar and wind provide just over one percent! When the President talks of "green jobs" he is lying to Americans who need real jobs. The stimulus bill was nothing more than a political "pork" bill and is providing no real surge in job creation. Indeed, the administration has claimed to have "saved" or produced jobs in non-existent Congressional districts. Meanwhile, the members of the U.S. House and Senate have voted themselves $4,700 and $5,300 in new raises at the same time they have voted to deny a Social Security cost of living increase in 2010 and 2011. The job of every voter in November 2010 is to remove from office every Senator and Representative that voted for and supported the Obama administration's policies who will run for reelection. Then, maybe, we can put America on an economic footing that will generate real jobs and put an end to the Green Lies about "green jobs", environmentally inspired legislation, and the existing Green laws and regulations that are currently killing any hope of recovery.Source
Posted on January 11, 2010 January 20, 2018 Tags Alan Caruba, ViewsLeave a comment on The Lies About Green Jobs
Great Britain Meets Cold Reality
There is a price to pay for imposing "global warming" policies on an entire nation as our English cousins have been doing now for decades; closing coal mines, building wind farms, believing nonsense about carbon dioxide causing warming, supporting the Kyoto Protocols and the recent UN Climate Change conference. Sooner or later reality imposes itself and, inevitably, innocent people die as a result.
Posted on January 11, 2010 January 20, 2018 Tags Alan Caruba, Global Cooling, ViewsLeave a comment on Great Britain Meets Cold Reality
Not by Fire but by Ice
Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
— Robert Frost, American Poet
Considering the thousands of absurd claims made about the discredited fraud of "global warming", a recent National Geographic News story, "North Magnetic Pole Moving East Due to Core Flux", struck me as potentially far more significant.
"Earth's north magnetic pole is racing toward Russia at almost 40 miles a year due to magnetic changes in the planet's core, new research says." The article by Richard A. Lovett, noted that "The core is too deep for scientists to directly detect its magnetic field, but researchers can infer the field's movements by tracking how Earth's magnetic field has been changing at the surface and in space."
Most people are familiar with magnetic north because that is where compass needles actually point. It is not the same as the North Pole and, currently, magnetic north is close to Canada's Ellesmere Island on the edge of the Arctic. The movement has been erratic since first located by scientists in 1831. In 1904, it began to shift northeastward at about nine miles per year. In 1989, it sped up a bit and is now "galloping toward Siberia."
If I hadn't read Robert W. Felix's latest book, "Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps", I frankly would have paid little attention to the news, but I had to pause because Felix asks, "Could this movement be the beginning of the next reversal? I don't know, but I wouldn't rule it out."
Why is this of interest? Because ice ages recur every 11,500 years and right now the Earth is at the end of the latest interglacial period, i.e., the interim between ice ages.
Since ice ages and magnetic reversals appear to occur together, it is entirely likely that what we're really looking at is the next ice age and, to make matters much worse, a potential magnetic reversal.
"Among the many species of mammals now existing in Europe and Asia, all but six appeared during the past two million years, with no time to evolve," says Felix, neatly dispatching Charles Darwin's theory that species evolve over tens of millions of years.
At some point in the past 200,000 years Homo sapiens climbed down out of the trees, stood upright, and began their trek toward what we call civilization and civilization as we know it—the spread of agriculture and the rise of cities—is only about 5,000 years old.
The late paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould, said, "We have not a shred of evidence for any genetic improvement since then. I suspect that the average Cro-Magnon, properly trained, could have handled computers with the best of us."
The bad news about magnetic reversals is that they have often been accompanied by massive extinctions and, as noted, they return in a dependable, predictable cycle. "Mass extinctions," says Felix, "have been the rule, rather than the exception, for the 3.5 million years that life has existed on this planet."
Many scientists maintain that the last magnetic reversal occurred about 780,000 years ago at the Brunhes/Matuyama boundary, but in addition to full-scale reversals, Felix includes magnetic "excursions" in his calculations.
Magnetic excursions are times when the earth's magnetic north pole moved south for a short while–sometimes as much as 500 years–and then moved back. Magnetic excursions are apparently aborted magnetic reversals, says Felix. They recur about every 11,500 years. And they are deadly.
The last one, the Gothenburg magnetic excursion, took place about 11,500 years ago. Is it just a coincidence that some 40 percent of the large animal species, including the sabre-toothed cat, the mammoth, the mastodon, and the great Dire wolf went extinct at the time? "No," says Felix. "That was no coincidence."
Nor is it a coincidence that more than one million huge elliptical holes – some the size of a small city – were blasted into the earth at the same time. Today, those huge holes are sometimes known as Carolina Bays, Grady Ponds, Maryland Basins, or, in Texas, Salinas.
Then there was the Mono Lake magnetic excursion of 23,000 years ago, when the earth descended into catastrophic glaciation, and the mammoths were almost decimated. And prior to that was the Lake Mungo magnetic excursion of 33,500 years ago, when the Neanderthal went extinct and the earth descended into yet another period of glaciation.
If this cycle holds true, says Felix, the next magnetic reversal—–and extinction—-is due any day.
Solar scientists have been watching the sun with a fair amount of trepidation lately. As Felix notes, "At the beginning of each (geological) cycle, magnetic polarity on the Sun reverses and magnetic north becomes magnetic south. No one knows why."
We are in the Holocene cycle that began about 10,000 years ago.
Anthony Watts, a climate scientist—-one of the many that did not buy into the global warming fraud—-recently reported that "The sun has seen a resurgence of activity in December, with a number of cycle 24 sunspots being seen." That's good news because sunspot activity seems to correlate with warming and cooling cycles. The fewer the sunspots, the cooler the Earth becomes.
"If the past two years have taught us anything," says Watts, "it is that the sun can be tricky and unpredictable."
Will the next ice age begin shortly? Depends on what you mean by "shortly" because it could be tomorrow or it could be another two centuries or so. One thing is sure; the Earth's latest interglacial period is nearing an end.
A magnetic reversal would likely have a devastating effect on planet Earth and, frankly, I don't want to be around when it occurs.
Editor's Note: To learn more, visit www.iceagenow.com.
Posted on January 7, 2010 January 20, 2018 Tags Alan Caruba, Global Cooling, Views1 Comment on Not by Fire but by Ice

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