Tom’s Big Picture

As I was writing a post (now delayed) about cultivating musical taste in children, I noted in passing that most Contemporary Christian Music is owned by secular corporations, a cause for concern. However, in trying to find a reference for this well-known fact, all I could locate was various polemnics by fundamentalists, heavy on rhetoric but light on evidence- not necessarily rhetoric I disagree with, but ineffective as a fact-based investigation likely to convince others. I think if you could prove this to most Christian parents, they could make better-informed decisions without need for divisive moralizing on an issue, that among all of the cultural fronts, is fairly low priority for me. While I hope to help my family avoid the emotionalism and self-centeredness of contemporary worship by limiting exposure to emotion-saturated CCM, this is not an issue that motivates me very much in terms of public advocacy, esp. compared to abortion or the demographic decline of my nation- the Church is addicted to emotionalism and there’s little I’m going to do to change that- it’s a job for the Holy Spirit, not me.

That said, I do have mad Google skillz, so I could research a few facts pretty quickly and at least put a reasonable fact-based resource out there for parents and Christians to reference. To get a fair sample, I simply looked at the Billboard charts of CCM, and took the top ten “Hot Christian Songs” as of today, March 10, 2007. The list is below:

Casting Crowns
Does Anybody Hear Her
PLG | Beach Street/Reunion

tobyMac
Made To Love
EMI CMG | ForeFront

Lincoln Brewster
Everlasting God
Integrity | Vertical

Jeremy Camp
What It Means
Tooth & Nail | BEC

MercyMe
Hold Fast
| INO

Echoing Angels
You Alone
| INO

Aaron Shust
Give It All Away
| Brash

Chris Tomlin
Made To Worship
EMI CMG | Sixsteps/Sparrow

The Fray
How To Save A Life
| Epic

Mark Schultz
Walking Her Home
| Word-Curb

The first label is Beach Street Records, whose website is not very helpful at identifying its true ownership. However a little Googling reveals that they are owned by Sony/BMG, a secular corporation.

The second label is EMI CMG, also a secular company- at least they’re being upfront about it.

The third label is Integrity, also owned by Sony/BMG.

The fourth label is Tooth & Nail, which is owned by EMI, but doesn’t promote this fact, as it markets itself as some sort of Seattle-based “countercultural” CCM (I suppose so kids can be death-metal-obsessed Goth freaks for Jesus instead of just death metal Goth freaks), but it’s the same corporate owned mystery meat.

The fifth and sixth labels are INO, part of Integrity Music which is also owned by Sony.

The seventh label is Brash, which appears to be an “independent” label in Atlanta (though with distribution through TimeWarner’s Warner Music), but there is no indication that Brash is anything but a smaller version of a secular label, NOT Christian.

The eighth label is EMI CMG again, covered previously.

The ninth label is Epic, also owned by Sony/BMG.

The tenth label is Word-Curb, which has been owned by everybody in the secular world, and whose current master is Warner Music.

So there you have it. Contemporary Christian Music is 100% owned lock, stock and barrel by secular corporations.

Why is this a problem? The problem is that Christians believe that CCM is “safe” spiritually and let their guard down regarding its content. Many parents allow their children to listen to anything marketed under the CCM label.

CCM is no longer (if it ever was) a balanced enterprise, seeking spiritual integrity and maximum market penetration without sacrificing either. Today’s CCM is a pure profit-seeking enterprise, which means it will appeal to the lowest common spiritual denominator in the market to maximize profits. The evidence conclusively demonstrates that it is qualitatively no different than any other genre. At least with secular genres, we know to be on guard for destructive messages; do the same with CCM.

De Toqueville’s opinion of American women and their virtues, as compared to the decadence of Europe at the time.

Child molesters to face death penalty for 2nd offense.  Appropriate for a crime worse than murder in its effect, in many ways.  Only 25 liberals voted against it- showing that the death penalty, a Biblical and just punishment for many crimes, still has strong support in this state.

In my last post in this series I described the paradox of millionaires as described in the book The Millionaire Next Door. The typical millionaire was an average student who now employs his more studious, academically superior peers. In the corporate world, brilliant engineers with stratospheric IQ’s work for $80,000 a year while the salesman CEO makes millions.

I believe nothing happens by accident, and I happen to know this one from experience. Having talked to lots of people with engineering mindsets about entrepreneurship, and learning from my own mistakes, I think I understand why. Bluntly, most people with this mindset are gearheads who care more about technology, equipment, trivia, minutiae, etc than the far more boring, purely logistical things that have to be mastered to run a business.

To give you a couple of examples from my own experiences, I recently had occasion to purchase a laptop for someone who is going to work for me. Now, a decent laptop for full-time business use should cost about $1500; no matter where you buy, a good one should cost about that much (I like IBM Thinkpads based on bad experiences with the HP brand- plus Thinkpads have North American support- my last call into tech support had me talking football with a guy in Atlanta). However, something about the idea of configuring and purchasing a laptop triggered something in the “gearhead sector” of my brain. Instead of giving the employee a budget to work with and having him purchase and configure his own laptop (staying within the Thinkpad brand), I must have spent at least two hours of my time checking out specs, playing with configurations, and finally ordering the thing. It was a stupid waste of time, but my “gearhead sector”, the pleasure I get from interacting with machines and gear, overcame what should have been my better judgment.

Another example: until about six months ago, I used to program heavily. Now, I am NOT a trained programmer, but thanks to my level of interaction of Microsoft Excel (there’s some sort of Foxworthy-type joke here: if you open Excel twice as much as Word, you just might be an engineer…), and the fact my parents bought me a computer in the 4th grade where I proceeded to learn BASIC from the manual (thanks Mom and Dad- the $2000 in 1980’s dollars investment at Radio Shack is paying off nicely), I can hack my way around Visual Basic for Applications. Now, if you use Microsoft Office at all, VBA is like playing legos with the innards of the applications. You can do anything you can think of, automatically- MS Word and Excel can do almost anything you can imagine. You can see how this is going to work out badly for me in terms of time management.

So every now and then we have a programming need. If it were at all possible, I’d jump into it with enthusiasm, programming in VBA things that should never be in VBA; I even bought a book and considered learning PHP/MySQL to program tasks too complex for VBA. About six months ago, I came to my senses. I rediscovered a website I had used in the past called Scriptlance. This is a site, partially thanks to Bill Gates’ lobbying for a flood of H-1B visas to put American programmers out of work, where you can find genuine American programmers (I always try to favor my countrymen when possible, even if they’re more expensive) who are experts at programming and will work for $15 an hour (as an aside, I have discovered that all kinds of professionals will moonlight for much less than what they earn in their dayjobs- my guess it’s because of debt bondage, not necessarily unemployment, where they’ve tapped out their high-earning job and need a side job to make payments- yet another reminder that debt is slavery!). To continue, these guys will work for $15 an hour, and guarantee no overages- they quote a project cost at what they think it will take them to program it, and one rule of programming is that it always takes longer- but I only pay their project cost. The other benefit is that the freelance system bypasses the artificial credentialing rackets of the universities, as someone’s feedback profile on actual projects is more important than a diploma.

So while I was wasting weeks every year programming, I could have paid someone else who is better than I am at the task, and bought back my time very cheaply. Again, my “gearhead sector” got in the way of optimizing my time.

What causes the “gearhead sector”? Why is it that smart people with analytical minds get bogged down in meaningless details?

The answer is surprising. Two factors to consider:

1. The latest studies on autism and its milder cousin Asperger’s syndrome are revealing that genetics and the assortive mating of a highly mobile society are probably the driving factors behind the increase in autism over the past few decades. Specifically, autism hot spots in Silicon Valley tend to indicate that in areas with high levels of “geeky” genes, autism is more prevalent. In other words, when geeky guys have the chance to marry geeky girls, they tend to, and this results in higher prevalence of autism. Which probably indicates that…

2. The “engineering mindset” of analytical thinking ability is probably one point along a continuum between “normalcy” and autism. Many psychologists are now rejecting arbitrary category-based diagnoses, replacing discrete mental illnesses and syndromes with the concept of “shadow syndromes”, reflecting the reality of a continuum on nearly every measure of human personality.

Autism and Asperger’s, if you recall the Rain Man movie, can result in a sort of idiot savant behavior, where the sufferer is adept at specific tasks usually involving non-human objects like trivia, math, or even music. The two conditions are most marked in what they do not involve, specifically human expressions of emotion and an inability to deal with change.

I believe the “gearhead sector” I referred to earlier, whether this manifests itself in irrational obsessions with technology, machines, or even Lord of the Rings trivia, is an embryonic form of Asperger’s. It even could be that the “moral courage” of the engineering mindset that I referenced in my last post is really just a partial emotional numbness, an ability to resist peer pressure and the herding impulse because of an embryonic autistic mindset. However, whatever the cause, courage is as courage does- Robert E. Lee was himself an engineer by training.

So the reason smart people work for less-smart people is because the smart people have a mild mental condition that prevents proper focus. This condition must be managed, and it can only be managed if it is acknowledged to exist and prevented from biasing how everyday tasks are prioritized.

Personally, I’ve learned to manage my situation by compartmentalizing this part of my personality- in two ways. First, I allow myself to study technology as a hobby- I subscribe to PC Magazine, read technology news, etc, but only as a hobby for pleasure. Second, I find ways to make the “human element” abstract and object-like- for example, whether a sales process or politics, when human interaction is thought of at a high enough level, it reduces to just another engineering problem. And that’s the real secret to blowing past the salesmen types in business endeavors- whereas they are guided by their instincts, their natural charisma to get things done with people, if you can apply your “gearhead sector” thinking process to solving scalable interactions with people, you hit jackpot. Instead of making a sale, you have a sales system. Instead of buying ads, you have a marketing system, etc, etc.

One of the few people I respect in the business advice world once said that it’s really difficult for “engineering types” as he called them to understand what’s really important in a given business, but once they do, and they apply that analytical ability directly to optimizing the revenue-limiting function of the business, the sky’s the limit for their success.

But what is important to think about in business? Where should your analytical skills be put to use, if definitely not in obsessing over laptop specifications, then where?

You’ll have to wait for the next in this series for my answer.

Britain to ban Samurai swords- if it’s a crime to own a sword, only criminals will have swords. “Vernon Coaker, the Home Office minister, said today: “Samurai sword crime is low in volume but high in profile and I recognise it can have a devastating impact.  The plans are outlined in a consultation paper, Banning Offensive Weapons, published by the Home Office today. At present there are 17 weapons, including knuckle-dusters and batons, on the Offensive Weapons Order.”

Until I discovered his poetry on the Internet, I was unaware that Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island, was also a poet. His poems are similar to Kipling’s in the broader sense of showing fine craftsmanship of verse and rhyme, the sort of poetry that an entire nation could appreciate- whereas in our time, poetry is the domain of decadent elites and their culturally hostile hangers-on, like a person who calls himself “Amiri Baraka”, a black Muslim who was the poet laureate of New Jersey and penned the following lovely piece after 9/11, called “Somebody Blew Up America”.

They say its some terrorist, some
barbaric
A Rab, in
Afghanistan
It wasn’t our American terrorists
It wasn’t the Klan or the Skin heads
Or the them that blows up nigger
Churches, or reincarnates us on Death Row
It wasn’t Trent Lott
Or David Duke or Giuliani
Or Schundler, Helms retiring

It wasn’t
the gonorrhea in costume
the white sheet diseases
That have murdered black people
Terrorized reason and sanity
Most of humanity, as they pleases

They say (who say? Who do the saying
Who is them paying
Who tell the lies
Who in disguise
Who had the slaves
Who got the bux out the Bucks

Who got fat from plantations
Who genocided Indians
Tried to waste the Black nation

It continues on this theme ad nauseum for another 5 pages. That’s poetry in 21st century America.

So while this sort of hatred of the majority culture is tolerated and even subsidized by the government, Kipling is banned because of his most infamous poem, “The White Man’s Burden“, and Stevenson is criticized as well, for a little ditty he wrote in his lovely book of children’s poetry called A Child’s Garden of Verses:

Foreign Children

Little Indian, Sioux, or Crow,
Little frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanee,
Oh! don’t you wish that you were me?

You have seen the scarlet trees
And the lions over seas;
You have eaten ostrich eggs,
And turned the turtle off their legs.

Such a life is very fine,
But it’s not so nice as mine:
You must often as you trod,
Have wearied NOT to be abroad.

You have curious things to eat,
I am fed on proper meat;
You must dwell upon the foam,
But I am safe and live at home.
Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,
Little frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanee,
Oh! don’t you wish that you were me?

You see, this little poem teaches children to hate, don’t you know? Many subsequent printings of ACGOV have omitted this poem in compliance with politically correct demands. This volume is wonderful for children, with or without the omission, though we should vote with our dollars and get the unabridged version if possible.

Now, Stevenson is not a particular favorite of mine, as many of his poems are very sentimental- it’s great poetry, but some of it is not my cup of tea. But the following is one of my favorites, simply titled “Prayer”, and is a wonderful reminder of the days we once enjoyed, when “art” and “culture” were not things you had to protect your children from, but were rather the highest expressions of faith, confidence and heritage in the nation of one’s birth. By steeping our children in the heritage of a healthy past, perhaps they can one day, with God-given talent, restore the great Western cultural traditions that produced the greatest art the world has ever known. And no one will have to pay taxes to support half-literate obscenities masquerading as “poetry”.

Prayer by RL Stevenson

I ask good things that I detest,
With speeches fair;
Heed not, I pray Thee, Lord, my breast,
But hear my prayer.

I say ill things I would not say -
Things unaware:
Regard my breast, Lord, in Thy day,
And not my prayer.

My heart is evil in Thy sight:
My good thoughts flee:
O Lord, I cannot wish aright -
Wish Thou for me.

O bend my words and acts to Thee,
However ill,
That I, whate’er I say or be,
May serve Thee still.

O let my thoughts abide in Thee
Lest I should fall:
Show me Thyself in all I see,
Thou Lord of all.

I must thank my readers for the growth of my blog so far. As of yesterday, Google has updated with a PageRank 4 ranking (quite high for a blog) and Alexa, a traffic rating service, puts the site in the 200,000’s. This is well within the top 1% of websites, as traffic follows a Zipf distribution on the net.

With success comes attention, some approving, and some disapproving, as recent events have highlighted. I have heard Rush Limbaugh talk before about the inbred liberal blogging subculture- the folks who brought us Howard Dean as the frontrunner before the money men in Hollywood and New York, who provide 70% of funds for the Democratic Party, came to their senses and united behind someone like Kerry more skilled in fooling the American people and with a longer track record of trading votes for dollars. Dean is the man of whom Karl Rove said, “Please nominate this man.” Unfortunately for Rove, Dean lost it in the Iowa caucus speech, and Bush went on to be re-elected by an anemic margin of victory compared to a real conservative like Reagan. But enough about faux-conservatives.

What accounts for the liberal leanings of scribblers, whether of the blogging or journalist variety? I think it is rooted in biology. All of us have talents that are unevenly distributed- some of us have analytical skills, others verbal skills, those being the two great areas of useful talent. Analytical skills are useful for describing reality. Verbal skills are useful for creating realities.

Those of us with analytical skills will thus be more constrained in our writing- it must be based on some analysis of reality. Verbal skills, on the other hand, create their own reality, and thus the verbally skilled writer can, like Mozart, write “as the sow piddles”. This accounts for the leftward distribution of blogs, journalists, lawyers and others with skills primarily in the verbal department. (As an aside, TFLE is also why it is dangerous to take seriously the ideas of musicians, popular books, etc, Christian or secular, as they are more likely based on the created reality of a verbally skilled person than a rigorous analysis of reality- get your theology from theologians, science from scientists, etc).

I call it “The Fruit Loop Effect”. TFLE is simply acknowledging that any sample of media content will be skewed toward a liberal worldview, where realities are created on the basis of what the writer wants reality to be than rigorous analysis of what reality actually is. TFLE is one of my motivations for blogging, as our side needs more voices in proportion to the numbers we represent.

There could also be a demographic basis for TFLE. Conservatives, as a group, are statistically more likely to be employed (it is much easier to be gainfully employed analyzing reality, say as an engineer, than to be paid to create reality, say as a journalist), to be married and to have children, all time-consuming tasks prohibitive of copious amounts of blogging. Thus, those that DO have the time to blog copiously are statistically more likely to be liberals. I post three times a week if I’m lucky, and I feel like it takes a lot of time (while employed and married with children, toddlers no less), but the Deaniacs measure their posts by the hour!

As a conservative blogger, what are the practical implications of TFLE?

First, as recent experience has shown, as soon as you have any level of success (meaning that sufficient PageRank to your blog pushes your results to the top of a Google search), and if you allow comments, you will be ambushed. And when dealing with people with a contrary worldview, there will be no agreement, convincing or even agreeing to disagree. It is simply a war of ideas, both sides trying to get the other “off message”, a tactical political exercise but ultimately of no value to readers if no new ideas or real discussion takes place. The worst part for conservatives, for the demographic factors described above, is that there are more of them and they have more time. An arms race of “who has the most free time” ensues, and underemployed liberals always win that game.

So a proposed heuristic for conservative bloggers:

1. Once you exceed a certain threshold of success, it is absolutely necessary to moderate all comments. This is a step I am going to have to take starting today. There is a silver lining I think: the longer the delay between comments, because of delays in their appearance, the more thoughtful the replies will be, as people will be less reactive in what they say.

2. The site owner decides which comments appear and which ones don’t. You have to take control of this. I recall a conversation talk show host Dave Ramsey had with a caller who was asking if he should delay paying off his house so he could use the money instead to provide startup capital for a business. Dave’s response was to ask the caller if he would take out a loan on the house if the house were already paid off, to which the caller responded no; and Dave explained that the two decisions are equivalent. The same applies for a blog, which is not primarily meant as a forum, but as a platform for a certain writer. Before allowing a certain comment, it must be clear that it adds to the discussion. Not that it must agree, but that it is a good faith comment, not an arrow in the war of ideas. The presence of obscenity in the first reply should have tipped me off to cut the discussion off earlier. There is actually a well-documented sociology of “trolls” in open forums. Of course, the liberal trolls will respond with much gnashing of teeth about “free speech”, but “free speech” refers to government censorship, not private property. Besides, it is always the liberals who restrict free speech: in Europe and South Africa, people serve jail time for simply pointing out historical facts inconvenient to the Marxist mythology.

3. Most people are not confrontational. Thus, when a confrontation occurs, most people’s response is to head for the exits. While wasting time responding to people not interested in what you have to say, people you would like to hear from are less likely to comment, lest they be attacked as well. I have a tendency to want to “poke the monkey” just to see what it will do in reaction- perhaps I poked the liberal monkeys beyond reasonable limits of entertainment this time.

4. Finally, it can be difficult for family members and friends to watch tasteless attacks upon a person’s character. This alone calls for limiting dissent to comments that do not involve personal attacks. We have to swim upstream to the culture anyway in our everyday lives, so why pick fights with the peanut gallery?

And so, finally, an appeal to my readers. I want to hear from you. I don’t mind responding, within limits, to the hecklers. The question is, do you enjoy it? Does it make you more likely or less likely to want to visit the site? Does it make it more or less likely that you will comment? I had thought that a good fight would generate interest, and there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Are my guidelines above mistaken?

Thank you again for taking the time to visit.