Author: Dan G.

What happened to Jennifer Knapp?

That’s apparently the question that drove at least one visitor here. And it got me thinking – what did happen to her? The last album I remember her releasing was The Collection back in 2004, which (in the 2-disc version) was a mix of hits and unreleased or hard to find b-sides, covers, and demos, and was a permanent fixture in my CD player until it was abandoned for my Zen. Gotee apparently also recently re-released Kansas, remastered and with a couple bonus tracks. To be honest, I hadn’t thought much about it until I saw the search and realized I hadn’t heard anything about her in years now.

Turns out that in 2004, she announced she was going on a sabbatical of sorts, and then rather disappeared off the face of the earth. Google has brought up dozens of totally unsubstantiated rumors, but the one link I could find was referencing a Relevant magazine article from 2004:

In an interview from the January/February 2004 issue of Relevant Magazine, Knapp stated that she was taking a break from music for a while, leaving the future of her career in God’s hands.

“It was definitely time for a break,” she said. “I was touring Lay It Down while recording The Way I Am, then went directly into touring that record. It got to where I was just doing shows to support the record, rather than having a record support the heart of the people I was supposed to be serving. I don’t want to make and tour another record just because that’s what people expect, or because ‘it’s about that time.'”

Knapp gave no indication of when new material will surface. “Truly, no plans and no promises of when,” she said. “At this time there’s really not enough material, and I don’t want to force anything just for the sake of getting a record finished.”

It’s too bad she’s retired from music, as she remains one of my favorite artists, but I can absolutely understand wanting to have a life back after the chaos that surrounds the modern musician’s lifestyle. I hope she’s still making music, even if it’s just for herself, as it would be a shame to think that so much talent could be left untapped.

Edit 10/28/09: For those of you still stumbling here via Google, commenter sami points out that Jen is back!

Edit 4/13/10: For all you stumbling across this post in reaction to the CT article, I’ve posted some new thoughts.

Oh, the irony

From the new White House Dot Gov:

End Deceptive Voting Practices: President Obama will sign into law his legislation that establishes harsh penalties for those who have engaged in voter fraud and provides voters who have been misinformed with accurate and full information so they can vote.

Heh. Obama in October 2008 on allegations of voter registration fraud: “there’s been fraud perpetrated probably on ACORN if they paid these individuals and they actually didn’t do registrations… this is another one of these distractions that gets stirred up in the course of a campaign.”

Hopey. Changey. Come on man, it’s your first day, don’t mess it up already.

Obamanauguration

It’s official: Barack Hussein Obama is our President. Here’s hoping that he is a good president, and a wise leader. In these times especially, he needs prayer and support in the same way Bush and his predecessors did – there is no job tougher than the presidency. Please note that when I say support, I do not mean devotion, and I do not mean blind trust, and I do not mean that we should support all his beliefs or actions; however as President it is he who stands at the helm of this great ship called America, and wishing ill on the captain of the ship you’re riding on is at best foolish.

No, we can pray for our President. We can hope he succeeds in bringing America to new levels of prosperity and freedom. We can do that while opposing his policies and methods that he has laid out so far, hoping that he will become wiser in office and come to understand some of the harsh realities he has – at least apparently – so far avoided.

As for the ceremony itself, I didn’t watch it on TV, because I simply cannot stand watching the people who now constitute the broadcast media teams. Instead, I read the speech, and watched a couple of clips. While most of it is the typical fluff that has been the vast majority of his speeches so far, there were a couple comments that caught my attention as possibly betraying Obama as someone who has already learned a thing or two.

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West – know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

This is harder, tougher talk than I have seen from him in the past, and hopefully it is a sign of a more realistic and mature leader, who is now realizing that there are much larger fundamental issues here than just what can be seen at the negotiation table.

That said, the rest of the speech left a lot to be desired. Sure, we have the typical grandiose promises every politician makes – but some of his rhetoric stretched beyond ambitious into the realm of absurdity. His promise to the third world that he would “make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow” sounded like the statement of a man who believes himself a prophet, and not the statement of a responsible political leader. My personal favorite quote was “We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories” – I think I saw a SciFi original movie about that one.

And of course, it would not be a modern political speech without a little bashing of the last president, with comments such as promising to “restore science to its rightful place,” and that we are finally ready to “lead once more” – as if it hasn’t been America doing the only thing even resembling leading in the last decade or so.

So, I see hints of some good, and reminders of the bad, all veiled in a lot of fluff. Here’s hoping we can get down to the meat soon with President Obama, and that when tested, he makes the wise choice – not just for his own good, but for the good of the country.

Good luck, Mr. President. I’ll be praying for you.

Obama isn’t even president and I’m sick of him already.

So apparently Obama is recreating Lincoln’s train route from Illinois to D.C., following in the late president’s footsteps as he continues to build himself up, complete with a vintage railcar to give him that “rustic” feeling.

I wonder if he knows that Lincoln took the route he did because he was afraid of being assassinated? Or that he was rushed under the cover of night from station to station to avoid assassins, avoiding the large crowds? Or that the whole thing caused him significant backlash in the eyes of the American public?

I wonder if he cares about little things like that. We know that, in his unicorn-infested world, the law doesn’t apply to him, so why should reality?

What shocks me most about this is how it shows he has totally bought into the hype surrounding him. I wonder if he truly considers himself a messianic figure, as so many of his followers do? The imagery, the throngs of screaming fans – it’s more than any rock star could dream about, and the last time we’ve seen this in history is a Godwin-invoking moment. People are already getting more excited and loyal to the idea of Obama than they are to America, and that is a very dangerous game to play.

Here’s hoping I’m wrong.

Supply, demand, oil, and deregulation!

So Chris Byrne linked to a very interesting article from 60 Minutes on oil futures, speculation, and how they caused the price of oil to skyrocket even as the demand for it didn’t go up and the supply didn’t go down. Economics is a fascinating field to me, but only in spurts, so I know entirely too little about the subject. But it’s interesting that the system put in play to allow commodities traders to more easily exchange their goods is now being sucked into the theoretical trading market that’s been the source of most of our recent economic woes. It’s notable that the deregulation of the futures market that allowed for these sort of trades to happen came under the Clinton administration, just like the housing regulations that forced banks into making bad loans – oh, Bill, is there anything you can’t screw up?

The comments section of his site also highlighted a few good points. Mike suggests that the problem wasn’t so much that speculation occurred, as the article indicates, but that it increased suddenly and to a very large degree. Gun Blobber adds the timing of it coincided with the housing crisis, so the money had to be moved somewhere else. Additionally, it’s also escalated by the fact that there is something like 20 times more money invested into futures than the actual value of the underlying securities. Chris also wrote a very extensive post touching on this and other issues a few months back when discussing the problems with Wall Street. I said then and I’ll say it now, the more I realize how our market is propped up, the more I wonder how it’s lasted this long.

As I understand it, the root problem comes from how we have more money in the investment “pool” than we have stuff to actually invest in – or rather, stuff that is deemed worthy of investing in (startup companies may be considered too risky, etc). This causes more money to be bound to an item – like oil, or real estate, or whatever – than what it is actually valued at on the supply/demand scale, which artificially inflates prices. When things get bad for investors, or the value rises so artificially high that the market “crashes,” then that money has to shift somewhere else. That’s why we saw oil rise so high, and then suddenly fall when the money moved.

This sort of thing makes me agree with Chris that we’d be better off if we banned equities trading in, and securities based on, synthetic instruments, and made companies actually invest money into “real” things – or at least put regulations in place to strongly “encourage” this behavior. The massive amount of money floating around would become available to all the garage geniuses out there trying to start the next Google, or just your average joe wanting to start a bookstore down the street. By allowing small businesses to grow, we would help the economy to grow, which would give us yet more opportunities for investment. Of course, as Chris points out, this would kill off the big investment banks and brokerage houses, but they’re little more than bookies at this point anyway. They are, however, getting massive bailouts from the government for running a risky business that finally crashed on them, and that is A Bad Thing.

Take everything I’ve said with a grain of salt, as I’m certainly nothing remotely close to an expert here. I’d love to hear feedback on this issue.