The first debate of this presidential race took place last night. Pundits are unanimous that one candidate totally ran away with the victory and left the other in the dust. They just can’t agree on which candidate that was.

I don’t own a T.V., so I listened to the debate via streaming media on my computer. I didn’t get the visual effects–the expressions, etc.–so I had to concentrate on what was said.

Kerry is a better debater than Bush is. That’s really all you can learn from these events. Bush isn’t glib; he doesn’t “think on his feet” well. None of that has anything to do with running the executive branch of the federal government.

There’s a superstition that is nearly universal: debates show who’s correct. I call it a superstition because there’s no evidence for it. A person can be categorically wrong and know he’s wrong and still whip the stuffing out of his opponent if he holds all of the debating talent. Something like that goes on in courtrooms thousands of times a day right here in the land of justice for all. Have you ever been in a courtroom trial? Heh heh, I rest my case. You know I’m right.

Bush will carry Tennessee handily, barring some upheaving catastrophe between now and Nov. 2d. In fact, I expect him to win by a landslide across the country, and I’ve been saying it all year. That means I’m hardly a hero for putting a Peroutka sign in my yard today. Michael Peroutka is the Constitution Party presidential candidate. In not supporting Bush, I’m really taking no risks. If any fellow conservative attacks me, I have an easy dodge: “Hey, Kerry can’t win Tennessee.” Not every Peroutka supporter has it so easy.

9/11 seems to have changed everything. Among my friends, Bush can do no wrong. A “third party” is unthinkable, almost like supporting a different god than the one in the Bible. But there are some serious issues that we need to come to grips with. I’ll name one: abortion. We antiabortion folks get the Republicans’ rhetoric, the kids get the garbage disposal. Eight years of Reagan, four years of Poppa Bush, four years of little Bush, and where are we in the battle, hmm? And there are many other important issues where, despite the image which the Republicans project to us, they can be counted on to split the difference with the left when the radials meet the road.

But most conservatives begin shaking in rage when they see another conservative not supporting Bush. Hopefully better times and deeper thinking will return soon.

Three years ago, when I opened my plumbing business, I needed a cell phone. (Now, since the technology isn’t necessarily cellular, they’re called “mobile” phones.) Choosing a provider was like exploring an uncharted jungle. It required great powers of analysis to construct an apples-to-apples comparison of what was being offered. Most irritating was the fact that the various companies were obscure deliberately.

I was equal to the task, though, and I ultimately went with SunCom, a fancy name for AT&T, which was just about the biggest and most reliable option I found. I got 1,000 anytime minutes for $55/month, plus all the little add-on fees.

It’s been okay. I have discovered on the Internet that everyone has gripes against his mobile phone company, and mine are no different from others, except for one annoying point: roaming!

I can be in the middle of Memphis and unable to hit an AT&T tower. Wham: sixty cents a minute. Being in the plumbing business, I have little choice as to whether or not I’m going to talk on that phone. End of the month, another $5 or so tacked onto the bill. But what’s money to a plumber, right?

It’s the principle of the thing. :rolleyes:

Last November a law was passed that makes your number portable; that is, you can go to another company and take your same phone number with you. I was promising to do exactly that last year, but I waited a month or two to let them iron the bugs out of the transferral system, then I had a month or two with no roaming, then I got busy — ah, you know the drill. I just let it go.

Well, yesterday I finally did something about it: I moved to T-Mobile. I have the same 1,000 minutes, but at $40 instead of $55. There are NO ROAMING charges and free long distance. I paid a $35 activation fee and got a “free” Nokia 6010 handset, a quantum upgrade from my old Motorola V120c.

This is how the free market works. AT&T tried mightily to keep me, but they just couldn’t do it. T-Mobile simply had a better deal. They got me on a one-year contract. At the end of that year, if they haven’t kept pace with their competition, they’ll lose me the same way that AT&T did.

Technology is becoming cheaper; these companies’ sales volume is increasing all the time; everybody just has to have that mobile phone; and yet, for all that, the prices have only barely come down in three years. AT&T doesn’t have a single offer on their web site that’s any better than the one I got from them three years ago. Among phone users, the pressure is increasing to drive prices down. The high prices cannot be sustained against such pressure (unless the government steps in and forces people to pay higher prices). Step by step, companies that cannot compete will be marginalized in the phone market.

Can you hear me now?

A lady had a big problem and got a big plumbing company to give her a bid on fixing it. They told her $6,200. She called me and I went by and took a look. It looked more like $4,500 to me, and she was greatly relieved. She wanted me to do the work, but felt that she had to honor her invitations to two other contractors who were yet to come by. I encouraged her to do just that, confident that the others couldn’t beat my price. I thought that I had the job in the bag, but she called this week and said that company XYZ had made her an offer so low she couldn’t pass it up, so she was getting them to do the work.

I don’t know XYZ’s price, but it must have been close to $3,500-$4,000. How does this happen? How can contractors have such disparate pricing?

1. GREED. The $6,200 quote was largely greed. The one making that offer was fishing for whales. A big company has many opportunities to make offers on jobs and occasionally some sucker will accept the bid. The men then make $1,000/day. You have to admit, it sure beats driving all over town tinkering with rotten pipes in slummy shacks for a few bucks per job.

2. OVERHEAD. A big company simply cannot work as cheaply as a small one can. The $6,200 company has layers of management all the way up to the home office “up north,” as well as stockholders who “deserve a return on their investment.” (The corporate bigwigs are the biggest stockholders.) Massive levels of insurance coverage, big equipment, lawsuits, office staff and computers, recruiting and training, buildings, etc. all drive their costs through the roof.

3. UNCERTAINTY. On a big job, you never really know just what you might run into. This particular job required sawing 100 feet of concrete, opening a couple of walls, and digging through a yard to an as-yet-unknown depth. Various mishaps could add a day or two to the job. A contractor needs to split the difference between “covering himself” in case of miscalculations and “fishing for whales” with no regard for the customer’s right to a fair price.

4. HUNGER. When a plumber doesn’t have enough business to pay his bills, he become a lot less picky. He’s willing to work at nearly any price. A company that has men sitting around with no work to do is a company that’s willing to cut the price to rock bottom.

5. SKULDUGGERY. I sure hope there’s no skulduggery in this lady’s job. Those who underbid me are certainly a larger company than I am (since I’m a one-man band), so they have greater overhead. I’m not sure how they beat me. Either they are much more confident in their work and figured the price with no elbow room, or they plan to do it in a cheaper way and haven’t revealed that to her. Or maybe they plan to come back in the middle of the job and claim that things are different than what they originally bid on, and now they need to add $X to the price.

It’s a common practice for a contractor to use sly methods of squeezing more profit from a job. He quotes it low in order to get the business, then he makes his money by cutting corners or by manipulating the situation. Hey, if your driveway was unusable and your yard was torn up and your plumbing wouldn’t work, how willing would you be to send a company packing so that you could return to the Yellow Pages and start trying to find a replacement? Many a customer just pays the higher price in order to be done with the skunks and to get them off the property.

I’m not at all certain that there will be anything wrong with the work this company will do. Maybe they just did a better job at estimating and they outbid me fair and square. I sure hope so.

My wife and I just celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary by making a quick getaway to Mountain View, Arkansas. It’s about three hours from Memphis, but it’s like going to another world and another time.

What’s different? It’s like stepping back in time to when people were a community. There’s almost no major crime. There’s not been a murder in five years. You can walk downtown without some dopehead mugging you. In fact, every night people go out to the square around the County Courthouse and sit around picking bluegrass music. You can walk around from group to group and listen, sing along, or sit in on the session.

I could write about Mountain View for days. Just go! You’ll see.

On my web site, I posted a link to an outfit called truecatholic.org, which features the real pope, who lives not in Rome, but in Springdale, Washington. Well, I now find that I only scratched the surface. Here’s a site that lists seventeen claimants to the papal chair. And there are a number of others who intend to be pope sometime in the future. :doze:

I haven’t been blogging much of late. My spare time has been taken up with writing on the Catholic Answers Forums. If you have any interest in seeing what I’ve written there, this link will take you to a list of my posts.

These debates are a world all their own. The contestants exhibit a wide range of emotions. They accuse one another of the very errors they, themselves, are committing in logic, research, fairness, and every other topic. They misquote one another and misconstrue perfectly clear sentences. They make authoritative statements about things they’re totally ignorant of. They’re blinded by self-interest.

And that’s just the ones who agree with me! 😛

I’m happy to report that, after about fifteen hours of labor and many trips to and fro, I completed the repainting of the flooded ceiling from last week. It was the most difficult painting I’ve ever done: large room (400 sq. ft.) with gobs of stuff in it and against the walls. It was hard to make the entire surface smooth so that looking at the ceiling from an acute angle didn’t reveal irregularities in the texture of the paint.

Plumbing is easier. If something doesn’t cooperate, you can slam it upside the head with a hammer or pipe wrench. If it looks ugly, you can cover it with drywall or bury it underground or hide it in a cabinet.

But if an attic gets flooded, you can’t hide it, bury it, or beat it into submission. It holds the high ground and you’re at its mercy.

I just read the Associated Press report about the Cassini spacecraft’s cavortings around Saturn’s rings. It’s amazing, just like they say. The engineers who pulled this off are some of the most amazing people on the planet.

One quote from the story really got my attention. The writer said “Saturn and its rings resemble the early solar system, when the sun was surrounded by a disk of dust and gas that eventually formed the planets and turned into scientists and engineers.”

Well, I added that last part. The original quotation stopped at the word “planets.” I just added the last part because it is precisely what atheistic evolutionists teach in college classrooms, although they’re careful not to make it quite that clear. :laugh:

Today’s my birthday. On May 25th I wrote about my spiritual birth in 1969 when God gave me a new heart via faith in Christ. But today is my physical birthday.

I was adopted as a newborn by Evan and Juanita Barley. As I heard the story, the arrangements were made before my birth. Presumably some girl in Houston was carrying an unwanted fetus. At that time, it was illegal for women to hire abortionists to kill their children. I have no idea whether or not my natural mother would have done such a thing if it had been an option. Certainly a “girl in trouble” would experience many conflicting emotions, including fear, and could at least feel a strong temptation to do whatever was necessary to address the situation. This is especially true if older counselors assure her that the baby is not a baby and the beating heart is not beating and that little Kevan would be better off dead–if he were alive, but he really isn’t, so it’s okay to kill him, uh, it. But, I thank God, that’s not how it was in those days, before the slaughter of the forty million began in 1973.

My adoptive parents are both deceased now. They were somewhat older than the average couple that has babies. On the other hand, I assume that my natural mother was somewhat younger than average–perhaps seventeen. That would put her in her mid-to-late sixties now.

I’ve never felt a desire to “connect” with my natural parents. My adoptive parents are my parents, and they’re all the parents I’ll ever need. But I’ve sometimes felt sorry for my natural mother. If she’s still living, this is the 49th time she’s looked out the window, or off into the sky, or maybe back toward downtown Houston, and remembered the Friday night when she passed through the valley of the shadow of death in order to bring me into the world, and wondered what her boy is doing on his birthday. She doesn’t know that he looks just like his “father,” has an IQ in the genius range, earned two masters degrees and a Ph.D., works in six languages, has played in a symphony orchestra, acted in plays, sung in choirs, pastored churches, and repaired toilets. She wonders about his wife and kids. She wonders if it turned out okay.

All she knows is that she’s glad, too, that she gave me life instead of death. She hopes that I know that she’s never missed my birthday. She hopes I understand why she gave me up.

And she probably sings a quiet little “Happy Birthday dear Kevan” when nobody is around.

Thanks, Mom.

Yesterday my plumbing finally passed inspection at that house I’ve been rehabbing–the one with the borrowed water meter. Today the meter gets pulled and tonight, under cover of darkness, it goes back to its original home.

My customer (the investor) is from Viet Nam and, being unfamiliar with bureaucracies, asked me why everyone at the water department was so stupid. On the telephone he was transferred to eight or ten different people, none of whom knew anything about how to solve his dilemma. Someone even transferred him to the meter shop, which is just the guys in work clothes who have absolutely nothing to do with setting up a new account and typing it into the computer and sending the bill and such. He asked “Is there no instructions for them, what to do if A or B or C, and then A1 or A2 or A3, etc.?” He’s an engineer and thinks in linear terms.

My answer was that the opposite is true. In a bureaucracy, they’re smothered with instructions and regulations because everyone is trying to cover his posterior and keep his job, but nobody is concerned about the customer. What you routinely find in these government offices is people who say “I filled out the form, I followed the procedure, you can’t fire me or I’ll sue your backside. True, what I did accomplished nothing, didn’t help the customer, and, in fact, made things worse; but I’m safe and that’s all that matters.” And, of course, it’s impossible to make a rule for every situation. If smart people aren’t empowered to exercise initiative and solve the problems with “whatever it takes,” the problems don’t get solved and the bureaucracy becomes a nightmare of red tape and gridlock.

Which pretty well describes government in America. Join the revolution: check out the Constitution Party.