Author: Kevan

It’s Monday and I am reminded of one of my favorite one-panel cartoons. Two old black men wearing overalls are sitting on the front porch of a house in the country, guitars across their laps, and one holds up a tiny object and complains to the other, “It’s this *&^% Prozac. I ain’t had the blues in weeks!”

I’ve never understood “blue Mondays” or other excuses for being miserable. Oh, I understand being miserable all right. I used to do it whenever possible as a teenager. I wore sunglasses, even at night. I slumped. I wrote sad stories and I played sad songs. “Poor me.” One day I realized that nobody cared that I was so miserable. I thought that they should see me, feel my pain, commiserate, pet me, and admire my nonconformity. Instead they just went on about their lives and I found myself ignored. What a revolting development.

So I grew up, and I find that it’s much better up here. Now I wake up happy that I have another day to live in, and on Monday I’m happy that I get to start another week. Even though the week began yesterday, I have the same clock in my brain as everyone else and I tend to “start” on Monday. Who feels bad on Monday? I can’t understand it.

The morning’s work and study are done. A French-pressed cup of High Point coffee is smoking on the computer desk, and I’m about to hit the road and solve plumbing problems for people who need it badly. (That’s a tautology. By definition, if you need a plumber, you need him badly.) And they even pay me money. The temperature in Memphis was 72 degrees this morning and it’s 73 now. The air was ionized by some front that came through last night. It’s close to paradise.

Except for one thing: thieves came and stole the air condtioning units at our church last night. As I remember, we have about twelve. Well, we had about twelve. We’re at zero presently, and today is the first day of summer school at our K-12 Christian school. I guess if I were over there, I wouldn’t be in such a good mood. Those big honkers cost oh, $3,000 apiece, plus labor (I’m guessing). But that’s how the world has always been. Wherever anyone has been happy, he has been near others who were suffering.

A Rasmussen poll indicates that 30% of Americans would consider voting for a third party in the ’08 presidential election if that party made immigration enforcement its top priority.

Although I favor the enforcement of existing laws and the improvement of our system, I can’t bring myself to say that it should be our top priority. I am encouraged, though, to see the positive attitude toward third parties. To me, they parallel my own status as an independent plumber. When customers break away from the large plumbing shops with their high overhead and their self-centered philosophies, those customers can actually get what they want instead of what the powerful shops tell them they must have.

I voted for the Constitution Party in the last election and will probably do so again in ’08.

In yet another tribute to the triumph of Communism over the evil white rulers of Rhodesia, the New York Times has reported “Zimbabwe’s government on Wednesday announced 20-hour daily electricity cuts for households across the country as supplies are shifted to irrigate the crucial winter wheat crop amid persistent food shortages.” This country used to produce far more food than it needed, and it exported to other nations.

I suspect that Air America has figured out a way to blame this on President Bush.

Upon the death of Jerry Falwell this week, the editorial cartoonist for the Memphis newspaper dashed off a drawing of Tinky Winky welcoming Falwell into Heaven. The cartoonist, who is well known to be a good artist and deadeningly devoid of creative thinking, was alluding to the uproar of vitriol that was directed at Falwell in 1999 when his magazine stated that Tinky Winky was a homosexual cartoon character.

The magazine was right, and anybody who cared to research it knew that it was right. But nobody cared. They just wanted to hate and vilify Falwell. It’s a lot like the crucifixion of Rush Limbaugh when he said that Donovan McNabb was being overrated (at that time) because the sports media establishment was anxious to see a black quarterback do well. Rush said nothing racist, but it was called racist thousands of times. So with the ridicule of Falwell.

Ann Coulter’s column this week (May 16) gives the quotations and documentation for the mainline media’s statements that Tinky Winky was homosexual. (Of course, they quit saying it when the Falwell business hit the fan.) For instance:

Michael Musto of The Village Voice boasted that Tinky Winky was “out and proud,” noting that it was “a great message to kids” not only that it’s OK to be gay, but the importance of being well accessorized.”

More info appeared in an article on Newsbusters.

It’s bizarre. It’s Orwellian. It’s like trying to write by looking in a mirror instead of at your hand.

Coinciding with Cinco de Mayo, the illegal aliens in America are staging a nationwide protest, calling for reform of immigration laws. They complain that their current status is a major problem for them. Their familes are torn apart. Congress is doing nothing to remedy the situation. When immigration officials round up illegals, it makes them afraid to speak out in public.

It’s crazy. An intruder breaks into your home, commandeers a bedroom, and begins living off your shelter, insurance, utilities, appliances, and furniture, and then starts complaining that the police are hassling him and you’re not doing enough to get his family moved in with him?

Y’know, I have a solution for these problems they’re complaining about . . .

I often do plumbing for an organization which promotes, among other things, “peace and justice.”  One of their slogans (you see it on buttons, bumper stickers, etc.) is “Stop the Violence.” Someone there asked me once why I wear a sidearm. I told him “It’s sort of a fundamentalist version of ‘Stop the Violence.’  If somebody starts some violence, I intend to stop it if I can.”

This past Saturday night I discussed carrying with a friend and mentioned that, once you get used to it, you feel somewhat vulnerable whenever you happen not to be armed.  Philosophically, I oppose the existence of places where only criminals are armed, and I mentioned schools as an example.  It is not legal for me to be armed on school property. He and I both agreed that shooters would gravitate to such places, knowing that they have a free hand against their prey.

And so thirty-six hours later we hear that a shooter went to Virginia Tech and blew away over thirty kids.  I am literally horrified when I think of what the students endured while this evil murderer casually snuffed out one life after another.

If a trained handgunner had been present and armed, the murderer would have been summarily stopped and most of those kids would be alive today.

Several articles about Don Imus have appeared recently. No two agree in details, but all agree that he is worse than Hitler, Bloody Mary, and James Dobson all rolled into one. That is a tipoff that something is askew in the analyses, but don’t expect many to notice.

I did. I’ve never listened to Imus. I’d heard that he was ugly and I happen to think that the world already provides enough ugliness to last me for a day, so I haven’t sought him out. Then I heard that he’d said something ugly about the Rutgers basketball girls. “So what else is new,” I thought. “Isn’t that what he’s paid to do?” I mean, does anyone pay Don Imus to restrict his speech to acceptable levels of depravity? No, they pay him to be ugly.

Imus was just using the degrading jargon of the black underclass to elaborate on the appearance of the black girls whom he and his partner had observed to be tough and tattoed. He was saying that they looked like the people who typify the culture where such language is used.

I didn’t see the girls. I don’t know what they looked like. I can say, generally speaking, that no one should look like the underclass and expect to be treated as upperclass. But I have no opinion of the girls’ appearances, since I didn’t see them.

The airwaves would be better off without filthy talkers, but I don’t think that’s what the sharks have been after for the past week. I hear them on Air America. They want to silence anyone who refuses to conform to their dictates. Running Imus through the disposal is just a strategy to try to get to Limbaugh, Hannity, and Beck.

I like to give God credit for things, but the word “miracle” is overused. If everthing is a miracle, then nothing is. If one says “I believe in miracles: I saw the sun rise this morning,” then he and the atheist both agree, for the atheist saw the sun rise as well.

It is difficult to define “miracle” because it involves certain presuppositions about God’s relationship to the universe. The Bible says that he upholds all things by the word of his power and that all things “hold together” by, or through, him. Yet a miracle goes beyond that, and I think a miracle is when God intervenes and does something that could not occur naturally.

If a sick person gets well, that’s not a miracle. But if he gets well in an instant, that’s a miracle. God usually answers prayer through providence rather than through miracles. If one is dying of cancer and God’s people pray seriously and the cancer goes into remission, that’s only a miracle if it conflicts with the large record of cases where other cancers have gone into remission. I’m not saying God didn’t do it, I’m saying that he did it through providence and not through miracle.

Why quibble? As I said at the beginning, if everything is a miracle, then nothing is. Unbelievers have a long history of laughing at believers because the believer experiences nothing unusual, but still calls it “God.” The believer is thanking God for a medical recovery and the doctor gets ignored along with the scientists who developed the effective medicines. The unbeliever thinks that there is nothing compelling in the believer’s worldview because he sees plainly that the believer is looking at nature and calling it supernatural.

If there is such a thing as nature, (and I think that there is), then those things which are within that realm need to be labeled as such, and “miracle” needs to be reserved to those phenomena which conflict with the natural order of things. Examples would be a storm ceasing suddenly when commanded to do so, a structural deformity in a human body being remedied instantly, or an uncanny coincidence in response to prayer such as an exact dollar amount arriving in the mail precisely in response to a specific need. Such timing and specificity may rise to the level of “miracle.”

A plumbing inspector failed me because I plumbed the job according to the Code book. Really, that’s what happened. It seems that there are three sets of rules by which we plumb in the Memphis area: (1) the Code book, (2) the “Blue Pages,” which are Shelby County’s amendments to the Code, and (3) an unwritten body of rules I’ll call “We’ve never allowed that.”

An inspector came to my job, looked at a certain joint, and said “You can’t use a 90 there; you have to use a long sweep.” That surprised me, so I got out the Plumbing Code and showed him the pertinent paragraph and asked “What does this mean right here?” (The book specifically said that I was correct.) He was surprised by what he saw, but he repeated “We’ve never allowed that.”

I decided to call the office where the top Code guys sit. “Mr. ____ tells me I cannot use a 90 to change from vertical to horizontal.” The Code official answered “We’ve never allowed that.” I protested “But the book says it’s legal.” All he could say was “Well, we’ve never allowed that.”

So I crawled under the house, cut out the 90, and replaced it with a long sweep. Nobody ever said the world was fair.

The long national nightmare is over.

The crisis has passed.

I’m back.

There has been a lot of water under the bridge since my last post nearly a year ago. And you see where the nation has gone since my absence. Coincidence? I think not!

This is the new blog with a new look and address. The old one was powered by Greymatter, fine software, but subject to exploits by porn-peddling spam-spewing pond scum. Greymatter is ancient history in the world of blog software and WordPress has a good reputation–so here we are. Maybe I’ll learn soon enough how to customize it.

Meanwhile, we need to resume issuing those correctives which, if adopted, will make the world a better, saner place. And tonight we begin with President Bush’s State of the Union Speech.

The nation has forgotten Reagan’s rhetoric: government isn’t the solution, it is the problem. To hear Bush speak is to hear about programs, initiatives, and funding–that is to say, more and bigger government. That’s all I’ll say. The implications are obvious and frightening to anyone who knows the history of what governments do.