FLOW: a plumber’s weblog

This scam has been circulating in Memphis for a while.  Today I got another postcard in the mail, advertising it.  Customers have asked me about it.

The ad begins with the polysyllabic trigger word failing infrastructure, as though America is crumbling from the shorelines inward.  All they’re referring to is the fact that your plumbing might break, duh!  Even people who voted wrong in the last presidential election probably know that already.  You can figure it out by studying the trucks that go around in your city.  Do you see any with decals indicating that the driver is a plumber?  Well, just a little higher-level thinking will tip you off that he probably makes his living fixing broken plumbing.  It happens.

Next revelation: repairs cost money.  I will just leave it at that.

Punchline: these postcard-mailing bloodsuckers will sell you an insurance policy that says they will cover the cost of the repair or replacement if your water service line has an emergency.

As with all insurance, the question is “What are the odds?”  Quite obviously, the company cannot make money unless the odds are in their favor.  In this case, however, the game is rigged; it isn’t even fair.  The odds of anybody needing this coverage are pathetically small.  Your water line is fine!  Save your $60/year in a jar somewhere for when you really need a plumber.

This company, by the way, is just one more home warranty provider and the water line scare is a low-cost gateway for them to upsell you later.  I mean, if you’re going to cover your water line, then why would you leave your air conditioning system at risk?  And your indoor plumbing and drains?  And your appliances?  And your computer?  And . . . and . . . and . . . .

Home warranties are a bad deal.  They’re overpriced and usually the service techs they use leave a lot to be desired.  Many customers have told me of their bad experiences with home warranty companies.  Yes, sometimes they’re a godsend and sometimes people hit a jackpot at the casino.  I recommend neither.

This came today via a text message:

I just wanted to thank you for doing such a great job fixing our plumbing issues. We’ve been suffering with that shower for years because I was told they needed to tear open the wall in order to fix it. I’m so thankful to have found someone knowledgeable AND honest. Thanks again for your work. We have a toilet that might be leaking from underneath so I’m sure well be using you again! ?

It isn’t hard to understand how to be a super hero in the service business.  If you just show up on time and keep your word, you’re already 90% there.  Admittedly, keeping your word isn’t always easy.  Sometimes it can even cost you money.  When Proverbs 15:4 describes those who are accepted by God, it includes “He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not.”  It’s a rare trait.

In my opinion, the remaining 10% of being a super hero is mostly desire.  For some reason, I want to help people.  That makes me go out at night when I’d rather stay home, keep trying to find a solution when I’d rather give up, take extra time on a job when I’m already losing my shirt.

As I said, it isn’t hard to understand.  As a comparison, it isn’t hard to understand how to be slender: except in cases of medical abnormality, it’s just diet and exercise.  Yet, everybody’s still fat.  Likewise, plumbing companies struggle to stay afloat and try to compensate for their failure with expensive advertising and rapacious pricing and overselling.  Their customers hate them, but they keep using them (unless they discover me) because, like abused children, they think that’s just the way the world is.

Dr. Gus died today.  He was the dean of the School of Fine Arts while I was at Bob Jones University and he was my first and only orchestral conductor. He was one of the most gracious people who ever endured me.

As a sophomore I sat at supper one night and a cellist at our table complained that she had to play double bass in the orchestra because there were no bass players.  Intrigued and ever adventurous, I asked her how someone might join the orchestra?  “I guess you’d talk to Dr. Gus,” she replied.  (Music majors never had to ask such questions; the opportunities were actually requirements.)

I found Dr. Gus somewhere on campus the next day and said “I’ve heard that you’re short on bass players in the orchestra.”  He conceded, “Oh, we need bass players badly.”  I announced “I could probably play as badly as anyone else.”  I then outlined my professional experience: I had played the electric bass in beer joints as a country musician and in high school as a big band jazzman.  And although I had plucked an upright bass a few times, I’d never held a bow in my hands.  “But I could learn!” I cheerfully chirped.

Always gracious, he lamented that there was no way for me to play at the level of the university orchestra, but I could join the “string ensemble” and perhaps try out for orchestra the following year.  That satisfied me and I joined the string ensemble right away.  I could read music well, but knew nothing about the bow.  After watching me on my first day, a cellist had to inform me “You’re supposed to change your bowing direction with every note.”  Oh.

I worked hard, excited by all that I was learning.  In about three weeks Dr. Gus dropped by our class and just observed.  After class, Mrs. Pollard approached me and said, “Dr. Gustafson says that you are to report to orchestra practice this week.” Thus ended my career in the bush league.

No other member of the university orchestra loved it more than I, but none knew less than I.  They were patient with me, but Dr. Gus could be very firm when he thought it wise.  I remember an oratorio when we were in the final hours of rehearsal before performance and he had admonished the huge choir up in the loft to project.  They weren’t getting it, so he stopped the music and upbraided them, showing a bit of anger.  He ended by shouting a one-word command: “PROJECT!” I’ll warrant you, everybody projected!  But I noticed his daughter Dianne (1st chair violin) smiling up at him with an expression that subtly said “Oh, Daddy, quit putting on!”  He just wanted us to do our best.

In our first reading of Verdi’s Rigoletto, we came to a place where the entire orchestra became silent except for the double bass “buzzing” a note behind some offstage trumpets.  That trumpet group wasn’t in place yet, so I would be playing those four measures all by myself.  I knew nothing about the piece, and when I heard everyone else stop playing, I thought I must have read my music incorrectly, so I also stopped.  Dr. Gus continued directing in the silence and called out “double bass!”  I quickly tried to play, but that “buzzing” (tremolo) was a bowing technique entirely new to me and I didn’t have the dexterity to do it.  I clawed and gouged for a few beats and then, in a characteristically irreverent attempt at humor, asked, “Had enough?”  He looked at me as he continued beating the time and shouted “PLAY!”  I played.  And I doubt that there was ever a bassist in the instrument’s history who practiced a tremolo more assiduously than I did that week.  You can bet I had it down by the next rehearsal.

Despite my meager attainments on the instrument, Dr. Gus always treated me like a colleague.  As we took our places after an intermission, I recall him catching my eye from his position at the conductor’s stand and giving me the “OK” gesture with a wink, just reassuring me (howsoever falsely) that I was doing fine.

He was an immensely talented conductor, partly because of his technical proficiency, partly because of his loving heart.  We wanted to follow him.  And he said such funny things.  I reminded him in his office once of how, years before, he’d put his conducting wand on his music stand and turned to the cellos and said “that phrase should descend like a fat woman slowly sitting down into a huge soft sofa.”  He grinned and asked, “Did I say that?”  Such images arose effortlessly in his artistic mind.  (He was originally a graphic artist.)  Another time he warned the violins that they needed to play the high note in a phrase and immediately go to the next notes without slowing down: “Fiddles, you’re trying to build three tabernacles on that note.”  (See Luke 9:33 if you don’t understand that.)

A few years ago one of my kids was graduating from the university with some degree or another and I happened to see Dr. Gus standing around in the Amphitorium.  He was about eighty years of age by then and, of course, wouldn’t remember me.  I still wanted to greet him, tell him my name and what years I played for him, and let him know what the Lord had done through me in church music with the things I’d learned from him.  Always gracious, he gave me the reply that I’m sure he gave to hundreds of others: “Well, we played a lot of beautiful music together, didn’t we?”

The arctic temperatures continue marauding through Memphis and people’s pipes continue to freeze and burst.  And I continue to hear about it.

Some things cannot be helped.  If  a meteorite comes through your roof and smashes your toilet — well, we all have days like that.

On the other hand, there are things you can do to protect your pipes from freezing and bursting.

First: insulate them.  I got to one home and found the copper icemaker supply line running across the attic with no insulation until it descended into the ceiling over the refrigerator.  After I repaired it, I took a roll of insulation which obviously had lain up there for decades and I spread it over the length of copper tube from beginning to end.  Anybody could have done that before the freeze.  It would have saved thousands of dollars in flood damage.

Second: block the air vents, by which I mean the little windows around the foundation (if the house is on a crawl space) and the gable louvers.  Often I will see all of the pipes under a house doing just fine except for the ones near an open vent.  The ground has heat in it and it radiates under the house.  If the vents are closed up, it helps to keep that heat in.  Also, the moving air has greater ability to freeze a pipe.

Third: keep things warm when a pipe is near an outside wall.  I saw a home where the heating system was poor, so they closed off a bathroom, trying to heat the rest of the house.  Without the indoor heat to help, the pipes in the bathroom wall froze & burst.  This is a common problem in a laundry room because they’re often located in an out-of-the-way spot that, for the same reasons, isn’t heated.

Fourth: add some heat.  You have to be  careful with this step lest you burn something, but adding heat is the only way that some situations will stay thawed.  A halogen work light puts out a lot of heat.  In a somewhat closed-off space, a 60 watt light bulb can make all the difference in the world.  (Think of the space behind a washing machine with, perhaps, some cardboard lying atop it.)  If the attic vents are closed off completely, opening the door to the attic will allow heat in from the house.

Fifth: leave each faucet (except for the outside hose bibbs) running.  Everybody knows this trick; by continually replacing the cooling water with warmer water from underground, the pipe doesn’t freeze.  (If you read some expert talking about a “piston effect,” ignore him.)  A stream as big as a matchstick will do the trick.  For the outside faucets, just insulate them well.  Those styrofoam covers work well, but you can also wrap the faucet with heavy terrycloth or even newspaper, which is a great insulator, albeit short-lived.

Last of all, everybody needs to know how he will shut off his water if something goes wrong one day.  There are a lot of clueless people wandering through life, but you don’t have to be one of them.   Does your house have a shutoff in it?  They’re usually about a foot off the floor in a cabinet or closet.  Is yours in the basement?  The older homes in Memphis (pre-1980 or so) must be shut off at the meter by the street.  Such folks are doomed without a meter key.

The state of “the trades” in this generation, and probably the previous one as well, is abysmal.  There’s still room for more decline, to be sure, but that’s a small consolation.  Little education (albeit much indoctrination) takes place in grades K-12, so we’ve developed this idea that everybody should go to college.  That system of mass re-education and its resultant lifetime of student loan debt scoops up most of the young people and convinces them that they should be able to sit at a computer and make $50k.  Who fixes the plumbing?

Generally, the leftovers.

It is not my intention to denigrate any capable individual; I am one and I’ve met others.  But bright and capable students these days seldom dream of leaving high school and working with their hands, learning a trade, and building a business from it.  One of my bosses, who had been hiring plumbers for years, told me quite sincerely (with acknowledged hyperbole) “all plumbers are either drunks, dopeheads, or lazy.”  Students who are otherwise will ordinarily avoid the trades.

Over time, this sorting process has produced a plumbing industry where plumbers mistreat customers (to put it mildly).  Small wonder, then, if plumbing companies mistreat plumbers.

Every so often I look around and see what the plumbing companies are up to so that I can warn my customers.  I got to looking at ads on Craigslist.  Many companies are seeking plumbers to hire.   Like lonesome singles in the “Personals” ads, they really try to sound adorable:

See what can be yours:
Top Pay & Bonus Plans
Paid Vacations
Flexible Schedules
Drug free work environment
Steady work throughout the year
Paid training on-site and off site
Best equipped/designed trucks in the country
Full Benefits: Medical, Dental, Vision, Prescription, & life Insurance

I began comparing this luscious beauty with what I already have at home (being a sole proprietor) and I saw that all I lack is “paid training.”  (When I read the manufacturer’s websites on new products, I have to do it on my own time.)  I also happen to know that this company charges $1,500 for a job that I charge $700 for.

This one made me smile:

[XYZ Company] has grown to the point where we are adding 2 premier service plumbers! And we offer premier benefits like health insurance, vacation pay, sick pay, holiday pay, retirement plan and year round work!

[XYZ Company] also offers GUARANTEED weekends off! Now who does that?

They’ve “grown to the point” that they’re hiring?  Suuure they have.  One of their former employees told me a few weeks ago “Nobody can work for that guy.”  GUARANTEED weekends off?  My friend told me, “Yeah, once a month!”

I can’t fix these companies.  Like cockroaches, no matter how many you kill, there’ll be more.  All I can do is say “Go toward the light.”  As a sole proprietor I have decentralized plumbing service with the use of computers and a mobile phone.  Memphis could use a hundred more: individual guys building and living off their own reputations, teaming up with friends when a job requires it, providing personalized service to grateful and loyal customers.  Maybe the idea will catch on some day.

Another wave of thawing and bursting swept over the city today.  I received a number of calls, nearly all of which I referred to a plumber friend.  I just spoke with him at about 10pm.  He was on his way to his last call of the day. He made over $1,000 today.  I made about $225, but I only worked nine hours and got home around 7:30pm.  I had some friends in trouble and some promises to keep — the kinds of stuff that don’t pay much money.

At the supply house today I learned that one plumbing company was booked three days out and had turned down forty calls.  My customers were lucky that they know me.  All of my callers were served.

I even missed a chance to be in the newspaper.  A reporter whom I know called to ask if he could do a story with pictures about plumbers and frozen pipes, but I had to decline since I was spending the day doing mundane stuff.  My fifteen minutes of fame — down the toilet.  Story of my life.

Much bemoaning has been heard in the last decade about how divided America has become.  I think we’ve gotten past that this week.  Across all racial and religious lines, despite Marxist leftism and Americanist rightism, irrespective of age, college football team loyalty, or propensity toward cell phone moronism, America has come together to say with one common voice:

It’s too darned cold.

Yahoo Weather told me at 7:00am that it was five degrees out on the streets of Memphis. That’s just downright disrespectful. My phone began ringing at 7:30 as victims reported waking up to frozen pipes.  Those pipes have been just fine for twenty three years, but nooooooo, the weather had to dive down to South Dakota levels and wreak havoc across our beloved southland.  And I don’t even want to know what South Dakota is like today.

In fact, that last paragraph was written over a bowl of beef stew at Jason’s Deli on Highland.  This paragraph is being composed at home ten hours later.  What happened, you ask?  A housewife called me in the middle of lunch to complain that bucketfuls of water were pouring through her ceiling.  Some women have a low tolerance for that sort of thing, so I closed my laptop and headed for the truck.  En route to her house, another girl called with a similar problem.  Before I could finish that conversation, I received a third call: water pouring through the ceiling.  I got home at 9:20pm.  Mankind was not created to live like this.

It’s getting better.  The forecast for tonight shows a low of 23 degrees, which is a far sight better than five.  It’s supposed to climb into the 60s by the weekend.  But for tonight, I can’t bear the thought of opening a refrigerator door.

This week’s news stories would make you think that the sky had fallen or the Lord had returned to establish his kingdom or something. Marijuana was legalized.

This is hardly a big deal. You still can’t smoke it in public, so stoners will have to do it in private. How is this different, pray tell, from what they were doing before?

“But it’s legal now!” Again, I have to ask, “So what?” Everybody who wanted to smoke dope was already doing it, and practically nobody was getting caught (since cops have other things to worry about).

There are three distinct arguments among my libertarian friends for legalizing recreational drugs:

1. People should be free to do as they please, except for fraud or the initiation of force.
2. The effects of prohibition are worse than the effects of legalization.
3. The benefits of legalization are too attractive to pass up.

The first argument is an assumption based on atheism. Since there is a God and he has given certain rights and responsibilities to the State (and others to individuals), the first argument is powerless, although it does provide a powerful tool for criticizing government actions.

The third argument is profoundly unsound. No amount of tax revenue could justify an otherwise evil action.

I have a lot of sympathy with the second argument. The “War on Drugs” has been the most colossal failure of anything government has ever done (and readers, that’s saying a lot!) It seems incontrovertible that nothing is going to stop people from doing dope. Why, then, sink hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into the effort?

This argument says nothing about the morality of using drugs. Instead, it says something about the purpose and responsibilities of the State.

There is a higher level on which the issue might be discussed, too, and that is the matter of personal responsibility. I favor a world where people can take their chances and take their losses. The old saying is that to protect people from the consequences of their folly will be to fill the world with fools.

There was a time when drugs were legal. You could buy heroin at the pharmacy. “Dope fiends” were scarce. That day could return.

In an earlier post, I recommended that school staff, including teachers, who were willing, trained, and supervised be allowed to carry guns for the sake of the schools’ safety. Shortly afterwards, the head of the NRA made a public recommendation that every school be provided an armed guard. In my post, I had pointed out how an armed guard would be ineffective. Since LaPierre’s statement, many critics have also done the arithmetic on the idea and shown its impracticality.

Yeasterday, Ron Paul weighed in with the libertarian insight that turning the schools into a TSA-type guarded compound would be an unacceptable advance into an Orwellian nightmare. Although I agree with this much, his statement also went so far as to disapprove of arming the staff themselves, claiming instead that “real change can happen only when we commit ourselves to rebuilding civil society in America, meaning a society based on family, religion, civic and social institutions, and peaceful cooperation through markets.”

Paul’s statement needs a couple of corrections.

First, armed citizens do not constitute a police state; instead, we are freemen who fear neither the state nor one another. Allowing teachers the freedom to defend themselves is just basic Americanism.

Second, society did not massacre the children at Sandy Hook and rebuilding society will not stop the next massacre. Paul is certainly right about the value of freedom for improving civil society, but that is really a different issue. Evil men will always try to prey upon the weak, even in the best of societies. The weak must be protected by the strong.

The idea that we have moved into participatory culture has attracted the attention of social scientists for about ten years. For instance, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology housed the foremost thinker and writer in the area, Henry Jenkins, who was the director of their Comparative Media Studies Program until his recent move to the University of Southern California.  The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has poured $50 millions into the topic. Microsoft is currently researching and reporting on the topic, and participatory culture has become something of a buzzword within such fields as education, library science, and political activism.

And yet, for all that, it has not attracted much attention in Christian literature. The closest thing to it has been occasional references in the emerging church movement to participatory music and worship, actually ancient ideas. Furthermore, the emergent movement self-consicously sought to adapt the church to the postmodern culture; but Ryan Bolger, Associate Professor of Church in Contemporary Culture at Fuller, has opined that participatory culture is actually the next stage after postmodernism. So even the emergers don’t recognize the scope of the changes.

For Christians to take a closer look at participatory culture will have two specific values. The first one is obvious: a correct understanding of a culture is an essential element to effective communication and ministry. The second value is a little less obvious: since this cultural trend is so effective at garnering participation, what can it teach Christian ministries who need more participation?

Definition

To introduce the idea of participatory culture, I will relate an example from media scholar Henry Jenkins:

Ashley Richardson (Jenkins, 2004b) was a middle-schooler when she ran for president of Alphaville. She wanted to control a government that had more than 100 volunteer workers and that made policies that affected thousands of people. She debated her opponent on National Public Radio. She found herself in the center of a debate about the nature of citizenship, about how to ensure honest elections, and about the future of democracy in a digital age. Alphaville is the largest city in the popular multiplayer game, The Sims Online. (Found here.)

A generation has arisen that understands itself not only to be a consumer of media content, but also a creator. Through blogging, Facebooking, multiplayer gaming, YouTubing, and various other online activities, a culture of participation has become their natural way of thinking and living. Jenkins (p.7) defines a participatory culture as one:

1. With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
2. With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others
3. With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices
4. Where members believe that their contributions matter
5. Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).

Facebook immediately comes to mind as a setting where these things are true, but it is only one in a sea of others.

What has Changed?

“Participation” is nothing new, especially in church life. The Protestant Reformation emphasized that worship was for participants rather than spectators. The black church in America developed a style of worship often described as “call and response,” which expressed an African cultural tradition of participatory communication (See Sundermeier, The Individual and Community in African Traditional Religions, 49-50). The Charismatic Movement highlighted the New Testament teachings regarding every member’s responsibility to identify his spiritual gifts and to use them in ministry.

The new culture, though, has lifted participation to a new level, primarily for three reasons:

• Lowered cost. The cost of internet access, computers, and recording devices is near zero in many cases, cheap in most others.
• Mentorship. Abundant help from around the globe awaits any inquirer who wants to participate in something.
• Audience. Anything offered up has hundreds of millions of potential viewers, so there’s a good chance of attracting a few who express appreciation and feed the ego.

The effects of this culture change have been profound. Jenkins reported, “According to the Pew Center for Internet and American Life, more than sixty percent of American teens have produced media, and a significant portion have distributed that media content online.” Most of those who were teens then are adults now.

Free Software as an Example

The participatory culture is not limited to kids uploading photos to their Facebook pages. There is a comparatively little-known movement called FOSS, which stands for “free/open source software,” which marshals the labor of thousands of volunteers to provide computer software at little or (usually) no cost to the end user.

The biggest entity in this movement is Ubuntu, which is one “distribution” (or variant) of the GNU/Linux operating system. After Microsoft and Apple, Ubuntu is the most widely used desktop operating system in the world. It boasts 20 million users and a goal of 200 million by the end of 2016.

According to their web site,  Ubuntu is the product of “thousands of individuals and teams” who work on software development, design, bug stomping, local community groups (LoCo teams), language translation, documentation, testing, support to new users, and the Brainstorm website (“Anyone can suggest new ideas and the community votes on which ideas are the most important”).

The sponsoring organization, Canonical, holds an Ubuntu Developer Summit  annually (the last one was in Copenhagen a couple of weeks ago) that sees participation not only in person, but also via IRC, live streaming, and microblogging. Participants work together worldwide using a collaborative text editor called “etherpad.”

Understanding

Whence the desire on the part of so many to contribute so much? A number of scientific studies have been made  and the motives are found to be understandably diverse; but, broadly speaking, the majority fall into the category of wanting to contribute to something good.

As we seek to increase participation among those to whom we minister, there is a temptation to consider original sin insurmountable and recalcitrance to be incorrigible.  Yet here we see a remarkable level of self-giving among a class of humanity with no identifiable Christian commitment.

If we refer back to the earlier bullet points, we can see how such participation reflects Jenkins’s description of a participatory culture.  Summarized, we can say that this is how people, as people, behave under given circumstances.

Conclusion

If indeed  our younger people have grown up in a participatory culture, we should expect a certain impatience on their part with a church structure whose inner workings has high barriers to entry, a paucity of readily available mentorship, or precious little feedback when attempts at participation are made.  It may be that technology can be incorporated in adaptation to culture, but the issue is deeper than that.  Although the tech revolution has given us this culture shift, the motives for participation are greater than just the desire to play with toys.  Tech itself is very often a distraction more than a help, but understanding the participatory culture and fostering it in whatever ways may be found effective bids fair to unleash a torrent of creative power for the work of Christ.

I would summarize what I’ve been hearing from the mass media since Friday as

When in trouble
When in doubt
Run in circles
Scream and shout

Angry people, grieving people, ignorant people, and conniving people are throwing dust in the air and shouting Somebody do something! Just what is to be done is a secondary concern (except among the conniving). The main theme has been that we cannot accept this, so we must do something.

Since the shooter used a .223 caliber Bushmaster, many speakers have called for banning assault weapons. Hopefully they are speaking from mere ignorance. A hurting person can be excused from saying ill-advised things at a time of emotional upheaval. The suggestion remains, however, ill-advised. Most of those favoring this move cannot tell you what an assault rifle is and how it differs from, say, a deer rifle. For this reason they cannot tell you how the elimination of these weapons would make a school massacre less likely. But assault weapons look scary, and that’s enough for such commentators.

The truth is, eliminating assault weapons (if they could be defined) would not have affected this massacre at all. One feature of an assault rifle is a high-capacity magazine, which means you don’t need to reload as often. But what’s the hurry if you intend to shoot kids and teachers in a school? A simple revolver would work just fine. Kill the teacher first, squeeze the trigger five more times, stand at the door so that the first graders cannot leave, reload (it takes about 20 seconds for an amateur, but someone who has practiced a lot can cut that in half easily), then squeeze the trigger six more times, then repeat, etc. Schools are a mass-murderer’s dream come true: countless easy targets and nobody can shoot back.

The chattering classes also love the word “semiautomatic.” You can just hear the thrill of excitement when they call a rifle a “semiautomatic rifle.” It’s like when a Bible college undergraduate first learns the word “supralapsarianism.”

For those who may not know, a semiautomatic is simply a gun that you don’t have to cock before firing. As a boy, I hunted birds with my uncle, who carried a semiautomatic shotgun, and my father, who carried a pump-action shotgun. I carried a single-shot .410 and I may have killed as many birds as they, simply because I aimed more carefully. When a covey of quail flew up, Daddy probably got off as many shots as Uncle Max, even though he had to cock his shotgun before each shot. (A pump-action is pretty quick.) Being able to squeeze off rounds more quickly (with a semi) doesn’t obviate the fact that you still have to aim the #@$% gun if you’re going to kill anything. Even a simple revolver can be fired repeatedly without cocking it. The quick action of a semiauto adds nothing to the success of a school massacre.

Schools are already locked down, with visitors required to sign in. That doesn’t work, either. I needed into a high school recently and, since my appearance fits the profile of a safe person, kids hanging around inside just opened the door for me. (School had ended for the day some minutes earlier.) Signs were everywhere telling me that all visitors had to sign in; I ignored them. When I’d found the teacher I’d come to see, he showed me a door near his classroom where I could park my truck and come right in. “It’s probably unlocked,” he said as he walked over to check it. “Yeah, it’s unlocked; just park out there and bring your stuff in this door.” They’d have to turn the place into a prison to control all the access points. And how secure are those points when 3,000 kids are trying to get in and begin the day?

While we’re talking about banning the weapon — has anyone considered how easy it would be to drive a car onto a school playground? Anybody sick enough to shoot first graders multiple times is sick enough to drive onto a playground and mow them down.

In anything like a free society, the only solution is to maintain the ability to stop a massacre if it begins. You cannot always stop one from beginning.

Some conservatives are repeating the idea that there should be an armed guard at every school. I have to wonder if these kibitzers know anything about handgun combat, or any combat at all? Apparently not. Does a sicko like this Lanza kid want to pull a massacre at a school which has An Armed Guard? He simply walks up to the guard, draws a weapon, and kills him. It’s easy to do unless the guard already has a gun in his hand and is alert because the attacker looks unusual. And how formidable is the average guard? These days, they’re only on the premises of most places for insurance reasons and to operate a buzzer to let people in. They are obviously not combat ready.

Or suppose, like Lanza, the killer intends to die with his victims? He starts shooting children at the far end of the property and the overweight and aged guard (in another building) begins huffing and puffing his way to the sound of the shooting. Twelve people are already dead and the killer is reloading his revolver for the third time. Fatso comes through the door and, out of breath and trembling from excitement, he levels his semiautomatic handgun and empties it in the direction of the killer. Out of fifteen rounds, one of them manages to hit the thug and the murders are over. Instead of twenty dead, it’s only twelve. Not much improvement, and that’s a “best-case” scenario. Give the perp slightly better weapons and the foresight to watch for the guard and the improvement diminishes to near zero.

A effective measure would be to have many armed guards in every school, all of them combat ready. I am referring to the school staff themselves. Those who are willing can be trained, tested, and supervised. (Hoplophobes, read that sentence repeatedly until you understand it.) When the school is filled with capable handgunners, punks like Lanza cannot get far. Such scum might open fire at a school, a mall, or a bus station, but the school would be a place, like a gun store or a police station, where an evil doer is the least able to work his will.

Nobody’s telling the truth about the fiscal cliff — at least, nobody in the federal government is.

The true condition of Washington’s finances is beyond repair. Any number of accountant-types on YouTube can show you in simple terms how the debt and the deficit (those are not the same thing) are out of control. There’s not enough money anywhere to eliminate the deficit and pay the debt.

All this talk about reducing spending is equivalent to a clown juggling tennis balls: it entertains, but it makes no difference. Remember when Romney said he would eliminate Big Bird? That’s about like going into a forty-acre field, plucking a blade of grass, and crowing “Now we’re making progress; this field is finally getting mowed.” They’re spending $1 trillion a year more than they’re taking in and the entire PBS costs $445 million, Roughly 1/2,000th of the overspending. (PBS is much more than just Sesame Street.)

Obama wants to increase taxes on the rich. Why? If taxes on rich people went even so high as 100% it could only fund 1/3 of the annual overspending, and it would obviously increase unemployment. Taxing the rich won’t help the problem.

As anyone knows who has managed a business or a family budget, spending has to be reduced to whatever one can afford. The problem, of course, is that politicians get elected and re-elected by offering people stuff that someone else pays for. As a rule, only such thieves can be elected, so any who display economic sanity will eventually be defeated at the polls.

The immediate responsibility falls to the Supreme Court. Most of what Congress authorizes is unconstitutional and it’s the Court’s job to declare it so. That would prevent elected thieves from running the credit card bill up another trillion. Most of the entitlement spending would thereby be phased out.

The next step would be to streamline the tax code so that businesses have the incentive to advance and the ability to predict their futures. Eliminating the minimum wage laws would address unemployment decisively. Tax revenues would stabilize and the budget could be set accordingly.

None of this will transpire, of course, so we will certainly go off a fiscal cliff. Not in January, to be sure — that’s just political theater — but eventually America will collapse financially.

Have a nice day.

Two Middle East mothers are sitting in a cafe
chatting over a plate of tabouli and a pint of
goat’s milk.

The older of the two pulls a small folder out of
her handbag and starts flipping through photos.
They start reminiscing.

“This is my oldest son, Mujibar. He would have
been 24 years old now.”

“Yes, I remember him as a baby,” says the other
mother cheerfully.

“He’s a martyr now, though,” the mother confides.

“Oh, so sad, dear…” says the other.

“And this is my second son, Khalid. He would have
been 21.”

“Oh, I remember him,” says the other happily.
“He had such curly hair when he was born.”

“He’s a martyr too…” says the mother quietly.

“Oh, gracious me…” says the other.

“And this is my third son, my baby. My beautiful
Ahmed. He would have been 18,” she whispers.

“Yes,” says the friend enthusiastically, “I
remember when he first started school…”

“He’s a martyr also,” says the mother, with tears
in her eyes.

After a pause and a deep sigh, the second Muslim
mother looks wistfully at the photographs and,
searching for the right words, says . . .

“They blow up so fast, don’t they?”

“He hath spoken blasphemy!” (Mt. 26:65). Phony indignation is as old as sin itself, but the current deluge against Todd Akin’s statement bodes to set a new record.

Unfortunately, in conversational English, Akin said “legitimate rape.” Modern sociological thought has broadened the term “rape” to mean many things which is didn’t in previous generations. The law recognizes the concept of “statutory rape,” meaning “consensual” sexual relations with one who is incapable of giving consent according to the “statutes.” Generally, that means someone who is too young. It is misleading (though legally correct) to call such an offender a rapist. But modern thought, heavily informed by feminist philosophy, extends the term’s range to personal coercion within marriage, domestic disputes where a woman already has a consensual sexual relationship with the offender, and cases where she’s too drunk to consent or deny. (You’re familiar with the thought of Andrea Dworkin, right?) Todd Akin was speaking of a forced traumatic attack and, obliquely, was questioning the broader use of the term which is embraced by proaborts. As such, to speak of a “legitimate rape” was primarily a poor choice of words for a public audience. He should have said “forcible assault rape.”

Next, consider his claim that the raped body has ways of preventing pregnancy. Many commentators are pretending that Akin was expressing 18th-century misconceptions about sterility. They say this either through ignorance or malice. In fact, he was expressing views that were common among antiabortionists in the ’70s and ’80s, the early years of activism. Consider this paragraph from a medical doctor:

Finally, we must factor in one of the most important
reasons why a rape victim rarely gets pregnant, and
that is psychic trauma. Every woman is aware that
stress and emotional factors can alter her menstrual
cycle. To get pregnant and stay pregnant, a woman’s
body must produce a very sophisticated mix of hor-
mones. Hormone production is controlled by a part of
the brain which is easily influenced by emotions.
There’s no greater emotional trauma that can be ex-
perienced by a woman than an assault rape. This can
radically upset her possibility of ovulation, fertiliza-
tion, implantation and even nurturing of a pregnancy.

There’s nothing medieval in that. It comes from Abortion Questions and Answers by J. C. Willke (chapter 30 .pdf here or rev. ed. (1988) book at Amazon here). The book is written on a popular level, so the arcane and nearly impenetrable scientific documentation is missing. Is the paragraph strictly accurate according to today’s gynecological science? I certainly couldn’t say. But there’s nothing in it that is offensive to good sense, the common experience of mothers, and criminal statistics on rape pregnancies (which Willke did document).

Nobody would care about Akin’s imprecise statement were it not for the political benefits they hope to get. He hath spoken blasphemy! Yeah, right; I’m sure you’re just heartbroken.

Two facts remain: (1) pregnancy through assault rape does occur (albeit rarely), but it amounts to a microscopic sliver of the 1.5 million abortions annually performed in this country, hence, it is a straw man; and (2) the child is innocent and therefore not a fit subject for condemnation and execution.

Before Marguerite first called me for plumbing service in November of 2002, I had never heard of her. She identified herself as Marguerite Bergtholdt, which was her married name, and told me that she’d gotten my name from her daughter-in-law Veronica.

When I entered her home at 2813 Central Avenue, I just assumed that she was one more well-to-do lady like so many other customers I’ve served. She left me alone near the stairs while she finished tending to her bedridden husband, Harry. I began studying the trophies, plaques, posters, newspaper clippings, and photographs that covered the walls where I stood and slowly got an idea of who she was. When I acknowledged what I’d been looking at upon her return, she simply observed, “Well, I’ve lived a long life.”

I became a regular visitor to Marguerite’s home, mostly for plumbing purposes. I was always amazed by the force of her personality and the liveliness of her mind. I spent many hours, all told, sitting at her table and talking, but mostly listening.

Harry died in ’03. The day of the funeral (March 18th), the kitchen sink stopped up. I was over there that morning to straighten it out. They all left for the funeral and I left a bill and locked up on the way out. I managed to get loose from my jobs long enough to attend the services at St. Louis Catholic Church.

Marguerite was gracious enough to come to my church a couple of times, and it was my privilege to chauffeur her and her daughter Shirley.

Many obituaries and testimonials will pour forth in the next few days to retell some part of the story of this amazing woman. My contribution is meager: she was kind to me and it was an honor to serve her for these ten years.

(1) All electioneering ads shall be banned from the airwaves. All of them. From president to dog catcher.

(2) All such ads shall be banned from cable or Internet locations where they interrupt other viewing, such as pop-ups or ads you have to watch before another video begins.

(3) All visual ads shall be limited to 8-1/2″ x 11″ in size. No billboards or yard signs or newspaper ads may be larger than that.

If a voter wants to learn about the candidates, he can pick up literature (8-1/2″ x 11″) anywhere the campaign makes it available: checkout counters, libraries, etc. There will be plenty of web sites he can visit. His friends can give him a list of phone numbers he can call to have info mailed to him. The permissible avenues of communication are abundant.

This reform accomplishes three things. First, it makes election time less repulsive. Second, it lowers the stupidity level of the process, since the voters have to read and inquire in order to form opinions. Third, it guts the power of money, since all candidates are limited to simple sheets of paper and web sites. Maybe there’s a way to ban direct mail; I haven’t got that one figured out yet.

(For the music, see this YouTube video.)

I’ve abandoned orthodoxy with its old restrictions
I’ve figured to the hour that the Rapture is at hand
I’ve exchanged my sanity for bold date-setting fictions
I’m Camping, I’m Camping, I’m out in la-la land

Chorus:
Yes, I’m Harold Camping. I can read the future
At six o’clock this Saturday the Rapture has been planned
Pack your luggage, Pilgrim, I know the day and hour
I’m Camping, I’m Camping. I’m out in la-la land

Yes, I’ve reached the firm conclusion with pinpoint precision
But you can bet that Sunday I’ll have Plan B in my hand
I’ll continue just as always, heedless of derision
I’m Camping, I’m Camping. I’m out in la-la land

Chris Luedecke is a singer-songwriter of unique abilities, and he plays a mean clawhammer banjo.

Last week I was sick with a cold. Not just any cold, but one of those demonic things that creeps around your body and perpetrates random acts of mayhem. I stayed home from work Wednesday and Thursday, putting wood on the fire, sleeping in the recliner in front of the fire, and coughing through the day and night.

This may sound like I was miserable, but I actually had a lot of fun. I was able to make progress in my studies (I’m always studying a few things) and I got this blog remodeled so that it looks more like I want it to. I would go out to the driveway and split wood, then bring it in and collapse back into the recliner to recover from the exertion. Splitting firewood is always fun; it’s like playing golf, I suppose, except that you accomplish something.

I was sorry to get well. Oh, I wanted to get well eventually and I needed to get back to work and earn money, but I was having such a good time, I was mostly concentrating on the next fun thing that I could do. I sneaked out on Thursday and did one job, then returned to the chair until morning.

Reluctantly on Friday morning, I got dressed and began running calls I had scheduled while sick. I gained strength as the hours passed and left my last job at 7 PM, still energetic.

So now I’m working a regular schedule, but I’m still happy. I think that I was born with the ability to have a good attitude, yet anyone who knew me before I was about 23 years old could tell you that I displayed a bad attitude, mixed with melancholia, most of the time. I guess I grew up.

Coffee helps.

This news story from England illustrates the depth of the suicidal impulse that has gripped the West.

Fleeing from a felony (grand larceny to the tune of $11,000 dollars) and the police will not pursue because the thief might hurt himself: “The officers were asked not to pursue the suspects, as they were not wearing the correct safety equipment and were not wearing helmets.”