Author: Kevan

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.