Here’s my new plan: From now on, when an asshole in my neighborhood decides to ignore a direct request by me to extinguish the fire burning on his property, in addition to contacting the appropriate authorities, I will be posting pictures online of said asshole while in the process of disobeying the law, along with his address.

This particular shining example of living fecal matter appears to reside at 639 Greenwood Cir, Mount Olive, AL.

You that are eager, you that are proud, and you that are ready to write the future in your names, know this:

Whatever comforts to which you cling, of whatever you make your foundation, wherever the bricks you lay, you cannot trust their security.  Nothing can be trusted with certainty.  With your newest faculties seek out your safest footholds, and realize your position.  If we are to free ourselves of the bindings of our evolutionary heritage, we must recognize and address the manifestations of ancient humanity’s pre-scientific patchwork mythologies.

We cannot guide human progress according to the limitations and guidelines  of ancient peoples who did not have a fully realized notion of even the simplest aspects of biology or mechanics.  We are beyond the stopgaps necessitated by a lack of understanding.  Take for a harbinger the clear and consistent pattern of religious persistents to retreat into the nearest region of science that has not yet been fully explored.  When cornered from there, they will simply jump up another rung, until one day we finally obtain every datum on the nature of the universe.  Trust that then, we will succeed them, if never earlier.

Some time now has passed since I lost all faith in God, but it was for the first time tonight that I could say the same of us.  If there is a morality to evolution, it is that if we refuse to evolve, we will die.  Humanity relies on its own progress.  If we don’t start recognizing that there is a more complete, fascinating, and beautiful universe to be explored, if we ignore what we can see with our amazing brains, all standing on the precipice of organic evolution at this place in time, and do so based on a stubborn adherence to archaic tales from lore, we stand to deny ourselves the right to advance in universal history.  The universe and all of space-time are unquestionably the grandest field that we can perceive as a member of reality, and therefor the most significant and necessary stage for humanity to contribute.  We should recoil and nest in our own primitive history to the doom of our significance not as the species of humans, but as representatives of all of life on Earth.

Me, I believe in Earth, faith be damned, and I believe in humanity as her champions, her mouthpiece, her apostle.  What do you believe in?

Very short.  I just came home, poured myself a drink, and hammered this thing out.  It’s got, like, symbolism, man.

Read The Magic Pill.

I just had a lengthy chat with Charter support about the fact that I upgraded to their Internet Plus 30Mbps package two months ago and never saw a speed increase.  They tried to put me through to tech support, but I told them not to bother, just switch me back to the lower plan.  I’ve been through that song and dance, and the only tangible effect is a reduction in my personal time balance at work for the multiple days I have to take off work, and a reduction in the amount of Febreze left in the bottle after the chain-smoking technicians soil my home with their body odor and lingering smoke-stink.

There was some back and forth, and two steps of elevation to get me refunded for the two month’s of Plus I paid for but never benefitted from from, but I did get that refund.  The interesting thing, however, is that they went ahead and kicked me down to the lower “Express” package immediately.  The plan I’d been paying for was supposed to give me 30Mbps, and the Express package is supposed to be 15Mbps.  When I upgraded from Express, I was routinely seeing 18-20Mbps, so I had high hopes for the Plus package, thinking I might get closer to 35Mbps.  Well, after the upgrade, I actually started consistently getting just 15Mbps.  I thought that the reduction was unrelated, though obviously very disappointing.  Now I’m not so sure.

See, after my chat today, when they dropped me back down to Express, my speed went back up to 20Mbps.  Right away this happened.  So, the only conclusion I can draw from this is that somehow, for some reason, upgrading my speed actually was the reason my speed decreased.  Maybe, in a perfect world, I could talk to some technician there who could actually determine why this was the case, but this world is far from perfect.  My best bet will be to see if my friend Tommy (former cable tech) has ever had experience with this same phenomenon, if my curiosity is ever to be sated.

For now, though, I’ve decided that I’d rather save the $10 monthly than have higher speed, especially since getting the higher speed would require me to have those techs at my house again, at least once (but probably more).  15Mbps is pretty decent, and the difference in upload speed between the two plans is tiny, so I won’t sweat that, either.