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My faith in the future of humanity has taken another blow. Matt read this story earlier today, and sent it on to me. For those of you who don't click through on links, I'll quote you the first two sentences of the story.

JACKSON, Tenn. - McKenzie, Tenn., police have charged two Carroll County parents with raping their child.

The parents, ages 19 and 18, are charged with raping their 1-day-old girl before she was taken home from McKenzie Regional Hospital about six weeks ago, said McKenzie Police Lt. Tim Nanney.

Done? Ok. I try to keep this somewhat clean since my family reads this, but hearing about stuff likes this really chaps my ass. What kind of fucking person rapes a ONE DAY OLD CHILD? I'm revolted by the thought of it. Rape is a horrible action by itself. Raping a child, who is most likely defenseless towards the physical advances of a much larger adult, is worse by far. But raping a ONE DAY OLD CHILD, in the hospital in which they were just born? I cannot even fathom the kind of person that would do such an unspeakable and revolting act.

It is mentioned in the article that the parents were implicated because the police ruled out all of the hospital staff, leaving only the parents as suspects. I suppose it's my duty as an American to abide by our belief that people are innocent until proven guilty. It is very true that the parents might be completely innocent, and that someone else was to blame for this atrocity. It would only be slightly less hideous if it wasn't the parents that committed the act, though. Someone raped that child, and whoever it was should face the unbridled wrath of the legal system. To quote my conversation with Matt:

i think it was among the best cases to lobby for capital punishment i've heard in a long time

I agree with Matt. Any person that is capable of doing such an unspeakable act should be immediately removed from the gene pool.

The sad thing is, I almost pegged the location of the act. When Matt told me about the story, I said "this had to take place in Kentucky." He said something along the lines of "close, Tennessee." The sad thing is, it's not just the state that it happened in that makes this concept unique to me. My knowledge of the world and its people isn't vast, and I'll be the first one to admit that. I am probably speaking out of naivety, but I can't imagine anything like this happening anywhere outside of America. So, now I say thank you. Thank you to the person(s) in Tennesse who raped that child, you've made me lose more respect for the country I live in. I hope you're happy.

You've also made me lose respect for my species. I've never heard of any other creature on Earth that would violate its offspring in such a way. Sure, there are animals that eat their young, but as far as I know, that only occurs during times of extreme need, when it's not likely that the offspring will survive anyway. While seeming completely heartless, it is a completely logical act to eat what's available in a time of need. Animals do what is needed to survive, and what will ensure that the bloodline lives on. Nothing is served by the raping of a day old child. Nothing.

People of Tennessee, if you're listening, please do the right thing and make sure the people responsibile for this atrocity are placed somewhere that ensures that they will never be able to disrupt the sanctity of an innocent life again. Put them in prison, throw them in a well, toss them off a cliff, or put them on a rocket bound for the sun. I don't care. The person(s) responsible shouldn't be allowed to see the light of day ever again.

Upon first glance, that phrase would bring up happy memories from my teenage years. Scorched Earth was a game that I played on my computer for countless hours against human and computer foes alike in a 256-color, tank based, battle royale. But that's not what I'm talking about. Others might envision the predictions of mutually assured destruction brought about by the Cold War and its stockpiling of vast amounts of nuclear weapons, poised to anihillate the majority of the Earth's population at the orders of two men, seperated not only by distance, but also social and economic policies. But that's not what I'm talking about either. I'm talking about a hot-button topic for our times - Global Warming.

For as long as I remember hearing about this topic, I remember thinking that people were making a bigger deal of this phenomenon than it merited. After all, the Earth has been around for around four billion years, and humans have been smart and meddlesome creatures for what, the past hundred, maybe hundred and fifty years? What could we possibly know about how the Earth works? How arrogant are we to think that we could possibly have an influence on such a massive system that existed long before we came about, and will likely exist long after we're gone? As recently as this past weekend I had this discussion with my dad and uncle. "Sure we've progressed, but we're not that smart." That was our general concensus. I've never dismissed the notions of Global Warming completely, but I have never really took them as seriously as some of the "save the planet" types wanted me to.

That viewpont has been changing recently, along with some other viewpoints of mine. Call it an awakening, call it paying more attention to things I didn't pay attention to in the past, call it what you like. It's the topic of another discussion really. Anyway, the more I've been reading and thinking about the subject, the more I think it merits attention - if for no other reason than to be cautious. Sure, my past thinking that we've got nothing to worry about because we're nothing of consequence to the Earth could be true, but what if it's not? There are a lot of very intelligent people across the globe that believe this is something we need to act upon immediately, if not sooner. These people aren't just folks that stayed at a Holiday Inn Express the night before. They know their shit, through and through. They've studied, researched, modelled, and experimented. And they're all saying the same thing. If we don't change our ways, we're fucked. And not like, "eh, we might have to get used to sweating a little more." They're talking severe climate change in in the next 100 years. Climate change that's drastic enough to start conjuring visions of Venus in our backyards.

Doomsday prophecies are normally something I dismiss with a quickness, but I can't help but buy into this one, at least partially. I've come across a few things in the past couple weeks that make me believe more and more that unless we pull a 180 right now, we're done for. I'll name two here. First was a two paragraph blurb I read in this past month's issue of Discover, entitled "Plants grab control of the global greenhouse." Judging by the article title I thought that someone found some mechanism, either natural or artificial, to use plants to help control the greenhouse effect. Not so much. The gist of the article is that living plants (not just dead and decaying plants) are a significant source of methane emissions, and that these emissions *increase* with temperature. Nobody observed this before, which reminds me of my belief that mankind is far too arrogant about it's knowledge, but I digress. Do the math. Plants are good because they eat up carbon dioxide while releasing oxygen. Carbon dioxide is a potent greenhouse gas. This is a good thing right? But, on the other hand, we now know that they also release methane, which is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So, plants emit methane, which spurs global warming. This results in plants releasing more methane. Sounds like a positive feedback loop to me. Nature probably has mechanisms to keep these processes in check, but it seems that mankind has thrown a wrench in that machinery by throwing the process all out of balance.

The second thing was a show I just watched a few hours ago. One of the few shows I deem worthy of watching is Nova, on PBS. I have my MythTV box record every instance of it that it comes across. Their most recent episode was entitled "Dimming the Sun." It covered a lot of material, so I'll attempt to summarize here in a few sentences. Essentially, it is the belief of many climate scientists that while we've been fouling up the atmosphere by adding carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the air through our various energy-producing means, we've actually been providing a protective blanket at the same time. Their findings suggest that the ash, soot, and other filth that our burning of fossil fuels has deposited in the air has actually helped us calm down the greenhouse effect. This happens by altering the nature of the clouds that form downwind of polluted areas. "Normal" clouds tend to form when water condenses around larger natural airborne particles such as pollen. The abnormal clouds they described are formed by condensation around the ash and soot particles mentioned earlier. These particles are much smaller, and lead to many more smaller water droplets than would occur in a "normal" cloud. As a result, the clouds are more reflective, which makes them more efficient at blocking sunlight. As a whole, the Earth's surface is seeing between 5 and 15% less solar radiation than it was 30 years ago, depending on where you're measuring. Other man-made phenomena, such as airplane condensation trails, contribute to this effect. The probem with this scenario is that the developed world has become pretty good in controlling its emissions of particulate matter, but not nearly as good in controlling greenhouse gas emissions. This is resulting in the removal of our protective shield against global warming, while increasing the things that cause global warming in the first place. Not good. The projected effects vary depending on the models used, but some models predict that the Earth could warm by as much as 20 degrees Fahrenheit by the turn of the century, with drought and famine becoming widespread. Totally not good.

So, call me crazy, or blame the five or so beers I've consumed this evening, but this really strikes me as something that needs to be taken seriously. I can't say that I'm well-informend on the topic, but this might be my motivation to start learning more. But from what I do know, and what I highlighed above, this isn't some crackpot theory. This is based upon undisputed observations over the past 30 years, if not more. If the scientists are right in their predictions, something needs to be done, and soon. If they're wrong, they're wrong, and we go on as usual. But if they're right, our planet might not be hospitible for human life in a relatively short period of time. Is this really something we want to roll the dice on?

I've been putting off writing this post for a while now, but if I put it off any longer, I'll probably lose the inspiration to write it altogether.

For those that haven't heard, five people were murdered during a Damageplan concert in Columbus, Ohio on the evening of December 8, 2004. One of the slain was the band's guitarist, 'Dimebag' Darrell Abbott. He was also the guitarist and a founding member of Pantera. He was the first person targeted by the gunman, who was gunned down by a police officer responding to the situation moments later.

There are a few things that really bother me about this whole ordeal. First and foremost, Dimebag is dead. He is easily one of my favorite guitarists and one of the biggest inspirations for me in music. The man had an incredible gift for writing and playing, one of those gifts that few people possess and even fewer are able to take advantage of. In my opinion his greatest strength was his rhythm playing, and, more to the point, the riffs he brought to the table. I'm hard pressed to think of one other guitarist in metal that wrote as many badass riffs as he did. It's like he had a magic bag of guitar tricks that he would go into when writing songs and just pull them out, with no effort at all. I still say to this day that the main riff in "Regular People" is the coolest riff I've ever heard. He was also an incredibly gifted lead player, as evidenced in songs such as "Hollow" or "Floods". The man had the gift of music, and that gift has been silenced.

Secondly, the circumstances surrounding his death really bother me. I was pretty shocked when I first heard about it, but as more details came out, it bothered me more and more. From the reports I have read, the murderer was an obsessive Pantera fan who believed that Pantera stole the lyrics to songs he had written, and also blamed Dimebag for Pantera's breakup. He apparently went to the show to kill all of the members Dimebag's new band, Damageplan, which included Dimebag's brother/Pantera drummer Vinnie Paul. Nobody can really say what was going on in the killer's mind, but I think it's pretty safe to say he wasn't all there. Regardless of whether he was sane or not, the fact that someone is that obsessed with a band is quite disturbing. Granted, I'm a large fan of music, and a rather rabid fan of my favorite bands, but killing a band member over the breakup of a band is just plain pointless, and totally stupid. If he was so distressed about Pantera's breakup, what does killing their guitarist and drummer accomplish? The only thing it does ensure is that there will be no reunion for that band. So in the end, the outcome is nothing but a senseless killing.

The third thing that really bothered me came out a few days after the killings, in response to the murders and the metal community's outpouring of grief over the issue. I stumbled across a post in one of the RSS feeds I peruse for my daily news. It brought the fury out of the person that had posted the link, and it did the same for myself and all of the people I sent it along to. The link in question is an editorial piece written up by a 'gentleman' named William Grim for the website iconoclast.ca. When I say 'gentleman', I of course mean an arrogant elitist prick whose head is so far up his own ass that it's in danger of coming out of his mouth, creating some sort of right wing conservative chicken/egg paradox. The piece was an ignorant and horribly judgmental depiction of Dimebag and the metal community as a whole. The man is flat out wrong on so many levels that I don't even know where to start. I guess I'll just pick them off one at a time.

It was highly amusing, and also terribly sad, to watch on television fans conducting a "vigil"for the slain Mr. Abbott outside of the Alrosa Villa.

The vigil was "highly amusing"? Watching people mourn the loss of an innocent man murdered in cold blood is amusing? Right. I'll be sure to chuckle when our good friend Mr. Grim expires.

But one can see why the heavy metal fans so closely identified with Mr. Abbott. He was an ignorant, barbaric, untalented possessor of a guitar and large amplifier system. Freakish in appearance, more simian than human, he was the performer of a type of "entertainment" that can be likened only to a gorilla on PCP. Lacking subtlety, wit, style, emotional range and anything approaching even the smallest iota of intellectual or musical interest, Mr. Abbott was part of a generation that has confused sputum with art and involuntary reflex actions with emotion.

Stunningly judgmental statements here. I think it's a pretty safe bet that Mr. Grim had never met Dimebag, but he seems perfectly comfortable passing sweeping judgments nonetheless. I'm particularly 'fond' of the part where he refers to Dimebag as untalented. It's a quite common belief that in order to accurately judge someone else's prowess in a particular skill or craft, you must also possess similar skills. While I can't speak to Mr. Grim's musical knowledge, many people have classified Dimebag as one of the most influential guitarists of the past 10 years. Gorillas on PCP do not garner such respect from people who know what they're talking about.

Part of the hard work of civilization is teaching young to be able to distinguish between the good and the bad in all aspects of life. If we teach our young children to obey the 10 Commandments and to obey the laws of the land, but don't teach them to realize that Johann Sebastian Bach is superior to Dimebag Abbott, we have failed as parents and mentors. If a person has gone through 12 or 13 years of education and has not developed an appreciation for the greatest artistic achievements of mankind, that education has been an utter failure.

I partially agree with the first part of this statement, but we quickly diverge after that. There are things that things that can be considered good and some things that can be considered bad, but art and music are not in this category. These things are completely subjective, and mean different things to different people. There is no magic equation or all-inclusive law that defines what is good or bad in the artistic and musical worlds. Musical and artistic tastes are as varied as the people on the planet, so we should instead focus on exposing our children to many forms of art and music and let them make their own conclusions as to what is "good" and what is "bad." Mr. Grim makes many statements that seem to implicate that classical music of the renaissance is innately superior to heavy metal and the other forms of music of our day. Being a self-proclaimed elitist, I can only assume that he his trying to justify his musical tastes by trying to elevate them in the same fashion by which he attempts to elevate himself - ignorant judgments. No piece of music will elicit identical reactions in two people, so how can one piece of music be rationally considered better?

Ok, that's enough. There's no need for me to continue this, I'm just making myself mad. Rest in peace Darrell. We'll keep shredding.

It'll make hamburger out of your foot! No, it's not some knife or something you'd see on a late night infomercial - it was Joe's shower door. After I got out of my shower this morning, Joe's girlfriend called into my room asking if I had a tweezers, and I was like "No, but I've got a needle nose pliers..." And Joe was like "yah that might do it". I was dropping some serious WTFs by this time, so I put some clothes on real quick to see what the deal was. Joe and Shauna were in Joe's room, and Joe was kinda hunched over, looking at his foot. I didn't see it at first because Shauna was looking at it too, but once I got around her, I noticed the bloody towel and the puncture wound in his toe. It caught me pretty off guard, since I was still mostly asleep. Apparently when Joe was getting into the shower, the large heavy glass shower door fell in while he was trying to close it, and shattered all over the inside of the bathtub in his bathroom, puncturing his toe in the process. It left a pretty hefty mess, and left him with a piece of glass lodged in his toe. Once we got everything straight, Shauna took Joe up to the hospital to get his toe fixed. They gave him a tetanus shot and numbed his toe all up to remove the glass, which had apparently lodged itself into one of the tendons in his big toe. He's doing all right, but he's gotta wear this funky shoe thing and keep his big toe taped together with the toe next to it to make sure that the tendon can heal. How lame is that??

What I'm wondering is why the hell there is a big fucking piece of GLASS in an apparatus like that these days anyway? That's what SAFETY GLASS and/or PLASTIC is for. Safety glass is designed to not shatter like normal glass, and if it does fragment, it doesn't leave nearly as many jagged edges. And Plastic, well, it hardly breaks at all. Had Joe been in a different position or had the glass fallen differently, it could have severed toes, or in Joe's worst nightmares, body parts more critical to the male physique. The aparment company is just lucky that Joe didn't get hurt worse.

Probably the only funny part about the incident was when Shauna called to report the accident, and talked to a lady from the apartent company...

Lady: "His last name is 'Glass'?"
Shauna: "Yes, Glass, as in, there's glass in my boyfriend's foot and I have to take him to the doctor"

I've got a couple pictures up in the random photo gallery, including the one on the right. Yes, that is blood, and a whole lot of glass. Joe also has a couple pictures up here.

Other than that, today was ok. I didn't get dick for sleep last night, thanks to a nap yesterday and a really weird dream, where, if I remember right, a ghost-like instant messenger window with an unknown writing in it was chasing me around this water filled room. It never hurt me, but I could never escape. Joe thinks it's a sign that I spend too much time in front of a computer, and I'm going to have to agree with him there. Perhaps ghostly instant messenger windows will be the motivation for me to get off my ass and get in shape. Or maybe I'll just live up to my online namesake and find a proton pack and waste its ass.

Yah, like 49,999,999 other people yesterday, I lost power due to the massive outage, but unlike approximately 49,000,000 of those people, I wasn't complaining. While I was listening to the radio last night in the darkness with my family, I must have heard at least 20 different reporters say (not in these terms, but with this meaning) "OMG HOW CAN SOMETHING LIKE THIS HAPPEN THIS IS A TRAVESTY WHO IS TO BLAME?!?!?" I've got a few things to say to these people.

1. STFU. You were asking questions about a MAJOR outage not more than a couple hours after it happened. Rooting out the cause with certainty will probably take weeks. Calm down.

2. Be patient. Instead of bitching and asking stupid questions that nobody can answer at this time, let the people in charge of the power grid do their jobs and get stuff back up and running. Then let them figure out what went wrong, so they can correct the problem and keep this from happening again. Then read their reports, so you don't have to ask stupid questions.

3. Consider yourself lucky that this doesn't happen more often. Consider the logistics of keeping power flowing for over 250 million people. It's quite astounding. Not only are there hundreds of thousands of miles of cables and wires, the electricity on those lines has to be in perfect phase (yes, those lovely sine waves) or something like what we had yesterday happens. That's a lot of precision over a huge area. Mistakes are bound to happen.

4. Chances are good that its your fault. A vast majority of the people in our society are huge power consumers - I'm stepping off the pedestal for this one, I'm as much to blame as anyone, but alas I'm not complaining about the outage. Everyone nowadays needs a TV in every room, constant Air Conditioning, Computers, audio/video equipment, and 1.5 kilowatt hairdryers, but nobody wants to see more power plants. People hate coal plants because they pollute the air. Nobody wants nuclear plants because they make toxic waste. Hydroelectric power is nice and non-polluting, but it screws up ecosystems. Geothermal power works well in places like Iceland, but since tectonic/volcanic activity here is rather tame compared to there, it's not an option. So unless you don't want power, suck it up. Something has to give, and currently, those are the only viable alternatives. Some will say wind and solar power, but they cost too much right now and don't yield enough juice. Sorry. People want things cheap, and they want it on, and they want it to be shiny and happy with no damage to anything. Unfortunately these three principles don't mesh together perfectly. Something has to give.

Yah, this might be the crappiest work week ever. On Monday and Tuesday our server host company decided it would be a good idea to move all of our servers to different racks and power supply units. Yes, All of them. more than 100 servers. So yah, the phones were going crazy then, and we answered them. People were pissed and for good reason. We were pissed too. Who in their right mind performs maintenance in the middle of the day, on a weekday?? We pay for their stupidity. Now we get a call today stating that a bunch of our servers will be down for a while because the new power supply system that they're on has a couple wires that are "glowing red" and that they need to disconnect some stuff to resolve the problem. Meanwhile in our secret underground bunker, the phones are ringing off the hook and we're not even answering them because we have nothing that we can really say. Thanks a lot [insert lame service provider company name here]! Thanks a million.

In addition to all the work BS, I had to buy a new tire for my car last night because the old one decided that it liked being flat. $105 for a tire I'll probably be driving on for less than two months. Great.

[Editors Note: The tire got about 3 weeks worth of use, as it took most of the impact when I wrecked the IROC...]

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