Mariana Musings (10-29-09)

Some whiny ass Christian recently got fired from Home Depot for wearing a pin with the phrase “One nation under God, indivisible” written on it. Since he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer he thinks he’s being attacked for his religion and his patriotism and he’s just ever so confused.

Newsflash buddy; you don’t get to play martyr until someone tries to feed you to a lion. Or sponsors a campaign to add a constitutional amendment banning Christian marriage. You broke the dresscode, and when your employers politely and patiently tried to compromise with you (they offered him the chance to wear a “United We Stand” pin), you threw it in their faces and refused. Then they justly canned your ass.

Not coercive or theocratic in the slightest.

You see, Home Depot is a business. They want to make money. When you abuse your status as an employee to advertise your political and religious beliefs you inevitably alienate vast swaths of their potential customer base. This is bad for business. You weren’t just being obnoxious, you were being a bad employee.

And quit pretending to “love [your] country.” You were showing utter contempt for the United States with that pin. You cannot love the United States and bandy about the pledge of allegiance at the same time; the values of these entities are polar opposites. Observe:

Pledge: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America…One nation under God”
USA: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”

There is no reconciliation between using the government to promote theistic religion and the idea that peoples’ free exercise is not being prohibited. You can’t love America and love the Pledge.

Mariana Musings (10-28-09)

The Democratic Party campaign for healthcare reform continues to sicken me; they’re going with the opt out option. I have a hard time believing what cowards Democrats are. Despite having complete control of congress they waffle and whine and can barely be motivated to pursue their own agenda.

The Caduceus

In the interests of compromising the pursuit of quality healthcare for all Americans they’re busy reaching “across the aisle” to people who actively oppose the concept. For politeness’s sake Democrats reach out to people who slander them with bullshit about them executing old people and the mentally handicapped. Even more infuriating, this “bipartisanship” isn’t just something they’re doing, it seems to be a sacred duty that everyone expects of them. Where was the bipartisanship when Bush attacked SCHIP?

In the end, a public plan with an opt out option is better than nothing. However, all the option will ensure is that in the deep south healthy red necks will get to decide whether or not sick poor people can have access to healthcare. And we know what that choice’ll be. It saddens me that in order to get passed a bill has to give the option for the south to opt out.

What’s the point of even being a country if whenever we collectively decide to do something as a nation you guys try to get out of it? Whether it’s gay rights, hate crime legislation, slavery, healthcare, or abortion rights; the deep south has a history of thinking it’s too good for the rest of the country. Just secede again already if America isn’t good enough. We know you want to.

Mariana Musings (10-27-09)

Because global warming, war, the economic crisis, our crumbling infrastructure, and nuclear proliferation are not serious enough issues to occupy our elected officials, Rhode Island lawmakers recently attended to the very important business of ensuring that sex does not cost money in their state. Up until lately Rhode Island was one of the few states whose citizens enjoyed the freedom to, if they so chose, do business with prostitutes.

Life? Liberty? Happiness? Fuck that shit, I'm moralizin'!

Critics of the move might point out that it goes against everything the USA allegedly stands for, namely the right to live freely in a way that makes them happy. Of course people who fret over things like that are chicken little alarmists; Rhode Islanders are perfectly free… to live by the standards set by the meddlesome moralizers they apparently elected.

Besides, only evil degenerates would ever have sex with prostitutes. I know this because a man in a suit told me he read about it in an anthology of the edited and translated writings of prescientific desert barbarians which was dictated to them by an invisible man who lives in the sky! And you don’t want to make the invisible man who lives in the sky angry, do you?

Mariana Musings (10-26-09)

Dick Cheney recently said words, so you know it was a bucketful of stupid. CNN described his sentiments as “Obama has failed to give troops on the ground a clear mission or defined goals.” Maybe it’s just me, but I though that’s the shit you should have done before you started the war, numbnuts!

The aptly named Dick Cheney

Then he goes on to say this, and it’s not even a paraphrase, these are his actual words: “Make no mistake, signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries.” What’s wrong with you, Obama?! Pelting our allies with your psychokinetic brainwaves of indecision!

OK, so maybe signals of indecision aren’t propagated by the president’s psychic powers. Maybe instead “signals of indecision” are propagated by multinational media conglomerates that just received word from one Dick Cheney that the president is “dithering” and “afraid to make a decision”?

Not that it matters how the fictional signals are propagated; Cheney’s thesis is bullshit. The president giving the appearance of indecision doesn’t hurt anyone, or make the terrorists any more motivated to kill us (they’re already willing to strap bombs to themselves, remember?). Besides, if Dick hates the terrorists so bad, then why does he expend so much energy worrying over how they feel about anything?

Mariana Musings (10-25-09)

I’m afraid Alan Grayson may have just jumped the shark, at least for me, with his recent comments about Dick Cheney being a vampire. Not that I have anything but pure contempt and hatred for Cheney, but this is ridiculous.

Grayson can wield harsh rhetoric, but will he do so wisely?

Most liberals, myself included, loved Grayson for calling out the Republicans for their sociopathic lack of concern for the sick. However, I think Grayson now believes that support for the former instance of vitriol is support for anything he says so long as it’s done in a scandalously aggressive fashion.

No. We supported the healthcare statements for being true and meaningful. Grayson, cracking jokes about Cheney having fangs and turning into a bat cheapens your former boldness. Please keep the heat turned up, but don’t let your virtue degrade into a gimmick!

Breaking Waves (Week 43, 2009)

Soulstorm Legacy (console RPG Maker) has been completely restructured. You may have noticed that the page is a lot shorter now.

Chirostenotes. Photo by Keith Schengili-Roberts

That’s because I’ve split it into multiple pages. It had gotten too unmanageable with all of the game’s data on one page like that, especially after I finally finished adding the magic data.

Now there are two daughter articles, System Data and Scenario Data. The System Data page itself had to be split into a couple of articles, a Magic page and an Item page.

Work on Paleobiota of the Hell Creek Formation resumed this week, with the ornithischian section receiving the most attention. I’ve also tidied up the

Triceratops. Photo by Nielseno

pterosaur and flora sections. Sadly, the theropod sections were not nearly as complete as I thought they were; I thought they were complete. I had only done one state’s worth of work on the oviraptorosaurs’ section, but I think they’re covered. The ornithomimmosaur section was also weak.

The tyrannosaurs were really the only section that was truly finished among the theropods. I’ve finished them all now, though, as far as I can tell. I’m moving on from this project generally. Someone with more access to papers than myself can fill in the details.

I created the article Fruitadens for the spectacular new genus, but left it as a stub as time constraints prevented me from reading the paper. Dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation has been updated

Camptosaurus skull. Photo by Anky-man.

to include information relevant to the new genus announced earlier this week.

I’ve given some attention to the Bissekty Formation. I’ve mainly corrected formatting errors and moved some tables from the old design to the new one. I also added some taxa that were listed in The Dinosauria but not in the article itself. I intend to finish up my contributions to the article next week.

To make my life, and the lives of other WP:PALEO members easiers, I’ve created the Paleobiota Help Template. It’s an article talk page template for articles containing paleobiota tables and contains snippets of wikicode that can be cut and pasted into articles. So far it’s been a big help for me. The amount of time saved by having bits of code commonly used in those articles is quite impressive. The current version is only a prototype and I need to add more features, but I think it will be a significant benefit to the project.

Mariana Musings (10-22-09)

A Muslim American man recently ran down his own daughter in a car because she was “too Westernized” and was not living in accordance with traditional Iraqi values. Or, to put it another way, an extremely conservative man attempted to murder his own daughter for being too liberal. She survived, but her injuries are life threatening.

Without the slightest hint of irony, Christian American right wingers are already frothing at the mouth over the evils of Islam, and “cleverly” using the phrase “religion of peace” in a sarcastic fashion. They blame Islam for driving a man to attempt the murder his own child. But isn’t child killing at the heart of both Christianity and Judaism as well?

Noor Faleh Almaleki

The values of fundamentalist muslims and conservative Christians are the same, especially in regards to women. They both value modesty, submissiveness, religiosity, sexual abstinence, and child-rearing. The only difference is quantitative; American conservatives are slightly more liberal about those identical issues.

Where muslims have burqas, conservatives have these. Where muslims hold women as property, conservatives hold them as second class citizens. Where muslims practice honor killings for fornicators, conservatives merely use promiscuity as an excuse to defend rapists.

Whenever I see conservative Christians freaking out over the “evils” of Islam I can’t help but laugh. They simultaneously struggle to advance conservatism in American while attacking other cultures for having particularly advanced strains of conservatism. And you know all those honor killings, child genital mutilations, and genocide in the Koran? That’s in the Bible, too.

Sonar Echoes (10-22-09)

James Hrynyshyn
On Tuesday, Limbaugh’s radio show included this line: “Mr. Revkin, why don’t you just go kill yourself and help the planet by dying?”

The insanity and evil of Rush Limbaugh is a feature, not a bug. It’s what appeals to his core audience. Limbaugh is dispensable. Unless a major cultural shift occurs that fosters different values in the people that compose his listeners, there will always be a willing demagogue to take his place with the same shtick. The problem is our decadent, degenerate culture.

PDF Request for Wang et al. (2006)

If anyone has a PDF of

Wang, Y., Ken, S., Zhang, W. and Zheng, S. (2006). “Biodiversity and palaeoclimate of the Middle Jurassic floras from the Tiaojishan Formation in western Liaoning, China.” Progress in Natural Science, 16(1): 222 — 230. DOI: 10.1080/10020070612330087

the Tiaojishan Formation article would be greatly benefitted by you sending a copy to saint_abyssal[-at-]yahoo.com! Please leave a comment on this post if you send it as I do not check my email regularly. Thanks in advance!

PDF Request for Estes and Berberian (1970)

If anyone has a PDF of

Estes, R., and P. Berberian. 1970. Paleoecology of a late Cretaceous vertebrate community from Montana. Breviora volume 343, 35 pages.

the Paleobiota of the Hell Creek Formation article would be greatly benefitted by you sending a copy to saint_abyssal[-at-]yahoo.com! Please leave a comment on this post if you send it as I do not check my email regularly. Thanks in advance!

Weird Search Engine Traffic (10-19-09)

Presumably the traffic was triggered by this post.

“Breaking Waves” changes?

If you’ve been here lately, you’ve gotten to know my “Breaking Waves” column with greater intimacy than you probably wanted. I’m planning some changes to the column that I hope will make things better for both of us. The current plan is to cease the daily posts and move to a weekly format. There’s a couple of reasons for that:

I got burnt out trying to document every thing I did at Wikipedia and elsewhere on a daily basis.

I was often editing the same pages multiple days in a row, which resulted in multiple nearly identical posts which were probably as much a chore to read as they were to write.

The daily lists of links were drowning out more meaningful content on the blog.

I didn’t have time to write good stuff due to constantly updating you guys on my Wiki activities, as if you gave a shit.

The new format will hopefully be more interesting to read, as I’m going to put more time into discussing what I did, in addition to just listing it. Since there will be fewer posts I can afford to put images in them without them making the blog’s load times ungodly.

Bleh

Haven’t felt like blogging lately, as may be apparent by my complete lack of posting. Oh well.

Sonar Echoes (10-03-09)

8rll6 at Youtube
how dare beck blah blah cry cry… i watched this episode… first off let me just say there is no such thing as an atheist… maybe they don’t believe in the common perception of what god is, but they believe that there is a higher power of some sort at work if they are true with themselves. To me beck was basically saying that morals are lacking a bit in America. Yes he went a bit religious with it, but that is free speech so don’t cry about it.

I don’t believe in God, or souls or spirits or “higher powers.” You’re a narcissist for presuming to know what others believe. Go fuck yourself.