Obese Criminal Now Only Fat - Wants Obesity, Freedom Back

Are you fucking kidding me?

So this giant fat fuck named Broderick Lloyd Laswell (what would you like to wager he has some catchy "street" nickname like "McNugget" or the ever-imaginative handle for a fat man, "Tiny"?) and another chicken-shit piece of crap beat a guy to death and stab him, then set his house on fire. Of course he gets caught and goes to jail, because...well, because he weighed 413 pounds. This guy couldn't run from the police; he probably gets winded just thinking about lifting his double baconater to his pudgy face.

So Laswell is in prison and over the last eight months he's lost about a hundred pounds. You'd think he'd be happy and that now he'd think of sprinting away from the five-o, hurdling fences and what-not. You would, however, be very very wrong because he's suing the county, accusing them of starving him. Yeah, you read that correctly. Check out this pathetic excuse:

On several occasions I have started to do some exercising and my vision went blurry and I felt like I was going to pass out...About an hour after each meal my stomach starts to hurt and growl. I feel hungry again.

Ok, a little clarification is necessary here. When, in the quote above, Laswell says he "...started to do some exercising...", what he was actually doing was trying to get out of bed. He also classifies taking a shit, brushing his hair, shuffling from the bed to the toilet, and standing motionless while thinking about barbeque as "exercise". Also, when after an hour without eating his "stomach starts to hurt and growl", it should be mentioned that under his "normal" schedule when on the street, he would routinely eat stray dogs, sheep, cows, and perhaps the occasional hobo. All barbequed on a spit and flavored with delicious cajun spices.

Ok, here's the last bit that pertains to his...err, "case":

If we are in a small pod all day (and) do next to nothing for physical exercise, we should not lose weight...The only reason we lost weight in here is because we are literally being starved to death.

It should be obvious now that I have precious little sympathy for this gigantic fat fuck. Three-hundred twenty pounds is still morbidly obese and for him to complain that his treatment - getting 2000-3000 calories/day - is "literally being starved to death", I think he should get a new punishment.

He should be airdropped into the middle of Sudan.

Just a parachute, his VonDutch sweatpants, jail sandals and a metal tablespoon is all he gets. Oh, and a world map to help him find his way home (Ahhhhahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!! A fat street criminal from the U.S. finding his way home from a country he couldn't point out on a map if I offered him 20 million dollars! That's hysterical!). That's the new punishment - then that lardy doucheface will truly find out the definition of "literally starving".

Fucking ass.

Skeptic's Circle #85

The new Skeptic's Circle is up at Andrea's Buzzing About...although it may be more accurate to say the Circle is down. It's under some rocks and you should lift the heavy igneous up and check it out.

Denyse O'Leary - Championing Teh Stupid

I think I'd like to play hide-and-seek with Denyse O'Leary. See, I'd be sure to win because she'd hide under a blanket on the floor, making a huge bump, and in her mind she would be absolutely invisible. I believe that she'd seriously believe that was a fantastic plan and ruse. My point is proved by the situation below.

Over at her blog she posts a little whine about sciencebloggers being mean to Chris Mooney because he said that Expelled is a "success". Well, if we jaunt over to Chris' blog and check that post, we do see that someone was a bit rude to him, but overall the criticisms were polite and to the point. Much like this one:

Why is it that when you put your foot in your mouth and people call you on it you selectively quote the worst of the critiques and then quickly brush them aside with all of the others? Cherry picking and poisoning the well are denialist tactics. You should be above that.

Why don't you take on the moderate criticisms leveled by PZ, Orac and Kevin in the previous post? Why did you post it as "just the facts" and ignore all contradictory facts?

Or, you know, this one:

I was expecting you to explain why you framed Expelled's takings as a success rather than a failure (by the producers own standards!), or to just admit that you'd made a mistake (we all make them from time-to-time). I certainly wasn't expecting you to cry "I'm right, you're wrong, and you're being meeeeaaan".

And I can't believe you mentioned the troll who called you a creationist! Trolls are to be ignored, not to add weight to your tales of persecution. WE ignored him.

Look what you've done. You've ignored all of your constructive commenters, and focused on a troll and a post by Greg (who, lets face it, hasn't liked you for a long time, has he?). What impression do you think people will get from that?

Hm, that sounds like reasonable criticism to me. Could it be that O'Leary is distorting the facts to achieve her own goals? Could it be that she has an ulterior motive for her writing that shows through in her disturbingly poor attempt to obfuscate what actually occurred?

Nah, I just think she's a dumbass.

Ben Stein Gets, As The Kids Say, Pwned

Kill a Kid for a Job

Ok, so it's been a while. Not too much has happened that was either infuriating or up my interest alley recently (aside from the recent UFC where GSP won his title back! Go GSP!), plus life just gets in the way of my blogging.

All that changed today when I read an article about the country of Gabon, where brain-dead government wannabes kill children in order to have better luck in possibly being appointed to a cushy corrupt government job. The next time someone says to you, "oh, it's just a silly belief...what harm can it do?", hand them this article and slap them in the face.

The deal is that rituals are performed with the organs (they're sometimes eaten or made into "magic" amulets) and the blood. You know, "black magic". Whenever I hear that term I think of the movie True Lies when the good guys have their meeting to talk about the bad guy and the presenter says that the Head Bad Guy calls himself the "Sand Spider". The Good Guy Head Honcho asks why and the presenter says, "Probably because it sounds scary." Seriously, it boggles my mind that we have landed probes on Mars, we can reattach a person's severed hand or change someone's heart, but there are still morons out there who think that if they eat a seven year old's spleen they'll get a better job.

Jean-Elvis Ebang Ondo, the founder of the Association to Fight Ritual Crimes or ALCR, and whose 12-year-old son was kidnapped, killed and mutilated in 2005, was quoted as saying:

Unfortunately, this practice (child ritual murder) seems to be spreading again in Gabon,

Yeah, again.

One of the main problems is, as the Human Rights Watch on Gabon for 2007 mentions,

...an inefficient judiciary susceptible to government influence...widespread government corruption...(and) trafficking in persons, particularly children...

You can't have the people in power be above the law and able to do as they please with no recourse - actually, with positive outcomes like it states in the Star article.

But no politician has been convicted for such crimes (ritual murder of children). An attempt to prosecute a legislator from Gamba region last year failed after he claimed parliamentary immunity..."An 8-year-old girl was snatched in Ndolou department and killed in Mouila. The man allegedly responsible was a candidate to Parliament who entered the government after this crime."

How do you fight that sort of amazingly fucked up "system"?

Assheads like this guy need to be stopped. There is no "cultural relativity" or any of that, "well, they do things differently over there" bullshit. When people are killing essentially defenseless people (and, obviously, animals) for ridiculous superstitions, it's time to stop the delusion.

What a hell-hole.

Skeptic's Circle #84

It's the 84th edition of the Skeptic's Circle, happening in real time over at Archaeoporn.

It's like porn, only with fossils. So, imagine Wilfred Brimley and Estelle Getty gettin' it on.

Ew. Actually, don't.

Denyse O'Leary - No One Does It Worse

You know, for someone who proclaims that she's a "journalist", Denyse O'Leary is painfully stupid and horribly, terrifically, tragically unaware of how to read and interpret a basic sentence. Take her recent post supposedly poking a hole in Richard Dawkins' statement in the shitfest movie that is Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (a wonderfully apropos title).

She says his position that they are "lying for Jesus" is "wearing thin" in light of what he said in the movie, which she quotes from this blog article - another painfully stupid attempt to link religion and atheism, say that "freedom" is somehow being oppressed, and that Ben Stein is some sort of hero. Here's the Dawkins quote:

Mr. Dawkins responds by laying out the "intriguing possibility" that life may have come into existence elsewhere in the universe and that this unknown intelligence seeded life on earth.

Hm. I don't see anything there that suggests supernatural involvement. Life may have come into existence, evolved there and then seeded Earth via some planetary collision or meteor impact sending dust/organic matter along for the ride to Us. How the hell are these IDiots missing the crux of what Dawkins is saying so completely?

Well, O'Leary only links to her own work five times in this piece - down from her usual twenty-seven. The links are, again, painful to read because of the oversimplification and reliance on irrelevant asides (check out the bit on "retraction" in this piece for the definition of "non-sequitor"...and while we're at it, maybe O'Leary should look up the difference between how scientists define the word theory and how the general public and IDiots define the same. Might be enlightening, but I doubt it).

One day these morons might have something intelligent to say, but until then they'll just keep putting the word "Intelligent" in their movies and ideas. That always makes me think of the hilarious irony that the idea of "Intelligent Design" relies on everyone saying, "This problem of life originating on Earth is R E A L L Y hard....soooo ....let's not work on it and just say that God Did It, ok?"

"No Intelligence Allowed", indeed.

Saturday Insanely Good Guitar Performance

Courtesy of fingerstyle god Pete Huttlinger. Enjoy an "impossible" song.
And now I have to go practice.

Dinesh Douchesouza Gets It Wrong Once Again

Jesus fucking christ Dinesh D'Souza is thick.

I mean, I'm not going to kick his ass again, I've done that too many times, plus PZ's already done it.

All I'm going to do is point out that in his new post he pulls out the same old-ass bullshit. Allow me to present:

The real problem with Darwinism in the public school classroom is that it is often taught in an atheist way.

And of course his "evidence" for the old-ass argument:

the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits public schools from teaching or promoting atheism in any way. How do I know this? Well, the religion clauses of the First Amendment protect the "free exercise" of religion and at the same time forbid the "establishment" of religion. Courts have routinely held that the free exercise clause protects not only religious beliefs but also the absence of religious beliefs. If you are fired from your government job because you are an atheist, your First Amendment rights have been violated. In other words, the term "religion" means not only "religion" but also "atheism."

Yet if the free exercise clause defines religion in a way that includes atheism, then the no-establishment clause must define religion in the same way. So the agencies of government are prohibited from "establishing" not only religion but also atheism. This means that just as a public school teacher cannot advocate Christianity or hand out Bibles to his students, so too public school textbooks and science teachers cannot advocate atheism.

To refresh everyone's memory, here's your First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Firstly, D'Souza blockheadedly equates secularity and atheism (the difference being obvious - secular = no mention of any supernatural being(s) on the money; atheist = "There is/are no supernatural being(s), so stop being retarded" on the money), then he goes on to make a house of cards built on that false equality by saying that "Darwinism" - whatever the fuck that means - is a religion, is being taught in the schools via biology class, and as such is violating the above stated First Amendment.

Ok, let me make this crystal clear so even Dinesh can understand: If atheism is a religion, then not sucking my dick is a sex act.

No one is hindering his or anyone's right to the free expression of their silly religion. Get the fuck over yourself and stop being such a little whiny douche.