Crimes and Misdemeanors, A Discussion

I don't have a lot of time for blogging these days, so until things slow down I'll post this gem from You Tube, the first part of a commentary on one of my favorite films (starring one of my favorite actors, Martin Landau) by one of my not-favorite directors, Woody Allen.

Expelled: Imagine!

FINAL UPDATE: Heddle has a great post on this whole thingie.

I'm entering the countdown to finals, so have fun here.
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Well, folks, where do I begin?

Since all the excitement about PZ’s expulsion from a free screening of Expelled, a lot of things have happened. It's almost too much to recount.

The free screenings and RSVP links disappeared from the website – and only certain people (atheists, skeptics, scientists, etc.) who had already RSVPed to see the movie started receiving e-mails saying that their upcoming screening were “cancelled” when they weren’t. The goal was obviously to have only sympathetic audience members at these advance screenings. (In some cases, the screening times were abruptly moved one hour earlier, angering the sympathetic members of the audience who naturally did not get a cancellation e-mail and thus showed up at the original run time.)

A Scientist and skeptic who received these apparently fraudulent e-mail “cancellations” of Expelled was Evolutionary Biologist John Lynch. (This blog post includes “before and after” screengrabs of the official Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed website showing the screenings “disappear”)

A couple of the commenters on his blog managed to attend the screenings anyway:

Commenter Brad on his experience:

Commenter Ken McKnight on his experience:

More on this story from Troy Britain:
"Expelled Promoters Just Can’t Stop Lying"

Mark in Santa Clara on his experience:
"Expelled Has Gone Truant in Santa Clara"

Meanwhile, this is what happens when you are invited to pay $10 to see an advanced screening of Expelled: you don’t get to see Expelled. You have the "privilege" of getting to see film clips already available all over the internet, and to watch Ben Stein win an award. This is what happened to Troy Britain.

"Expelled! The Movie Rip-off and the Event at Biola", again at Troy Britain's blog.

The producers of Expelled plead for a grassroots effort from its sympathetic audience to “adopt-a-theatre” on opening day, April 18, 2008. How pathetic. Do people really want to [I]rent a theatre[/I] in order to see a movie? (Just like Michael Moore, eh?)

This account is at James F. McGrath’s blog: "Freedom Friday"

Blogger Troy Britain contacted me to learn where I got the Expelled RSVP link to forward to PZ Myers. I told him that I got the link from Glen Davidson’s comment at After the Bar Closes, but that the source for Glen was a Christian blog promoting the film Expelled and exhorting the general public to sign up for these advanced screenings! That’s right, folks, we got this “top secret” URL from a Christian blog on blogger, a public site.

Troy’s blog: "The Expelled RSVP Sites: Getting to the Facts"

Of all the media outlets that have reviewed this flick (despite the producers’ Soviet-style blackout on advanced reviews of Expelled, would you have expected Fox News to pan it? Well, they did. In fact, they tore it to shreds!

Fox News (!) pans Expelled: "Ben Stein: Win His Career"

Man, it must suck to be a conservative when even the conservatives think you suck.

But it gets worse:

Those opening and closing scenes of the movie? In which Ben Stein seemingly addresses an audience of Pepperdine University students in a full auditorium? Where they cheer him at the end? Looks like a real bunch of students think NeinStein is hip and that his message was well-received, right?

It turns out that Pepperdine University students accept evolution, so the filmmakers had to rent the auditorium (it was not an event sponsored by the university), and hired actors to play "the students."

It was with some irony for me, then, that I saw Ben Stein's antievolution documentary film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, opens with the actor, game show host and speechwriter for Richard Nixon addressing a packed audience of adoring students at Pepperdine University, apparently falling for the same trap I did [creationism].

Actually they didn't. The biology professors at Pepperdine assure me that their mostly Christian students fully accept the theory of evolution. So who were these people embracing Stein's screed against science? Extras. According to Lee Kats, associate provost for research and chair of natural science at Pepperdine, "the production company paid for the use of the facility just as all other companies do that film on our campus" but that "the company was nervous that they would not have enough people in the audience so they brought in extras. Members of the audience had to sign in and a staff member reports that no more than two to three Pepperdine students were in attendance. Mr. Stein's lecture on that topic was not an event sponsored by the university." And this is one of the least dishonest parts of the film.

The producers/promoters of Expelled, Premise Media, have been served with a cease-and-desist letter, alleging plagiarism of an animation of the inner workings of a cell produced by Harvard University.

ERV’s blog:
"Expelled: Expelled for Plagiarism"

and

"I Love the Smell of Roasted Creationists in the Morning" (ERV again)

Wesley Elsberry’s blog:
"Okay, Expelled, but Plagiarism Will Do That for You"

PZ Myers’ blog:
"Peter Irons Drafts a Letter"

Panda’s Thumb:
"Will the Public See Expelled?"

The producers of this turdfest that is Expelled have also admitted that they never sought permission to use the John Lennon song, “Imagine”, which is played if the film over some archival footage of Josef Stalin, while Ben Stein screams that liberals want to turn our country into what Lennon (or Lenin?) envisioned, from the administrator of John Lennon’s (not Lenin’s) estate – namely his widow, Yoko Ono.

The Wall Street Journal's article.
(requires subscription)

Entire article available here:
Yoko Ono, Filmmakers Caught in 'Expelled' Flap

At this point, the scandal is growing heads like a hydra. Already everything I posted here is old news, because new news is still coming out. Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable!

Excuse me, but it’s normal procedure to expell a student for plagiarism, and this is now plagiarism plus stealing.

To add the cherry on the top of this frosted cherry-picking cupcake, the producers sent me a spam e-mail to my school account exhorting the “friends of Expelled to "help the film" in its hate speech against atheists, skeptics, legitimate scientists, and anyone else who doesn’t pass their moral purity test. I informed them that spam was unprofessional and that the only reason they had my address was that they had required it – first for me to RSVP, and then again in the theatre, where I was told that I had to give it again on an “agreement form” not to illegally videotape and distribute the film.

And, being that I was required to give them this information, that should have ended their use of my e-mail address. (I did not give them my snail mail address, though the form asked for it – and interestingly enough, this “agreement form” had no place for a signature, just for my printed name.)

Very, very unprofessional, I must say. Just astonishingly stupid, clumsy, and unethical. Boy oh boy, what an example to the upcoming class of students entering college. These guys have some nerve to preach to the rest of the nation about the state of our educational system.

All I can do is sincerely thank the makers of Expelled for exposing the methods of creationists to the nation at large. For years, these people have operated in secret, allowing only the most controlled speeches and presentations to the public, so that everyone remains on message. Now in complete disarray, their publicity machine has done more to destroy the concept of intelligent design as “science” in the public mind that anything I could have done or said. Thank you, thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart for this high-publicity disaster.

At Rotten Tomatoes, the rating for Expelled is 10% (less than Ishtar and Howard the Duck) and falling.

Now, it is evident to all why intelligent design has no place in science classrooms or in academia at large: it is a cheat, and its advocates are cheaters. And cheaters don’t belong in class – let alone teaching in our nation’s classrooms.

But one thing that you don't do - you don't piss off Yoko Ono.

UPDATED: Well, there I was, about to add a comment that I don’t really need to hear “Imagine” one more time in my life, either, because the song has become banal, kitch, the atheist’s equivalent of “Kum-bay-ya” (another song that I wish I could never hear again) – and then Corrente goes and rewrites John Lennon’s famous anthem especially for Ben Neinstein. And it’s hilarious.


Imagine there’s no science
So many people do
Nothing to study or wonder
The end of seeking truth
Imagine all the country
Dumber than a post…

You may say Ben Stein’s a schemer
But he’s not the only one
Many a fool would destroy us
A new Dark Age will have begun

Imagine no progression
Evolution canned
No need for artful discussions
A devaluing of man
Imagine all the children
Burning all the books…

You may say I’m a boomer
And my time will fade away
I hope someday you’ll stand up
And keep ignorance at bay

SECOND UPDATE: Oh for the love of Darwin, now someone over at John Lynch’s site has written “Bensteinian Rhapsody.” (One of my favorites!)

Anyone? I just filmed a sham,
Put some lies into your head,
Libelled Darwin, coz’ he’s dead,
Honor, you know I once had some,
But now I’ve gone and blown it all away-
Anyone? ooooohhhhh
Was it mean to tell those lies?
You’d learn more science by watching Rocky Horror-
Anyone? Anyone? My reputations now in tatters-

Too late, my crime is done,
Dembski told me I did fine-
Behe’s squirming, (he’ll be fine),
Goodbye science lessons-you’ve got to go
Gonna leave your kids behind and hide the truth
Adolf, oooooh (a shame he wasn’t atheist)
I’ll just have to lie,
I’ll just pretend that he wasn’t Christian at all--

guitar solo -

THIRD UPDATE: Ed Brayton weighs in on Expelled. And I notice that anonymous trolls who come here and criticize me (a woman) for speaking up don't have a complaint about them speaking up.

Don't come here and tell me what to say. If you don't like what you see here, leave.

FOURTH UPDATE: I told you it was a hydra. Premise Media, which produced Expelled, is now countersuing XVIVO (which produced the Harvard animation). In other words, it's a SLAPP. And ERV is totally convinced that the fact that Premise, based in Canada, filed its bogus lawsuit in Texas, not in Canada nor in Connecticut, where XVIVO is based, has nothing at all to do with the fact that Texas has no anti-SLAPP laws. ;-) She has issued a challenge to Premise Media.

Lab-lit-a!

It has surprised a lot of people who know me to find out the extent of my interest in science – in particular astronomy, geology, and evolutionary theory – and the depth of my involvement in the evolution vs. creationism/ID debate. This is due to the fact that there has long been a split between the humanities and science. It is a split that has troubled me for a long time.

Literary theory has become rife with talk of “oppressive narratives” and the like, a rootless orientation that views not only literature but life itself as a collection of “stories,” either “oppressive and from the dominant culture,” or as an act of resistance against said oppression, without any consideration as to how stories get to be told in the first place.

In order to tell these stories we must have more than just human culture and language – we must have brains, we must have mouths, and in fact I would argue that perhaps we can tell stories because we have opposable thumbs – and yet, I have rarely come across anyone who wants to talk about the scientific realities that underlie our storytelling.

Science is seen as “dehumanizing,” as a “white male oppressive narrative,” just another viewpoint, with no privileged position, and therefore literature just floats along, disembodied, disconnected from the factual and the real. And so we have the ultimate degradation of literature, literature as “spiritually uplifting” Wonder Bread, nice narratives meant more to comfort than confront. Even the rape and murder of a young girl is portrayed with all the sentimental mush (and kitsch) of an angel pendant:

Generally speaking, the sex-murder of an adolescent offers little that’s good. But in The Lovely Bones, mom and pop hook up and so do Ray and Ruth, whose body Susie is allowed to occupy just long enough to have real, true, beautiful sex for once in her afterlife. “I had never been touched like this,” she tells us. “I had only been hurt by hands past all tenderness. But spreading out into my heaven after death had been a moonbeam that swirled and blinked on and off. . . . Inside my head I said the word gentle.” The book ends with a glow.

Every impulse in every sane reader must shriek No! at this pabulum. It’s not lovely that Susie’s been slaughtered, hacked, and dumped in a pit. It’s not lovely that icy Mr. Harvey gets his comeuppance by a conveniently dropped icicle as the pit containing Susie’s body parts is being drained, leading us to assume that her remains will be found and that she will finally get a lovely stone.

Nice thought if you can abide it. Unfortunately, it’s false to all human experience to find “growth” in tragedy. In fact, the dull truth is that pain is tautological. The only thing suffering teaches us is that we are capable of suffering.

According to Jeffrey Sharlet, a journalist/provocateur who helped inspire this essay, and Andi Mudd, a spectacularly unwondrous college student who assisted in researching it, The Lovely Bones and its ilk “deserve a public shaming.” That’s because BBoWs [“Brooklyn Books of Wonder”] are escape novels, albeit garnished with intellectual flourishes. They’re kitsch, which Milan Kundera defined as “the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling [that] moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.” [Emphasis mine]

It’s no surprise to me that I have avoided such novels as The Lovely Bones, The History of Love, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, all of which are mentioned in the above article by Melvin Jules Bukiet. Their titles alone shriek their sentimentality and sugar-coating of the realities of life.

But there is something else: science is missing in literature. I am not talking about science fiction – I am talking about scientific fact. Whereas television courtroom dramas detail the plodding methods of lawyers (though also made melodramatic through highly unlikely twists and turns), it seems that the only genre dealing with scientific fact is the forensic science drama – and those are extremely inaccurate.

Melvin Jules Bukiet goes on to say:

Serious fiction, literature, even if it’s fabulist, sharpens reality. BBoWs elude reality to avoid the taint of anger or cynicism or the passion for revenge felt by real people in similar situations. Instead of telling a story of brute survival, BBoWs indulge in a dream of benign rescue.

Surely that is the kind of “rescue” that those who argue that science is just “another narrative” dream of – an escape from reality, from pain and necessity. I remember, in one of my college lit classes, getting into an argument with someone of this opinion, that science was “nonsense”; it culminated with me asking her if she believed in the science that had manufactured the car that had brought her to class that morning. She said nothing after that, but her glare was palpable. I had transgressed the role assigned to women, ostensibly by feminists – victim, empath, and right-brained child-hugger. If I wanted to write, why didn't I write what "women [should] write about" - having my period, feeling "connected" with other women (sometimes I do, sometimes I don't), or wanting or raising a child?

Hoo, boy. Talk about an oppressive narrative, talk about taking a privileged position, this reassumption of helplessness, collectivity, and irrationality by women.

While these people are celebrating their newly-found liberation of being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, I discovered another article in American Scholar that brought together three of my favorite subjects: literature, science, and Valdimir Nabokov (Lolita! My favorite novel!) in an elegant call for the reintegration of scientific fact into art and literature – and for seeing literature as a creative and intellectual act, beyond narratives of race or gender oppression.

For the last few decades, indeed, scholars have been reluctant to deal with literature as an art—with the imaginative accomplishment of a work or the imaginative feast of responding to it—as if to do so meant privileging elite capacities and pandering to indulgent inclinations. Many critics have sought to keep literary criticism well away from the literary and instead to arraign literature as largely a product of social oppression, complicit in it or at best offering a resistance already contained.

Literary academics have also been reluctant to deal with science, except to fantasize that they have engulfed and disarmed it by reducing it to “just another narrative,” or to dismiss it with a knowing sneer as presupposing a risibly naïve epistemological realism. They have not only denied the pleasure of art and the power of science, but like others in the humanities and social sciences, they have also denied that human nature exists, insisting against the evidence that culture and convention make us infinitely malleable.

[Interestingly enough, this mirror’s Dennis Prager’s complaint about boys and girls being taught to completely escape gender roles, but in a more reasoned and informed manner than Prager displayed.]

I and others want literature to return to the artfulness of literary art and to reach out to science, now that science has at last found ways to explore human nature and human minds. Since these are, respectively, the subject and the object of literature, it would be fatal for literary study to continue to cut itself off from science, from the power of discovery possible through submitting ideas to the rule of evidence.

There are many ways in which science can return us to and enrich the art of literature. We could consider human natures and minds as understood by science and as represented in literature, not just as seen through the approved lenses of race, gender, and class, but in terms, for instance, of the human life history cycle, or social cognition, or cooperation versus competition. Or we could develop multileveled explanations that allow room for the universals of human nature, and for the local in culture and history, and for individuality, in authors and audiences, and for the particular problem situations faced in this or that stint of composition or comprehension.

One way to use science to approach literature (and art in general) is to view it as a behavior in evolutionary terms. Why do art in general and storytelling in particular exist as cross-species behaviors? Asking the question in these terms makes possible a genuinely theoretical literary theory, one that depends not on the citation of purportedly antiauthoritarian authorities, but on the presence of evidence and the absence of counterevidence, on examining human behavior across time and space and in the context of many cultures and even many species.

The humanities have always accepted the maxim that biologist D’Arcy Thompson stated with sublime simplicity: “Everything is what it is because it got that way.” How it got that way starts not with the Epic of Gilgamesh but much further back: with our evolving into art-making and storytelling animals. How did our capacities for art and story build and become ingrained in us over time? How do we now produce and process stories so effortlessly: what aspects of the mind do we engage, and how?

Contrary to the populist propaganda about “Big Science” (right-wing propaganda that is ironically heir to the post-modernist/literary solipsist and extreme-left feminists movements) as a sterile and dehumanizing force, threatening our values and our emotional lives, science is a profoundly human act. It demystifies that which scares us. It makes new questions and new mysteries possible.

Science does not have the freedom that art and literature do – it cannot. Scientists are not and should not be “free to ask any question” if the question is skewed to advance an agenda, or is irrelevant, or is simply not sensible to ask at this point. That may mean that many questions appropriate to be asked tomorrow will not be asked today, which is unfortunate, but that also means that tomorrow, when we do ask the question, we will have a trail of research showing us why the question is now possible to be asked.

Art and literature do not need to supply that paper trail, but science must. However, art and literature do need to have their questions grounded, at some point, in reality, in scientific fact, or they will become floating bubbles, self-contained, beautiful but useless, and subject to the wind.

Some years ago I went to a friend’s art opening, and he started gushing about his latest idea – a sculpture, to scale, of the solar system. “Um,” I said with a smile, and went on to tell him how I, as a teen-ager, simply tried to draw the moon in orbit around the earth to scale, and ended up taping sheets of paper together until I at last had a scroll that reached a length of about 40 feet.
“Oh,” said my friend, disappointed, but simultaneously fascinated. “Well, maybe I’ll just do a surrealist ‘found object’ installation, then: ‘UNIVERSE (ACTUAL SIZE).’”

When I raised this issue at After the Bar Closes, Louis supplied this link to Lab Lit, which I hope to explore further. Thanks, Louis!

This Theory Will Self-Destruct in Eight Years!

Everyone remembers what anniversary we celebrate on April 2, right? A certain interview appearing in a Kentucky newspaper?

I remember.

To William Dembski, all the debate in this country over evolution won't matter in a decade.
By then, he says, the theory of evolution put forth by Charles Darwin 150 years ago will be dead.
The mathematician turned Darwin critic says there is much to be learned about how life evolved on this planet. And he thinks the model of evolution accepted by the scientific community won't be able to supply the answers.

"I see this all disintegrating very quickly," he said.

Uh-huh. Sure.

We'll just see about that.

Expelled: Fear of Not Flying and the Story of O(vation)

UPDATED: ReligionProf received an e-mail (actually two) about Freedom Friday! When my mouth stopped watering, because I thought that meant French Fries Day, I read his sarcastic wit about being "invited" to rent a theatre in which to show Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Those Gone with the Wind allusions are becoming more appropriate by the second! (If you rent a theatre so that Ben-I-love-credit-cards-Stein can show his movie in it, do you get to bring your own treats - say French Fries - into the theatre, or do you still have to put up with what's at the concession (they named it that for a reason) stand?)

(Photo courtesy of Quidam at AtBC)



So now you know where we got the information about the super-secret, no-atheist-cooties-allowed screening of Expelled. It was Glen Davidson, Expelled debunker extraordinaire, who informed us about the screenings. And where did Glen get his information? It was posted on a Christian blog.

Well, so much for "crashing" the screening. If anything, it was this film that crashed, and burned.

Troy Britain also found another public link to these screenings. He says:

This is followed by miscellaneous links and quoted endorsements. Did you happen to catch the URL in the middle of that? It goes right to one of the RSVP pages. Glen thought people might find this interesting so he promptly posted it on several popular blogs, web pages, and newsgroups, that deal with the CvE debate.

It was found on one of those sites (After the Bar Closes on Antievolution.org) by Kristine Harley, who then passed it on to Myers, and you know what happened after that.

So there were at least two places on publicly accessible web pages where one could find links to the Expelled RSVP pages and sign up to see the film. And both apparently included the Mall of America showing.

Slap the cuffs on me.

Troy himself found out what happens when you are "invited" to see a screening of the film Expelled: you don't see the film Expelled. You pay $10 see a trailer of the film. Oh, and you see Ben Stein win another incestuous ID award, to which the audience treated him to three Minnesota "we're-too-polite-to-tell-you-to-step-away-from-the-microphone-but-we-have-to-pee" ovations.

Oh, yes, this is exactly how previews for legitimate films meant for a wide audience are screened. Who can forget those merry days when Gone with the Wind was previewed before a hand-picked audience of cave hermits who thought that the Civil War was still going on? And those chivalrous cops dressed in authentic Confederate uniforms "skulking around" [that's really funny, Denyse O'Leary!] the theatre to make sure that no one gave away which side won the war?

Shimmies to Bad at Bad Idea and Troy at Playing Chess with Pigeons (and no, my shimmies do not cost $10, nor do I know specifically where $10 blowjobs can be found. Quit asking me!) :-)

P.S. Gee, come to think of it, we haven't heard from Ben Stein on this. In fact, he's been pretty quiet about this whole incident.


Maybe he's too busy rewriting everything "from Darwin to Hitler!"

(courtesy Quidam from AtBC again. Shimmies, Quidam! I read Mein Kampf. Bleh. More on what Hitler thought was evolution here at AtBC.)

Two "Expelled" Reviews

(Image courtesy of midwifetoad)

Josh Timonen's review is up - he let me see the draft and add my two cents. Thanks, Josh! I pulled out two things that Josh discusses that particularly bothered me in the film:

They interview someone else about evolution, who mentions that science doesn't know how life began. So the film shifts to discussing the origin of life on earth. Philosopher Michael Ruse mentions the theory that organic life piggybacked on crystalline structures (Richard writes more about this in his review). Stein takes the opportunity to ridicule the idea: "Crystals!? On the backs of CRYSTALS!?" The film cuts to B&W video of creepy fortunetellers hunching over crystal balls. Stein's only desire is to oversimplify the theory and make fun of it.

The film mentions the Miller-Urey experiments (I'm pretty sure these were the experiments referred to in the film) done on the mixture of elements likely to have been around at the dawn of life. Stein's voiceover merely states that these experiments were done to replicate the origin of life, and that "Nothing happened" (there is more to this story, of course). Boy, those stupid scientists should have known then and there that they were way off track!

Josh does a masterful job of wading through a film that expels insult upon insult on one's intelligence, and this was more work than I wanted to do on this awful film. I'm not getting paid for this. I've gotten paid for reviewing books/films that I thought were hideous that, as it turns out, were all better than this.

Also, Rev. Barking Nonsequitur also reviews the film. It's interesting that Josh mentions the inferior sound of the film (too much "gain"), because during the screening Rev. Barky, also a sound guy, leaned over to me and said, "The sound is terrible." I couldn't tell.

The film was trying to be a Michael Moore documentary about people being persecuted because they chose to mention the word "ID" but with Ben Stein - who is really not very pleasant to look at. He looks like an emotionless basset hound and his eyes seem to be exuding a viscous fluid much of the time. Of course he comes off very smug all through the film which is interspersed with interviews of supposed victims of the elitist Nazi science academia establishment. Of course when they are interviewing the "evil" people like PZ and Dawkins, there were lots of footage of Nazi and Communist rallies, death camp scenes and retarded people making fools of themselves underscored with malevolent or dopey music to set the mood.

I really enjoyed the point that Richard Dawkins made about the film's technique:

Now, to the film itself. What a shoddy, second-rate piece of work. A favourite joke among the film-making community is the 'Lord Privy Seal'. Amateurs and novices in the making of documentaries can't resist illustrating every significant word in the commentary by cutting to a picture of it. The Lord Privy Seal is an antiquated title in Britain's heraldic tradition. The joke imagines a low-grade film director who illustrates it by cutting to a picture of a Lord, then a privy, and then a seal. Mathis' film is positively barking with Lord Privy Seals. We get an otherwise pointless cut to Nikita Krushchev hammering the table (to illustrate something like 'emotional outburst'). There are similarly clunking and artless cuts to a guillotine, fist fights, and above all to the Berlin wall and Nazi gas chambers and concentration camps.

Now you begin to get an idea of how bad this film is, aside from its message. Ben Stein should go to the privy to expel whatever it is that he ate for dinner that is giving him nightmares about Hitler, and go back to bed. Spare us all his personal hang-ups.

UPDATED: I’ve been asking myself why I have not found much to say about the content of Expelled. I guess it is because I am so flummoxed by this film’s request that I laugh at its incredibly puerile use of stock footage “asides” of people hitting each other, Krushchev pounding a table, things blowing up in a lab, etc. Its humor is on or below the level of the Three Stooges, and I never liked them. As I said, take Michael Moore’s worst moments and string them into a full-length film…

But there’s something else. This film is empty. It is devoid of content – everything is chopped up, including the interviews of the intelligent design theorists. Even they get short (very short) shrift.
When I saw how bad this film was, I was relieved – but I’m still stunned at how incredibly artless this film is. What is there for me to say? Perhaps this was how (since Godwin’s Law has been trashed by now) Hitler’s art teachers felt when they saw the future Fuehrer’s talentless art.

UPDATED: More reviews.

Why It's A Load of Bunk

Science Sunday: Intelligent Design Goes to the Movies

And Julia Sweeney weighs in.

Ben Stein and the producers of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed held a press conference. But hardly any questions were allowed.

Most. Hits. Evah!

UPDATED: Courtesy of BWE over at AtBC.
SECOND UPDATE: You may have noticed that I've added Site Meter to this blog, because while Freestats gives me numbers, it hasn't updated its user profiles yet. So far I'm liking Site Meter better. Plus, now this blog has full syndication.




Welcome, and many thanks to all the visitors here. As a result of Expelledgate, I have had over 7100 hits on this site.* I feel like I've taken part in an important moment in history!

Thanks again, Richard, for directing people here and for quoting me.

And thank you, Wesley, for using your scalpel on the producer's pat-the-lady-on-the-head response to me. (Okay, you're all thinking "Lady?" I hear you.)

If you need to cleanse the palate, Wesley has a nice post about Rosalind Franklin and the invisible line between "scientists" and "technicians" that, along with chauvinism and opportunism, deprived this remarkable woman of a Nobel Prize for the co-discovery of DNA.

There are legitimate controversies within evolutionary theory. There are valid questions about and real problems within the process of peer review. There are many unanswered questions in both evolution and abiogenesis, and as Lawrence Krauss [fixed spelling] lectured to a rapt audience at the American Atheist convention, there are many, many unanswered questions about this universe which, as it turns out, is stranger than we have imagined, and perhaps stranger than we can imagine.

(As soon as the video of Lawrence's lecture is up I'll post it here, and I recommend that everyone watch it. If you're not familiar with the concepts you may have to refer to other sources on the subject, and work your way through the video more than once, and think it through more than once. I bore up quite well during his lecture, and it still blew my mind. You will fall in love with cosmology all over again.)

These questions are so much fun that I want everyone to explore them, debate them, or at least know about them - instead of creating false controversies about conspiracies that don't exist (and creating conspiracies that do exist, like throwing an interviewee out of a theatre where the film he was interviewed for was being screened.) Can we return to the real questions now? Can Americans learn the real questions through real science in our science classes? Thank you!

*As of late Friday, that is. My blogometer has not updated over the weekend. I'm waiting for my blogometer to be resurrected. So, it would appear that my stats are even higher.

Expelled: PZ, Darwin, and Now, Jackson Pollock

UPDATED: Richard and Greg weigh in. Richard mentions me *shimmy!* and Greg has the equivalent of the Encyclopaedia Britannica of links about Expelledgate (including my characteristically ladylike and demure THOSE FASCIST FUCKS THREW PZ OUT OF THE THEATRE RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME! rant.)

I'd like to take this moment to thank those intelligent design theorists who have given me what turned out to be a shitting-bricks-but-ultimately-awesome roller coster ride.
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Well, now Mark Mathis has backed off of the “PZ Myers was being disruptive” lie and has confessed to Denyse O’Leary – the biggest information leaker since Robert Philip Hanssen – that the real reason that he expelled PZ from Expelled was money, and his own pettiness.

You should know that I invited Michael shermer to a screening at NRB in Nashville. He came and is writing a review for scientific American. I banned pz because I want him to pay to see it. Nothing more.

Mark Mathis, did you think that this nitwit Denyse could keep a secret? No, Denyse goes and posts this admission on her blog for us to see. Thank you, Denyse. That is precisely how she ruined the screening of the creationist film “The Privileged Planet” at the Smithsonian, by not staying mum about how this is a stealth “documentary” for the intelligent design camp.

*We pause here for a fit of laughter*

But that’s not all, folks. The story just gets better and better. The writer of the film has weighed in at After the Bar Closes.

As I said on my blog, as a documentary filmmaker, I'm under no obligation to be objective.

*We pause here to run to the ladies' room to laugh and, er, expel at the same time!*

But that's not all. It looks like Mark Mathis is padding his audiences with his own staff.

The film was just silly, with virtually zero scientific content, which, of course, is not surprising coming from Ben Stein - a comedian, speech writer and game show host . . . but not a scientist.

I'm hopeful that anyone with the least bit of intelligence (no pun intended) will see straight through the film's hokey attempts to distract viewers from the lack of scientific credibility with appeals to their emotions - like the dark lighting, foreboding music and harsh camera angles that set the scene for Stein's interview with - dun dun dun - biologist Richard Dawkins, an avowed atheist.

Or worse, the countless images and references to Nazis that culminate in Stein dopily wandering through the Dachau concentration camp pondering the ways in which the "Darwinian gospel" was a "necessary but not sufficient condition" for the atrocities that took place there.

But the real silliness came after the credits rolled, when the audience had a chance to pose questions to Mark Mathis, the film's producer.

One woman said it was morally reprehensible to equate the death of six million Jews with Darwin. I clapped, and was astounded when nearly everyone else remained silent.

I shot my hand up to ask a question. "The intelligent design movement has gone to great lengths to argue that intelligent design is not religion, that it's science. And you made a whole film arguing that it is religious. How do they react to that?"

"Well," Mathis said, "I guess it makes them a little uncomfortable."

Some arguing ensued concerning the scientific merits of ID, and someone asked, "Where's the evidence? Where are the peer reviewed papers?" to which Mathis proudly proclaimed, "Actually, there are ten peer reviewed papers."

A guy in the front row scoffed. "Ten papers?" he asked sarcastically.

Mathis told the guy not to interrupt, and then mockingly called him "Mr Darwinist." Zing!

He began calling on others in the crowd, who asked friendlier questions. But Maggie and I quickly realised that we'd seen some of these people before - earlier that evening, in fact, working at the movie's registration table. These friendly audience members worked for the film? Had Mathis planted questioners?

People asked what they could do to help the film succeed, and a young woman in the front row inquired: "How can I pray for you and for the movie?" Mathis grew excited. "We need to start a grass roots movement!" he said, encouraging people to tell their "networks" about the movie and to get as many people as they could to go on opening weekend.

Another man in the front row wondered about the film's premise that supporters of ID are being silenced. He pointed out that a recent trial about the teaching of intelligent design held in Dover, Pennsylvania, gave supporters of intelligent design all the time in the world to make their case, but most of the 'leading lights' of ID didn't even show up.

When Mathis was responding, the guy asked another question, and the producer shot back, "How about you let me finish talking?" Then, a security guard for the film approached the calmly seated man and told him, "I may have to ask you to leave."

"Does anyone else see how ironic this is?" the guy asked.

"Shut up!" someone shouted from the back.

Now that’s what I call honesty and integrity – filling a theatre with plants who yell "Shut up!" and "Darwinist!" at anyone who asks real questions (as opposed to “How should we pray for this film’s success?”) at a film that purports to be about "free academic inquiry."

(Now, I thought it was bad when someone screamed, "Read Mein Kampf!" at me during the Q&A. "I have!" I yelled back. And I have. Whom do I sue to get that part of my life back? By the way - do you want me to name a little kampfing film that broadcasts the "news" of its "struggle" in the same manner as Hitler's ponderous, whining book? Do you? Can you guess?)

I saw this film, Expelled. The reviews are out there at Expelled Exposed, and despite my background as a movie critic myself I don’t have much to add to what has already been insightfully articulated about this astonishingly inarticulate film.

Just let me just add this comment: If the intent of Expelled was to draw a line between Darwin and Hitler, the effect was to make a film that was as banal and inartful as Hitler’s attempts to be a portrait artist. (Did you know that Hitler was a frustrated artist?) If you believe in this film and in prayer, you’d better start praying, because its specious message aside, its construction blows goats.

If the intent was for Stein to be the right-wing Michael Moore, the effect is a right-wing version of whatever ends up (mercifully) on Michael Moore’s cutting room floor. Moore is a blowhard but at least someone is keeping his ego (somewhat) in check. Not so with Stein. Expelled is a mess!

Ironically enough, on Sunday I caught the tail end of a debate between atheist Frank Zindler and conservative Jew Dennis Prager. I don’t care for these debates, but I had no idea who Prager was, and wanted to learn about him. Well, at the end he stood up and, like an old time fire-and-brimstone preacher started railing against little girls who play with trucks (moi?) and the “secularist, nihilist, Nazi-Communistist crap, like Jackson Pollock, that passes for art today – go to any gallery and see the effects of secular atheists on our culture! See the crap that passes for art today!” etc.

Well, I wasn't thrown out this time, either. I walked out. I stomped right out of there. I work in a museum dedicated to education, and the art world doesn’t deserve to be insulted by yet another cultural ignoramus who is scandalized by Haydn. (Apparently this dork who refers to evolutionary theory as a nineteenth century throwback thinks that music reached its nadir in the eighteenth century with Mozart!)

If you don’t like Pollock, or Georgia O’Keeffe, or Klimt or whoever, fine. But don’t deign to make global, purportedly “objective” statements on behalf of humanity about how this stuff is “bad” or “nihilistic” or “destructive to our youth” because you won’t take the time to at least understand it.

Don’t tell me that “atheists can’t be artists.” I am an artist. Just watch me, Bub. I’m writing a poem about what you said yesterday, Dennis Prager.

Remember, Adolph Hitler also wanted to be an artist, but wasn’t one – and his vision of National Socialist art was the kind of thing that conservative Christians would like to see: banal, safe, repetitive, derivative. Does anyone besides me see the irony of conservative Jews (Ben Stein, Dennis Prager, et al) echoing the statements of Joseph Goebbels in his speeches against "degenerate art" also known as "modern art?" Anyone? Anyone?

Um, Bueller?

This is the Alexander Calder Flamingo sculpture at the Federal Plaza as seen in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (while Ferris sings in the parade). Ferris run! Run away from the atheist, nihilistic Calder! Think of your salvation!