So Now PZ Was Never Expelled from "Expelled"?

This is what I received in reply to a comment I made about PZ being expelled from the preview of Expelled last year. It from some nutjob in Sweden called talitha00cumi.

Amused Child [my YouTube moniker], you're lying through your false teeth, bro. NO ONE was thrown out. Not PZ, not anyone!

Do you need to lie to get attention? Were you neglected as a child and now crave any sort of attention you can get?

PZ was one of the childish, irresponsible ones, and he was warned that he'd be throw out if he didn't behave, but he was never thrown out.

Stop lying.

WTF? I told this creepy piece of work that I considered these comments defamation and that I wanted an apology. Holy shit, I'm totally going to hire a lawyer if that's what it takes! This person does seem to be confused between the preview of Expelled and the visit to the Creation Museum - except that this ding-dong has been corrected on that account several times! Nevertheless this person wrote back:

Not false [his/her statements]; true. Totally.

Offensive, perhaps, but true. This silliness NEVER HAPPENED! One person who filmed a private conversation was asked to stop. He wouldn't. He was asked to leave. PZ was warned many times for his bad behavior, and spread the rumor that he was "expelled." He wasn't.

The truth hurts - but only if you prefer lies.

Again, WTF? No one can be this confused. It seems to be the work of a Lone Stranger rather than any coordinated effort, but it certainly sets a new standard for revisionism. It's really surprising because this person is all over the internet and while s/he is religiously fanatical ("Catholics aren't Christians" and all that - I hate that shit), s/he doesn't get vicious, until s/he replied to me. And it pisses me off! I've called twice for an apology - I think that's the least I should get for being called a liar.

UPDATED: In your face, Talith00cumi. You've been caught.

"wow. Funny. The guy must be a total jerk and was expected to disrupt the film. Dickie Dawkins can be a total jerk, but he's dignified enough to keep silent during a film, I'm sure.

Did anyone find out why the guy wasn't allowed in? Or are you all just guessing based on... knee-jerk reactions and empty heads?

Just a lil question."

I have a lil question, too. Where's my apology, you hypocritical wonder?

Sour Grapes, Again

Josh Rosenau has an excellent dissection (if you'll pardon me) of teh Ben Stein affair. But I can't let this go:

Everyone used to love my column until Expelled, and then people were mean on the internet and got me fired from a job I didn't want anyway [emphasis mine].

Point 1: Stein, not "everyone" loved your column. Felix Salmon didn't. And I certainly did not, though half the time I didn't know what the hell you were talking about! (Hence my reference to "glossolalia.")

Point 2: You "didn't want it anyway"? Isn't that what you said about your upcoming (but not anymore) commencement speech at Vermont? Man, I totally call phony-baloney on this. Have you ever been disinvited/fired from something that you did want?

Ben Stein, actor - in a one-man stand-up routine of Aesop's Fables. Too bad that, alone there on the world's stage, he's the straight man in a larger cosmic joke, mostly on him. But hey, if there's a buffoon, there must be a buffoonator. Right?

UPDATED: The Wall Street Journal blog sums up FreeScore.com, and gives information on how to receive your truly free credit report.

FreeBore.com

UPDATED: Advertisers are fleeing Glenn Beck's clown routine. I guess when they say "Kill Grandma"* they didn't realize it was being used like "kill the people," i.e. make them laugh.

Did you know that even a great scientist like Stephen Hawking would not stand a chance in the British health care system?

Stephen Hawking: a Briton. And not dead. But probably dying of laughter - if this crap were funny.
----
The most boring person in the world (sounding more slurred than usual here) just lost his gig at the New York Times. And all because he advertised a scam which offered a free credit report that wasn't.



He claims that it was because... because... because atheists wrote hate mail to the Times!

The sad thing is, no we didn't. At least, I didn't. I had forgotten all about Ben Stein. And his train-wreck of a column.

(It's not hard to do, frankly.)

I'm in Texas attending a conference and eating food that I haven't been able to get my grubby hands on since 2006, when I visited Georgia. (Blackened catfish! Country fried steak! No, I won't touch it in the north!) I have too much to do these days to write any more than the one letter I fired off to the Times asking when they were going to tire of the snake-handling. Felix Salmon dropped his "Ben Stein Watch" and I did not pick it up. Ho-hum. But if Stein wants to claim that "the atheists" somehow created this pre-existing policy at the Times about conflict of interest, that's fine. I'm flattered. We all should be. (It take more evidence to believe that the Times already had this policy, than to believe that we went back and changed the past to put it there! Uh-huh. Maybe we planted all those fossils, too? Of course!)

Then he said it was because he starred in Expelled. Yeah, right. That was only over a year ago. (I guess you lose track of time when you, uh, have the ability to transcend it. Gee, if only we could go back in our time machine and change the past again so that Ben Stein was never bor - I am a genius!)

I guess all the financial blogs have been take over by teh atheists, because they're pretty much nodding
their
heads
in approval
at his firing.

(Also here. And here. Boy, I need a drink after going back in time and writing all these posts! *Twinkle*)

Compared to the liability for intelligent design that Stein has proved himself to be (I'm beginning to feel sorry for the Disco Boys), he's making atheists sound like they have supernatural powers. That's not the way to convince the American public to buy into supernaturalism. They might start thinking that naturalism is, well, super. It sure beats being a crybaby.

One more thing: "Americans in Financial Hole." Why did that just give me the creeps?
---
*Note how the "Kill Grandma" right wing clown routine is begetting an unholy "survival of the fittest" phenomenon. Ironic, huh? (Not really.) You see, it's okay when creationists do it.

Oh, by the way, Stephen Hawking is still alive. And still British.

Penny Lane

Guess what film is opening in Canada.

Guess who's flipping out about the possibility of "picketers" (because there were so many of them here, right?). Can anyone name one flipping "protest" against any showing of Expelled? Neither can I.

I wonder who will picket or try to crash? (There was a big hoo-haw over the screening at the Mall of the Americas when "raving atheist" biologist PZ Myers got ejected by line producer Mark Mathis.) Perhaps I will recognize some prominent local figures strutting importantly on the sidewalk.

Picketers please note, there is a wide sidewalk, and plenty of coffee shops nearby. The restrooms in the Cumberland Terrace are usually pretty clean too.

Be reassured, picketers! The government-funded Nanny Monster is always right, and she says that neither the universe nor life forms show evidence of design, despite the evidence. And in our random universe, the biggest Monster should rule, and that is She.

Yadda, yadda, yadda...

First of all, this breathless tactic ("Please picket! Please picket our film! We won the lawsuit and lost the war! We need more publicity now that we've run out of new angles!") gave me a flashback. (Yes, this is the same nutball group that also culminated in my contacting the FBI. Sheesh.)

Second of all, it reminded me of the other times that Denyse O'Leary poisoned her own well by opening her mouth.

Thirdly, it makes me think that "Nanny Monster" is a good nick-name for Denyse. (Do we need reminding as to why?)

Fourth, it makes me think that, as with the neighborhood nutballs who comprised the former neighborhood group, something very, very unexpected and existentially just is about to happen.

In anticipation, shimmies to Pharyngula and U Dream of Janie.

Oh! And don't forget - "How Life Began" is on the History Channel tonight (please let it not be inaccurate and suck), and Ken Miller will be on The Colbert Report.

(P.S. There was "a big hoo-haw" at the screening of Expelled that Rev. Barky and I attended? Well, I guess there were as many "hoo-haws" as there were women attending, no?) :-D

Yoko Loses Lawsuit

Yoko Ono has lost her bid to remove the song "Imagine" from the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. And at AtBC, Glen Davidson expressed my feelings when he said: "I can't say I really mind."

Neither do I. Copyright law is just nuts. (So is Yoko Ono, who is not a sympathetic character.) Plus, I have to admit, I'm curious to see the reception that Expelled will get in Canada.

But I'm also kind of wondering how Ono will go ballistic... You don't want to piss her off...

(I just wish I could never hear that song again.)

P.S. I prefer Elvis Costello. (“Was it a millionare who said ‘imagine no possessions.’?”)

Not that John Lennon really believed in any of that nonsense - even when he was running around in military fatigues and spouting stupid faux-revolutionary rhetoric. But it sounded good in a song lyric.

Pop songs appeal primarily to emotions, not reason or logic. The fact that a sentiment sounds good coming out of a singer's mouth, with swelling strings and a Phil Spector production doesn't mean that it has any validity whatsoever.

No, we do NOT need more of this kind of sentiment. It actively works against the difficult and often unpleasant but utterly necessary task of sorting reality from fantasy.

Yes, remember that “But when you talk about destruction/Don't you know that you can count me out? (In! In!)” Hypocrite. I always hated that song, too.

Ironically, it’s Ben Stein and his producers who takes the song seriously, in contrast to what Al Barger has written:

On the other hand, maybe we should just give peace a chance. If we just go to Kim Jong Il, lighting candles and singing this song, then maybe one day he'll join us, and the world will be as one.

Hey, I thought it was Josef Stalin! ;-)

Now, probably Lennon himself didn't think that much about it when he was writing it. He had a hook and a catch phrase, and developed a strong tune for it - though it is stiff, white English church music that sounds like you should be wearing a jacket and tie and sitting on a hard wooden bench while you listen. Still, it is admittedly a well crafted, pretty song [emphasis mine].

It is?

Expelled: Imagine!

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

I'm entering the countdown to finals, so have fun here.
-----
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.

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.)

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.