Despite my promise to be off the blog for a day and a half, I just had to jump on here and point you to this post, which contains just the right amount of scorn and contempt, and which I seriously wish I had written. Skeptico rocks.
I think I might have to join the fan club.
Tony Zirkle, Republican candidate for Congress in Indiana’s Second Congressional District, spoke to a Nazi party celebrating Hitler’s 119th birthday. For video, go here.
Zirkle claims to be a devoted Christian. That’s his excuse for speaking at a Nazi event:
This is just a great opportunity for me to witness,” he said, referring to his message and his Christian belief.
Zirkle is, as is consistent with his “faith,” a supporter of intelligent design creationism. He thinks that people who home school their children so as to avoid good science education should be refunded a third of their property taxes:
Two of the issue that have been flaming the controversies over public education are the evolution/creation debate and indoctrinating kindergarteners that homosexual domestic partners constitute merely one more acceptable, alternative lifestyle. Our public schools should not be exploiting our elementary school children to become pawns in these highly emotional, divisive debates.
Under the 1st and 14th Amendments, Congress has authority under the due process clause to ensure that states are not depriving citizens of their religious free exercise. Therefore, in any district where public schools take either position on these two issues and force their opinions on public school children, I will propose legislation that will entitle parent(s) to a refund of the approximately 1/3 of their property taxes (or percentage of rent that derives from property taxes) that go the public schools so that the parent(s) can either home school or send their children to a private school.
Now, I’ve not heard of even a single biologist who supports the Nazi cause. But here’s an ID creationist, and such a respectable one1 that he’s a congressional candidate, who is speaking right there in front of a picture of Hitler and next to a Nazi flag.
What does that say about Expelled’s message that biologists are Nazis?
Orac has a more complete takedown.
I ask because a tragic mishap has befallen this church:
As many as 70 people have been taken to hospital, several critically injured, after the auditorium floor collapsed at a church in Abbotsford, BC, Canada.
Around 9 pm PDT an approximately 900 square foot section of the stage and floor collapsed at a Starfield concert attended by more than 1200 people at Central Heights Church. Reports from the concert goers indicate that sound and lighting scaffolds collapsed onto the front section of the stage and mosh pit, causing the floor to collapse into the basement 10 feet below.
This is no laughing matter; it sounds like some people are likely to die, others will certainly face a long period of recovery and possibly disability. I’ve called the church to inquire about where to make a donation to help with the medical care or recovery costs of the victims; I haven’t heard back yet but I will post a link when I do.
I don’t want to minimize the magnitude of the tragedy by bringing theology into it. But I’m not the one doing that. The church’s own theology insists that the question in the headline be answered, since the church has made up its mind on the issue. In a FAQ on their website the church claims:
5. Why is there so much pain in my life?
Pain is part of the consequence of our rebellion against God.
They link to The Great Questions of Life as a way of learning more about their theology1:
The Effects of Sin
Sin brought disease and death into the world.
God is Just
God is a righteous judge. This means that He always does what is right…. Through Jesus, He wants to save us from sin and all of its effects. But if we won’t let Him, He will allow us to feel the evil results of our wrong actions.
God Knows Everything
God knows the past, present, and future. He sees, hears, and understands everything that happens. He knows your thoughts and why you do what you do. God knows what is best for you….
I’m quoting selectively, so run down the links and see. I think this church teaches that if something causes you pain, it’s your own damn fault.
Sometimes it is2. But in this particular case, my hope for the members and guests of this church who have been injured by this accident is that they escape being condemned as vicious god-hating madmen by their pastors, and that they benefit from the finest evidence-based medical care that can be brought to bear to heal their injuries, physical and otherwise.
Mark Mathis is one of the producers of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. He was recently interviewed by Jay Davis of Real Detroit Weekly, and if there was really any doubt about it, this establishes pretty well that Mathis is stupid beyond belief.
I confront Mathis with this point [that intelligent design creationism is untestable], and he counters that evolutionary theory is also untestable. This is patently untrue — to give just one example, scientists have witnessed speciation, the arisal of a new species from an old one.
When I point this out, he interrupts me immediately: “Whoa! Wait a minute! Please send me whatever material you have that demonstrates that we can observe speciation because I have not seen anything. I’ve never heard anyone even claim that!”
Is he serious? He’s just produced a film about evolution, and he’s never heard of the fact that speciation has been observed and thoroughly documented in the scientific literature? I’m stunned. I send him peer-reviewed research confirming this fact via e-mail, and he later responds, “This isn’t an important argument for me.”
The interview goes on, with Mathis lying some more about evolution:
“You can’t apply falsifiability to Darwinian evolution. How is it falsifiable?”
I respond by quoting the biologist J.B.S. Haldane: “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.”
And it goes on:
Mathis pauses before saying, “If you want to get into the science…” He then trails off and mutters something irrelevant before finally confessing, “Look. You can get into the intricacies of the science on both sides. And I am not qualified.” On that point, we can both agree.
The interview then moves on to the subject of the famous night when Mathis summoned armed security guards to prevent PZ Myers from seeing the film (while not recognizing his companion, Richard Dawkins, and hence letting him in):
No producer who releases a film called Expelled would actually expel an individual who appears in his film from seeing that film. Right?
Mathis laughs before offering two reasons why he told the security guard at the screening not to let Myers in. First, Mathis says, “He has viciously attacked me personally and attacked the film.” Just to clarify, Myers did not break into Mr. Mathis’ house in a drunken rage with a bowie knife—he has simply been critical of Mathis’ arguments.
The second reason? Mathis assumed that the incident would engender “some additional attention” for the film. I’m not joking. He actually called that a reason.
“He was not invited to the screening,” Mathis says. “I don’t have time to read P.Z. Myers’ oral diarrhea.”
“But the screening wasn’t done by invite, was it?” I ask.
“It’s still our screening. I’m still the producer on site. And I still have the ability to say, ‘I didn’t invite you. And you’re not coming.’” Mathis repeats, “I denied him entrance to a film that he was not invited to.”
“But just to clarify, others who weren’t invited were allowed in, right?”
“Done by discretion! Done by discretion!” In case you’re wondering, this means yes. It seems safe to say that discretion is something that Mark Mathis lacks entirely. I let him scream for one more minute.
“We have the option of ex… uh, of kicking, uh, of not allowing P.Z. Myers to come to the film he wasn’t invited to. Okay? Who cares?!”
Ok, that last quote? That’s not even intelligible speech.
I shouldn’t be surprised. That’s exactly what we’re accustomed to getting from creationists.
Hat tip to Joe. Just Joe, again, who apparently reads Pharyngula more often than I do.
I grew up in Ohio, and for several years in the mid 90’s, I had the opportunity to drive through the town of Mt. Vernon on a fairly regular basis. It was a quaint, old-fashioned midwest town, with a real town square, a drugstore with a soda fountain right out of the 50’s, and everything else you’d imagine in a town that looked essentially like a time capsule, or a movie set, from my parents’ generation.
So it wasn’t really a surprise to me when I heard through the media that a middle school teacher in Mt. Vernon was lying in his classroom about evolution…
In one class, Freshwater used Lego pieces to describe the beginning of the world. He dumped the pieces, then asked students if the Legos could assemble by themselves, said Joe Stuart, 18, assistant editor of the high-school newspaper.
…and forcing his religion on his students…
On Monday, Middle School Principal William D. White told Freshwater to remove “all religious items” from his classroom by the end of Wednesday.
Freshwater agreed to take down the Ten Commandments from the door of his classroom, posters with Bible verses and Bibles on a shelf. But he refused to remove his personal Bible from his desk when students are in the room.
…because, if anyplace is going to attract religious extremists who are living in a previous century, it would be a town that seemed like it was living in a previous decade.
But what I hadn’t heard before was that middle school teacher John Freshwater has allegedly mutilated and injured his students1
“We are religious people, but we were offended when Mr. Freshwater burned a cross onto the arm of our child. This was done in science class in December 2007, where an electric shock machine was used to burn our child. The burn was severe enough that our child awoke that night with severe pain, and the cross remained there for several weeks. … We have tried to keep this a private matter and hesitate to tell the whole story to the media for fear that we will be retaliated against.”
So according to this, not only does Freshwater walk around with an “electric shock machine” and painfully burn his students, but he also intimidates them into not telling. These are, if I’m not mistaken, exactly the tactics used by more traditional child abusers. But I’d guess - being blissfully ignorant of this seamy side of human behavior - that most ‘traditional’ abusers avoid branding their victims with religious symbols, due to the sort of obvious evidence that a brand would constitute.
It is also worth noting that Freshwater doesn’t have the support of his co-religionists - he’s a radical, an extremist, and others don’t want anything to do with his antics:
[School Superintendent Steve] Short said it is alleged that Freshwater used his classroom to advance religion and that he teaches his own beliefs from the Bible and not the approved curriculum. In the fax, the parents also said, “We are Christians who practice our faith where it belongs, at church and in our home and, most importantly, outside the public classroom, where the law requires a separation of church and state.”
Freshwater may believe whatever he wants, but he needs to be fired because of his behavior.
(Hat tip to BCS’er Joe. Just Joe.)
I’ve liked other videos put together by this guy, but this time he utterly outdoes himself - and merely by letting Ben Stein talk:
The producers of Expelled, having been notified by XVIVO (pdf) that their movie infringed on XVIVO’s copyright of an animation of the inner workings of a cell, responded to that by almost immediately filing a lawsuit against XVIVO. This, of course, is well known, since it happened more than a week ago.
Yoko Ono, Sean Ono Lennon, Julian Lennon, and EMI Blackwood Music Inc, have apparently decided not to allow Expelled’s litigious, lawsuit-happy producers strike the first blow in their case. They have filed a lawsuit against Premise Media Corporation, C&S Production LP and Rocky Mountain Pictures, Expelled’s producers and distributors, seeking an injunction preventing them from continuing to use John Lennon’s song Imagine, and also seeking damages.
This story hits a little closer to home than most lawsuits involving big-ticket celebrities and movie distributors. BCS contributor Iatra Polygenos, back when she was a freshly-minted veterinarian, was part of a team that treated one of Yoko Ono’s cats. Iatra is loyal to her clients, even clients that really belonged to her clinicians at a time before she really had clients of her own, so the BCS family is rooting for the plaintiffs in this case, just out of sheer biased loyalty.
As many people have pointed out, plagiarists don’t steal from just one source. If you do it once, you are going to do it again, and again, and again. Plagiarists are serial offenders by nature.
I’m not sure what is going to happen next, but it seems likely that the next shoe to drop will involve Expelled’s alleged stealing of video from PBS. Or it might have something to do with Expelled’s use of the song All these Things That I Have Done, by The Killers, which has also been said to be a result of plagiarism.
What’s sad about these cases is that it is really simple to get rights to clips and music. For the most part, all you have to do is call up whoever owns the rights, and ask for a license to use the material. A fee is negotiated, usually off a fairly standard fee system, you pay it, and you get to use the material1. The only reason someone wouldn’t do this if they were going to use three major pieces of other peoples’ work in a movie that opens in 1,052 theaters would be - well, that they are bad, evil little people.
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is out, and it looks pretty certain at this point as though it is only appealing to religious extremists. Predictions from the producers that the movie would make $12 to $15 million on opening weekend, and blow Fahrenheit 9-11 out of the water, have turned out to be no more than smoke from a wet campfire. And the self-satisfied predictions from the producers that this was going to be as big a deal to science as Galileo and Copernicus - well, that was all just silly.
But now that the movie is out, the fringe religious activists that are behind it are going to follow up with certain political action. I think that one of the political actions they are going to take is to try to get the movie screened in schools.
It isn’t a new idea - this was done with An Inconvenient Truth, for which a program was started to distribute free copies to science teachers. I’d expect a program like this to crop up for Expelled sometime soon, and I’m not the only one.
So, the question is - what do we do about it?
I’m of the opinion that the more widely that Expelled is seen the better - movies like this one, which are blatantly antisemitic, obviously misleading and condescending to the audience, and, by most accounts, overwhelmingly boring, really can’t hurt our cause as long as we are in a position to respond to what is happening.
At the moment we have no coherent response. I’m thinking of putting together (along with some of my friends) an information pack for Alaska school districts about the movie, utilizing some of the resources at Expelled Exposed, here, and elsewhere on the net. Perhaps I should seek the collaboration of other potentially interested organizations?
Let me know what you think.