Smoking Guns and Drunken Logic

Today is April 18!

You know what that means, right?

Today's the day Expelled opens nationwide!

The Times has a brief and scathing review.

From the review, it sounds like Ben Stein listened to Billy Flynn: "Give 'em the old razzle dazzle, razzle-dazzle 'em... Long as you keep 'em way of balance, how can they spot you've got no talents?"

You're just a bagel, Ben. And your arguments are like a piece of Swiss cheese -- nutty and full of holes.

PS: I couldn't bear to post a picture of Ben Stein's smug face on my blog, so I put up a picture of Mr. D. instead. He looks displeased about the movie too.

Godwin's Law: The Movie

A new movie is coming out this Friday called Expelled. It claims to present evidence that intelligent design (aka creationism) is being pushed out of academia despite being well-supported and a good alternative to evolution. Oh, and it also links Darwin to Hitler.

Right.

It is propaganda and lies, pure and simple, which is why I'm not actually linking to the movie's web page. (Learn more here.) I actually had this quandary a few weeks ago, and here comes Pharyngula with a solution to my problem! I couldn't bear to link to the actual movie page and boost their Google ranking, but I couldn't just let Ben Stein and his pseudoscience slide under the radar entirely. NCSE to the rescue!

Two Stories, One High School Student

Matthew LaClair is a troublemaker.

Last year, he brought a law suit against his high school (in New Jersey!) for a history teacher's utter failure to make the separation between church and state in the classroom. He secretly taped the teacher saying things like, "only Christians had a place in heaven, that the Big Bang and evolution theories were not scientific and that dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark." (Did I mention that I live in New Jersey too?)

Other than the fact that I'm still getting over this sort of thing happening in New Jersey (!), there are two sentences I find alarming in this article. First: "After the tapes became public, Matthew received a death threat and was shunned and bullied by some of his classmates, he has said." Wow. It's unbelievable to me that his actions would actually be cause for people to shun someone. If this had happened in my high school, I'm pretty sure we would have thrown him a parade.

Second: "In the fall, the board reprimanded the teacher and later adopted a policy barring students from taping in class without a teacher’s permission." I find this vaguely unsettling. What if another teacher is saying wildly inappropriate things in the classroom? How can students prepare themselves to keep church out of school if the school makes rules against what Mr. LaClair did? Very shady if you ask me.

Anyway. Sometimes you don't need a tape; the evidence is already written down and published.

You can't keep a good rabble-rouser down, and he's causing some more trouble in history class. This time, his beef is with a textbook that plays down the causes and impacts of global warming. (For example, although millions of people might lose their homes as coastlines are flooded, they won't have to pay as much for heating! Yay!)

Whether you agree with him or not, this guy deserves a lot of credit for standing up to The Man. Freethinking is not taught in most high schools; anyone who comes away with that particular skill is likely to be self-taught. Mr. LaClair, I salute you.

Short and Sweet

I admit it. I read the message boards on the Discovery Institute web site on occasion. I like to see who's there, who's posting what, and what their latest nonsense says. Sometimes people get so caught up in the argument that it can be difficult to figure out what they're asking, or saying, or referencing. Currently, Expelled is the hot topic, but I'll come to that in another post when I have more time.

Anyway, I found this great article on Natural History Mag's web site. It gives a short statement by each of three prominent ID nutjobs (Behe, Dembski, and Wells) and rebuttals by three prominent real scientists (Miller, Pennock, and Scott). There's also a short article at the end summarizing how this whole thing isn't actually about science at all, it's about religion and politics. (Shocking.) It's a quick read and really lays out the major problems with the arguments of the intelligent design crew. Have fun.

The boy who sued Jesus.

School Board to Pay in Jesus Prayer Suit
Struggling to Squelch an Internet Rumor

I emailed these articles to a few people when they first came out a few weeks ago, but it's worth putting them up again, I think. I found the juxtaposition of these two articles bizarre and interesting. (When they were first published, they were right next to each other on the Education section home page.) On the one hand, people (on the Internet) are ready to spring into action against what they see as a slight against Jews, even if it's a complete falsehood and based on assumptions of the "backwardness" of Kentuckians. On the other hand, people actually don't like the Jews in some places, because we hate Jesus, apparently. (And in the backwards state of... Delaware?) So I guess the national spirit is, "We don't like the Jews, but at least they're better than those Muslim types." Alarming.