The Austringer

Visa has a commercial based on turning getting snacks and into seats at the theater into a mini-action flick. The protagonist couple get their tickets and see a clock showing “8:59″. The music ramps up and our heroes almost manage to screw up pay trying to find cash, but the woman saves the day with her Visa card. They enter their theater just as “9:00″ shows up on the clock.

But I don’t understand why have all the rush and fuss just to make it for the “Please turn off your cellphone” notice and the fifteen to twenty minutes of advertising and previews.

True-Value Hardware features a commercial in their “empathic employees” series, this one with a woman as a customer with a dirty face. The empathic employee asks, “Squirrels?” She nods, and the employee has a flashback to working in a garden plot and encountering a squirrel damaging his plants, whereupon he presses his dirty hands to his face. “Repellents and fertilizer,” he tells the woman, “will bring your garden back.”

Now, the sort of arrogant or nearly oblivious squirrel portrayed in the commercial is what Diane and I call a “snack squirrel”. Depending on the state, it is possible that such are in season even now, in which case I think the proper response is, “Harris’ hawks. Harris’ hawks will take care of that problem in no time.”

I suppose red-tails would, too.

Meijer ends Humane Society contest after sportsmen complain - Latest News - The Grand Rapids Press - MLive.com

Meijer is a grocer/retailer that operates in the Midwest. Recently, they offered customers the opportunity to donate a $1 towards a $5,000 goal for a donation to aid people who have pets and whose homes have been foreclosed upon.

Sounds OK, doesn’t it?

The problem is that a couple of layers underneath that bright, shiny surface, one finds the poser group HSUS (”Humane Society of the United States”) as the folks being aided by the donations. HSUS is a radical animal rights organization masquerading as an animal welfare group. From the name on, they borrow legitimacy from the hard work and effort of local shelters and the national 130-year-old animal welfare group, the American Humane Association.

The US Sportsmen’s Alliance, a hunting advocacy group, criticized Meijer for its donation plan. Meijer decided to truncate the donation period in response.

Meijer Inc. ducked Monday after finding itself in the cross hairs of a national hunting group over donations to help families and pets going through foreclosure.

The Foreclosure Pets Fund is run by the Humane Society of the United States — an organization the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance charges is anti-hunting.

I’ve noted before the problem of animal rights groups feeding off legitimate concerns of animal welfare:

This isn’t to say that the fakes haven’t gotten on the bandwagon of pushing legitimate reforms already suggested by animal welfare advocates. But their participation is best considered a form of crypsis, since they have an agenda that goes far beyond the laudable aims of animal welfare.

Support animal welfare. Don’t get conned by animal rights groups trying to disguise themselves as animal welfare advocates.

Essentially, the radical animal rights groups appear to be implementing a plan to become the only voices for animal welfare, though their aims go much further than those of legitimate animal welfare groups. The radical animal rights groups want an end to any human “exploitation” of animals, and that includes pet ownership and the extinction of domesticated animal species, as well as any take of wild animals for any reason. Eating meat is right out. Hunting and fishing are targets. Biomedical research using animal models would be history. However, selling the general public on those goals is not a public relations winner right now. How would Meijer, Inc. care to contemplate a grocery store without milk, butter, eggs, meat, fish, or any other animal-based product? How would Meijer customers take it? That’s right, no sale. On the other hand, animal welfare is an incredibly popular idea and causes people to open up their wallets for charitable giving. There’s only some much money in the animal welfare charitable giving pot, though, and those pesky folks running the local animal shelters and the AHA as the national organization for them are soaking up quite a bit of that money. If, though, a radical animal rights group spends enough money on a public relations campaign to “own” some particular animal welfare issue, they can get most of the money that gets donated by people interested in that cause, say shutting down puppy mills or, as in current events, aiding pet owners in financial straits. That money does not go to the local shelter or the AHA, and they are able to do less in making progress on those animal welfare concerns, making them appear less effective than the disguised radical animal rights groups, causing a further shift in charitable giving toward the radicals.

Many of the comments following the news item linked at the top take issue with Meijer and those against the donation scheme as unfairly depriving the people at the end of the charitable giving chain, the pet-owning foreclosed, of needed funds. They simply don’t understand how having the cash flow go through a radical animal rights organization is a problem. They note the activism and enthusiasm of these groups for specific animal welfare issues and call it “good, good, good”. The problem is that, just like a legitimate front organization for the Mafia, that’s not all that is going on. If we are going to have our established animal welfare groups, locally and nationally, it is they who need to be able to receive our limited donations, and not the radical animal rights groups who are seeking to displace and silence them.

There was a hearing in the Yoko Ono copyright infringement case this past week, and Premise Media has been enjoined against further distribution of “Expelled” until the case is settled next hearing on May 19th.

That means that theaters that already have a copy may continue to show it, but no further prints may be sent out to other theaters, and no CD or DVD versions may be distributed, either.

Friendly Atheist » Scientists Are Murderers

According to Ben Stein, at least.

Stein (speaking about the Holocaust): …that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you.

Crouch: That’s right.

Stein: … Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.

Crouch: Good word, good word.

Reprehensible and insane seem to be the only adequate descriptors here.

Now we can see why Ben Stein was recruited for this job. I hope that someone on the spot is able to read out Stein’s statements above in the legislative sessions where “Expelled” is being touted as a reason to pass antievolution legislation. It would go some way towards informing the legislators as to just what they are signing themselves and their constituents up for.

Update: Check it out on YouTube.

Anti-Evolution Film Misappropriates the Holocaust

The Anti-Defamation League weighs in on “Expelled”, and they don’t buy Stein and Berlinski’s arguments at all.

Anti-Evolution Film Misappropriates the Holocaust

New York, NY, April 29, 2008 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today issued the following statement regarding the controversial film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

The film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed misappropriates the Holocaust and its imagery as a part of its political effort to discredit the scientific community which rejects so-called intelligent design theory.

Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler’s genocidal madness.

Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.

The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world’s leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry.

Abbie Smith is the latest blogger to switch over to ScienceBlogs, taking her ERV blog there.

Of course, there’s a tale there. ERV was formerly hosted on “Blogger.com”. Some time ago, Blogger was snapped up by Google. It’s still a large, free blog hosting site. Abbie was already planning to switch over to Seed’s ScienceBlogs, but was planning on doing so at the end of the semester so as to have some free time to devote to handling the inevitable little problems that crop up.

The schedule got advanced because last week “ERV” at Blogger suddenly disappeared from the Google search engine, and this morning the blog disappeared entirely, with a cryptic message as to how the weblog had been deleted and its name was no longer available for use.

Mark Chu-Carroll of the “Good Math, Bad Math” blog looked into the situation, found out that somehow Blogger’s administration had come to a determination that the “ERV” blog there was supposedly webspam, and vouched for Abbie’s good character. The “ERV” blog at Blogger is now back up.

Abbie is rightly indignant, though, that someone else would have to intercede on her behalf. She was given no notification, no opportunity to rebut a charge that her blog was webspam, no opportunity to collect her data, and — most importantly — no apparent way to contact anyone about the problem.

As I’ve gone over before, Google does have to balance the existence of web security problems against the information that it reveals to legitimate webmasters. However, in my opinion they’ve gone way too far toward the paranoid extreme of choking off communication with people running websites. Maybe it is arguably the correct thing to do with third parties who simply rely upon Google’s ubiquitous search engine to direct people to their sites, and who could be bad guys. I’d argue that there is still some need there for a bit more outreach. But in the case of someone like Abbie Smith, who is using a service provided by Google, there is more responsibility inherent in the relationship than simply sometimes providing a weblog host, and arbitrarily abrogating that relationship without communication and without means of arbitrating the outcome of those decisions. Google needs to figure out if they have what it takes to provide a service to bloggers, and get out if they decide that’s not the role that they want. It is not ethical to use the content generated by bloggers to bolster their bottom line without at least providing some minimal level of interactivity between the blogger and those who administer the blogger’s web presence.

A news report says that actor Wesley Snipes gets a three-year prison sentence for tax evasion.

Tax evaders, like Kent Hovind, should do the time their cases indicate.

But there’s something extra to the Snipes case, according the the report.

“This case cries out for the statutory maximum term of imprisonment, as well as a substantial fine, because of the seriousness of defendant Snipes’ crimes and because of the singular opportunity this case presents to deter tax crimes nationwide,” prosecutors wrote in a memorandum to the judge, as quoted by the AP.

Uh, no. It corrupts our system of jurisprudence if individuals are sentenced based upon “opportunities” and not upon the specific facts of the case. If this advice were followed, obscurity ought to let offenders out on the street, because no one pays attention to them, and anyone with name recognition would have to beware any brush with the law. If the government wants people to know that tax evasion doesn’t work, it should develop a reputation for assiduously tracking down and fairly prosecuting each such case, not taking the cheap route of nailing the occasional celebrity.

We’re watching one of these reality-TV shows with someone doing a survival stint in the Australian outback. Our hero was discussing the lack of water, and just before the commercial break announced, “I’m going to have to drink my own pee.”

The scene faded to black, and the first commercial came on. It was advertising for some brand of beer.

I think the beer brewer should get a refund from their agent.

With the revelation that the producers of Expelled did not obtain permission to use a short segment of John Lennon’s song “Imagine”, the premiere of this movie appears to be a train wreck in progress. Given that they reportedly used the snippet about “imagine there’s no religion” with various nasty visual content from Communist China, it seems unlikely that they will manage to work out a deal with Ono to license the song at this point. Premise Media (PM) is arguing that the snippet meets the requirements for a “fair use” exclusion, or that they have an “educational” movie, or whatever in order to set aside the issue.

Let’s assume that Expelled does actually open tomorrow at a thousand theaters across the country. (We’ll set aside the very real possibility that Ono will seek an injunction against PM.) Given that the Wall Street Journal has raised the issue that the rights clearance procedure at PM is at the least sloppy if not completely incompetent, there will be lots of observers looking for other potential copyright infringement for photos, music, and video clips. Will it stand up to that sort of scrutiny? Will theater owners stand firm with PM as accessories to infringement as further claims are made? I think that we are likely to have an interesting weekend, and not just like the IDC cheerleaders were hoping for, either.

My part of the day’s events here in Tallahassee is done; I had about three minutes to say my piece at a noon press conference on the capitol steps (just in front of the dolphin sculpture). Vic Walczak of the Pennsylvania ACLU was up first, then Mary Ann Fiala, then Sir Harry Kroto, Nobel laureate in chemistry, and then me.

For those of you in or near Tallahassee, there is a panel discussion tonight at 7 PM at the Challenger center featuring Walczak, Kroto, and David Campbell (a Florida science teacher).

The text of my bit is below the fold.

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John Lynch noted the presence of one well-known anti-semite in the interviews. So, you might ask, which naughty atheist did the “Expelled” folks catch out on this unseemly behavior, and how many times did they cut away to goose-stepping Nazis while the interview went on?

Surprise! The anti-semite that Ben Stein shares the big screen with is an “intelligent design” creationism advocate often referred to as an authority on William Dembski’s blog and signer of the Discovery Institute “Dissent from Darwin” list Maciej Giertych. Lynch finds this pearl of Giertych wisdom:

In our civilisation, a righteous person living honestly will not get in conflict with the law, even not knowing it. On the other hand, living in agreement with the letter of the law but dishonestly, derives from the pharisaic attachment to rules but not to ethics. The exploitation of rules, of imprecisely written laws, of gaps in them, of their multitude and inconsistencies, activities on the verge of legality, tax evasion techniques, all formally within the law but unethical, derive from the rabbinical casuistry, from the mentality of deriving ethics from the written law. Yet, such a swindler, acting within the law, has in fact no moral respect for any law. He cannot be compared to the Sabbath traveller sitting on a water bottle, who is also using a convenient interpretation of the Law, but he is doing this in order to fulfil the Law and therefore in full respect for it.

Did the producers bother to give Ben Stein the background on this expert speaking for the “Expelled” conjecture? Did anyone bother to tell Giertych that Kent Hovind is not Jewish?

Here in my hometown of Lakeland, Florida, the headline taking over the front page of the paper concerns the vicious beating of Victoria Lindsay. Lindsay is a teenager with a MySpace page. Something that she put on her MySpace page, what exactly I haven’t managed to find out, triggered eight of her fellow students to take violent action. Six girls aged 14 to 17 and two boys of 16 and 18 years attacked Lindsay at the house of one of them, where Lindsay was staying after a falling-out with her parents. The six girls spent about thirty minutes beating Lindsay, while the two boys kept lookout against them being interrupted. They then put the wounded girl in a car and drove her around Lakeland while threatening her with more bodily harm if she tried to squeal on them. Lindsay had a concussion, eye injuries, and lacerations from the beating. The teenage attackers are all charged with kidnapping, and various are charged with battery and witness tampering. They are being tried as adults, so they can all collect life sentences for the kidnapping charge.

Oh, I forgot to mention… the girls videotaped the beating to release it on MySpace. I’m not sure how exactly they thought that they would escape consequences in this affair, or even whether they gave much consideration to consequences other then trying to threaten Lindsay some more.

William Golding had to place his youngsters descending into tribalism and violence in an artificial setting of a remote island to make his fictional account have that ability for the reader to suspend disbelief. (Though I have to admit that encountering that book at age ten myself I wasn’t all that discriminating on such issues.) It seems that the alienation Golding established by physical distance from other sources of civilization has been achieved with no physical distance required at all in real life.

Remember how Mark Mathis, producer of “Expelled”, kept going on about how the “Crossroads”/Rampant Films thing was what they had in mind while interviewing Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Eugenie Scott, and others, then they decided to chuck all that and go with the “Expelled” concept? It seems that Mathis should have had a session with Ben Stein so that they could make their stories match. Stein was interviewed by the New York Sun and by the WORLD magazine, and there are several interesting things about the content of his responses.

One of the things that has dogged Mathis is the fact that the “expelledthemovie.com” domain was registered at the beginning of March, 2007, about a month earlier than the invitations for interviews went out to Eugenie Scott and PZ Myers. No similar domain seems to have been registered by Mathis for the alleged “Crossroads” concept. Ben Stein adds another piece to the burgeoning chronological evidence stack that argues against taking Mathis at his word. When did Ben Stein get the word that he’d be the front-man for an attack piece? According the WORLD interview, that would be sometime in 2006:

WORLD: How did you get involved with Expelled?

STEIN: I was approached a couple of years ago by the producers, and they described to me the central issue of Expelled, which was about Darwinism and why it has such a lock on the academic establishment when the theory has so many holes. And why freedom of speech has been lost at so many colleges to the point where you can’t question even the slightest bit of Darwinism or your colleagues will spurn you, you’ll lose your job, and you’ll be publicly humiliated. As they sent me books and talked to me about these things I became more enthusiastic about participating.

Plus I was never a big fan of Darwinism because it played such a large part in the Nazis’ Final Solution to their so-called “Jewish problem” and was so clearly instrumental in their rationalizing of the Holocaust. So I was primed to want to do a project on how Darwinism relates to fascism and to outline the flaws in Darwinism generally.

Emphasis added.

So, starting sometime in 2006, Mathis or his fellow producers were engaging Ben Stein with precisely the concept of “Expelled”. There is no mention by Stein of any such thing as “Crossroads” or of being intrigued by the “Crossroads” concept.

And Stein in the New York Sun interview contributes a little something extra to the discussion over the animation used by the “Expelled” project.

Mr. Stein became involved with the film when he was approached by Messrs. Ruloff and Sullivan during pre-production. “They sent me an absolute torrent of information, some of which I read, some of which frankly I did not read,” Mr. Stein said. Intrigued by what he did absorb and by a segment of computer animation commissioned by the producers that depicts life at a cellular level in its nearly infinite complexity, Mr. Stein signed on. “It just became a gigantically bigger project than I even had the slightest clue it was going to be,” he said.

So part of what brought Ben Stein aboard the project was being shown an animation of processes occurring inside the cell… a couple of years ago, if Stein’s statements are in any way consistent. (Hint to Mark Mathis: you can argue for your version of the past by attacking Stein’s credibility in recall of when he was approached for this project.) Now, the whole flap over unauthorized use of the Harvard/XVIVO “Inner Life of the Cell” video didn’t get going until around September, 2007, when IDC advocate William Dembski’s lecture in Oklahoma revealed its use there to people who recognized the source of the animation. It was shortly after Dembski was hit with cease-and-desist requests that the projected release date of “Expelled” was shifted from around February 12th to April 18th, apparently to give time for the copycat animation to be made and edited in to “Expelled”. So essentially the New York Sun gave these folks a pass when they reported,

Intrigued by what he did absorb and by a segment of computer animation commissioned by the producers that depicts life at a cellular level in its nearly infinite complexity

There is no evidence that the producers had commissioned any such animation at the time that Ben Stein was recruited. It appears that the “Expelled” producers were using the Harvard/XVIVO product, “Inner Life of the Cell”, as a recruiting tool for their project. There is evidence that the copycat animation was only “commissioned” relatively recently, certainly long after Ben Stein was signed on to the project.

Remember to visit Expelled Exposed.

When textbooks illustrate crypsis using dead specimens of carbonaria and typica morph peppered moths (Biston betularia) placed on normal bark and soot-covered bark, you get Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Jonathan Wells telling people in online discussion that such illustrations represent “fraud”.

When Ben Stein sets up a lecture room at Pepperdine University and fills it with hired extras representing students, DI Senior Fellow Jonathan Wells says nothing at all about that.

Michael Shermer has the goods on the Pepperdine thing.

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.

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.

Now, one might make an excuse for Wells. Maybe Wells is just not paying attention and the various things happening around “Expelled” simply haven’t come to his attention, and he’d be right up front to show his consistency in denouncing “fraud” wherever it shows up.

Unfortunately, the facts say otherwise. Wells has put in his two cents concerning the very recent flap about charges of copyright infringement and the “Expelled” film:

Expelled does NOT use the Harvard animation. The producers paid a professional to create a new animation that is more accurate than the Harvard one (based on current knowledge of cellular processes). Any similarities between the Expelled animation and the Harvard one are due to the fact that both animations depict many of the same processes.

Wells doesn’t address the issues raised concerning the shared errors in the animations, but notice how hot off the mark Wells is to dismiss that there is any basis to the copyright infringement charges in the “Expelled” case, and how little credit Wells ws willing to extend in the case of the peppered moth crypsis illustration. Is it credible to assert that Wells has not been apprised of the Pepperdine incident? That doesn’t seem likely. Now, even if that were the case, I’m sure that Wells will shortly have that information. Will we then see Wells as loudly proclaiming the fraud-like character of the “Expelled” sequence at Pepperdine as he did for peppered moth crypsis?

I don’t think so.

But I’d love to be proved wrong, with Wells acting on principle here and giving the “Expelled” folks a taste of his displeasure.

Remember to visit Expelled Exposed.

Abbie Smith at ERV has the scoop on this: XVIVO has made the opening legal salvo with a cease-and-desist letter to Premise Media accusing them of copyright infringement concerning the animation showing the interior of a cell used in the film. They request that the disputed animation be removed from the “Expelled” film *before* it makes its commercial debut on April 18th.

Now, that’s a short schedule. Somebody’s going to be out a packet of change over this. It may not even be feasible for Premise Media to alter the film on that timetable and have their big opening, too. There’s speculation that Premise Media may say, ‘damn the lawyers, full steam ahead!’ and simply figure on writing off the financial end of this as a big loss, hoping that they’ll gain martyr cred by doing so. The thing about martyrs, though, is that they not only need to be oppressed, but they are supposed to somehow convey at least a dollop of righteousness along the way. Funny, though, how righteousness just doesn’t seem to be any part of the operating mindset behind the writing, production. or promotion of this film. Getting caught cheating doesn’t make you look like a martyr, it makes you look like a crook.

Hey, maybe Ben Stein will finally get to use Nixon’s most famous line that Ben Stein claims he, Ben Stein, didn’t write.

Update: If the “Expelled” folks think about this for more than five minutes or so, they will do everything in their power to comply with the XVIVO request, including screwing the distribution deal and holding off the premiere for another several months. Why?

Pause and consider.

“Expelled” is a production linked into the persecution stories at the heart of IDC. They have had months of discussions and correspondence with the principal figures of the IDC movement. They likely have recordings of discussions in meetings and other places where all these folks felt free to chat.

There is a serious line of inquiry as to whether there was collusion to infringe on the copyright of XVIVO.

Lawsuits come with the subpeona power of the courts for discovery. Depositions of witnesses are taken under oath. Cross-examination of witnesses is not restricted to a delimited field of questions; anything that could bear upon the credibility or trustworthiness of witnesses in court is fair game for inquiry. The court can compel answering awkward questions with contempt citations if needed.

If this goes to court, what witnesses can Premise Media put on the stand who *wouldn’t* potentially be tainted by the revelation that every single “persecution” story in it is overblown, misleading, or simply false in its particulars?

Premise Media could accomplish what outsiders never have hoped to do: bring about the complete public discrediting of the IDC movement in its most basic claims to personal integrity and suffering in the face of persecution. And it would be a completely self-inflicted wound. All Premise Media needs to do is blow off the XVIVO letter and continue with their opening schedule unaltered.

The FoxNews review by Roger Friedman is in, and it reads like one of those Muppets in the theater balcony wrote it. Skip past the top-of-the-page stuff about Mariah Carey. Down. Further down. Next to “Buy a Link Here”, there it is: “Ben Stein: Win His Career”.

After seeing a new non-fiction film starring Comedy Central’s Ben Stein, you may not only be able to win his money, but also his career.

Stein is that whiny little guy with the monotone voice that makes him seem funny and an unlikely “character” for TV appearances. But that career may be over come April 18 when a movie he co-wrote, narrates and appears in, called “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” is released.

Directed by one Nathan Frankowski, “Expelled” is a sloppy, all-over-the-place, poorly made (and not just a little boring) “expose” of the scientific community. It’s not very exciting. But it does show that Stein, who’s carved out a career selling eye drops in commercials and amusing us on sitcoms, is either completely nuts or so avaricious that he’s abandoned all good sense to make a buck.

To wit: Stein, Frankowski and pals say in “Expelled” that perfectly good scientists and educators are being stigmatized for wanting to teach their students creationism and “intelligent design” — in other words, junk science — in addition to or instead of conventionally accepted Darwinism. You see, Stein, like some other celebrities, finally has shown his true colors and they aren’t so pretty.

There’s more good stuff. Go read.

Hat tip: Ross Myers.

Kevin Miller has a writer’s credit on the upcoming entertainment from Ben Stein, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”. To his credit, he has been engaging people in online discussion. To Miller’s shame, though, he seems to have a penchant for making unsubstantiated personal aspersions, in this case going after me as being a “scoundrel”, basically taking a statement from Michael Crichton as license to libel.

It’s a tiresome, shopworn tactic, but I’ve come to expect tiresome, shopworn tactics from “intelligent design” creationism advocates. Unable to defend his assertions with evidence, scholarship, and logic, Kevin Miller descends to name-calling. In years of discussions with various IDC cheerleaders, I’ve seen the same progression from making what appear, superficially, to be arguments based on principles and about concepts to simple nay-saying and name-calling, but Miller’s retreat into schoolyard bullying proceeded faster than most.

So above the fold here I’ll give a short version of the specific post, then I’ll lay out the exchange as it stands to date. Most of what I’ve entered has been in a thread at the Antievolution.org bulletin board. Miller’s attack on me concerns my use of the word “consensus” and not spitting after I say it. The way he develops his attack is via this title and a long quotation from novelist and gadfly Michael Crichton:

Consensus science, the first refuge of scoundrels–and Wesley R. Elsberry

Miller’s readers are not treated to any exposition of how I have had the dastardly bad taste to dabble in consensus. I’ll have to provide the context Miller fails to convey. When Miller objected to my use of “consensus” in a reply, I clarified my meaning as follows:

[Miller:] But you of all people should know that consensus science is like patriotrism–the last refuge of a scoundrel.

That statement alludes to facts not in evidence. The scoundrels I’m familiar with in the developing story of the forthcoming propaganda film are the producers, and it appears, the writer. The evidence speaks clearly that false claims are made in the movie and that false claims are made in promotion of the movie. It’s not just one “interpretation” that John Lynch was told that the Tempe, AZ screening had been cancelled when the promoter knew full well that the screening would proceed.

I’m not talking, as Kevin has to be, about “consensus” imposed artificially from the top down. We scientists know what that looks like. It looks like the Inquisition that harassed Galileo. It looks like Lysenko’s discarding of genetics and the evolutionary biology of the west in favor of a Stalinist form of Lamarckism. (Scientists died for standing up to Lysenko, by the way.) It looks like a socio-political movement that will do anything and call its arguments by any label to force them into public school classrooms without having passed muster via the scientific process.

What I was pointing out is that a scientific consensus is different, it proceeds from the evidence through hypotheses that are tested, and a community that criticizes the arguments until what convinces that community is the consilience of evidence and theory, not the personal authority of either any one individual or even the collective authority of the community. The process doesn’t always proceed smoothly, as Kuhn noted in discussing paradigm shifts. But what happens even then is driven by the various and sundry individuals of the scientific community, each of whom by Kevin’s earlier (and apparently abandoned) argument having their own separate worldview and thus without any expectation under Kevin’s argument that they could possibly agree upon some one view, and yet that is exactly what the history of science shows us has happened time and again.

I think that is a perfectly reasonable response not only to Miller’s specific objection but also Crichton’s general polemic. Sure, top-down ideologically-driven “consensus”, like Lysenkoism, is justly excoriated. But consensus that follows from the evidence and argument representing the hard work of scientific research is not that sort of thing. Confusing and conflating the two does nothing but further the aims of propagandists.

One can almost feel empathy for Miller. He’s in a bad spot. His conclusion about “Big Science” goes ‘poof’ if he admits that the conclusions of science proceed from evidence and tested theories convincing the scientific community rather than “Big Science” issuing an edict from the top-down that things must be so. It is so obviously the case that the bottom-up view of consensus is the one applicable to how science works that Miller can’t keep to a topical discussion, and instead has found it convenient to trash-talk me. I just noticed the category into which Miller placed the post in question: “Mofos”. I have exalted company there: Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, and Christopher Hitchens. Although I have disagreements with them on the relationship of science and religion, I’m thinking that I’d far prefer their company to that of Kevin Miller.

OK, so now for those who care about the picayune back-and-forth that is the background to Miller’s attack on my person, read on. Everybody else can figure out something useful to do.

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This New York Times article talks about a modern work hazard, the stress of blogging for pay. Apparently, a couple of high-profile technology bloggers have kicked the bucket in an untimely fashion. One of them left an email that may stand as his last words: “Have come down with something. Resting now posts to resume later today or tomorrow.” If that were true, it would be a truly astounding technical feat.

While I’m not in the particular always-on rat race described in the article, I can say that having a research position does offer some of the same potential causes of stress. There is the concern that time is passing, and there is always more to do. I’m not putting myself in the reduced sleep-cycle hole that some of the bloggers described in the article do in order to steal a few minutes’ march on the competition. But I have to admit that over the past year, I have often skipped trying to add content here on my blog in order to have more time for the research.

I would be interested, I think, in finding out more about blogging for pay. I don’t think the bleeding-edge news story angle is for me, but I think I could do something in the way of higher-quality considered analysis of various things ranging from technology through media and politics. If you are looking for that sort of person, you know where to find me.

“Didymos” on the AE BB reports on email correspondence with the “Expelled” producers concerning pre-release screenings. Apparently, they have tightened up signing up for the few remaining screenings. But another aspect to the promotion was revealed as well:

Thank you for your interest in Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. If you have signed up for the Expelled Challenge then this is how it works.

Organize a group ticketing event at your local theater and take your group to see the film. Once your group has seen the film, collect the ticket stubs from everyone that went with your group. We will provide and address to mail those ticket stubs along with the name of your group, the date, time, and location of when you went to see the film. The group that responds with the most ticket stubs will be given a $10,000 grant.

This sounds like a different kickback scheme than what has been offered before as a kickback scheme aimed at Christian schools.

Welcome to the
Expelled Challenge web site
where, as a Christian school or a Christian home school group, you will have a chance to win up to a $10,000 donation while educating your students, parents, and staff of the controversy that is surrounding the Intelligent Design and evolution debate. This is an extremely important project for those of us who believe our world was designed by a creator and not an act of random chance.

What is the Expelled Challenge?

To engage Christian schools and home school groups to get as many students, parents, and faculty from their school/group out to see Ben Stein’s new movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (opening in theaters April 2008).

# Here are some suggestions as to how to do that: Organize a school field trip and invite parents to attend as well.
# Offer extra credit to your students to go on their own time.

What is the reward?

The reward is two-fold. First, your students will encounter firsthand the debate between Intelligent Design and evolution, and also the importance of knowing what you believe and standing firm in what you believe. Second, by collecting the ticket stubs from your students, faculty, staff and parents, you could be eligible to win a $10,000 donation.

Each school/home group that registers through the link below and submits their ticket stubs will be eligible for a donation as funds permit, but the school that submits the most ticket stubs will win a donation of $10,000!

Please click on the link at the bottom of this page to register your school to take the Expelled Challenge and tell us how many ticket stubs you think your school will submit. Registering is very important as only schools who register will be eligible for donated funds. Please note, if funds are available, they will be given according to the order in which the schools are registered. Deadline for registration has been extended to April 18th, 2008.

Click Here to REGISTER NOW!

The “Expelled Challenge FAQ” has been altered. The listing of amounts schools can earn based on number of ticket stubs turned in? Gone. It appears that there is a directional evolutionary trend toward dwarfism in this kickback scheme. The FAQ emphasizes the tenuous nature of the kickback funding, as it it comes from a third party source and is not controlled by the promoters who are running the scheme:

Q: How are the funds for the donations being provided?

A: Being that this film is viewed as history changing, funds have been provided by the Faith and Arts Community Endeavor project, specifically for Christian schools, organizations, and groups to encourage them to see the film and engage these Important issues.

Q: Will all schools who submit their ticket stubs be given a donation?

A: The goal of the project is to help Christian groups be able to see the film. Funds for the Expelled Challenge will only be distributed to those who register through the Expelled Challenge website you were just on and on a first come, first served basis in the order in which they were registered. Bottom line, funds are limited – register as soon as you can!

All indications are that funds behind this are not just “limited”, but are almost non-existent. I’m sure that they will pony up that “winning” $10K chunk to a Christian school, but if your group is not confirmed to be a Christian school, or comes in 10th place instead of 1st, or signed up just before the movie opening, don’t get your hopes up for anything but a “Thanks for participating in the Expelled Challenge! We regret…” letter.

Congratulations go out to PBS and Nova for winning the Peabody Award for “Judgment Day”, the episode documenting the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case.

Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial NOVA/WGBH Educational Foundation, Vulcan Productions Inc., The Big Table Film Company

The centerpiece of this thoughtful, topical edition of NOVA was the recreation, verbatim, of key testimony and argument from a six-week trial in Pennsylvania that served as a crash course in modern evolutionary theory, the evidence for evolution and the nature of science.

We had most of the plaintiffs’ side of the case on hand to view the broadcast last November. We gathered together at Lauri Lebo and Jeff Pepper’s beer can museum near York, Pennsylvania. We were companionably squeezed in there for the broadcast.