Expelled!
gregladen | June 25, 2011Apparently, when you make a movie, there's this box of stuff left over that someone has to own. It can include things like the original unedited film/video, from which the director and editors selected/cherry picked what they wanted to include, as well as various correspondences and documents and stuff.
The company that produced that horrid piece of drek known as "Expelled! No Intelligence Allowed" has gone out of business (a little Darwinian process at work, may we assume?) and the box of stuff that resulted from that film is now on the auction block. The auctioneer's gavel will strike this…
gregladen | October 10, 2008After both the state and federal courts rejected the attempts of Yoko Ono Lennon and EMI Records to enjoin the showing of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed on the ground it used a 15-second fragment of John Lennon's Imagine, all of the plaintiffs in both cases have now withdrawn their claims and dismissed their cases.
Bad for evolution, but probably good for the fair use doctrine. Here's some details.
gregladen | June 11, 2008This just in:
Perhaps he was inspired by the turnout for Young People Fucking, or maybe he misses all that media attention he got after taking credit for getting C-10 through the House with nary a peep over the controversial changes to the film tax rebate. Whatever the reason, Reverend Charles McVety is headed back to the capital to co-host a private screening of a very different kind of film: Expelled: The Movie, the controversial anti-Darwin documentary that purports to expose a sinister anti-creationism bias within the mainstream scientific community.
The details are HERE.
gregladen | May 22, 2008Update on the Ono Law Suit ...
As you most certainly know, Yoko Ono and her two sons have sued the producers of Expelled! for their use without permission of the song Imagine by John Lennon.
Well, it appears as though a ruling from the court is imminent. AP is lubing the shoots with a retrospective summary of the suit.
Ono is not asking that the film be pulled, but rather, that the song she controls the rights to not be used.
At a hearing in U.S. District Court in Manhattan this week, the filmmakers' lawyer, Anthony T. Falzone, said that if the judge granted Ono's request for an…
gregladen | May 8, 2008 You Can't Hide
...I landed a job in Kansas. Finally, a state with some horse sense! But even here the Darwinian octopus had insinuated its fetid tentacles, depriving the good and open-minded high school students of the state the right hear to both sides of the story. Even when they provided a forum for polite discussion of both sides of the issue, presided over by some of the most learned and free-thinking right-wingers in the state, still they turned up their noses....
I always suspected this ... The clues were subtle, but they were there. Have a look.
gregladen | April 29, 2008Expelled!, the so called documentary, has a web site on MySpace. Recently they ran a poll asking if Intelligent Design should be taught in schools or not. The results of that poll overwhelming indicate "no" ... with 420 thousand "nay" votes and fewer than one thousand in favor of violating the tenets of the Constitution of the United States of America.
So The Expelled! web site meisters removed the poll.
Of coruse, they are not that smart, so they kinda screwed it up. You will be interested to know that the poll is still located here.
I'm getting tired of this unpatriotic crap.
gregladen | April 29, 2008
Second commandment: Try not to be a moron.
(FYI: observed instances of speciation)
Hat Tip: TUIBG and Julia
gregladen | April 27, 2008With all this talk about Expelled!, the creationist movie, I thought it was about time to resurrect the review I wrote many moons ago of Flock of Dodos by Randy Olson, along with some updated information.
Flock of Dodos is a much better film than Expelled!, and explores the same issue, with somewhat different conclusions. So, for instance, if you are going to use one of them in a school or church to explain the ID/Evolution controversy, I recommend Flock.
(That's a picture of Randy with some big birds at the Tribeca Film Festival.) Plus, since its been out a bit longer, Flock of Dodos is…
gregladen | April 23, 2008Despite the fact that the producers of Expelled! have the most nefarious of motives in mind, and that we can expect more from them (we are waiting for the other shoe to drop), it is interesting to note how many conversations this documentary about Intelligent Design Creationism has sparked. Ultimately, the intended purpose of Expelled! is to silence real scientists and set back scientific research that is on the verge of filling one of the most important "gaps" in which the Christian God of the theistic evolutionist currently lives. In the long run, conversations that arise from movies like…
gregladen | April 23, 2008Evolving in Kansas provides a lie-fighting fact revealing review of Expelled!'s showing in Iowa.
The film debuted at the Varsity Theater in Ames, Iowa on Friday night (April 18). Ames is important because it is the home of Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez, the pro-ID astronomer, who lost his tenure bid at Iowa State. He contends that it was purely because of his Intelligent Design work, while his opponents contend that ID either was not a factor or it was not the most important factor.
In any case, the headline of the Discovery Institute reads "Expelled in Iowa gives Standing Ovation to Persecuted…
gregladen | April 22, 2008Now that Expelled! No Intelligence Allowed, the movie, exists, we wait not so quietly for the other shoe to drop. I'll tell you in a moment what that other shoe is going to look like and where it is going to drop. First I want to make a couple of topically linked but otherwise discombobulated comments.
First, I want to express my heartfelt warm fuzzies for all those of you who have come out to tell me "Yes, Greg, you are an asshole, but that's OK. In fact, it's what we love about you" and shit. Appreciate it.
Second, you did notice that the take for Expelled! fell short of the expected…
gregladen | April 22, 2008Chris Mooney has made an "appeal to authority" (Randy Olson) in asserting that Expelled is a success by Hollywood standards, and this may be correct. PZ Myers and his comet tail may have increased that success as per Mooney's Framing TOE, but the reverse is also true: the science blogging share of the blogosphere has expanded and participation in that community has significantly increased. Oh, and nobody understands me.
What Chris actually does is to cite Olson, who in turn makes the argument. One could ask why Chris did not make the argument himself because the argument should stand on…
gregladen | April 20, 2008Chris Mooney, who every day seems to transmogrify more and more into a creationist apologist, makes the case that Expelled! is a box office success. He seems almost giddy about it in his post on the topic. I'm sure Chris will be blaming PZ Myers, me, the rest of us people for part of this. But see below.
Elsewhere, and in contrast, we find evidence that Expelled is "on track to be a box-office bomb" (from Laelaps).
There is other evidence of Expelled! lack of success.
Playing in 1,052 theaters, the pic distributed by Rocky Mountain Pictures earned $1.2M Friday for what should be a $3.4M…
gregladen | April 20, 2008Steve Mirsky does a little Darwin Quote Mining reversal exercise in a recent post called "Never You Mine: Ben Stein's Selective Quoting of Darwin:"
One of the many egregious moments in the new Ben Stein anti-evolution film "Expelled" is the truncation of a quote from Charles Darwin so that it makes him appear to give philosophical ammunition to the Nazis. Steve Mirsky reports.
Steve rightly corrects stein, but does not put the quote mining in sufficiently broad context. So I do:
The original text from Darwin that Stein refers to in Expelled! expresses Darwin's ambivalence about the social…
gregladen | April 17, 2008The Seattle Times, which as far as I know is a regular newspaper, has published a guest editorial by Bruce Chapman in their opinion section.
Chapman has published a lot of editorials in the Seattle Times, and in sum, they make him look like (I'm just sayin') he's on the payroll of both Microsoft and the Discovery Institute
His editorial is loaded with the usual creationist crap ... claims that Darwin was forced on him in college, noting Haeckel's embryos, quote mining from Dawkins, etc.
...Darwinists have avoided debates, and in universities have stooped to denial of academic tenure,…
gregladen | April 16, 2008At this moment (noonish central time, April 16th) if you type "Expelled" into a google search, the results in order are:
1: The expelled movie site.
2: Another page on the expelled movie dite
3: The wikipedia entry for Expelled
4: A blog by PZ Myers at Pharyngula for when he got expelled from Expelled
5: The National Center for Science Education site Expelled Exposed.
gregladen | April 11, 2008And the review is very negative. Of Expelled, as well as of PZ Myers and atheists in general.
The man made famous by Ferris Bueller, ... quickly wades into waters far too deep for him. He makes all the usual mistakes nonscientists make whenever they try to take down evolution, asking, for example, how something as complex as a living cell could have possibly arisen whole from the earth's primordial soup. The answer is it couldn't--and it didn't. Organic chemicals needed eons of stirring and slow cooking before they could produce compounds that could begin to lead to a living thing. More…
grrlscientist | March 23, 2008tags: Expelled!, Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, religious wingnuts, christian fundamentalists, cultism, streaming video
This streaming video reveals the unadulterated stupidity of the religious wingnuts; their poor public relations skills, their artlessness, their shocking lack of creative abilities, along with their unabashed duplicity. Oh, by the way, Happy Easter! [9:30].