If you haven't been keeping up, let me give you a quick heads up about this whole Expelled brouhaha.
A bunch of lying Creationist cultists decided to make a film whining about how oppressed Creationist "scientists" are. Ben Stein got involved somehow. They hoodwinked a bunch of real scientists into talking to them. They excluded any scientists who were religious but accept evolution. They hyped the film to evangelicals, but barred reviewer, journalists, or the scientists who are in the film from seeing it. They expropriated copyrighted material. They lied a lot.
But really, the part that bothers me the most is that they are trying to link evolutionary biology with the Holocaust, which is bad enough, but they don't even believe it. It is strictly a scare-tactic. If they believed it, then perhaps they would be less anti-semitic.
If you want to see the details and haven't been keeping up, just use Expelled as a search term at ScienceBlogs, but start here.
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Today, for the first time, I saw the "Expelled" commercial on the History Channel. It was very surreal. Having kept up with the film and the hoopla surrounding it for quite awhile, I think my mind somehow convinced me that it only existed in the Internet, so seeing it in "real" life was just ... strange.
It wasn't a very convincing commercial, either, being vague about it's intentions and silly in it's stereotypes (you've got to love the asshole science teacher with the WAAAAAACKY hair!). I know Ben Stein is a pretend funnyman, but they'd have done better to skip the sad attempt at comedy and try and play up the "controversial documentary about the struggle between science and religion" angle.
You may want to check out the interview the Scientific American did with Mathis. That is, if you hadn't already...
They've put the whole conversation - a little over one hour of Q&A.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-conversation-with-mark-mathis
P.S.: I'm a recent subscriber of this blog, and I agree with you: Bill Maher is a Crank... funny crank, but crank nonetheless. :)
Also readers might want to look at the YouTube preview (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOkneEH0Hok)
The most important thing about this movie is that it's EVEN WORSE THAN YOU THINK (much worse in fact)...
You're creeping me out PAL. You have started reading my freaking mind. I'm beginning to feel extraneous.
Well, if you read each others' work enough...
Also, I was following commands from our Overlord (no, not the robot ones, the Minnesota ones.
beware the googlebomb. A commenter in pz's page mentioned it. when you do link to the site, change the link somewhat, take off the italics, add a period, comma, etc to the link text... google has very smart AI that might detect this huge flood of referring sites that are disparate and assume that there's a slashdot effect of sorts, and sort of shut down search results that relate expelledexposed.com
Googlebombs. So funny that pz has that much power.
I've been out of the loop for a while, so i haven't been commenting. If you ever need a person to do data entry or research for you, call on me, PalMD... i could use some coin :-)
Slate reviews the latest in crankery:
Isn't being "skeptical of the skeptics" one of the sure signs of crankery?
This is his book-jacket promise: to "turn the scientific community's cherished skepticism back on itself."