Expelled From Expelled

When I noticed that Ben Stein’s new Creationist movie previewed a shot of Richard Dawkins, I already knew that the movie must have used some amount of deception in getting him to participate. Dawkins had vowed years ago that he would not do interviews for any anti-evolution films or documentaries because of an incident in which he gave an interview that was edited to look as if he couldn’t give an answer to some questions that were given to him. Sure enough, Dawkins was told that he was participating in a movie called “Crossroads”, which was suppossed to be about an honest discussion about evolution vs. intelligent design, not about scientists getting expelled for beliving in Creationism. Sure enough, Dawkins’ opinions were once again purposely misconstrued, such as when he goes into a thought experiment about how even if Earth was seeded by some other intelligent life form like aliens, then the aliens themselves would have had to evolved from something themselves. This was turned into: “What? Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN INTELLIGENT DESIGN.” “Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN ALIENS FROM OUTER SPACE.” On top of that, when Dawkins and another scientist from the movie, PZ Myers, booked seats together for the screening of the movie, Myers was himself EXPELLED from the movie theatre! Lies about the two being “gate-crashers” were subsequently spun despite the fact that the producer has gone on record saying that “of course” he had seen Dawkins and allowed him to attend because “he had handled himself fairly honorably” (as if Myers was somehow less honorable in the way he stood in line next to Dawkins). According to Dawkins, the movie is terribly boring and attempts to tie Darwinism to the Nazis, which seems about as intelletually dishonest as one can get. All of this is pretty hilarious. The religious right have finally got their Hollywood documentary and they’ve managed to raise the bar of deceitfulness and general douchebagginess far higher than anything Michael Moore could have done to “Donation of Constantine” levels.

http://richarddawkins.net/article,2394,Lying-for-Jesus,Richard-Dawkins

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c39jYgsvUOY>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c39jYgsvUOY

The Islamofascists are Coming!

This is an interesting article on how Conservatives tend to think that Islamic terrorists like Osama Bin Laden are somehow going to invade America and turn it into a Muslim state. I myself have noticed how frequently I have to remind conservatives that even the Nazis, the Japanese, and the Soviets were never able to build up enough resources to even attempt such a concept, and they had, you know, an army. And a navy. And an air force. Yes, I know it’s all shocking, but those sorts of things are necessary to even attempt to completely conquer a global superpower like the U.S. The terrorists are in for a long walk if they’re really going to “follow us home” as Bush insinuates.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/08/13/simon/index.html

Chomsky and Hitchens

Here’s an interview of Noam Chomsky and Christopher Hitchens from back in ’92.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ysQPtAOJjY&mode=related&search=

Hitchens wrote a defense of Chomsky…

http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/other/85-hitchens.html

…But after 9/11 the two crossed swords:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011008/hitchens

http://www.counterpunch.org/chomskyhitch.html

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011015/hitchens20011004

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200112/hitchens

Glenn Beck

What do you do with a hard-line conservative recovering from substance abuse after losing his mother and brother to suicide? Give him a liberal-bashing show on CNN Headline News of course.

Rush Limbaugh has long been considered too offensive for television. He couldn’t even keep his quibs about racial bias silent as a football commentator for ESPN and was let go in 2003 after suggesting that the media only gave positive performance reviews for the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback because he was black (something Rush still bitterly complains about constantly on his radio program). Yet Glenn Beck, who often describes himself as a recovering alcohol and drug addict, runs a show on CNN Headline News that is almost a carbon copy of the Rush Limbaugh radio program. Now, we all know that accepting Jesus or Muhammed or some higher power has long been considered one of the unwritten rules of substance recovery, and in Beck’s case, it was the power of Joseph Smith who helped him overcome his troubles, but only lately has mental instability become accepted as a qualification for news commentary.

By his own admission, Beck has not completely come to terms with his own emotional demons within himself, yet he has taken the attitude that he has figured the rest of the world out (the rest of the world being far less complex than his own mind). You see, the UN is like the Third Reich, environmentalism is the new eugenics, and Al Gore is Hitler. No doubt many manic depressives agree with these amazing and thought-provoking theories. And since those crazy left-wing hippies at CNN have slowly begun to realize that a great deal of the American population hold similar ideas to those who are mentally ill, they decided to give him his own news platform to propell these wonderful ideas throughout the American conciousness.

Here’s what Beck had to say on the subject during his radio show:

“Al Gore’s not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization. The goal is global carbon tax. The goal is the United Nations running the world. That is the goal. Back in the 1930s, the goal was get rid of all of the Jews and have one global government… You got to have an enemy to fight. And when you have an enemy to fight, then you can unite the entire world behind you, and you seize power. That was Hitler’s plan. His enemy: the Jew. Al Gore’s enemy, the U.N.’s enemy: global warming… Then you get the scientists — eugenics. You get the scientists — global warming. Then you have to discredit the scientists who say, ‘That’s not right.’ And you must silence all dissenting voices. That’s what Hitler did.”

Now you know he’s up to date, since it was only a couple of months ago that conservatives found out that climate scientists were fudging their data in order to get more grants. The new common knowledge that disproves global warming is that all the scientists are fudging their data because they want to globalize the world under the U.N. This of course, has long been predicted by conservative radio-show prophets who forsaw that the Anti-Christ would come and try to take over the world through the U.N. This proves that the Bible tells us that America must only commit itself to its own interests and not allow devil-worshipping institutions like the World Court take control away from our soverign rights.

Of course, there are a few minor problems with this comparison. One is Hitler was head of his government whereas Al Gore is not. Another is climate science is peer-reviewed by other scientists from around the world rather than political appointees of one nation. But in this case, nearly all the climate scientists are in on it. So it’s no wonder that the Bush Administration has been forced to continuously block reports from their own agency:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0927-10.htm

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6341451/

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/06/03/tech/main510920.shtml

Obviously, since eugenics was once considered “science,” we can never rely on this undemocratic form of tyranny ever again. This would explain other “scientific” reports that the Bush Administration has so wisely blocked, like this one on health care that was blocked in 2006 for “being too political.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/28/AR2007072801420.html?hpid=topnews

Obviously, liberals are no more interested in scientific purity than conservatives. Take their irrational stand against sociobiology, the idea that IQ is determined by evolution. Richard Hernnstein’s book The Bell Shaped Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, funded by the conservative think-tank, The Heritage Foundation, in 1994, argued that classes were becoming more divided by intelligence rather than racial or social disadvantage. Conservatives touted the book as proof that Affirmative Action was unnecessary while liberals roundly criticized it. So if liberals could take such an anti-scientific stance against eugenics then, how do we know they won’t take an anti-scientific stance for eugenics in the future?

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1252/is_n3_v122/ai_16424249

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociobiology