Here are some quick, simple things you can do right now.

• The Florida Senate Education committee is meeting this afternoon to consider their bogus “academic freedom” bill. Florida Citizens for Science has a link to a very good analysis of the bill; it basically declares the bill pointless, vague, and self-defeating. You might try calling your Florida representative — the link has a list — and urging them to recognize the Bill Analysis and Fiscal Impact Statement of the Professional Staff of the Education Pre-K-12 Committee, and kill SB 2692.

• The New Humanist has an online poll (yeah, we know how valid those are) that asks Do you think the story [about getting evicted from a screening] could amount to good publicity for Expelled? Vote what you think.

  Amusingly, it points out that the fourth most popular blog post in the entire world is mine — and this is what the movie producers are bragging about.

• Josh Timonen reviews Expelled. He was one of the guests we brought along to the movie, and he got in. There’s not much to do there, but you can read the post and comment.

The producers of Expelled have spent a couple of days sweating over damage control, I guess. They’ve shut down or delayed all the pending screenings of their movie, and now they’ve issued a remarkably dishonest press release. The mendacity is astonishing in its scope; somebody tell me, is this “framing”?

Something amazing happened yesterday. The controversy around Premise Media’s upcoming movie Ben Stein’s EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed became the hottest topic in the blogosphere. According to BlogPulse, a service of Nielsen Buzzmetrics, the issue held the number one slot throughout the day on Monday, March 24th (http://www.blogpulse.com). There were also over 800 results on Technorati (www.technorati.com).

Well, yes, it was HUGE. I know, because I was the recipient of much of the buzz. Most of those links were not congratulating Expelled on their success, they were laughing at their hypocrisy and incompetence, they were linking to me, and they were spreading the news that this was a creationist propaganda film run by particularly clumsy ideologues. It was a hot topic, all right.

Mathis continued, “I hope PZ’s experience has helped him see the light. He is distraught because he could not see a movie. What if he wasn’t allowed to teach on a college campus or was denied tenure? Maybe he will think twice before he starts demanding more professors be blacklisted and expelled simply because they question the adequacy of Darwin’s theory.”

I wasn’t distraught. At worst, I felt a little guilty that I’d escaped a bad movie while my friends and family were stuck with watching it.

I haven’t demanded expulsions or blacklists — I will proudly continue to demand competence. Unlike watching a movie, being awarded a professorship should require some substantial understanding of a discipline; does Mathis really think that the position of teacher and researcher ought to be simply handed to people for showing up, no matter what their qualifications?

They were also aware that Dawkins, who oddly used his formal surname “Clinton” instead of Richard to sign up, was in attendance.

No, this is not at all true. Richard Dawkins was in attendance as my unnamed guest; the reservation form had asked for my name and affiliation, and only asked how many (up to three) guests I would be bringing with me. There was no public announcement anywhere that he would be attending. Also, although he was prepared to show his passport, he wasn’t asked for it at the door.

Also, what kind of illiterate is writing this press release? Dawkins surname is Dawkins. Slow down, bozos, you’re in such a frantic hurry you haven’t even bothered to proofread.

Recognizing the opportunity to make a point of the inconvenience and pain that they, and others like them, have caused to numerous scientists and educators, the decision was made beforehand to deny Myers access to the film if he actually showed up.

Yet another revision of their story…if this were true, why not ban every evolutionary biologist? Their rationale applies just as well to Dawkins as it does to me. Also note that Mathis previously admitted to banning me on a whim: “You should know that I invited Michael shermer to a screening at NRB in Nashville. He came and is writing a review for scientific American. I banned pz because I want him to pay to see it. Nothing more.“

Someday, they’ll settle on one story, but it won’t matter — they’ve left too long a trail of revisionist excuse-making.

Executive Producer Logan Craft noted: “EXPELLED makes it clear that academic freedom is at stake. Yet Dawkins and his friends continue to misrepresent the film and slander the producers. It is obvious that they do not want to debate the real issues raised in the movie.”

What misrepresentations? It’s a movie that blames the Holocaust on Darwin — it’s stupid and foolish. How have the producers been slandered? They’re the ones lying at every step. This is their movie, in one perfect picture:

Myers has apparently been asking supporters to sneak into the different private screenings for many weeks. After being denied his chance to see the movie, Myers blogged about his experience and expressed his outrage.

Errm, what? I haven’t asked anyone to sneak into screenings. I haven’t even asked them to sign up for them, as I did. This claim is as complete a fabrication as anything else in this press release.

As for “expressing [my] outrage”, that’s absurd. I laughed and laughed, and had trouble maintaining my normally sober decorum in a public place as I left the theater. Outrage? Judge for yourself.

The only other thing remarkable about their collection of lies is how desperate they sound — you can practically smell the flop sweat.

The volume of email coming into my mailbox is a bit overwhelming right now — that silly story about getting expelled from Expelled was funny enough that it got picked up all over the world, an opportunity that you’d think some communications experts would use advantageously … but that’s another argument. There has been an uptick in nasty “I-will-pray-for-you-and-laugh-when-you-roast-in-hell” messages, but the majority have been positive, with a lot saying they like the site and are going to be return readers. This is not going to be an all-Expelled-all-the-time blog, however, despite the fact that right now most of my non-spam email seems to be about Expelled. Here, then, in one place, are some of the more interesting recent articles I’ve been sent about the fiasco, and then we’ll move on for the rest of the day.

• Amanda Gefter got into a screening and reinforces our opinions: it’s a poorly made movie that clumsily tries to associate evolution with Hitler, and that the producer, Mark Mathis, is a bullying control freak. She also makes an excellent point: the Intelligent Design movement has been desperate to publicly distance itself from religion, yet this movie argues that ID is religious.

• Scott Hatfield digs into the background of the Expelled team. It’s nutty fundagelical Christian kooks all the way down, with not an iota of science expertise among them. I know. That is so surprising.

• Speaking of a complete absence of knowledge…ah, Uncommon Descent. UD has been having so much fun with this story, especially since one of our local sciencebloggers gave them some useful apologetics. Unfortunately for them, if you read the succession of accounts they give — and do note, none of these people were there — they are mutually contradictory and completely divorced from the facts. Trust me, their kind of sloppy, speculative, and false approach to a recent incident accurately parallels their explanations of life’s origins, too.

Watch this appalling video of homeschoolers misusing the Denver museum to promote creationism. Aside from the general pattern of lies from the tour guides, two things jumped out at me.

The really awful pedagogy. Over and over again, the creationist says some stock phrase and then pauses, waiting for his kids to fill in the missing word. This is simply demanding rote learning. Similarly, he leads the kids in asking a good question — “how do you know?” — while training them to ignore any answers. Right there on the wall is a description of radiometric dating methods, for instance, and they turn their back on it.

Then there is the twisted logic. T. rex has big sharp teeth; they know, though, that he was a vegetarian, because “if this creature was designed to eat meat from the very start, what would he have to do until Adam and Eve sinned, and death entered the world? What would he have to do? Fast and pray for the Fall.” Oh, and of course, he then says, “Is that likely? Everyone look at me and say…<pause>no. Try that with me…no.”

This is child abuse. Those kids are getting their heads stuffed with ignorance.

At least this news report is unsympathetic.

(via Sandwalk)

My account of the affair at the Mall of America has been confirmed by none other than the movie producer, who wrote to Denyse O’Leary:

You should know that I invited Michael shermer to a screening at NRB in Nashville. He came and is writing a review for scientific American. I banned pz because I want him to pay to see it. Nothing more.

This is what I’ve been saying all along; I was not “unruly”, nor was I “gatecrashing”; Mathis saw me there, and on a petty, arbitrary, vindictive whim decided to have me thrown out without legitimate cause. It really is that simple. That is how creationists operate.

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Hey, now Mathis repeats the same thing in IHE.

Mathis later confirmed in an e-mail that he had barred Myers from the screening. “Yes, I turned Mr. Myers away. He was not an invited guest of Premise Media. This was a private screening of an unfinished film. I could have let him in, just as I invited Michael Shermer to a screening in Nashville. Shermer is in the film as well. But, in light of Myers’ untruthful blogging about Expelled I decided it was better to have him wait until April 18 and pay to see the film. Others, notable others, were permitted to see the film. At a private screening it’s my call.

“Unlike the Darwinist establishment, we expell no one.”

Unless it’s someone they don’t like.

(The IHE article isn’t very good — it’s the usual media mush that runs away from the idea of actually calling idiocy idiocy.)

I was wrong — it’s not the Harvard multimedia video. It’s an independently generated copy. I grabbed a few images from the DVD I got at my truncated visit to the Expelled screening, and here, for instance, is the segment that shows that striking kinesin motor protein towing a vesicle down a microtubule. This is the version in the Expelled movie:

Now here’s an equivalent frame from the actual Harvard video.

Now I’m embarrassed to have mistaken one for the other, since the Expelled version is of much lower resolution and quality. However, do notice that they both have roughly the same layout and the same elements in view; this is a remarkable, umm, coincidence, since these are highly edited, selected renderings, with many molecules omitted … and curiously, they’ve both left out the same things.

Another curious coincidence: you’ve heard of the concept of plagiarized errors, the idea that the real tell-tale of a copy is when it’s the mistakes that are duplicated, in addition to the accuracies. In this case, I previously criticized the Harvard video for a shortcut. That kinesin molecule is illustrated showing a stately march, step by step, straight down the microtubule. Observations of kinesin show it’s more complex, jittering back and forth and advancing stochastically. That’s a simplification in the Harvard video that is also present in Expelled‘s version.

It’s clear that what they did was brainlessly copy what they saw in the original. I don’t know whether this is actionable anymore — that they slapped together a look-alike video to cover their butts makes the issue much more complicated.

Hmmm. I should have thought the powerful voices of communications experts shrieking at Richard Dawkins to hide under his bed would have had some effect, but no…he’s gone ahead and written his review of Expelled. And lo, in the camp of the Framers, there was much wailing and weeping and grinding of teeth, and rending of garments, and epic despair, because surely this will cause the destruction of Science.

The New York Times has weighed in, and they contacted the producers of Expelled…and what do you know, they’re still scrambling to find a credible story. They haven’t succeeded yet.

Mark Mathis, a producer of the film who attended the screening, said that “of course” he had recognized Dr. Dawkins, but allowed him to attend because “he has handled himself fairly honorably, he is a guest in our country and I had to presume he had flown a long way to see the film.”

Unbelievable. So basically it’s a baseless implication that I would be a troublemaker, and the arrogant and absurd assumption that Dawkins flew to Minneapolis from Oxford to see their preview of the movie.

Lying is just a reflex for them at this point. He also claims that he made Dawkins “shrink” in the Q&A, which is total nonsense. Mathis is a shrill and frightened man when he’s confronted; back in November, I called in to a radio interview he was doing, and he practically broke down in hysterics. He ended the “debate” by yelling into the phone, “Go to his website! Myers is an atheist! He’s an atheist!”, classic ad hominem.

I wouldn’t go so far as to claim Mathis was afraid of me — he was on home ground yesterday with a friendly audience — but it’s clear that he really, really dislikes me. The simple explanation for what happened at the screening is that he spotted me in the line, let his irrational venom get the better of him, and he had me evicted while he retreated back into the theater, and therefore missed spotting Dawkins. Everything else now is transparent spin to hide the fact that they were hypocritical about expelling me, and screwed up big time in allowing a more prominent critic slip by.

As for the implication that I’d be a horrible, disruptive presence, here’s one excerpt from the movie; it’s also on a DVD that they were giving away at a table at the screening^*. Look what a horrible, malign ogre I am.

I heard that people in the audience gasped in distress at my comment that I want to see religion reduced to a “side dish” instead of the “main dish”, but seriously — I saw that and thought that gee, I’m awfully conciliatory on screen.

Socratic Gadfly takes on the NY Times article in more detail; I’m getting a little tired of the story myself, after spending much of the afternoon with reporters. I think I’ll spend more time at the American Atheists meeting tomorrow, and look forward to our gathering of pharynguloids tomorrow night.

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The story is now also on Salon.

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By the way, one of the other things I’m doing here is taping some conversations with Richard Dawkins. Our discussion of our experiences at that movie are now on the web.

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^*By the way, another interesting thing is on the DVD. They’ve got excerpts from the Inner Life video. Creationists are certainly drawn to stealing that work, aren’t they?

I’m still busy at this conference, so I have to be quick — and here it is looking like this will be my all-time high traffic day, all thanks the hypocrisy and incompetence of the silly goofballs at Expelled. Anyway, Greg is collecting links, and here’s another eyewitness account.

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Skatje reviews the movie.

People are asking me to tell them more about the movie, Expelled. I can’t! I was thrown out!

Let me clarify a few things. This was a private screening with no admission charge, and you had to reserve seats ahead of time; you also had to sign a promise that you wouldn’t record the movie while you were there, and they were checking ID. Everyone in my family reserved seats under our own names, myself included. There was no attempt to “sneak in”, although apparently the producer, Mark Mathis, accused me of doing so in the Q&A afterwards (Mathis, of course, is a contemptible liar). We followed the procedures they set up, every step of the way, and were completely above board in all our dealings.

Mark Mathis was there at the screening, and apparently spotted me and gave instructions to the guard to throw me out. I asked the guard why I was being evicted, and he explained directly that the producer had given him that instruction.

They were well within their rights to exclude anyone. When I was told I would not be allowed in and threatened with arrest, I told the security guard that I would not cause any trouble. I stopped to talk with my family when they came over with a theater manager to evict me; again, I left peacefully. Apparently, the guards were talking about carrying out further measures when they saw me standing outside the theater, and speculated that I was going to harass other attendees. This was not true; I’d just had to leave my friends and family behind, and all I really wanted to do was tell them where I’d be. The last thing I wanted to do was spend two hours hanging around a movie theater.

This account is a complete fabrication. I was not disturbing anyone, was not trying to make a scene, and was only standing quietly in line. When I was taken aside by the guard, it was a complete surprise.

I was the only person evicted. The people I was with, which included my wife, my daughter Skatje, her boyfriend Collin, Richard Dawkins, and the entire staff of the Richard Dawkins Foundation, were overlooked. I was the lucky one.

Afterwards, we went out to eat and have a beer or two, which is why I didn’t give you all a more complete summary right away. We laughed over the movie, which I hear is not only boring and poorly made, but is ludicrous in its dishonesty. Apparently, a standard tactic is to do lots of fast cuts between biologists like me or Dawkins or Eugenie Scott and shots of Nazi atrocities. It’s all very ham-handed. The audience apparently ate it up, though. Figures. Christians have a growing reputation for their appreciation of dishonesty.

There are plans afoot for rebuttals. It’s hard to come up with much motivation to do so after discovering how bad this movie is, but yeah, both NCSE and the RDF will be doing something. Dawkins is going to mention it at least briefly in his talk tomorrow. He may write up a review, too, although I don’t think he considers it a high priority (did I mention what a piece of dreck this movie is?).

Kristine was there. You can read her summary.

The RDF crew are a fine bunch of people and we had a good time after the crappy movie. Which I have not seen. Apparently, I’ve been given a fair amount of time in the movie, too.

This outcome so far has been absolutely perfect, as far as I’m concerned. The hypocrisy of the Expelled makers has been exposed by their expulsion of one of the people they filmed (final lovely irony: I’m also thanked for my contributions in the credits), they’ve revealed their incompetence by throwing me out when Richard Dawkins was right next to me, and I didn’t have to waste two hours on a bad movie.

I’ve also got a story to tell: when the creationists saw me and Dawkins in a lineup, I am the one that had them so frightened that they had to call for the guards. I feel mighty.