Stien has a film coming out called Expelled. I saw some ads at the Darwin Awards site and at first assumed this would be an examination of unconventional, though not crackpot, scientific theories. Judging by the trailer it’s a film in support of Intelligent Design, or at least in support of it’s proponents.
Boy, between this and America’s Most Smartest Model, it looks like Stein’s reputation for being intelligent is about to go in the crapper.
Not that his stint in the Nixon administration helped any…
Well, I must say I too am an ID supporter and fully agree with Mister Stein. How is the bank supposed know whether to cash your check if you don’t carry any ID with you?
He’s even more full of shit than I thought he was, and I thought he was a dunderhead before. But then I think think that humanity is “nothing more than mud animated by lightning” so what do I know?
Maybe they could just trust me, seeing as how I’ve been going there for 15 years?!? Do you think George Bailey would have asked me for ID? No! He would have smiled at me, talked about the wife and kids, and given me my money on a handshake!
Are you trying to claim the my ancestors are mud?
or would they be lightning? Uncle monkey is confused.
Ben Stein, ex-Nixon speechwriter, tells the unvarnished truth about the evolution conspiracy! Yes, that sounds like a persuasive testimonial. He just exudes trustworthiness, that one. I suspect that ID proponents might just find themselves regretting his support before too long.
At least he’s sexier than Ann Coulter.
I must say I’m rather disappointed in his movie’s website. Maybe I’ve read too many creationist rants, but I was expecting something a little more creative. I could write more compelling anti-evolutionary propaganda myself, and I don’t even have the benefit of having worked for Nixon.
>He just exudes trustworthiness, that one.
>the benefit of having worked for Nixon.
Hmm. I’m having trouble following. Could you draw a clearer picturer for some of your slower readers?
I can understand why a man who knew H.R. Haldemann, G. Gordon Liddy and some of those other creeps would have doubts about evolution. Perhaps he just thinks Darwin got it backward.
How would George handle a replicant, eh?
The Voight-Kampff test includes a question about Zuzu’s petals.
“You’re in your home, and your daughter has a rose; you know what a rose is, don’t you? A flower, okay? Your daughter has a flower, and some of the petals have fallen off. She asks for your help in pasting them back on, but you’re not helping. Why is that?”
When I first heard about Ben Stein’s involvement with this movie, I thought he was in it for the easy money. After reading his last couple of American Spectator columns, though, I’m forced to the conclusion that he’s not in it for the money; he’s actually wigging out.
As much as I love Stein, his columns are starting to weird me out to the point I have trouble finishing them. Like maybe someone spiked his metamucil with benzedrine. Rants about his illnesses, real and imagined (At one point, he was writing about how he really thought he’d been bitten by a spider in spite of no actual proof of this–and he didn’t sound as if he were joking.), rants about the democratic congress, rants about Iraq, and he’s not even really saying anything new. It’s the same column that he apparently puts through the derationalization randomizer every month.
I’ll repeat: I love Stein, and that’s why I’m silently praying for him to get back to Planet Normal as soon as possible. Come back, Ben! We don’t need you old, flakey, and irrelevant, 'cuz one Andy Rooney is enough.
Really, I thought this was a thread about voting rights and eligibility.
This movie is big news in some religious circles. There are people who think Ben Stein is really revealing some vast conspiracy to silence ID “scientists”. One friend of mine, a perfectly nice woman in many ways, thinks it’s going to be a huge hit, and that it will convince the world that nasty Evolutionists are going about putting tape over the mouths of researchers who have found the Ark, dinosaur footprints alongside human remains, proved that the Grand Canyon was created during The Flood . . . etc.
Once I thought he was sorta funny. Now I think he’s sorta nutz. It’s hard to imagine that he’s serious, but if he’s not, why’s he doing it? I thought maybe it was a sarcastic sendup. But it appears not. 
If this thing takes off it could be the start of a cottage industry for BS.
Next, he could expose university astronomy departments that don’t teach astrology then he could blow the lid off chemistry departments that ignore alchemy. And what about those geography snobs that ridicule Atlantis? And the paleontologists that blithely ignore the swarms of plesiosaurs that patrol Loch Ness?
Where did he get the idea about the “mud and lightning”? I’ve never even heard of such a suggestion before.
That’s a rather casual description of one idea for the origin of life – a “primordial soup” chemically chaged, maybe by an electrical discharge, that created the first primitive life forms.
I’m trying to think of any man that this doesn’t apply to.