What We Need is an Ellis Island for the American Southwest

One of the big issues in this year's mid-term election is immigration. As usual there is a lot of bluster on both sides of the issue. But one thing that I haven't seen is a lot of ideas for actually controlling immigration in an orderly manner. Conservatives, when not jumping up and down screaming "What part of illegal don't you understand!" tend to focus on enforcement, calling for border fences and putative action against employers who hire illegal aliens. Liberals tend to focus on legalizing illegal aliens, talking about "a path to citizenship" and using the word "comprehensive" a lot. And Libertarians call for open borders.

The problem with enforcement is that it doesn't work. While it is not a particularly well known fact, president Obama has actually increased the rate of deportation of illegal aliens and auditing of businesses which hire illegals. And yet the screams of the opponents of illegal immigration have never been louder. The truth is that we'll never be able to deport 12 million illegal immigrants and until we as a nation admit that, we'll never solve our problems with immigration.

That's where the liberal "path to citizenship" comes in; whether you call it an amnesty, a pardon or whatever; an illegal would come forward, pay a large fine, and "go to the back of the line" where after a period of time they would be eligible for citizenship. While it seems like a fairly good idea to liberal ears, the major problem with it is that the average Democratic politician doesn't have the guts to actually go through with it. For example the DREAM Act which was a relatively modest version of this idea (applying only to young people with no criminal records who agreed to join the military or attend college) was proposed but will not be voted on until the Senate's lame duck session largely because Democrats were afraid of blow back in the election. With large Republican gains and possibly an outright Republican takeover of one or both houses of Congress expected in tomorrow's election, it seems unlikely that the lemmings in Congress are likely to approve any kind of comprehensive immigration reform.

In the very unlikely case that our government does grow a spine however what's wrong with the open borders policy advocated by Libertarians? Nothing really except that it removes a lot of control from the government. And Americans would fear increased competition for low-paying jobs from cheap, illegal immigrant labor. And of course it makes it easier for terrorists, drug dealers, and other assorted nogoodnicks to get into the country. The truth is that no country has truly open borders and the United States will not be the first.

So here's my idea. Politicians love to idealize the past and pander to voters who long for the "good old days." So why not reach into the past and create another Ellis Island, this time for the American Southwest.

Basically, the United States would create one or more processing centers on its border with Mexico. They would be places where potential immigrants could go, get some papers and maybe a lead on a job. They could also be searched, vaccinated, and be subject to background checks. The upside would be that the United States would know who is entering the country and would be able to track them more easily if it needed to do so. It would also eliminate the dangerous crossings of the border which have led to the death of many illegal aliens. With thousands of illegal immigrants removed from the other parts of the border, drug runners and terrorists trying to cross the border would be more likely to stand out and border enforcement would be more likely to work.

This would be a small part or of a truly comprehensive reform of our immigration system. A single processing center on our southern border would not resolve the problem of immigrants overstaying their visas. And it certainly wouldn't do a thing about the 12 million illegals who are already here. But it could resolve the emotionally charged issue of people crossing our border illegally.

Of course this is all just spitting in the wind if our politicians continue to be either gutless talkers or mendacious panderers on this issue. And the current election cycle doesn't give me much hope. But if America's politicians do ever grow up and actually fix this problem, it would help if they'd look the story of Ellis Island for inspiration.

The Coming Age of Paid News

I haven't bought a real, physical newspaper in years. And yet I read online versions of newspapers aggregated through Google every day. And this Doonesbury cartoon does a pretty good job of encapsulating the results of an entire society doing the same thing. And certainly there is a lot of breast beating by journalists about the way that Google and Yahoo supposedly steal food from their mouths by posting links to their content. But the plight of newspapers is bigger than Google News, Google Reader, and bloggers posting links to their content. Linking to online newspaper articles drives readers to newspaper websites and generates at least some ad revenue. There is also an elephant in the room that the newspapers don't like to talk about when they talk about search engines and blogs linking to their content. Newspapers also make a lot of money off of classified ads. Or at least they used to. With Craigslist stealing the classified ad business which newspapers used to own, things start getting grim.

And forcing Google, Yahoo, or even bloggers to pay for linking to news websites sounds like a pretty good way for newspapers to cut off their nose to spite their face. (On a personal note, I actually had to look up that saying before I wrote it down, my original mangled version of that idiom was much more disturbing.) It doesn't bring back the classified ads revenue and it sets up a dynamic not unlike the one that currently exists with the music industry which is currently alienating an entire generation of its fans by suing people willy-nilly.

So what is the answer? At the moment there is none but there is certainly a lot of experimentation going around. Plenty of journalists have been pushed out of old media like newspapers, radio, and television and found a home on the web as bloggers. And some of the bigger blogging sites like Huffington Post and The Daily Beast are growing larger and have the resources to act more like traditional newspapers. (He writes having rarely if ever visited either website.) It's possible that big professional blogs will eventually replace traditional newspapers altogether. It's also entirely possible that in the future newspapers will go completely online and will rely on either contributions or on some sort of micro-payment system which is reasonable and convenient enough that people are actually willing to pay it. This is pretty much what is happening now with iTunes and the Amazon MP3 store. While most teens still won't pay for music, older people are perfectly willing to trade a few dollars for the convenience of being able to download music from one reliable place at a low price. Or maybe the future of news looks more like TV and radio, multiple shows and channels all supported by advertising. I just hope that they don't overdo it.

Moreover devices like Amazon's Kindle promise to open up a whole new market for bloggers as they allow people to carry thousands of books and subscribe to hundreds of newspapers (which are updated every day), all in a relatively compact device. Of course these days tiny laptops are almost as compact and software similar to that of the Kindle's can be programmed for them. But laptops are real computers and their software can be hacked to remove the DRM software which controls what can and cannot be loaded onto the Kindle. The Kindle by contrast is completely "safe" from such shenanigans. This is why I think that in the end the newspapers' problems are more about control than they are about money. A big newspaper like the New York Times could potentially save a lot of money right now if they just gave all of their subscribers a Kindle but they will likely resist the move lest a user hack their device to read for free. So instead everybody reads for free.

As a post-script to these meandering thoughts I'd like to point out that many of the bigger newspaper bankruptcies have happened in part because they were mismanaged into the ground. And we certainly don't reward financial mismanagement in this country. OK, so we do; but the newspapers aren't too big to fail. Maybe the newspapers (and the mainstream media in general) need to ask themselves if they deserve to survive at all. While they are good at reporting body counts for the was Iraq, they did piss poor job of considering arguments that might have kept out of that war. Similarly, they've proven very good at detailing gory details of our economic crisis but did little to warn us that it was coming. And those who tried to warn us were generally laughed at. (I realize that the last link was a to a clip from CNBC, a cable TV network but radio and newspapers were every bit the enthusiastic cheerleaders to our exuberant economy which crashed so embarrassingly with every talking head on TV telling us that we had no way of knowing what was coming.)

Leo Loses It

Another thing I stumbled onto on Twitter.

I don't think I've ever seen Leo Laporte angry, especially on the air. Of course, I don't watch his shows live, I subscribe to his podcasts which can be edited for content and otherwise cleaned up. And wouldn't you know it, it's over the Palm Pre. This little phone is either going to take over the universe or destroy it. At this point, I'm not sure which outcome to root for.

Too Empathetic?

Screaming For Blood While Rome Burns

FARK's slogan is "It's not news, it's FARK" but as with other fake news outifts like the Daily Show, there are occasional turds wisdom excreted from its bowels. One recent shouting match turned up some interesting mind pellets. It was attached to a link to Matt Taibbi's rant telling off an AIG executive who wrote an open letter bemoaning his company's reaction to AIG's recent bonus scandal. The ensuing thread went as you might expect with people dividing neatly along idealogical lines with right wingers defending the AIG executive and left wingers defending Taibbi. But a half way down the thread, there were links to two interesting Slate articles examing AIG from another angle. By taking a look at one of AIG's deals with Goldman Sachs, the articles point out that while we are all screaming for people's heads over $160 million dollars worth of bonuses while AIG funnels billions of taxpayer funded bailout dollars to its trading partners which themselves have also received billions of taxpayer funded bailout dollars. 

In other words, we have one scandal which is essentially distracting us from something much bigger and much worse. Taibbi sees this as one big conspiracy designed to shift power and money to Wall Street. But it doesn't need to be a conspiracy in order to be an outrage. And that seems to be part of the problem. We are all so busy getting outraged over the latest Wall Street scandal that we are ignoring the real problems which have lead us into the economic hole in which we are stuck.

Boing Boing links to an interview with environmentalist James Lovelock which is a curious mixture of pessimism and optimism but makes for interesting reading:

Do you think we will survive?

I'm an optimistic pessimist. I think it's wrong to assume we'll survive 2 °C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth. At 4 °C we could not survive with even one-tenth of our current population. The reason is we would not find enough food, unless we synthesised it. Because of this, the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90 per cent. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. It has happened before: between the ice ages there were bottlenecks when there were only 2000 people left. It's happening again.

I don't think humans react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what's coming up. Kyoto was 11 years ago. Virtually nothing's been done except endless talk and meetings.

It's a depressing outlook.

Not necessarily. I don't think 9 billion is better than 1 billion. I see humans as rather like the first photosynthesisers, which when they first appeared on the planet caused enormous damage by releasing oxygen - a nasty, poisonous gas. It took a long time, but it turned out in the end to be of enormous benefit. I look on humans in much the same light. For the first time in its 3.5 billion years of existence, the planet has an intelligent, communicating species that can consider the whole system and even do things about it. They are not yet bright enough, they have still to evolve quite a way, but they could become a very positive contributor to planetary welfare.

Lovelock came up with the controversial Gaia Hypothesis in the 1970s. It's a theory which suggests that our bio-sphere, that is every living thing on Earth, acts like one giant organism to regulate the planet's climate to maintain ideal conditions for life. The theory gathered a lot of attention from science fiction authors and from counter-culture types but has been strongly criticized by scientists. It's hard to know what to think when dealing with ideas which as far as I know are pretty far out of the scientific mainsteam. But sometimes it is interesting to keep an open mind and look at new ideas.

FARK on the Subprime Meltdown

FARK is one of the wildest places on the Internet. The most amazing thing about it is that even though by design it's a frivolous site that usually consists of a bunch of jerks shouting at each other from the safety of their keyboards, a lot of useful information gets posted to it. They recently had a pretty interesting discussion on the country's recent economic troubles. In addition to the original submitted article, many useful links have been posted in the discussion including this link to an amusing but informative Google Docs presentation (warning, gratuitus use of the "F" word) which explains the subprime mess with stick figures, an episode of This American Life devoted to the subject, and the FDIC's statement on what will happen to the Washington Mutual now that it has failed. All in all, a lot of pretty useful information buried underneath a lot of shouting and insults.

Google Evil? It's More (And Less) Likely Than You Think

Slashdot reports on a mistake by Google which resulted in an entire domain being blacklisted by Firefox which uses Google's list of bad website for its anti-phishing filter. The top comment by on the website encapsulated an increasingly common reaction towards Google:

"In my mind giving this power to Google is the most objectionable thing related to the company. I know somebody who has had his legitimate business ruined because Google mistakenly added his site to this list. Why? Because it was hosted on the same physical server as a truly objectionable web site.

People need to stop childishly sneering at Windows users and take their focus away from Microsoft. The terrible Goliath is clearly Google now. Even when it's not being evil it causes trouble just by being *clumsy*."

Whether or not you agree with this sentiment, there is still an undeniable kernel of truth to it. Google is now more powerful than Microsoft, the traditional big, evil boogyman of the computer industry. While Microsoft flails about trying to convince people that it is still relevant which weird ads, Google has quietly built an advertising and software empire which affects all of our lives. People instinctively use Google to search for information so much that the word has become a verb in popular culture. The ads on almost every website on the Internet are powered by Google. I personally use Google every day. I'm typing this blog post in Google's Chrome web browser and it will be posted on Google's Blogger website. And when I'm not at my computer, I still access Google on my cellphone. Clearly, Google is no longer the little company started by two graduate students at Stanford running on a computer made of Lego.

Because of this power, when Google makes a mistake, it affects people heavily. A couple of months ago, Google decided that I was a spammer and now I have to solve a CAPTCHA every time that I want to post something on my blog. Some of the twisted, mangled words that make up the CAPTCHAs can be surprisingly difficult to recognize. This can be discouraging at times and as a result, I'm posting a lot less these days. On the hand, spam blogs are a very real problem and Google would be doing a poor job if it didn't try to do something to stop them from proliferating.

As Google continues to grow larger and more powerful, it is natural that people will grow to distrust it. And the consequences of mistakes at Google will become more serious. I doubt if Google will ever be as "evil" as Microsoft whose hardball tactics are notorious in the software industry and which has been fighting off federal anti-trust and patent infringment suits for almost a decade. But Google's actions whether good or evil now have a very direct effect on people and often that effect can be felt directly in the pocketbook. With all this at stake, it's natural that people are going to get upset at Google even as they continue to use its seach engine and software every day—just like Microsoft.

Pluto Debate Continues to Continue

Astrobiology Magazine has an interesting article on the continuing debate over the status of Pluto. Mark Sykes of the Planetary Science Institute debated the always charismatic Neil deGrasse Tyson recently on the IAU's decision to "demote" Pluto from planet status to dwarf planet status. This is an issue which can provoke a lot of passion when lay people, let alone scientists, debate it.

One of the most interesting things about the article is that as our knowledge of the planets has grown, the community of people which studies them has grown as well.

"When I first started in this business, a large fraction of planetary scientists were astronomers who had cut their teeth on Earth-based telescopes," Sykes said. "Since then, we've been flooded with data coming back from close flybys, orbiters, landers and rovers. Most of the planetary science questions being asked today are geophysical and geological. Planetary science is merging with terrestrial science to become real comparative planetology. Only a small fraction of the planetary science community belongs to the IAU anymore."

That's a pretty surprising thing to a lay person like myself. Most of the people who study planets these days aren't necessarily astronomers, they are geologists, physicists, chemists and all sorts of other flavors of scientist. No wonder it's so hard for people to agree on these things.

It's interesting thing to see the sausage being made as scientists debate an issue in public. While Pluto's status is a thorny issue, it's a fairly easy to understand issue. It's not obscure or difficult to understand like dark matter or dark energy. Everyone has heard of Pluto and seen pictures of Pluto and knows a lot of the facts that are being argued over in this debate. Perhaps this is why it's so compelling.

"It's good for people to know that debate in science is the norm," Sykes said. "Science is dynamic. Science is argumentative. Science is continual testing and challenging. Science is not about something everyone has to memorize because some organization has given it its blessing."

Understanding FISA

Here's an interesting blog post, complete with flow charts, about the changes FISA, the wiretapping law that is supposed to protect us from terrorism. I don't have much to add because it's sorta complicated....

ISPs Use Sledgehammer to Kill Cockroaches

A number of Internet Service Providers have been dropping the alt.* hierarchy from their Usenet servers at the behest of New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo who has been crusading against child pornography. The alt.* newsgroups are particularly vulnerable to attacks like this one as the vast majority of them are completely uncensored and unmoderated. The ISPs also have a huge incentive as alt.binaries.* newsgroups which reside underneath the alt.* heirarchy use up an enormous amount of bandwidth in the form of pictures, music, and video—much of which is copyrighted and this infuriates copyright cops like the RIAA and MPAA. As a result when a politician made a big stink about pornography, the ISPs have buckled quite quickly.

Reading Cuomo's press release, you'd think that Usenet newsgroups exist entirely to distribute kiddie porn. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Usenet groups exist to discuss an almost endless variety of topics from technical topics like computer programming to television to computer games to sex—yes there are perverts who talk about sex and even distribute porn on Usenet. But Usenet is so much more. There is no pornography—child or otherwise—on alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer, alt.tv.tech.hdtv, or alt.comp.freeware but all of these groups are among the thousands of useful and entertaining discussion forums which will be banned in the name of the children.

Usenet is a decentralized, uncensored place where people can go to discuss any topic and this is a precious thing on the Internet. Blogs and specialty websites are many and varied and can be hard to find. Usenet is always there with everything you want in one place. And best of all, you can choose your software for accessing Usenet which allows you to control every aspect of your online discussions from the look and feel of your messages to the ability to kill-file online jerks.

Years ago, unhappy with AT&T's poor Usenet service, I began using a third-party Usenet provider which is independent of my ISP. Stories like these will likely cause more people to move to these third party providers and once people see what Usenet looks like when someone who actually knows and cares about newsgroup discussion is serving up newsgroups—less spam, more content, more newsgroups—they'll use it more. And now instead of hosting Usenet on their own servers, ISPs will instead be serving it up to a third party server which will serve it back to the ISP which will serve it their own users. In other words Usenet, which was already using up tons of bandwidth, will begin to use up more. But at least the ISPs will be protecting the children.

Right.

I've always believed and no, I don't have a cite for that belief, that the typical "Internet Predator" is by far the stupidist and laziest pervert of them all. Sure, it may be cool to watch Chris Hansen busting a pedophile who showed up to hook up with an undercover cop who pretended to be a twelve year old girl on the Internet; but let's face it, how many times do you have to watch a show like To Catch a Predator to realize that the average horny teen on the Internet is really an undercover cop trying to bust perverts? I'm guessing not many. The real predators, if they exist, aren't on the Internet trolling for kids. They are in the same places where they've always been around kids either as abusive teachers or priests or in some other job that allows them easy access to helpless children with neglectful parents. Many of these perverts are parents or uncles or cousins themselves. And no amount of censorship is going to stop them from hurting kids.

The End of the LinkScanner Controversy?

Slashdot reports on and Australian website's reaction to being flooded by traffic by AVG's LinkScanner. As before, AVG has promised to fix this problem. It's nice to see an anti-virus company—particularly a company which makes its products available for free—listening to its users and fixing its products. Commercial anti-virus companies like Symantec and McAfee turned their products into bloated messes years ago and its nice to see AVG back away before doing the same.

People Actually Read This?

I found an interesting comment attached to my post about AVG's LinkScanner identifying itself as IE6. Pat Bitton says:

Following is AVG's official response to LinkScanner concerns:

We’d like to thank our web community for bringing these challenges to our attention, as building community trust and protecting all of our users is critical to us. We have modified the Search-Shield component of LinkScanner to only notify users of malicious sites; this modified version will be rolled out on July 9th 2008. As of this date. Search-Shield will no longer scan each search result online for new exploits, which was causing the spikes that webmasters addressed with us. However, it is important to note that AVG still offers full protection against potential exploits through the Active Surf-Shield component of our product, which checks every page for malicious content as it is visited but before it is opened.

I couldn't find any reference to this on AVG's website but it's late and I wasn't looking too hard. A quick google search leads a blog post which link to comments from an article by The Register on the controversy. Among those comments is one by (presumably the same) Pat Bitton:

Response from AVG
By Pat Bitton
Posted Saturday 14th June 2008 02:59 GMT

Hi, folks. Pat Bitton from AVG here. This issue has clearly raised some concerns that we had not anticipated, and we acknowledge that we need to do something. Our primary purpose with LinkScanner, as Roger Thompson has pointed out, is to protect users against web-based threats that they cannot see. These threats are also usually invisible to web site operators, who presumably also don't wish to be unwittingly passing infections on to their visitors. This kind of problem can and does affect all types of web sites, big or small, and is extremely transient - which is why we don't use the static database approach cited by some as a viable alternative. Over the next few days, we will be exploring ways in which we can continue to deliver informed protection as unobtrusively as possible without adversely impacting site analytics. Any webmaster reading this post who is interested in working with us constructively to reach this goal is welcome to contact me at pat.bitton(at)avg.com.

These two comments suggest that AVG is taking this problem seriously and is working hard to fix it. Hopefully their update will do just that. In the meantime, I've reinstalled AVG antivirus without the Safe-Search component which includes LinkScanner. I've done this even though Firefox 3 is not affected by LinkScanner because AVG's Search Shield extension doesn't work with the newest version of Firefox. But you never know when you'll want or need to use Internet Explorer right?

Ultimately, the problem of malicious websites installing drive-by malware is a real one and it is good to see antivirus companies trying to do something about it. Basically what we have here is an arms race between the malware authors and security software authors. What is happening now is a lot like what happened with old computer viruses which would infect any executable file on your computer which led antivirus software to scan every program that tries to run on your computer. The same thing is going to start to happen now with web pages.

Slashdot Takes On AVG

It's official, I have no life. I've been pouring over a recent Slashdot discussion of AVG's LinkScanner problems. Along with the typically sensationalistic write-up calling Grisoft "slimy" for their product's perfectly legitimate if poorly implemented new feature, the discussion includes a lot of good stuff including how to disable LinkScanner and suggested alternative's to AVG antivirus. It's ironic that Slashdot, the website which first pioneered the Slashdot Effect, which is the term coinedd by how a popular website can knock a smaller website offline by linking to it is up in arms over what is essentially an automated version of the same kind phenomon.

Snuggly the Security Bear

Ham-handedly protesting the erosion of our constitutional rights never looked cuter.

LinkScanner Identifies Itself As IE6

AVG's LinkScanner feature continues to be controversial. And The Register continues to field complaints about LinkScanner's affect on website statistics. LinkScanner donwloads websites found in search results looking for sites that try to download malware onto your computer. LinkScanner now identifies itself as Internet Explorer 6 to websites after webmasters began filtering it from their traffic logs. This makes it undistinguishable from normal web traffic and skews website traffic statistics which hurts website advertising revenue. The Register quotes Steve Jackson, co-chair of the International Web Analytics Association:

"In order to make an omelet you have to crack some eggs. But a good omelet has cheese, ham, peppers, mushrooms and all sorts of other ingredients which AVG seem to have forgotten about."

While the controversy over the LinkScanner's bandwidth hogging and traffic skewing is a serious problem, the problem of websites that install malware on your computer is very real. Tools like LinkScanner would seem to be necessary to protect less sophisticated users of vulnerable operating systems (like Windows, there I've said it) from having their computers attacked by websites which knowingly or not are hosting malware which exploits unprotected computers.

Is AVG Bad For Websites?

A new website called AVG Watch claims that a component in AVG's antivirus product can overwhelm web servers by hitting them hard and downloading pages in an attempt to determine if they are hosting malware that can infect your computer. Another website complains that this component also hurts websites financially by skewing their traffic statistics which affects their ad revenue.

The component is called LinkScanner:

"LinkScanner works with both Internet Explorer and Firefox, and consists of two features, AVG Active Surf-Shield and AVG Search-Shield. AVG Active Surf-Shield prevents you from accidentally becoming infected by drive-by downloads and other exploits, ensuring the web pages you visit are safe at the only time that really matters - when you are about to click the link. AVG Search-Shield works with Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines to deliver a real-time safety verdict on all search results, including search ads, displaying an icon to show the safety rating for each site."

That's a direct quote from the documentation of AVG Anti-Virus Free 8.0 describing LinkScanner.

AVG Watch seems pretty steamed about the practice, comparing comparing it to a Denial of Service Attack. They claim that according to their own tests LinkScanner will download a page it encounters during a Google search hundreds of times more than necessary, leading to a lot of stress on webs servers as the number of people using the latest version of AVG Anti-Virus grows.

This seems like a worrisome possibility for me since I've always sworn by AVG for protecting my computers from viruses and other malware. Recently, AVG has been giving me problems with false positives and now this....

There is one ironic post-script to this episode. I have been using Firefox 3 as my main browser since its second Beta version and right now AVG Safe Search, which presumeably allows AVG to run LinkScanner within Firefox, is not compatible with the latest version of my favorite browser. So it seems that none of this applies to me right now. I'm neither "protected" from accidentally clicking on evil websites and I'm not inadvertantly "attacking" good websites either. Still, it's an interesting issue.

The More Things Change...

I was looking at some cartoons on Gocomics when I saw this old Bloom County cartoon. It was originally published in the Washington Post and later released as part of a collection called "Loose Tails"—in 1983—twenty-five years ago. When you consider that the issue of Intelligent Design versus evolution is still being argued about in the courts, it's pretty amazing to see people still arguing. The whole series of Bloom County's "scientific penguinism" cartoons can be seen here.

Evolution, Schmevolution

The controversy over the movie Expelled has made me think about a lot about how people debate the topic of evolution. It also reminded me that a few years ago The Daily Show took a brilliant and hilarious look at the subject with a series of reports called "Evolution Schmevolution." Poking fun at both sides of the issue and giving the intelligent design crowd a chance to argue their side, Jon Stewart showed how fake news can be much better and smarter than "real" news. While Nova did a brilliant job of covering the recent intelligent design trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, sometimes it's nice to step back and relax and not take the subject you're debating too seriously.

Here's an interesting review of the movie Expelled. It is documentary narrated by Ben Stein about the "Intelligent Design" movement. ID is essentially creationism repackaged to sound more "scientific." But for the most part, it consists of repeating the same claims and using the same tactics that creation uses to try to use doubts and create controversy to discredit the theory of evolution.

One of the things that I liked about the review is the calmness and objectivity of the reviewer. He doesn't call Stein and his friends "liars" or "idiots" and rightfully points out that this movie is essentially "preaching to the choir" of people whom are already predisposed to distrust evolutionary theory. He does note that it is a propaganda film but doesn't stoop to the level of the propagandists. Too often on the Internet, I see a lot of noise and very little signal as threads of comments frequently devolve into name-calling contests.