And doesn’t Leftist Hollywood’s refusal to take on Islam add up to a politically incorrect and culturally insensitive insult to Muslims? As Penn Jillette Tweeted so elegantly last week:

“I believe the most damning thing that can be said about Muslims is saying you’re afraid to say anything.”

Or as an agnostic friend of mine emailed last night: 

“Your headline needs to read, ‘Comedy Central Determines That Christians Are Nicer and More Tolerant Than Muslims’”

So I guess that means we Christians should take the announcement of what looks to be another tired, old, cliched, cinematic attack on our faith as a compliment, right?

Hayden Christensen has signed on to star in Snakes of a Plane/Cellular/The Final Destination director David R. Ellis‘ big screen adaptation of John Case’s thriller novel The Genesis Code.

And what is “The Genesis Code” about? As though you have to ask. From the press release announcing the film [emphasis mine throughout]:

The story follows a former national security expert, played by Christensen, who, while investigating the murder of his only sister and her young son, discovers that a religious sect called The Shadow of the Cross may be involved. With the help of his sister’s friend Ana, they follow the clues to a clinic in the mountains of Italy, where a terrifying secret experiment has been conducted – successfully. The results are so threatening to the foundation of the Church that they will do anything to keep it from being revealed.

From the filmmaker’s own description, at best the Church is portrayed as threatened by a truth they’ll do anything to keep secret. If that sounds vaguely familiar to another Catholic-bashing franchise starring our friend Tom War-of-Racism Hanks, you’re not alone. From a couple of rave customer reviews on Amazon:

I read a lot of thrillers, and I really enjoyed THE GENESIS CODE for the most part. This novel resembles the DA VINCI CODE in the sense that it’s a religious thriller, and the villains and assassins are far-right Catholics.

Another:

Science vs right-wing religion? Hmmm … haven’t we heard that somewhere before?

The good news is that Hayden Christensen’s been cast to lead the potential franchise. So if he’s as inept and over his head at undermining religious faith as he was at mythologizing Darth Vader…

We may not live to see the day, but eventually the truth will be told and the history will be written and it will not be kind to this Hollywood generation. Not kind at all.  They are not only on the wrong side of history, and this war, but they know it and rather than fight they have chosen instead to bow and scrape — to go morally AWOL. 

As the “South Park” censorship and the rest of this report proves, all the Big Talk during the Bush years from our artiste class about questioning power was just as we suspected: a bull shit fig leaf for partisan cowards.  

There are notable exceptions in 90210-Land, but for the most part and for the first time since the invention of this wonderful art form we call the motion picture, The Men Who Make The Movies are nothing close to men. They’re hardly even artists.

What we have instead is an industry infected with partisan Leftists; gutless appeasers of the highest order who at best have chosen to run from this fight and at worst have joined the other side.

NOTE: As always, I want to offer my insincerest apologies for breaking the well-known rule that only allows Hollywood’s big elite stable of butt-boy writers to speculate about an unseen film.

I speak not of my former houseboy Roderigo (we still can’t find him, alas), but Al Gore, who mysteriously disappeared as his self-propelled universe of climate change hysteria started to crumble around him.

Gore was always “the boy in the plastic bubble” – he could go anywhere and say anything he wanted about the coming apocalypse – but you couldn’t say anything back. He was protected by the shared assumptions of a like-minded media, fawning academics and that cool habit of skipping out of conferences before those awkward Q and A sessions.

But now he’s reared his hallucinatory head – in yet another bubble – the New York Times op-ed section. There he addresses the “climate-gate” mess – but being a true believer, he prefers to call it an “attack” on science, and focuses only on details he feels comfortable defending.

He sidesteps Phil Jones’ revelations of no global warming in the last fifteen years, and the fact that the famed “hockey stick” graph that Gore embraced like a bag of éclairs, is a fraud.

So what is Gore’s defense? He writes…

“But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes.”

And therein lies the hubris. Fact is, just months ago, Gore would have told you there were no mistakes when it came to man-made global warming science. Belief was pure.

Now, after all the fabrications, cover-ups and “mistakes” have been exposed, you have the commander-in-climate…shrugging.

Of course, he still clings to catastrophe, pretending it’s based on fact. But facts are not what you’re hearing. What you’re hearing is all the air coming out of the bubble.

And if you disagree with me, then you sir are worse than a racist homophobe who eats polar bears.

Tonight we’ve got the hilarious Jim Norton, the lovely Diana Falzone, the sharp Monica Crowley and the always thoughtful, Father Jonathan!

And for all you fans who missed Friday, we will be replaying that show this week!

… But who needs logic when you’ve got big Government, right?

Certainly there isn’t even a pretense at a coherent narrative or interesting, complex, plausible characters in Land of the Lost. Given that those are among the things critics tend to praise, it’s hardly a surprise that the film has gotten awful reviews.

Nonetheless, Land of the Lost is quite enjoyable. Despite the claims of some critics who seem disposed to hate everything about it, the movie is quite funny, with many instances of Ferrell’s usual blustering and amusing comeuppances as well as numerous funny comments by Danny McBride as Ferrell’s reluctant and cowardly sidekick. Jorma Taccone’s performance as Chaka is also very risible at times.

Moreover, there is actually a very good, important, and timely thought in Land of the Lost. In a very amusing way, the film satirizes the current-day perversion of science in which claims of consensus are used as a blunt instrument to shout down opposing ideas.

Ferrell plays Dr. Rick Marshall, one of his typical blustering, ambitious, well-meaning characters. Marshall has written about his theory that a certain kind of elemental physical particle can be harnessed and enable people and things to move from the known universe into a parallel realm in which things from all times exist simultaneously.

Marshall’s theory has brought him nearly universal derision among scientists and the media, which the film amusingly conveys through bookend scenes in which Marshall appears on NBC’s Today Show to talk about books he has written, and is abused by host Matt Lauer as a charlatan and a fool.

Lauer’s reaction perfectly represents the media’s reaction toward, say, those who claim that the scientific evidence shows that anthropogenic global warming is not occurring and the current temperature trends of the earth show the very opposite of a crisis. Instead of actually engaging the scientific evidence, the media whores simply claim that all reputable scientists agree that there’s a crisis requiring the absolute destruction of Americans’ civil and economic liberties, and that anyone who disagrees with that premise is the equivalent of a Holocaust denier.

Lauer vividly recreates that approach in his scenes with Ferrell. The great irony is that Marshall turns out to be correct, and Lauer remains both abusive and now openly wrong, physically attacking Marshall in the second interview at the end of the film.

My guess is that this aspect of the film was not intended as direct satire but instead simply reflects something the filmmakers picked up in the contemporary zeitgeist. However, its presence in the central story of the film and the bookend scenes–which are in very important places in the film, the beginning and end–gives it great prominence and suggests that skepticism toward such claims of consensus has entered the culture as a real phenomenon.

The claim of consensus and refusal to address scientific evidence, of course, is the direct opposite of the scientific method, which is based on continual attempts to disprove accepted theories and hypotheses. The scientific method treats all claims as hypotheses, not facts, and requires humility on the part of the scientist.

Today, by contrast, on subjects as varied as earth’s temperature record, the process(es) of species origination, and even whether the speed of light is a constant, many people knowingly misuse science for political purposes, arguing that “the science is settled” on a variety of issues when it most certainly is not. (People have done this throughout history, of course.) They do this in order to convey a sense of necessity and inevitability to their political preferences instead of actually having to show that their proposed policies are provably better than the possible alternatives.

Regarding global warming, for example, alarmists continually claim that scientists are agreed that anthropogenic global warming is happening and is a crisis. In fact, neither of those statements has achieved anything like a consensus among scientific experts in the appropriate fields. For example, the widely cited report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was written not by scientists but by politicians who ignored the multitude of comments made officially by scientists questioning the panel’s alarmist claims.

Actually, many more scientists are on record as opposing the idea of an anthropogenic global warming crisis.

The same is true in a wide variety of other issues in which claims of scientific consensus are used to shout down political opposition.

In undermining the prevailing habit of using false claims of scientific consensus as a political bludgeon, Land of the Lost does something very good indeed beyond the laughter.

–S. T. Karnick, editor of The American Culture

“The reason a person is a conservative republican is because something is wrong with them. Again, that’s science – that’s neuroscience. You cannot be well adjusted, open-minded, pluralistic, enlightened and be a republican. It’s counter-intuitive. And they revel in their anti-intellectualism. They revel in their cruelty.”

Tolerance.

And then she says this about Sarah Palin: “Of course she’s successful with a segment of the country because she represents that lesser segment of the country.”

Wow.  Those are fighting words, you ugly little soul.  No, that’s mean, and I don’t want to act like you just for the easy laughs.  At least not here, in the ‘24′ blog!   Please feel free to deeply insult many of my friends and family on the way to declaring yourself an arrogant, intolerant nut.

Meanwhile, we’re going to watch ‘24′ in the hopes that you are the mole.  And maybe make fun of you.

See you in the comments!