Minnesota has more than its share of wits and piss-takers. There’s its whole entire gay community for instance.

The gay and lesbian community of Minnesota has issued a letter of apology to recently resigned Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch for ruining the institution of marriage and causing her to stray from her husband and engage in an “inappropriate relationship.”

“On behalf of all gays and lesbians living in Minnesota, I would like to  wholeheartedly apologize for our community’s successful efforts to  threaten your traditional marriage,” reads the letter from John Medeiros. “We apologize that our selfish requests to marry those we love has cheapened and degraded traditional marriage so much that we caused you  to stray from your own holy union for something more cheap and tawdry.”

Zing!

The letter comes on the heels of Koch’s own apology, released yesterday, in which she expressed her deep regret for  “engaging in a relationship with a Senate staffer.” Although the letter did not specify the identity of the other participant in the  “inappropriate relationship,” it is widely rumored to be former communications chief Michael Brodkorb, who lost several positions with the GOP in the wake of the scandal.

Koch, Brodkorb, and their fellow Republicans campaigned this year to put a constitutional amendment on next year’s ballot to  define marriage as the union between a man and a woman, thus forbidding gay marriage. Sadly, the amendment comes too late to prevent Koch from straying from her own marriage.

Dear good Minnesota. Happy hols.

It’s accommodationism day in the neighborhood…I guess it’s a Christmas thing. Baby Jesus is born, Tim Minchin got his (requested) song dropped from a tv show, Julian tries to square a circle, and to make it all complete, Chris Stedman writes yet another “mean atheists are doing it wrong and I am doing it right” article for the Huffington Post. I had been ignoring Stedman for months, but he does make it difficult.

…effective criticism of religious dogmatism accounts for the diverse spectrum of religious expression. It is balanced, it is rooted in compassion, and it responds to what people actually believe and practice, not just the most extreme forms of religious thought.

Well some people do actually believe the most extreme forms; often a lot of people. It’s not the case that most religious believers are thoroughly liberal and unextreme. [Read more…]

Omigod omigod omigod Tim Minchin wrote a song about Jesus and it has jokes in it – jokes about Jesus! Would you believe it? He wrote it because some tv people asked him to for their pre-Christmas show.

It was the worst possible time to be writing a new song – I’ve been overworked and ill, was on tour, and was really feeling the stress. But I wasn’t going to say no… it’s Jonathan Ross!

…

It’s certainly not very contentious, but even so, compliance people and producers and lawyers all checked my lyrics long before the cameras rolled. As always with these bespoke writing jobs, I was really stressed for about 3 days, and almost chucked it in the bin 5 times, and freaked out that it wasn’t funny and all that boring shit that people like me go through when we’re lucky enough to have with a big audience with high expectations. [Read more…]

The Twenty-First Floor gives us a video by someone called SKEPTICSExposed, titled Rhys Morgan Harassing Burzynski Clinic. It is deeply absurd.

The video then goes on to try and link Rhys to the identity fraud of James Randis longtime partner in exactly the same way that Marc Stephens did in emails to Popehat and even using the same images. Which does make me wonder if SKEPTICSExposed might be down to the infamous Marc Stephens. Particularly as, like the red arrow letter before, these videos don’t attempt to address any of the arguments made by Rhys  and others.

Oh surely not. Surely Marc Stephens wouldn’t be so silly as to continue trying to bully Rhys Morgan even now that the Burzynski Clinic has issued a press release saying it has severed its relationship with Marc Stephens. I mean he wouldn’t go around trying to bully skeptics as some kind of wack hobby would he?

Mind you he is still deeply involved with Ken White aka Popehat – still corresponding with him with near-amorous intensity, still trying to tell Ken what to do on the basis of not a damn thing.

Skeptics have all the fun, wouldn’t you agree?

Neal Pollack knew Christopher Hitchens better than you.

Christopher Hitchens and I were friends for 40 years, plus another five when we were enemies. He took ideas so seriously that if he disagreed with you on a matter that he deemed important, he’d literally throw you in a ditch. It was 1972, the height of our mutual virility. He and I went to a pub to celebrate his most recent intellectual victory over the establishment press. I intimated that sometimes women could be funny on purpose. Even back then, the thought enraged him. Hitchens threw a drink in my face, pressed a lit cigarette into my neck, and hit me over the head with a barstool. [Read more…]

Yesterday I expressed (via Katha Pollitt) reservations about a certain kind of combative anger that Hitchens sometimes deployed. Daniel Dennett talks about when rudeness is necessary.

He starts with an example.

We were both appearing in a debate as part of the program of Ciudad de las Ideas, an excellent gathering held annually in Puebla, Mexico. (It’s modeled on TED-I call it TED Mex. Go. It’s well worth the visit.) One of the speakers for the other side, the God side, was Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, and after our short set pieces, the rebuttals started with the rabbi. We each were allotted four minutes only for rebuttal, and the rabbi launched into a series of outrageous claims trying to besmirch Darwin and evolutionary biology by claiming that Hitler was inspired by Darwin to organize slaughters to ensure the survival of his race. I sat there, dumfounded and appalled, and tried to figure out how best to rebut this obscene misrepresentation when my turn came. [Read more…]

I said maybe I should do one of these, because sometimes people do go OT and that can be tiresome if you want to talk about the T, but it’s fine if there’s no T to begin with. If the particular set of people who bump into each other here want to talk about everything in general, I might as well make that possible.

I have a cold. I asked Facebook to sing “Soft Kitty” for me, and it did.

Newt Gingrich plans, if elected president, to arrest judges who don’t do their judging according to the bible.

Kim Jong-un is not sure he’s crazy enough to run North Korea.