There’s a ton of stuff on the interwebs worth reading right now, and I have to play catch-up a bit. Bear with me, blurbs will be short. I expect a link back to this post sometime later today from Mike Haubrich, who likes to syndicate my Friday Random Crap in my Tabs, so go over there and read his stuff when you get the chance, as it’s all uniformly excellent and I can’t pimp him enough.

Check out Where’s Poppa?, part 2 of a great series on the lack of evidence for any deities (much less the Abrahamic god Yahweh). The master linking post is here.

TV Guide has to be very sneaky about political commentary. I love Probably Bad News… great site, always full of LOLs.

This is probably my favorite Greg Laden post ever. It’s the next part of his Falsehoods series, in case you haven’t been following, in which case go read them all. The post is about how the rich are actually out-reproducing the poor in the States, putting the lie to yet another racist polemic.

Neurologica explains how facts are NOT anti-religious, it’s just that religions based on falsehoods have to assume that the facts that contradict them are intended to affront them because otherwise their foundations will crumble. The example used is of the Krishna denying the moon landing ever happened, because according to their scriptures, the moon is further away than the sun and space travel is impossible without first dying. This is used to illustrate why Christians have their heads up their asses about evolution. Fun times!

Three interesting articles on Daily Galaxy: Stephen Hawking musing on non-carbon-based alien life, Harvard figuring out that plate tectonics is probably a prerequisite for finding habitable Earthlike planets, and DNA evidence suggests we were almost wiped out as a species about 70000 years ago.

Heaving Dead Cats takes a study about confirmation bias and applies it to religious asshattery, as though nobody’s ever thought to do that before. Great read, though!

How do you teach your kids not to masturbate in public without stunting their natural sexual development? If anyone knows the answer, it’d be Greta Christina, but there’s further musings on the topic at Life Without a Net, linked above.

Our Lady of Perpetual Win has posted a very bitter pill to swallow, in the form of a short story that you may want to sit down and have a glass of whiskey before reading. Because you’re going to think twice afterward.

A mutant gene is apparently responsible for Fragile X syndrome. That isn’t news in and of itself, but tracking down the gene responsible is.

An anthropologist with a mind for meta has undertaken a study to explore the evolution of Darwin’s theory of evolution. This is specifically for those people that think Darwin is some kind of prophet and his materials are taken as dogmatically true.

PZ Myers’ I Get Email series pretty well covers all the fundie tropes, but there’s nothing funnier than a letter that consists of “blah blah unrelated qualifications blah blah anti-intellectualism yadda yadda Pascal’s wager dobby dobby God Bless.” Like that’s going to shake PZ’s lack of faith.

Over at Balloon Juice, DougJ discusses the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, probably falsely executed based on some egregiously spurious pseudoscience about fire.

And last, but by no stretch of the imagination least, Dan J kicks the shit out of the health care lies that are floating around the wingnut world. Oh, and also out of the idea that one can convert an atheist to religion, when said atheist reasoned their way into their non-belief to begin with, by explaining exactly how one “deconverts”.

Happy Friday!