Who needs to read any other site? Freethoughtblogs has it all.

• Digital Cuttlefish has a poem about Texas cheerleaders. Don’t worry, it’s not porny at all!

• Ophelia Benson finds Simon Singh in trouble again, being threatened with a lawsuit by quacks who don’t like him pointing out the duck-like nature of their voices.

• Dana Hunter is searching for a notorious car — one that survived the eruption of Mt St Helens.

• Ian Cromwell dissects gay conversion therapy and discovers something completely obvious about its proponents.

• Sikivu Hutchinson also puts the smack down on the religious fanatics pushing gay conversion therapy.

• Maryam Namazie notices that women are mysteriously disappearing from the pages of Ikea catalogs in Saudi Arabia. Turns out it’s a Swedish conspiracy.

• Richard Carrier is going to Skepticon! So am I!

• Mano Singham reveals the logo of our American drone program. Are we the baddies? Yes, we are.
  It’s not a joke. That’s really their logo.

• Taslima Nasrin notes a recent archaeological discovery: Bronze Age women worked as metalsmiths. Must have been before the patriarchy took over.

• Zinnia Jones makes my brain hurt. You MUST watch the video she posted; it’ll make you feel so good and happy. Then you can read the comments from the Religious Right about it, if you want to be whipsawed into fearing a large chunk of humanity. Or if you’d rather just wallow in despair, skip the heart-warming video and go straight to the Commentator Accountability Project.

Hey gang, what’s happening?

• Lilandra blasphemes. The kitten picture is unforgivable.

• Martin Wagner talks about the Austin bat cruise, among many other things. I tried, but I just couldn’t make it this year. Next time! I’d like to be shat upon by a bat.

• Brianne Bilyeu has a report from Louise Kellar about the Creation Evidence Expo in Indianapolis. Guess what? There wasn’t any evidence!

• Frederick Sparks criticizes the biases of science. Ouch.

• Ophelia Benson is concerned about the direction SCA is taking, and recounts some events at this past weekend’s HFA conference. Hey, I was there! Also of note: Ellen Beth mentioned that the obsessed clown posting as “ElevatorGate” was specifically excluded from the event.

• Greta Christina weighs traditional vs. DIY publishing. I can tell you that traditional publishing sure is slower.

• Jason Thibeault discusses the proper methods of hunting witches.

• Maryam Namazie features the FEMEN this month in the Nude Photo Revolutionary Calendar.

• Mano Singham discusses political purity. Is your presidential candidate a perfect paragon? I know mine isn’t.

• Steven Andrew notes that arctic temperatures are now higher thant they were in the Medieval Warm Period. There goes another denialist excuse!

Since I’m utterly useless these days, you’ll have to get your jollies by browsing elsewhere on the network.

• Ed Brayton really doesn’t like SE Cupp. Neither do I. He fails to mention one awful moment in that clip: she cites Ayn Rand. Positively.

• Zinnia Jones suggests that we shouldn’t use religious arguments even in favor of causes we support.

• Brianne Bilyeu thinks we can acquire a Minnesooota accent just by living here. That settles it, I’ve got to mööve, fer sure.

• Would you believe that the loons on AVoiceForMen are arguing that middle-class white men are the new “nigger”? “NO WAY,” says Ian Cromwell.

• Dana Hunter sees birds.

• Stephanie Zvan announces another Mock The Movie night on Thursday. I have to miss this one, I’m working late and then traveling late. Mock on!

• Justin Griffith has a love story. Also a tragedy: so many young people are getting maimed in our wars.

While I’ve been flattened by a virus (my guts are still gurgling at me), everyone else on the network has been charging on ahead. It’s too bad I’m only doing a virtual tour, a real one would do a better job of spreading the disease and reducing productivity so I could catch up.

• Al Stefanelli has started a series on mental illness. First up: OCD.

• Kate Donovan has a series on how to be a friend to a mentally ill person.

• Stephanie Zvan has been running a series all week on the Social Security system. What’s with all the series posts lately?

• Dana Hunter’s heart is thrilled by medieval mayhem and horses. Perhaps a little TMI on just how much she loves the horses…

• Ian Cromwell notices some troubling similarities between a certain presidential candidate and an American Psycho in #MittBateman.

• Mano Singham notices a similarly troubling obsessive vanity in Paul Ryan, Superman.

• Sikivu Hutchinson also has a few complaints about Massa Mitt and white privilege that exempts them from the stigma of ‘handouts’.

• Taslima Nasreen observes that all the anti-Islam movies are badly made films slapped together by people who don’t know how to make movies. But we don’t kill people for bad acting.

• Aron Ra debated Ray Comfort. Ray Comfort then declares victory, announces that he never heard of this guy “Aaron”, and mocks him for using a great big sciencey word that means “lives in trees”.

• Chris Clarke observes the entirely coincidental, fortuitous, and convenient suitability of southern California flora for terraforming alien worlds, with special attention to the their applicability to the Firefly universe.

You’re sitting at home, skipping church, and there’s nothing on the TV but right wingers babbling about politics. Fix yourself some pancakes and browse the godless blogs instead.

• Zingularity exposes a disgraceful Dr Pepper ad that uses monkey-men to sell soda pop and evilution.

• Comradde Physioproffe believes atheism+ is necessary, and the people arguing against it are asshats. Agreed.

• Those same asshats seem to now have taken on the job of driving Stephanie Zvan away from blogging. It’s the usual tactic: make comments so ugly and demeaning that she loses all optimism for humanity.

• Deacon Duncan is troubled by faith, family, and politics. Not individually, just the combination.

• Finally! Dana Hunter posts her explicit dragonfly porn! Imagine a world where predator drones acquire the ability to self-replicate (a much more important milestone than self-awareness.)

• Al Stefanelli finds schoolboard officials leading meetings in sectarian prayer…in central Pennsylvania! The heartland of the Enlightenment! What with its Amish and Mennonite population, and Dover, and all that, don’t you know.

• Ian Cromwell wants to leave FtB for Big Think, because of their commitment to quality thought.

• Ian admires Kanazawa as much as Mano finds Orly Taitz adorable.

• Natalie thinks stories are the rationalizations we tell ourselves to make narrative sense of transitions, but they’re probably not entirely true.

• Lilandra weighs in on atheism+. She’s for a secular morality, but seems a little doubtful that we’ve got it in practice.

I scan the main page of Freethoughtblogs every day, and here are a few of the stories that caught my eye this time around.

• Black Skeptics has posted a list of books by and about African American atheists. I’ve read one, Moral Combat. I’m getting on Amazon to order a few more — I’ve heard Anthony Pinn speak several times, so I should definitely pick up one of his books, he’s good.

• Jason Thibeault finds an excellent post on io9 about recent sexist dust-ups in geek communities. It compares ReaderCon (SF), DefCon (hacking), and TAM. It’s a good objective article on the topic, and I’m afraid TAM comes off the worse in the comparison, and DJ Grothe appears to be an evasive jerk who rejects the solutions found in every other organization.

• Maryam Namazie has just discovered Atheism+. She likes it.

• AronRa has also thought about Atheism+. He’s not jumping on the bandwagon, but he sees it as a “new civil rights movement, stripped of religion.”

• Kate Donovan is now blogging at Ashley Miller’s place.

• An Arizona judge has declared that women ought to stay out of bars, unless they want to be blamed for sexual assault, says Zinnia Jones. Interesting. I wonder if owners of bars in Arizona are now freaking out at the tremendous loss of business that would entail, or if they’re all high-fiving each other and looking forward to evenings with drunken bros everywhere?

• Dana Hunter is teasing us with promises of dragonfly porn. All right, already, deliver. I’m going to be teaching all morning, I can’t possibly hit reload on her blog every minute.

• Did you know Brianne works as a clinic escort? You should read some of her stories: she deals with screamers and the biggest assholes in the universe.

I recognize that there are certain aspects of Pharyngula’s corporate culture that are to be trifled with only at the risk of great social peril. I also recognize that Freethought Blogs as a whole might well be leary of new people coming on board and then immediately posting things that run counter to everything the community here stands for. PZ and I have agreed that my participation here is on an “at will” basis for that very reason. It’s a sound and well-justified measure.

But there are times when a person must say what she or he must.

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