What is it like to be dead?

The answer is we don’t know.  

I don’t know.  You don’t know.   No one knows.   That’s it.   Off with you . . .  [I figured that this title would draw some Bible-toting fundies to the site].

So you can all leave now.  There’s nothing here to discuss.  Go visit some other blog post.  Have a nice long life, because at the end of your life, you’ll likely just be dead.  You know, you’ll be

blooey, breathless, buried, cadaverous, checked out, cold, cut off, deceased, defunct, departed, done for, erased, expired, extinct, gone, inanimate, inert, late, lifeless, liquidated, mortified, no more, not existing, offed, passed away, perished, reposing, rubbed out, snuffed out, spiritless, stiff, unanimated, washed up and wasted.

There is no reason to think that any dead person has ever been aware of anything at all.  

I’ll admit that it is possible that at the moment you die, your consciousness will continue.  Maybe you’ll instantly be transported to the far side of the moon to ride a sparkly majestic merry-go-round after you’re dead, but there’s no evidence for that or any other version of continued sentience.  The only evidence is that when you’re dead, you’re dead.  There’s nothing more we can say about it.  There’s no credible report that anyone has returned from the dead to say otherwise.   You didn’t listen; I said “credible.”

. . .  Oh, I see some of you are still hanging around because you can’t accept “I don’t know” for an answer.   I

Share

Continue ReadingWhat is it like to be dead?

Who is paying uninterested people to tie up seats for FCC hearings on Net Neutrality?

Was it Comcast?  Whoever it was, this tactic is disgusting. There was huge turnout at [the Feb 25] public hearing in Boston on the future of the Internet. Hundreds of concerned citizens arrived to speak out on the importance of an open Internet. Many took the day off from work…

Continue ReadingWho is paying uninterested people to tie up seats for FCC hearings on Net Neutrality?

If you are taking the anti-depressants Prozac, Effexor, Paxil or Serzone, don’t read this post.

Are they gone?  Are all the millions of people who take Prozac, Effexor, Paxil and Serzone-who-are-not-severely-depressed gone?  Good.  Now we can talk. The rest of you have probably already read the news that:

Antidepressant medications appear to help only very severely depressed people and the drugs work no better than placebos in many patients, British researchers said Tuesday.

Why would the news media ever report the truth regarding these wildly-hyped antidepressants?   After all, scientists have long known that most of the power of these drugs is in the placebo effect.  Or, at least, scientists should have suspected this, because the FDA was refusing to release the full data sets regarding these drugs trial, at least until the good scientists who work on this new report (Prof Irving Kirsch and colleagues) requested “the full data under freedom of information rules from the Food and Drug Administration, which licenses medicines in the US and requires all data when it makes a decision.”  Gosh, it appears that some of the relevant data wasn’t available to the forty million people taking these drugs, until long after the release of these drugs through massive corporate guerilla marketing.

placebos.jpg

In its advertisements, the manufacturer of Prozac, Lilly, doesn’t say anything about the drug not working well for large numbers of the patients for whom it was being prescribed.  In fact, Lilly makes this claim:

The safety and effectiveness of PROZAC have been thoroughly studied in clinical trials with more than 11,000 patients. There have been more than

Share

Continue ReadingIf you are taking the anti-depressants Prozac, Effexor, Paxil or Serzone, don’t read this post.

I’m going to summarize a supermarket tabloid newspaper for you this week, so you can save your money.

At the supermarket last week, I picked up a copy of the Sun.  Actually, I think the full title of the newspaper is Sun: God Bless America, based upon the front cover. I was intrigued by the front page headline: “Seven Miracle Prophecies That Will Come True on Easter Sunday.”  I wondered what those prophecies were, and now I’m going to share them with you so you don’t have to spend your hard earned money on the Sun: God Bless America.

sun-lo-res-450-pixel.JPG

It’s going to be quite a day this Easter Sunday, that’s for sure.  Based on reading the lead article in the Sun: God Bless America, I now know that the following things will be happening on March 23, 2008:

  • 1.  George W. Bush will announce that all of our troops will be coming home from Iraq, and that the Iraq government will take over full responsibility for Iraq’s security. 
  • 2.  There will be numerous miraculous healings all over the world, including people with cancer, heart disease and arthritis.  People will rejoice and no one will have to live in despair any longer.
  • 3.  Pollution will miraculously reverse itself.  In fact, according to the article, the levels of pollution will all return to where they were before the Industrial Revolution.  The authority for the statement is “Professor Jonas Peake, an authority on Biblical prophecy at Britain’s famed Cambridge University.”
  • 4.  Congress and the White House will pour lots of that money that was destined for Iraq into the
Share

Continue ReadingI’m going to summarize a supermarket tabloid newspaper for you this week, so you can save your money.

Marty Kaplan on the pros and cons of Ralph Nader’s candidacy

Marty Kaplan, a research professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, repeatedly raises important points relating to our dysfunctional news media. He posted today on his ambivalence with the recently announced candidacy of Ralph Nader. Nader, who skipped the primaries, says that his third-party race will inject into the…

Continue ReadingMarty Kaplan on the pros and cons of Ralph Nader’s candidacy