One out of every 99 American adults lives in a prison cell, according to a new Pew study. Using updated state-by-state data, the report said 2,319,258 adults were held in U.S. prisons or jails at the start of 2008 — one out of every 99.1 adults, and more than any other…
George Carlin is preparing for another HBO special, this one on "not giving a #%&@." Carlin was recently interviewed by Salon.com's Heather Havrilesky. I'd recommend signing up for Salon's Premium membership, to give you access to Carlin's full interview [Salon Premium is $29/year, with lots of extras thrown in]. Here's Carlin…
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 …
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…
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.
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