Ghosts and Near Death Experiences

Someone asked my opinion about the existence of ghosts recently, as many have, and I have multiple experiences seeing things that I still deem to be paranormal, and don't much care to describe those accounts in any great detail. Do ghosts exist? Definitely. Are they as individualized as various stupid documentary shows might imply? No. Ghosts are provable by the laws of the conservation of energy. Energy, like matter, can neither be created nor destroyed. It carries on, and we all contain energy. When our mortal frames meet their respective demise, that energy simply doesn't disappear; it lingers in some state, somewhere, be it in the vicinity of the body's death or in another location that might hold more significance to the entity in question. I've never embraced the notion of pesky poltergeists or similar spirits that throw dishes around or generally cause mischief, as I find no reason for an extant mass of energy to suddenly find the power to crack back into our dimensions and affect tangible objects in any manner, especially for the sake of merely being a pain in the ass. Sounds of moaning, creaking, and echoed, labored voices might be reported in particularly haunted venues, but perhaps the power of suggestion might be narrating the nature of such experiences to those who expect such hauntings? Why are they always moans and creaks? Are ghosts that uninventive and boring?

Which brings me to those that recount tales of being dead. How can they recount such tales? They're dead. The brain ceases to record. Nobody will convince me that they can remember being dead, because hey dork, you're dead - there's no remembering. Yeah I've heard that the brain continues to function in a limited capacity for a modicum of time, but the lack of adrenalin in the system and similar components preclude one from memorization at the brink of their terminus. While I do believe in heaven and spiritual realms beyond this environment, it is inherently against the will of "God" to allow us to drift into his spiritual world, then report back to the earthly base of operations as if it's like going to Hawaii. Like the proverbial (almost literally) thief in the night, nobody can tell me of the days of rapture and end of the world, and as such, nobody will convince me how the transition into the next world might appear, as to me, the description will simply be a function of their own brains' panic and doomed desperation.

Another Open Letter

So I love the AFLAC duck commercials; they are the best. I hate advertisers, but this series is so cute, it's the best. Well, some poultry rights people have some protest against it, like it negatively portrays a duck or abuses it or whatever. It was at http://www.upc-online.org/alerts/020304aflac_duck.html

Supposedly ducks are being degraded. So I wrote the head honcho the following:


I understand your concern and humane foresight for the portrayal of a duck being abused, but the notion of protesting AFLAC into changing the nature of their duck's portrayal is illogical at best. Why is this a quest of yours, when, as an animal rights conscious citizen, I see so many other injustices in today's society, particularly with poultry, that you waste time with a campaign that I find amusing, creative, and clearly without abuse to a live duck? I despise advertising and their nefarious practices but found the AFLAC duck to be a breath of fresh air and incredibly cartoonish in nature - and most importantly, harmless.
As a supporter of animal rights, there are limits to where protests and contention must extend. When those limits are breached, such activists and supporters of animal rights merely appear overzealous and idiotic with oversensitive protests that carry little effect or gravity in the scope of greater efforts. I sincerely applaud AFLAC for their commercials, as they are some of the few that amuse me, and clearly no live animal is being harmed. Firing shots at this campaign is an embarrassing gesture of oversensitivity and I, as others that have heard of this, strongly recommend you rescind the complaints and seek the myriad other injustices and abuses that exist in the food industry, etc, rather than a mere portrayal. Any such campaign against a comedic character merely strips away credit and respect from your cause, I hope you see that. I am not against your goals, merely pointing out a mistake in logic.

You are welcome to publish my thoughts, despite their dissention. As stated, I support your general cause strongly, but find this protest a bit of a joke and thought better of you to redirect efforts elsewhere. Is there a protest against Daffy Duck being shot up by Elmer Fudd a future campaign? Common Sense.
Sincerely,
Mike Caldwell

E-Virgin.com

With this zany internet, an infinite number of channels are at our disposal for human abuse and exploitation. We invent the camera? Cameras can produce porn. We invent the television? TV can show porn. We invent the telegraph, and people start having telegraph sex. Then phone sex. People would play chess by mail. I wonder if there was ever postal sex? Talk about needing to last a while. But love letters and the like have sufficed in their day. And the girl could spray a wisp of perfume onto the paper, and the guy could fart onto his. So cute and appealing to the many senses. Just remember, there's a real, legitimate postal rule in the Domestic Mail Manual (DMM as it were) that specifically states that if mailing live scorpions, you must write "LIVE SCORPIONS" on the box. Remember that.

As so many means for communicating love and romance have developed, the logical successor to the old "dating service" concept would be the likes of match.com or eHarmony.com. Thankfully match.com's marketing blitz has faded, but eHarmony, and this Neil Clark Warren bozo, holy hell is it getting tiring. Based on the "success stories" I've seen, the slogan should be "where nerdy guys can find girls with fat asses". And the whole concept is bogus anyway - as people are matched on 30 different dimensions. Yeah, but remember that it such a system is still based on that person's self evaluation; about as subjective as possible. This near flawless matching system and evaluation is only as reliable as the lunatics which submit them. Nobody's going to be honest with themselves and fill this evaluation out with the famous 30 dimensions:

"Well, let's see, I'm an asshole - check, I want a big fat person,
check. I like fighting, crime, laziness and anger, check. Hey now
I'll turn this gem into the soulmate-o-matic and grab my princess!"

That Neil guy on all the eHarmony commercials, grumble. Hey, I'm all excited if his site brings people together and they find happiness with this method. But ol' Neil started characterizing the wondrous, amorphous concept of love as a chemical formula; mix some compatibility with chemistry and blammo. It isn't quite so simple, and with the understandable tendency for all participants of such dating sites to subtly misrepresent themselves in favor of a better portrayal, rather than a sanguine, accurate depiction, drives dating "systems" into the flaws of misrepresentation that led these isolated souls to the web in the first place. Such supposedly innovative sites like eHarmony will forever waste obdurate, yet innovative, scientific "logic" on the hasty frameworks of inaccurate, poorly sketched personality profiles, drafted by all who sought to camouflage their flaws within a supposedly multidimensional autobiographical profile.

With my countless essays on romantic injustice and relationship imbalances, it may appear that I suffer from some related pang of unrequited love. In a sense, that impetous might be true, but in truth, it's a combination of common sense and the suffering of those around me which angers me and drives me to comment on our innate zest to find a perfect partner with which to fill egos, build security, and erect an indirect sense of fulfillment. The desperation and hurried approach to finding one's soulmate is exactly what creates embitterment, dating services, and most of all, the constantly rising propensity toward divorce. Finding that one perfect partner is not to be hastily derived, calculated, or arranged. It might happen or might not. Some people are perfectly happy eliminating that goal from their existence, and quite happily pursue a path of independence and self-sufficiency. More power to them.

The point is simple; love is an aspect of fate and otherwordly destiny that transcends any type of human wisdom or scientific processing. Success stories may exist, but meeting a true love will happen as a serendipitous aspect to life's journey, not from a fiendish set of calculated maneuvers through a scientific dating service or similar system. The eHarmony slogan touts the ability to assess compatibility, and that word is so tasteless and harsh - people are not pieces of computer equipment. True emotion, fulfillment, and altruistic peace has so little to do with the objective, emotionless harshness of a statistically crude personality rating system - I'm surprised so many people accept faith in this ironic application of science to such an amorphously soft, mysterious, spiritual concept as true love. While many will find true love and happiness by meeting their beloved in a crude setting like a dating service, I can't see how the concept could ever be true to the heart and soul, as the spirit defies numbers and statistics, and always will surpass these finite inventions of the finite, narrow human mind.