Apparently, polls are now the proper way to settle metaphysical issues. This guy claims to have evidence of life after death, based on claims about near-death experiences (NDEs), which are so convincing…not. People experiencing trauma and physiological shock, whose brains have received a nasty jar and have had the continuity of experience abruptly terminated, are not the best people to accurately describe the objective nature of the phenomenon; also, the mind is pretty darned good at filling in gaps in our experience with confabulations.

It’s an untrustworthy basis for believing in magical post-death transformations, but this guy has made it even worse. How does he test for life after death? He collects anecdotes on a web site — a kind of glorified pointless poll. So I suppose it is only natural that the article about the collection of tripe would put up a pointless poll of its own.

Do you believe in the afterlife?

82.2%
Yes.

7.7%
No.

10%
I’m not sure.

Using the methodology of these loons, I think that if we get a majority saying “No” it will mean that there is no life after death.

You’ll need a Twitter account to crash this poll. There are these things called Shorty Awards being given to popular twitter users in various categories, like health. Unfortunately, as you can imagine, a medium with almost no content, restricted to 140 character brief comments, is easily dominated by the shallow and the superficial, so alt med quacks are having a grand time running up the score.

Let’s see if we can do a little readjustment. A skeptic, Dr. Rachel Dunlop, is also in the running, currently at #16 (she’s being beaten by Dr House). All you have to do is get onto Twitter and enter this string: “I nominate @DrRachie for a Shorty Award in #health because…” and fill in your own brief reason.

There are also lots of other categories that you can tinker with — I notice that @pzmyers is in the lead in the awesome category of #squid right now, with one vote. The numbers in most of the categories are actually so small that we could pharyngulate just about anything, if I were a cruel and capricious leader who wanted to organize a coordinated skewing of #religion or #bacon or whatever. But I shall content myself with sending my legions marching off to #health…this time.

Another one! While you’re on twitter, also vote “I nominate @maddow for a Shorty Award in #journalist because…”.

They taunt me. Really, I know I’m an old lump, it’s OK, you can stop mentioning how I’m not on the poll but all the young cool groovy atheist kids are. And then Hemant has to gloat that at last he can win without me around — yeah, and Potsie might have stood a chance of scoring when the Fonz was out of sight.

Just for that, I voted for Laura.

Hemant (makes me want to add stuff – like him to me) 26% (33 votes)

Laura (makes me want to play car-wash…with nothing but her hair) 46% (57 votes)

Luke (makes me wish I was cougar….wait a minute) 2% (2 votes)

Skepticcat (makes me wish I was a cat dressed as Princess Leia) 4% (5 votes)
Amanda (makes me wish I was covered in sprinkles and jimmies) 1% (1 votes)

Other (makes me wish you’d done your homework better, Sue) 22% (27 votes)

I wouldn’t let one of those quacks get near my neck, let alone any other body part, but apparently Connecticut chiropractors are fighting hard to suppress the information about risk of serious injury from cervical manipulation. And it’s poll time!

Chiropractic Warning: Should chiropractors be required to tell their patients about the remote risk of a stroke from cervical manipulation?

Yes (505 responses)
28%
No (1155 responses)
63%
Depends (163 responses)
9%

Nice spin in the question, too. It’s only a “remote risk” of paralysis, stroke, and death from an ineffectual ‘treatment’. Maybe Connecticut should go further and require that patients also be informed that chiropractic is also a pointless exercise that in good hands is nothing but physical therapy, and in ill-informed hands is dangerous nonsense based on 19th century pseudo-science? Yeah, tell your patients about “subluxions”.