Man in coma for 23 years now fully conscious?

You've heard stories of people waking up from comas, but how often is it claimed that a person in a vegetative state for 23 years wakes up and can suddenly communicate with his family in sophisticated ways? That is the claim in this story, but not so fast! If you read the entire story, you'll see that family members are taking the man's fingers and pointing at a special keyboard. He's not able to move his hand himself. He's not able to speak. Does this sound suspicious? Check out this quote:

The therapist, Linda Wouters, told APTN that she can feel Houben guiding her hand with gentle pressure from his fingers, and that she feels him objecting when she moves his hand toward an incorrect letter. Arthur Caplan, a bioethics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said he is skeptical of Houben's ability to communicate after seeing video of his hand being moved along the keyboard. "That's called 'facilitated communication,'" Caplan said. "That is ouija board stuff. It's been discredited time and time again. When people look at it, it's usually the person doing the pointing who's doing the messages, not the person they claim they are helping."
So there it is: Yet another case of hope prevailing over the evidence. This same issue of "facilitated communication" once swept the United States among people with severely autistic children. Many parents who desperately wanted to believe that their severely autistic children were suddenly writing sophisticated phrases have been devastated to learn that it was actually a case of "automatic writing," displaying the thoughts and the attitudes of the facilitators rather than the patients.

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William K. Black: It’s time for real economic reform

We are a nation in severe crisis. According to William K. Black, a white-collar criminologist, President Obama doesn't deserve any more of our patience:

The Obama administration promoted Bush's architects of the financial disaster and demands that we hail them as heroes. President Bush was ridiculed for saying: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." FEMA administrator Michael Brown stood by while Hurricane Katrina reduced a single large city to ruin. Geithner and Bernanke stood by while scores of large cities were devastated.
Black offer much more than criticism. He offers ten opportunities for digging us out of this mess. It will be difficult to attain any of these while the banks own Congress, but we need to dig deeply an somehow find the political will. Here are two of Black's points that stand out to me:
Can the Wrecking Crew. Fire the senior leaders of Bush's and Clinton's financial Wrecking Crews and stopping treating them as financial experts. President Obama should not reappoint Bernanke as Fed Chairman. He should dismiss Geithner and Summers and cease to take any advise from Rubin. Replace them with the Reconstruction Crew -- people with a track record of getting things right and being effective economists, regulators, and prosecutors . . . End "too big to fail." These banks are "systemically dangerous institutions" (SDIs). They should not be allowed to grow. They should be shrunk to the point that they no longer pose systemic risk, and they should be subject to vigorous regulation while shrinking. They are too big to manage and too big to regulate. They are ticking time bombs that will cause recurrent global crises as long as they are SDIs.
Here are some of Black's other suggestions. I agree with all of them whole-heartedly: - We need to provide the FBI with 1,000 more specialized white-collar crime investigators. - No more executive compensation looting. - Kill TARP and PPIP. ("Use the funds to help honest homeowners that would otherwise lose their homes because of predatory loan terms.") - Make the Federal Reserve System public. - Defeat any proposal to make the Fed the "Uberregulator." - Create a robust "Consumer Financial Product Agency. - End the waste of long-term unemployment (Instead, of paying them to do nothing, pay them to do public works) Consider, also, Black's Five Fatal Flaws of Finance.

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Afghanistan = Vietnam

On Friday's show, Bill Moyers drew upon President Lyndon Johnson's taped phone calls and commentary regarding the Vietnam war, before drawing the following conclusions:

Now in a different world, at a different time, and with a different president, we face the prospect of enlarging a different war. But once again we're fighting in remote provinces against an enemy who can bleed us slowly and wait us out, because he will still be there when we are gone.

Once again, we are caught between warring factions in a country where other foreign powers fail before us. Once again, every setback brings a call for more troops, although no one can say how long they will be there or what it means to win. Once again, the government we are trying to help is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent.

And once again, a President pushing for critical change at home is being pressured to stop dithering, be tough, show he's got the guts, by sending young people seven thousand miles from home to fight and die, while their own country is coming apart.

And once again, the loudest case for enlarging the war is being made by those who will not have to fight it, who will be safely in their beds while the war grinds on. And once again, a small circle of advisers debates the course of action, but one man will make the decision.

The conversations secretly taped by Lyndon Johnson are riveting. They demonstrate that Johnson consistently saw escalation to be a terrible option, yet he ordered it. The entire episode of Bill Moyers Journal can be viewed here.

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Life is real

After a business meeting in Boston last week, I had two extra hours before I needed to head to the airport. I decided to visit a few historical sites on foot by following Boston’s “Freedom Trail.” At one end of the trail is the “Old North Church,” from which the patriots displayed two lanterns to give warning that the British were about to attack “by sea.” As I was approaching the Old North Church, I had an odd thought: The Old North Church really exists. It’s not just part of a concocted story like Harry Potter. You can walk up and touch the bricks and feel the history in your fingertips. You can trace the history of the church through hundreds of authentic letters and other writings. You can say with great confidence that the Old North Church played a real-life role the Revolutionary War. Because I am a lawyer and a writer, I spend a lot of time thinking of abstract ideas. For that reason, I often need to remind myself about some of the many parts of life that really happened. Maybe I also need to remind myself that some things are really real because entertainment has become such a central part of our lives. When Americans get together, they often bond by discussing television shows and movies. These works of fictions are so often discussed that they seem to rise to the level of "facts." But our world mostly depends on real events that dramatically affect our lives. On the flight back home from Boston, I started thinking of some of the other amazing things that actually play critical roles in our lives. They aren’t just stories in history books or science books. For instance, World War II really occurred. It wasn’t just a movie. There are cemeteries filled with the bodies of the soldiers that died in that war. Consider also, the importance of large-scale immigration to the United States over the past centuries. Without that mass movement of people to the United States, most of us wouldn’t have been born. The scale and the details of many real life events are more amazing than anything any fiction writer could conjure up. Here are some other important facts that I am generally amazed at whenever I take the time to remind myself that these aren't simply stories: * The Greeks really built an extraordinary civilization, as did the Maya and the Egyptian. These aren't just yarns spun by museums and authors. * We’re floating in space and there are stars under our feet too. * The sun is a giant furnace that really does light and heat the earth, and someday the sun won’t exist. * The universe is expanding in rapidly in such a way as to suggest a Big Bang, which was a time when there was no Earth and no living things. * Human beings are animals, and we run in large flocks. 40% of our DNA matches the DNA of lettuce. * All living things are related. * We don’t have any credible users’ manual for living life on earth. * We are far from rational beings. * Despite its unfathomable complexity, including the fact that it is constituted of many billions of cells, the human body works. * Almost all human cognition is subconscious and it is driven largely by emotions, addictions and instincts. * There really are 7 billion people on our planet and we are rapidly exhausting the planet’s resources. I often need to remind myself of these things. I get too distracted by day-to-day aspects of my life, which causes me to take all too many things for granted. Thus, I need to remind myself that much of the world around us is really real, not just a story. This is almost embarrassing to admit, but I often enrich my life by consciously acknowledging the obvious.

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Colonoscopies: a sure way to save thousands of lives every year.

Every year 50,000 Americans die of colon cancer or rectal cancer (combined, they are referred to as colorectal cancer). If Americans over 50 years of age (and those in other higher risk categories) were screened for colorectal cancer as recommended, 80% of these cancer deaths could be avoided. These numbers are staggering. To put them in perspective, about 3,000 Americans died during the 9/11 attacks, which caused this country to become apoplectic to the point where it started an entirely needless war that is currently in its seventh year. Needlessly undiagnosed colon cancer takes the lives of more than ten times as many Americans as 9/11 every year. Needlessly undiagnosed colon cancer killed enough Americans over the past twelve months to fill an entire major league baseball stadium. So where is the "war on colon cancer? My insurance company just send me a mailer reminding me of the importance of obtaining a colonoscopy, the gold standard for detecting and preventing colorectal cancer. The statistics are so stark that it would be irrational for anyone to not proceed with this procedure, even though going through with it are less than pleasant. Given that I'm 53 and I've never had such a procedure, I signed up. I started looking for information on the internet and found this highly informative video introduced by Katie Couric and featuring Dr. Jon LaPook, a gastroenterologist, who undergoes a colonoscopy on camera to demonstrate both the preparation and the procedure. After viewing this video, the entire thing looks a lot less daunting.
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