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Rom Houben Misdiagnosed as In A Persistent Vegetative State

A former engineering student and martial arts enthusiast, Rom Houben was paralyzed in 1983 car crash. He has expressed the horror he endured for 23 years after he was misdiagnosed as being in a coma when he was conscious the whole time.

He described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them - but could make no sound.

"I screamed, but there was nothing to hear," said Mr Houben, now 46, who doctors thought was in a persistent vegetative state.

"I dreamed myself away,' he added, tapping his tale out with the aid of a computer.

Twenty years ago, Carrie Coons, an 86-year-old from New York, regained consciousness after a year, took small amounts of food by mouth and engaged in conversation.

Only days before her recovery, a judge had granted her family's request for the removal of the feeding tube which had been keeping her alive. More

Darwin in Turkey

It was only a matter of time. Creationism and Intelligent Design have come to Islam via The United States.

"Sema Ergezen teaches biology to Turkish students interested in teaching science themselves, and she has long struggled with her students' ignorance of, and sometimes hostility to, the notion of evolution.

But she was taken aback when several of her Marmara University students recently accused her of being an atheist, or worse, for teaching anything but the doctrine that God created the Earth and everything on it.

"They said I was a liar if I called myself a Muslim because I also accepted evolution," she said.

What especially disturbed -- and amused -- the veteran professor was that the arguments for creationism presented by some of the students came directly from the country where she was educated in the biological sciences years before -- the United States. Translated and adapted for a Muslim society, the purported proofs that Darwinism and evolution were wrong came directly from American proponents of Christian creationism and its less overtly religious offshoot, intelligent design." More

The Third Man Factor

Charles Lindbergh heard the Third Man on his 1928 transAtlantic flight, New York to Paris. James Sevigny heard the Third Man when he was tumbled two thousand feet by an avalanche, his back broken. "Most of the people who've encountered the Third Man aren't mystics," says John Geiger, "a senior fellow at the University of Toronto and governor of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society." A NASA astronaut heard him, as well as explorer Ernest Shackleton, who coined the "Third Man" term. They have been religious as well as atheists.

Ron "DiFrancesco was working in the World Trade Center's south tower on September 11 when the building was hit by a hijacked plane. He was trapped on the 91st floor of the 110-story building, gasping for air as the smoke and flames closed in.

He was about to pass out when he sensed someone near him. Then he heard a male voice. He says it told him to get up, and it guided him through a maze of hazards to safety.

DiFrancesco was the last person to get out of the south tower before it fell. . . ."

Not religious, Sevigny says "If it wasn't for the Third Man, I would be dead". . . . "There's no way that I would have the strength to get up and walk across that valley and do the things I did to survive." More

John Geiger, The Third Man Factor

The Peril of Positive Thinking

Don't like the news because it's always glum? Well, quit thinking the glass is half empty. Hey, it's half full, chum, and it's going to get fuller. Somebody will come along and top it off for you. Just don't ask me who. As for the news, you can always change your attitude toward events by getting your daily dose of Happy News.

"Ever since psychologist Martin Seligman crafted the phrase 'learned optimism' in 1991 and started offering optimism training, there's been a thriving industry in the kind of thought reform that supposedly overcomes negative thinking. You can buy any number of books and DVDs with titles like Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude, in which you will learn mental exercises to reprogram your outlook from gray to the rosiest pink: 'affirmations,' for example, in which you repeat upbeat predictions over and over to yourself; 'visualizations' in which you post on your bathroom mirror pictures of that car or boat you want; 'disputations' to refute any stray negative thoughts that may come along. If money is no object, you can undergo a three-month 'happiness makeover' from a life coach or invest $3,575 for three days of 'optimism training' on a Good Mood Safari on the coast of New South Wales."

What more could you want? Hmmm, let's see--maybe a dose of reality.

"What makes you think unsullied optimism is such a good idea? Americans have long prided themselves on being positive and optimistic — traits that reached a manic zenith in the early years of this millennium. Iraq would be a cakewalk! The Dow would reach 36,000! Housing prices could never decline! Optimism was not only patriotic but was also a Christian virtue, or so we learned from the proliferating preachers of the 'prosperity gospel,' whose God wants to 'prosper' you. In 2006, the runaway bestseller The Secret promised that you could have anything you wanted, anything at all, simply by using your mental powers to 'attract' it. The poor listened to upbeat preachers like Joel Osteen and took out subprime mortgages. The rich paid for seminars led by motivational speakers like Tony Robbins and repackaged those mortgages into securities sold around the world." More from Barbara Ehrenreich

Bobby Fischer: Genius & Idiot

"Is it possible for someone to be extremely intelligent and creative in a certain field and at the same time, in other respects, to be simple minded? The answer is yes.

Consider Isaac Newton. He was certainly a genius in the fields of mathematics and physics. On the other hand he devoted most of his life to studying the prophecies of the Bible, calculating the year in which God created the entire universe in six days, and determining the probable year that Jesus would return!

Consider Arthur Conan Doyle. He was a brilliant writer, creator of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, yet he firmly believed in the reality of fairies. He even wrote an entire book defending the authenticity of several crude photographs of the tiny winged fairies taken by two little girls.

My third example is Bobby Fischer, perhaps the greatest chess player of all time, certainly the best known." More