conuly

Some NSA Officials Favor Giving Snowden Limited Amnesty For All The Wrong Reasons

http://bit.ly/1gxXlHZ

Feds joins battle on citrus disease

http://bit.ly/1b5jANq

Obama to review changes in spy policy

http://usat.ly/18JP52D

Tech giants team up in anti-snooping effort

On the one hand: good for them! On the other, I am even more uncomfortable with corporate influence in the government than I am with the NSA, and that is saying an awful lot.

http://usat.ly/19v5TaK

The Return of the Welfare Queen

http://bit.ly/19odyex

Federal judge declares Utah polygamy law unconstitutional

http://bit.ly/1bFgIKy

This Ethiopian village has gained wealth, but has bred hostility

Because they aren't Christians or Muslims, basically.

http://bit.ly/IShpWz

ECONOMIC INEQUALITY: A MATTER OF TRUST?

http://nyr.kr/18Dk0jK

IF YOU REFRAIN FROM TALKING ABOUT RACE, PEOPLE MIGHT THINK YOU’RE RACIST

As many commenters point out, not all of the "black" people on that modified Guess Who? board look unambiguously black. So there's that as well.

http://bit.ly/1k0V0oL

Surprise! Charity Buys 21 Sacred Katsinam for Hopi at Auction in Paris

http://bit.ly/IVI58J

Scientists discover double meaning in genetic code

http://bit.ly/1duyD6q

How cholera evolved to be one of the deadliest diseases in history

http://bit.ly/18IkCil

This study shows how a good metaphor can change the world

http://bit.ly/1bEyUAv

Inside the Rainbow Gulag: The Technicolor Rise and Fall of Lisa Frank

http://bit.ly/1hPDhRG

The second operating system hiding in every mobile phone

http://www.osnews.com/story/27416

A Pen That 3-D Prints Bone Right Onto Patients

http://bit.ly/JeNtEF

In Ukraine, skepticism greets new vow on E.U.

http://wapo.st/1cruH49

Kindergartener signs song for deaf mom. It's the most adorable time of the year!

http://cnn.it/1gxU7UM

Teacher accused of feeding autistic student hot sauce rehired.

Either Florida has a serious teacher shortage or they really hate disabled kids down there.

http://abcn.ws/1ctku7j

http://bit.ly/1bR1bId

I thought we already knew that! Didn't we already know that? I'm pretty sure I already knew that, at least.

She was very excited about it, because, really, who isn't excited about the prospect of being gainfully employed?

Her autistic son gets home from school early one day a week, and she asked for accommodations for that day, maybe the ability to work from home, so she could better care for him. They rescinded the job offer, and now she's suing as a violation of the ADA and the Civil Rights Act.

Now, which big company am I asking you to boycott right now? Who could possibly act in such a stupidly heinous manner?

Take a guess, and then I'm sticking the answer under a cut.

( *drumroll* )

Comment if you were surprised. You'll get a consolation cookie.

Now, in the comments there are many people asserting that "of course" most autistics are "low-functioning". They say this, but they never once attempt to prove it. They must think we're too stupid to notice.

Quite aside from the never-ending discussion on how to define those terms and whether or not they're even valid, there really is no proof of that claim. When people say that, they're making it up. They really are. Don't buy into claims like this until you check it out yourself. As I get older, I find that the more often something is repeated, the less likely it is to be true, and this little gem is no exception.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/magazine/the-autism-advantage.html

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Some autistic brains really are wired differently

What child prodigies and autistic people have in common

This latter is not all that well written, I think. Of course, I'm inclined to find the "all aspies are brilliant!!!" meme truly irritating, so "all brilliant people are autistic!!!" isn't much better.

Two of the top-level comments, so far, are the sort that ignore everything said in the article and only go nattering on and on about person-first language. One of them, upon being corrected, still goes "Oh, but, you know, not all people with autism will ever be able to talk!" And if they did, they'd automatically agree with her? The arrogance there is astounding, and far more annoying than the original "person first language totally rocks!!!" comments.

I'm thinking I'd be far less annoyed by the whole concept if the people insistent on it would ever, ever say something of content instead of their vapid, sanctimonious little comments.

http://juststimming.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/quiet-hands/

I never had to deal with that from teachers nor, for the most part, family. The only thing similar is my mother's complaints that when I spun a mardi gras necklace on my arm, I made her dizzy - but even then, she didn't care so long as she didn't see me.

My mother's comment once, when I complained about the judgment inherent in saying autistic children don't "play properly" with toys but may "just" line them up was, before I could get to the point, a vehement interruption of "But that IS playing!" That's certainly how I played as a child much of the time.

Sometimes, I love my family very, very much.

that Arthur just had a show on Asperger's!

George meets a rabbit with Asperger's, and after a few rather pathetic comments about "the piece of the puzzle" the show goes on.

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There's also a "Word From Us Kids" that was edited from that episode, despite it being otherwise complete. You can see that clip at the end of the video here.

First, apparently the Theater Development Fund is running special Broadway performances for autistic children and adults (they said that specifically, with that wording) and their families.

It sounds like a really great program.

Now, you'll notice that in the list of organizations they thank, a prominent one isn't mentioned. YOU know which one. But I wouldn't expect them to be, first because this isn't really AS's thing, and second because, you know, they're evil. Or maybe they were deliberately excluded, a sign of good taste if you ask me.

And in the more awful news, here's a video of a bus driver and an aide beating up on an autistic student. They've been convicted but not sentenced. Why people who hate kids or just aren't good with them go into professions where they have to interact with children, I don't know.

DO NOT READ THE COMMENTS.

Half of them are "oh, that boy was violent, what do you expect them to do, he shouldn't be on the bus if his parents can't teach him to behave" and the other half are "oh, those terrible fatties from the ghetto should be shot". It's a sad day when both sides are obnoxious.

Could places like Silicon Valley be breeding a whole generation of kids with autism or Asperger's syndrome?

Because I distinctly remember talking this subject to death only about five years ago. And, uh, three years before that as well. And last year, maybe?

And yet, the comments (don't read the comments) are acting like this is a wildly new proposition, and as it is SOOOOOOO new they are deeply, deeply suspicious of it. (Especially because it doesn't mention vaccines at all, but that's all right, lots of people are willing to promulgate equally absurd non-vaccine hypotheses as well. Maybe people have too much sex! Maybe they use too many birth control pills! Maybe it's artificial sweeteners! Wait - could it be vaccines??? Or some sort of hormonal imbalance that I'm making up right now?

And there's always the eugenicists....

(Do NOT read the comments!)

As far as inheriting autism goes, I've said it before, but to recap:

I'm pretty sure both parents were/are what's called "the broader autistic phenotype". One day I have to explain how I grew up, our whole family functioning as a little self-contained unit that didn't particularly want or need anybody else. (This was actually a great way to grow up, but by my teens I could see that other people didn't live quite like that!) And I'm pretty sure both grandmothers were/are as well. And we ALL know my mother's father was autistic, that's not even a possibility that he wasn't.

Now, my mother swears that she knew about me from the time I was a baby. And I believe her - I remember being dragged around to doctors as they tried to get me diagnosed, to no avail. (Apparently, bright children who could talk just didn't get autism diagnoses back then. Remember this the next time somebody points to their bright, verbal child and says "This child is autistic because of vaccines, it's an EPIDEMIC!" Very often when people do, I reflect that the kid is no different than I was at that age.)

At the same time, when I started researching the subject (after I admitted it to her), she didn't want to talk about it for a while. She thought I outgrew it or it "wasn't that bad" or whatnot. How she could hold both views simultaneously I do NOT know, but there it is.

She's gotten better about it, and recently she randomly brought up that a friend had said that if I wasn't "so aspie" she'd think Jenn was on the spectrum. (I don't see it myself, but possibly for the same reason my mother... wait, I'll get to it.) And that brought up the whole issue, again, of who in the family might be anywhere near the spectrum at all, and my mother, at the end, scoffed "C'mon! If that's all your criteria, half the world must be autistic!"

And I think I finally figured out the issue here, and I pointed it out to her - if my idea is correct, and there's a heck of a lot of it floating around in her family and the people she's chosen to associate with (including, y'know, her husband my FATHER) - she doesn't know what normal is. She thinks her family is the epitome of normal, but you know, her cousin Frances thought Schlomo was a normal name! (And it is to some people, just like we're all normal to my mom.)

That's a tangent, but it's a bit more interesting I think than the link, which, y'know... isn't really news.

but apparently not, as this editorial on a business that hires autistics deliberately is only a few days old.

Weird how that happens. Nothing really new here, it's not saintly to hire disabled individuals - heck, it's probably the law where you are, if not to seek out disabled people to hire to at least not discriminate against them and to give reasonable accommodations.

It's time for my yearly poll!



All done?

Whew, now I don't have to mention it again for a whole 'nother year. (Well, assuming nothing tragic happens in the world of autism, like autism speaks continuing to exist or something like that.)

But maybe I did.

Now, the article is ostensibly about how children are less likely to be fooled by a certain optical illusion. So far so good, but then you get to this paragraph:

Other investigators have noted that children with autism don’t succumb to visual size illusions, consistent with the idea that autism involves an excessive focus on details. But visual context largely eludes all young children, not just those with autism, Doherty asserts.

At the risk of making a pun in bad taste, let me say that this is just typical. Here we have an autistic strength (not being easily fooled by misleading extraneous information) and yet people insist on describing it as an unalloyed negative (an "excessive" focus on details?)

Man, that is just annoying. This sort of thing can make a cloudy day seem gray and dreary instead of potentially snowy and wonderful. And it's a pity because I got the link to that first article after reading this cool article about how a class of kids studied bees and got their research published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Telling quote? "“It’s so different from other science-education programs, where the aim is to learn facts,” Lotto said."

Yes! This is something that's been bugging me about my own science education (and, by extension, the nieces') for the past several years! Science isn't just a bunch of facts piled together like rocks! You can learn the facts when you're grown, or you can look them up (when does it really come up how many planets are in the solar system?), but what you need to learn as a child is how to think and figure things out scientifically! Not how to pass a multiple guess test or what King Phillip can order.

When children die in hot cars, I normally point out that it's surprisingly easy to forget a child in the back seat, and that this is fortunately a rare occurrence. No, I really do that.

However, in this case they had two counselors and a driver for four adults. I don't know how things are run, but I know that drivers of school buses are required to walk to the back of the bus at the end of their run, every day, to post a sign saying they checked for children. Why? To prevent this sort of thing from happening.

However, let's digress slightly. Way down at the bottom of the comment page there's THIS off-topic comment:

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First off, the Rotenberg Center is in the news again.

And one on the potential advantages of being autistic

Here's one about how trauma might alter your DNA. Sounds like Lamarck has gotten a worse rap than he deserved.

Here's an article about how prozac isn't actually more effective than a placebo. I haven't read it - I misplaced my original link, so I googled for it and this is what came up.

And finally, a LONG article about the morality of babies.

( Read more... )

As always, read the comments to the articles at your own risk.

Here is a neat summation of the various issues around this, if you haven't thought of this before.

Here's an article on the death. I find it annoying that they describe her, at six, as being unable to care for herself because she had Rett's syndrome. I know what they mean, but meanwhile - she was kindergarten-aged! Barely the age typical children start real school. At that age, you're not supposed to be able to care for yourself, which is why children are expected to have guardians. They might've found a better, less silly way of phrasing it.

According to this, anyway.

Dr. Edwin Cook, an autism researcher with University of Illinois at Chicago, offered a novel theory for why autism is more common among children with older parents: Autism is known to run in families and it may be that adults with mild or undiagnosed autism have children at later ages, Cook said.

Not that novel, it was my very first thought when reading the headline. Admittedly, having it be my very first thought doesn't necessarily mean anything, but it definitely was what I thought.

of ethical and professional guidelines.

To those of us who already know all this, this is old news.

To those of us in deep denial... nothing's gonna convince those folks. As in...

I feel very sorry for this doctor. We are still at stage 1, of 3, of the truth. They are still ridiculing the idea. I have a 16 year old son, he was normal befoe his vaccinations, with in a few months of his injections he changed. He has been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome.
I believe he his an mmr casualty.
In America, one family has been paid out for mmr damage.

Asperger's syndrome. Huh. 25 years ago, that kid would never have been diagnosed. Asperger's wasn't even in the DSM at that time. It's better this way, I do believe that, but when the next comment by this person runs "And you know, the rate of autism is increasing!!!" remember that it's increasing because kids like his weren't getting diagnosed back in the 80s.

It always craps out in the rain. And this time it was raining AND the ceiling was leaking RIGHT OVER MY BED. (I moved my bed.)

Here's a story about Autism Speaks raising money to help a school that couldn't open because of Katrina. Aww. They finally did something righ- no, no, wait, actually it seems they never gave any of the money they raised to help that school or any other, and who knows where it went.

Huh.

Well, I'd say "that sucks", but that's pretty much par for the course for these people. I'd like to pretend to be surprised... but I'm not. I mean, how could I be?

Due to transportation difficulties I actually only was there for half an hour or 45 minutes at the end. (They ran out of fliers!) And at the end Ari Ne'eman asked us all to post something about the event, and I spent the past few weeks thinking about what to say. Because you know, I came in at the end and all. Well, I just spent a heck of a lot of time organizing some of the tags over on asperger (we'd run out of tags because we were tagging entries by username, so I neatly deleted all those and set up a new system which is alphabetical in nature, but I had to go retag all the previously tagged-by-username entries), and you know, there's a lot of good posts there languishing in obscurity, some of which made me realize I do know exactly what I want to say!

It's not strictly speaking on the protest, which I feel slightly guilty about, but it's inspired by the protest. And anyway, he asked all of us and I kinda mumbled, so that's not binding or anything, is it?

Now, the thing with Autism Speaks, as far as I'm concerned, is that they're evil they use hate speech and think it promotes "awareness" to be extremely offensive (and occasionally deceptive), even concerning their own children. However, some people don't find anything wrong with parents saying in front of their children that they want them dead or... well, anyway, the point is that if you go and tell people Autism Speaks is evil because they're hateful, some people won't listen. (Some people....)

No, what you do, apparently, is tell them that Autism Speaks mismanages its own money and that only a tiny percentage of the funds they take in goes to help actual autistic children and their families. (Meanwhile, they seem to spend quite a bit of money into their own pockets. And, as I found out talking to people then, into donating free tickets to their own benefits, but that might be reasonable, I don't know. Seriously, why do people give them money?)

This is a very good argument because you can't... argue with it. Whatever you feel about cures or autism or killing your kids, you can't argue with the fact that these people waste your money. (Well, not my money, because I'd sooner give all my money to the scientologists than let so much as one copper penny get into their greedy little hands, but you know what I mean. They waste the money of people who don't know better than to give them money to waste, and that's just shameful.)

So, you know, that's the background on Autism Speaks.

Well, for those 45 minutes or so, I spoke to a very few people, and I listened to other people speak as well. (And a very special shout-out goes to those two admitted special-ed teachers who seem to think nobody ever listens to The Poor Parents and that it's reasonable to tell a child you want them dead. I hope your teaching licenses get revoked for the sake of the poor kids in your care. BTW - it's not like Autism Speaks is giving so much of its money to help you and your students either, so yeah.) At one point, a man started giving us his whole life story the little bit he knew about autism. He's got a friend with an adult autistic son who... oh, I forget, who doesn't speak and who needs a lot of help. And the person he was talking to was going "Oh, well, most of us aren't that low-functioning and that's not the norm" and... I knew why I was uncomfortable with this line of argument, but it took a while before I knew how to say it, so I didn't interrupt.

It's very common among some parties to divide autism roughly into high-functioning and low-functioning for matters of convenience. Depending on who's doing it, they might say "Well, high-functioning, they're autistic but they can talk and get jobs and go to school and they're often brilliant, and they make eye contact and never do anything weird to make me uncomfortable!" or they might say "Well, yeah, but what about those low-functioning autistics who can't even communicate or live a normal life, who are randomly violent and sad sad sad all the time and probably retarded and who do weird things with their poop and they rock back and forth and it's weird".

And then, depending on how they divided it up and why, they might go "Well, we can't cure autism because we like those smart people" or "Well, those people who don't want a cure aren't really autistic and I don't like them" or "Well, those people who don't want a cure are only saying that because they like those smart people, and they're not thinking about those poor low-functioning autistics whose parents all secretly want to kill them".

At this point, my thoughts go into several different tangents. Try to keep up, okay?

1. I will grant that there is some logical purpose behind labels such as high or low functioning. However, even if those labels were consistently applied (which they're not), there's just too much variation in people in general. These two views people have miss the whole middle ground of people who need more help in some areas and less in others.

2. You'll also note that the way people in their own minds (as compared to any sort of clinical or official usage... which I also don't think is as consistent as it should be) group people is full of ableist assumptions, like the one that says that "low functioning" people always would want a cure if only they could understand (but can't) and that if anybody is capable of communicating in any way that they don't want a cure they're not "low functioning" even if they fit every other category out there.

It also makes fairly arbitrary assumptions about what is better and what isn't. Speech, for example. Hard as it is to believe, there are people in this world who would rather see their child work hard to speak badly than to see them communicate well in any other fashion, be it sign language, writing, or an assistive device or... anything else. Or, take stimming. Stimming is what autistics are doing when rocking or flapping or pacing. It can be fun, it can be calming, it can alleviate boredom, and it can help people function. By any reasonable measure, stimming that doesn't hurt people should be considered a good thing - it helps people work and learn and get along in a world where things can be frustrating or overstimulating. However, it's not uncommon to hear people complain about it, to talk about how some of us "just don't understand" why it has to be eliminated in their kids. Recently, somebody posted on asperger about her experience in working at a school for autistic kids, and the teachers went out of their way to shame kids for stimming because it's "weird". (By the reasoning used above, these kids would be "high functioning", as they talk and all that. However, when push comes to shove their parents would say they're not as compared to "those high-functioning autistics who don't want a cure who aren't really autistic and don't count". More on this in a bit.)

They also make the assumption that without lots and lots of help, these kids will never change or develop on their own. This is probably more complicated than that, although I'm not going to take any stand opposed to actual help.

3. Because I just used the phrase "ableist assumptions" and mentioned a few things which I think are fine about autism, I've put myself in the group of "those horrible people who don't want a cure because they Just Don't Understand!!! Did I mention the poop????? They don't want my kid to ever have any treatment ever!!!!"

It's because of this arbitrary division people set up. By sorting the spectrum into "low-functioning" and "they don't really count", they're able to put every possible aspect of being autistic into the "we have to get rid of it!!!" bin. (And then they wonder, some of them, why their kids are unhappy! More on this in a bit.) Because those of us who "don't really count" say that stimming is okay, or maybe that it's okay to type instead of write if it's easier for you, it's like we said "No, you should absolutely never take any steps towards helping your child communicate in any way whatsoever" or "Yes, I think your kid should keep doing weird things with their poop and never be toilet trained" or "Sure, I think that being so sensitive to tags that you rip off your shirt is JUST PEACHY".

This is nonsense, of course. Nobody endorses the view that autistic kids shouldn't be helped to function as best they can. Nobody thinks that meltdowns are fun (especially not anybody who's ever had one). Everybody in the world thinks that people need to be able to communicate with others. But we can have those self-obvious views without also having the views that everything autistic is automatically bad, or that normal is a better way of being by definition, or that the only cure for the aspects that are problematic is to eliminate autism altogether.

4. Around the same time I went to this protest, I read a few of the comments over in Schuyler's Monster. I stopped at the top, basically, because I was getting upset, but a few people with autistic kids were talking about how "those people who don't count" (Hi!) couldn't possibly understand why a cure is important because, after all, we can't see how unhappy their kids are when they can't "make friends" or when they get "picked on".

(Interlude: That's my childhood in a nutshell. I've told my nieces. You can ask my sister. I was friendless for almost my entire childhood. I think I understand this just fine.)

One shouldn't make assumptions, but that's just what I'm going to do. I'm going to assume that these people have kids who, logically, are "high functioning". Why am I going to assume this? Because I imagine that if I had a school-aged kid who had trouble with toilet training or who couldn't speak or who had frequent inexplicable meltdowns that this would be my concern - not the fact that they didn't have friends. (The later comments may have been different, I don't know.)

So if their kids are probably a lot like I was as a kid, why don't my opinions count? Because it's convenient for them to say I (and anybody else anti-cure) have nothing in common with their children. It's really as simple as that.

Of course, I can offer up some advice as to make their kids happier, but they're unlikely to take it if it conflicts with their view that their kids' problems == autism. For example, I might suggest that most people (gay people, black people, autistic people, and everybody else) are happiest when they're accepted for who they are instead of being asked to hide aspects of their identity. And I might say that the ultimate cure for prejudice as expressed by their kids' peers isn't more prejudice but more learning. And I might even suggest that if their kids were typical and other kids picked on them, their answer wouldn't be "be more like them!" but "those kids aren't worth your time".

Or I might not waste my breath.

5. So this all brings me back to why those comments irritated me. WHEN you make a big deal about how "I'm not like THOSE people, most of us aren't like THOSE people", you're justifying the sort of division in people's thoughts that allows them to say that YOU don't count - after all, if you're not like THOSE people, and THOSE people are really autistic, where does that leave you? (And if some of THOSE people are also anti-cure, does that mean they're bumped into being NOT those people? What does that do when they need services?)

Furthermore, you undermine your own efforts to get accommodations. If you're not like THOSE people who rock in a corner all day, surely your boss is justified in actions taken if he's uncomfortable seeing you occasionally flapping your hands or spinning in your chair? (And if it's okay for YOU to stop stimming because you're not like THOSE people, then surely it's okay to make THEM stop stimming so they can be more normal - like you! - right? Nobody is helped by this!) If you're not like THOSE people who can't even communicate, how can you be justified in asking to email instead of using the phone? Can't you even talk? If you're not like THOSE people, why aren't you looking me in the eye?

(I agree that this is all very illogical, but nothing about this makes much sense except the simple fact that we need to not make arbitrary distinctions where they don't benefit any of us.)