Praised with Faint Damns

Is CBS considering revisiting to legitimate TV News? It certainly seems to be engaging in "self criticism" sessions; this is from "Outside Voices." The blurb reads:

Each week we invite someone from outside PE to weigh in with their thoughts about CBS News and the media at large. This week, we turned to Bob Giles, veteran journalist and curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. Here, Giles discusses the harm in U.S. news outlets' lack of tough questions. As always, the opinions expressed and factual assertions made in “Outside Voices” are those of the author, not ours, and we seek a wide variety of voices.


Outside Voices: Bob Giles Has A Tough Question For The U.S. Press - Public Eye

Television’s great advantage is that it can take the viewer along for the interview. The audience can look into the eyes of the news source as he or she responds to the reporter’s queries. It is what sets TV news apart from print and radio news reporting. In an era when elected officials try to manipulate the news and spin it to their advantage, when they are able to speak anonymously or have hired spokespersons speak for them, this special role of television reporting as visual surrogate for the public is critical. The public knows that reporters who can be seen asking strong questions is one antidote to misinformation.

My, wasn't that trenchant? Move over, Bob and let Bob have a swing.

I've become less and less impressed with US media as I've had more exposure to international media, something that's probably true of most other bloggers.

It's not simply the unwillingness to ask "awkward questions" - it's the apparent unwillingness to deal with complicated issues. Very likely this is due to the effect actual news has on ratings; reality is complicated and often requires graphs and numbers to explain. It can be hard to compete with a car chase over on Faux.

But I learned a hard lesson on the web long ago; raw numbers of eyeballs are meaningless. You need the right eyeballs. You need those eyeballs to think of you first, and regularly. Profit comes from the right eyeballs relying upon you and your credibility. That credibility rubs off on the advertisers, it does, and vice versa.

"Crap traffic" degrades the brand. Listen to Limbaugh's sponsors sometime. Viagra alternatives, weight-loss nostrums and get rich quick schemes.

This tells you a lot about Rush's respect for his demographic. It tells you a lot about the advertiser's dependence on the outright gullibility of his audience. One of my key evaluation critera for ANY form of media is to look at who the advertisers are, and what sort of readership sales of their product will depend on.

And there are other factors here. "News as Entertainment" isn't all that entertaining because all that pretending to be news that's worthy of my time gets in the way of being fun.

The Daily Show and the Colbert Report have demonstrated that it's possible to do accurate news analysis and do it with wicked and pointed humor. By contrast, the Big Three seem to have abandoned analysis entirely, along with any detectable sense of humor or irony, leading otherwise respectable journalists to refer to the Daily Show as "Fake News."

My sons and daughters, if it was actually fake, it wouldn't be funny. CBS and the rest of the MSM have been relegated to being the straight man for the Comedy Channel.

CBS needs to hark back to the good old days, voluntarily reclaim the old "fairness doctrine" for itself and by doing that, announce it has grown a pair.

Journos seem terrified that they will be denied access to the President's incoherent ramblings and Tony Snow's nonsense. I figured out years ago that all I need to know about either is that their lips are moving. Why in heavens name would you waste a perfectly good reporter on such a meaningless job?

An intern could do it. Monica Lewinsky could do it. She's pretty good at fluffing Presidents, from what I've been told by the media. Ad Nausium.

Take the pool feed, pick any non answer or prevarication at random and show them to be the fools and liars they are with it. A couple news cycles like that, and the phone will start ringing.

How do you think John Stewart gets some of HIS improbable guests? He's had Dick Cheney. Note to Dick - that didn't go so well.

This administration needs to be reminded that the sword has two edges. They need you to get their story out. So make it clear that it has to be a factual, verifiable story before you put the Tiffany stamp upon it.

It used to be that miscreants feared "Hello, We're from 60 Minutes" nearly as much as a justice department raid or an IRS audit. Let's take CBS back to that happy place, where reporters were named by Nixon on tape with many unprintable adjectives wishing improbable conjunctions upon them.

People like me can do opinion - it takes little more than hubris and good typing skills. Some of us can come up with some pretty good analysis of what the facts mean to our particular readerships. What we cannot do is compete on a fact for fact basis with a professional news organization. We therefore seek out stories, stake out our take on them, and refer our readers to the sources. When I seek out intelligence, my first criteria is that my sources of intelligence do not insult my intelligence.

CBS has not been a source of mine for... well, years now. Why you, when there's Greg Palast? Why you, when there's the BBC? Why you, when there's CNN? Hell, the Daily Show is a better quote.

It would behoove you to pay close attention to your website referrer logs to see how often you are cited, and by whom. (I got to this story via fark.com. But it wasn't a complementary reference.)

When the Right Wing pays pundits under the table while trying to muzzle PBS news, that should tell you something about how much they fear the shock and awe of fact-based inititatives.

And yes, I know, the Owners Object to many factual stories and will kill them given half a chance, along with Dan the Messenger Man. But, well, it seems to me that enough of you journalistic glory-boys and girls have enough loose change rattling around to buy some corporate influence yourselves. Ain't capitalism wonderful? CBS is trading at around $30 a share right now. It' s looking like a not bad investment. Consider how rewarding polishing that tiara could be.

The alternative is stark; I already outsource my news, relying for the most part on CTV news and BBC news for television coverage and The Guardian and the Globe and Mail for print. All of these organizations routinely report domestic news that never appears in US media, and generally in greater depth.

Meanwhile, as all the networks try to integrate their news slants into their shows, I become less and less inclined to watch TV at all. Last night, your hit show "Numb3rs" revolved around a plot twist so very improbable that the lead characters should have refused to show up; it involved smuggled guidance systems for "Katusha style" rockets, which were also being smuggled in via Singapore.

Dear Lord in heaven. I do hope all terrorist plots are that amazingly silly and overcomplicated. Mythbusters made a quite functional rocket using commercial pipe, a chunk of graphite, a tank of nitrous oxide and a large salami. College students routinely build far more sophisticated science projects than a short-range missile guidance system. A really sophisticated one - using, say, GPS navigation or a laser designation system shouldn't cost more than a couple-hundred bucks in parts. Rocket Science just ain't rocket science anymore.

If all I wanted to do was create widespread terror, well, a couple pounds of talc would do as well as anything. But it's not that difficult to come up with a somewhat impressive Fuel-air explosive warhead, either.

According to one Russian military scientist writing for the Russian military magazine Voyennyye Znaniya (Military Knowledge), FAE weapons are effective against exposed personnel, combat equipment, fortified areas and individual defensive fortifications, clearing passages in minefields, clearing landing sites for helicopters, destroying communication centers, and neutralizing strongholds in house-to-house fighting in a city.⁽²⁾ In addition, he stated that "fuel-air explosives are capable…of completely destroying in a given area vegetation and agricultural crops that have been planted." "In its destructive capability, it is comparable to low-yield nuclear munitions."⁽³⁾

(gif animation)

The best thing about a crude FAE is that it doesn't even have to work properly to work pretty well.

The [blast] kill mechanism against living targets is unique--and unpleasant.... What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction [vacuum], which ruptures the lungs.… If the fuel deflagrates but does not detonate, victims will be severely burned and will probably also inhale the burning fuel. Since the most common FAE fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE should prove as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as most chemical agents.⁽⁸⁾

Gee, I wonder where I could find someone with enough chemical know-how to put one of these together....

How about any junior college chemistry teacher?

Perpetuating absurdities upon the American people in the name of entertainment in either the news or entertainment divisions is no way to impress folks like me; people with actual three digit IQ's. You know, the demographic you used to have.

Unless you and the rest of the domestic MSM does something to repair it's credibility soon, it will find itself limited to that market segment that relies on rabbit ears from Radio Shack.

And tell me, do, what will THAT do to your stock options?

tag: MSM, CBS News, intelligence gathering, news reporting, 5th Estate, fark, the Internet, foreign press, The Daily Show, Steven Colbert

What sort of people rely on Open Democracy.net?

I got this in my email today.

You may recall that you generously gave your time to fill in our openDemocracy users' survey this summer.

Nearly 3,500 of you did so, a terrific sample. You can click here for a visual tour of the results. We really appreciate your help, it taught us a lot about what you are looking for from openDemocracy.

Survey Says (pdf)...

Overwhelmingly, well educated, well-paid white SMART people, even given a 4% 3d World readership.

In other words, folks like me that the Republican Party has taken for granted for decades upon decades. While the politics of the readership seem weighted heavily to left of center, it's because readership spikes in two places; Center Left (classical liberal, I'd assume) and No Category - where I live, as a Libertarian. "No Category" is arbitrarily placed to the right of Center - which has a lower readership.

From that strong Independant spike (were I bet they did not expect it) it slopes down to bottom out at 3% at Center Right and Conservative. That means a heck of a lot of old-fashioned Center-Right folks are relying on Open Democracy as a reality check - and of course, us generally Anti-authoritarian folks what likes at least three sources before we decide who's al is being gored.

So, my fellow Libs, and fiscal conservatives, dig down and donate. I don't about you, but I always figured the smart money was on freedom. This seems like confirmation to me.

To quote their email to me:

To make the process quick, efficient and secure we are using both a UK and a US service for charitable giving. Anyone in the world can donate, just click here and you can see how it is done.

Do that thing, willya?

tag: Open Democracy, individual liberty, libertarian, 1st Amendment, antiauthoritarian

The Law's fixation upon Ass.

Erotic Truth: From the mentality that gave us "don't ask, don't tell."

Teacher arrested under peeping-tom law - Yahoo! News

Ware was charged under a 2001 law meant to protect people from ultra-small cameras that can be used to peek into dressing rooms or up women's skirts. Under the law, filming a person without consent for sexual arousal is a felony.

...but merely watching teenagers wrestle and perform gymnastics in skintight Lycra fetish gear is perfectly OK - as long as you refrain from obviously masturbating.

Yep, when you think about it, it's not only possible to show that the Law is an Ass, it's pretty easy to illustrate that it's FIXATED upon ass.

Ask ANY Congressional page or White-House intern.

tag: sexual ethics, pornography laws, covert pornography, patriarchy, prudery, Republican Pedophiles, Pederast

Bush Sets New Course,,,

...in order to prove that his followers really will follow him into Hell.

"Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me," he told the nation. "It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq."

The White House released a chart of Bush's "mistakes," (reproduced with the story) none of which addressed the most fundamental errors of policy, integrity and intelligence; such as invading a sovereign nation against the best foreign policy and military advice. It did not address the "mistake" of lying to congress and the American people about Weapons of Mass Distruction. Actually, it seems to be an exercise in blaming the victim. All of his "mistakes" seem to amount to depending too much on the Worthy Oriental Gentlemen of Iraq. (My Wog reference should remind history buffs of earlier and equally unsatisfactory imperial adventures into that region.)

Iraqis just ain't as easy to jerk around as Mexicans, are they, George?

Still, the president's admissions were calculated to advance his current political aims and came with significant limitations. He offered no regret for the March 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein and still argued for staying in Iraq until the job is done. His tone was sober but came without apology or contrition. As one aide put it, "This is not a speech being given on bended knee."

Allow me to sum this up: Bush is admitting past mistakes in order to gain support for entirely new ones. At some point, you have to cut an addict off. Bush's drug is power - and he can't handle this drug any better than cocaine or alcohol.

"He's pretty much alone on this," said William S. Cohen, [in the WaPo story] a former Republican senator from Maine who served as defense secretary under President Bill Clinton. Bush had an opportunity to draw Democrats in by embracing at least some recommendations of the Congressionally chartered Iraq Study Group, Cohen said: "It would buy you bipartisanship for five or six months. . . . By simply ignoring it and allowing it to die in the crib, so to speak, Democrats are now free agents."

And what might they do with their free agency? Well, Nancy Pelosi seems to be given to subtle hints, perhaps too subtle, and certainly deniable... but in regards to a threatened Presidential Veto of the overwhelmingly popular Stem Cell Research Bill:

"There is nothing wrong with this bill," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). "We should pass this bill again and again and again and again, until we get a president who will sign it."

One way or another. One way or another. Pelosi is clearly hoping that she won't have to lead a charge for impeachment, but rather be in the position to reluctantly accede to the Will of the People. Smart politics, that - never interfere with an enemy who's busy destroying himself.

Should Bush veto stem-cell research for a second time, against the clear mandate and will of the people, in the name of maintaining the sacredness of saving the pre-born while at the same time insisting on further prosecuting a war that costs the lives of many, many more "post-birth" individuals, a lot more people are going to start waking up and smelling the hypocrisy.

It's a lot easier to notice hypocrisy if it's intended to advance unpopular causes, but these days I'll take what I can get.

tag: Nancy Pelosi, Impeach the President, Politics, , constitution, unitary executive, commander in chief, terrorism, foreign policy, incompetence.

From the Japanese Interest Desk of the Department of the State of Confusion

And the mystery ingredient is:

BURI!

Words: Japan Probe
Uncensored Pictures: Banana Hole
Censored Pictures and commentary from Lost in Ube

Interesting factoids: NHK is government owned. The occasion was a widely popular New Years Live TV event, the performance the doing of some person called DJ something-or-another (Doesn't seem to be lacking for free traffic already), who reminds me irresistibly of The Chairman from Iron Chef. Clearly the mystery ingredient is BURI!

Turns out that the fully-dressed performers were wearing body suits airbrushed to appear as if they were naked. (Note, a stunt that would not work with Vegas dancers).

It turns out that a large cross-section of the audience (pro and con on the issue, I might add) who saw these images in lower resolutions were convinced the girls were actually mostly nekkid, but a casual examination of a section of the still from the performance (featured above) clearly reveals how fake the nudity was.



Now here's a question for ya; which is actually more offensive: a pretty and fully naked Japanese girl, or a Japanese girl who is covered in an airbrushed body suit with a fully erect mushroom as a sop to "modesty?"

You know, I've been known to create erotic and even consciously pornographic works. Not only do I like playing with social taboos, I enjoy sucker-punching them, kicking them in the groin when they are down and then symbolically peeing on the whimpering metaphorical remains of my wrath. I am definitely down with consciously messing with misplaced and objectionable social taboos.

But, much to my surprise and vast amusement at my own expense, I personally found it objectionable. I was actually offended! Why the hell should it be offensive to ME, of all people- instead of just compellingly silly? Dear Lord, there is little in the world that could be sillier looking than a cheerleader apparently dressed in nothing but gold lame' gloves and a turgid "Hello Kitty" mushroom!

Where's Mario when you need him?

Anyway, I came to the conclusion that the concept I was searching for was "Tawdry." It includes the idea that nudity is so inherently dirty that the only way to depict it is to fake it - and then fake it as much, as broadly and as compulsively as possible in order to profit from those who want to participate in something that is dirty because it IS dirty.

It's seeing nudity and sexuality as being sinful - and deliberately rolling in the dirt to the wildly masturbating throngs. It's an appeal to the lowest expressions of the worst manifestations of the most basic of urges. It's taking advantage, in other words, of the moral and ethical failures of other folks.

In that, it's no different than equally offensive appeals to racism with the the goal of getting elected. A lot of folks see this as being comparable to the Janet Jackson nipple "slip," but in fact it's much closer to being DJ whatsisname's Macaca Moment.

Ok, now that was a pretty damn rude observation, so I'll soften it with a more general observation of human nature.

In my vastly cynical opinion, it boils down to this; prohibitions against nudity are not to protect us from the attractive naked flesh of pretty Asian cheerleaders. It's to preserve the male illusion (and indeed, a variety of female self delusion) that we would all be so attractive, if only we were permitted to shed the coverings that protect you, the viewer from an Occasion of Sin.

I've seen enough nekked people to know that the un-enhanced and unsorted human body when scratching it's butt and otherwise going about it's affairs is about as inspirational to lust as, well, your average damp and slightly smelly bath sponge.

This leads us to a genuine backstage truth. There ain't nobody LESS naked than a nude woman lookin' for to be An Occasion of Sin. And there's another, too. The fact that a significant array of males were perfectly happy with being deluded by a crudely airbrushed body-stocking clearly shows that most women are spending way too much on their hunting camouflage.

tag: ethics, sexual taboos, DJ Ozma, NHK, Japanese Culture, Japan TV, pornography, prudery, prudes, foreign press, moralism, ethical realism, morality

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A Delightfully Racist Holiday

Yes, I did say "racist." I mean, I simply say out loud what O'Rielly and his ilk are thinking, on the days when they are smart enough to not actually say "Kwanzaa is racist." They are correct in the narrow sense, as it's intended to boost the spirits and pride of an entire race of people; it's a black holiday with decidedly black roots and celebrating it is to buy into a set of values intended to improve and empower black people. But I'm not saying it as if it's a bad thing.

Any time any group of people wants to get together and collectively improve themselves, to earn respect from others and (often much harder) improve their own self-respect, I'm all for people "gettin' above themselves." It's generally not all that hard, either, considering the sort of folks that set that bar.

I think everyone of every sort should look through these principles and consider if they, their communities and their race are actually doing anything positive to improve the lot of others of their own community, their race, their country and their family.

Celebrating Kwanzaa

Umoja (Unity)
To strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation and race.
Kujichagulia (Self-Determination )
To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for
ourselves.
Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility)
To build and maintain our community together and make our brother's and
sister's problems our problems and to solve them together.
Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics)
To build and maintain our own stores, shops and other businesses and to
profit from them together.
Nia (Purpose)
To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community
in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
Kuumba (Creativity)
To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our
community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.
Imani (Faith)
To believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.

The Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath.

Tip of the hat to Disinformation for this (via the title link).

The Guardian story illustrates a point I've believed since I was - oh, 14 or 15 years of age, when I stopped attending Church with my mother. The following was a large part of the reason why.

A rotten year for Jesus Christ, American - The Guardian

They say the devil has all the best tunes. It's been a rotten year for Jesus at the movies, too.

Used to be you could depend on the Church for great art, but not any more. The evangelical movement is also the bedrock of American philistinism and the anti-intellectualism diagnosed by the historian Richard Hofstadter. The De Medicis and the Renaissance popes were no less corrupt and hypocritical than this crew, but at least they had taste. At one extreme, there's Titian, Michelangelo, Tiepolo. At the other are the paintings that adorn the walls of Reverend Ted Haggard's mega-church in Colorado Springs: sub-heavy-metal album-cover art by way of some fascistically devout Aryan brotherhood prison tattoo parlour. All the paintings - of warriors for God in their ripped T-shirts, of chesty virgins bearing gourds of massage oil to soothe the toiler's aching bones - seem wildly, cluelessly homoerotic, no matter how many coyly half-exposed DD-cup breasts are depicted. In a subculture whose "artists", like LaHaye, can style themselves without irony as "salespeople for the Gospel", the battle for good art is already lost, and their Willy Loman will never arrive.

I was born an artist, much to the distress of my parents. This, aside from everything else, the autism that while nameless was surely visible, the multiple personality that probably became visible in bits and pieces, had they only looked; worst of all, I was an artist, and thus doomed to live and die in poverty, unable to support my parents in their old age, due to my inherent appreciation of symmetry, balance, composition, and the accurate perception and portrayal of reality.

The above sounds as if it were written tongue in cheek. But indeed, all these things - and the imagination that drives it - were anathema to the culture of the day. It doesn't capture the visceral fear and resentment my mother and father respectively held for me, as advised by rather a lot of perfectly respectable books on the subject of raising children. In both cases, they tried in every way possible to interfere with, distract and discourage any "impractical" pursuits and "sinful, willful" interests. An imagination, a sense of proportion, the ability and willingness to question authority in expectation of a sensible answer is all that was condemned during my childhood as the worst combination of beatnik and hippie culture.

Being a good son, in my way, I did try; but I'm as unsuited for being other that what I am as a porpoise is to sprinting.

But before coming to that conclusion, I tried everything I could to become "normal," and of course the single greatest bastion of social conformity and unquestioning obedience to authority that is "normalcy" in our culture is Christianity.

If only they could agree on which sort of normal would allow one to avoid Hell, eh?

But Mother covered all the bases; I was raised Episcopal, went to Catholic school and was dragged every Sunday to a series of increasingly wacky Fundamentalist, Evangelical and Charismatic churches, sects, movements and outright cults; the weirdest and most obviously heretical being the "Name it, Claim it" churches.

- As the name "Positive Confession"/"Word-Faith" implies, this movement teaches that faith is a matter of what we say more than whom we trust or what truths we embrace and affirm in our hearts. The term "positive confession" refers to the teaching that words have creative power. What you say, Word-Faith teachers claim, determines everything that happens to you. Your "confessions," that is, the things you say -- especially the favors you demand of God -- must all be stated positively and without wavering. Then God is required to answer. Word-Faith believers view their positive confessions as an incantation by which they can conjure up anything they desire: "Believe it in your heart; say it with your mouth. That is the principle of faith. You can have what you say" (Charismatic Chaos, pp. 281, 285).

I had yet to deeply study the occult, but I had read my Andre Norton - "Witch World" was the Harry Potter of my day - and I recognised ritual magic when I saw it. And when the spirits started moving and tried to climb into my ears and up my pants legs, I found out that the shielding rituals mentioned in Norton's stories actually worked.

I'm rather surprised that I thought to try them, but when you have a congregation babbling in "tongues" in a rented hall that is neither consecrated nor shielded in anyway against spiritual contamination, you will find yourself up to your elbows in members of the spiritual ecology - all of them some variety of "hungry." Given the ability to notice, it's not so surprising as it seems. Turns out that Andre Norton cribbed heavily from Diane Fortune and other respected occult writers current to her time, such as Gardener and perhaps even Crowley.

Like all good SF writers, she based her work on known technology and extrapolated from there, so of course they worked.

I'm a big fan of pragmatism. I can't think of a single serious engineer or occultist who is not. It's only the theorists and theologians that trip over doctrine.

I was not poking under those rocks to find a new religion - by that time, I was getting pretty cynical about any human religion as having any deeper significance than "coffee hour." It's only been of late that I've realized that is indeed the primary significance - an hour a week with friends and family, not talking about work, or sports, but of spiritual matters, or of worldly things from a spiritual viewpoint. That is what was meant when it was said, "The Sabbath was Made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath." If it's not a useful means of fulfilling your own, individual spiritual needs, you should be looking elsewhere.

What I did not realize at the time is that my own peculiarities, my own unique wetware, would always keep my communions down to "two or three." At most. At the root, even before my rational objections based on obvious hypocrisy, mindless babbling in "tongues," the evident presence of spirits other than anything I'd recognizes as God-Like, the sheer, eye-glazing banality that was and is the American Protestant movement in general; all of these objections were in fact my rationalizations for my neurological aversion to being forced to be in loud, echoing caverns filled with strangers and badly-tuned sound systems.

So I decided I would be a heathen. It was far easier to be a heathen in my mother's eyes than it was to try and explain my as-yet nebulous and under-founded objections to the expression of faith that is American Christianity. If you have ever tried to explain such concerns to anyone who faithfully watches the 700 Club and who considers Robert Schuyler to be a Really Deep Thinker, you probably understand my choice.

Of course, if you faithfully watch the 700 Club, and consider any Televangelist to have the last word on the meaning of Scripture - you probably stopped reading four paragraphs ago. The reason for that is simple - there ain't any preachers on the 700 Club who's message much resembles the red letters in the Bible.

Now me, being Aspie and therefore somewhat literal-minded, was told as a child that the red letters in the Bible were the words that Christ supposedly spoke, and all else was other folks trying to explain them or tell us how He got from, say, Jerusalem to Sardis.

So I never paid all that much attention to Peter, much less Paul. After all, you could almost feel the triple rap of Himself's knuckles on Peter's Saintly Noggin when He said, "upon this rock, I shall build My Church."

It may not have been an unmixed complement, any more than His references to the people as "sheep" and his disciples as "Shepherds."

Anyway, in my own clandestinely stubborn and willful way, I set out to find Christ for myself; I'd already found that anyone willing to point the way for me, all altruistic-like, was holding a pair of shears behind their back with an eye toward fleecing me.

I came to admire the relative skill of Jesuits compared, say, to Pat Roberson. With Jesuits, you can be fairly sure that you are considered a renewable resource, and that a superior mastery of the flock is a mastery that appears to be mere advice and influence.

One thing about aspies that can and does make us socially insufferable upon occasion is that we do not see things in emotional terms. During this entire time, I was getting a high-resolution, brutally vivid view of the hidden motivations behind all the convenient alterations and re-interpretations of The Word. I had absolutely no insight at all into the why of it; I considered it in my own private arrogance to be some combination of gullibility and stupidity.

Of course, that arrogance led me right into my own ten years of enforced humility; Aspies have emotions, they just have little or no connection to the verbal parts of our brains. But we can be as easily manipulated with them as anyone else; more so, really, as we tend to think we are above all that, and are therefore emotionally vulnerable to appeals to very good opinions of our own inherent, superior-minded objectivity.

It took me ten years to see through that one, and it took some particularly blatant lapses on the part of my "guru" to realize that preaching and practice had diverged to the point that they were out of bow-shot of one another.

One can almost hear the angels snicker at moments like that.

But along the way, I realized something else. You see, as a side-effect to that ten-year purgatory and a series of emotional mishaps that would make for a very implausible reality show, I ended up in mental health triage and was diagnosed with profound clinical depression, a depression that was either somewhat cyclic, or which had predated my cultic diversion.

One of the most important characteristics of clinical depression and it's bastard cousin, anxiety disorder, is a complete inability to think in terms other than black and white, off and on, good and evil, Hatfield and McCoy, Cowboy and Indian, Christian and Islam.

If one is Good, the other is Bad. If what I am is "normal," than everything different than me is "abnormal," and dangerous. Here's where Anxiety comes in - Anxiety makes you obsess about the dangerous "other" while clinical depression makes you cling to your own idea of normalcy, no matter how objectively insane and potentially dangerous it is. Anxiety is no relation at all to Prudence or Caution.

Once I got some antidepressants into my system, I realized very quickly how very stupid I had been, and how impossible it would have been for me to realize that, short of hitting that wall.

So I don't make fun of people who see the world that way. I do consider them very, very dangerous, for I know what sort of excesses I would have accepted and committed in the name of maintaining my comfortable, if somewhat bizarre sort of "normal." I thank Goddess every day for the blessing of an unambitious cult leader. Consider the extent to which the followers of Jim Jones went to prove their own righteousness to themselves - they poured cyanide-laced kool-aide down their children's throats before taking their own lives.

I should point out that if you were to take all the followers of Jim Jones before their mass suicide and give them a battery of psychological tests, the vast majority would have tested "normal." This tells us something about our cultural ideas of what "normal" is, and perhaps something about the need for better testing.

At any rate, I had a mess of conflicts from that period that I needed to resolve. First, I had less trust for Authority than ever, both self-proclaimed spiritual authorities, and temporal authorities claiming the mantle of God. I considered both to be deceptive and dangerous by definition - and still do. Now I admit there are some of each who are quite sincere. Those I consider even more dangerous than the the unrepentant Marjoe Gortners of the world. Marjoe was quite happy taking your cash - the sincere want your soul, and will cheerfully crush your spirit or even kill you to "save" it.

Now, I should know; because of my peculiar blessings, it takes a lot more crushing to put a really permanent dent in me. While I did not think of my life as man and child as being any more remarkable than anyone else, I was forced to revise that opinion when it's exceptional negativity was brought to my attention during an emotional abuse assay that likened it to physical abuse on the level of frequent broken bones.

I can say that based on what I now understand of my parenting, my schooling and my later life, I should be a paragon of apparent normalcy. Or at least, should have been until a probable breakdown at or about the same time. I know a fair bit about the predictable courses of both legitimate and illegitimate psychological influence and pressure and I should have grown up as externally "normal" as, say, Donald Rumsfeld, had I taken my father's example or at least Al Gore had I taken more after my Mother's side.

Instead, I withstood far more stress without ever entirely losing at least a compass pointer toward the direction of reason and right action; being aspie and a multiple personality, I'm very resistant to pressure, and at the same time adept at avoiding it.

I speak of that as a blessing, as it's very difficult to take credit for being either dissociative or autistic; both are probably genetic to a large degree and if you happen to have both, whether it's a blessing or an affliction is pretty much a question of choice. I view it as a different mental toolkit and figure that it's better to explore what I can do with the relatively rare tools I have lucked into than try to compete at a disadvantage in areas I'm poorly equipped to handle.

But one thing I will say is that aside from the ability to mentally evade and ignore the worst pressures set against me by the people in my life, mostly with with the best of intentions, there is one thing that has sustained me since I was a very little child who took Sunday School very seriously:

My faith.

You see, I've always somehow always known that there is a God, a God who is somehow much larger and more pervasive than most commonly think, a God who is both compassionate and practical, loving and yet sometimes moved to outright schadenfreude by our misadventures, or at least, more than willing to let us suffer our bruises for as long as it takes us to get a clue.

I know this in a tangible sense, as surely as I know that I'm typing. It's something I consider to be so obvious as to be self-evident, and I believe that would be true of more people if they were willing to be less religious and more spiritual.

The key phrase for me was one that leapt out of the Bible at my face, years and years ago. "God made the Sabbath for Man, not Man for the Sabbath."

I'm constantly surprised that that phrase has survived accidents of translation, for you will not find the concept enshrined in any church or at the root of any mainstream doctrine; quite the opposite. Indeed, the Catholic church goes even further, to trump the entire Bible and any individual ethical collywobbles by stating with authoritarian arrogance that "church tradition is a superior guide than scripture or conscience."

Now, the only intelligent response to that is "g'wan with ye, ya heathen." No doubt the priests of B'all and the Quezaquatl human sacrifice cult would have said much the same thing - and for much the same reasons. It's the priests what live off the leftovers of sacrifice, you see, with an evident reluctance to do much sacrificing of their own.

Well, those particular red letters, "The Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath" was aimed straight at their bottom line. THAT sort of teaching was why He was crucified, and that is why the same thing will happen today, unless and until we laugh the greedy bastards out of our Churches, our Mosques, our Temples and our Groves.

Religion is for OUR benefit, not God's. We seek out particular religions and flavors of religions because they speak to us, not because one is superior to one or another. Being created first for the benefit of people, and then controlled for the benefit of those in charge, religions are imperfect by definition, and not to be taken any more seriously than they should be, as a means to an end. They are merely a means of structuring a time and a place where you can be spiritual in company better than you could if you stayed home, and if that costs a bit, and a priest or a preacher is good at bringing you to a place where you can be spiritual, well, then; "The worker is worthy of their hire."

Just so long as they don't get too uppity about their place in the grand scheme of things.

If you can do it better staying home, you should. If you are at all like me and find that groups of people and personal spiritual awareness are directly incompatible, you'd have to be some variety of stupid to put up with it. It's not just uncomfortable, it's BAD for you.

If you find that you are subjecting yourself and your children to the cold, judgmental stares of the dour and humorless, adjusting your daily life and routine to meet their approval, choosing your friends and your interests to avoid scandal, shopping and interacting only under the Sign of the Fish, - you would do better to dive head-first into a river of Triple-X porn. At least you might gain some insight into some pretty basic human motivations, that's never a wasted exercise. It's also never a wasted exercise to peek behind the Curtain that hides the Great and Terrible Oz.

Aside from that, a good orgasm is a more spiritually productive than an hour of feeding your anxieties with hellfire and your delusions with "pie in the sky."

There is a Jewish teaching that says that it is a Mitzvah, a Good Deed, to give your partner an orgasm, because it is the closest a person can come to seeing the face of God.

I'm sure that's a metaphor - but it certainly does have a profoundly liberating effect; it literally takes you out of your mind and body; the very opposite experience that those fearful Augustinian types would suggest.

Makes you wonder why they keep trying to paint white as the new black, doesn't it?

tag: dominionism, social engineering, religous cults, psycological torture, The strong-willed child, truth, Christianism, Christian, faith, fundimentalism, authoritarianism, individualism

Iraq: Forget winning. Forget losing. Let's beat the spread.

The Blog | Sen. Harry Reid: The Clock is Ticking, Mr. President | The Huffington Post

From Sen. Harry Reid's Blog:

Frankly, I don't believe that more troops is the answer for Iraq. It's a civil war and America should not be policing a Sunni-Shia conflict. In addition, we don't have the additional forces to put in there. We obviously want to support what commanders in the field say they need, but apparently even the Joint Chiefs do not support increased combat forces for Baghdad.

There's an even simpler reason, Harry. It's wrong. Going in was wrong, the people who planned the war were wrong, the administrators sent there are wrong, the ideas were wrong, the priorities were wrong, the money went to the wrong people; everything about this war was and is comprehensively wrong.

And now, after Cheney gets bitch-slapped by the Saudis, we are supposed to be their proxy army in a religious civil war between Islamist factions? We don't OWN a dog in this hunt, Senator. Not even our Islamic citizens do; as with all religious wars, it has almost nothing at all to do with the religions in question - and looked at it that way, we have neither laudable nor illegitimate reasons for trying to pick a winner.

Senator, I remind you that you represent a state of Casinos, and in the parlance of the casinos, it's not whether you win or lose; it's whether you beat the spread.

The House of Saud has lots of money, let them train and equip their own cannon fodder. Hell, let them hire mercenaries from Blackwater at the going rate.

I see no reason why we should be expending lives and treasure to protect Saudi interests. If Americans must die in this war, at least they should die very far in the black, with robust survivor insurance and pre-paid disability coverage.

We do need to increase recruitment of Regular Forces people so that the Guard and Reserves can go home, to replace casualties and to replace those who leave as soon as stop-loss measures expire. We need money to deal with the long term health care costs of the wounded and and their post-traumatic stress. And we clearly need to have a new generation of general officers, which means there must be larger classes of cadets, at least for the next few years.

Meanwhile, Sir, I suggest that research into more practical crops for bio-fuel generation than corn (ones that will grow as well or better in cornfields) and a much higher priority for both bio-fuel production and nuclear energy. We need a realistic way of dealing with nuclear waste. That's not Yucca Mountain - we need fuel reprocessing, ideally on-site.

We also need to look into sustainable crops for paper and fiber. That would be hemp, and hemp could further reduce our dependency on petrochemicals for fiber. It takes less fuel to harvest and process for paper. It makes better jeans than imported third=world cotton and you can't smoke it, unless you like migraine headaches, so lets get rid of that dumb law. Hemp is a not bad crop for stabilizing a clear-cut, so the timber companies might not scream as much as one might think, especially as the waste foliage and residue from fiber extraction could be feedstock for bio-fuel production. Oh, and giving the Mexican textile industry a huge boost wouldn't hurt our border issues any much.

Here's another suggestion for you; the deregulation of ethanol production for individuals. So long as they are using a properly designed, factory-inspected automated distillation apparatus, they may produce as much as they like for private use or sale.

At one stroke, you've made it possible for many small businesses to turn their waste streams into fuel for their business operations, for households to generate an additional revenue stream in poor areas and all without a single tax dollar being spent. Of course, a fuel still would not make drinkable ethanol from organic kitchen and yard waste with the occasional dog turd thrown into the mix. At best, one could hope for "relatively non-toxic."

But, yes, it is predictable that this will result in a proliferation of private distillation for consumption. Whether this is a problem depends mostly on how we chose to react to that reality. If nothing else, ethanol stills are a lot less toxic than meth labs, and sketchy folk can make money brewing 'shine, maybe they won't blow themselves up or poison their kids with toxic methamphetamine fumes. At the very least, alcohol is somewhat less personally destructive. Certainly it would be possible to create an infrastructure for reliable testing and grading of potable alcohols, and that gives you the ability to place a tax upon it, if you care to. If a tax stamp on a bottle of shine means "assured to be non-lethal," I think that's likely a tax paid for a useful service.

We need to start thinking seriously about simple and incremental means to soften the blow of a fuel crunch in case of a general middle east conflict and we need to free ourselves from being caught up in that dynamic. Driving down the world price of crude oil will definitely suck a lot of energy out of various terrorist campaigns and some very unfriendly regimes. Every barrel conserved or replaced is tiny victory in preventing widespread warfare over dwindling oil supplies as well as a significant boost to our economy and every individual bottom line.

Being addicted to mid-east oil makes it impossible for us to be an honest broker. Furthermore, it's a low cost way of developing a technology that could dissipate the looming Chinese energy crunch, forestalling a nasty resource crisis, and one that cannot be seen by the Chinese as "meddling," which almost any other approach could be. I'd much rather sell them a solution than be on the wrong side of their problem, and I feel I'm on firm Yankee ground when I say that.

Democrats - and indeed, Republicans and every stripe Independents need to start thinking outside of the box. We cannot afford to prop up current energy conglomerates to keep them doing what they are doing. We have already lost six critical years due to the Cheney "energy plan," and clearly sustainability was not part any part of that. It's time to throw wide the doors,and redirect the tax breaks and grants to sustainable energy. Let the market sort things out. After years of windfall profits, they have the resource to do very well by themselves if they choose to do well by us. They DO need to be reminded who is in charge of this nation, every bit as much as every other special interest who has been on the Iraqi Gravy Train to Hell.

Them what caused the mess outta be on the front lines of cleaning up the mess - or paying for it. But it would be wrong to think that the Iraqi clusterfuck was the result of malice. Had it been just that, we would not be in such an intractable mess. No, we have been ill-used and ill-advised by a generation of Neocon idealists, people who wanted to change the world for the better, in the very worst way. And lo, they were half-way successful. They did change the world, and they did it in the worst way.

But the fault was not in their lack of compassion, or of foresight; it certainly was not for a lack of sheer brainpower. It was due to the though that you could actually set off vast changes in how we do everything and predict a particular outcome.

Nope. You can initiate vast changes and influence a positive outcome by spotting and amplifying positive trends while damping negative ones. OR, you can aim toward a particular future with some reliability by focusing very narrowly and influencing change toward that particular end while accepting random fluctuations. You cannot do both at once on a massive scale and get anything you particularly want.

When things go to badly wrong, when the friction and stress levels in a particular area get too bad, you get rising levels of violence and even open warfare. Warfare is a symptom of large, systemic problems, so starting a war as a matter of foreign policy is akin to curing a cold with a syringe full of live rubella. Yes, you can then cure the rubella and when you have done so, if the patient survives, likely the cold will have passed as well. But they weren't cured of one disease; they simply survived two.

Their planning did not account for people who did not use their economic and social models as a basis for their own thoughts. It did not account for people who did not think in classical western terms, or with the biases built into English or the assumptions about the cultural roles of religion Americans take in with the mass-market formula we are given in place of that nasty pornographic breast milk. There was no place in their plans for chaos, for randomness, for sheer human perversity - and that is what you are dealing with in nearly pure form in the theatre of war.

Overwhelming firepower will overcome a large amount of chaos - but only by means of paradoxical destroying the remaining traces of order. And armies just plain suck at creating conditions suited for orderly civilian life; people who understand that don't do well in armies. Hell, that's one of the most persuasive reason we HAVE a large army; expensive as it is, it's both more useful and far cheaper than the prisons it would need to be replaced with.

The problem was not so much that the Bushes hadn't done sufficient planning; oh no. The problem is that they had far too many plans, far too many ideas, far too many people who were sure they knew how to get the job done! Not one of them would stray from their ideological purity to accept the plans or the input of the people who grew up there, knew the culture and had an idea of what would work and what was doomed to failure.

So we have the Neocon pattern of Faith-Based Failure, the folly of creating chaos and then trying to mold that chaotic mess as if it were wet sand at the beach. It's an apt analogy, for even if it had worked, it could only have worked to that extent; a superficial appearance of a vast and intricate order at the mercy of the first wave, rainstorm or passing spaniel.

But we are left with a big pile of chaos, and we must make the best of it. The best thing to do with chaos is to treat it like a big old murky pond filled with old tires, catfish and crawdads. You bait a line, throw it in and let your mind wander to your granny and her famous gumbo.

The worst possible mistake would be to attempt to plan a new energy infrastructure. That could take decades and we certainly do not have twenty or thirty years to piss away on this. The best way is to encourage as many potential solutions as possible so that competition and experience can narrow things down. Arguments over which fuel-stocks congress should support are dumb, just as arguments over whether we should emphasise wind, solar, nuclear or geothermal research and development. In all cases, the answer should be "yes." I'd say the idea would be to think in terms of tax breaks or subsidies contingent on units of energy delivered, with an eye toward making start-ups possible, and real dollars dependant on engineering and production efficiencies.

In other words, make it possible for as many people to try as many different approaches to this problem as possible. Start an energy rush!

This is not cause for panic or despair. Yes, it is the end of an era; we must change the way we do things because we are well past the point of diminishing returns. We certainly must take global warming seriously, and I think it prudent to prepare as well as we can for potential worst cases, not because I think the worst case predictions are that likely to come true, but because we will be prepared for the shocks, disasters and dislocations that we cannot possibly have anticipated.

I absolutely do not think there's any need to consider it as the likely end of civilization. It does mean a change in how we go about obtaining our needs and our comforts, it certainly implies rethinking how we upholster our caves - but a huge amount of the necessary thinking and prototyping has been done, is well understood and is already creeping into use. Some judicious tweaking of building codes could turn that into a wholesale rush.

The great advantage of a combination of passive conservation and diffuse technologies such as ethanol and bio-diesel produced in useful quantities close to or even by the end user is that aside from the obvious advantages, it's another layer of disaster-proofing that requires no central co-ordination or management.

It means that if mass energy distribution is disrupted by some disaster, there is in place a nearby capacity to brew up needed fuel, and a great deal of fuel in individual hands. The sheer advantage, for instance, of a higher percentage of people having a full tank of fuel in a time of evacuation is obvious - as is the advantage of having a large and distributed excess capacity for fuel generation from whatever biomass is at hand.

In national security terms, it means that nobody can hold us hostage - cutting off petrochemical supplies would be an inconvenience, not a disaster.

In cultural terms, it should mean a gradual drift toward sustainable living at or above the level of comfort we have become accustomed to and with the degree of mobility a free people require. I do not see this as an either-or, I see it as a range of choices; there are urban dwellers that wouldn't bother with cars if they had viable alternatives and could rent a car any time they felt the need. Enough people do this now that it's clearly both practical and cost-effective. More urban rapid transit would make this more possible.

But there is no way that people can be forced to change their whole way of life overnight as many radical greens would like. The only way a society changes is because it's to the advantage of individuals to change where they go, what they do and how they go about doing it; what they choose to buy and what they consider valuable to them. From that perspective, there is no single magical solution. There are many millions of tiny improvements that can add up to a magical result, if we go about things intelligently. It's possible, even easy to generate huge multiples of effect by tossing regulatory and incentive snowballs downhill - so long as you don't try to predefine who's yard the huge snowball lands in. Toss enough snowballs, and the "right" people will have more than enough to keep them fat, rich and busy for the next hundred years.

As I said, we need an energy rush. This will inevitably lead to a glut, because all of the parallel efforts to reduce energy dependence. So then you are left with all the things you could do if there were cheap enough energy to throw around... and the really smart folks are thinking about that opportunity already.

A lot of our problems could solve each other if we simply introduced them to one another. You put your hog farm together with a co2 emitting power plant and bio-reactor producing oil rich algae from hog waste and co2-rich stack gas. Suddenly your two waste streams are raw material for a whole new industrial process with nearly zero additional footprint and the operation costs covered by now-absent disposal overhead.

Instead of emissions and waste, you have a new raw product which can be used in the power plant, and the compressed, energy rich residue that can be animal feed. That smells green to me - as in greenbacks.

We have to step away from a culture that spends far too much time and effort trying to keep people from doing things we think they shouldn't outta do and start thinking about how to get folks actively exercising their perversity bumps for profit. The people who are generating the solutions, who are doing the non-linear thinking, the very people who support the progressive politics that swept you into the Majority Leader's suite are the very people the other guys have been pandering to, with their obsessions about social conformity and their willingness to create a living hell on earth for others in the name of forestalling hell for themselves.

Now, I learned in Sunday School that human sacrifice was a bad thing. Is that still taught in Sunday School, Senator? I think it's an important question to ask of your particularly Christian colleagues to your right.

Penis size, estrogen levels linked to Authoritarian Family Values

World Net Daily never fails to entertain. This excerpt provided by Right-Wing Watch, who were content to show what sort of bizarre and alleged thinking leads to ultraconservative christian posturing. Amusing as it is to point out the particular panic button the author is trying to push, I will point out that context makes this paragraph seem to be almost reasonable.

The real absurdities, as I point out below, are the unreasonable assumptions that are assumed by implication.

Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That's why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today's rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products. (Most babies are bottle-fed during some part of their infancy, and one-fourth of them are getting soy milk!) Homosexuals often argue that their homosexuality is inborn because "I can't remember a time when I wasn't homosexual." No, homosexuality is always deviant. But now many of them can truthfully say that they can't remember a time when excess estrogen wasn't influencing them.

The fun thing here is that the premise is reversible. A diet rich in testosterone, taurine and other hormone analogues that enhance aggressive alpha-male posturing are just as anomalous as a diet rich in estrogen-enhancers. (Aside from the observation that generations of Samurai argue that the effect high soy-protein consumption cannot be all that profound.)

If the above argument is to be taken seriously, it must therefore be seen as a potential cure for behavior that can be linked to Testosterone Poisoning, a terrible affliction that can lead to absurd public posturing and an irrational obsession with penis size.

Taking the above argument seriously as evidence of doctrinal soundness is also quite entertaining. Note the argument from authority. "Homosexuality is always deviant." Alas, neither the Bible NOR the DSM-IV are reliable supports for this argument, homosexuality has been eliminated from the DSM as a disorder or deviance, although a recognition of clinical homophobia may well be on it's way toward inclusion. In regard to the Bible, serious study of the bible in the original texts and in relation to what we know about the relevant cultures they were speaking to, we find little evidence that there was any widespread concern about homosexuality outside of the context of Levitical ritual purity laws.

In order for the Bible to support this argument, we must accept that the Sin of Sodom was unbridled homosexual lust, instead of willful violation of cultural norms regarding the rights of guests, while also supporting that the Centurion and his Companion, who he loved enough to petition Christ for a miracle had a completely platonic relationship.

In historical context it would be surprising - almost astonishing, actually - had the relationship not been sexual. This behavior was something that did very much get up the noses of the religious Jews of the day; an added cause of friction and resentment between the cultures that Jesus could not have been ignorant of.

Odd that He said nothing. He was not noted for his ability to remain silent in the face of clear, systemic immorality, even when the consequences were potentially dangerous for him. Most spiritual leaders would have refrained from flogging the money changers and dove-sellers from the Temple. Indeed, most spiritual leaders would have wanted their own piece of the action.

But, having said that, I have to say that diet does profoundly effect human behavior, maturation rates, intelligence and health. It's not insane or indeed even particularly radical to be concerned about the individual changes in sexual development that a diet rich in soy might bring about.

What is bizarre is what is assumed - that our current diet is not affecting our socio-sexual development equally strongly; that high per-capita beef consumption has nothing to do with some of the more obviously failed cultural imperatives - such as the idea that pre-emtive aggression would solve the problem of terrorism.

By way of contrast, Gandhi's diet consisted largely of rice. We know that starch-laden diets tend to suppress aggressive tendencies and going to the extreme of a macrobiotic diet seriously impairs critical thinking, which is why diet is such an important issue to most cult leaders; it's possible to select the mindset you wish by restricting and/or mandating certain food items.

It is matter of undisputed fact that consuming large amounts of soy as an infant will have effects both immediate and long term. This is also true of diets generally high in protein (height), carbohydrate (width) and male hormones (aggressive behavior, possibly ADHD, binary thought processes associated with fight/flight hunter-killer reasoning.)

Thing is, whether these changes are good or bad are a matter of context, and the judgment as to what things you and your children should eat is generally based on what sorts of behaviors and thought processes any particular advocate or disadvocate finds distasteful.

The essential message here is "High levels of testosterone in boys is good. High levels of estrogen in anyone are bad." I'm not at all sure that's a defensible assumption.

For myself, I rely on my gut for decisions of this sort and my gut has eclectic, even catholic tastes.

Give a Clue this Christmas!

My Latest Autism Designs and what they mean.

People who are neurotypical tend to think in boxes. One problem with being on the Autistic Spectrum is that you tend to not think in boxes. As far as I can tell, our thought process is highly relational. We tend to not even SEE the boxes and we don't think in a binary way at all.

A great number of problems come from the inability to understand that different people can have starkly different ways of understanding the world around them.

We tend to assume that people who came up with a functional solution for a problem came to it in the same way; indeed, by way of the same initial perceptions. Autistics and Aspies are as guilty of this as anyone; indeed, it's been studied within the AS population. The reason it's not been studied within the NT population is simple; in the case of NT's, the assumption that another person has a thought process that works like yours does is statistically likely to be correct.

So, when an autistic person makes this unwarranted assumption, it's called "mind blindness" and the autistic is gently handed a clue in the form of "social stories." When an NT does it, it's in the form of an organization called "Cure Autism Now."

If "autistic thought" were not valuable, there would not be such a roster of famous thinkers, such as Einstein and Newton now thought to have been probably autistic to some degree. By the same token, it should be a profound clue that there are courses to teach neurotypicals to "think outside of the box," and almost all higher education is aimed at rooting out simplistic, either-or thinking and to over-ride fear and submission responses when you have to communicate about or defend your work.

The ability to think and function outside of the box is an asset of significant value; recognising that is especially important if you are planning to "do something for autistics." Their ability to function in 'in an appropriate way' is limited, but that does not imply their ability to function, given an appropriate context is as limited as it appears. The trick is to find that context; and in that context they will not have so much difficulty "being appropriate."

There's no area where this insight is more critical than in regards to the parents of autistics themselves.

Make no mistake; autism can be a crippling condition, and it's made worse by being a condition where you absolutely must depend upon others to accommodate your needs and accept limitations that those without the condition cannot easily see or understand. But even the most obviously disabled "autist" is as severely affected by presumptions of how their disability affects them and even more by refusal of others to accept our word for the accommodations we need.

This following paragraph is emblematic of the crippling parental fears that the 800-lb gorilla of the pro-cure movement exploits for funding and validation:

You are never prepared for a child with autism. You will gradually come to believe it, but never fully accept it, get used to it, or get over it. You put away the hopes and dreams you had for that child - the high school graduation, the June wedding. Small victories are cause for celebration - a word mastered, a dry bed, a hug given freely. - FAQs about Autism: Cure Autism Now

Those of us who object to such fear, panic and the pervasive bigotry that exists with in the pro-cure movement - as well as it's seemingly obvious ethical deficits are pretty soundly attacked, with all kinds of terrible motives assigned us. (Theory of Mind, eh?)

A great deal of the work on the support groups that accept AS persons as contributors - something of a rarity - is to get non-AS people to accept that our "inability to cultivate friendships" is not a crippling condition to us. Once we have our one or two friends - friends as geeky and weird as us, generally speaking, we are done. My personal limit is two, and what NT's call "friendships," I now interpret as "Acquaintances." Yes, of course that has profound effects in terms of my ability to sustain a social network, and that has cost me many opportunities; indeed even jobs. I try and work things so that one of my two has the social skills I lack and the willingness to use them on my behalf.


Unfortunately, there is a lot of very bad advice out there and some very bizarre ideas as to what will be helpful to people such as I, who are on the spectrum and who are nonetheless potentially articulate and intelligent beings. Mostly this revolves around the idea that a bad job of conforming to the expectations of others is superior to a good job of being me. Here's Lennie Schafer on the topic of "fake autistics" like me.

(What about "high functioning autism" and how does that fit in? Simply put, it doesn't fit in anywhere. High functioning autism is not clinically defined and is not in the DSM-IV, and for good reason. High functioning autism is an oxymoron. If one meets the criteria for a diagnosis of autism, by definition one cannot be high-functioning. It would be as silly as the term sharp-eyed blindness.) (1)

So why would a handful of people, amongst a few others, who apparently are for the most part Aspergers, if anything, want to identify themselves autistic? Perhaps because autism is a profound disability and Aspergers is a disorder that is mostly not. Autism thus carries more moral weight than Aspergers and therefore has more moral clout for self-esteem building political and social agendas. "We autistics don't want to be cured" carries much more punch than "We Aspergers don't want to be cured", especially given the reality that there is no movement anywhere that seeks to "cure" those with Aspergers into being anything else.(2)

Aspergers-labeled alone, they would be ignored by the press and would be denied the juicy sense of empowerment that would come with a high-profile "oppressed minority" movement article like the one in the liberal New York Times. (3) (4)

The New York Times reporter failed to do a journalist's most basic homework. She failed to check the credentials of those doing the complaining, despite my urging. Anyone can call themselves autistic and write cranky letters to the editor. So how does someone determine if a person is truly autistic,or is an autism imposter with Aspergers? Ask to see their diagnosis. If someone claims to have autism for purposes of making some political statement, ask them to prove it. In any of the correspondence I have had with the autism "imposters", not one has ever supplied such documentation. (5) Of course, it is highly unlikely to ever see it. The irony here is that if someone has enough language skills to effectively complain about the treatment of autistics, then they themselves cannot be autistic.(6) Apparently more than one big city newspaper has failed to see through this deception, so eager are they to get an unusual victim story into print. Can we afford to allow the interests of our autistic children and everyone else "on the spectrum" to be pushed out of the public eye and displaced by a handful of imposters crying a contrived victimhood? Who speaks for autism? Not this bunch.

Note that he, and those like him don't like being quoted, even under "fair use" constraints.

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Of course, if I committed so many foolish rhetorical errors in public, I'd prefer not to be used as a hideous example either.

1. Argument from Authority. Of course, the process of determining what goes into the DSM-IV is pure and objective science .
2. Aspergers is, in fact an autistic spectrum disorder and has quite a range of effects. As a step-parent of a diagnosed Aspie, I'm very aware of the fact that there are very significant issues involved. They are not so inconvenient to US, as parents. They are going to affect HIM quite significantly unless we find some adaptive strategies that work for him.
3. As opposed to the entirely legitimate empowerment that comes from suffering the hideous, horrendous burden that is Autism.
4. Of course, it's a liberal thing to be concerned about the civil rights of children being abused and neglected for the sake of the convenience and social comfort of their conservative parents. This is the root host for "Autism, A Debilitating Disease, not a Culture," a page that links to both Free Republic and Free Dominion, while telling Canadians they a vaccilating, unpatriotic fools for not joining the "Coalition of the Willing." Snark aside, the fact that this site, is associated with Authoritarian Right Wingers explains a lot about the entire, very authoritarian "curebie" movement.
5. For myself, I want to see Lennie's MENSA results, his HIV status and full financials proving he's not unduly profiting from his activism before I deign to speak with him. I suspect he's unworthy of my attention, but if he proves otherwise, I will of course listen.
   
6. Factually untrue.

Unpuzzled is my most militant anti-curebie design, with the slogan, "help find a clue."

I know, it's rude and confrontational, but I've found that sometimes you need to swat people with a clue-by-four in order to startle them enough so they actually listen.

Those "seeking a cure" tend to ignore everything from those of us who ARE on the spectrum because it doesn't fit into to their mindsets, just as they reject "inappropriate" responses to communications from their autie and aspie children.

This is especially true of issues about communication style, reasonable accommodation and most importantly, the concept that a difference need not be AS disabling as it seems from an "NT" perspective. And, speaking as someone who's gone round and round on this at various times and under various circumstances, those who most boldly wave the "puzzle ribbon" seem at times to be making a point of their puzzlement, and their inability to understand to be the issue of auties and aspies.

See point above about how many friends and relationships an autie or aspie needs in an emotional sense. We do not absolutely require a relationship with the biological parental units. It's a nice thing to have, but we cannot and some quantity of will not be as easily coerced by family emotional ties as neurotypicals can be. This is not just because we have a "faulty" connection between emotions and reasoning. Our reasoning is not emotional, and our emotional responses seem to be quite different - across the board. Put two aspies in the same room and they will communicate quite well indeed - but their body language, topic choices and intuitive negotiations of "status" will be starkly different - and one of the greatest differences is the relative lack of huge tooth-bearing grins with full eye-contact.

To an aspie, to most sensible primates and all cats I've ever met, bare teeth and a full-on gaze is, at the very least, a statement of territorial or situational dominance, inviting a ritual contest of wills to determine who will be in charge and who will submit. Your typical aspie doesn't wish to play that game, having no need or real desire to join your pack, so if you do see them bare their teeth - it's probably in the context of a genuine, non-ritualized warning that Bad Things Will Suddenly Occur If You Do Not Go Away NOW.

What part of "Agggh! [flap flap flap] [throw object] LEAVE ME ALONE" is unclear to you people?

The "Unsmily" design honors the "aspie smile," a neutral expression that essentially means "hailing frequencies open." That look of slightly blank attention is a sign that an aspie or autistic is willing to let you talk at them for a while. Indeed, oft-times we are listening so hard that we are not thinking about what we will say next.

No pointless social noises please! Talk about something that is both objectively important and something within the realm of my interest and ability to have an opinion on. Make a full statement, then shut up and let me talk at YOU for a while. Then it's your turn.

Appalling, isn't it?

Well, that is the way aspies and auties communicate best - asynchronously. The full give and take of an NT conversation is difficult for us, and those of us that can manage it are doing it because we realize that style of communication is important to our NT friends all out of proportion to anything actually communicated. Mostly we grunt and make what experience has taught us to be socially appropriate noises at the expected times.

We are quite unlikely to put up with attempts to get us to conform to your expectations of what people like you should be. We are not 'like you,' and while we do very clearly appreciate that you have social advantages we do not, and we all understand that any parent would wish their child to have every possible advantage - we also know that many of those "advantages" come with a price. Some of those prices are ones we cannot pay - and for many of us, compromising who we are or being less than honest about what we know to be true is a price we will not pay - no matter how politically incorrect it may be to point out that the emperor has no clue.

Now we know who the terrorists are.

The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) (S.3880) defines as "terrorism" causing any business classified as an "animal enterprise" (e.g., factory farms, fur farms, vivisection labs, rodeos, zoos and circuses) to suffer a profit loss and is punishable by a long prison sentence -- even if the company's financial decline is caused by peaceful protests, boycotts, media campaigns or leafleting. Defining non-viol ent activist tactics that cause exploitive corporations to lose profit but don't physically hurt anyone as "terrorism" is both a deceptive misapplication of a serious termand a completely unacceptable violation of our Constitutionally-granted First Amendment rights to freedom of speech. Industry groups pushed the AETA through Congress quickly and with little public scrutiny. The AETA was unanimously passed in the Senate on September 29th and on November 13th it was passed in the House with only 5 Representatives voting. President Bush signed the AETA into law on November 27th. Read the full text of the bill here.

Clearly, the lame duck congress is trying to cause as much mischief and pay off debts to various industry supporters as possible before being turfed.

It also clearly illustrates who is really running this country and what sorts of people terrify them. Al-Queda it ain't. It's you, it's me, it's anyone who might be concerned about our food supply, the labor practices within the food chain, the standards and practices of the busnesses running that food chain, the ethics involved, related to people, animals and consumers...

In other words, you are the terrorist. As am I. Osama Bin Ladin - not so much.

This bill does nothing whatsoever to combat terrorism; instead it sweepingly defines any number of actions that are commonly considered to be first-amendment protected speech as terrorist acts. Expect it to be enforced selectively and convenienently.

If you were wondering if the "war on terror" might just be a cynical contrivance to get you to surrender your rights without protest, you need wonder a lot less. At the very least, this bill is a cynical attempt to use the war on terror to suppress your rights for the benefit of corporate agrabiz giants.

My favorite Social Transgressive.

As long-time readers may know, ana voog is one of my favorite online people, and she's pregnant. Like most starving artists, she's short on margin for unexpected expenses. So am I, or I'd simply send her some money via her website. I'm sure that a lot of her lj and Myspace friends are in the same place on this and I'm sure there's a bunch of us that have stuff we make or do, so I was thinking, maybe an auction? I've got this astonishing bit of art that I did when I heard the good news.

I'm thinking I could put up some signed prints. Who's in?