Tom Robertson was gracious enough to spend his afternoon taking shots of the making of this endeavor.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Shooting "The Uninvited"
I spent last Saturday afternoon and evening directing "The Uninvited," a short film of one of my comedy scripts for the upcoming Sketchworks show. The use of intense, unsourced, and unnatural colored light is intended to invoke the Italian horror genre of the 1970s, specifically Dario Argento, and, super-specifically, his film "Suspiria."
Tom Robertson was gracious enough to spend his afternoon taking shots of the making of this endeavor.
Chris Gray (center) and Stephanie Northrup (in bed) go over lines while Director of Photography Matt Green (second from the right) checks the monitor.
Stephanie confronts the Grim Reaper (Chris).
Herschel Horton works the second camera.
Susan, myself, and the two Deaths (Chris and Mike Stiles) go over blocking for the next shot.
Matt watching the action on the monitor.
I demonstrate for Chris how Death should put the moves on Stephanie.
Tom Robertson was gracious enough to spend his afternoon taking shots of the making of this endeavor.
Friday, January 28, 2011
We Deserve Michael Vick
Michael Vick is a monster who, for either sadistic reasons or sociopathic ones, tortured animals to death in the manner of a budding serial killer.
But monsters, like Vick, have always existed in our society.
However our monsters in the past have seldom had access to the sleazy enablers that Vick possesses: Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lune hiring Vick, and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, allowing it to happen. A slew of dirtbag sports columnists and Vick apologists talking sanctimoniously about "redemption" and second chances and Vick's right to make a living (as if anyone had a "right" to be a quarterback in the NFL). The lawyers and soulless PR hacks who wrote the by-the-numbers script for Vick to mouth the empty words of contrite boilerplate that he would have to say before the preordained conclusion to the charade of his public apologies (How convenient that his regret and self-realization aligned so perfectly with his ultimate financial interests.) achieved their obvious cynical purpose.The fans who talk of MVP awards and how Vick brought "excitement" back to the game. And now, the first in the inevitable line of companies that will throw more money at Vick to associate his personae with their product.
Well, why not? We've become a nation of torture-coddlers, For eight years we had a Torture Administration. Now we have a president and a congress who will do nothing to punish it in the past or prevent it in the future. One party, we now know, is the Torture Party, and the other is the Acquiescence Party. In the last decade cruelty was repackaged as courage and sadism became an indispensable element of public policy.
We, the American people, because of the choices we have made and the behaviors we have accepted, stand for nothing anymore but greed and craven expediency.
Michael Vick is an Eagle. Let's make him our national symbol,
He's what the people want.
He's what they deserve.
But monsters, like Vick, have always existed in our society.
However our monsters in the past have seldom had access to the sleazy enablers that Vick possesses: Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lune hiring Vick, and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, allowing it to happen. A slew of dirtbag sports columnists and Vick apologists talking sanctimoniously about "redemption" and second chances and Vick's right to make a living (as if anyone had a "right" to be a quarterback in the NFL). The lawyers and soulless PR hacks who wrote the by-the-numbers script for Vick to mouth the empty words of contrite boilerplate that he would have to say before the preordained conclusion to the charade of his public apologies (How convenient that his regret and self-realization aligned so perfectly with his ultimate financial interests.) achieved their obvious cynical purpose.The fans who talk of MVP awards and how Vick brought "excitement" back to the game. And now, the first in the inevitable line of companies that will throw more money at Vick to associate his personae with their product.
Well, why not? We've become a nation of torture-coddlers, For eight years we had a Torture Administration. Now we have a president and a congress who will do nothing to punish it in the past or prevent it in the future. One party, we now know, is the Torture Party, and the other is the Acquiescence Party. In the last decade cruelty was repackaged as courage and sadism became an indispensable element of public policy.
We, the American people, because of the choices we have made and the behaviors we have accepted, stand for nothing anymore but greed and craven expediency.
Michael Vick is an Eagle. Let's make him our national symbol,
He's what the people want.
He's what they deserve.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Roy Sanders Is Magic (And Other Discoveries At the CHoA Autism Conference)
Things got quite heated at CHoA's Autism Conference, which was held last month. Roy Sanders, Medical Director of the Marcus Center, used the event to take his shot at me. The timing of the attack was not unexpected but the bizarre nature of it surely was. The following is my take on the conference, and the events that followed, which I originally wrote for the Georgia Tech SWANSA e-mail list.
I wasn't expecting much from this year's CHoA Autism Confernce that was held last month..
Boy, was I surprised.
Who knew that Roy Sanders had magical powers?
But I'll get to that.
Let's take the events of the conference in chronological order.
First up was Catherine Rice, a behaviorist from the CDC, who was there to give us the obligatory What-Is-Autism? opening presentation.
The talk actually touched more on issues of classification than anything else I have seen so far in these types of events. In the course of her presentation, she inadvertently raised a couple of interesting points. First, until 1980, the DSM classified autism as a type of schizophrenia.
Now here's a question (one that I didn't actually ask): In 1979, WAS autism actually a type of schizophrenia and in 1981 it WASN'T schizophrenia? The implication from Rice, of course, was that this is an example of how far the understanding of autism has come. But, as my numerous public questions to "experts" make clear, the classification of autism, even today, is divorced completely from empirical evidence. James McPartland, in my questioning of him, admitted that the use of the word "disorder" in the classification of ASDs was purely definitional.
If autism, or any word, is only whatever a designated authority structure says it is, then that's what it is. If autism is defined as schizophrenia, then it's schizophrenia. And if it's defined as a disorder, then it's a disorder. And if it's defined as two parts from this column of symptoms and three parts from that column, then that is what you have.
If you believe that the evidence points to the Moon being made of cheese, then upon arriving on it, you may be forced to admit that no, the Moon is not made of cheese. If you DEFINE the Moon as being made of cheese, then upon discovering that the orb revolving around our planet is actually composed of a different substance, you may be forced to admit that it is not, in actuality, the Moon.
If autism,as defined, is different from autism as experienced, then it's pragmatic utility as a useful term, even for the "science" of behaviorism, is questionable indeed.
Which was brought more into focus by Rice's second tidbit. She declared that there are those with autistic traits who are not counted as having an Autistic Spectrum Disorder. She compared it as the difference between neuroses and psychoses but then didn't really touch on it again.Yet, given how much of her presentation was related to doing counts of "ASD" cases in the general populace and whether or not the rate of autism is rising, this would seem to be highly pertinent Let's follow this line of reasoning. All autism is a disorder (thus ASD). Some people have autistic traits but, they are not disordered. So now, at least according to Rices' brief explanation, we find out that, a little bit of autism equals no autism at all.
Now, why not the easier explanation of: some people have autism and they're fine with it? Is it because that interpretation would be injurious to the autistic population? Or would the real victim of such an interpretation be the behaviorist money train for whom every diagnosis is a ka-ching?
I asked Rice, what the methodological procedure was for labeling the entire autistic spectrum as disordered (taking into account that she doesn't consider autistic-lites as part of the spectrum). It was at this point that Roy Sanders, the Medical Director of Marcus popped in to shut me off.
Hmm.
Next up was Felissa Goldsmith, a child psychiatrist from Marcus. Dr. Goldsmith treats a PowerPoint presentation like a teleprompter. And that's not a compliment.
There was little new here. However, there was such an underlying contempt for autistic kids in her talk that I had to check with Linda later to confirm that it wasn't just me picking up that vibe.
To give just the most egregious example: Goldsmith suggested more than once that parents should be encouraged to mourn their children's autism like a death. And to do this on special occasions like birthdays and Christmas. This easily was the most sickening thing I've been exposed to all week. ("Daddy will be down in a moment, Timmy. He's mourning the child he wanted that you'll never be.") This is the advice you'd expect to come from a monster and I said as much.
I asked Sanders if this was the official policy of the Marcus Center. Boos from the audience. He curtly dismissed the question as inappropriate.
Well, it's not like I was the one who brought it up.
Dr. Michael Morrier, from the Emory Autism Center, gave a somewhat uneven presentation on ABA that ended up focusing on how his people do it over there. I want to say some good things somewhere and it might as well be here. As I told Morrier after the presentation, he is the least offensive behaviorist I have ever encountered. When asked about his center's use of aversives, he replied that they don't use any.
Giving Morrier the benefit of the doubt, if I was forced to send a child anywhere for the application of ABA, Morrier would probably be my choice.
Still, even if he seemed more of an actual human being than any other behaviorist that I have ever personally met, he still was, after all, a behaviorist. At one point, talking about instilling eye contact as a habit in children, he observed that one could be TOO successful. If children make eye contact all the time they become creepy staring machines. And Morrier noted that regular run-of-the-mill kids don't make eye contact all the time either. Instead, they do it 63% of the time. (Or something like that number, I neglected to make a note of his actual percentages and all the figures that follow in this paragraph are approximations of his actual numbers.) Morrier was quite explicit that the goal was to get the autistic kids to make eye contact at EXACTLY the same percentage of the time as normal kids. He even talked about making up the gap (as if this were some sort of missile crisis from the 1960s) between the two groups so that children who begin training at age three are 14 percentage points behind in eye contact percentages and those that begin at age 4 are 28% behind.
Morrier never felt the need to explain why a random sampling of non-autistic kid's eye contact percentages (or any other behavior) should serve as the golden mean against which all similar autistic behavior should be measured. There was no suggestion that it might be possible that regular kids might be indulging in too much eye contact and perhaps should receive some therapy to tone it down a bit.
There was no evidence presented that, having trained children to achieve the same percentage of eye contact to non-eye contact, that these children were indeed receiving the same benefits from this activity. Presumably, eye contact is a skill that delivers information to those engaging in it and that the everyday children doing it were themselves benefiting from the activity.
Certainly a question that you might think should be asked is: do autistic children, trained to make eye contact, receive the same benefits as regular children naturally engaged in the same activity? Or are they merely being trained to pretend that they are not autistic? A previous speaker at the AAC made a big deal about how his research has shown that those on the spectrum tend to gain their information about people from studying mouths rather than eyes. Assuming that this is indeed the case, and that all these babies haven't had laser pointers slapped on their heads for nothing, then wouldn't you want to know if forcing a child to shift his primary attention from mouth to eyes will be accompanied by an increasing ability to make use of this information? Or, will the child be left in a worse position, forced to concentrate on areas of the face he is less equipped to easily decipher?
Finally it was Sanders turn.
During his presentation, Sanders literally sat on his hands and continuously kicked out his legs and pointed his feet which might have been adorable if he was a shy, pretty girl in a sundress instead a self-conscious middle-aged introvert seemingly hyper-aware of his own poor public speaking skills.
Sanders attempted to use his own personal situation to illuminate what parents in the audience would face and the things they should do to prepare for raising a child on the autistic spectrum. And, as might be expected, it was the same old, tired checklist, although this time it was wrapped in a droning awkward wallow of self-pity and look-at-me-I'm-a-martyr-for-raising-an-autistic-child self aggrandizement.
At the conclusion of his talk, I asked the question why, in the two years of this particular conference, which seems to be aimed squarely at the parents of autistic children, that they had not chosen to include a single adult or teenager who was actually on the spectrum. Someone who might be able to explain to the parents what their own children were actually experiencing.
Sanders was dismissive of this question as well.
I then asked why, with all the usual suspects that he was recommending parents consult, he had not included actual people on the autistic spectrum who could possibly contribute a valuable understanding as to why their children thought and acted as they did.
His response was that not all people who claim to be on the spectrum actually are.
Well, THAT'S awfully cryptic, Roy.
His meaning became clear soon enough, right after the meeting. And it was at this point that I discovered that Roy Sanders' has magical powers. For he revealed to me, much to my surprise, that I am not on the autistic spectrum.
Wait a minute, I hear some of you saying. Don't you have to take a bunch of intricate expensive tests and pay a bunch of money to get an autistic diagnosis? Well, yeah. That's what I thought. A major part of this whole four hour plus drone-a-thon I had just finished sitting through was about the importance of getting special testing. Nobody said anything about just dropping Roy Sanders into the room and having him magically deduce it.
But his magic didn't end there. He had an even more dazzling trick up his sleeve.
It seems, rather than being on the spectrum I'm a "schizo" something-something-something. I'm afraid I didn't catch the full diagnosis. DSM labels are like your kid's Pokemon monsters. What grown-up with a life really has the time to keep up with them all? But I invite Roy to publicly post his diagnosis to this group so that I might be properly discredited as an autistic advocate in a public forum.
This later part was all relayed to me as he walked briskly to his car, making so little eye contact with me that he practically called out for a session of ABA and Christmas day parental mourning.
I'm sure you can imagine my internal dialogue: "Huh? What? What are you doing? You can't walk away now after dropping that on me! I'm going to need counseling. YEARS of therapy! Preferably behavioral because that's science! I need to come to terms with this diagnosis! This changes my entire life! I need to know that there's hope for me and that I can live with this schizo-whatever-whatever and still have hope for a happy and productive life!"
Perhaps I'm being unfair. After all, was not the magical diagnosis enough, and, in his quick retreat, he sure seemed like he had some place he needed to be. Perhaps, and I'm only speculating here, Saturday is the day of the week he reserves for mourning his own adopted child's autism.
And, of course, declaring me off the spectrum was probably an easy call. After all, if I am on the spectrum, it's not like Sanders or the Marcus Center are in a position to make a buck off of it.
In reality, his is the game pseudo-scientists play all the time, employing the magical intuitive powers that their credentials supposedly convey to conveniently discredit their adversaries.
Sanders was explicit that if I continue to pursue matters as I have that I will soon find myself barred from meetings such as this one. How much easier that will be if he is in a position to use his special magical insight to claim that his critic doesn't have standing.
I have spent years now arguing just how untenable the behaviorists' and their allies position are. I have shown you how they can't answer the simplest of questions.
Sanders, being the stupid man that he is, thinks that if he bars me from the meetings that he will have won. If it happens it will instead be a complete and total vindication for myself. I have, since my early days in Bob Morris' group, argued that you can't do business with these people. Nonetheless, in the time since then, I have treated them as the scientists I know them not to be. I have asked them to justify their uses of simple words they use everyday like "disorder" and those from our community who have attended these meetings have seen their complete inability to do so. What more do I need to do to show their essential fraudulent nature?
When I am barred (and I think it is a matter of when rather than if) I will have demonstrated, once and for all and for everyone here in the autistic community to see, that the behaviorists and their allies are unwilling to engage the autistic community in any form of real dialogue or debate that does not at first begin with a servile acknowledgment of their superior knowledge and authority in all matters pertaining to us.
I was asked, after the meeting, why it was that I couldn't be nicer. Bob Morris was nice. And they repaid his niceness by treating him with contempt and running the clock out on him.
The people charged with fixing us, hate us. Loathe us. Talk about us as tragedy, a collection of deficits and disorders. They encourage parents to MOURN when their children are identified as us. They think the best that we can ever be is a crude approximation of them. They compare us to animals. They compare us to AIDS. They compare us to cancer. They compare us to death.
And in doing all this they enrich themselves.
The time for nice, from me, or anyone, is past.
Way, way past.
Walt Guthrie
I wasn't expecting much from this year's CHoA Autism Confernce that was held last month..
Boy, was I surprised.
Who knew that Roy Sanders had magical powers?
But I'll get to that.
Let's take the events of the conference in chronological order.
First up was Catherine Rice, a behaviorist from the CDC, who was there to give us the obligatory What-Is-Autism? opening presentation.
The talk actually touched more on issues of classification than anything else I have seen so far in these types of events. In the course of her presentation, she inadvertently raised a couple of interesting points. First, until 1980, the DSM classified autism as a type of schizophrenia.
Now here's a question (one that I didn't actually ask): In 1979, WAS autism actually a type of schizophrenia and in 1981 it WASN'T schizophrenia? The implication from Rice, of course, was that this is an example of how far the understanding of autism has come. But, as my numerous public questions to "experts" make clear, the classification of autism, even today, is divorced completely from empirical evidence. James McPartland, in my questioning of him, admitted that the use of the word "disorder" in the classification of ASDs was purely definitional.
If autism, or any word, is only whatever a designated authority structure says it is, then that's what it is. If autism is defined as schizophrenia, then it's schizophrenia. And if it's defined as a disorder, then it's a disorder. And if it's defined as two parts from this column of symptoms and three parts from that column, then that is what you have.
If you believe that the evidence points to the Moon being made of cheese, then upon arriving on it, you may be forced to admit that no, the Moon is not made of cheese. If you DEFINE the Moon as being made of cheese, then upon discovering that the orb revolving around our planet is actually composed of a different substance, you may be forced to admit that it is not, in actuality, the Moon.
If autism,as defined, is different from autism as experienced, then it's pragmatic utility as a useful term, even for the "science" of behaviorism, is questionable indeed.
Which was brought more into focus by Rice's second tidbit. She declared that there are those with autistic traits who are not counted as having an Autistic Spectrum Disorder. She compared it as the difference between neuroses and psychoses but then didn't really touch on it again.Yet, given how much of her presentation was related to doing counts of "ASD" cases in the general populace and whether or not the rate of autism is rising, this would seem to be highly pertinent Let's follow this line of reasoning. All autism is a disorder (thus ASD). Some people have autistic traits but, they are not disordered. So now, at least according to Rices' brief explanation, we find out that, a little bit of autism equals no autism at all.
Now, why not the easier explanation of: some people have autism and they're fine with it? Is it because that interpretation would be injurious to the autistic population? Or would the real victim of such an interpretation be the behaviorist money train for whom every diagnosis is a ka-ching?
I asked Rice, what the methodological procedure was for labeling the entire autistic spectrum as disordered (taking into account that she doesn't consider autistic-lites as part of the spectrum). It was at this point that Roy Sanders, the Medical Director of Marcus popped in to shut me off.
Hmm.
Next up was Felissa Goldsmith, a child psychiatrist from Marcus. Dr. Goldsmith treats a PowerPoint presentation like a teleprompter. And that's not a compliment.
There was little new here. However, there was such an underlying contempt for autistic kids in her talk that I had to check with Linda later to confirm that it wasn't just me picking up that vibe.
To give just the most egregious example: Goldsmith suggested more than once that parents should be encouraged to mourn their children's autism like a death. And to do this on special occasions like birthdays and Christmas. This easily was the most sickening thing I've been exposed to all week. ("Daddy will be down in a moment, Timmy. He's mourning the child he wanted that you'll never be.") This is the advice you'd expect to come from a monster and I said as much.
I asked Sanders if this was the official policy of the Marcus Center. Boos from the audience. He curtly dismissed the question as inappropriate.
Well, it's not like I was the one who brought it up.
Dr. Michael Morrier, from the Emory Autism Center, gave a somewhat uneven presentation on ABA that ended up focusing on how his people do it over there. I want to say some good things somewhere and it might as well be here. As I told Morrier after the presentation, he is the least offensive behaviorist I have ever encountered. When asked about his center's use of aversives, he replied that they don't use any.
Giving Morrier the benefit of the doubt, if I was forced to send a child anywhere for the application of ABA, Morrier would probably be my choice.
Still, even if he seemed more of an actual human being than any other behaviorist that I have ever personally met, he still was, after all, a behaviorist. At one point, talking about instilling eye contact as a habit in children, he observed that one could be TOO successful. If children make eye contact all the time they become creepy staring machines. And Morrier noted that regular run-of-the-mill kids don't make eye contact all the time either. Instead, they do it 63% of the time. (Or something like that number, I neglected to make a note of his actual percentages and all the figures that follow in this paragraph are approximations of his actual numbers.) Morrier was quite explicit that the goal was to get the autistic kids to make eye contact at EXACTLY the same percentage of the time as normal kids. He even talked about making up the gap (as if this were some sort of missile crisis from the 1960s) between the two groups so that children who begin training at age three are 14 percentage points behind in eye contact percentages and those that begin at age 4 are 28% behind.
Morrier never felt the need to explain why a random sampling of non-autistic kid's eye contact percentages (or any other behavior) should serve as the golden mean against which all similar autistic behavior should be measured. There was no suggestion that it might be possible that regular kids might be indulging in too much eye contact and perhaps should receive some therapy to tone it down a bit.
There was no evidence presented that, having trained children to achieve the same percentage of eye contact to non-eye contact, that these children were indeed receiving the same benefits from this activity. Presumably, eye contact is a skill that delivers information to those engaging in it and that the everyday children doing it were themselves benefiting from the activity.
Certainly a question that you might think should be asked is: do autistic children, trained to make eye contact, receive the same benefits as regular children naturally engaged in the same activity? Or are they merely being trained to pretend that they are not autistic? A previous speaker at the AAC made a big deal about how his research has shown that those on the spectrum tend to gain their information about people from studying mouths rather than eyes. Assuming that this is indeed the case, and that all these babies haven't had laser pointers slapped on their heads for nothing, then wouldn't you want to know if forcing a child to shift his primary attention from mouth to eyes will be accompanied by an increasing ability to make use of this information? Or, will the child be left in a worse position, forced to concentrate on areas of the face he is less equipped to easily decipher?
Finally it was Sanders turn.
During his presentation, Sanders literally sat on his hands and continuously kicked out his legs and pointed his feet which might have been adorable if he was a shy, pretty girl in a sundress instead a self-conscious middle-aged introvert seemingly hyper-aware of his own poor public speaking skills.
Sanders attempted to use his own personal situation to illuminate what parents in the audience would face and the things they should do to prepare for raising a child on the autistic spectrum. And, as might be expected, it was the same old, tired checklist, although this time it was wrapped in a droning awkward wallow of self-pity and look-at-me-I'm-a-martyr-for-raising-an-autistic-child self aggrandizement.
At the conclusion of his talk, I asked the question why, in the two years of this particular conference, which seems to be aimed squarely at the parents of autistic children, that they had not chosen to include a single adult or teenager who was actually on the spectrum. Someone who might be able to explain to the parents what their own children were actually experiencing.
Sanders was dismissive of this question as well.
I then asked why, with all the usual suspects that he was recommending parents consult, he had not included actual people on the autistic spectrum who could possibly contribute a valuable understanding as to why their children thought and acted as they did.
His response was that not all people who claim to be on the spectrum actually are.
Well, THAT'S awfully cryptic, Roy.
His meaning became clear soon enough, right after the meeting. And it was at this point that I discovered that Roy Sanders' has magical powers. For he revealed to me, much to my surprise, that I am not on the autistic spectrum.
Wait a minute, I hear some of you saying. Don't you have to take a bunch of intricate expensive tests and pay a bunch of money to get an autistic diagnosis? Well, yeah. That's what I thought. A major part of this whole four hour plus drone-a-thon I had just finished sitting through was about the importance of getting special testing. Nobody said anything about just dropping Roy Sanders into the room and having him magically deduce it.
But his magic didn't end there. He had an even more dazzling trick up his sleeve.
It seems, rather than being on the spectrum I'm a "schizo" something-something-something. I'm afraid I didn't catch the full diagnosis. DSM labels are like your kid's Pokemon monsters. What grown-up with a life really has the time to keep up with them all? But I invite Roy to publicly post his diagnosis to this group so that I might be properly discredited as an autistic advocate in a public forum.
This later part was all relayed to me as he walked briskly to his car, making so little eye contact with me that he practically called out for a session of ABA and Christmas day parental mourning.
I'm sure you can imagine my internal dialogue: "Huh? What? What are you doing? You can't walk away now after dropping that on me! I'm going to need counseling. YEARS of therapy! Preferably behavioral because that's science! I need to come to terms with this diagnosis! This changes my entire life! I need to know that there's hope for me and that I can live with this schizo-whatever-whatever and still have hope for a happy and productive life!"
Perhaps I'm being unfair. After all, was not the magical diagnosis enough, and, in his quick retreat, he sure seemed like he had some place he needed to be. Perhaps, and I'm only speculating here, Saturday is the day of the week he reserves for mourning his own adopted child's autism.
And, of course, declaring me off the spectrum was probably an easy call. After all, if I am on the spectrum, it's not like Sanders or the Marcus Center are in a position to make a buck off of it.
In reality, his is the game pseudo-scientists play all the time, employing the magical intuitive powers that their credentials supposedly convey to conveniently discredit their adversaries.
Sanders was explicit that if I continue to pursue matters as I have that I will soon find myself barred from meetings such as this one. How much easier that will be if he is in a position to use his special magical insight to claim that his critic doesn't have standing.
I have spent years now arguing just how untenable the behaviorists' and their allies position are. I have shown you how they can't answer the simplest of questions.
Sanders, being the stupid man that he is, thinks that if he bars me from the meetings that he will have won. If it happens it will instead be a complete and total vindication for myself. I have, since my early days in Bob Morris' group, argued that you can't do business with these people. Nonetheless, in the time since then, I have treated them as the scientists I know them not to be. I have asked them to justify their uses of simple words they use everyday like "disorder" and those from our community who have attended these meetings have seen their complete inability to do so. What more do I need to do to show their essential fraudulent nature?
When I am barred (and I think it is a matter of when rather than if) I will have demonstrated, once and for all and for everyone here in the autistic community to see, that the behaviorists and their allies are unwilling to engage the autistic community in any form of real dialogue or debate that does not at first begin with a servile acknowledgment of their superior knowledge and authority in all matters pertaining to us.
I was asked, after the meeting, why it was that I couldn't be nicer. Bob Morris was nice. And they repaid his niceness by treating him with contempt and running the clock out on him.
The people charged with fixing us, hate us. Loathe us. Talk about us as tragedy, a collection of deficits and disorders. They encourage parents to MOURN when their children are identified as us. They think the best that we can ever be is a crude approximation of them. They compare us to animals. They compare us to AIDS. They compare us to cancer. They compare us to death.
And in doing all this they enrich themselves.
The time for nice, from me, or anyone, is past.
Way, way past.
Walt Guthrie
Monday, January 24, 2011
Exhibit A As To Why Sports Rankings Are Arbitrary Bullshit
1) Auburn is ranked the number one team in the nation.
2) Oregon is ranked the number two team in the nation
3) The number one team and number two team play each other in a championship game.
4) The number one ranked team beats the number two team in a close hard-fought contest.
5) Final BCS standings for the year come out after the contest and Oregon is ranked...THIRD in the nation.
How the fuck does this happen? We're supposed to believe they were the second best team in the nation. How does losing to the best team in the nation make them NOT the second best team in the nation anymore? Isn't that generally supposed to be what happens when the best compete against the second best? The second best will lose. That's why they're SECOND best.
This happens ALL the time in sports rankings and goes to show what complete and utter arbitrary bullshit they are.
2) Oregon is ranked the number two team in the nation
3) The number one team and number two team play each other in a championship game.
4) The number one ranked team beats the number two team in a close hard-fought contest.
5) Final BCS standings for the year come out after the contest and Oregon is ranked...THIRD in the nation.
How the fuck does this happen? We're supposed to believe they were the second best team in the nation. How does losing to the best team in the nation make them NOT the second best team in the nation anymore? Isn't that generally supposed to be what happens when the best compete against the second best? The second best will lose. That's why they're SECOND best.
This happens ALL the time in sports rankings and goes to show what complete and utter arbitrary bullshit they are.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Galas at the Monster Bash
Some shots of the model Galas taken by Linda and myself at last summer's Monster Bash in Atlanta at the Starlight Drive-In.
Apparently Blogger has a quirk where the vertical pictures of some cameras, like mine, sometimes get rotated to landscape when you load them. I know this because I just spent half an hour googling this delightful just-discovered phenomenon at 5 in the morning trying to find a fix.
 |
Apparently Blogger has a quirk where the vertical pictures of some cameras, like mine, sometimes get rotated to landscape when you load them. I know this because I just spent half an hour googling this delightful just-discovered phenomenon at 5 in the morning trying to find a fix.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Addressing the Crank Room
I was asked last November to speak, along with several others of differing viewpoints, for five to ten minutes to the Atlanta Autism Consortium about my perspective on the push to get an autism insurance bill through the Georgia legislature this session. My minority opinion, presented to the behaviorist-dominated room at the Marcus Center, was that anything that can be done to keep another buck from going to the behaviorists would definitely be worth the effort. This is the text of what I said:
My name is Walt Guthrie. And I'm an advocate for those on the spectrum.
This year, I had the distinct privilege of working with Carmen Allen, and others, to kill SB 161 in the Georgia Legislature.
Next year, should the participants in this room succeed in introducing an insurance bill into the state assembly, I look forward to the opportunity to participate in the killing of that as well.
It is not that I object to children who might very well be in need of a specialized education or specific therapies receiving financial assistance to meet those needs. I do not.
It is, rather, that I know that any bill that this collection of organizations --primarily Autism Speaks and the Marcus Center -- has any hand in either crafting or supporting, will be weighted primarily, if not in its entirety, towards ABA and other similar dehumanizing pseudo-scientific behavorial applications.
Autism Speaks is an organization loathed by large sections of the autistic community for their efforts to equate the autistic spectrum with cancer and AIDS. In ad after ad and billboard after billboard, they paint a picture of the autistic experience in terms of pure negativity, even assuring that autistic children will be responsible for their parents' future divorce. Their work recalls the propaganda of Julius Streicher in the Third Reich, depicting Jews as rats and vermin, laying the moral groundwork for their
extermination.
Autism Speaks, in their support for genetic research, suggests they are inclined towards a somewhat softer genocide: Prenatal testing that will result in a genetic search and destroy that, once the markers for autism have been established and located and the tests drawn up, will result in a "cure" for autism by simply eliminating future generations of autistics from being born.
THESE are the people that the Marcus Center wishes to partner with.
The Marcus Center would have us believe that the autistic insurance teat should be doled out primarily for the behaviorists to suck on. Because, after all, ABA is "science."
In all the time that I have come here I don't believe that I have ever encountered any science, or found anyone who would actually qualify as a "scientist." They use words like "disorder" and they don't know what they mean or why they use them. Ask them and they might mumble that the DSM "says" it is. But they can't tell you why. To paraphrase the creation-scientist: "The DSM says it, I believe it, and that settles it." A few, like James McPartland, admit it's definitional. It's all made up. This is the foundation of their whole existence and they just made it up. Out of thin air.
They focus on differences and transform them, with a wave of the hand, into deficits. If autistics do surprisingly better than was expected on a test measuring this skill or that brain function then this becomes the brain somehow "compensating." They put laser pointers on children to find out where they're looking. If regular kids look at eyes and autistic kids look at mouths then the conclusion is naturally that looking at mouths is a trait that must be corrected. Why? Because being on the autistic spectrum is definitionally a disorder so the behaviors exhibited by those on the spectrum must all be symptoms of that disorder. Nothing autistic can be good.
They make it their mission to change behavior because, in their narrow world, behavior is all that can be measured and measurement is all. They make no attempt to empathically understand the interior emotional and intellectual world of the autistic. In the words of Dan Crimmins that would be all "touchy-feely."
As a result, I'm sure, of such a philosophy, I regularly have such encounters here as one Marcus Center employee comparing her working with children on the spectrum to the training of dogs.
Their lack of intellectual curiousity here is stunning. They talk endlessly about why autustics do the things they do, such as avoiding eye contact and yet when queried if they actually asked those on the spectrum why they don't make eye contact, they'll respond that THAT wouldn't be science. Imagine. Asking people why they do what they do is methodologically off limits. No, children will instead have their behavior coercively altered based on theories derived from cherry-picked data designed to fit the behaviorists' bigoted preconceptions.
If the behaviorists in this room were real scientists, they would be incompetent. Some of my colleagues in this fight believe they ARE incompetent. I believe, on the whole, that they are, politely put, engaged in willful misrepresentation. But whether their lies are to themselves or to the public at large, the children on the spectrum deserve better than to have their lives entrusted to them.
The people in this room, specifically those associated with the Marcus Center, do not have the best interests of the autistic community at heart. They are engaged in fraud at multiple levels. Whatever legislation they concoct to further enrich themselves should, and will, be met with ...skepticism.
By the way, I'm not very popular at these meetings.
My name is Walt Guthrie. And I'm an advocate for those on the spectrum.
This year, I had the distinct privilege of working with Carmen Allen, and others, to kill SB 161 in the Georgia Legislature.
Next year, should the participants in this room succeed in introducing an insurance bill into the state assembly, I look forward to the opportunity to participate in the killing of that as well.
It is not that I object to children who might very well be in need of a specialized education or specific therapies receiving financial assistance to meet those needs. I do not.
It is, rather, that I know that any bill that this collection of organizations --primarily Autism Speaks and the Marcus Center -- has any hand in either crafting or supporting, will be weighted primarily, if not in its entirety, towards ABA and other similar dehumanizing pseudo-scientific behavorial applications.
Autism Speaks is an organization loathed by large sections of the autistic community for their efforts to equate the autistic spectrum with cancer and AIDS. In ad after ad and billboard after billboard, they paint a picture of the autistic experience in terms of pure negativity, even assuring that autistic children will be responsible for their parents' future divorce. Their work recalls the propaganda of Julius Streicher in the Third Reich, depicting Jews as rats and vermin, laying the moral groundwork for their
extermination.
Autism Speaks, in their support for genetic research, suggests they are inclined towards a somewhat softer genocide: Prenatal testing that will result in a genetic search and destroy that, once the markers for autism have been established and located and the tests drawn up, will result in a "cure" for autism by simply eliminating future generations of autistics from being born.
THESE are the people that the Marcus Center wishes to partner with.
The Marcus Center would have us believe that the autistic insurance teat should be doled out primarily for the behaviorists to suck on. Because, after all, ABA is "science."
In all the time that I have come here I don't believe that I have ever encountered any science, or found anyone who would actually qualify as a "scientist." They use words like "disorder" and they don't know what they mean or why they use them. Ask them and they might mumble that the DSM "says" it is. But they can't tell you why. To paraphrase the creation-scientist: "The DSM says it, I believe it, and that settles it." A few, like James McPartland, admit it's definitional. It's all made up. This is the foundation of their whole existence and they just made it up. Out of thin air.
They focus on differences and transform them, with a wave of the hand, into deficits. If autistics do surprisingly better than was expected on a test measuring this skill or that brain function then this becomes the brain somehow "compensating." They put laser pointers on children to find out where they're looking. If regular kids look at eyes and autistic kids look at mouths then the conclusion is naturally that looking at mouths is a trait that must be corrected. Why? Because being on the autistic spectrum is definitionally a disorder so the behaviors exhibited by those on the spectrum must all be symptoms of that disorder. Nothing autistic can be good.
They make it their mission to change behavior because, in their narrow world, behavior is all that can be measured and measurement is all. They make no attempt to empathically understand the interior emotional and intellectual world of the autistic. In the words of Dan Crimmins that would be all "touchy-feely."
As a result, I'm sure, of such a philosophy, I regularly have such encounters here as one Marcus Center employee comparing her working with children on the spectrum to the training of dogs.
Their lack of intellectual curiousity here is stunning. They talk endlessly about why autustics do the things they do, such as avoiding eye contact and yet when queried if they actually asked those on the spectrum why they don't make eye contact, they'll respond that THAT wouldn't be science. Imagine. Asking people why they do what they do is methodologically off limits. No, children will instead have their behavior coercively altered based on theories derived from cherry-picked data designed to fit the behaviorists' bigoted preconceptions.
If the behaviorists in this room were real scientists, they would be incompetent. Some of my colleagues in this fight believe they ARE incompetent. I believe, on the whole, that they are, politely put, engaged in willful misrepresentation. But whether their lies are to themselves or to the public at large, the children on the spectrum deserve better than to have their lives entrusted to them.
The people in this room, specifically those associated with the Marcus Center, do not have the best interests of the autistic community at heart. They are engaged in fraud at multiple levels. Whatever legislation they concoct to further enrich themselves should, and will, be met with ...skepticism.
By the way, I'm not very popular at these meetings.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
FrankenKenna
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
My Directorial Debut
Shot last year, The Voice Commands was the first film that I directed for Sketchworks. Script is mine. The cinematography is by Matt Green. All the performers are out of Sketchworks. Linda, as usual, was there selflessly doing every unglamorous job that needed to be done.
Monday, January 10, 2011
James McPartland Is a Dick (And More)
I originally wrote this to an e-mail group after attending Dr. James McPartland's talk at the Emory Psychology Department's Colloquium.
I caught the James McPartland talk at Emory November 8.
Off the bat, three things you need to know about him.
One: he's the Assistant Professor in the Child Study Center.
Two: He's the Associate Director of Developmental Electrophysiology Lab
Three: he's a dick.
He's actually more than that. But we'll get to that.
First, the dick:
In the course of his "research," McPartland makes use of a computer program called "Cyberball," which is a sort of "video game". Now, I have put quote marks around the words "video game" because it is the most primitive-looking thing you can possibly imagine. We are not talking "Gears of War" here. From the brief demonstration, given during the talk, it appeared to be something that might have come out in 1975 just prior to the introduction of "Pong." But what do I know? For all I know it might have just popped out of the MIT Media lab last month. In any case, I cannot emphasize enough how boring this game is.
It is a simulated game of catch between three players. Each player can choose to throw the ball to the person on his left or the person on his right. That's it. That's the game. It doesn't appear that you can miss or that the other person can fail to catch the ball. There is no skill and no chance whatsoever involved. For all intents and purposes, assuming the demonstration of this game was representative of actual "play," the "game" is the equivalent of nothing more than three people with one person calling out the name of one of the two others, and then that person being able to do the same and so on and so on.
Of course no human being would ever willingly choose to waste their time playing such a "game," but McPartland has apparently made countless kids waste irretrievable hours of their childhood at no discernible benefit for themselves "playing" this simulation that simulates nothing.
But this is not what makes McPartland a dick.
This is:
What is the purpose of Cyberball? Well, it turns out it does have one. According to McPartland, Cyberball is designed to make a player feel excluded and outcast. You see, the other two "players" of Cyberball don't exist. They are just part of the program and what they do is ignore the player and just toss the ball back and forth to each other. Now, McPartland claims that the children he works with are, by the nature of their autism, already shunned and socially mistreated by their peers. So what does he do with them? He experiments on them by making them play games designed to increase their sense of isolation and social ostracism. And these are experiments solely for his benefit since McPartland made no claim during the course of his talk that these sessions would provide any benefit whatsoever for the children playing them.
McPartland tricks ostracized children into performing activities designed solely to further their own sense of ostracism.
Where I come from this sort of person is also technically known as a douchebag.
Oh, and did I mention that he was excited about the prospect of a computer program that might test for empathy.
Let the irony of THAT sink in.
The bulk of his talk is old territory that I've addressed before. More laser-pointer-on-the-head sort of nonsense. This time we learn that autistics take 200 milliseconds or so to process faces. Regular folk take, on average, 180. Noting that that might not seem like a big deal, McPartland admitted as much and then went on to claim that it actually was, without offering the slightest bit of evidence except to note that those 20 milliseconds add up over time (Yeah, he's right Those two percents of a second add up. Work those face recognitions, kids. You only have 86,400,000 milliseconds in a day to work with!) During it all he performed the verbal sleight-of-hand of telling us that some of this was hard science, some was unpublished and some was just speculation. It was almost like a psychic doing a "cold reading" to the room, leaving himself plenty of wiggle room should anyone call him him on any of his claims (The main one being that autistics maybe just aren't properly motivated to have the desire to be social. Or something. As someone who understands the spectrum from living it, listening to McPartland's meandering theory of autism was like listening to my great aunt and her circle describe what goes on in Grand Theft Auto). There was more talk about perceiving upright faces vs inverted faces. If you believe this is relevant to anything on Earth then God love you. I won't be dragged into another discussion on it.
Afterwards, in the reception following McPartland's talk, I asked him directly whether or not autism was empirically or definitionally a "disorder." He responded that it was definitional and that ALL people on the autistic spectrum are, by definition, "disordered." Then, having admitted this, he jumped to the it's-only-a-word defense. If I found the word "offensive" (a word I never employed in the course of the discussion) then that was on me. Because who could find any objection to being labeled "disordered?"
I told him what the word "disordered" actually means.
It means "nigger."
It means "faggot." It means "kike."
It performs the same societal function and is derived in PRECISELY the same manner. It is a derogatory classification whose purpose is to dehumanize one arbitrarily grouped and categorized set of humanity. And like the white racist, who feels that he can designate, by his own criteria, any one that he chooses to include into or exclude from the inferior class of "nigger," James McPartland and his intellectually low-functioning behaviorist brood think they are entitled to arbitrarily classify an entire subset of humanity as definitionally "disordered" and then have full power to say who is and who is not in that set. Neither James McPartland nor the typical hardcore white racist feel any need to empirically justify their respective words. Why should he? Just as the word "nigger" empowered and elevated the white power structure, the word 'disorder' gives the behaviorists their power, income, and justification for their very existence.
James McPartland is a grinning clown, the moral equivalent of a racist, who experiments on vulnerable socially outcast children to make them feel worse about themselves, all so he can grind out a steady stream of lazy speculation disguised as science.
Fuck him.
I caught the James McPartland talk at Emory November 8.
Off the bat, three things you need to know about him.
One: he's the Assistant Professor in the Child Study Center.
Two: He's the Associate Director of Developmental Electrophysiology Lab
Three: he's a dick.
He's actually more than that. But we'll get to that.
First, the dick:
In the course of his "research," McPartland makes use of a computer program called "Cyberball," which is a sort of "video game". Now, I have put quote marks around the words "video game" because it is the most primitive-looking thing you can possibly imagine. We are not talking "Gears of War" here. From the brief demonstration, given during the talk, it appeared to be something that might have come out in 1975 just prior to the introduction of "Pong." But what do I know? For all I know it might have just popped out of the MIT Media lab last month. In any case, I cannot emphasize enough how boring this game is.
It is a simulated game of catch between three players. Each player can choose to throw the ball to the person on his left or the person on his right. That's it. That's the game. It doesn't appear that you can miss or that the other person can fail to catch the ball. There is no skill and no chance whatsoever involved. For all intents and purposes, assuming the demonstration of this game was representative of actual "play," the "game" is the equivalent of nothing more than three people with one person calling out the name of one of the two others, and then that person being able to do the same and so on and so on.
Of course no human being would ever willingly choose to waste their time playing such a "game," but McPartland has apparently made countless kids waste irretrievable hours of their childhood at no discernible benefit for themselves "playing" this simulation that simulates nothing.
But this is not what makes McPartland a dick.
This is:
What is the purpose of Cyberball? Well, it turns out it does have one. According to McPartland, Cyberball is designed to make a player feel excluded and outcast. You see, the other two "players" of Cyberball don't exist. They are just part of the program and what they do is ignore the player and just toss the ball back and forth to each other. Now, McPartland claims that the children he works with are, by the nature of their autism, already shunned and socially mistreated by their peers. So what does he do with them? He experiments on them by making them play games designed to increase their sense of isolation and social ostracism. And these are experiments solely for his benefit since McPartland made no claim during the course of his talk that these sessions would provide any benefit whatsoever for the children playing them.
McPartland tricks ostracized children into performing activities designed solely to further their own sense of ostracism.
Where I come from this sort of person is also technically known as a douchebag.
Oh, and did I mention that he was excited about the prospect of a computer program that might test for empathy.
Let the irony of THAT sink in.
The bulk of his talk is old territory that I've addressed before. More laser-pointer-on-the-head sort of nonsense. This time we learn that autistics take 200 milliseconds or so to process faces. Regular folk take, on average, 180. Noting that that might not seem like a big deal, McPartland admitted as much and then went on to claim that it actually was, without offering the slightest bit of evidence except to note that those 20 milliseconds add up over time (Yeah, he's right Those two percents of a second add up. Work those face recognitions, kids. You only have 86,400,000 milliseconds in a day to work with!) During it all he performed the verbal sleight-of-hand of telling us that some of this was hard science, some was unpublished and some was just speculation. It was almost like a psychic doing a "cold reading" to the room, leaving himself plenty of wiggle room should anyone call him him on any of his claims (The main one being that autistics maybe just aren't properly motivated to have the desire to be social. Or something. As someone who understands the spectrum from living it, listening to McPartland's meandering theory of autism was like listening to my great aunt and her circle describe what goes on in Grand Theft Auto). There was more talk about perceiving upright faces vs inverted faces. If you believe this is relevant to anything on Earth then God love you. I won't be dragged into another discussion on it.
Afterwards, in the reception following McPartland's talk, I asked him directly whether or not autism was empirically or definitionally a "disorder." He responded that it was definitional and that ALL people on the autistic spectrum are, by definition, "disordered." Then, having admitted this, he jumped to the it's-only-a-word defense. If I found the word "offensive" (a word I never employed in the course of the discussion) then that was on me. Because who could find any objection to being labeled "disordered?"
I told him what the word "disordered" actually means.
It means "nigger."
It means "faggot." It means "kike."
It performs the same societal function and is derived in PRECISELY the same manner. It is a derogatory classification whose purpose is to dehumanize one arbitrarily grouped and categorized set of humanity. And like the white racist, who feels that he can designate, by his own criteria, any one that he chooses to include into or exclude from the inferior class of "nigger," James McPartland and his intellectually low-functioning behaviorist brood think they are entitled to arbitrarily classify an entire subset of humanity as definitionally "disordered" and then have full power to say who is and who is not in that set. Neither James McPartland nor the typical hardcore white racist feel any need to empirically justify their respective words. Why should he? Just as the word "nigger" empowered and elevated the white power structure, the word 'disorder' gives the behaviorists their power, income, and justification for their very existence.
James McPartland is a grinning clown, the moral equivalent of a racist, who experiments on vulnerable socially outcast children to make them feel worse about themselves, all so he can grind out a steady stream of lazy speculation disguised as science.
Fuck him.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
A Few Questions About Tangled
A few comments on Tangled, which a couple of my friends invited me out to see last week. Spoilers follow:
Does Rapunzel's little anthropormorphic sidekick actually commit cold-blooded murder at the film's end? That's pretty hardcore.
Why do all the ruffians go to all the trouble to save the hero from the gallows at tremendous personal risk to themselves? They have no reason to do so.
Why does Maximus the horse listen to anything Rapunzel says to him, much less obey her requests not to ruin her special day. What does he care?
Speaking of Maximus, was I the only one on the planet completely distracted by his total resemblance to James Rolfe, You Tube's Angry Video Game Nerd?
And finally, what is up with this princess fixation that Disney has? Really, does every heroine have to be a fucking princess?
Does Rapunzel's little anthropormorphic sidekick actually commit cold-blooded murder at the film's end? That's pretty hardcore.
Why do all the ruffians go to all the trouble to save the hero from the gallows at tremendous personal risk to themselves? They have no reason to do so.
Why does Maximus the horse listen to anything Rapunzel says to him, much less obey her requests not to ruin her special day. What does he care?
Speaking of Maximus, was I the only one on the planet completely distracted by his total resemblance to James Rolfe, You Tube's Angry Video Game Nerd?
And finally, what is up with this princess fixation that Disney has? Really, does every heroine have to be a fucking princess?
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Monday, January 3, 2011
Danielle Trixie
Babies With Frickin' Laser Beams On Their Heads
For about the last year now I have been attending various autism conferences around Atlanta. It's been a very eye-opening experiencing to say the least. For several months I've been giving my take on these various meetings on a student e-mail list out of Georgia Tech. This is the first of those critiques.
Regarding October 8th's Atlanta Autism Consortium meeting at the Marcus Center for those who may have missed it.
Mary Ann Romski addressed the state of knowledge regarding non-verbal children. To sum it up: Nobody knows anything. Nobody can agree on anything. Nobody can define anything including the meaning of "non verbal." I, personally, applaud her for her honesty.
Interesting fact: How many non- verbal 5 year old autistic children are still non-verbal at 10 or 15? Oh, wait, it's not an interesting fact because nobody knows! That's right. Nobody has bothered to do a tracking on these kids that are the literal poster children for the autism "crisis." Why might this be? Hmmmm.
Next up was Warren Jones: a snake oil salesman who is making his reputation putting laser pointers on baby heads. Or something like that. Turns out, those of us on the spectrum look at the mouths of actors in Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe more than we do the eyes. This is important because...um...oh yeah, regular people look at eyes more than mouths. So looking at mouths MUST be a symptom then. Now Warren Jones, of course, is waaay too much of a "scientist" to inquire of people who can CAN communicate why they look at the things they do, even to gain a little insight before self-generating his own hypothesis. Turns out, he says, that people will tell you different thing. And that would make his job hard. Far easier to stick laser pointers on baby heads and make your own inferences for those who can't talk. Oh, and did I mention that at the beginning of his talk that he promised that he was going to offer us an insight as to what an autistic child might be feeling when he walked into a school cafeteria and then proceeded to do absolutely nothing of the sort? Unless showing us chart after chart of where babies with lasers on their heads look when shown some other chart somehow did that.
Warren Jones is a straight-up fraud. Exactly the type to benefit the Marcus Center. Let's put a laser pointer on every baby head in America, find out which of the toddlers have a mouth fixation, get them diagnosed as High Risk, and then get them into ABA as soon as possible. Ka-ching.
Regarding October 8th's Atlanta Autism Consortium meeting at the Marcus Center for those who may have missed it.
Mary Ann Romski addressed the state of knowledge regarding non-verbal children. To sum it up: Nobody knows anything. Nobody can agree on anything. Nobody can define anything including the meaning of "non verbal." I, personally, applaud her for her honesty.
Interesting fact: How many non- verbal 5 year old autistic children are still non-verbal at 10 or 15? Oh, wait, it's not an interesting fact because nobody knows! That's right. Nobody has bothered to do a tracking on these kids that are the literal poster children for the autism "crisis." Why might this be? Hmmmm.
Next up was Warren Jones: a snake oil salesman who is making his reputation putting laser pointers on baby heads. Or something like that. Turns out, those of us on the spectrum look at the mouths of actors in Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe more than we do the eyes. This is important because...um...oh yeah, regular people look at eyes more than mouths. So looking at mouths MUST be a symptom then. Now Warren Jones, of course, is waaay too much of a "scientist" to inquire of people who can CAN communicate why they look at the things they do, even to gain a little insight before self-generating his own hypothesis. Turns out, he says, that people will tell you different thing. And that would make his job hard. Far easier to stick laser pointers on baby heads and make your own inferences for those who can't talk. Oh, and did I mention that at the beginning of his talk that he promised that he was going to offer us an insight as to what an autistic child might be feeling when he walked into a school cafeteria and then proceeded to do absolutely nothing of the sort? Unless showing us chart after chart of where babies with lasers on their heads look when shown some other chart somehow did that.
Warren Jones is a straight-up fraud. Exactly the type to benefit the Marcus Center. Let's put a laser pointer on every baby head in America, find out which of the toddlers have a mouth fixation, get them diagnosed as High Risk, and then get them into ABA as soon as possible. Ka-ching.
Really? Another Fuckin' Blog? Really?
Ah, the first post. The purpose of which, of course, is to explain why the world needs another God damn blog.
Well, I've got nothing. The world doesn't need another blog. The world needs less blogs. The world needs more people to wake up to both their lack of writing talent and to the dull banality of their day to day lives which in no way needs to be shared.
And perhaps I am one of these poor deluded saps. We shall see. Or, worse case scenario, I alone shall see.
Who am I? Well, I was a political cartoonist for the Birmingham Post-Herald for 20 years before it abruptly folded in 2006. co-edited and co-published Rant Magazine, an arts and politics monthly, from 1996 to 2001. Currently I write comedy for the stage here in the Atlanta area and, as an Aspergerian and angry activist, spend a lot of my time lately skirmishing with behaviorists and other local pseudo-scientists. Oh, and I'm also a faith-hating atheist.
So, hopefully, this curmudgeony mixture of whimsy and loathing will be as delightful as anything the Unabomer ever wrote in his manifesto.
But if not, I'm a photographer as well, so I'll be posting pix of hot chicks too.
I probably do hate you but I will pander to you.
Well, I've got nothing. The world doesn't need another blog. The world needs less blogs. The world needs more people to wake up to both their lack of writing talent and to the dull banality of their day to day lives which in no way needs to be shared.
And perhaps I am one of these poor deluded saps. We shall see. Or, worse case scenario, I alone shall see.
Who am I? Well, I was a political cartoonist for the Birmingham Post-Herald for 20 years before it abruptly folded in 2006. co-edited and co-published Rant Magazine, an arts and politics monthly, from 1996 to 2001. Currently I write comedy for the stage here in the Atlanta area and, as an Aspergerian and angry activist, spend a lot of my time lately skirmishing with behaviorists and other local pseudo-scientists. Oh, and I'm also a faith-hating atheist.
So, hopefully, this curmudgeony mixture of whimsy and loathing will be as delightful as anything the Unabomer ever wrote in his manifesto.
But if not, I'm a photographer as well, so I'll be posting pix of hot chicks too.
I probably do hate you but I will pander to you.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)