Part of being a good citizen of the blogosphere is visiting, reading and, most importantly, taking the time to leave a comment on other’s blogs. It’s all about the conversation. In the interest of setting an example I’ve decided to link to those blog posts that have compelled me to leave a comment.
1322 More thoughts on a privatized army
1319 Protecting offensive speech
1258 what we bring forward
Henery did something. I wrote about it. George encouraged others to read and then do something themselves. Others went out and did something. Wendell did something. And now Wendell has announced his intent to do something everyday and creates a This Is What I Did Today blog. Gawd I love the blogosphere.
I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.
It’s Saturday and your condom of the week is brought to you by KFC!
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
This is a passage I copied from Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre by Jerry Palmer.
The Amateur, the Professional and the Bureaucrat: The world is divided into three categories:
The improviser/professional is a person who can learn from experience.
The programmer/bureaucrat is a person for whom nothing is new
The total incompetent/amateur is most often female; lacks the necessary expertise to improvise successfully; has no master plan; doesn”t belong; the opposite of the programmer/bureaucrat and a person for whom everything is new. p. 10-13
Part of being a good citizen of the blogosphere is visiting, reading and, most importantly, taking the time to leave a comment on other’s blogs. It’s all about the conversation. In the interest of setting an example I’ve decided to link to those blog posts that have compelled me to leave a comment.
2319 THE LEFT-COAST SPIN…
2307 DOES ANYONE REMEMBER $4 GENERIC DRUGS…?
[Update — 2136 — I just got off the phone with one of my friends who is a mental health professional and educational specialist. She pointed me to the information on facilitated communication and suggested that this was likely what is going on here. I have to wonder, who is on the other side of the camera, who is typing at the keyboard? From The Skeptics Dictionary:
While several studies have indicated that facilitated communication does tap into the mind of a person who heretofore had been incommunicado, most studies have shown that facilitated communication only taps into the beliefs and expectations of the facilitator.
Many control studies have failed to produce strong evidence that facilitated communication works. Defenders of FC routinely criticize as insignificant or malicious those studies that fail to validate FC.
Yet, it is unlikely that there is a massive conspiracy on the part of all those who have done research on this topic and have failed to arrive at findings agreeable to the FCI.
Parents, family members and professionals want to see those they love get better. They need to have hope. And in our search for hope we too often see that which isn’t there. I think that when the person behind the camera shows themselves, we’ll know much better what is going on here.]
This story is starting to feel more and more like a bit of guerrilla theatre. Not that that is a bad thing. The number of children effected by Autism is growing at an alarming rate and because I have occasion to work with students with Autism, I have a personal interest in how this story continues to develop.
This morning a poster purporting to be the woman in the video commented on MetaFilter. This is the comment:
Someone said I should post as well, so I’m doing so.
It’s interesting how many people describe what I do as checking out of reality, or various variants on this. In fact, this has more to do with which parts of reality a person is paying attention to. Somehow it is “reality” to engage in a lot of abstract symbolic thought (and sort of paste that thought on over one’s surroundings and believe oneself to be perceiving them) but “not reality” to engage in interaction more or less directly with one’s surroundings. If you talk to me for awhile you will find me quite a bit more lucid than some people are painting me as. (Those interested might want to thoroughly read my disclaimer on assumptions and the post linked from it.)
Last September I went to a conference, where there were a number of other autistic people present. Most of us did not talk directly to each other much. Many of us did, however, subtly alter our movements in order to convey things to each other. When I got home, there were emails from a woman who was there who had correctly picked up on the meaning of what I was doing and vice versa. She had circled the table where I was sitting, and I had vaguely altered the rhythm and tone of my movements. This was a form of mutual acknowledgment. Another time I had a conversation across a room with someone about a plant in the corner without either of us saying anything. (No, this isn’t telepathy, it’s being highly aware of each other’s reactions.) The interesting part being that in both of these instances, most people would not have seen any communication taking place.
As far as research is concerned, they seem to be finding that non-autistic people filter out large parts of the world around them, imagine a whole lot to fill in the gaps, and are generally unable to stop even when it would be useful to stop. This has its useful points, and I would never deny that. But they are finding that autistic people, while we can and do filter our experiences like that, can drop the filter when necessary to directly perceive things (inasmuch as the human brain can directly perceive things). Much of our understanding of the world (including pretty high-level understanding) is taking place through things like pattern-matching that are often thought to be “mere” perception instead of “real thought”.
(Unfortunately this also means that mapping language-based communication based on patterns of what those around me were saying or what I was reading often led to some pretty serious misunderstandings, including doubts about my ability to understand the difference between reality and fantasy. My grip on reality was and is stronger than I have sometimes been given credit for, although as I said continued interaction with me should show that I’m not running around hallucinating or something.)
But it also means that there are serious questions as to which group of people is more “in their own world” or “detached from reality”.
I can easily see the advantages of the thought pattern other people have, though, and why most people have it. The one I have also has its advantages.
Someone mentioned being dropped in the woods alone. That’s an interesting example. It’s sometimes thought that the Wild Boy of Aveyron was originally autistic, and the victim of a failed infanticide (possibly based on the changeling tales that recommended infanticide to “bring the real person back”). There are many other stories of autistic children — some thought to not understand a whole lot — who suddenly perform very well in survival situations.
I have said before that I would probably perform better in a survival situation than in an apartment. In an apartment, the steps required to get things like sustenance are pretty divorced from what the things around you tell you. There’s nothing about refrigerators or stoves that tells me how to get food from them, and that’s something I in fact have a good deal of trouble with. In a survival situation, obtaining food becomes a much more physical and practical problem, something that I could probably handle better. It’s been shown that if you put me alone in an apartment for awhile, I can’t pick up any environmental cues for how to do things, so I don’t do a lot (I am not as good at most purely internally-directed physical actions). In a survival situation there are a wide variety of environmental cues that would prompt me into more action more readily. (Even living on the streets, which I only did for a few days during a housing problem, makes what needs to be done more apparent than living in an apartment.)
This is of course not true for all of us, but I don’t doubt that it would be true for a substantial minority, and stories seem to bear that out.
Another thing that I think people might be missing here, is that I never really stopped, even while using other people’s language (or appearing to), using my own.
There’s a vast difference between using a mode of perception as a little kid and discarding it and moving on to other ones (if indeed little kids have more than a superficial similarity to what I do, which I’m not sure either way on), and developing it into a fairly sophisticated way of handling things. I am sure the language of most very young children looks far more useless than adult language. I am likewise sure that the mode of perception and communication I’m most used to doesn’t look all that sophisticated in a toddler, even though I have seen it be extremely sophisticated and useful in adults who never lost that way of perceiving or communicating. (Some of who use the “second language” of, say, what I am writing now, some of whom don’t.)
A closing thought, from a translation I did of an article in French called Autistes: L’intelligence Autrement:
A number of scientists associate the peaks of ability in autistics with a strictly perceptual intelligence, which they often consider a not-very-advanced cognitive faculty. Yet, certain tasks on the Raven test seem to require a cognitive processing more complex than simple perception, notes Laurent Mottron. However, autistics, use perception in a different way than we use it, and this, to solve tasks known as intellectual. “Perception is superfunctional in autistics who discriminate better than we do on the visual and auditory planes. It probably plays a more important and more effective role in the resolution of tasks that call upon the intellect, than among the typicals,” he emphasizes.
When they look at an object, autistics categorize and generalize much less than typicals. Still, they meticulously explore the appearance of the object, its brightness, its shape, and make of it a very thorough, deep processing that opens many doors for them, explains the researcher. Autistics seem to learn many more things than us by simple exposure. “We assimilate information without making an intellectual effort, in a fashion less voluntary than the typicals, and without really knowing what we are doing,” specifies the autistic Michelle Dawson. “This knowledge sits in my brain without doing anything until I find myself in front of a task in which this information is integrated and is used to solve the problem.”
posted by silentmiaow at 5:15 AM PST on January 26 [48 favorites]
I’ve forwarded this to a couple of associates whose professional credentials in this area are far beyond my street-level knowledge. I’ll let you know what they think.
I think that unless one of three things happens before 2008, our next president will be a Republican. Either: Congress cuts all funding for the Iraq war and facilitates an immediate withdrawal; a massive offensive pushes us out of Iraq, cue people clinging to helicopters lifting off from the Green Zone; or President George Bush is impeached.
Barring one of those three unlikely events, the next president will inherit the war and no Democrat in their right mind wants to do that.
Andrew Sullivan nails it this afternoon:
…what’s happening now isn’t a serious effort to win, or even establish a peace, but a crass effort to smear some of this on the next administration, no matter which unlucky bastards comprise it.
If we leave before he’s out of office, the whole of this sorry affair is his. He has no one to blame for his failures. If somebody else comes in and, miracle of miracles, pulls something off, Bush will act as if he loosened the jar that somebody else finally opened. If the next (probably Democratic) administration pulls out, Bush will have succeeded in wiping his sticky booger on them, and his water carriers will take delight in trying to spread the meme that Democrats lost the war.
Does anyone believe that Jimmy Carter would not have inherited the Viet Nam war if President Richard Nixon had not resigned?
Does anyone think that Barack Obama, John Edwards, Al Gore, Bill Richardson, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Wesley Clark or Tom Vilsack are stupid enough to voluntarily pick up the pieces from President George Bush?
What do Amber Marshall, Amy McElhenny, Angela Comer, Angela Stellwag, Becci Hill, Brandy Lynn Gonzales, Cameo Patch, Carol Flannigan, Carrie McCandless, Cathy Heminghaus, Darcie Esson, Deanna Bobo, Deborah Reeder, Debra LaFave, Elizabeth Miklosovic and Elizabeth Stow all have in common? Joseph Farah wants you to know.
I’m sitting in Phoenix on Lee thinking how cold my feet are when I surf over to Word Of Mouth to see what things Lorain are happening and find this from Henery Hawk: ...as I watched the snow fall, wondering what to do, I realized there were people in our city, wondering what they were going to do. Just to stay warm. How completely, utterly selfish of me.
Almost disgusting.
I jumped up, grabbed writing materials, my camera and keys, and ran out the door.
Not all bloggers are sitting in their mother’s basement dressed in pajamas.
My understanding of how we got into this whole health care nightmare was that during the ’50s President Dwight Eisenhower instituted a wage and price freeze and employers, looking for another way to entice and reward employees, thought that health insurance — an untaxed benefit — would be just the ticket.
Robert Reich thinks President George Bush may have proposed ending that benefit.
The only halfway interesting thing about the President’s underwhelmingly platitudinous State of the Union speech was his health care proposal. It deserves one cheer for the following reason: It potentially de-couples health care from employment.
Under his proposal, everyone would be eligible for a tax deduction for health insurance up to $15,000 per family, $7,500 for a single person – regardless of whether the insurance is provided by the employer or purchased elsewhere. And there would no longer be any advantage to getting it at work because employer-paid premiums would be included in taxable income.
Get it? With this plan, you can just about kiss employer-provided health insurance good-bye.
And good riddance. It”s the biggest tax break in the whole federal tax system, costing the Treasury some $130 billion a year. But you”re not eligible for it when you and your family are most likely to need it – when you lose your job, for example. And the biggest beneficiaries are upper-income employees. The lower your pay, the less likely you are to get any employer coverage at all.
But Reich isn’t prepared to cheer too loudly.
The President”s plan to de-couple health insurance from employment merits only one cheer, though, because it”s only the first step. Two cheers for a president or any politician who comes up with a way to get health insurance to lower-income people who can”t afford it on their own even with a tax deduction. It”s called universal health care. Every advanced nation has it except the United States.
The President punts on universal health care – putting the responsibility for America”s 47 million uninsured on the states. But state government budgets are already sagging under the weight of paying half the costs of Medicaid.
The only way lower-income families will get the preventive care they need is through federally-subsidized health insurance. It”s a good investment over the long term. Preventive care will lower the nation”s overall health care tab because it will mean fewer expensive trips to emergency rooms by people with health crises that could have been caught and averted earlier.
I wonder what the ratio is between Americans killed by terrorists and those who die for lack of health care?
1:100,000? 1:1,000,000? 1:10,000,000,000?
President Bush isn”t running again but the one cheer he deserves marks the start of the 2008 presidential race. Affordable health care will be the biggest domestic issue in the upcoming election. The candidate who gets three cheers on this will be our next President.
I agree.
I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.
Scenario: Johnny falls while running during recess and scrapes his knee. He is found crying by his teacher, Mary. Mary, hugs him to comfort him.
1973 – In a short time Johnny feels better and goes on playing.
2006 – Mary is accused of being a sexual predator and loses her job. She faces 3 years in State Prison.
(For the record, I graduated from Warren High School in 1973 and I have no doubt that this is true.
I’ve watched the video several times now and I’m feeling uneasy about what I’m watching. My discomfort comes from an uncertainty about the chasm between the first and second parts of the video. I’d really like to hear from the woman’s psychologist or other medical professionals who are working with her.
Language exists so that people can communicate with each other. If that isn’t happening, is it language?
An Andrew Sullivan reader writes:
What that autistic person is doing is not a form of communciation. Communication in essence is a way to relate to others and what I was seeing is basically a serious sensory disorder and an inability to function and communicate in today’s society.
The wonder of the Internet is that we’re even having this conversation.
She just wants an understudy, a body
double for the days when she does
not feel like appearing in any of the roles
she has assumed and/or been assigned.
She places an ad in the paper. Wanted:
one wife, mother, daughter, neighbor,
friend. Live-in OK. Own car necessary.
No lines to memorize; everything ad-
libbed. No days off.
From understudy by Beverly Rollwagen.
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
This is a passage I copied from Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre by Jerry Palmer.
Thrillers promote the belief that the ends justify the means, and rarely stop to examine what the ends are. They have scant respect for any of the moral institutions of our society.
“I knew why I was allowed to live while others died. I knew why my rottenness was tolerated and kept alive and why the guy with the reaper couldn”t catch me and I smashed through the door with the tommy-gun in my hands spitting out the answer at the same time my voice screamed it to the heavens. I lived only to kill the scum and the lice that wanted to kill themselves. I lived to kill so that others could live. I lived to kill because my soul was a hardened thing that reveled in the thought of taking the blood of the bastards who made murder their business. I lived because I could laugh it off and others couldn”t. I was the evil that opposed other evil, leaving the good and the meek in the middle to live and inherit the earth.” Mickey Spillane, One Lonely Night, chapter 10.
… when we read and enjoy a thriller there is no doubt in our minds that the hero is on the side of the angels, and we adopt his point of view, wholeheartedly, for the duration of the reading; we couldn”t enjoy the story if we didn”t. In doing so we distinguish between the hero and the villain. p. 6
I’m not ready to give up my own views on magic and spirituality, but in the June 2004 issue of The Psychologist Eugene Subbotsky said we believe in magic, in part, because it give us a helpful hand in circumstances that are beyond rational control. …the illusion of control is a typical feature of the human mind and has an important adaptive function. And so?
A while back I began to write a one-act play about thingness. (You can read Thinghood Parts I, II, III and IV.) Prompted by a discussion with my 9th graders, I was fascinated by the way we prefer the vaguness of things over the specificity of names. I didn’t finish it, but then I came across this quote from A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner:
…when you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you sometimes find that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.
I think that I have to get back to Things.
All our living
is in waiting…
Then a voice says ‘Next’
and a new dance
begins.
From Dancing in the Waiting Room by Angus Macmillan.
[Update — 0754, 28 January — Now we have another candidate: Joey Oglesby.]
In the past 48 hours there has been a great deal of discussion about whether or not Donnie Davies, lovesgodsway.org and CHOPS are a hoax. Joe My God outs the prankster as comedian wannabe Todd Quillen. Now everyone has to figure out whether they believe Quillen’s little joke was a good thing or a bad thing.
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