On Bad Parents

Today is Autistics Speaking Day. To follow in the tradition of last year, I'm going to take the opportunity to talk about something that I wouldn't normally blog about. Be forewarned that this is not -- at all -- a pleasant topic. In fact, it's downright disturbing. If you are a parent to an autistic child, this will be particularly disturbing to you. If you are autistic yourself, it will be equally disturbing in a completely different way. Be forewarned.

Towards the end of September, the blog The Thinking Person's Guide to Autism hosted a series of exchanges referred to on-site as the Self-Advocate/Parent Dialogues. If you haven't read it, I strongly recommend you do so -- including the comments. Yes, I know that's ten-eleven (depending on how you count) blog entries, many of which have an inordinate number of comments. I make this recommendation anyway -- and recommend it strongly.

During that exchange, a lot of issues -- many of which are very important -- relating to the parent/self-advocate divide in the modern autism world were discussed. By and large, the parents present were interested in helping their child and were willing to respect and try to understand the viewpoints and interests of autistic people. And, while I can't directly confirm this, I strongly suspect (and have no reason to disbelieve) that those parents love their children and wanted to do what they could to help them. I believe (and have no reason to disbelieve) that, to those parents, their involvement in autism issues was not primarily about themselves or their personal interests and desires, but rather about trying to raise their children.

One fact, however, was not mentioned during that dialogue, and it's a simple fact that while the above can almost certainly be said about the parents who participated in the Dialogues, it certainly cannot be said about all parents. Put another way, not every parent of an autistic child is a good parent.

"Good" and "bad" are relative, of course, and everyone makes mistakes. I'm not trying to demonize or stereotype the parents of autistic children here.

Still, there's an attitude among parents' groups characterized by the presumption that each parent loves their child and is generally trying to raise their child as best they can. There are three real problems with this -- and I've already discussed the first one. Specifically, parents are human and thus fallible. Even if a parent is trying to raise their child as best they can, this doesn't mean that they are.

The second problem with that presumption is far simpler. It simply isn't true.

I know I've repeated myself here. This was deliberate. The point needs to be driven in -- preferably with a metaphorical sledgehammer.

For years, I've been reading coverage of parents doing truly awful things to their children. Take for instance, Marguerite Famolare, as quoted in this article about the Judge Rotenberg Center. According to her, the center's systematic torture of her child is great -- after all, if she shows him the remote control to his shock harness:

He'll automatically comply to whatever my signal command may be, whether it is 'Put on your seatbelt,' or 'Hand me that apple,' or 'Sit appropriately and eat your food,'" she says. "It's made him a human being, a civilized human being.

I have to rather strongly disagree with her definition of humanity. Beyond this, I think that the quote speaks for itself.

Then there's the case of Karen McCarron, who I recently learned is trying to appeal her well-deserved sentence and get a new trial. Her story is, in a way, much simpler to explain -- she murdered her daughter and blamed her actions on said child's reified neurology. According to her lawyer, McCarron believed that Jesus would bring her child back, sans certain reified aspects of how she learned and experienced the world.

I did not select these two cases at random. While I could have picked from a lot more, including many not on that list (which is rather outdated at this point), they serve as illustrations of the fact that there are some phenomenally bad parents out there. Some of said parents have autistic children.

More importantly, however, they serve to illustrate another factor -- the ways in which certain attitudes prevalent in the autism world can be used as justifications for truly monstrous acts towards autistic people. When I object to, for instance, the reification of autism, I am doing so for damned good reason. When I talk about psychosocial stigma, I am not talking about something even remotely close to trivial.

Finally, these cases are public -- they have public documentation which I can link to. Trust me, I have a lot of examples from personal experience. I've spent a surprisingly large amount of my professional life trying to clean up the messes that bad parents and poor parenting decisions (of various sorts) have left behind.

The third problem with the attitude I referenced is central to the attitude itself and not the underlying beliefs. There is an old saying that "sympathy for the guilty is treason to the innocent." The saying -- and the underlying meaning behind it -- apply here. Yes, parents of autistic children often function without adequate support, are stressed, are under incredible pressures, etc. If, however, we choose to allow this to detract even one iota from our condemnation of this sort of parent's inexcusable actions, if we say that Karen McCaron's actions were "really about a lack of support" or some such, we are essentially arguing that the act of torturing or murdering an innocent child is excusable.

I disagree with this in the strongest terms possible.

Such actions need to be condemned. We, as a community, owe that duty to Karen McCaron's and Marguerite Famolare's victims.

I have, at this point, been writing this blog entry all day -- essentially dropping everything else in my life to do so. It is, however, phenomenally difficult for me to do so. As I type this sentence, it is 6:17 in the evening. I have been writing this almost since I finished breakfast.

As the amount of time I've spent on this text implies, this is not an easy topic for me to write about. I don't even like to think about parents such as those two. I originally intended to write far more about them than I did... but gave up on several (actually rather important) points simply because I couldn't bring myself to write them. In fact, I even dropped one major and prominent example of bad parenting from my list -- simply because I didn't think I could stand writing out another paragraph detailing such behavior. I know for a fact that I will regret that decision.

I would love to think that every parent was a good one, that (all) parents could be trusted to act in their child's best interests, and that we could count on parental love to ensure that our parents would be our allies.

Unfortunately, I know all too well that this is simply not true.

On a Recent Huffington Post Article

Around a week ago, this article was posted to the Huffington post.

Quite frankly, my initial reaction to it was to think that it was an April Fool's joke. The sheer absurdity of the juxtaposition involved in talking about healing divides while spewing hate speech is striking.

Yes, hate speech. It's pretty unambiguous. Reading through the comments, however, it quickly becomes apparent that people don't get it.

Well, some commentators do. Thanks, Kim! (And, of course, all of the other people who I don't know...)

At the moment, the commentators seem to be divided between those who engage in reification error and those who don't. This is... pretty typical, really.

In any case... let's see. The post characterizes the neurodiversity movement as being made up of "people with Asperger's Syndrome or higher functioning autism" (this is nowhere near true, and "high functioning" is considered insulting), describes ASAN as "a self advocacy movement for people with high functioning autism" (ditto), and ends by stating that "We aren't the enemies. Autism is." (Which qualifies as blatant hate speech).

I really don't know what to say here...

On Highly Misleading News Articles

Catching up on a newsfeed, I came across this article. Suffice it to say I wasn't impressed -- at all.
In essence, the article reports data from the National Birth Defect Registry and notes that "over 60%" of autistic children entered into their database had some form of structural birth defect as well as an autism diagnosis. I was pretty surprised at this news -- just not by the fact that the number was so high.

My surprise was at two things: One, that they considered this news... and, two, that the number was so low.

You see, the registry relies on parents to input data on their children. Specifically, it requires parents to register their children with birth defects.

Obviously, this means that not every child with a birth defect gets entered. More importantly, parents will only enter their children if they believe that said children have birth defects.

Now... how many parents of autistic children consider autism a birth defect?

The news story suggests that the answer is higher than I thought. Of course, it may just be that some of the remaining 40% have other issues. I don't know -- I haven't seen the data.

This, of course, is what is known as selection bias. More specifically, it's a blatant case of sampling bias.

In other words -- why the heck is this news?

The answer: media sensationalism. Frankly, publication of this article fails pretty much any accepted standard of journalistic ethics, specifically because of accuracy standards and the harm limitation principle. On the other hand, that's never stopped the publication of countless other sensationalized articles...

Some Recent Advocacy Efforts

Fellow bloggers Kim Wombles, Thelma, and Louise have started an effort to form a new autism organization, one which actually looks pretty good... if still young. I hold out great hopes for their efforts.

Edit: I somehow managed to miss Kathleen's involvement with the project. She deserves a mention as well. Again -- good luck!

At the same time, the anti-disease group PKIDs has released a pretty spectacular set of videos on the horrific costs that the decision not to vaccinate can impose on families. Sullivan of LBRB has blogged on them here, complete with embedded video.

In his post, however, Sullivan wrote the following:

For any who wish to comment that this has nothing to do with autism, I agree. Unfortunately, the autism community is one of the biggest sources of misinformation about vaccines and vaccine preventable diseases. If I can help PKIDs a bit with this post, I see that as a good thing.

I have to somewhat disagree. Ideally, he is right -- this shouldn't have anything to do with autism. His comment that the autism community is one of the biggest sources of misinformation about vaccines and vaccine preventable illnesses, however, hits the nail on the head.

The instant vaccines entered the autism discussion, the two became connected. Despite the fact that the connection is purely artificial, a product of quackery and delusion, it is very real... and very horrifying.

Watch those videos. I'm particularly fond of the Hib, Hepatitis, and pneumococcal disease videos, but the others are generally pretty good as well.

This is what groups like DAN and Generation Rescue are telling people to risk rather than accept a percieved risk of having their kids turn out like us. This is what they are telling people is better than autism when they advise parents not to vaccinate their children.

Frankly, I find that phenominally insulting.

Edit: Corrected a typo ("However" was missing an e).

Scary, scary figures

I recently came across this piece by the LA Times. Frankly, I'm scared. Epidemiology may not be my field, but this is far, far worse than I'd imagined.

The mathematics of mass vaccination are complicated, and the level of vaccination required to achieve herd immunity varies between illnesses (or even strains of the same illness), but I can't think of any illness where a vaccination rate of 13.5% is enough to provide such an effect. That is, admittedly, the most extreme example on the list, but I could say the same of a vaccination rate of 50%, which is much more common. Generally speaking, a vaccination rate of anywhere from 85% to 95% is required for herd immunity to provide any real protection.

They might have well posted this data as an article, and labelled it, "California kindergatens are fertile breeding grounds for some of the nastiest diseases circulating in the world today!"

I'm beginning to suspect that it'll take a genuine tragedy to stop Jenny and her brand of idiots. In the meantime, her kill count keeps rising... and, for every additional unvaccinated child, the scope of the inevitable tragedy, when it comes, grows.

As I said, I'm pretty thoroughly scared by this.

Another Example of Bias in Science and the News

I'll also have to admit that neuroscience isn't my area of expertise... or even an area of particular interest for me (beyond the subfield of cognitive neuroscience, which is of interest to me to the extent to which it provides useful evidence for theories in cognitive psychology). This isn't anything against the field -- I just don't personally enjoy reading these studies nearly as much as I do other sorts.

That taken care of, a recent MSNBC piece contains the following quote from an autism researcher whose name they didn't spell (but I very strongly suspect, based on my knowledge of autism researchers, the pronunciation given to the researcher's name, and his stated institutional affiliation to be Dr. Eric Courchesne -- please correct me if I'm mistaken):

We discovered that at birth the brain is near-normal in size, but by about twelve months of age the brain has grown too large, too fast, which suggests that mechanisms that regulate how the brain grows have been derailed in this disorder.

I pulled this specific quote because it's an excellent demonstration of a peculiar form of normocentric bias that pervades much of the autism world. There are a number of other problems with it, but for now I just want to focus on that one. It's worth noting that there are a number of other spectacularly problematic quotes in the piece, however.

I was going to go on a rather long rant about the subject, but then I realized that someone else had already done a pretty spectacular job of highlighting the problem. In essence, he's assuming that there's a single, "good" course of brain development (the one that most children show) and that all deviations from this course must be harmful. This is not the case.

Another case of "abnormal" growth that I can point to is in the hippocampi of London taxi drivers, a direct result (as far as we can tell) of the fact that they have to memorize a simply absurd amount of information regarding the layout of a pretty large and chaotic city... unless they navigate by GPS, and those that do don't show the "abnormal" growth I'm talking about.

Given the known functions of the hippocampus, this shouldn't be too surprising.

So I won't deny that the patterns of growth the doctor is talking about are interesting. I do think, however, that his interpretation is completely inaccurate and highly biased. If anything, I think the reports he's citing are evidence in support of the EPF model of autism... but we'd need further research to get something directly citable (without a lot of interpretation and discussion) as evidence in a primary paper on the subject.

On the Media

As I noted in a previous post, I had my wisdom teeth out recently. I'm only starting to come out of the narcotic haze of the painkillers now (and will need to take another shortly), so my plans to start job-searching will have to wait. No, this isn't because of the pain -- it's because of how badly the painkillers effect me. Still, while I have a few lucid moments, I might as well comment on all of the stuff I've missed.

For one thing, I haven't been able to read any peer-reviewed journal articles. This... really, really sucks, from my perspective. More than any of the other effects of the hydrocodone they gave me, the fact that it pretty much destroys my attention span to the point that I can't read research articles drives me ready to tear my hair out.

This does, however, present a somewhat unique opportunity as I go over the news I've missed. This entry is going to be of a special format -- as I catch up, I'm going to post a brief summary of each article dealing with autism, a link, and a comment on just how offensive the media coverage of the story was.

To start with, take this piece, whose main offence was to equate all developmental disabilities. As this is supposed to be reporting on abuse of persons with developmental disabilities... this really shouldn't be the case. The nature of the disability in question should be at least stated. It is insulting to spread the stereotype that all persons with developmental disabilities are "mentally incompetent".

Any broad category of disabilities covers a huge range of issues. The term "physical disability", for instance, can cover anything from a trick knee to quadriplegia. "Developmental disability" is only different in that it covers a greater variety of issues... many of which are only issues because of the lack of available societal supports.

On the other hand, the article does a good bit to highlight issues of abuse. I have mixed feelings about it.

Next, we have this piece, dealing with an Aspie contestant in a talent show, deserves particular mention for being exceedingly odious. For one thing, the entire piece is based not on what Mr. James (the contestant in question) can or can't do, but rather on a judge's prediction on whether or not he can cope with the stress of being on the show.

The language of the article itself, however, is so blatantly offensive it's absurd. Even the title is offensive -- "Asperger's sufferer will not..." indeed! The first line of the article repeats the theme: "The X Factor contestant Scott James, who suffers from Asperger's syndrome..."

Excuse me. Asperger's is a description of the way your brain's wired. You don't suffer from Asperger's (or autism) any more than you suffer from liking classical music (and, in fact, it's harder to separate "Asperger's" from the rest of you than it is said like). Saying that someone "suffers from" Asperger's (or autism, or...) is around as offensive as saying that someone "suffers from being Jewish".

Next, a local piece on the whole sign fiasco. Decent coverage... except I'm going to need to withdraw my earlier declaration of respect for Ms. Wallace. When the heck will these people realize that the cancer thing is even more offensive?

Then there's this piece which deals with an Aspie surfer... and deliberately calls up the whole lack-of-empathy stereotype. Enough said.

Next, this bit on the murder of a twelve-year-old autistic boy. This article actually manages to avoid being offensive. Way to go, UPI! Of course, the incident itself is another story, but at least the coverage wasn't bad.

This article on a summer camp for autistic kids actually looks pretty cool. Beyond its continuous reification of autism and oversimplification of the research, the article actually makes the program look decent... which should not be taken as an endorsement. All that really means is that the program isn't setting off any red flags based on this article.

This article covers the opening of a new school in a spectacularly uninformative fashion. Kudos to the author, though, for its opening line.

An article in the National Post details the (hopeful) end of a truly obscene saga of an autistic Canadian who got trapped in Kenya. Nothing too bad about the article, but, again, the story itself is pretty offensive.

According to this piece, an autistic child whose school was attempting to deny him the ability to bring his service dog with him won a victory in court. I do, however, feel sorry for Ms. Crook. While it involves skipping out of the chronology of the articles, it's worth noting that there's a considerably more offensive follow-up story by ABC here.

Really, when will the media learn that Autism Speaks doesn't speak for autistics?

Anyway, next up is a Salt Lake Tribune article on a couple who's been charged with abusing thier autistic son. Again, good coverage for a nasty incident.

This piece tries to hold out an autistic nineteen-year-old who recently became an Eagle Scout as an inspiration. At least it's better than most such attempts... which isn't saying much.

Finally, the Onion's latest effort in mocking Obama concluded with a pretty damn offensive bit about Biden and Asperger's.

Well... that's a few days in the news for me. No, this wasn't really atypical.

P.S.: It looks like the Psycho Donuts fiasco has come to an end. Cool.

Edit: It may just be the painkillers kicking in, but I find this incredibly amusing for some reason.

On Finding Things Out From Unlikely Sources

Not all of the blogs I follow are run by people who I agree with. In fact, some of them have downright offensive content.

Beyond the obvious reasons (e.g. keeping an eye on one's enemies, being aware of arguments against positions I hold so I can prepare for when they're inevitably used against me), I also occasionally find out information of interest from them. By this, I don't mean information of interest about what they're up to (I'd file that under the category of "the obvious reasons"), but rather information about the neurodiversity movement.

You see, they're usually doing the same thing that I am -- namely, keeping an eye on the other side of the "debates" (kinda hard to call it a debate when the "other side" doesn't regard you as capable of rational argument, but I digress...). The fact that they report it from a position which is biased against us doesn't change the fact that they do report on said news.

This comes in handy on occasion. For a variety of reasons, I sometimes miss information that really would have been of interest to me... or that I'd find comment-worthy.

I was rather firmly reminded of this yesterday when I came across some information at one of them.

I won't link to the post... or to the blog in question. I don't want to raise that... person's... Google ranking any. I will remark that his hate-filled invective has managed to generate a response blog which typically comments on the blog's inane deluded ramblings... which often somehow manage to be more offensive than Encyclopedia Dramatica's entry on the word "offended".

No, I won't link directly to that, either. If you are morbidly curious enough to want to see a page which actively attempts to be the most offensive thing on the Internet, please don't say I didn't warn you. I probably wouldn't even bring it up if I wasn't under the influence of narcotics, but, in my current mental state, I literally can't think of a better way to convey just how offensive That Person's hate speech is.

In the midst of one of his hate-filled rants, however, he managed to mention something genuinely interesting, something that I wasn't aware of.

You see, I'm almost certainly not going to be able to attend this year's AutCom conference. It's a simple matter of funding -- I blew most of the money that I could have used to go there by going to Autreat instead. As I knew I wouldn't be able to go, I'm afraid that I didn't check out the agenda for the AutCom conference in as much detail as I should have.

Simply put, That Person mentioned (in as offensive a way as possible) that Amanda Baggs would be re-presenting her talk from Autreat at AutCom. This drew me short for a moment -- to say that Amanda's talk had been good would be a major understatement.

I checked over the agenda to confirm... and there it is. I don't know if Amanda will be representing her talk exactly as she gave it at Autreat or if she's revised and/or made additions. Either way, I can't reccommend it enough.

And no, Amanda's isn't the only breakout session which appears to be a rehash of an Autreat presentation. Right now, I'm really wishing I could go to AutCom.

Who knows, I may be able to find a way. It'll just be extremely tricky.

And this entry took me well over twenty four hours to write. Gyah, the painkillers are effecting my functioning level...

On Timing

I finished my program this week. I suppose I'll need a new sub-heading for my blog, even though I'm going to start applying to Ph.D. programs soon.

For now, however, I'm going to just kick back and relax... and get my wisdom teeth out (an hour or two from now). It was pretty hard to work an appointment for that in around my practicum schedule.

And I'm going to start job-searching (for supervised fieldwork) on either Monday or Tuesday, depending on how much pain I'm in. Either way... new sub-heading, here I come...

Billboard Fiasco

Perhaps understandably, I have been in and out of touch a lot as of late. Last weekend, I unexpectedly found myself cut off from the 'net for... well, pretty much the entire weekend. I had 158 e-mails in my secondary e-mail account (which I don't use for mailing lists) when I got back. Newsfeeds and the like? Didn't get 'em. I'm still catching up on blog posts.

As a result, I managed to miss a pretty interesting event, something that's truly unusual in the disabilities field.

It started out pretty typically: York County, PA's Autism Society decided to try some truly uncreative advertising. Upon noticing, a number of autistic (and non-autistic) people promptly complained. This included a letter from the ASAN.

That's where things got strange.

In only a few hours, the president of York's ASA chapter wrote back... and apologized. The ad campaign was promptly withdrawn.

Wow... an autism organization actually taking responsibility for a mistake and apologizing to the autistic people they offended? Who'd've thought?

I'd never heard of Ms. Wallace (the president of ASA-York) before this. She's now earned a good bit of respect from me. Way to go!

On Experience and Knowledge

There are times when I believe I've seen entirely too much of the evil and suffering in the world. Over the course of my life, I've seen children abused by their parents (sometimes in truly horrific manners), I've seen casual stupidity on levels that truly boggle the mind, and I've seen people totally undeserving of what happened to them suffer in spectacularly god-awful ways.

Of course, my instinctive reaction to this sort of thing is to try to understand it, so that may help account for the amount of horrible stuff I've seen. I'm not quite sure how -- it's not like I spent my childhood hanging around hospital burn wards (althout I am quite acquainted with what you see in them, thank you very much) -- but this reaction has certainly been influential in the course my life has taken.

I hate to see evil at work. Human stupidity frustrates the heck out of me. Seeing good people suffer is something that I never enjoy (and something that makes me want to help out in any way I can).

Despite this, however, I can't help but feel that I'm becoming a bit jaded at times. Hell, I barely even reacted when I first saw a certain work of a hate group that I won't dignify by mentioning by name here.

My reaction to a recent news story about the murder of an autistic child was a perfect case in point. When I read it, I found myself shocked.

No, it wasn't at the crime itself. Frankly, it takes more than finding out that some woman (appears to have -- I haven't evaluated the evidence in this case myself) burned her autistic child to death for financial gain to shock me. There have been cases where mothers did the same thing to their neurotypical children for lesser reason (and no, this is not intended as a statement that neurotypical children are "worth more" -- it's intended as a depressingly realistic acknowledgement that many people, including mothers of autistic children, percieve things that way).

It was the punishment meted out -- which is very much out of line with the usual pattern in these cases -- which did it. Perhaps attitudes are changing... or perhaps I'm just being overly optimistic. I hope it's the former.

And yes, I condemn this mother's actions in the strongest terms possible. There is no excuse whatsoever for the premeditated murder of a child.

I just wish it happened less often.

Mass Media Stupidity

I recently came across a particularly appalling example of poor journalism from the New York Daily News. I was utterly shocked... and that's saying something.

Forget issues of correlation and causation. Forget a lack of understanding of scientific methodology. Forget not "getting" statistics (and especially the meaning of statistical significance) and hypothesis testing. The media usually screws all of these up, but this one's failure is more basic.

This article is reporting on a CNN piece.

When the news starts reporting what other news services say as the news, you know that it's time to find a new news source.

Another Expression of Outrage

I have a younger brother. I don't like talking about him, especially in a public forum, but he exists.

There's a reason I don't like talking about him, too. Specifically, the current state of our relationship is a very painful subject for me. There is a very good reason for this.

Specifically, he will not respect any boundaries in our relationship. Whenever I tell him that I am not comfortable with something, whenever I ask him to stop something... he takes it as encouragement to continue. This pattern has continued for more than a decade, progressively getting worse and worse. There was even an incident where he wouldn't even respect the boundary represented by a locked door as I lay curled on the ground inside, crying and begging him to leave me alone.

If you're reading this as "he broke the door down", you are entirely correct.

I do not feel safe -- physically safe -- in his presence. I do not feel comfortable when he is so much as in the same building.


The latter is mainly because he's tended to disregard the former... and sneak up on me to initiate physical contact, usually in the form of a hug. If I don't feel safe when he's in arm's reach -- and he knows this -- how the Hell can I regard this as anything but a hostile action?


Meanwhile, my mother is in denial in regards to the nature of the situation. She insists that my brother loves me and cares for me... and that this somehow invalidates all of the above. She has repeatedly laid the blame for my "outrageous" behavior (e.g. exhibiting a startle reflex when he sneaks up on me, trying to stay out of arm's reach, leaving the room when he enters) entirely on me. She has also made repeated efforts to force us together despite the fact that I've directly told her (in writing, no less!) that her attempts often render me unable to focus on my work for days.


Her last such attempt was made on the day my final projects for my last semester's classes were due. The less I say about feelings about that, the better.


I bring all of this up because of their impact on my feelings regarding a recent statement by Tony Attwood, made in response to an ASAN petition. When boiled down, the general gist of what he's saying boils down to, "Wives who cannot accept their husbands for who they are and/or fail to understand the ways in which their husbands express their emotions may become depressed and feel deprived of affection"... only formulated in a way that places the blame squarely on the husband.

The sheer absurdity of this, especially in this context, is hard to describe. The outrage I feel at this is equally so.

Disregarding the fact that any relationship goes in two directions, individuals on the spectrum tend to recieve an absurd amount of blame for things that, frankly, were not their fault. As I've mentioned above, I have personal experience with this sort of thing.

Dr. Attwood... for perpetuating psychosocial stigma towards your clients, for directly causing harm to the very people who your profession is supposed to help, and for using your professional reputation to help legitimatize a group of the worst clinical frauds I've ever seen... shame on you.

Words fail me.

I recently came across a blog post about a recent news story. The basic summary is that a Newfoundland police officer noticed an autistic boy's odd gait as he left a video store. The officer then reached the conclusion that the boy was drunk. When the boy didn't respond appropriately to the officer's approach... he was arrested and thrown into jail overnight, without so much as a phone call or a breathalizer test.

As the title says, words are failing me here. Someone needs disabilities training...

Modern Aspie Marathon?

I recently read an article on an Australian Aspie who decided to bike to Sidney (in Australia, 950 km from his home)... without telling his mother anything.

Wow. That brings back memories, but I don't think I ever ran off quite that far. The worst I think I ever did was walk to my mom's workplace because I was angry with my babysitter. That didn't involve crossing even a single city boundary....

An Expression of Outrage

Despite the title of this post, I cannot even begin to truly express my outrage at some recent news from Staten Island, New York.

The short version of it is this: a bus driver, named Robert Fischetti, was responsible for taking an eight-year-old autistic boy, P.J. Rossi, to school. P.J.'s parents aparently thought that something was off about his treatment there because one day, they sent him to school with a tape recorder in his packpack.

What the tape recorder captured was unconscionable. To give just one example, the bus matron responded to P.J.'s screams of pain with, and I quote: "Shut up, shut up, shut up, you little dog!"

Not, mind you, that the driver was much better. Fischetti's response? "Good one!".

The Department of Education called their behavior "inhuman" and promised that he would be kept away from kids.

Now, a few years later, Fischetti's back on the road, driving kids to school.

Disabled kids, at that.

And I feel sick. It's a shame -- I was having a pretty good day before I heard about this.