Posts by Russell Brown
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they are still gorgeous, glam and gusty.
That would be the winds of change, then?
It's a shame Close Up didn't talk to someone who wasn't a gorgeous former athlete though. Kris from Pearl, who provided the dresses, told me the young Down's woman had plenty to say.
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This point was raised by others earlier in the thread, and I really don't get it. Why respond? Why dignify?
Well, the Obama campaign did, in response to the wingnut theory that he wasn't really born in Hawaii: they released his birth certificate. It didn't convince the conspiracists (this theory has much, much greater currency than the Palin baby-mama one did) but it nailed it for any sensible observer who wanted to know that Obama's late mother was not an immigration fraudster.
It is odd that Trig Palin's birth was not recorded at the local hospital where he was born. Such birth records are public data in the US, and it would be a reasonable question to ask the hospital why.
You cannot disprove these things.
Well, a DNA test would do that, but this this HuffPo column does the job for me. I think Sullivan's wrong and obsessive over this.
But in the context of a campaign where all kinds of crazy ideas took flight, I can't really muster the outrage. McCain/Palin milked the new baby in some weird ways -- it was consciously used to politically position Palin.
For example, I found McCain's repeated claims that by virtue of having a five-month old Down's baby Palin knew more about autism than "almost any American that I know," and that by the same means she was "uniquely qualified" to discover the cause of autism, offensive and opportunist. Especially when the Obama campaign had made such a significant commitment to disability policy.
And, I further confess my sympathy for Palin is limited by the fact that she repeatedly declares her desire to overturn Roe v Wade, a decision founded on womens' privacy. It doesn't make the conspriracising any better, but it sure does curb my sympathy.
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Hi Philip,
Russell alluded to my talking about human diversity in place of disability on Wednesday night. That's part of it but I'm actually more interested in diversity of experience and how we describe and value it.
I'm hugely aware of that with our boys. It was a large and useful step to grasp that they weren't going to see things my way because their experience of the universe was profoundly different to mine.
For instance, look at our quest for "normality" and the high value we place on our children "being normal". What if we reframed "being normal" as "having a common experience" and revalued it as somewhat dull and boring?
Parts of the autism rights community are big on that: they're neurodiverse and the rest of us chumps are neurotypical.
OTOH, I get frustrated with the there's-nothing-to-fix mantra. Some AS people do have cognitive problems that really make their lives hard to live. I wish for the day when our younger boy gets over his eating problems. Most food looks, smells, feels and tastes repellent to him, which, obviously, severely limits his diet.
(It's actually been a good week, though. As part of an incentive scheme of his own devising, he wrote a 2000-word essay on the Wrath of the Lich King extension to World of Warcraft and then -- which was a bigger deal -- consented that it be posted to the WoW community on NotSchool, the online learning programme he rather reluctantly participates in. He proceeded to completely pwn some other kid on the forum who insisted that Warhammer was better, but hey ...)
I also have a story up on Humans from an Asperger woman who finds life hard to live and is anxious and angry about what's happened to her. Actually, if anyone wanted to do a good deed, a friendly and supportive comment under her story would be cool ...
Great to have a rant - and now I can update my own blog for the first time in months.
Link whore! ;-)
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Niall Ferguson's Vanity Fair story on the history of the credit explosion is a top read.
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Lowering interest rates will have the same effect as a dose of smack would have to someone who's already overdosing on the stuff.
Isn't it more like getting the overdosing smack addict to do multiple lines of coke to wake him up -- and then finding yourself with a dude with cocaine psychosis?
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* Admitedly a small house in Cockerell street
And thus, Google Street View becomes an indispensable storytelling tool ...
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After Martin Bryant went on his shooting spree in Tasmania, rumours circulated that he was diagnosed with Aspergers. In truth, he was assessed as legally retarded, but from what I remember the lies travelled halfway round the globe before the truth could punch in its username and password.
He was actually assessed as Asperger in the official psychiatric report. In a report for the defence, another psychiatrist agreed there was some evidence for Asperger Syndrome, but also important evidence to the contrary.
A further complication is that AS had only just entered the diagnostic manual at that time, and clinicians seemed to be sticking very closely to the letter of that, while I think now the thinking is more flexible.
Bryant may well have been AS -- his failed, clumsy attempts at social engagement seem to have stoked his anger -- but he clearly had many, many other problems, including low IQ.
I recall it because we'd just had the AS diagnosis for our older boy at the time, and the impression via the media was very much AS = mass-murderer. It doesn't, plainly, but thank goodness I was able to determine that for myself with this new thing called the internet. I wrote about that here.
There was a fairly calm discussion on the autism web about the news of the childhood AS diagnosis of the VTech mas-murderer Cho Sueng-Hui. I wasn't the only one who had thought about it before that news came out. But if he was AS, like Bryant, he also had a hell of a lot of other problems. One expert declared that he had a "perfect storm" of personality disorders.
With both men, you have to wonder if they had received better childhood intervention tragedy might have been averted. Bryant's parents and doctors don't seem to have had any idea what they were dealing with (he was medicated for hyperactivity, among other things), and Cho's family just went into denial about it.
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My concern is that people who might have once found a pleasant home in such a place, or just an opportunity to prepare for life in the wider community, have been effectively reclassified as criminals.
And tragically, some people are quite okay with that. I heard tell of a meeting in which Rodney Hide declared that Act's corrections policy would fix the problem of support for the mentally ill by keeping them in jail.
I'm the parent of two ASD boys, and well aware of the over-representation of people on the autism spectrum in prisons in most countries. The idea of that as a solution gives me the shivers.
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Thanks Graham -- great post. I ran out of time this morning to form a coherent thought on the Real Groovy news, but you've done it better than i could have.
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Still, nice to see the media finally getting their heads around the notion that not all of us have mortgages -- and for some (like my late grandmother) low interest rates are actually a damn bad thing.
Quite. My mum depends on investment income. And she and others like her also have money stuck with unreliable finance companies. Not so great.
OTOH, as a homeowner who will actually have to borrow money to extend the house soon, I'm starting to feel guilty about the windfall ...
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